Hokage By Necessity

-Chapter Fifteen-

Guests At the Door (Part II)

Kankuro had packed a picnic basket and she and he and Gaara had left the village in the hands of a laughing Temari, who'd sent them out the door with her wards and the two ANBU active on the rotation. It was more of an audience than she wanted, but less than she'd expected.

She was also accompanied by a more discrete audience, one that had almost caused her to open kunai holes in the walls of her lovely guest room. Her body was by this point so accustomed to going without proper rest that when she did sleep, her body truncated the lighter stages of sleep and plunged her almost directly into REM-sleep, scrabbling desperately for what rest it could. Some time later-Temari having confiscated her alarm clock and making the reflexive instinct to check the time when no one tried to murder her in the first five seconds of waking impossible-she jerked upright and found herself wholly disoriented.

The only things that impressed themselves on her mind were the strangeness of the room and the fact she wasn't alone in it. But it was hardly her first time waking disoriented, so she waited for the long heartbeats that it took for her vision and mind to clear enough to discern friend from foe. Drinking had brought many odd embarrassments into her life-groveling after accidental wounding was a relatively minor one.

When she could finally make out what it was, she wasn't certain at first she was fully awake. Moonlight filtered in through the round window, glistening on Jirou's tails like they were sculpted of the snow fallen on the coldest of nights. His eyes, when he turned to her, caught the light, burning for a moment with cold fire, but his smile was warm and playful. He glanced at something in the opposite corner of the room and Sakura followed his gaze, squinting into the dark.

She sensed him before she saw him, a blacker, more sharply-edged shadow in the charcoal darkness. "Ichirou," she murmured.

"Contractor," came her softly grumbled answer.

Sakura tried to find a delicate way to phrase her question, but her tact apparently kept more normal business hours. "What the hell are the two of you doing?"

"Watching beautiful things, Sakura-sama," Jirou replied smoothly. "Few sights compare to the stars in a desert sky, but I would find myself equally content watching over you."

Sakura blinked at him. "If you woke me up in the middle of the night to lie to me, I'm going to put you through that wall."

"So aggressive," Jirou chuckled, one of his tails brushing against the underside of his jaw as he tilted his head beguilingly. "How ferocious you are in bed, Sakura-sama."

One of Temari's innumerable oddly shaped pillows found itself launched at the softly laughing kitsune, who avoided her strike by becoming a grey-winged moth fluttering in the moonbeam.

"You're really related?" she asked Ichirou.

"Mother insists it is so. But we are half-brothers only and Mother has never admitted as to what the other half of Jirou is."

"Something she was fascinated by, undoubtedly," Jirou said as the moth's wings curled tight and then unfurled as his tails. "We might have been born for her repentance, but Mother has never been one to waste an opportunity. We really didn't mean to interrupt your rest-or at least I didn't-but it appears that you're still unusually sensitive to our chakra."

Sakura nodded slowly, because now that he'd brought it to her attention, she could feel the unusual interaction of their chakra again. "Is this...normal for your contract?"

"Not at all," Jirou replied cheerfully. "But it shouldn't be a cause for concern. You should know, though, since you're awake and so you won't make a fuss when you notice, that if we join you for your day, we'll accompany you guised in the form of an inanimate object on your person. Deserts offer less in the way of opportunities to follow you as an animal without being conspicuous."

Sakura nodded, then rubbed at her burning eyes. "If that's all, then-"

A burst of white fire at her elbow bloomed into Jirou, who caught her up in his arms. "Though since we seem to interrupted your rest already, I may as well take a moment to show you the stars."

"Wha-" her sputtered protest was swallowed up by the displacement of teleportation. In a heartbeat, they were perched atop one of the highest of Sunagakure's dwellings, Jirou settling her easily across his lap as he settled on the roof, one of his kness coming up to support her back, his tails settling over her as a blanket.

"Relax," he coaxed. "You're always looking down. When was the last time you saw the stars?"

Sakura stiffened at the criticism, but the only retort that sprang to her lips was that she used them as a matter of course to navigate when she was shaving time from her missions by traveling through the night. She relaxed sulkily against his silk-clad leg. "It seems there are only two groups of people in my world recently. Those who tell me I'm working myself to death and those that want something done yesterday."

"I don't doubt those have always been there. You're only hearing the first now because your body knows that what you've been doing is nigh on impossible to sustain. You fill every second of your day until you're too tired to dream. Quite frankly, I'm astonished you haven't died through exhaustion induced-carelessness yet. And you feel guilty because of it, which is why those latter voices seem so loud."

"And how would you know?"

"Because while you are a new curiosity, there have been generations of fools before you. You've just come at the right time to strike a balance between whimsy, which is why we looked, and being the contractor poised to change the world, which is why we stayed."

Sakura scoffed, but she did tilt her head back. The sky was absolutely free of clouds and the stars did seem to burn with a special brightness, broader and more expansive than any view she'd ever seen in Konoha. It seemed like the sky was poised to swallow the world and, rather than making her uncomfortable with her own insignificance, she was comforted by the idea, no matter what Jirou said, that there was no way in heaven or in earth that she would be the one to tip the balance of the next world-crisis. She was only Sakura, which meant it was alright to fail. Someone else would always step in when she faltered. Karin could solve the puzzle of Konoha acute respiratory syndrome, Shikamaru could manage the village, and Kakashi could give her one of his condescending pats on the head. The world would right itself and everything would go back to the way things were.

Except they wouldn't.

Not with Madara and Itachi and whatever had caused their reincarnation, the commissioned Uchiha children, and the open support and hostility she'd faced from various factions.

There wasn't any going back and she'd known that, but as she faced the unblinking eyes of the mokumoku ren of the sky, she tried to imagine what it would like to live a well-balanced life. One not driven by a fear of change coupled by a desperate need to prove to herself that she was worth friendship and affection. She was as aware of the whole pathetic mess of her feelings as she was of her addiction, but awareness wasn't enough. She had an endless list of excuses and a trail of broken resolutions that tapered off until she'd stopped making them altogether. As she'd lived day-to-day life in an increasingly sterile routine, she'd found outlets for her aggression and frustration in more difficult practices, more desperate missions, and bloodier brawls.

She couldn't imagine that fused into a healthy, seamless whole.

"You're thinking too much," Jirou scolded, one tailtip prodding her in the temple. "Take a kitsune's advice. Stop mulling over 'might have beens' and miring your life in regret. What's that saying you're so fond of repeating? 'It is what it is.' All that matters is what you do going forward."

"And you're not just offering that advice because of a history of trickery and dead contractors?"

Jirou laughed. "It is because of all those dead men that my advice is perfectly sound. Despite them, I serve you joyfully, Sakura-sama. Of all the times I've been called on to serve, yours is the most interesting."

-\_/-

Sakura widened her stance, feeling the sand shift beneath her boots. The environment meant that Gaara had a major advantage, but she wasn't particularly interested in the outcome of the sparring match.

Just the match itself mattered, making it hard to keep her fingers from trembling with excitement. Flexing them, she looked across the expanse of sand to Gaara, who was watching her intently. She could feel her heartbeat so strongly she didn't doubt she could glance down and watch her chest pulse in time to the insistent beat in her ears. Most of her best battles, the ones that had pushed her to her limits and redefined new ones, had been in the field and to the death. She'd had good friendly matches in the years since the War, but this was the first one in a long time she'd been completely sober for.

That made it a different beast entirely.

Adrenaline and norepinephrine were flooding her system, bringing her to the peak of responsiveness, sharpening her senses and focusing her attention. The world was a more vivid, more present place, the sensation frankly addictive. If all sparring matches were like this, Sakura thought, she could stop making excuses to herself and quit drinking entirely.

"Ready?" she called out.

"I am waiting only for you," Gaara responded with a faint smirk.

Sakura grinned and sprinted forward, no longer having to give conscious thought to augmenting her muscle function with chakra. She'd crossed the space between them in an instant, but her fist impacted with sand in a blow hard enough that the chakra she'd infused into the blow rippled out along his shield, sand exploding upward from where he'd swept it up from the ground.

But before the first grains had a chance to spill into the open toes of her boots, she already launched herself to one side and transitioned into an airborne spinning hook kick, the sole of her boot smashing into the sand-shield with crushing force and when another layer replaced the one she'd shattered, she used the force and momentum to shove off his shield and gain a little distance.

Landing in a crouch, digging long furrows in the sand with her boots, she unfisted her left hand and made it a blade, giving more shape to the chakra she usually allowed to react with explosive force. She thrust her hand into the sand at an angle and a gaping chasm was torn open, but before the growing fissure could swallow up Gaara's feet, he forced his own chakra into the sand beneath his feet. When the two forces met, there was a roar as sand geysered upward at the point of impact.

He took control of the geyser and it arched toward her, but the Sakura buried beneath it was nothing more than illusion, she already closing the distance between them again. He was still smirking as sand swept up to meet her barrage, but Sakura didn't mind. It was almost a dance, each blow countered with a handswith-wide stroke of sand, he not even bothering to raise a full wall against her. She put less chakra into each blow, but she progressively increased her speed, but still he met her easily, not even bothering to turn as her shifting patterns of attack brought her behind him.

She knew he did it to tease her and she laughed, this time using the full strength she hadn't dared use against other opponents into the attack. This time the sand wasn't enough, her fist kissing his right shoulder with enough force that he stumbled forward even as the rest of the force diffused through his sand and left a crescent moon-shaped depression half a foot deep between them. She stood between the horns and the arms of it were perhaps sixteen foot wide. She saw the sand crack in the innermost barrier, but then Gaara was facing her again, eyes full of...something.

Whatever it was, she was almost certain it was reflected on her own features, some mix of aggression, exhilaration, and pleasure. His smirk widened and her smile was full of teeth.

"Glad you've decided put some effort into it," he told her.

"And not make the most of this? Give me some credit," she said as she pressed her assault, Gaara no longer passive in his defense. They were both practitioners of jutsu that could utterly wreck a landscape and he'd taken them somewhere that neither of them had to be mindful of accidental destruction of someone's home.

Gaara raised the desert against her, giant walls of sand rising up to crush her, but the seeming flexibility of the sand wasn't a cause for concern. Even regular earth shouldn't crack and shatter as she'd demonstrated in her second bell test, but in the moment she released the chakra gathered at the point of contact, it underwent what was almost a state change, fracturing like ice smashed by a sledgehammer.

She leaped high and Gaara dodged her punishing heel kick, but the sand in sixty feet in any direction from point of impact bowed in to leave her standing in a bowl-shaped crater twenty foot deep. Gaara's protective sphere partially dissolved, leaving him standing on a lone pillar of sand high above her. The pillar dissolved in dozens of tentacles that pursued her relentlessly as she tried to both evade and close the distance again, one or two drawing bloody furrows that she ignored, trusting that they'd be healed before the fight was over.

As she came within range, Gaara used her own trick against her, dropping the sand from beneath her feet and drawing it up around her in a cage. She was jealous of the sheer flexibility of his technique, but if he could form from sand almost anything he could imagine, she could break it. But as her fist approached the bars, he dissolved them, reforming it as a crushing shackle when she couldn't reverse the strike in time.

But even if she was no Hyuuga, she could still emit chakra from any of the points on her body, the sand exploding into grit as she pulsed chakra from her forearm. A dark bruise bloomed and faded even as they both paused a moment to evaluate their approach.

High on his cheekbone, a bruise was forming. The sand next to his skin was so densely packed with his chakra it was akin to Chiyo's chakra shields. It interfered with the conversion of her chakra to physical force, leaving him bruised and most of her chakra refracted away in nothing more harmful than gusts of warm air.

It was the first time she'd seen enough of his personal taijutsu to get a sense of how he used it in conjunction with his ninjutsu. He blocked and absorbed the force of attacks with his sand, but it that was breached, he didn't attempt it with his person, instead using a style that deflected and redirected an attack. But, as she'd just borne personal witness to, he didn't have much occasion to use it, letting her stay close only briefly before he'd managed to force her to a range where he had the advantage.

Her mind was awhirl with possibilities of what might be possible if her destructive taijutsu could be supported by his ability to manipulate sand. With his cooperation, she'd be capable of gaining truly enormous height before one of her sky kicks, change direction in midair, or any number of other feats that weren't really possible alone. Pointless, of course, because he could just crush the enemy and be done with it, but her whole body was tight and aching and alive at the moment and all sorts of impossibilities became merely improbabilities.

"Something on your mind?"

"You're magnificent," she admitted.

Gaara chuckled. "A sentiment returned, Sakura. Unfortunately for you, this is not a landscape. It is a sandscape."

With a shuddering groan, the sand shifted, Gaara disappearing entirely and everything within sight became a weapon in his arsenal. As soon as she destroyed one form, another took its place, and she couldn't be still for more than a few second at a time. It was not a sustainable form of battle, even if it was forcing her to use every iota of her speed and skill, her hair plastering itself to sweat-streaked cheeks, so she reached through the confusing haze of the chakra-saturated sand to find the source.

When she did, a feral smile spread across her face. They'd agreed beforehand that it was going to a match of her taijutsu and what minor supplementary jutsu were taught at an Academy level against his sand manipulation, as well as defensive taijutsu on his part, but she didn't regret the restriction at all. She didn't need to spare focus for shuriken or kunai hidden in the shifting sands and whatever tricks of genjutsu and other ninjutsu he had aside from this one overwhelming and highly adaptable technique.

This time the canyon she ripped open to get to Gaara was enormous, a move she'd never use in real combat because of the sheer chakra waste of it, but the admiration and faint surprise in Gaara's eyes was more than worth the expense. But then his eyes hooded, became sly, and he leaped into the air to avoid the foot sweep of the real Sakura, not the shadow she'd left behind, but she'd expected that and through arm strength alone swept her body around a full rotation, her legs coming up to twist and lock around his.

Before he could recover from being slammed against the ground, she was on him.

Shinobi in general learned very few katame-waza, taught to disengage and gain ground rather than grapple, but that also meant they sometimes found themselves at a loss when an opponent was too close for conventional weaponry and use of brute strength only ended in injury. So had gone the lesson taught to her by Anko through a series of humiliating defeats and a mounting dango tab. Sakura, frustrated and determined, had found a man willing to teach her how to counter Anko's constrictor-style style grappling. She might be able to match the other kunoichi's body manipulation, her ability to unnerve opponents with innuendo, or her longer reach, but Sakura needed far less leverage than someone her height and weight should.

What usually followed when she'd gotten an opponent to this stage-usually on retrieval orders-was a dislocation of vertebrae so severe she often ruptured the intervertebral cartilaginous discs. While a medic-nin-and foreign-nin had them, no matter how inferior they might be-might heal anything short of a compound joint break in the field, spinal injuries were much slower to treat. The excruciating pain just came as a bonus, especially when it was taken into consideration she could produce the same effect painlessly with the right medical ninjutsu.

The first time had been an accident. The second was on purpose.

She doubted Gaara had been properly trained to be on the receiving end of grappling techniques and she didn't want to cause unintentional harm, but he wasn't as blindly stubborn as her teammates were and she herself had been, so she decided to trust his response.

Disengaging herself, she shifted positions and came down hard on Gaara's back, powerful thighs pressing against his ribs. She was glad of the smaller gourd he now carried at his side rather than on his back, because she doubted he'd have appreciated any permanent damage done to it. Beneath the pressure of her thighs, his shielding began to crack, the pressure on his ribs increasing

When he tried to get his arms beneath him to buck her off, she pinned them behind his back, forcing his face back down into the sand. She heard his frustrated snarl with satisfaction. But that satisfaction turned to a yelp of pain as Gaara sacrificed his crumbling shielding to turn it into sand-senbon rammed deep into the muscles of her thighs. No longer able to keep the pressure of her legs, she flew from his back when he used his legs to push himself into a forward roll.

She could have held on to her grip on his arms and hope to hyperextend or dislocate something, but she released him so that she could have some control over her own landing. She came down on her side but recovered quickly enough she was upright by the time the lash of sand he'd send after her impacted. Her inner thighs were sticky with her own blood and the muscles cramped uncontrollably for the instant it took to focus her chakra to the area. Gaara took advantage of her preoccupation to sweep his arms wide, fingers spread, then smashed his palms together with fingers interlacing.

They were in the narrow belly of the canyon she'd ripped down almost to bedrock, so there were walls of sand not more than double her body length to either side-spears of sand burst from both walls and there was an instant's doubt she'd finish in time, but then she was perched lightly atop the first section of them, He gave her no time to rest, forcing her to keep using emerging spears to leap higher enough to avoid impalement, occasionally forcing them through at head-level and forcing her to swing herself upward through the tangle.

He chased her up out of the canyon, a geyser of sand depositing him gently on the rim just seconds after her boots hit the ground.

She turned on the balls of her feet, panting slightly now, but willing to continue the battle, when Kankuro's shout interrupted. "Okay! We got it. Great and mighty kage. Now quit, because if you collapse of chakra exhaustion Temari's going to turn me into a puppet. And, yeah, I know you're not close to that, but I'm going to be the voice of reason and point out that our village is going to be suffering from an infestation of foreign ninja after tomorrow. As much as I'd to let you two have at it, you're not going to be able to recover in time if you keep going."

Sakura kept her stance until Gaara inclined his head inclemently to show he agreed with the ceasefire. Straightening, she wrinkled her nose as she shifted her legs to see the damage he'd done. Streaks and runnels of blood of blood were quickly drying, but the partially-healed wounds itched. She stopped the muscle spasms, but couldn't seal them completely because, unlike metal senbon, his sand senbon couldn't be pulled out cleanly, instead losing their shape and leaving a good part of the sand still inside the wound. While it helped quell the bleeding, it exponentially increased the risk of later infection and poor healing later.

She was still considering the best way of flushing clean the wounds when Kankuro and the rest joined them. Kankuro was more than a little wide-eyed. "I thought sparring was supposed to be about control," Kankuro remarked.

"No," Gaara replied. "Sometimes it's about finding a partner capable of taking everything you have to offer."

Kankuro stared at the landscape they'd completely remodeled in the course of their battle. Enormous sinkholes where Gaara had drawn ammunition for his jutsu, the impact craters Sakura had left, and the gaping lips of the canyon they stood beside. "I think the right words for this are 'holy shit'. I mean, in my head I know what Gaara's capable of, but when I live with him, I'm not spending all my time thing, 'Wow, this guy could bury half the village before the coffee's done percolating.' And then you go and-" Apparently at a loss for words, he made a complicated gesture with his hands that ended with him throwing them up in the air.

Sakura blinked and exchanged a bemused glance with Gaara, who shrugged. "Um, thanks?" she ventured.

"Anytime," Kankuro said, making a quick recovery. He glanced down, probably evaluating the injuries she'd garnered sparring with his brother and his eyes caught of the stretch of browning blood visible between her skirt and boots. "Oh, ouch," he said, wincing in empathy. "How he'd get you there?"

"He was demonstrating an unexpected ability while I was trying to break his ribs," Sakura remarked dryly. Her gaze traveled to the Konoha part of the contingent.

Avoiding looking at Kakashi just yet, because whether for good or ill, she wasn't-wouldn't she reminded herself firmly-going to depend on his opinions again. His partner on the rotation was Hanabi, the mask making it difficult to gauge her expression, though her body language reflected astonishment. As she'd gotten the impression that the young prodigy had more respect for the strength implied by the title she carried than her actual strength, she was glad.

She wouldn't go so far as to call the expression on Mamoru's face astonishment, but he was clearly surprised. Seeing her attention, he spoke. "You're very strong, Hokage-sama!"

Her lips quirked self-depreciatingly, even if she was a little flattered by the compliment. "It's mostly superfluous. Very few battles happen to be so conveniently located and with so few allies and noncombatants nearby. And even if you avoid killing any people, no one's going to walk away pleased with your services if you've destroyed their businesses, storehouses, and homes in the process of what they've asked you to do."

Gaara nodded. "A kage should be capable of great destruction, but it is his restraint that makes him worthy of respect." His eyes traveled across the mess the made of the landscape and amusement crossed his face. "Although I admit, this is more relaxing."

"And fun," Sakura agreed, trying to read Yu's expression while tugging her sweat-damp hair behind her ears. He didn't look surprised. Rather, he looked smug. "How was it, Yu-kun?" she couldn't resist asking.

"I'd like to have seen your ninjutsu and genjutsu too, but it was pretty good, Hokage-sama. Of course, I already knew how strong you were."

Mamoru scowled faintly at the other boy, who just edged one brow higher in defiance.

"Maa, maa," Kakashi said in his familiar scolding tone. "Let's not turn this into an argument. I'm sure we all had faith in our kage."

The muscles in Sakura's jaw clenched involuntarily, but she forcibly relaxed them. Not in time to escape Kankuro's notice, but he made no comment on it. "So, picnic?" he suggested.

"After I take care of these," Sakura agreed, hand sweeping down to indicate the slowly seeping wounds.

"Here," Gaara rumbled, apparently understanding her difficulty. Kneeling next to her, he swept his hand just above the surface of her skin, extracting the sand as gently as was possible, shifting his hand to repeat the process on the other leg.

Sakura murmured her thanks as she sealed the wounds from the inside, the flow of blood pushing out most of the bacteria that might have entered, her immune system more than capable of dealing with the rest. When she fished an alcohol swab from her pack and cleaned up her legs as best she could, there wasn't even residual redness. She glanced over at Gaara. "I know you didn't let me fracture any of your ribs, but if you don't mind the intrusion, I can take care of any bruising. I should heal the one on your face anyway."

Seeing he make no protest, she smoothed the her thumb over the swell of his cheek, leaving perfect flesh behind. When she would have shifted her focus to his ribs, he caught her hands gently. "They can wait until we reach shade. It's easier when you don't have to work through fabric, isn't it?"

Sakura's brow furrowed as she looked up at him, then smoothed as she realized what he was implying. Not surface bruising, but likely bone bruising, tiny fractures incurred in those few seconds when his shielding had dissolved in order to reform into his sand-senbon. Considerably more work to repair than a contusion. Bone was more difficult to coax than flesh. What was remarkable was Gaara's pain tolerance, which she hadn't expected at all, but she supposed that even if he lacked scars from piercing wounds, it would be really unreasonable to think that no one had used her strategy against him before.

"Alright," she agreed, turning expectantly toward Kankuro, who was grinning at them.

"Okay kids, I've went and booked us a spot at the best oasis within twenty miles, so let's go before we lose our reservations."

Sakura stared after him. "I can't decide if he's really qualified to be a jounin-sensei or if you should just rent him out as a tour guide."

Gaara chuckled. "Both my siblings have their uses. I'm very lucky to have them."

Sakura made a sound of agreement.

"And have you found nakama of your own? You've been Hokage long enough now to notice." His eyes were watching the group ahead and his voice was low. They slowly ambled after the others. "People change when your position changes, unless there is will and effort put into maintaining what came before. I'm sure you've noticed by now, what you need most as a Kage is someone willing to give you both loyalty and the truth."

"I've learned that I have better friends than I deserve," Sakura admitted ruefully, thinking of Shizune and Ino and others who'd been undervalued in favor of her obsession with her place and relationship with the other members of Team Seven. "And more supporters in places I wasn't expecting." Daichi was foremost in her mind. "But, yes," she admitted, "I have a 'family' of sorts. Odd and small as it might be. I don't know that you remember Sai?"

The best description of Gaara's expression was 'diplomatic.' "I recall him, yes. He was very...memorable."

"He can be that," Sakura admitted with a laugh. "But he's also the best teammate I've ever had. I don't know what that says-"

"Stop," Gaara interrupted softly. "You don't have to qualify it. Whatever you seem to think, you don't need to apologize for being happy, Sakura. Recognizing the potential for happiness is as important as being able to recognize an opening in battle."

She regarded him with almost the same admiration as she'd felt in their earlier battle. "When did you get so wise?" she teased gently.

"I came to my kage-ship entirely too young for it, commanded the joint forces of an unprecedented alliance, but first I had to be helped up out of my own darkness. That much rage and hatred doesn't disappear in an instant, no matter how hard Naruto tried. He made me realize that wasn't all there was for me, but it was only the first step in a long journey. He was hated for what he was, for what he could do, but I was hated in part for what I'd already done. None of my actions changed when how I felt about them did. I had fear and it was easy, but it's much harder to win respect, especially when the fear came first. That's when I learned the true value of family. And friendship," he added as an afterthought. "The family your heart chooses."

There didn't seem to be anything more to be said after that, so they traveled in companionable silence, listening to Kankuro carry the conversation ahead of them. She was beginning to pick out the first signs of green when a messenger-nin appeared at Gaara's side. "I'm sorry to interrupt your outing, Kazekage-sama, but your sister said that you'd want word brought to you regardless."

"What is it?" Gaara rasped.

"It's one of the teams from Iwa. Their jounin-sensei requested sanctuary and early entry a few hours after you departed. Two of his candidates had collapsed. It's some kind of fever, Kazekage-sama. And our medic-nin can't bring it down."

A/N: Fight scenes. In another ten years, I'll be good at them. Also, talking. At any rate, back to First Flower.