This world, and (many of) these characters don't belong to me. I just enjoy playing with them – I hope you enjoy them too!

Kankurō was not having a good day.

Mind, most days were not good days anymore. The desk job that had chafed so unbearably that first year now proved to be a blessing in disguise, affording him both privacy and a certain degree of freedom where his hours were concerned. His office in the theatre, where the most recent crop of puppeteer recruits trained, had been decorated by a softer, more academic sort of man. Kankurō had been too lazy to update it to suit his own tastes, and that had been a blessing, too. At the moment, he was curled up in a ball on the other's man's sofa. A blinding headache beat painfully against the navy upholstery with its thin gray stripes, and his stomach churned and roiled, though there was nothing in it.

Groping for a coherent thought through the pain, he tried to remember which cocktail of drugs he was supposed to take now. There had been so many medications, and so many varying dosages of each, that he had almost given up on finding a pharmaceutical solution to his current dilemma. But the medics insisted. He still may have ignored them, except for the simple fact that he would eventually have to justify that decision to Gaara. And they did help, sometimes, if he took them early enough. When it got this bad, no drug sufficed to stifle the pain.

No, today was definitely not a good day.

His stomach heaved, and he pressed his lips together, trying to decide whether he was really going to be sick. He no longer wondered whether one could vomit on an empty stomach. One most certainly could. It was a horrid, noxious green mess of bile and undiluted stomach acid, rather than masticated meat and plant fibers, but it came up just the same way and tasted worse. That thought decided it: he rolled off the couch, dizzy with the headache, and staggered into the bathroom, holding his pounding head in his hands.

When he had finished, he lay spent on the cold tile floor. Spots danced before his eyes, but he didn't have the strength to get up and turn off the bathroom light. Going back to the sofa was out of the question. There had been resistance and escape training which had been preferable to this, he thought dimly, and a vague recollection of shivering for hours, chained down in a tank of icy water, bubbled through to the surface of his mind. After a moment, that memory was all that remained, and he slipped out of consciousness into a thankfully painless sleep.

When he woke, dawn was breaking, and the whole theatre campus was silent. The migraine had passed, though it left him with a crushing sense of fatigue. That didn't matter. Exhaustion was a never-ending plague, and he managed anyway. In research and development, it didn't matter whether he labored dawn to dusk or dusk to dawn, as long as the job got done. And he usually didn't mind the work. The only reason he'd hated this job to begin with had been the certainty that Gaara had stuffed him into it in hopes of keeping him safe, and because he knew it would eventually remove him from the duty roster for active assignments.

He was an excellent shinobi, but a brilliant inventor. Already his role as a craftsman, as a weapons master for Suna, was guaranteed. The most promising recruits would be apprenticed to him, and such a role was far more important to the village than that of one rank and file jounin puppeteer. It was an honor to have risen so quickly. It was a joy that his Gaara had believed him capable of filling such a position, long before Kankurō himself had realized just how completely his skills exceeded those of his peers. It was an honor and a joy, and he loved making puppets. But for all of that, it was damned boring.

He missed the excitement, the blood, and the thrill of wreaking havoc with his creations. He was a true son of the puppeteer corps; the art was indivisible from the fight. But he was also a loyal brother, even if Temari still thought he was a pain in the ass, and he couldn't deny Gaara anything. If Gaara wanted him at home, home he would stay.

Of course, he'd barely seen Gaara in the last few months. Rendered useless for hours at a time, he spent most of his waking, functional hours at the theatre, trying to keep up with his largely self-imposed workload. He met his brother for brief lunches, long enough to keep abreast of the little fires the Kazekage was constantly called upon to extinguish: small bands of rogue shinobi, political aggravations of varying importance, and recently, a string of mysterious murders that left the victims utterly drained of their chakra. They were supposed to have dinner together in a couple of days, as a matter of fact. And – damn the luck – Temari was would be in town, too, visiting from Konoha. Seeing him so infrequently, she couldn't fail to notice the changes in the elder of her two brothers.

Kankurō grimaced to himself, gathering his bearings as he peeled himself off his bathroom floor. As a little kid, he'd been a tad pudgy, and Temari liked to remind him of it. She couldn't tease him now, he thought ruefully, dragging his shirt up before the bathroom mirror. His ribs protruded above a hollow belly, and he'd had to order new trousers. He studied his empty stomach for a moment, debating whether or not he ought to try to eat something. The migraines that had beleaguered him for the last six months invariably nauseated him, long before they began and often for hours after they ended. He vomited so frequently that he'd ended up in the hospital three times, badly dehydrated. More alarmingly – at least from his standpoint, because it was getting harder to conceal – he had lost eight kilograms since those first blinding headaches had forced him to seek assistance. His physician had forbidden him to train (an injunction he ignored), and was threatening to admit him to the hospital.

Frustrated, and anxious that Gaara shouldn't find out, he had bullied the good doctor into inserting a permanent port in his chest. Once able to administer the necessary rehydration fluids himself, Kankurō had avoided the hospital as much as possible, returning only once to have his no-longer effective meds tweaked. That had proven more trouble than it was worth; his physician had been extremely concerned with the amount of weight he had lost, and sent him home with bags and bags of partial parenteral nutrition solution, to supplement what he was able to eat. He was supposed to use a bag every other day, given how little he could stomach during an attack. They kept him chained to his desk for hours at a time, though, and the migraines descended several times a week. A pile of them lay unused in his desk drawer, along with plastic tubing, a sharps disposal box, and a box of sterile needles.

He surrendered this time, however, and clicked a needle into place, hanging the attached bag of fluids on the back of his desk chair. He would eat breakfast when it drained, despite a complete lack of appetite. His sister was sure to comment on his weight loss, despite his loosely fitted costume and hood, but that might be laughed off. Dehydration and inanition would etch fatigue too sharply into his face, highlighting his hollow cheeks and painting the circles under his eyes garishly black against his pale skin. He had to present himself in the best possible light while she was here.

But for now, it was time to get to work, and the wheels in his head began to grind against gears and cogs, pulleys and poisons.

Some of his colleagues had seen limited success in harnessing the energy of black powder; and while Kankurō preferred to rely on mechanical principals, avoiding the volatile chemical mixture of saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur, the damn stuff was fascinating, and he found himself constantly toying with the idea. It had a lot of potential, if you could only get around its vulnerability: any shinobi with a refined control of fire-nature chakra could deduce the presence of the explosive and proceed to deflagrate the powder at will. He wasn't exactly a purist, but loading one's primary weapon with an explosive which, improperly ignited, could destroy the weapon itself seemed counter intuitive.

He was thumbing through a friend's treatise when a faint tapping at his door roused him from his reveries. A quick, practiced jerk had the IV line free of the port, and he dropped the needle into an unmarked box in his bottom desk drawer before answering the hesitant knock.

His visitor surprised him. He hadn't really been expecting anyone, but there were usual suspects – messengers from Gaara, colleagues in the theatre. Temari was known to drop in unannounced when she was visiting, because she was a nosy bitch who still didn't believe he could boil water without spoiling the pan or burning himself, but she wasn't due to arrive until late tomorrow. So today his guest was a puppeteer, all of 130 cm tall, with a mane of wild black curls crammed under a woefully undersized hood.

She was a pale, skinny thing garbed in traditional black, with huge, moss-colored eyes. They were wide and round and winged at the outer tips, and she looked just like a scrawny black kitten watching from beneath the pointed ears of her hood, which was laughably rounded over her mass of hair. A hitai-ite belted around her narrow waist announced her genin rank, almost as certainly as the awe with which she regarded him.

Hero-worship was okay, in small doses. After about a minute, though, Kankurō wagged his brows at her. "I'm busy, kid, so get to it."

"Oh! Sorry." She bit her lip, embarrassed. "I… um…" She shivered a little, and Kankurō pinched the bridge of his nose as she fumbled for something to say.

"Kid…"

"My sensei made me come!" She gave him a swift, deferential bow. "I didn't want to, but he said you should see it."

"See… what?" Kankurō prompted, losing patience quickly.

"My puppet."

"And your sensei is who, again?"

"Ajibana Ibuki."

Kankurō scowled. Ibuki was a fine shinobi – he wouldn't waste Kankurō's time. If he'd sent this snip of a girl with something to show, it was something worth seeing. Kankurō moved further into his office to grant her entry.

"Well, haul it out and let's have a look, then."

She peered around him, pursing her lips thoughtfully. "There's not enough room…"

Kankurō glanced around the generous space of his office, and then examined her. No visible puppets, and no carrying scrolls. "How big is this thing?"

She shook her head violently, causing the hood, which had only been attached to her head with a prayer, to sail over his desk and onto his chair. She yelped and moved to chase it.

The IV bag was still hanging on the back of his desk chair. With a grunt, Kankurō launched himself over her head, tucking and rolling in midair to land behind the desk. He swiped the hood from the chair and vaulted back over the desk with it before she could even gasp.

"Here." He held it out to her. She stared at it for a moment, as if debating whether to put it back on. But she took it and shoved it back over her head before making a graceful little bow of gratitude.

"You were telling me why there wasn't enough room in here," he reminded her. "Stay focused." His voice was a little sharper than her nervousness should have inspired, but his antics had tired him. That worried and infuriated him.

She bit her lip anxiously and pointed upward. "The ceiling. It's too low."

"Okay," he answered, impatient. "Will the east side stage do?" It was the closest of the performance stages and usually abandoned this time of day.

She nodded, another vigorous motion that threatened to detach her hood.

Kankurō gestured brusquely at the door, and she hurried through it and down the corridor. He sauntered behind her, trying to ignore the twinges of pain from the catheter in his chest.

"What's your name, kid?" he asked as they walked.

She glanced back at him, and the hood slipped off her hair. She caught it in midair and flushed. "Nozara Kumi."

"Leave it off," Kankurō advised, as she glared at the offending article with unconcealed distaste. "That hair of yours is as good as a hood, anyway."

Her nose wrinkled crossly. "That's what I said! The day I joined the theater. But Ajibana-sensei said, 'It's tradition!" and made me wear it. I put fire paste in his shoes," she went on, with a sudden unexpected gleam in her eye, "and he blamed Hachiuma, my teammate – who had laughed at me because of the hood."

Kankurō grinned despite himself. Evidently, she wasn't naturally as reserved as she had appeared to be. "How did you convince him that Hachiuma was the one responsible?"

She shrugged, and fell back a few paces to walk beside him. "I paid a chuunin to do it for me. Ajibana –sensei had yelled at him one day for sleeping during gate duty. He did it during the night. Hachiuma is the only one who lives at home with his parents – our other teammate and I have a curfew at the barracks, so it couldn't have been us. Besides," she smirked, "Everybody knows Hachiuma's an ass."

Curfews were strictly enforced in the barracks for anyone under the age of seventeen, so she had a solid alibi. Kankurō blinked at the profanity, but was more interested in her living arrangements. Genin didn't live in the barracks unless they had no parents looking out for them. Orphaned, then.

"It could have been someone else, though," Kankurō observed, filing away the girl's probable history as a potentially worthwhile piece of trivia.

Kumi shook her head. "Possibly, but if you're good enough to be a jounin instructor, there aren't many people in the village who would be bold enough to pull pranks on you, outside your team. And even if there were, Ajibana-sensei is pretty well-liked. I like him, when he isn't telling me to put the hood back on. Hachiuma was the most logical suspect."

Kankurō nodded along thoughtfully, his grin broadening in growing admiration of the childishly vindictive plot. "I like the way you think," he approved.

Glowing under his praise, she bit her lip again – a nervous habit, Kankurō decided – and was silent all the way to the stage.

The east stage was the only indoor stage on the theater grounds. Suna traditionally held its performances outdoors, but the occasional rare storm had necessitated an indoor performance hall. Of course, in typical shinobi fashion, it was never meant to be solely recreational. The platform was made of pockmarked limestone, which had been marked and chipped over the years by hundreds of stray kunai and other projectiles, and all the partitions could be easily removed or rearranged for practice in an enclosed space.

He spent a great many hours on this stage, these days. It was thankfully winter, and rarely topped 20 degrees outside, but Suna's aridity was barely tolerable at the best of times. With dehydration an ever-present threat for the ailing puppet master, he kept himself indoors as often as possible, where the humidity was ever-so-slightly higher than the windswept desert plains that surrounded the village. His days revolved around the migraines and damned IV bags, finding things to do for the hours he was confined to his desk or bed, scheduling presentations and meetings when he was free of them, and training only immediately after an infusion of hydrating fluids.

He wasn't aware of the scowl that had blackened his features until Kumi asked, "Kankurō-dono? Is something wrong?"

He blinked rapidly at her, clearing his mind, and shook his head. "Nothing that concerns you. I was thinking about something else." He gestured at the stage. "Listen, I'm not a patient guy. Let's see what got Ibuki so riled up."

She bobbed a nod at him and scrambled to the opposite side of the stage, losing her puppeteer's hood along the way. Kankurō followed the tiny puppeteer's bobbing black curls up the stairs. He sat on the edge of the top step, giving Kumi as much room to perform as he was able, though there was still no puppet in sight. The little girl turned back to face him, bit her lip again, and swallowed hard. Then she started to run, a hard sprint that would eat the distance between them in seconds.

A deft motion of her fingers tugged a small fawn-colored object, no bigger than her hand, from her robe. Another quick motion launched the object into the air. Her chakra strings caught the light as she spun on her heel and darted back the way she had come, with the puppet in tow, perhaps ten feet off the ground. Wheeling to face Kankurō once again, she flung her arms out and spread her fingers.

The desert lark remained aloft, gliding silently toward the stairs, where he sat watching with a vague sense of disappointment. It was a beautifully crafted bird, complete with sand-colored feathers and glass eyes, so lifelike that it would fool anyone who didn't know better. The glide was perfect, too, better than anything he had ever seen attempted. Her techniques were top notch for a genin. He glanced up at her, trying to decide if it was worth trying to be nice, and seeing his disenchantment, Kumi grinned.

Drawing her hands back toward herself, she stalled the glide. And let go.

Even as her chakra strings dissipated, a pair of tiny wings with rosy brown pinions spread out before him, two needle-like sets of talons appeared from the soft down of the belly, and the puppet began to beat the air below it with a near-silent rustle of feathers.

Kumi grinned at his shock, and wiggled her string-free fingers at him. The bird soared upward, then dove toward the stage, toward the hood Kankurō had believed she had dropped unintentionally. One snap of the puppet's talons snagged it from the ground. Higher and higher it flew, until it almost disappeared in the dark rafters above. It hung there for a long while, sailing on another perfect glide, this time totally uncontrolled, until finally the bird banked left and began to descend on slow wingbeats. Kumi raised a hand, and the little songbird fluttered down to perch on her finger. Instantaneously strings flew from her opposite hand to find purchase on the tiny puppet. It began to fidget excitedly, bobbing up and down on the girl's hand, dipping its head low and twisting round to scan its surroundings.

Kumi giggled at the stupor on Kankurō's face, green eyes dancing mischievously beneath her curls.

Kankurō stood up so quickly he felt dizzy. Trying to pick a single question out of the dozens swirling in his brain was like trying to follow the harmony of a single instrument in an orchestra, but he settled for two in rapid succession.

"Who built that puppet – and who taught you to fly it?"

"I did," Kumi answered, still panting.

"Bullshit."

"I did!" Kumi's finger tugged slightly at a string, and the puppet ruffled its feathers and snapped its beak at him. The movement was so realistic that Kankurō grinned in spite of himself.

"Not trying to take anything away from you, kid. That was an amazing performance. I might even be willing to believe you could mostly teach yourself to manipulate it. Maybe. But you didn't build that puppet."

Her eyes narrowed. "The hell I didn't!"

That made him grin, too. Such blatant disrespect would never be tolerated from a colleague, but her passion was too infectious, and the curse tickled him. In turn, his humor infuriated her, and that amused him all the further.

"My mother," she said, laying a definite stress on the noun, "was a puppeteer. She designed it. Mostly." A flash of old hurt welled up in her eyes, and even though it was quickly smothered by indignation and anger, it stripped the joy from the moment. Kankurō felt his smile fade. He fixed a serious gaze on the green eyes, unapologetic, but conceding the pain the admission caused her. He waited patiently for her to continue.

She reached up to stroke the bird. Eyes on the floor, lips pressed together, she steeled herself before returning his gaze. "In the Fourth War, she met a shinobi who used chakra-infused ink to draw animals that fought for him. She thought she could manage something similar with chakra-infused strings and wires.

"She never got it quite right," Kumi said, watching Kankurō's face carefully. "The longest flight she managed was just over thirty seconds. That was three weeks before she died."

Kankurō didn't say a word.

"She would have figured it out, eventually," Kumi said. A muscle jumped in her jaw. "It was mostly the wing shape." A twist of her finger laid the wings open for his inspection; the lark arched its feathers over its head like a crown.

"Her mother raised messenger falcons, so that's what she based her models on. But falcons have wings built for speed and power; it takes too much energy, too much effort, too many wing beats to keep them flying. Passerines have short, rounded wings," she gestured quickly around the tips of the sandy feathers, "that have a wider area to diffuse the weight over. They're not nearly as fast in the air, but they can take off quickly, and they're extremely maneuverable. And the lower energy expenditure means the chakra in the wires persists for a lot longer."

The puppet lowered its wings, and she stared at it. She laid a hand on it, as if to pet it again, and let it rest on the bird's back. "It's not a weapon," she admitted. "It was never meant to be a weapon. But it's big enough for a microphone, or even a camera, and a transmitter. A perfectly inconspicuous little spy."

Kankurō's mind raced. It wasn't the first time a puppeteer had attempted automating a puppet, but the incredible amounts of energy needed to fuel the damned things made them almost prohibitively chakra intensive. Sai's ink, or Deidara's clay, both of which functioned on the same principle as Kumi's chakra-infused strings, weighed relatively nothing compared to the very solid ninjutsu puppets of the corps. The chakra necessary to manipulate such weight drained from the special strings so swiftly as to make them useless.

"How did she – how do you – compensate for the chakra decay?"

"A chakra-draining seal, written in my blood," Kumi explained, tapping the bird's neck. "It's triggered when the chakra reaches a certain minimum threshold – or I can end the automation by resuming manual control."

He blinked. "That's… ingenious."

Kumi stroked the little songbird again. "That was Mom's idea," she said. "Using chakra-draining seals against herself to transfer chakra without having to touch her target. She used it in combat to trigger complex traps, stunning her enemies before finishing them off with puppetry. Applying it to her puppets was a natural next step."

"What is she called?" He assumed Kumi assigned a feminine pronoun to her puppet; most young female puppeteers did.

"Just Little Bird."

His smile returned, a little. "As in, 'A little bird told me I'd get to see something spectacular today,' yeah?"

That won him a grudging smile, and he got to his feet. Making his way toward her, he pointed at the puppet. "May I?"

Kumi nodded, and handed him the lark.

"What did you use? It's lighter than I expected."

"The strings are spider-silk; the rest is mostly balsa and polyurethane. Birds have hollow bones, you know."

"I think I remember that from biology," Kankurō replied absently, turning the lark over in his hands, admiring the craftsmanship. "The eyes came from Eiji, I can see that. Where did you get the feathers?"

"I made them. They're too important to chance on hand-me-downs from dead animals."

"These are artificial?" Kankurō demanded, lightly running his hand over the down on the bird's minute breast.

Kumi's nose wrinkled, but she nodded again. "They're a lot of work. I'm working on a bat prototype, right now, mostly because of those, but not having much luck. Same issue as the raptors – too many wingbeats." She tugged, and the bird stepped forward on Kankurō's hand, displaying its wings. "A real desert lark would preen itself to maintain the integrity of its feathers. Obviously Little Bird can't do that. She's pretty, but her feathers are too time-consuming, and too often and easily damaged."

"Come with me," he said, thrusting the puppet toward her, though sorely disappointed to relinquish the remarkable creation. "We've got work to do."