A/N: So, just to remind you guys, I go by the manga and not the anime. Which is why things might be a bit different than you remember about this arc. I studied the manga to write it xD Hope you enjoy! Oh, as a side-note, the girl that appears at the beginning of the chapter is a character that would appear in Saichi's story if I ever wrote it. X3 She's the one they referenced during Jun's arc.

And yes, "borrow" does mean steal.

"Honestly, shouldn't you be gone already?"

Saichi shrugged, leaning against the doorway of the building with a thoughtful, bemused expression. The young hunter-nin speaking to him sighed, one hand on the door, her other tucking a book against her chest. Her raven-toned hair blocked view of the majority of her face with how the bang dipped far past her onyx-toned eyes, but he what he could see told him that he was already pressing his luck, despite having been there for only a handful of minutes.

"Perhaps," he replied. "I was hoping, however, that you'd allow me to see him."

"Unlikely."

"I'm his friend," Saichi added, as if that would change matters. "I've known him for years."

"You're an enemy shinobi. Friendship is meaningless," she retorted. "Besides, you know I don't have that sort of authority. I'm only here to pick up the newest bingo book."

He shrugged once more.

"It was worth a shot," he replied. "... where are you heading this time, Shikako?"

She hesitated, glancing at the book she held.

"... I'm not certain," she declared after a moment. "I don't have intentions of seeing you, so not the Moon at least."

"That hurts."

"You're a big boy. Suck it up."

"Shika--"

He cut off, suddenly turning to stare at the forest with a narrowed gaze. Shikako did the same, her hand dropping from the door so that her hip held it in place while she seized a kunai from her pouch.

"You feel it, too?" She asked.

Saichi nodded, grabbing one of his knives.

"Something's coming."

________________________________

Silence coated the room. It was strangely comfortable, if Kazue was going to be honest. The silence meant that for the first time in a while, nothing dire was happening. No one was going insane- at least, no one that hadn't already dived off the deep end- and no one was on the edge of death. That knowledge was what enabled her to curl up in the hospital chair and read. Her hands gently held a scroll "borrowed" from one of the more private... libraries in Konoha, a pile of other "borrowed" items piled on the table beside her.

The only noise to break the silence was the soft, even breaths of her sleeping teacher.

Miki, her red-hair sprayed out across her snowy-white pillow, had been fast asleep for hours. Kakashi- as much as he seemed to dislike the idea- was away on important business, which was how Kazue had ended up staying with the woman. Despite the fact that she would be released soon, he still seemed to be just as concerned about her as he was about their newborn. A newborn whom the couple had yet to hold. After all, Miki had been barely past six months when she'd had the baby, it was just old enough to survive outside of the womb with assistance.

Kazue only knew the barest details of the matter that had pulled Kakashi away. Apparently, Jiraiya had died at some point in the past few days. Kazue hadn't known the man well (she'd come across him once or twice in the village); but from the way Momoe had gone stark white at the news, she knew others wouldn't take the idea as easily as she had. Naruto especially, she'd heard from others that the sennin was like extremely special to him. She couldn't help but wonder how he was handling it, but from what she'd over heard Kakashi telling Miki (the woman had wanted to check on Naruto) he had left the village on some training mission.

Not that Kazue could find it in herself to care about all that. She knew it was wrong- that she should care that he was hurting- but in her mind there was something far more important for her to focus on.

Jun.

She'd been looking and looking, but detailed information about his clan was hard to come by. Everything she found had only told her what she already knew- that his bloodline limit was a sentence to a lifetime of insanity. That unless they were sealed before the break, their personality would be taken over by their genjutsu.

The only thing she'd found was that in past records, there were a few shinobi whose lifespans actually seemed average. In the record of births and deaths in the clan- each appearance of the bloodline limit carefully noted- there were three individuals noted to have the bloodline limit that grew old as shinobi. They stood out considering that if the ones with the bloodline limit where even noted to be shinobi, they all seemed to either die young or be forcibly retired, details she was able to pull by comparing information in the other "borrowed" files.

The three individuals she found seemed... normal. One was a male who had lived to be eighty- a surprisingly old age given his choice in career. Another had in the field in his late twenties, the third when she was in her forties. None of the records Kazue had "borrowed" seemed to point at their jutsu being sealed away, nor did it indicate that they'd been considered unstable. Rather, one of them had been even been one of the second hokage's personal ANBU.

Kazue sighed, settling the scroll atop the pile at her side and raising her hands to massage her temple. Her eyes stung from how long she'd been staring at the black and white pages, no doubt the result of her having stayed up the entire night before to read as well. It wasn't that she doubted what she'd been told- Jin was proof enough that there was little chance of fixing him- but she wasn't going to give up, either.

She'd promised, after all.

There had to be something- those shinobi...

There had to be a way to contain this genjutsu. If she could cut it off, figure out a way to seal it away without taking away everything else that made Jun, Jun... it would fix everything. She knew, just as everyone else did, that Jun wasn't the type to want to live a life without jutsu. He had made as much clear when he held the details of how far gone he was from everyone else.

She let her eyes fall shut for a moment, her hands cradling her head. There had to be something...

That time in the forest flashed through her mind unbidden.

"What was that?" Kazue demanded. "I haven't seen a release technique like that."

Saichi shrugged in response.

"Old jutsu. It belongs to Ai's family."

Taira's Demand, that was what Saichi had called the jutsu style. In all of her research, Kazue had yet to find a mention of the style. She was beginning to wonder if she was remembering the right name. Surely if there was something that could cut through the genjutsu, the Kurama clan would have taken note of it. Then again, Saichi had said it was old and that it'd come from a scroll left behind by a gypsy woman. Perhaps that was the reason that there was no information about the technique- Konoha simply hadn't run into the clan, or didn't know enough about them to record it.

"Hm...? Kazue, you're here...?"

Startled, Kazue lifted her head to see Miki staring at her tiredly. She simply nodded in response and dropped her hands to her lap.

"I am. Kakashi-sensei was worried."

"He worries too much," Miki complained, her tone just about as awake as she looked- meaning not at all.

Kazue shrugged.

"You've given him enough reason to be worried," she countered.

Miki frowned, but straightened in her bed. Rather than reply, she rubbed her face with her hands as if to wipe away the fogginess from her waking mind. Kazue dropped her eyes back to the scrolls, her mind easily slipping back to the topic she'd been considering.

"... Miki-sensei?"

The woman paused, glancing at Kazue curiously. The hesitant tone in her voice wasn't something that the blonde usually spoke with.

"Yes?"

"Have you ever heard of something called... Taira's Demand? It's a jutsu technique."

Miki cocked her head thoughtfully, dropping her hands to her sides as she did. After a moment had passed, her expression cleared up.

"Perhaps it belongs to the Taira clan?" She guessed.

"... helpful."

"Don't look at me like that," Miki scolded. "I happen to know a bit about that clan, I'm not just taking it from the name of the technique, you know."

Kazue stiffened, the entirety of her attention focusing on her teacher.

"You know them?"

Miki nodded, pursing her lips thoughtfully as she seemed to gather up the needed thoughts in her mind.

"I do," she agreed. "Well, I know one of them. She's married to my brother."

Confusion colored Kazue's face.

"Miki-sensei... isn't Hayate..." she began hesitantly.

Miki shook her head, her fingers curling tightly around her blanket. No matter how much time passed, Hayate's death became no easier to think about, and it was even harder to think about.

"Not him," she corrected. "I have a little brother, Fukumoto Akito."

Kazue looked no less confused than before. If anything, she looked even more befuddled with this information. Miki's lips twisted up slightly in amusement as she shifted about on her hospital bed.

"How much do you know about me, Kazue?" She asked, prompting a hesitant expression to color the girl's face.

"... not much," she admitted. "You were adopted, weren't you? That's about all anyone ever says."

Miki nodded, her grip on the blanket loosening as she tapped her fingers thoughtfully against her leg.

"That's true. The Gekko family took me in. Due to... certain circumstances," here Miki paused, her expression darkening slightly. "I was separated from my family shortly after I was born. When I was a genin, however, I happened to come across him. We looked eerily alike and the details of his family matched up with what little the third and others had guessed about my own. So, it was assumed that we were most likely related."

Kazue nodded, the distinct feeling that a lot was left out of that explanation fluttering through her. Still, she focused on the more important details.

"He married a Taira?" She asked.

Miki nodded, focusing on the matter at hand.

"He did," she agreed. "They're Grass shinobi."

"Do you remember anything about her jutsu style?" Kazue demanded.

"... a little," Miki mused, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully. "Etsuko-chan... mainly used taijutsu."

Kazue slumped in her seat. Another dead end.

"Although, she had a strange bloodline limit that she apparently inherited from the Taira clan. From what I understand, her family had separated from the main clan when she was younger when the elder of the Grass village offered them a position as shinobi, and neither of them had held the bloodline limit so she knew little about it. She had a natural immunity to genjutsu."

Kazue stared at Miki, shocked.

"Immunity?"

"I was surprised, too," Miki replied, amused. "Apparently, it has something to do with their brains or something, I've never had a talent for that information. I only know as much as I do because Hiso-kun was curious to see if it was something he could try to develop a jutsu off of. Etsuko-chan set him right pretty quickly."

Kazue's mind was whirling. A natural defense against genjutsu. A release technique that could cut through a Kurama clan genjutsu. Taira's Demand...

Perhaps there was something she could do.

"Sorry, Miki-sensei!" She exclaimed, jumping to her feet and shoving her things into the bag beneath the chair she'd been sitting in. "I've got to go talk to Tsunade-sama."

Miki frowned, moving her covers to the side.

"What's going on? Why all the questions?" She questioned.

Kazue darted to the door, pausing just outside and glancing over her shoulder. Her eyes were bright, a determined expression coloring her face.

"I'm going to save him," she promised.

Then, without another word of explanation, she ran from the room.

______________________________

"So, you want permission to visit the Grass village..." Tsunade said, her expression revealing nothing of her thoughts on the matter.

Kazue shifted nervously where she stood, hands clasping the straps of her backpack.

"I do," she replied. "If there's even a slight chance... I need to see if I can do something. You understand, don't you? I can't just...I can't just stand here and... not after everything. I made a promise to... I mean, it doesn't matter. I just, he's my teammate--"

Tsunade held up a hand, cutting off Kazue's rambling.

"I do," she replied, sparking stark relief on Kazue's face. "Give me a moment to think about this. Do you have any more information beyond Miki's words?"

Kazue nodded eagerly, pulling her backpack off and shifting through the scrolls and books inside.

"I thought you might ask, so I took some time to look for a connection before coming here," she explained, laying out old files and the scrolls she'd been looking at before. "Look at this, these three... they all had the bloodline limit. None of the, however, were sealed. There were considerations..." Kauze paused and pulled a file out of her bag, producing a letter from the file to show Tsunade. "This even shows that there was considerations to seal one of them, but it never happened. Shortly after that letter is dated, though, he was sent on a mission to the Grass Village, according to his file. Nothing says what happened while he was there, but the sealing never happened. This kunoichi... I combed through her file again and it mentions coming across a group of traveling shinobi during one of her missions. It never mentions them by name, but it was in the Moon country, the same year that Ai was born, which would place the Taira clan in that area at the time.

"It's possible, isn't it?" She pressed.

Tsunade frowned, studying the papers for a moment before rocking back in her chair. She didn't say a word right away, simply plucked her sake bottle form the top of her desk and took a long drink, most likely buying herself time before she responded. As she thought the information over, another thought occurred to her and she eyed Kazue thoughtfully.

"Where did you get this information, exactly?"

Kazue shifted uncomfortably where she stood, looking anywhere but at the hokage.

"I... uh... asked Jun's aunt if she could... pick up a few things when she visited the Kurama compound..." she mumbled.

Tsunade chuckled; the amusement disappearing as she turned her attention back to the matter at hand.

"It's possible..." she admitted, sharp eyes flickering over the papers once more. "... you do realize, however, that there's a chance nothing will come of this, or that the Grass won't hold the answers you're looking for? For all we know, in order to find a jutsu like we need, you'll need the Taira clan itself. I came across them once, they're not all that welcoming of outsiders and have a reputation that puts them closer to mercenaries than shinobi."

Kazue crossed her arms, a stubborn look flooding her face.

"If I have to find them, then I"ll find them," she retorted. "I can't... it's Jun. He..."

'He doesn't deserve to go out like this.'

Tsunade fell silent again, then sighed, reaching into her desk.

"I'll write you a letter. They won't let you into the village without it."

"Tsunade-sama...?"

The woman glanced at Kazue, her expression just as determined as Kazue's.

"He's a shinobi of the leaf. I'm not losing another of you."

"... thank-you, Tsunade-sama."

"Don't thank me yet," Tsunade retorted. "I'm giving you two weeks at the Grass. If the jutsu is possible, but you need to find the clan, you have three months. After that, you're to come back. Understood? You're also to send regular letters back. Have Hik--... have one of the members of the code team teach you one of our new systems if you haven't learned them already."

"I... I understand."

"Good. Now, go pack, you should leave as soon as--"

A thunderous explosion echoed through the village, cutting Tsunade short. The woman spun around, staring out of her office windows just as a the doors into her office burst open.

"Tsunade-sama!" Iruka exclaimed. "Tsunade-sama, the Akatsuki are here!"