Hiro towel-dried his hair roughly, sparing a moment to thank superior Hyuuga genetics as it settled back, slightly damp, into smooth and ordered arrangement with a single shake of his head. Too bad superior Hyuuga genetics doesn't allow me to be in two places at once, he thought, casting through orderly drawers of black and gray clothing for something that didn't look like a uniform. Even if Kotoe-san thinks it does.

Apparently satisfied with his report on Genma's debriefing after several more probing sessions, Kotoe-san had promptly removed the hold from his file that kept him from field missions. She had also wasted no time in informing him, when he stumbled into his first psych class dripping wet from a cloudburst thunderstorm and covered in leaves and torn bark, that returning on time for the classes was his responsibility, not the mission desk's.

At least he had been on time, if not a minute or two early. He hadn't expected to see her standing in front of the small class herself, truth be told, but the old adage -- better safe than skewered -- held true, and he had settled into his seat with nothing worse than curious sideways glances from the other four crisp, gray-suited attendees. He'd held his head high, summoning the starched Hyuuga hauteur that came so easily to him anywhere outside the Hyuuga compound, and thought he caught a brief approving glance from Kotoe-san out of the corner of his eye.

The next few days had gone similarly, being pulled out to run reconnaissance for a quiet kidnapping, the details of which he preferred to gloss over in his memory, before rushing back to settle into his seat just as Kotoe-san was embarking on the first words of her lecture. At least he'd stolen a few minutes to shower and change, that time.

He was sure Kotoe-san, or the mission desk -- whoever was scheduling his time like this -- had some motive for what they were doing. Hiro just couldn't, for the life of him, figure out what it was.

This morning was almost the last straw, when sharp pounding on his door had dragged him out of bed and back into a debriefing room without even the opportunity to change out of his pajamas. But of course, there was no last straw. Just more questions, and answers, and running through every memory trick he knew to extract even more detail from panoramic glimpses caught through pale eyes and stored, but not indelibly. A Hyuuga with a photographic memory would be a powerful creature indeed, he thought, and wished that he were one.

Now, hours later, and days later than he'd meant to, Hiro finally pushed out the door of his apartment without an Intel agent in tow or a mission scroll in hand. Last Sunday he'd penned a rushed apologetic note to Ginta when he hadn't been able to visit, but considering the quality of hospital food -- or lack thereof -- and the look on Ginta's face when he'd bitten into that first pork bun, Hiro judged that something more was in order. Armed with the knowledge of Ginta's "best favorite" mochi, he headed off to the market.

If anyone at HQ wanted to talk to him, they'd just have to wait.

By the time Tsuki, Grandmother's head housekeeper, knocked on Ginta's door to tell him he had a visitor, Ginta had progressed well beyond the pretending-to-rest stage and was back in motion. Specifically in motion with chakra affixing his palms to the ceiling, and slim, muscular shoulders sheened in sweat as he worked on modified pull-ups. His torso was bare, his half-removed yukata flapped around his hips like a poorly-designed skirt, and he'd looped a fully-packed utility belt to his left leg to counterbalance the weight of the cast on the right.

"Oh! Ginta-chan! I thought you were resting!" The older woman averted her gaze quickly when Ginta kicked his legs and the yukata flapped open to reveal the thick pink scar on Ginta's left thigh, and a bit too much leg for comfort.

Ginta released his hold on the ceiling, jack-knifed his broken leg out in front of himself, and landed with an awkward thump on the tatami. "If you can still call me 'chan' you don't have to get all shy about me being half-naked," he told Tsuki, who was still looking politely away.

"You were supposed to be resting, Ginta-chan," she chided. "Your esteemed grandmother left me a copy of the instructions she received from your physician..."

That explained why there had been so many nourishing broths full of vegetables, then. And the gentle suggestions that perhaps he should take it a little easier, and wouldn't he like some tea and a book, and was it time for one of his pills?

Tsuki handed him a towel, producing it from the mysterious depths of her kimono sleeves. "You have a visitor waiting in the receiving room," she told him. "I'll help you find something appropriate to wear." She turned her back to Ginta and pulled open a chest drawer, extracting a fresh under-robe and a colorful kimono. So it wasn't an official visit from Shiratori or a social call by one of Grandfather's former colleagues on the village council, Ginta thought, otherwise it would be the black five-crest.

He eyed the design - rusty brown with a pattern of frogs and irises twined with geometric abstractions that stood for bridges. It wasn't the sober, most formal kimono, but it still bore the Sakamoto crest on shoulders, sleeves, and center back. Oh gods help him if Mother and Grandmother had arranged a surprise marriage meeting when he was trapped and helpless. He scowled as Tsuki helped him into it. "Who's the caller?" he asked. "Is Grandmother back?"

"I don't expect her back before supper," Tsuki answered calmly. She allowed Ginta to tie the slender obi for himself, and handed him his crutches. "It's nearly time for lunch, shall I prepare something for you and your guest?"

"That depends on who the guest is," Ginta answered mulishly.

"Hyuuga-san," Tsuki told him. "He said you weren't expecting him."

If hope had a scent, the whole room would have been filled with it. Ginta's scowl evaporated, and his reluctance to dress turned to impatience. "The receiving room? Awesome. Make us some tea, okay?" Ginta set off down the hall with a staccato drumbeat of crutchtips and bare toes echoing on the wooden floor.

The mismatched clomps echoing in from the hallway pulled Hiro's attention up, away from his dismayed contemplation of the ground-in dirt remaining under his fingernails. He felt uncharacteristically out of place intruding on this serene, traditional home in his well-tailored but undeniably casual blacks, though the maid -- Tsuki -- had been impeccably deferential. But when Ginta's empty hospital bed and the dust still gathering on Ginta's doorknob down the hall had driven him to try the Sakamoto residence next, he hadn't wanted to risk going back to his room to change into something more formal. Not with his current track record on getting out of there without a mission assignment.

He saw Tsuki bustle past first, presumably hurrying in her sedate way towards the kitchen. Then, a few minutes later, Ginta finally fetched up in the doorway, the dignity of his carriage and ornate kimono spoiled only by the crutches and the enormous grin that split his face.

"You look better," Hiro got in with a smile, angling to speak before whatever string of exclamations Ginta was likely to come up with. "The fresh air must have been good for you."

Ginta did look better, though Hiro doubted the fresh air was what had done it. The fine silk kimono still couldn't disguise too-angular shoulders, and it bunched in awkward folds around the heavy cast engulfing Ginta's broken right leg, but his skin had regained a healthy color and the hollows in his cheeks were not quite so deep.

"I brought you something," Hiro added quickly as Ginta opened his mouth to speak, and held out the unassuming paper bag. "It's not much, as a guest-gift, but... I didn't exactly expect to find you here."

"You look great! Wow! I am so glad to see you. I was just about dead of boredom. I was supposed to be resting, but I'm so tired of resting, and if you're not tired, why rest? Well except for being tired of resting, which isn't the same as being tired at all, it's..." Ginta's rapid-fire prattle skidded to a halt when he saw the slightly baffled, entirely amused look on Hiro's face. "Uh, what I meant was, hi! Hi, Hiro! Hi!" He took another breath, and his voice dropped and slowed again, to something sounding a little less like a sugar-fueled six-year-old. "I'm really glad to see you."

He crutched into the room, picked his spot at a right angle to the decorative niche in the wall where the wisteria scroll hung, then grinned at Hiro and waved him off when Hiro reached for the crutches to help Ginta sit. "No, watch this!" He swung through the crutches like a pendulum twice, then slid down the metal supports with an acrobat's skill, until he was seated on the tatami with his right leg stuck out to the side and his left folded neatly in a half-lotus.

His kimono gaped open scandalously. "Er.... Almost got it! If I was in pants I could totally have done that with modesty," he said, tucking the folds of fabric back around himself. "But it's way easier to just wear kimono when I'm just hanging around the house, and grandmother prefers it anyway, because she's old-fashioned. When I've been to your family's place — not your place obviously, but you know, the whole Hyuuga compound — I noticed a lot of them — your cousins and stuff, I mean — wear kimono, too."

He offered Hiro another sparkling grin. He felt like tiny champagne bubbles of delight were crowding up under his diaphragm, for reasons he didn't fully understand and didn't bother to examine too closely. Probably simple joy at seeing a friend, and really being home and alive, he told himself. Euphoria over having survived his mission finally hitting him.

"Sit, sit!" He patted the tatami to his left. "What'd you bring? Tsuki's making us tea, and she said she'd fix us lunch. We can tell her what we want, except I'll probably get nourishment again no matter what I ask for. The hospital gave grandmother a copy of my instructions for exercise and diet and stuff, like I was still five."

Hiro gave him a look like he wanted to say, but you are five. He kept his silence though, folding his legs elegantly beneath him and handing over the paper bag with a self-satisfied quirk of his lips, already anticipating Ginta's delight.

"I'm sure there's nothing in there that would make the nurses too displeased," Hiro mused thoughtfully, drawing out the moment and enjoying the eager light in his host's eyes. For all that Ginta had complained of his grandmother's traditionalism, it hadn't escaped Hiro's notice that Ginta had unerringly gestured him towards the customary seat for an honored guest, framed by the delicately calligraphed lines of coiled wisteria. Either he found the habits of a cultured upbringing difficult to escape -- Hiro himself had enough experience with that -- or Ginta was more traditional himself, at least in some ways, than he preferred to let on.

Though thinking back to several moments in their first conversation, Hiro had to forestall hints of color from rising in his cheeks, and to concede that Ginta's traditionalism must be limited at best. Allusions to "sudoku" came to mind. It was difficult to reconcile those displays of shocking irreverance with the sober glimpse he'd caught of Ginta's grandmother in the hospital, poised and entirely proper even in such dire circumstances.

"Is your grandmother out, then?" Hiro asked politely as Ginta bent over the bag, the mingled scents of ginger and cinnamon already wafting through the thin paper. Hiro was sure that, if the elder Sakamoto had been here, she would have greeted him herself; it was just that kind of household. With Ginta's evident relaxation in her absence, and Hiro's own brief memory of her sharp gaze -- almost as piercing as Kotoe-san's, he thought ruefully -- he was glad enough that it was just the two of them.

"Grandmother's out, yep," Ginta agreed. "She's coming back for supper, but that's hours away, so you're safe for now. I mean, if you're hoping to avoid her. If you were coming to see her and not me..."

He glanced up at Hiro with mock hurt on his face, and laughed when Hiro hastily waved his hands in denial.

"Yep, I didn't figure you were here to see her. I mean, Intel already has a guy assigned to check up on me who checks in with her, and if you wanted to talk to her about me, you'd do it when I wasn't here, and why would you do that anyway, since you're not Shiratori?" Convinced of his own logic, though no doubt having thrown Hiro widely off course, Ginta abandoned the topic of his grandmother and official visits from Intel entirely. "So what'd you bring? Oooh, yatsuhashi!" He beamed as he lifted a slightly limp triangular pink pastry from its packaging. "You remembered! Did you remember? I bet you remembered. You seem like the kind of person who'd remember, and I'm pretty sure I told you before I liked yatsuhashi best. Of course you probably could have asked someone and found out, but I think you remembered. You remembered, didn't you?"

The effort Hiro was making to conceal his amusement was sufficient answer for Ginta. Not only had Hiro remembered, but he was smugly pleased that Ginta had noticed. Ginta's grin broadened. "And you brought pork buns. This is great! We can eat these and some pickles and rice and it will totally count as lunch. And come on, how can this not be nourishing? Do you have any idea how much mackerel a man can eat before he starts getting fish stripes? I don't either, but I think I was about to find out." He held out an arm and shoved up the sleeve of his kimono, as if inspecting for nascent scales.

With amused tolerance etched into the lift of his eyebrows, Hiro leaned over to politely examine the proffered arm. Pasty pale it might have been, with a lurid purplish IV bruise engulfing the crook of the elbow, but fishy it was not. Hiro bent closer and gave an exaggerated sniff, just to be sure. The aroma of fresh, clean sweat rose from Ginta's skin, and a hint of musty mothballs from the kimono, but Hiro detected no trace of salty brine.

"I think you're safe," Hiro announced, his white eyes full of bright humor. "Though you'd better watch out for those sweets, if it's really true that you are what you eat." In response, Ginta's fingers clutched defensively around his crinkled yatushashi, but an instant later he wilted under the glare of disapproval as Tsuki swept back into the room, laden tray in her hands. Hiro had to laugh at Ginta's dismay upon seeing the generous plates full of healthy mackerel.

"Hyuuga-san, Sakamoto-san." Tsuki acknowledged them both with a bow, formal in the presence of company. "Please enjoy your lunch," she aimed pointedly at Ginta, and Hiro and Tsuki shared a silent glance of collusion as Ginta woefully let the yatsuhashi drop back into the bag. After pouring the tea and accepting Hiro's gracious bow of thanks, Tsuki tactfully withdrew in a swishing of thick kimono silk, leaving Hiro still barely suppressing his evident amusement.

The pleasantries taken care of, he eyed the ample portion of thick, shiny fish with evident anticipation, waiting for Ginta to start. He loved mackerel.

Ginta gave an elaborate sigh and picked up his chopsticks with his left hand, then put them down again, clapped his hands together, and offered a reluctant, "Itedakemasu," to the meal. Formalities taken care of, he picked up the lacquer utensils once more and broke into the char-marked flesh of the broiled fish. "You're the one who brought the sweets, you know," he told Hiro. "Besides, if you are what you eat, and I eat a lot of sweets, then that ought to make me sweet, right? Sweetness is a desirable trait even for a ninja, or so I've been led to believe." He smiled broadly, blue eyes crinkled into almost perfect crescents, and cocked his head to the side.

Hiro blinked, looking a little like one of the Sakamoto household cats at the moment it completely failed to catch the dragonfly it was batting at.

"It's okay," Ginta said reassuringly. "I don't think you really are what you eat. Otherwise we'd all be rat bars and soldier pills half the time." He ate a bite of fish, then waved his chopsticks in the air. "Don't be polite, you can eat. Grandmother has a good cook even if she thinks I have to eat mackerel until I grow gills."

He picked up the lid on a little ceramic dish and his expression brightened. "Look, gobo! I bet it's spicy, too. Not too spicy but you know a little spicy." Slender, tan matchsticks of shredded root vegetable in the dish were flecked with black sesame seeds and bright red specks of hot pepper. "I once was on a mission and we were out in the middle of nowhere and out of rations, and this chick on our team found some plants that she were wild gobo, so we dug it up and tried to eat it, only it turned out to be false gobo, which you really shouldn't eat raw."

He ate a bite of the vegetables, then grinned. "Wasn't the worst thing I ever ate on a mission though."

Hiro obligingly took the bait. "What was that, then?" he asked, sectioning a delicate slice of rich, tender fish. He was almost afraid of the answer.

"The worst thing I ate was... well, mud," he volunteered, savoring the flavorful seasonings of the fish in appreciative contrast. "We were stranded on one of the fronts as genin, out of rations and any berries or mushrooms we could scavange from the area, and it had been almost a week. My teammates had been chowing down on it to fill their stomachs, and eventually I broke down and tried it. Wished I hadn't, though," he added, making a face. "We do have some dignity to maintain."

The contrast struck him, as it always did: kneeling on pristine tatami, eating food seared by skillful hands and sipping tea from paper-thin china, their fingernails clean and every hair in place. And yet, tomorrow, they might be crouching in treetops, all over dirt and fingering steel blades balanced to killing perfection. Hiro appreciated the food and company while he had it.

"You ate mud? As in... wet dirt?" Ginta almost lost the piece of fish he'd just picked up, and juggled it in the air on his chopsticks before finally managing to ferry it to his mouth.

"Wow, that's some serious desperation," he said between bites. "I mean, I'd heard of guys doing things like that during the war, but I always thought it was just a myth. Like, something to scare you into packing enough ration bars and stop bitching that the only flavor you could get reliably was soy." Another bite of mackerel went in.

"That totally beats my spoiled duck embryos."

He shook his head and stared at the fish, which had developed an uncanny resemblance to the spoiled duck embryos as soon as he'd mentioned them. The bite in his mouth became nearly impossible to swallow, and he gulped it down with a large swig of hastily-grabbed-for tea, and followed it up with several bright yellow slices of pickled daikon.

Hiro almost choked on his half-swallowed bite of fish. Following Ginta, he washed it down with a long swallow of tea, breathing in short gasps until his throat eased. "Spoiled... do I even want to know?" He stared at Ginta incredulously. "The mud, at least, one of my teammates would have tried anyway — he was like that, Uchiha or not. And the other was an Aburame, they burn through clouds of chakra just sitting there, with the symbiosis. I tried it because they both said it wasn't that bad, actually, and my stomach was starting to eat through to my spine." Running surveilance with his Byakugan, trying to find a clear path out, he'd needed something to help keep him going.

"But spoiled duck embryos? Really?" He stared down at his full plate of fish, and decided to start in on the vegetables instead. "I really hope there was a good reason for that. A power outage on a diplomatic mission in River Country, maybe?" He faintly recalled that duck embryos were considered a delicacy there, although he hadn't been on a mission to that area in quite some time. Depending on the outcome of Ginta's story, he thought he might try and keep it that way.

"Yep," Ginta agreed. "Well, sort of like that. So we had this mission to River Country, me and Rokusaburo — you don't know him and he used to be called Masashi. Anyway. So he was really into gourmet stuff, and cooking. He's the one who taught me to grill peaches. Did you know grilled peaches are awesome?"

Hiro smiled and nodded with the careful motions of someone humoring an insane-but-not-yet-dangerously-so companion.

"So anyway we were in River Country," Ginta continued. He picked up his rice bowl and ate several bites unseasoned. That was better. Plain, bland, slightly sweet rice, which wasn't even remotely fish-flavored. "And our mission was over, and Rokusaburo decided we should bring back some of the duck embryos. You get them in the eggs, so really it just looks like duck eggs, but if you crack them open there's some slime and then contortionist baby duckling, instead of a yolk."

Hiro's pale eyes took on a slightly glassy quality. He'd stopped eating.

"Aren't you hungry? You can eat even though I'm talking. Then later I'll eat and you can talk." Ginta waited until Hiro picked up another bite of vegetable.

"Right, so anyway, then we were heading back and we totally ran into this Mist patrol, and we really didn't need them knowing we were there, so we holed up in some caves, and then we ate all our rat bars, and we ate cave fungus and crickets and these blind frogs that were actually pretty nasty. And then Rokusaburo said we should eat his duck eggs." Ginta paused for effect. "Turns out he should have eaten them the day he bought them."

Hiro felt his cheeks turning faintly green, and swallowed his last mouthful of stringy vegetables with careful deliberation. The hint of spice that lingered on his tongue helped somewhat to clear his palate of the unsavory sensations Ginta's tale was conjuring up, but he wished the steaming cup of jasmine tea in front of him were stomach-soothing ginger. After a moment, he gave up and set the tea down, picking up a pillowy pork-and-ginger steamed bun instead. "And after that delightful comparison, is it any easier for you to eat your mackerel?" He inclined his head pointedly at Ginta's barely-picked-at fish, to which Ginta made an extremely juvenile face.

"Personally, I think it's a good thing that we aren't, in fact, what we eat," Hiro mused. "Otherwise, those terrifying Akimichi nutritionists would have a much stronger hold over us than they already do. Not to mention grandmothers," he added for Ginta's benefit. "And considering that the adage isn't true, I can be comfortably assured that I haven't committed an extreme disservice to humanity by buying you yatsuhashi," Hiro grinned, teasing.

Knowing Ginta, he'd probably take that last as a compliment. And actually, maybe it was.

It took Ginta a moment of puzzling to derive Hiro's meaning. Then he grinned and reached for one of the steamed buns. "Yeah. So you can feed me junk food all you want, and I'll still be awesome." He laughed at the tiny double take he got from Hiro for that. "You don't think I'm awesome?" Hiro's eyebrows rose. "No, no, don't answer that. Besides we already both know we're both awesome. Also I'm not eating this fish, but we can talk about something else. Like..."

He bit into the pork bun and chewed happily, pondering topics. Staying with meal and mission themes brought him to, "How about this? What's the best thing you ever ate on a mission? And let's see, should we count diplomatic missions? Sure. Okay, so including those... I was once undercover in... Oh shit, can I talk about that?" He stared off past Hiro, one eyebrow quirked. "I'm not sure I can talk about that yet."

He thought a minute more. "Actually I can talk about it as long as I don't say where I was or what I was doing there. So okay, I was once undercover in a region where they grow apples, and I got invited to this state dinner where they served apple soup. I know that sounds weird, but it was amazing. It was served in hollowed out green apples, and the servants came around and took the tops off the apples, and there was this pinkish creamy soup in the middle, with little gold flakes floating on the surface. Like actual gold leaf, only that wasn't the awesome part, that was just pretty. The soup was the awesome part. It was all sweet and spiced and applish — is that a word? It can be a word — applish, and it was room temperature, not hot like soup usually is. But it was summer, so it made sense to have cool soup."

The rest of the pork bun disappeared into Ginta's mouth. He wondered if Hiro was sharp enough to figure out where that mission must have been. Probably. "So how about you?"

That actually sounded really tasty. Hiro purposely did not attempt to puzzle out any details of Ginta's mission from the description, even though Ginta had not been all that circumspect. However good an actor you were, it was far easier to actually not know something, than to just pretend you didn't know it. If Hiro happened to need that particular tidbit of information at a later date, he could always finish putting the pieces together then.

"My best meal..." Hiro contemplated the question, milky eyes directed towards the ceiling. "Probably in Tea Country," he decided, turning back to Ginta. "I was undercover too, but it was just a local politics issue, no particular security classification." His tone could have been interpreted to carry a hint of dry reproach, but it was hard to say for certain. If it had any effect on Ginta, he gave no sign of it, cheerily ignoring his fish and munching on vegetables and steamed buns.

"I was out there as a short-term, running support for a long-term agent who had somehow managed to convince one of the local crime bosses that he was his long-lost brother." A twist of his lips made it clear exactly how much respect Hiro held for the intelligence of that particular back-country honcho — or the plan. "Well, the long-term agent said that I was his cousin." Hiro waved his hands in the air, half-eaten pork bun still clutched in his left, sketching out the web of interrelationships. "And, to top it off, it was apparently my birthday, which was why I was visiting."

It had been rather a convoluted backstory, conveyed to him in frantic table-tap code and sideways glances during the first twenty minutes after his arrival, between the soup course and the salad. "The food was good — there may not be much going on down there in Tea Country, but they certainly know how to cook. But the best thing," and his eyes unfocused a little bit just thinking about it, "was the dessert. It was a huge trifle cake, with poached pears, vanilla bean custard, those little capery garnishes, and a thick milky sauce, all sandwiched between twelve parchment-thin layers of white angel-cake." His voice took on a distant, dreamy quality. "Why don't they have food like that back here in Konoha?"

It had almost been enough to make him give Keiji a pass for putting him in that situation in the first place. Especially since of the three people involved, none of them, even with subtle henges on the part of the shinobi, looked at all alike.

"There were capers on your cake? Eww." Ginta gave Hiro a disbelieving look.

"Not—" Hiro started. Ginta didn't let him finish.

"Or is it like that thing where you put salt on chocolate?"

Hiro blinked blank eyes.

"You know, where you put salt on fancy chocolate, to make it even better? My mom had some. It was caramel and chocolate with sea salt, and it sounds gross but it was really good." Ginta pushed the partly eaten main course away from himself and reached for the yatsuhashi.

"Also that must have been some phenomenal cake. Did it do that to you when you ate, it, too? You looked like you were gonna have to adjust yourself there a little for a minute, just from describing it." He watched Hiro's eyes to widen, then narrow, as a red tinge creeped across the Hyuuga's ears. Just the beginning of a tint. And then it was gone and Hiro looked as unruffled as if Ginta had merely commented on the weather.

"I bet Genma has a trick for dealing with that. Getting a boner on a mission when it's really not a good idea to. He's my Eros-trained buddy who plays sudoku, remember. Or wait... You debriefed him." The playfulness in Ginta's voice shuttered down. "Anyway, I heard he was getting out of hospital soon. And his buddy Raidou. Kakashi's out, too."

"Glad to hear that," Hiro answered softly. And wasn't that a downer. Hints of memories stirred in the deepest corners of Hiro's tidy and well-organized mind: fragments of Genma's voice whispering field atrocities in a dull monotone, Raidou's words strident with defensive anger and wild-animal fear. Hiro pushed them back away with an effort, important recollections to keep stored firmly in his subconscious knowledge, never to see the light of day. He needed practice, anyway: Kotoe-san must have towering file cabinets full of these old, faded debriefings and confessions, too painful to look at but too vital to forget.

He plucked a yatsuhashi from the bag, biting off a corner thoughtfully. The rich cinnamon flavor reminded him of the cake, and he flushed again, deep beneath the surface where no one could see. Observing Ginta's rising melancholy, he sacrificed himself on the altar of changing the subject.

"You seem practically like an Eros-trained agent yourself, the amount you talk about 'sudoku'," he ventured, head tilted at a mildly provocative angle. "Are you sure your friend Genma is the only one?" His attempt, bringing up Genma again, was to air out the topic, loosen up some of the ache and make it liveable. Paper over that particular minefield, as Kotoe-san would say, and hope it held.

As a conversational gambit that had been a rather obvious rescue, but Ginta was far from too proud to take it. He took a deep breath, sighed out half a laugh, and bit into a yatsuhashi. "I don't think sudoku is actually part of Eros training. I mean, except for a very narrow subset of targets, numbers just aren't vehicles for seduction, you know? Although I guess if you fall into that subset..." He winked. "But nope, I'm not in that service, and I never trained for it."

He stared away a moment. Behind Hiro where the scroll hung there was also a rough-crafted vase. Empty. To have a sprig of flowers in it with that wisteria scroll above it would have been over done. The vase had been Grandfather's. Elegant and expensive, but with a sort of underlying brutality.

Grandfather would never have allowed Ginta to train for Eros work, even if Ginta had wanted to. He'd have pulled every string available to him — and maybe he had — to see that the scion of the Sakamoto clan did not take that path.

Hiro moved his head, looking at Ginta with a question in unfathomable, milk-pale eyes.

Ginta snapped out of his reverie with a quirk-lipped smile. "Just thinking. I wonder if Genma's family every had anything to say about him going into Eros work. Or you know, any Eros agent, really. I mean, they start them young for that. But the best ones — Genma's definitely one of the best ones — they like the work. It's like they're rock stars. So it's not like they're, you know, abused kids."

Hiro gave a noncommittal nod at that assertion, not wanting to openly disagree. Just because they thought they liked it, didn't mean they weren't abused kids.

Of course, it wasn't so different from any other area of ninja life: starting young, being raised to enjoy the service, the adrenaline, the rush of success. So who was he to judge? He hadn't run any debriefings on Eros-missions yet -- for which he was profoundly grateful to both the gods and Kotoe-san -- so he didn't really know what it was like, what went through their heads. He was glad though, suddenly, that Ginta wasn't one of them.

"I wouldn't know," he said finally, turning the yatsuhashi over in his hands without looking at it. "I suppose we're all given to whatever division we're most suited for." Intel for Hiro, field or internal, or maybe now both; espionage and dirtier work for Ginta. He realised he'd have to request a note on his record not to be assigned to debrief Ginta's missions. It wouldn't necessarily be heeded -- in the worst situations, they'd use friendship as a tool to the breaking point -- but it didn't help even Intel to waste it prematurely.

Looking up, he saw that Ginta was sitting quietly, also toying with his dessert. Their tea was cold, the rest of the food abandoned; even with the elegance and simplicity of the decorations, the room felt somehow oppressive. But bright sunlight shone through the gap in a shoji screen leading out to a tastefully cultivated garden, and as he looked, a breath of fresh breeze gusted in and ruffled Ginta's hair.

"You're done with lunch, right?" Hiro asked abruptly, setting down the remnants of his own dessert. "Shall we take a walk out in the garden?" As a guest, he shouldn't have asked, but he was sure Ginta would understand his intent not to offend; steeped in ceremony as they both were, surely he could elide some formalities in the spaces of things that were left unsaid. And considering Ginta's acrobatics with the crutches earlier, Hiro was sure he would be able to manage a few garden paths.

"Yeah," Ginta said, brightening as he reached for his crutches. "But bring the yatsuhashi. We can eat some more out by the koi pond. I can show you my koi." That suggestion brought a lighter look to Hiro's face, too.

"Some of them are my grandfather's, of course. Did you know koi can live to two hundred? They can, but they usually live more like twenty-five or so years. But yeah, there's one — I'll show you — that Grandfather said he got when he was a kid. So that makes it at least seventy."

Now began the careful calisthenics involved in getting from floor to feet with a right leg that was rigidly encased in plaster from thigh to toes. It involved a lot of hip swinging, hands on the planted crutches, and chakra sticking the working foot to the floor. The whole maneuver put a strain on the newly healed muscle in that left thigh that put an unmistakable grimace on Ginta's face.

And then Hiro was right in front of him, one hand on Ginta's left forearm, the other reaching out to offer assistance. Ginta pursed his lips, blew out a disgruntled sigh, dropped the right crutch, and took Hiro's hand. "Thanks," he said, when Hiro had gotten him up, carefully balanced on one crutch. "That part's still tricky."

"Not a problem," Hiro answered mildly and handed back Ginta's other crutch, surreptitiously watching to make sure that Ginta was stable. Satisfied, he left Ginta to sort himself out and regain his dignity, and bent down to collect the remaining yatsuhashi, assuming Tsuki would take care of the rest. "Lead the way, Ginta-san," he called lightly, restoring to Ginta the protective mantle of host, and waited politely while Ginta nudged the screen open with a crutch-tip so they could proceed out into the sunny afternoon.

The formally-arrayed garden was not so different from the much smaller iteration in the hospital courtyard, though fireflies and night-mist were replaced by lazy midday heat and bright reflections off the water. Meandering paths and finely-arched bridges led in a roundabout trail towards the cool waters of their destination, filled with glittering silvered flashes glimpsed just beneath the surface, and ringed with soft marshy plants. Following along behind Ginta's slow-moving swings, Hiro recognized why Ginta would have been so soothed by that recent hospital visit.

For his own part, he tried to push away inevitable reminders of the equivalent sculptured garden at the center of the Hyuuga compound, and smile at the sunshine and pleasant company.

Ginta led Hiro past hydrangea that were just starting to show buds, and camellia that were already scattering red and white petals on the gravel, and under arching sprays of pastel sakura blossoms in baby pink and blush-edged white. "We can cross over that bridge and feed the koi there, and then go up to the garden behind the tea house. There's another pond there, where I have my breeders," he said, nodding at a curve in the path beyond the nearest bridge, where a stone lantern stood green with lichen.

"I'm not gonna do tea for you though, if you don't mind. I mean, I know how. I guess you sort of have to know how. But its a really traditional, old-school tea house where you have to crawl in to prove you aren't bringing a sword or whatever..." He shrugged and swung through his crutches, waving his leg in front of him. "I can't wait till I get this off and I can crawl and stuff again."

He stopped at the edge of the bridge, next to a lidded ceramic vase that stood nearly to his hip. "Anyway, we're not old and we're not trying to arrange a marriage between us--" He broke off abruptly, snorting a laugh. "Oh my god, can you even imagine? That would be hilarious. It'd be in all the society pages. 'Sakamoto and Hyuuga Clans United by Love.' Grandmother would be furious."

"I'm sure the Hyuuga would be equally ecstatic," Hiro observed dryly, "considering that they're so open to both outsiders and homosexuality. Probably Hiashi-sama and your grandmother could bond over their shared dismay." Before the Hyuuga head activated his curse seal, Hiro didn't add. The casual wrap of black fabric across his forehead felt momentarily stifling, as it always did when he thought of how Hyuuga tradition merged, for his side of the family, into unbreakable law.

He wasn't even going to try and guess at what strange train of thought had led Ginta to that particular hypothetical. Well, it was probably straightforward enough: as the only remaining scion of a family as old and influential as the Sakamoto, Ginta was well past the age at which he should, if tradition had anything to say about it, be married. Hiro suspected he'd been forced to undergo any number of measured, tedious tea ceremonies with all sorts of likely young women, probably in this very tea house, before his grandmother got the idea that it was never going to happen.

If she ever had. That was a battle of wills he'd be quite curious to see, Hiro thought, remembering his one solemn glimpse of the elder Sakamoto, outside Ginta's ICU wing door. He imagined such a confrontation might tell him a lot about his rather enigmatic friend.

"It's probably a lucky thing for me your family is so biased, or Grandmother would have already set up a marriage meeting with some pretty female cousin of yours." Ginta swayed side to side on his crutches, an unconscious gesture of pleasure at being outdoors. "I end up getting pulled in for one about once every six months or so. Even though pretty much anyone who's anyone knows I don't swing that way."

Hiro offered a sympathetic smile, like a man who'd been there himself and understood the suffering Ginta'd been through, Ginta guessed. Surely the Hyuuga put their young marriageable men through the same tortures.

"You're not, right?" Ginta asked.

Hiro blinked.

"Out, I mean. Or in, for that matter. I guess I never asked you. Given statistics, I should have assumed you were straight, so it's funny I assumed you weren't just now."

Ginta tucked both crutches under his right arm and reached down with his left to lift the lid on the vase, then reached in and extracted a silver-handled scoop full of tiny brown pellets. He held the scoop out to Hiro. "Here, you can feed 'em with me. Like this." Then he realized he didn't have a hand free. He shifted on the crutches, touched the cast-encased right heel to the ground very carefully, and grabbed a fistful of the pellets from the scoop, throwing them in a wide arc across the surface of the pond. The koi instantly came to the surface, an orange and silver mass of activity and gaping mouths.

Then he looked up at Hiro again.

"Should I not have asked you that?"

Belatedly papering over his discomfort with action, Hiro reached for the scoop, casting out another handful of pellets into the tight-packed gathering of scales and fluttering fins that roiled the water. "Ask what you want," he told Ginta sidelong, leaning one arm on the railing of the bridge and turning to look out over the pond. As Intel, it went without saying that some questions wouldn't receive a straight answer.

Not that this was necessarily one of them. "I suppose I'm nothing, really," Hiro told the fish distantly, his voice taking on a slight edge of bitterness that he made no particular effort to hide. "Our interactions are so constrained, even within the family, and I'm well aware that my bloodline is not considered to be of prime genetic stock. My grandmother might have arranged a marriage for me, too, but since I'm in ANBU now," his vague gesture encompassed his hidden tattoo and, with a broad wave, HQ off in the distance, "I think she probably won't bother."

Lightening his expression, he smiled up at Ginta, shaking black hair away from white eyes. "That suits me fine, anyway." Another layer of intrigue and coercion that he didn't have to bother with. Being eighteen and Hyuuga had enough trials; he didn't need to add that one.

Though why he had just decided to confide all of that to Ginta, he had no idea. Maybe because he sensed that Ginta wouldn't care, wouldn't judge him by it. That Ginta had similar enough problems himself. "I just pity you your long drawn-out tea ceremonies," Hiro teased, putting on a mock-sorrowful look. "And actually, the poor girls too, forced to put up with your flaming disinterest. You must break quite a few hearts."

Silently taking the scoop from Ginta and refilling it, he flung out another cascade of pellets, listening to them patter down on the surface of the water before getting snatched up by hungry mouths. It really was soothing, he decided, feeding the fish. They didn't talk back to you.

"Any girl foolish enough to set her heart on me probably deserves to have it broken," Ginta said with a dismissive hand wave. "I think the only hearts I've really broken are my mother's and grandmother's." He watched the fish instead of his companion, but he could feel a sympathetic flinch telegraphed through the wooden railing of the bridge.

"But yeah," he went on after a moment, "the tea meetings are brutal for everyone except the matchmakers. Those old biddies could probably get jobs in Shida's basement. The girl has to sit there in seiza, too, and none of the girls they propose for me are ninja. You and I, we can sit seiza for a long time — well you probably can. I can when my leg heals. Shit, I bet it's gonna hurt like a bitch when I try the first time — but anyway the girls have to sit there all dressed up like doll festival toys, keeping perfect posture. I can practically hear their knees weeping, and all for what? A chance to marry the gay son of a rich family who's probably gonna get his ass killed serving his village? I mean, yeah, Grandmother wants me to produce an heir, but there are ways to do that that don't require..." He shrugged. "I think that's why my stepdad hates me, actually. If he and my mom had a kid, everything would be way easier."

Under the water's surface a bright yellow koi, larger than the rest, surfaced for a moment, then slid under, ceding its place to an even larger blue fish with a bright red splotch on its nose. Ginta tossed a handful of pellets towards them. "That's Tanuki Fish. He's one of the ones I bred. The yellow one is Grandfather's." He finally turned to look at Hiro again, bringing up yet another topic before Hiro could pursue the stepfather angle.

"How can you be nothing? Everyone's something. I mean, just because you aren't actually getting any can't mean you don't have dreams or whatever, right? You've got some beard..." He eyed Hiro's jaw critically. "Okay, not much, but some. So you're past puberty. Don't tell me Hyuuga are so refined they don't have wet dreams."

Conversational partners, though, did talk back, apparently. Hiro avoided Ginta's eyes and gazed out at the pond, watching Tanuki Fish's round fish-mouth open and close around the floating pellets, gulping them away from the other fish that crowded around. "I imagine we're no more refined than anyone else in that respect. Biology is biology." He didn't particularly want to talk about it.

"There's a koi pond in the Hyuuga gardens, too. Some of the fish there are ancient. Older than Konoha, for sure." He paused, flicking another handful of pellets out onto the surface of the water. The blue fish lumbered towards them, but the shiny golden fish edged out in front, followed closely by an agile, deep red fish with black spots. "Sometimes I think that koi breeding is as far as discussion of sexuality ever gets, in my family."

At least he hadn't broken anyone's heart himself, Hiro thought, or even had the opportunity to. Of course, in his family the penalty for stepping outside the lines was much greater. Just the threat of discipline seemed to be enough to twist the natural paths of interactions between people, sculpting an insular and fundamentally suspicious culture, bounded on all sides.

It was easier to think about his family anthropologically, Hiro realized, now that he wasn't living there. Harder to recall the feeling of being insignificant, of being somehow less.

He took a breath, breathing in clean spring air and scented flowers, the delicate sense of damp rising off the water. "You must be pleased to be in ANBU, able to go your own way," Hiro ventured finally, turning to Ginta with an open look. "It seems that you've really carved yourself out some freedom."

I admire that, Hiro didn't add aloud. He thought it went without saying.

"Freedom?" Ginta watched the fish, watched a few of the smaller ones coming up now to steal pellets the more dominant fish had missed. "I guess. If you want to call it freedom. I guess we get a lot of autonomy. I do, for sure, because I take a lot of solo missions. But even on a team mission we're kind of on our own, so yeah, I guess that's freedom. They pick us for that, you know. Recruit people into ANBU who have a strong ability to act autonomously."

He tossed a few more pellets in a long arc and watched the scramble of flashing scales under the water. "I kind of think I was predestined to end up in ANBU, really. I mean, between my genes and my temperament..." He chuckled and turned to study Hiro's profile. "You too, right? Although temperament has to be a huge factor with you, since there's a lot of guys who share your genes. I mean, you're the first Hyuuga in maybe ever to be in ANBU, right? Unless you count Haruichi, but you can't count Haruichi, he's a special case. Actually he and I kind of did the same thing, did you know that? We didn't wait to be recruited. Well, that's a lie, actually I was scouted when I was seventeen and I turned them down. Grandfather said no. But then some things happened."

Several things. The Fox. Sakamoto Gousuke's death. Ginta's relationship with Tomoya, and the catastrophic detonation at the relationship's end. He watched Hiro's blank eyes, wondering just how much the other agent knew about any of that. Hiro was in Intel Ops, after all, something always worth remembering.

Hiro continued to look at the fish, not Ginta, but his attention seemed to have sharpened.

"So yeah, when I was nineteen I pretty much just walked up to Arakaki and said if that offer still stood, I'd take it. And he said to follow him, and we went to Sandaime-sama's office, and Sandaime looked me in the eye and asked me if I was--" For an instant Ginta's cadence faltered, then picked right back up, as truth fell by the wayside. "--sure about it, and I told him yeah, it was my destiny."

One arched eyebrow lifted. "Destiny? Isn't that a little strong?" Ginta didn't seem to be the type who much believed in destiny. "I might believe that from Genma, but I hadn't expected to hear it from you."

After Genma's recent debriefing, Hiro was well aware that Genma was one of those rare creatures: a true believer among the Black Ops. So much so that Hiro had found himself paging through Genma's thick Intel file, confirming that his spiritual beliefs were longstanding. Abrupt religious conversions usually meant nothing good, and particularly so among ANBU. Hiro doubted that anything anyone saw while wearing the bone and black was likely to present a convincing argument for the existence of all-knowing and benevolent gods.

"I never understood how any ninja could manage to be genuinely religious, myself." Hiro looked over at Ginta, who had clearly spouted an airy fabrication to avoid actually revealing anything genuine about an important turning point in his life. Ginta nonchalantly avoided his gaze, tossing pellets out into the pond one by one.

Changing the subject with a smile that he didn't quite feel, Hiro gracefully let Ginta off the hook. This wasn't a debriefing, after all, it was a friendly conversation; or at least, it should have been. "I know there wasn't anything 'destined' about my invitation to ANBU." He treated the word lightly, like a shared joke. "That was all politics, through and through."

Wasn't much of an invitation, either, in the end.

"I didn't know you knew Genma well enough to know he was religious," Ginta said thoughtfully. "Although I guess maybe it came up in the debriefing. Or maybe you just read it in his file?" How much of Genma's story did Hiro know, to be sent to do a debriefing after the horror that Genma and Raidou had just been through? A sideways glance showed no obvious reaction on Hiro's face, but it wasn't like Hiro gave much away unless he was extremely provoked.

"But yeah, destiny... It's not always religious. I mean, I had a certain amount of destiny just because I'm Gousuke's grandson and the genes carried, right? Not that it's a bloodline like yours or anything, but there's some kind of genetic component to being a good ninja, and Grandfather was really good, and I definitely take after him, except in looks. And then you add the whole social standing thing with the Sakamoto family and all..." He waved a hand airily, and several koi followed the trajectory.

"So I was destined to be in ANBU because where else do you go when you're the best and you'd probably suck as a sensei? And you were destined for ANBU as soon as Sandaime-sama and Hiashi-san made whatever agreement they made that got you sent over the wall, right? Since you're not a runaway like Haruichi."

That hit the mark, if the way Hiro's eyes narrowed for a second was any indication. But then Hiro had just about said exactly that, with his comment about politics. Ginta tossed another pellet, trying to skip it across the surface. It hopped slightly before it was snatched up by a greedy silver-edged mouth.

"So you didn't even get a chance to volunteer? They just showed up at your place and said, hey kid, go report to Arakaki?"

"Well, you know, it's never as straightforward as that." Hiro brushed his hands free of koi feed remnants and turned, shifting his weight to lean both elbows on the bridge railing and look up at the clear sky. "This is the Hyuuga we're talking about, so there had to be the predawn summons, and the interminable wait in Hiashi-sama's reception room, and then the extended rapid-fire interview in front of the entire Council..." The sun was hurting his eyes, but he continued gazing forward without much emotion, his back arched casually over the weathered wooden rail. "It really is worse," he added blankly, "knowing that they actually are staring right through you."

It had been utterly terrifying, almost more so because he hadn't even had much of anything to hide. Chiyo had died before he'd managed to get himself into any trouble on that score, and then... well, that was it, as far as he knew. He'd always been careful to stay far behind any lines he was in danger of crossing. It hadn't seemed to matter, though, faced with that row of impassive, unmoving faces, the chakra-mark on his forehead clearly visible for all to see.

Hiro winced finally, turning his eyes away from the too-bright light. "Then came the politely worded yet implacable suggestion that I might enjoy spending some time away from the Compound. Which, at that point, felt like an absolute gift from above." He smiled wryly, if not a bit shakily, certain that his illusion of calm, self-effacing poise would fool more than ninety-nine percent of the ninja he'd met, and also certain that it fooled Ginta not at all.

That was okay, though: some secrets needed to be kept, and some just didn't, not all the time. A vision of Sayuri-sensei rose up in his memory, standing in her elegantly appointed kitchen with a delicate carven teapot rattling on the stove. Remember, she'd said, the steam always needs somewhere to escape...

"I suppose you could call that destiny," he admitted, turning into a gust of fresh breeze and taking the opportunity to shiver off both sets of memories. "At the time, it mostly felt like getting hit by a brick wall."

Ginta dusted off his own hands, watching the koi scramble for the last crumbs to fall, then executed a crutch-assisted pirouette and leaned against the rail next to Hiro, mirroring his friend's posture, but not his gaze. Ginta's eyes swept over the back part of the garden, to neatly raked pebbles, ancient moss, carefully sculpted camellias and globe flower bushes. To the sheltered breeding ponds against the back wall.

"Soooo.... You kind of are like Haruichi? Not a runaway, I mean, but in official disfavor? They sent you here as some sort of punishment? What'd you do wrong? Weird punishment, if you ask me. I love being in ANBU. Don't tell psych," he added in a conspiratorial hush, "that's probably the kind of thing they'll kick you out for, loving your job."

Hiro gave Ginta a brief sideways look, almost imperceptible to anyone not watching, but Ginta caught a shift of light as Hiro's milky eyes twitched to the side. After only a few encounters, it was getting easier to detect where Hiro was looking. But still damn hard to tell what he was thinking.

"No, no disfavor," Hiro answered thoughtfully. "It's not a punishment so much as me being, well... rather expendable, but still reliable. I was never all that healthy as a kid, and it's not something they want continuing in the genetic line."

Ginta digested that concept for a moment, then let out a low, disgusted snort. "I guess they don't know a diamond when they see it. But their loss is ANBU's gain. Konoha's gain, really." He turned and flashed Hiro a dazzling smile. "My gain."

Surprised, Hiro threw back the same bright and open smile, more subdued on his less-mobile features. The hint of a question lingered quietly behind his eyes. "If only they saw it that way! But I'm afraid that if I were one of your koi, I'd be the plain muddy brown one, without any bright colors or flashing scales to recommend me." He peered down into the pond over one shoulder, but every fluttering tail and elegantly weaving fin he could spot in the turmoil was graced with clear perfection of pigment and form. "Surely you see those sometimes in your breeding program, and deal with them the way the Hyuuga do?"

Ginta raised an eyebrow, a complicated expression rising on his face.

Hiro shrugged, turning back to Ginta with calm equanimity. "It doesn't bother me anymore, not when going unnoticed is such a large part of what I do." His life would have been so different, had things been otherwise, that it was difficult to even imagine. "I wouldn't have been able to be here, if it hadn't been that way, and... well, I like being in ANBU too." The words carried a ring of truth that he hadn't expected before he started saying them.

"Clearly we'd both be a field day for psych," he added with a grin, cutting through his own seriousness and changing the tone. "It's a good thing we're both sneaky enough to keep our own secrets, right?" His airy hauteur made it sound like a given.

You'll keep my secrets, won't you?

"Even you might be surprised at the number of secrets I've got filed away never to see the light of day," Ginta agreed with a laugh, tapping the side of his skull with two fingers in a sort of bastard salute. "So don't worry, yours are as safe as if they were stored in the Hokage's vault of forbidden scrolls. Not that psych is likely to interview me about you. Although they might interview you about me someday, but if you can tell 'em anything they don't already know... Well, that will be when you're ready to take over Shiratori's or Oita-san's job, right? And by then I'll be Arakaki."

A hawk flew overhead, high enough to be little more than a dark winged shape against the bright sky. Ginta's eyes tracked it, unthinkingly calculating whether it might be a messenger bird and where it might be going. Conscious thought was still directed at what Hiro'd just said.

"Come on, I want to show you something," he said abruptly, sliding his crutches under his arms and swinging to his feet. The path to the upper garden where the breeding ponds lay was steep and narrow, and harder to negotiate on crutches than the lower garden had been, but Ginta didn't hesitate. When he got to the shallow breeding pools, he stopped and looked at Hiro, then down at the pond, where a magnificent silver and black koi swam lazily over to investigate their arrival. Gliding silently out from under a slab of stone came a second fish, muted brown in the shadows.

"See her?" Ginta asked, pointing at the darker fish. "Wait until she comes into the sun." He edged closer to the pond, balanced on one crutch and and dipped the other into the water, luring both fish closer. As sunlight hit them, both koi looked suddenly metal plated: bright platinum and dull copper. "You might think she was just a boring brown carp, but you'd be wrong. Even though she's not all that exciting to look at, she's really special. She's gonna be the key to me breeding an all-silver. All her offspring are really valuable, too. The Hokage has two of her fry in his private garden. Grandfather gave her to me when I was little. I named her Dango, because she reminded me of the color of sweet soy sauce."

He glanced at Hiro out of the side of his eye, then down at the fish again, and smiled.

Sunlight glistened on the water. The majestic silvery koi lost interest, and drifted away into the overhanging shadows of the rocks. Hiro knelt down by the pond to get a closer look at this plainest of drab brown koi. "Hi there," he said quietly, and dangled his fingers in the water. She swam up to him without fear, bumping against his hand companionably.

"She is pretty, in a certain way." He looked up at Ginta, qualifying his statement so that Ginta would know he truly meant it. Dango nibbled on his fingertip, thinking that there might be food. "I can see how she would have lovely offspring." Hiro turned to regard her again, her wide dark fish-eyes a perfect mirror to the rippling waters of the pond. Without any hint of concern or mistrust, she let him reach out and carefully stroke her smooth scales.

After a moment, he withdrew his hand and stood up, shaking free the lingering water droplets and stepping back from the edge of the pool with an unaccustomed soft look on his face. Regardless of Ginta's intention, it wasn't himself that the plain brown koi reminded him of.

"So some of her fry are in the Hokage's own private pond? She must be proud." Hiro smiled lightly, stretching his shoulders back from being hunched over. His own mother didn't remember, sometimes, why he'd moved out, but he patiently explained again every time he went home to visit. She always had some small tea-cakes or fresh-cut flowers waiting for him, depending on where in the Compound she'd been working more recently, prepared just in case he should happen to stop by. His mother wasn't drab or brown, not at all, but something about the serene, reflective quality of their eyes was the same.

"Two, yep." Ginta smiled at his fish. "You're a good guy, Hyuuga Hiro. Know how I can tell? You pet fish. Only really good people pet fish. If you wanted, I could give you one of her fry. I mean, from this breeding. Of course I don't know how many eggs we'll get, or how many of those will actually hatch. Frogs get some of them. But I'd save out one for you if you wanted. Might even get one with that really bright yellow. Or what color do you like? If I get an all silver, though, I'll be keeping that one for breeding. But I'd totally give you any other one. You could keep it here if you don't want to put it in with the Hyuuga koi. Or actually you could probably have a tank. I keep thinking about getting a tank, but..." He shrugged and withdrew his crutch from the pond. "Missions."

Hiro hesitated, eyes following the fish as they patrolled their small pond. "I..." started Hiro. Ginta could see the lift of Hiro's shoulders, the fall. "I'm not sure I could properly take care of it..."

"Sure you could!" Ginta enthused. Hiro wanted a fish — wanted one of Ginta's fish — Ginta could see that. "I'd teach you. Besides it's easy. And if you kept it here then it'd be totally taken care of. Of course then we'd have to visit together, but I'd explain to Tsuki that you're a friend and you have a fish here. You'd have to meet Grandmother, but she'd like you, I'm pretty sure. Especially if you had a fish. What color do you like?"

Hiro's lips twitched in a smile that seemed almost surprising. "That black-and-silver one was pretty. Or... I saw one that was almost bluish."

"Oooh, yeah, the slate blues are gorgeous! I have some over here, actually. They have red on the edges of their scales, but it's really subtle. You can see it in shallow water when the light's right." Ginta shoved back on his crutches and swung to the right, heading deeper into the back garden, towards another low-walled pool. "See?" he said, when they stopped. "There's two. And some red and blacks. And there's one black and white. But I really like the blue one with the red tail, see him? It's a boy, we think, although sometimes it's really hard to tell with fish. A lot of the time, really. But anyway, I think he has really nice coloring, and he's got a good shape. They're still small, so you could even have a tank if you wanted one of these. Which one do you like?"

Hiro crouched down to take a closer look at the juvenile koi. The fish reacted instantly, darting toward Hiro's shadow where it fell over the water. "How do you tell if it's a male or female fish?" he asked, trailing a finger through the water's ripples, and drawing a flock of eager koi fry in its wake.

"Well, the males are more likely to have colored fins. Females are kind of translucent. But sometimes males have translucent fins, so that's not a guarantee. And females have rounder fins, usually. And females are bigger and wider, but that's only when they're sexually mature, when they're over two, which these aren't. But females get eggs when they're grown, so then they're rounder, you know? And males are skinnier. But of course all these are skinny because they're juveniles. But that's why all the prize winners are females, almost, because they have rounder bodies and it shows off their colors and patterns better. So really it's kind of cheap to give you a male, except I do think he's prettiest, even if he's a boy."

If Ginta had kept his eyes solely on the fish, he might have missed it when Hiro activated his Byakugan. But he was watching Hiro's face, watching for a reaction. Veins stood out at Hiro's temple for an instant, than subsided again. "I think he's gorgeous," Hiro said, and reached his finger towards the red and blue fish.

"Wow, that's totally cheating. Awesome!" Ginta laughed delightedly. "OK, he's yours. That's Hiro's fish. You hear that fish? You're Hiro's. I never even though to try that before. Well, obviously I can't since I'm not a Hyuuga. But I never thought about asking one to look. So can you see, I don't know, like, the undeveloped ovaries in the females or something? That's awesome!"

"I'd be happy to sex your koi for you anytime," Hiro offered with deeply buried amusement and an arched eyebrow that Ginta would only be able to see in reflection. The mirrored surface broke as water rippled around his fingers, striking delicate highlights on the small koi's scales. My fish, Hiro thought. Now that was interesting.

"He needs a name..." Hiro pondered, tilting his head and watching with a smile as the agile fish darted around his hand, chasing shadows. A gentle twitch of Hiro's fingertips sent it arrowing towards the safety of a nearby rock, but half a second saw one misted fin poke out again, as if to say he was only playing. "Daiki, I think," Hiro decided finally. Brightly shining. A fitting name for a frosted blue fish that faded into the glints on the water.

Mostly. Except for that splash of bright orange flame gracing the tip of his elegantly curved tail. Daiki wouldn't be hiding much, Hiro thought with a grin. Not that he'd need to. "He really is lovely," Hiro continued, turning back to Ginta with a more serious, altogether genuine expression, and making direct eye contact. Though maybe Ginta couldn't tell. "Thank you," he said, and meant it.

After a moment, he went back to smiling at the fish in the pond: too much open honesty made him uncomfortable. Several of the other fry had come up in the intervening time, curious about what was going on, and Daiki magnanimously allowed them to play as well. "If Dango's his mother, who is his father?" Hiro asked, watching the strangely meditative swirl of brightly colored patches in the water. "Do you know?"

"Daiki's a good name," Ginta said with a nod, as if his blessing had been sought. "Let's see... The fry in here are from two different breedings actually. See how there's a couple that are slightly littler?" He pointed out two silver and orange fish that lurked in the shade of some floating water plants. "But Daiki's about eight months old, so his dad is Tanuki-fish. I bred them last August after I was on a mission that--" He broke off, laughing.

"Okay, actually I shouldn't tell you this, or you're gonna think I'm the world's biggest klutz on missions. But anyway I was on a big mission up north and there were some complications..." His lips twisted in a wry grimace. His last mission as Seishi -- that alias was dead. His last mission with Ryouma and team Badass -- the team was done, too. And Ryouma... He shook his head and brushed one hand through his hair, leaning awkwardly on his left crutch while his hand was off the grip.

"And then I was at the hospital for a while, and then Grandmother made me rest here for, like, two weeks. I thought I'd die of boredom." That got a sympathetic twitch of one of Hiro's eyebrows. "It wasn't just Grandmother, really. Grandmother and Arakaki were both in on it. And actually Sandaime-sama, only I didn't talk to him directly or anything except for one day when he came by the hospital and was all..." He shrugged. "You know how he is when he's being inspirational and leaderly and stuff, right? Giving you the feeling it was totally worth it, no matter what you just did?"

Hiro nodded. "Yes," he said. A small, entirely serious smile touched his face briefly. "I know."

"Yeah," Ginta said softly. "Like that. And then I got an official scroll from Sandaime commending me for my bravery on the mission and a hand-written note saying he was pleased to hear I'd decided to recover at my family estate. So, like, it's not like I could say no to that, right?"

That same knowing smile twitched the corners of Hiro's mouth up, the lashes framing whey-pale eyes dipped just a little, as he nodded. Was that sympathy?

"And then I had some time on my hands," Ginta said with a shrug, swaying from side to side a little as the cast grew heavier. "Kind of like now, only I wasn't on crutches so it was easier to get around and stuff, and I spent some time on my breeding program. I figured if I mated Dango and Tanuki-fish together I'd get some strong swimmers with good shape and maybe a few with the metallic scales, and some interesting colors. And then I did a breeding with Coin-fish and one of my all-gold males, so really all of these fry are eight months, but the smaller ones are from the second breeding and are a week and a half younger. It really worked, too, see? I even had a potential for my all-silver, but then I started back on active duty and while I was away on a mission a heron got in. Tsuki was really sorry, and she was crying and everything, but these things happen. I was just glad the heron only got the babies."

Hiro winced and nodded again, his fingers still trailing in the cool water. "Poor little guys," he agreed softly, petting whichever fish happened to wriggle itself beneath his hand.

It was good to hear Ginta so enthusiastic about something. For a while, he'd sounded so... listless. Listless for Ginta, anyway. There was a big difference between chattering on out of excitement, the words tripping over each other in their haste to make their way out into the world, and chattering to cover up the fact that you weren't really saying anything at all.

"You run a lot of solos, don't you?" he asked suddenly. It wasn't really a question; Hiro knew it, and Ginta knew that he knew it. "I'm surprised you don't end up in the hospital more often, actually." The failure rate for the class of missions Ginta took was ridiculously high, and they both knew that too. After all, the types of field missions they took were similar enough. Except that Ginta was a Hunter and Hiro was Intel, which meant that Ginta was expected to actually do something. Just watching wasn't always any easier, necessarily, but it often was less life-threatening.

Both, however, were isolating, physically strenuous, mentally exhausting. "I wish the Hyuuga gardens were as restful as this place is," Hiro gestured simply with his free hand, a wistful tone coloring his voice. "Sandaime and your grandmother were right, it must be a great place to recover."

"I take a lot of solos, yeah. And that's an interesting leap, from murdered baby fish to me taking solos a lot," Ginta said, pursing his lips and blowing a stream of air at the shock of hair that had fallen once again into his eyes. "Is that common knowledge? I guess it is, pretty much. I mean all you have to do is check the assignment board and see if there's one for me and if I have partners assigned. Still, it's kind of interesting that my dead fish made you think about that. I suppose the heron could be like a ninja, swooping in all silent and deadly and picking off the defenseless fry one by one. Or maybe we're the fish and Konoha is the heron."

He glanced at Hiro, catching sight of a focused but unreadable expression on the Hyuuga's face. Hiro had turned away from the fish to look at him, and Ginta felt suddenly terribly exposed, as if his cover had just been blown. He brushed the hair out of his eyes again and felt his smile turn a little brassy.

"There's two kinds of solos, right? The kind where they send backup in after you if you don't come back, and the kind where they don't. I try to always take the first kind. That's what happened last summer. Well, HQ didn't send the backup; Ryouma and his team decided to go in on their own after I didn't show up for dinner."

Or breakfast, or for two days after he'd been expected back.

"It actually blew up a pretty big op, but I guess if Ku— if they'd had a chance to examine my corpse, it would have been even worse. I mean, they'd have figured out I was from Konoha eventually. Or, you know, a real backup team would have been sent, but they'd have been too late. So I was lucky Ryouma and his crew had some initiative."

Pulling his hand out of the water and drying it slowly on his pant leg, Hiro made sure all of his attention was focused on Ginta, as the seriousness of the comment called for. "From what I hear, Ryouma has a lot of initiative," he ventured neutrally. Initiative, in the sense Ginta had used it, was not always a positive thing. "I'm certainly glad he decided to use it that time," he added with an easy smile.

Something was up between Ginta, Ryouma, and Hatake Kakashi, Hiro knew as much from when he'd visited Ginta across the hall from them in the hospital. He didn't have enough information to say exactly what it was, but it did bear watching, and maybe later he would try to discover what was going on.

Not before he was more certain about where he stood with Ginta, though. The hardest thing about secrets wasn't uncovering them in the first place; it was acting, from that point on, exactly as you had when you didn't know anything at all, which took a lot more delicacy and planning. That was a lesson that children in glass houses quickly learned.

Cross-referencing Ginta's cut-off syllable with what he remembered from Ginta's record, Hiro wondered at his companion's suddenly forthcoming mood. Everything relating to undercover ops in Lightning Country was still strictly confidential, and though Hiro had enough clearance to see the full report, it would have taken some digging, and possibly a few favors. Ginta certainly hadn't needed to mention Ryouma's name. It felt curiously like a gift, and Hiro's smile settled in more securely to the corners of his eyes.

"I haven't been there too often, for obvious reasons," he ducked his head, lowering his gaze, "but I certainly don't envy you being there back then. I'm glad it was solo mission type one." Looking up from under his hair, his smile was innocent but genuine.

"Yeah, me too. No type twos for me, even if Grandmother thinks they're all that way. The mission I got so messed up on just now, that wasn't even a solo, but..." Ginta's eyes twitched away from his companion's face, back to the slender fish darting in and out of shadows. "Any mission can go to hell, I guess. I was pretty sure I wasn't coming back from it, at one point, but not because I didn't want to. I was just... You know how it goes, right? It's not like it's in Konoha's best interests to let agents go down, though, even if the mission fails. But you're far from HQ and everything happens so fast. By the time they even realize you need backup, half the time it's too late..."

That wasn't where he wanted to go. He'd been trying hard not to think about the what-ifs since he got back. Trying hard not to think about the feeling that had come over him as he'd fallen towards an inferno: that feeling of serenity. He lifted his chin and smiled at Hiro, leaping for another subject with an acrobatic grace he didn't feel.

"You haven't been there, huh?" He could feel Hiro's eyes on him, seeing too much, knowing too much. Ginta's voice rose, his smile tightened. "It's nice up in the north east. There's a border town on our side of the line that has a really sweet onsen. We should try for an easy double sometime -- the kind where no one needs any rescues -- and I'll show you around."

It wasn't like he'd been particularly cryptic, but Hiro's reference to 'up there' made it plain Hiro knew more than Ginta had told him. It kindled a strange mixture of curiosity, apprehension, annoyance and... warmth? Yes, warmth. How strange.

"How many of my mission reports have you read, anyway? It's not any fun if I don't have any stories to tell you that you haven't already heard."

Hiro shrugged lightly and smiled, picking apart the pieces of Ginta's complicated expression. "Not that many — I'm not a stalker, you know." He caught a minute shift in the planes of Ginta's face. It was almost as if... Was that a hint of disappointment?

"But I saw you were in the hospital, and I was... concerned," Hiro tested out carefully, watching for Ginta's reaction with casual attentiveness. "So I poked around a little, using some resources that were at my disposal."

It hadn't been nearly that easy, attempting to bargain with the master manipulator herself for possession of Ginta's abridged summary records, but he suspected Ginta knew that too. "I'm Intel. That's what we do." He lifted one shoulder again, a touch self-consciously, and this time it was as much apology as it was a brief warning: this is who I am.

"I didn't see that much, though, really. And besides," he quirked a one-sided smile, hope chasing its way into his expression, "in my experience, the best stories never make it into the final mission reports." Crossing his legs and leaning back on palms flat against sun-warmed stone, he tilted his head up at Ginta, waiting.

"Yeah," Ginta smiled, not entirely sure he was meeting Hiro's eyes. "The best stories are the ones you save for when you have some alcohol, not the ones you tell the zombies." Hiro's eyebrows creased, and Ginta gave an apologetic shrug. "Er, I know, you wear a grey uniform, too. But you're not really a zombie, even if you do work for Intel. I mean, I worked for Intel for a while, too, right? And a lot of my jobs are sort of cross over with stuff Intel does. You're a field agent. You're not a zombie."

"Right..." Hiro said, quirking an eyebrow in a way that clearly said he was humoring the madman in front of him. Underneath the elegant brows, though, his pearl-drop eyes held a question.

"Before I joined ANBU," Ginta said, answering the question Hiro hadn't asked. "For seven months. Infiltration training and some local missions. When I upped with ANBU, Arakaki and Oita fought over which division was gonna get me. Obviously Arakaki won. I heard they played a game of shogi with me as the bet. I also heard Arakaki's only ever beat Oita at shogi three times."

He laughed and swayed on his crutches, letting the sun sink into the dark fabric of his kimono and warm him. Letting the wind ruffle his hair. But damn, he needed to stop letting so much of his weight rest on his armpits, because his hands on the crutch grips were starting to tingle. And damn that cast was heavy. Too bad there wasn't a bench out here...

After a moment's indecision, he pivoted a little closer to Hiro, stood a little straighter, and then carefully lowered himself to the ground next to his friend. It was less graceful than the move had been indoors, and some gravel skittered from under a skidding crutch tip as he neared the ground, sending him off-balance. The word that came out of his mouth when his cast-bound foot slapped against the ground with a hollow thunk would have curled his grandmother's hair.

"Uh, I mean, oops?" he said, wincing through a smile as he settled next to Hiro.

"I'm not saying anything." Hiro raised his hands defensively, protesting his innocence. Ginta appeared to be fine, though still a bit pained, and memories of his own past injuries twinged in remembered sympathy. "I'm not sure why you felt you needed to self-censor, though..." He lifted an eyebrow, questioning.

Ginta shrugged one shoulder, his arms still held close to his body to defend against the aftershocks of pain. "Grandmother's garden, Grandmother's rules, I guess," he mused, his voice airy but still tight, and gestured towards the pond. "And, you know, you shouldn't say bad words in front of little kids."

A laugh escaped from Hiro's throat without him quite realizing it, and he released the sudden tension that had built when he'd seen Ginta begin to topple. "Fair enough," he conceded, resting back on his palms again and tilting his head to let the sun warm his closed eyelids. Companionable silence reigned for a rare moment, backed only by the soft rustlings of leaves.

There were any number of things he could have said to break the stillness: they'd been in Intel at the same time, which was certainly an interesting path of inquiry to pursue, or he could have tried to extract more information about Oita-san, the only person Hiro'd ever met who was more impenetrable than Kotoe-san.

But instead, somehow, he found he was content to remain silent.

For a long, quiet moment, Ginta just listened to the breeze and watched the play of light on the rippling surface of the pond. Occasional orange flashes marked the passing of a fish, as the koi patrolled their water. The fierce ache in his abused leg died down the longer he sat still, leaving him strangely tired. Or maybe it was just the heat of the sun. Or the company. Ginta yawned, then gave Hiro a contented smile.

"You know, I really like you. You're like the koi. You're about the only person I know that I can get sleepy around."

Hiro opened his eyes in evident surprise and turned to look at Ginta. A soft, pleased expression lit his face. "Thank you," he said softly. The faintest hint of pink touched his cheeks.

"You're welcome," Ginta said, almost formally. He braced himself on his arms and leaned back, arching his spine and yawning again. "You and Kakashi. I can get sleepy around him, but that was mostly when I was really banged up. I don't know if I'd be sleepy around him if he was just visiting." He went quiet for a moment, thinking about that. Kakashi and him, curled up and falling apart.

Kakashi whose mother's photograph Ginta needed to steal from Grandmother's album.

Kakashi who was seeing Ryouma. And Ryouma, who was killing himself with speed.

He sighed and refocused on Hiro. Hiro who had come to visit him, and brought lunch, and been curious enough to do at least some digging into Ginta's past.

"You know something?" Ginta turned his head away to look at the pond, but his eyes slid to the corner, back to Hiro. "I'm glad I gave you a fish."