The sun was shining, bright and cheery, as it often did. It always made her smile, the sun, reflecting through her gauzy window-shade at dawn and turning the blackness behind her eyelids red with light. It hadn't been so different this morning, even after. She'd still smiled.

Should she have smiled?

Every day this week she'd rolled out of bed, sliding on her slippers and straightening her sheets, just like she always did. Called to her mother that she'd be down in a few minutes and would like three eggs, thanks. Washed her face and brushed her teeth, piled the books off her bed and laid them back on the shelves where they belonged.

It was harder now, with the thickly padded bandages that wrapped her fingers and twined cumbersomely around her forearms and elbows, but she managed. Everyone had bandages, these days.

(Except for the ones who didn't.)

Really, this week was wasn't so different. A black tie binding her hair, awkwardly braided instead of hanging free. Black sandals instead of her usual blue. A sleek set of nearly-new dress blacks, freshly washed after the funerals every night and pulled on wearily every morning.

A single sheet of paper added a few days ago, folded in the pocket of the now-familiar pants, that somehow weighed on her more heavily than all the rest put together.

She had the words memorized, by now. There weren't many.

Akiyama-san,

--referring to herself and not her father, which she still wasn't quite used to--

We have received word of your impressive actions during the recent disturbance, and would like to extend to you the offer of a position in the very prestigious ranks of our Seal Research Divison. Your sensei has already been notified, and we would appreciate if you would meet us at 1400 hours at the following location, on October 18th.

The address was printed below, written in the same precise and lovely hand as the rest of the letter. A calligrapher's hand--she would know. It was signed "best regards," but she didn't think they wished her the best anything.

She looked up beyond the stiff shinobi statues in her row just in time to see the famous Copy-nin Kakashi edging his way through the crowd, claiming his pride of place. He belonged there, sandwiched between the Sannin Jiraiya and the most powerful shinobi in all the world, and yet he stared blankly out at the assembled crowd as if he had nothing.

Was it wrong, that she wished instead for what he'd had? Or even for what he had now, standing as one in a long lineage of elite teachers and students, himself taught by the very best there was?

If only she'd asked--

But she hadn't. She'd waited, learning on her own, trying to become worthy of his instruction. She'd laughed with her team and picked up what she could from her own sensei, because she'd had time.

And now one of her teammates was gone, the other wouldn't speak to her, and all she had to show for it was a terse letter burning a hole in her pocket. No one knew seals like the Fourth Hokage of Konoha, and the Fourth Hokage was dead.

Rina stood quiet and still, one black shape amid a field of blackness, and felt alone.

Kakashi only realized the ceremony had ended when the crowd began to break up, murmuring quietly, and Jiraiya's heavy hand landed on his shoulder. He twitched, but Jiraiya didn't let go.

"Reckon you don't want to be here for this bit, kid," said the big man, looking out at the ranks of ninja coming slowly forwards, row by row, ready to pay their respects with flowers and blades and whatever else they wanted to lay at the monument's feet. "I know I don't."

"Is that why you smell like sake?" Kakashi spat, sharp and low.

Jiraiya huffed something that might have been a laugh, but wasn't. "S'called 'coping', brat. Something you might want to learn--"

"Jiraiya," said the Sandaime.

"No, sensei," Jiraiya said loudly, squeezing Kakashi's shoulder. "Coping and celebrating. We've had enough damn mourning. Someone needs to get pissed and laid and--and pour out a few shots on his idiot student's great stone head." He jerked a hand at the monument. "Might as well remind the world that the stupid sonovabitch died for a reason--"

"Jiriaya," snapped the Sandaime, as Kakashi wrenched out of Jiraiya's hold. "Enough."

Jiraiya snorted, red-rimmed eyes glassy. "No such thing."

"You're a disgrace," Kakashi snarled, crossing his arms tight. "You weren't even here to help. You're just... revelling in the aftermath."

"Kakashi."

"Fuck you, brat. I was out kicking diplomacy into people. What were you doing?"

Against his chest, Kakashi's fists clenched so tight his knuckles cracked. "Trying to keep him alive--"

"Well, you did a fine damn job," Jiraiya cut in, cheeks dangerously flushed. "Fuckin' magnificent job. Would've made your brilliant daddy proud--"

"Enough." A burst of chakra filled the air like a wall, slamming them apart. The Sandaime drew himself up, anger and grief brimming in his voice. He took a breath and released it. "You will control yourselves."

"Not if I can help it," Jiraiya said--slurred--and tossed off a mocking salute. In the front ranks of the frozen, watching ninja, there was nothing but silence. Kakashi growled softly, and Jiraiya snorted at him. "Yeah, right, brat."

The Sandaime opened his mouth again, but there was a surge of chakra, a snap of ozone, and Jiraiya was gone. Konoha's Hokage sighed. "Kakashi-kun," he began, turning back.

But Kakashi was gone, too.

There was some sort of commotion on the dais. Rina's bandaged fingers curled tight around her standard-issue chrysanthemum, but the sounds came to her as if muffled by a thick haze, every action seeming distant and remote. Of no relevance to her.

They were only a few feet away, those important people -- Hokage, Sannin, village-renowned prodigy -- but they might as well have been on the other side of the world.

The line shuffled, and Rina let herself be carried along without agency, drifting through a fog of confusion that had lingered, impenetrable, since the days-ago klaxxons had shaken her out of her complacency. After such a rent in her world -- an attack on Konoha; but the war was over -- the fragments of her thoughts and feelings and ambitions seemed to be taking a long time to settle into their new configurations. Most times these days, she couldn't even puzzle out what she thought about something, much less what she wanted.

Suddenly, her feet stopped, and she found herself staring out into the cavernous emptiness at the front of the line -- everyone behind her and no one in front, no more comforting river of footsteps to follow. The Yondaime's photograph waited there, his smile impossibly bright, so much closer than she'd ever seen him in reality.

It was just a piece of paper with printed colors, of course. She knew that, but her thoughts seemed clearer, somehow, when she could pretend she was directing them at someone who was listening. All the noise and all the people and the hanging stormcloud pall of grief receded into insignificance. "I would have been a good student," Rina told him quietly, and she knew it was true.

Reaching into her left pocket, she pulled out one final addition to her chrysanthemum offering: a sheet of tissue-fine paper, nearly translucent, with layers upon layers of drawings and notations rolled up into a tiny, compact scroll, secured about the middle with a simple black ribbon. It wasn't really anything special, because she couldn't think of anything special to give. But it was something, anyway, to give to a man she admired for his innovation and creative genius above all else.

It was years worth of her own work, copied out onto one long sheet of expensive paper: notions, careful calculations, crazed speculations, all of it. Since she didn't have any formal training, most of them probably wouldn't ever work, but it was the idea she wanted to give to him. That it was his inspiration, his example, that had led her down this path.

Sliding the center of her scroll down the long, elegant stem of the chrysanthemum, she laid the flower in front of his photograph with all the other scattered offerings: personal gifts that meant anywhere from nearly nothing to everything. "Thanks," was all she could really think of to say at that point, her throat choked around a smile that said more than that; his picture remained flat and unresponsive, but she thought he looked like he understood.

She was stepping back from the low table, prompted by the rustlings of the line behind her, when the nearby commotion intensified. It was almost enough to activate deep-set shinobi reflexes and call her attention back to the here-and-now, but she turned her face away. If anywhere, she was safe here, and she didn't need to know what they were doing. It didn't concern her.

Then, it did activate her reflexes, raising her hackles and making her fingers twitch. Because barely a whisper's distance (or yawning kilometers) away, Jiraiya and Kakashi both vanished in channel-shivering cracks of smoke.

The spark of adrenaline rushing through her system gave Rina a sudden idea: a crushingly obvious one, in retrospect, which had -- of course -- only become clear in the instant her hopes were dashed. The dawning acknowledgement that there were other seal specialists in the world, after all, other than the Yondaime. And just because her dream couldn't be realized one way, didn't mean it couldn't go another.

Jiraiya.

But Jiraiya was gone, and she had no idea where to even start to look. The missed opportunity stared her in the face: the one time he was actually in the village, the one time she'd known where he was going to be, and she'd lost her chance to ask--

Glancing around at random, futilely attempting to pinpoint a large man with an explosive white ponytail and facial markings, her eyes instead fell on something else. On the top of the Yondaime's stone head, a small figure stood: too slight to be Jiraiya, but just right for another. Another recently-missing person, and potentially another chance. The barely visible shock of gray-white haloing his head only served to confirm her guess, and once she escaped the confines of the crowd, she pressed her gauze-wrapped fingers into service forming seals.

An instant later, Rina, too, was gone.

There were scorch marks on the top of the monument, too. Long lines of black seared into the red stone. Eventually, someone with a moment of free time and the need to do something useful would come up here and scrub them away. Or they'd be left for the elements to wash clean. Kakashi crouched and dragged his (unshaken, never trembling) fingertips through one thick mark, watching flakes of black ash spiral into the breeze.

A hundred feet above the village, and the Fox had still left a scar.

Maybe he'd scrub them away. Do some coping--

Then he was on his feet and turning, metal in his hands, before the first shiver of strange chakra had finished pinging his senses. It blossomed into a cloud of dense smoke, thick and white, wrapped around the jutsu-user, and Kakashi braced himself to see Jiraiya's flush-cheeked, furious face...

Smoke wisped away in the wind, leaving a girl behind.

He palmed his kunai, concealing them behind his wrists, but didn't sheathe them. The girl wasn't old--his age, maybe, or slightly older--but that meant nothing. She was dressed in mourning blacks, stark against pale skin. Her colouring was almost the same as his, if you threw a touch of brown in, but her face was Rin's, and he hated her for that. Hated her more when he realized her expression was all Obito's.

She looked at him, wide-eyed and flustered, a little desperate and a lot hopeful, from twenty feet away. There were no tear tracks on her cheeks, but her eyes were red-rimmed.

Briefly, Kakashi pictured embedding a kunai in her forehead.

"What?" he rasped, tilting his head back. "This spot is taken. Go find your own."

"I don't want your spot," she told him, and was surprised that her voice didn't sound more ragged than it did.

The Copy-Nin, Hatake Kakashi. A year younger than she was, but already in the Bingo Books of two separate countries. The rising star of the younger generation, his father's son (though not too much so, everyone hoped). The pride of the Fourth Hokage, without question, and nobody doubted that he deserved it.

The raising hair on the back of her neck urgently informed her that he was frightening, with his one-eyed glare and feral challenge, the lightning aura of his tightly-leashed chakra tingling the edges of the chakra-burns on her hands. The effect should have been strikingly incongruous or comical, coming from a fifteen-year-old barely matching her in height.

It wasn't.

But Rina felt jaded by miserable experience, left unmoved by the barely-suppressed violence in his one flat, gray eye. She'd been bombarded by fiercer maelstroms of malevolent power and fury than this, clinging to Konoha's walls as the Fox approached, her hands buried in damaged seals (Yondaime's seals) that she barely understood. Inking amplifier after amplifier after amplifier, crackling more power through her jury-rigged stop-gaps than she'd ever put through any painstakingly-planned ones. Struggling to fix the battered barriers before It came.

She felt rather sorry for Kakashi, actually. They said that he'd been there, when the Fourth Hokage went down. That he'd been the first to find the body--

Her response to that thought was a full-body flinch, and she tried to shake off the feeling before it overwhelmed her. But mixed up in all that grief was a wrenching curiosity that tore at her almost as strongly, impossible to deny.

Had Kakashi seen the seal? Did he know it? Could he teach her?

"You were Yondaime's student," she managed finally, a too-harsh statement of fact that she couldn't have moderated if she'd tried. (Which she had. She had.) "You know his seals."

There was a pause, in which she devoutly hoped that he would not, in a minute, decide to eviscerate her.

"Please." She didn't try to hide her desperation, or the way that all of this emotion was tangled up together, part and parcel of her grief.

"Can you teach me?"

"No." The word was out of his mouth, short and sharp and vicious, before her question had even finished scratching around his brain. He could smell her now, ink-drenched parchment and sinus-biting emotion, dripping feminine grief with her please and her past tenses--

Were Yondaime's...

--and her soft, untrembling lips that he suddenly wanted to carve right off her face.

Violence roiled behind his sternum, desperate to break through the curving prison of his ribs. Something bloody and broken that wanted to scream and howl and set the world on fire. Wanted to tear apart the fragile body of a blue-eyed baby and rip his sensei free from the monster inside.

But Sensei was dead (destroyed; soulfire sacrificed to a god of death) and Rin was gone, and there was no one but Kakashi left. No one but Kakashi to keep a chain and padlock on his control.

He took a deep, slow, obvious breath that felt like burning. Only trash killed their teammates.

"I don't know you," he said, and now the words crackled like ice. "I don't care about you. And even if I did, I wouldn't teach you forbidden techniques. Konoha has enough craters without idiot chuunin blowing themselves up."

The air chilled a palpable few degrees with the frosted fury radiating from Kakashi's stiff shoulders, but Rina stood her ground, silently accepting his anger as nothing more than she deserved. For being here now. For asking this now.

She felt nauseous, the Yondaime's brilliantly smiling photograph jumping again to the forefront of her mind.

"I didn't mean that," Rina said quietly, her voice small. "I don't need to know any forbidden jutsu."

Liar, her conscience jeered. It was right -- she did need to know it. The Fourth Hokage's final, sacrificial masterwork... she needed to know it so badly she ached.

But if she'd wanted to commit suicide, there were far better ways to do it than letting herself be rent limb from limb by this... kid who wasn't. Even she, she thought with a haze of bitterness, wasn't quite that stupid.

He'd probably even feel bad about it afterwards, which just made it worse.

"I only want to learn the regular stuff, anything you can teach me. Anything you'd be willing to teach me." She pleaded in a low voice, as earnestly as she could. As earnestly as she was driven to, by her spine-wrenching need to understand.

It would take so long, if she had to figure it all out on her own...

What little she could see of Kakashi's expression was as flat as a ceramic mannequin. As a murderous ceramic mannequin.

I don't care about you.

She pleaded as earnestly as she could, but she had the feeling that she was only digging herself into a deeper hole.

And yet, she couldn't stop.

Control, Kakashi thought, breathing too fast for his own liking. Control, control, control. He could feel it slipping, feel the little sparks of chakra (Rin's chakra) gathering like seed lightning beneath his fingernails. The rising, red-drenched urge to shove his fist through her chest and rip her begging heart out through her ribcage.

Control, control, control.

He felt a little sick, as if he'd run too hard and fought too much and hadn't yet found a place to fall down. Felt shivery, deep in his bones. He clenched his hands.

"I'm not a teacher," he said, and now it was a snarl. "I'm not here to help. I'm a--"

Killer. Who hadn't managed to strike the one blow that would have counted.

His teeth ground together so hard his jaw cracked at the hinge. The girl's face was the colour of the sky just before it rained, skin drawn tight over her skull. He could smell her desperation.

Control.

Far below them, the dull mutter of a moving crowd drifted up, sound rising on the sun-burnished breeze. Even this far away, Kakashi could feel the leashed chakra presence of the Sandaime, weary and grief-stricken, but still held tightly in check. It helped, a little, to focus on that. To remember that there was at least one man down there still capable of breaking his neck.

He closed his eyes.

"You need to go away. Right now." The girl began to say something again; a beseechment, probably. Wanting something from him, when he had nothing left to give but a place for her bones to rest. Her family to mourn.

She probably still had parents, he realized, spiteful and sick. A mother and father who loved her and were proud of her accomplishments, whatever they were. Who'd cry over her, when she was gone.

He hated her.

She spoke again, hesitant and pleading, and something gave inside his chest. He opened his eyes, drew a breath, and screamed at her.

"Go away!"

He was turning her down. Really, truly, turning her down.

Thoughts of diagrams and drawings, of thousands of hours in the library crouched over seal-books and scrolls, fluttered through her mind like so many torn-off stacks of calendar days. So much time, spent blindly attempting to stumble out an understanding of the fundamentals, while he--

He had the key to everything. And he was turning her away.

"Please, you can't--" Her pulse flittered weakly in her throat, shallow and far too fast, but she wrenched up her chin to meet his steel-gray eye with a pair of platinum ones.

His fingers were clenched into chakra-sparking fists, the cords of his narrow shoulders tautly visible even beneath the draped fabric of his funeral blacks. The low thrum of power that enveloped him had uncoiled into full, crackling menace, and the air around his knuckles shimmered with haze at the threat of lethal chakra hurtling into visibility.

The harbinger of a storm.

Suddenly shivering into being, curled somewhere heavy and metallic in the pit of her stomach, was the cold realization that she was utterly alone up here. Yondaime's stony gaze surveyed the whole of battered Konoha, but the clatter and confusion of a battle could never be heard from these cloudless heights. And down was, even for a ninja, a long, long way to fall.

Kakashi's scream still echoed in her ears, the scent of thunder rising and his features twisting beneath his mask into the muffled outlines of a snarl.

Showing empty palms, spread wide apart, Rina backed away one step.

Then she backed up a little more.

Even if he'd been blind, deaf, and scentbound, he still would have known the moment fear gripped her. It was in her chakra, striking through the neatly organized coils and blighting her shining internal patterns with chaos. He could sense it in his own chakra, ripped wide open and laid bare to universe.

But he wasn't blind or deaf, and he'd never been scentbound. He could see her eyes widening, the colour draining from her already waxen face. Hear the rapid, uneven scrape of her breathing. Smell the terror rolling off her skin, sweet and charred as burning pitch.

If he let Obito look, he'd be able to see the pounding, chakra-laced rhythm of her heart.

She stepped back, slow and careful, with the deceptive gracefulness of a trained shinobi--but not nearly fast enough. Kakashi jerked forwards, elegance thrown to the wind, lone eye focused on her like a hound seeking point. Then he stopped and wrenched his head to the side. Sank his teeth into his tongue until blood welled up, filling his mouth like a copper bite.

It didn't help. Now he just wanted to tear her throat out.

Wanted to kill something, anything, and drown out the maelstrom eating his chest cavity apart in someone else's last breath. A clean, mindless, violent death that would snap the world back into place. Stop his hands from shaking.

But it didn't work like that.

And you didn't kill teammates.

"Translocate," he spat. Blood ran in rivulets from the corners of his mouth, soaking his mask. She hesitated and he struck, lashing the stone in front of her feet with an unfocused handful of blue-white chakra. A scorch mark curled like a fern. "Translocate. Do it now!"

The metallic scent of blood blossomed in the crisp air. Stone crackled and split in bursts beneath Rina's feet, sending out shallow, lightning-riddled tendrils in fractal-drawn cascades. Kakashi's fists were full-on glowing now, and his slit-narrowed eye held only the barest reminder of anything she could bring herself to call humanity.

With a convulsive twitch of shoulder-muscles and an automatic hunching over the stinging chakra-burn of aching fingers, Rina interlaced her hands into a seal buried so far into reflex that it bypassed thought. The raging demon-creature (Kakashi) said 'go,' and Rina went.

She thought she heard a low growl, rumbling deep and thick in the undercurrents of rough violence that eddied around her as she gathered her chakra, but it could have just been her imagination. For the second time in less than five minutes, a white-hot rush of energy surged through her channels, and she blinked momentarily out of existence.

Here flowed, in a rush of terrified instinct, into there. Falling breathless and panicked to her knees, she catalogued her surroundings with a ninja's calculating urgency: rough, red stone beneath her fingers; softly glowing sun warming the back of her neck; the hushed murmurs from the tail of the funeral crowd still wafting up from below.

She almost would have laughed, if it wouldn't have come out twisted and sharp-edged and wrong. Apparently her conscious mind had more sway over her instincts than she thought -- or was it the other way around? -- because she'd ended up exactly where she hadn't planned to find herself.

Crouching on the Sandaime's bristled, stony head, a lazy kunai-toss away from his successor (and now predecessor, because there was no justice in the world), Rina tried to gather her fragmented nerve to peek over the edge and see if it would ever be worthwhile to make another go.

She'd gone, but not nearly far enough. Kakashi wrenched himself away from the spiky stone edge of the monument, twisting around to look at nothing but blue sky and forest, the wide flat shelf that stretched away from the back of the Hokages' heads. It was a solid plateau covered with trees that would eventually fade into distant farmland. Untouched by the Fox. He exhaled.

Inhaled, and the air trembled between his bloody teeth.

Chakra still writhed around his hands, blue-white and unfocused. He forced it back inside his coils and pulled his mask down, spitting dark red onto scorched sandstone. Breathed again. A breeze washed over his bare face, chilling his lips.

When he turned back around, it was because the girl's chakra had gathered and sparked and--vanished.

Gone.

He didn't stretch his own out to search for her. Instead he stood and shook and tried to piece back the shards of his control. The shards of himself. But there were too much missing, too many people gone, too many holes punched through the middle of his life--

And what was the point?

One arm tightened around his middle, hard, as if it could hold everything together. The other hand covered his face, fingers splayed wide over cold skin and smeared blood. He breathed hard against his own palm.

"Goddamn, kid, are you okay?"

Startled, Kakashi didn't even feel the kunai in his hand before it was gone, flung towards the voice while his other hand yanked his mask back up. He spun, dropping into a crouch, and felt ice slurry through his guts when he realized he'd just killed someone--

But his kunai wasn't buried in flesh. It dangled from one gloved hand, spinning lazily. Behind it, a ceramic mask tilted thoughtfully to one side, watching him.

ANBU.

"Quick throw, huh?" said the man -- it had to be a man with that much height and shoulders that broad. His armour was blackened and scorched; a stained bandage wrapped most of his right arm. He stank of smoke. "I don't suppose you could cool it on the chakra-tantrum you're throwing up here? You're starting to make the natives restless."

Kakashi felt his cheeks flush, anger and shame burning red with equal measure. He gritted his teeth.

"Talker, too," the ANBU said, with something almost like cheer. He flicked Kakashi's kunai back at him. "Look, I'm not here to get in the way of your grieving. Just wanted to give you a warning about the pyrotechnics. Keep it low-key, okay?"

Staring at the black-and-bone armour sheathing the man from neck to ankles, the anonymous painted mask, the flex and coil of beautifully controlled chakra, and the complete disregard for injuries Kakashi could smell were painful, something shifted and clicked into place.

"Okay, then," said the ANBU slowly. "Well, be seeing you." He brought his hands up to translocate.

"Wait," Kakashi said. His voice creaked like rusted hinges.

"Yeah?"

"Who's in charge of your organization?" Kakashi took a step forward. "Where do I find them?"

"Arakaki Hisoka," said the ANBU, after a beat. "But that's really not a good idea--"

"Where?"

The ANBU sighed. "You want HQ. Big flat brick building next to the hospital, can't miss it. But there's no way Arakaki's going to let someone your, uh, size in. Or your age."

Beneath his mask, Kakashi's mouth flattened to a red-cracked line. "It won't be for long," he said. Just long enough to do something useful. One last thing. He lifted his hands.

"Hang on--" the ANBU began, and sighed again when the whip-crack of translocation cut him off. "Dammit."

In the distance, far down below, the funeral procession was barely drawing to a close. Those who'd left their offerings were already scattering slowly back through the streets, returning to the myriad of unfinished jobs still left to do. The Yondaime's picture glinted a little, as the sunlight sparked on the glass. The ANBU blew out a breath.

"Sorry," he muttered quietly, and bent down to fix the damage left by a hasty jutsu and a smear of blood on the old weathered stone.

Ten deep, calming, meditative breaths later, and Rina was still trembling, her burned fingers clenched in pink flowered bedsheets until she could feel the seared flesh crackle.

Not far enough, her instincts shouted from the depths of her wild-animal consciousness. Impulses screamed through charged nerves to get up, run, go.

She took another slow, shaky inhale, the comforting scents of parchment and ink steadily displacing the residual taint of burnt ozone, lightning, and blood. With a stiff ache, she pried her left hand free from the sheets and reached over to her bedside table, blindly fumbling open last night's bedtime reading and pressing her cheek against the cool roughness of the pages. Drawing in, with intemperate gasps, the dusty aromas of home.

Never far enough.

She had peeked back over the edge, just once. His back had been turned to her, senbon-straight, head tilted up towards the sky. It should have looked peaceful. Serene.

Her knees hit the mattress before she even realized she'd lifted her hands for the translocation.

It wasn't even just fear, she knew. There had been something wrong about the way he was standing there, fifteen years old and brittle as bone. Like the weight of the world had rested on his slender shoulders, and he'd dropped it.

She was glad, right then, that she hadn't had to see his face.

A cold shudder numbed her fingers, and she dropped the book down on the bed, watching the pages flutter. Kotoyama Kouzou, Reflections on the Nature of Bindings. It settled on a well-worn page with a diagram she could have drawn in her sleep: the simple first-level constraint of a minor element. Fire, for her very first explosive tag.

She thought of Kakashi, that shock of white hair still downy with youth, kneeling quietly beside his father as he learned his own first seal. Thought of him crouched next to the brilliant and shining figure of the Yondaime, their voices low and bright.

Thought of how long it had taken her, struggling and dappled with stale ink, to evoke anything more than a feeble puff of smoke.

Would she have traded it all -- her family, her future, her simple dawn smiles -- to wear the expression he wore now? It scared her, a little, that she didn't even know.

But the choice, after all, wasn't hers.

The soft springs creaked as Rina shifted on the bed, pulling a small, neatly folded paper out of her pocket. A fresh sheet joined it, from her bedside drawer, and she poured a small measure of ink into the well of her antique inkstone.

Life wasn't fair, she knew. People didn't get what they wanted. They died, they suffered, they learned and they parted... it all just happened, haphazard scatterings of fate. And maybe she couldn't hope for anything better -- but she could at least have this.

Dear Kitanura-san, she wrote in her very best calligraphic hand. Regarding your offer of a position in the Seal Research Division, it would be my pleasure to accept...