Chapter 100: Terms.

Four medical-nin knelt around the cot, and all four of them had their hands inside Chōjūrō.

Green light filled the tent. It pooled in the X carved across his chest, in the ragged hole in his thigh where a sword had stood for most of the fight, in the forearm where they'd finally pried a sai's point out from between the bones. A fifth medic was working on his right hand, setting fingers one at a time with small wet clicks. Chōjūrō didn't feel any of it. He'd been unconscious since the end of the fight, when Ao had watched every Leaf shinobi on the walls look up at the hole in the sky and sent four men in under the water to drag him out of the mud. His face was grey. His lips were grey.

"He's lost too much blood," one of the medics muttered. "We're pushing chakra into him faster than his body can use it."

"Then feed him a plasma pill."

That wasn't a medic.

The Fifth Mizukage stood at the foot of the cot. She'd been standing there for four days. Her blue dress was creased and stained at the hem where she'd knelt in his blood when they'd first brought him in, and her auburn hair had come halfway loose from its knot and she hadn't fixed it. She was smiling.

The medics did not look at her smile.

"Yes, Lady Mizukage."

Mei watched the green light flicker across the X on Chōjūrō's chest. Two clean cuts. Crossed exactly over his heart. If her men had reached him a minute later, he would have bled out in the mud.

Ao, standing at her right shoulder, looked at her. He looked at the back of her head. He took one small step to the left, putting himself between her and the tent flap.

"Lady Mizukage."

"Ao." She didn't look away from the cot. "Do you know what I think about, when I look at him?"

"I would prefer not to guess."

"I think about how young he was when he picked up that sword. How everyone told him he was too soft for it. How he trained every single day so that he could protect me and our village." Her smile didn't move. "And then I think about a little Leaf girl standing over him in the mud and taking it off him like a trinket at a market stall."

"Lady Mizukage, please calm down."

"I'm going over there."

Three of the jonin standing by the tent wall stiffened. One of the medics flinched so hard his green light flickered out for a moment, and another medic hissed at him to keep his hands still, and Ao's voice came in low and flat over both of them.

"Lady Mizukage. You should sit down."

"I've been standing here for four days, Ao. I don't want to sit down." She turned her head, finally, and looked at him. Her eyes were very green and very bright. "I want to walk across that inlet. I want to find that girl. And then I want to find everyone else in that camp, one at a time, and I want to see what their faces look like when I'm finished with them."

"I strongly advise against it."

"Good thing I didn’t ask what you thought."

She stepped toward the flap. Ao didn't move out of the way. The three jonin by the wall moved too, uncertainly. They weren't sure if they were about to stop their Kage or be killed for trying. One of them put a hand out, not quite touching her arm. "Mizukage-sama, please, at least wait until..."

"Until what?" Her smile widened. "Until they come back and finish him?"

"If they wanted him dead, Lady Mizukage, the girl would have finished him in the mud," Ao said. "She took the sword and walked away."

For a long moment, nobody in the tent breathed. The medics kept working with their heads down. The green light flickered on Chōjūrō's chest, and a cut along his ribs knitted closed.

Then Mei stopped.

Her hands relaxed at her sides. She let out a little breath and turned back toward Ao and the jonin, and her smile was softer now. Gentler.

"You're right," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm tired, and I'm upset, and I'm saying things I don't mean. I'm not going to do anything crazy."

The three jonin let out their breath all at once. One of them actually put a hand on his chest. The medic who'd lost his light got it back.

Ao didn't move from in front of the tent flap.

He'd served under more than one Mizukage. He'd been fighting since before most of the men in this tent had been born, since the days when the village was called the Bloody Mist and graduating meant being the last to survive. He knew what kind of smile was on her face.

"Lady Mizukage."

"Hm?"

"Which part were you going to do first?"

Mei tilted her head. "I don't know what you mean, Ao."

"You've already decided. I'm asking where you were going to start."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she laughed, very softly, and the sound made all three of the jonin take a step back.

"Well," she said, "I was thinking that if I went alone, at night, and stayed low over the water, I could get to the edge of their camp before any of their sensors noticed. I'd just wipe them all out."

"Lady Mizukage..."

"Tsuchikage-sama never has to deal with this, you know. He just flies wherever he wants and blows things up and nobody stands in front of his tent flap telling him no."

"The Tsuchikage is losing his war."

"Mizukage-sama!"

A chunin pushed into the tent from outside, breathing hard, rain dripping off his vest. He went to one knee in the doorway, which put him directly in front of Ao, which put him directly in the path of his Kage. He looked up, saw her face, felt the killing intent radiating off her body, and visibly decided he'd made a mistake getting out of bed this morning.

"A message," he said. "From the Leaf camp. A courier brought it to the edge of the flats under a white flag and left it on a pier post. It carries the seal of their Hokage's office."

He held up a rolled paper tied with red cord.

Ao took the message, broke the seal, and unrolled it. His one visible eye moved across it. His eyebrows rose about as far as Ao's eyebrows ever rose.

"Read it." Mei ordered.

Ao cleared his throat.

"To the Fifth Mizukage. From Hatake Kakashi, commander of Konoha's southern forces, with the authority of the Fifth Hokage." He paused. "Konohagakure holds the sword Hiramekarei. We will return it to Kirigakure, intact, on one condition. Mist withdraws all forces from the Land of Fire and returns home. In exchange, Konoha guarantees that none of your people will be attacked, pursued, or harmed as they leave our shores. No conflict between our villages will continue after your ships depart. Choose a place to meet. We will bring the sword."

He lowered the paper.

The tent was quiet except for the medics.

"That's it?" Mei said.

"That's it."

"They want us to leave."

"They want us to leave," Ao agreed. "And they'll give us Hiramekarei back for doing it." He looked down at the paper again. "Which is generous. Very generous. Too generous, I'd say, if I didn't understand why."

Mei's smile had gone strange. "Ao. I've spent the last four days deciding to walk over there and melt their entire army into the sand. And now you're telling me they want to give the sword back and send us home?"

"I am."

"And you think I should just take it."

"I think we should."

"We could take it ourselves." Mei pushed her loose hair out of her face. "Think about it. They have the sword in that camp right now. I lead the attack. We hit them tonight. We kill whoever's holding it, take it back, take every Leaf and Sand life we can, and we sail home with Hiramekarei and our reputation both."

Ao shook his head. Just once.

"No, Lady Mizukage."

"No?"

"No." He rolled the message closed. "Your power is the greatest in our village. I don't doubt you could kill a great many of them. But you would be one woman walking into an army that has Kakashi Hatake, the Third Hokage's son, the fan girl with the shadow user, and the girl who did that." He nodded at the cot. "And the rest of us would follow you in, because you're our Kage, and they would kill us in the hundreds. We've already lost more than we projected for this entire war. More than double."

Mei said nothing.

"We were never meant to win this war on our own," Ao went on. "That was never the plan. We came to put pressure on Konoha's southern shore while Iwagakure and Kumogakure did the real work. If they crushed Konoha, we'd take our share. If they failed, we'd withdraw before we bled too badly for it." He held up the paper. "Iwagakure has reportedly lost both its jinchuriki on its front. The Tsuchikage has not left his village. Kumogakure is still fighting, but we haven't heard of any changes in the situation over there yet. The plan has failed, Lady Mizukage. And Konoha is offering to let us leave before we bleed for it. With our sword."

"They cut my sweet little Chōjūrō open and left him in the mud…" Mei said quietly.

"Yes. And if you go over there tonight, Lady Mizukage, there will be a great many more of our people in that mud by the morning, and none of them will be lucky enough to survive like him."

Mei looked at Chōjūrō for a long time.

His chest was rising and falling under the green light. Shallow. Slow. But rising. The X was starting to close at the edges, red skin pulling together over the wound.

She closed her eyes. She breathed in, deeply, all the way down. Then she breathed out, and it went on for a long time, and a long thin ribbon of white mist went out with it. When she opened her eyes, they were tired. Just tired.

"Fine, write them back. Tell them the tide flats, tomorrow at noon, at low tide. Tell them to bring the sword." She told them.

"Yes, Lady Mizukage."

"And Ao."

"Yes?"

"If they so much as twitch at that meeting, I'm melting all of them."

"Yes, Lady Mizukage."

It had taken four days to get that letter across the flats.

A hawk from Kakashi to Shikaku in Konoha. A hawk from Shikaku north to the Cloud front, where the Hokage wrote back a single word, so hard the brush tore through the paper: YES!! A hawk from the Cloud front back to Konoha. A hawk from Konoha back down to the southern camp, carrying the Hokage's answer with Shikaku's seal on it. Only then had the courier gone out across the flats under the white flag.

Mist's answer came back that same night. By the morning of the fifth day, the deal was done.

All that was left was getting the sword away from Tenten.

"NO!"

She was wrapped in bandages from her ankles to her neck. Both arms. Both legs. Her ribs. Her shoulders. The medic who'd seen what three Gates had done to her already-healed muscles had spent an hour cursing and two more hours wrapping, and she'd been ordered not to stand up for a week. She looked like a bundle of laundry that had been rolled down a hill.

She was also lying on her side on the floor of the medical tent with both bandaged arms wrapped around a bandaged, flounder-shaped bundle as tall as she was, and she would not let go.

"Tenten." Shikamaru had both hands on the bundle's handles. He was pulling. "Let. Go."

"NO! You can't have her! She's mine!"

"It's not a her, it's a sword."

"SHE'S A BEAUTIFUL SWORD!"

Shikamaru pulled harder. Tenten came with it, dragged across the floor of the tent on her side, arms still clamped tight around the blade. Two medics backed away from the cot they'd been working at. A patient in the next cot sat up to watch.

"Temari," Shikamaru said through his teeth. "Help."

Temari sighed and walked over and took hold of the handles too.

The two of them pulled together. Tenten slid another meter across the floor and did not let go.

"But WHY?!" Tenten wailed. Her face was red and wet and crumpled. "Why can't we just kill them all instead?! Why do I have to give up Hiramekarei?! I just got her! I haven't even gotten to TEST HER OUT YET!"

"Listen to yourself, Tenten." Shikamaru dug his heels into the dirt floor. "Kill them all? That's not the point of this war. We're defending ourselves from our enemies. If we can make them go away by giving them back a stupid sword, that's more Konoha lives saved from dying for nothing."

"Hiramekarei ISN'T STUPID!" Tenten's grip somehow got tighter. "The point of this war should be to wipe out our enemies! They attacked us! Why shouldn't they be wiped out?! They're just jealous of us anyway! We can make them go away by killing enough of their ninja too!"

"And how many of our comrades die doing that?" Temari asked. She hadn't stopped pulling. "Compared to handing over one dumb tool?"

"IT'S NOT DUMB!"

"Tenten..."

"IT'S NOT FAIR!!!"

Something in her bandaged arms finally gave. The three Gates had torn everything she had and the bandages were holding together what was left, and there just wasn't enough of her left to keep holding on. Her arms slid. The bundle came free all at once. Shikamaru and Temari both staggered backward with it, and Shikamaru caught the weight before it fell and slung it across his own back with a grunt.

"Troublesome..." Shikamaru muttered. He looked down at Tenten on the floor of the tent, a heap of bandages with her face pressed into the dirt. Some of the edge went out of his voice.

"We have to look at the bigger picture here, Tenten." he reminded her.

Then he left. Temari followed him out with the sword.

Tenten lay on the floor and cried. You think I don't know that, idiot… lazy slacker pineapple-headed punk…

Someone crouched down next to her. A hand settled on the top of her head. It patted twice, lightly.

"Maa, maa." Kakashi's voice. Lazy as ever. A little softer than usual. "It's going to be okay, Tenten. There'll be more chances. There are a lot of legendary weapons out there in the world. You'll get your hands on more of them."

"It was my first known one..." Tenten sobbed.

Kakashi was quiet for a moment.

"I know…" He said.

He stayed there crouched beside her for a while longer, his hand on her head, and didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.

…

The two sides met in the middle of the flats, on the same ground where Tenten and Chōjūrō had fought five days before. The gash the two giant swords had carved was still there, a long black scar across the wet sand, half filled with seawater. Broken hilts still poked out of the mud here and there. A naginata snapped in two lay in a shallow pool and nobody had bothered to pick it up.

Konoha came from the north. Kakashi in front, hands in his pockets, his headband pushed up off his left eye. Shikamaru beside him with the bandaged sword across his back. Temari on his other side with her fan. Asuma and Kurenai a few steps behind. Twelve more Leaf and Sand jonin spread out in a loose line behind them.

Mist came from the southeast, across the shallows from the mouth of the inlet. The Mizukage in front, in a fresh blue dress, her hair put back up and perfect. Ao at her right shoulder with his eyepatch on and his haori dripping at the hem. Twelve Mist jonin behind them.

The two groups stopped twenty meters apart.

Nobody said anything.

Tenten wasn't there. She was a chunin. She was also tied to a cot by a medic who had been very clear about what would happen to her if she tried to stand up.

Mei's eyes moved across the Konoha line. Slowly. From face to face.

She was looking for someone. Kakashi could see that. Someone small, with buns in her hair. She didn't find her. Her smile didn't change.

Ao's head turned. Just a few degrees. Under the eyepatch, Kakashi knew, the Byakugan was looking through the dunes behind the Konoha line, through the wreck of the fishing boat, through the shallows. Counting.

"You have eight people hidden in the dunes." Ao said.

"You have six under the water." Kakashi said.

Nobody moved.

A Leaf jonin at the end of the line shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Two of the Mist jonin flinched and their hands went to their weapons. Three of the Sand jonin reached for theirs. Temari's fingers twitched toward the fan on her back.

Kakashi's hand came out of his pocket.

Ao's hands came out of his sleeves.

The air between the two groups went so tight it felt like the drizzle had stopped falling.

"Hey."

Everyone looked at Shikamaru.

He'd stepped half a pace forward. His hands were in his pockets. He looked tired, and annoyed, and like he very much did not want to be the one doing this.

"Everybody calm down," he said. "Seriously. Look around you."

Nobody did.

"I said look." His voice got harder. "Look at this beach. How many people have died on this sand since we got here? There's people on your side," he nodded at Mist, "who've lost friends. There's people over here who've lost family. And we're all standing on the same beach, about to do it all over again because emotions are running high."

A few of them looked down at the sand.

"Haven't we all seen enough people die?" Shikamaru said. "Because I have. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of this war. So let's do this. Let's sign the treaty and give back the sword and everybody here gets to go home to the people they actually care about." He took a breath. "Okay? Is everybody done?"

It was quiet for a long moment.

Then one of the Mist jonin took his hand off his weapon. Then another. Then the Sand kunoichi with the naginata lowered her blade a few inches.

Ao's hands went back into his sleeves.

Kakashi's went back into his pocket.

Beside Shikamaru, Temari was very carefully looking at the sea. There was color in her cheeks that hadn't been there a minute ago. She was thinking that if it weren't for this miserable war she would never have seen half of these sides of him, and for some reason that bothered her. In all those months in Sunagakure, she’d never seen him this manly!

Kakashi drew a rolled document from his vest. Ao drew another from his sleeve. They walked toward each other alone, met in the middle, and traded. Each read the other's copy. It took a while. The terms were short, but both of them read every line.

Kirigakure withdraws all forces from the Land of Fire. Konohagakure guarantees safe passage to Kirigakure's ships and makes no pursuit. The sword Hiramekarei, one of the Seven Swords of the Hidden Mist, is returned to Kirigakure. No further hostilities between the two villages shall be undertaken for the remainder of this conflict.

There were two seals at the bottom. Kakashi pressed his. Ao carried his copy back to the Mizukage, and Mei looked at it for a long time before she pressed hers.

Then Shikamaru stepped forward.

He walked ten meters across the wet sand with the bandaged sword across his back. Ao met him halfway. He swung it down off his shoulders. It took both arms; the thing was as tall as he was. He held it out flat across his forearms.

Ao didn't take it right away. His head tilted, just slightly. Under his eyepatch, his Byakugan was looking through the bandages. Through the steel. Looking for seals, explosive tags, anything Konoha might have tucked inside the wrappings.

There was nothing. Just the sword.

He took it. He settled it across his own back. He nodded to Shikamaru once.

Mei turned around and walked back toward the water. Ao and the Mist jonin followed her. Nobody looked back.

…

By sunset, the inlet was empty.

The Mist ships went out on the evening tide, low and grey and close together, sails filling with the wind off the land. The Leaf and Sand shinobi watched them go until the mist on the water took the last of them. Nobody cheered. Some of them sat down where they were and just stayed there. One of the Leaf jonin started laughing and couldn't stop for a while, and the man next to him put an arm around his shoulders until he did.

In the command tent, Kakashi wrote a short report and sealed it and tied it to a hawk's leg. Mist has withdrawn. Southern front closed. Awaiting orders. He took it outside himself and threw the hawk into the air and watched it climb north toward Konoha.

A few tents down, Temari did the same thing with a hawk of her own. Hers flew west, toward the desert and the Kazekage.

Then they both went back inside and waited.

The gorge didn't have a name.

The nearest village that did was nine days' walk to the south, and the people there had never heard of Konoha, or Iwagakure, or any war. Above the gorge there was nothing but snow and rock and sky. Below it, a waterfall had frozen solid in the middle of falling, a wall of blue-white ice forty meters high, and every day for the last month Naruto had thrown himself at it.

Jiraiya sat by the fire with his back against a boulder and listened to the boy snore.

It was past midnight. The cold up here had teeth. The fire was down to coals, and Naruto was rolled up in two blankets on the other side of it with his mouth open and one arm flung out into the snow.

Something cleared its throat at Jiraiya's elbow.

The toad was no bigger than a teacup. It had a scroll tied across its back with string, and frost was already forming on the top of its head.

"Cold out here, ain’t it?" The toad asked.

"Tell me about it." Jiraiya untied the scroll. "Thanks for coming all this way."

He unrolled it and held it low over the coals to read.

The handwriting belonged to his contact in the capital. Small and cramped. No greeting. There was never a greeting.

Stone front. The Four-Tails jinchuriki was driven from the field by Rock Lee of Konoha. Whereabouts still unknown. The Five-Tails jinchuriki was fought to a withdrawal by Tenten of Team Guy. Kitsuchi, son of the Tsuchikage, is dead. Ōnoki has not left Iwagakure.

Mist front. Kirigakure has withdrawn. A treaty was signed on the tide flats. One of the Seven Swords was taken in battle and handed back as the price of it.

Cloud front. Holding. The Hokage and Lady Tsunade are both present. So are the Raikage and the Eight-Tails.

Under that, in a different hand, one he knew, there was a single line from Shikaku.

The Hokage will not order you home. I am asking anyway.

Jiraiya read it twice.

Guy's boy, huh? Jiraiya had heard men laughing about that kid in a bar once, back when the first rumors started. Nobody laughed anymore.

His hand had gone inside his robe without him telling it to. Under his fingers, across his ribs, the scar was still bad. Four tails. Red corrosive chakra boiling off the boy, and Jiraiya on his back in a river with his chest opened up, wondering if this was how he died.

Naruto didn't remember any of it. Jiraiya had never told him.

Put that on a battlefield. Put it next to three other tailed beasts, in front of every other village and every spy watching this war for exactly that, and see what came back.

All this time on the road, Naruto had asked about home maybe a hundred times. Jiraiya always told him the same thing. Same old Konoha. Ramen's still good. Nobody misses you.

The kid was never going to forgive him for this.

He fed the scroll to the coals. It curled and blackened from the edges in, and Shikaku's line was the last thing to go.

"Any answer?" The toad asked.

Jiraiya tore a strip off the edge of one of his notebooks and wrote two words on it. He rolled it up and tied it to the toad's back.

Not yet.

The toad vanished with a small pop and a puff of smoke that froze in the air.

…

Jiraiya woke at dawn to the sound of three hundred Narutos screaming.

They were all over the frozen waterfall. Clinging to it with their feet, hanging off it by one hand, punching it, kicking it, sliding down it on their backs and running straight back up. Chunks of ice the size of cart wheels were breaking off the face and crashing into the gorge below. Every few seconds a clone lost its grip, fell, and burst into smoke halfway down.

The real one dropped out of the crowd and landed by the fire with steam pouring off his shoulders. He grabbed a skewered fish off the coals with his bare hand, yelped, and ate it anyway.

"Hey, Pervy Sage." He talked with his mouth full. "You think Bushy Brows has been training this whole time too?"

Jiraiya looked at the black flakes in the fire pit.

"Of course. Him and Guy aren’t the type to skip a day of training."

"Doesn't matter!" Naruto jabbed his thumb into his own chest and grinned so wide it took up half his face. “Bushy Brows is gonna freak when I get back and he sees how strong I got!”

He tossed the stick into the fire and ran back to the ice, yelling at his clones to hurry up.

Jiraiya watched him go.

"Yeah," he said, to nobody. "I bet he will."