I like the thought of Sasori as Kankurou's teacher. I have never thought about who taught him before, but this makes perfect sense.

Psycho!Kankuro makes me happy. If Sasori had stuck around for a while longer, I can see it happening.

Curious, curious. Plausible, although I don't agree with it at all, but it made me think. Still full of amazing things, though, as your writing always is.

"He’d seen the sluices filled with dark red stains" just made me *shudder*, a full-body crawl-up-the-spine and gasp for breath kind of shudder. It was that good. Nobody and nothing has ever done that to me before. Maybe it was your description rather than out and out saying "blood"; maybe it was the use of "sluices", which I now realise is a word that I like a lot and rarely see used; maybe it was the *implications* of that tiny little line, of fresh corpses laid out with the blood draining out of them, ripped open and gory to be stripped down to their skeletons and packed with mechanics... JeSUS, Caith. You're making me come over all poetic and morbid. Now I feel like I need to write some more psycho ninjas.

My overall fave part, though? The last four lines.

"Good and evil are separated by no more than a hair.

Believe me.

I know.

-From the private journals of Kankuro Sabaku, Red Sands Troupe Master, Jounin of Sunakagure and Master of the Thousand Wooden Forms, fifth century."

Like... you win the world. Please bear my internet babies. AND I F*CKING LOVE THE 'FIFTH CENTURY' BIT. YES. JUST YES. It implies (more implications in the tiniest of details!) the passage of significant time, how the characters we know in the current time have become historical figures, and, gorgeously, somewhat glorified as heroes and masters of their craft, as made evident by the identification of all Kankurou's many badass titles.

Now, originally I only stopped by to thank you so much for your consistent comments on Desert Heat. So, er... thank you. *bows* But then I noticed that little notice on your profile about the syntax error. Would it be the spelling of Kankurou's name? I notice that you (like many writers and even several issues of the English manga) spell it without the 'u' at the end. The 'ou' spelling is used to serve as the equivalent of a special character in the original Japanese (an 'o' with a funny hat thing) that gets lost in the romanisation to English, something which also occurs in 'jonin' and 'chunin' (jounin and chuunin).

Um. Geekery over. I shall feel very silly if this isn't the error you meant.

interesting idea though there is a big age difference between the two so i don't think they would have ever met before their fight in Shippuden but good nonetheless.

Wow. This helps a bit with my study of Kankuro's charecter. Do you beta?

I liked this . Hahaha... I kept waiting for the moment where the kanji for love would be etched into some stone somewhere (because of one of your other fics, I'm not sure which...) and it never came. I wasn't too disappointed, though, because it had definite pathos .

That rocked. I'm really getting into the Kankuro stories now...and this one was awesome!