A hospital alone shows what war is. ~Erich Maria Remarque
.
.
"But then I was like 'aww, Boss, there aren't any other toads that are as big and as awesome as you' and he was like 'well, you're right about that, brat' even though I probably didn't have enough chakra to summon any other toads anyway and I've only had the contract for a little while so it's not like I know all the toads, either…"
I listened with half an ear to Naruto's story, even though it was interesting - and oh god, what if Gamabunta hadn't helped? - as I made breakfast. The kitchen door was open, and I could hear the three of them at the table as Naruto enthusiastically regaled us with what had happened during the fight we had missed.
He was still a little low on chakra - for Naruto, anyway - but apart from a few yawns had bounced right back.
"Where'd you get a summoning contract, anyway?" Sasuke asked curiously.
"The pervy sage had it," Naruto replied and I could hear the shrug. "He let me sign it when I got him to teach me for the Exam."
"Most clans have a few summoning scrolls," I chimed in. "They aren't exactly rare." I hesitated, the ploughed onwards. "I'm not sure how organised the Uchiha were, but you've probably got a few hidden away in the compound."
Assuming they haven't been looted or anything.
"Hn," was all Sasuke replied with. The Uchiha… that was a topic that got tiptoed around and circumvented so obviously it did nothing but highlight the issue. Even I was guilty of it. I wanted to help Sasuke, but how?
I could hardly tell Sasuke the real culprit was Konoha itself. This was just a no-win situation.
But yes, summons are actually pretty common. There are thousands of different scrolls, some large, some small. For example the Great Toad Contract has several thousand summons attached to it, while Kakashi-sensei's dog contract has maybe a dozen. The problem is that it takes such a large amount of chakra to summon, and not all summons are equally good in battle situations. Added to that, summons are individuals. Not all of them are happy to be summoned. I think a prime example of that is Manda the snake boss, who demands a hundred sacrifices each time he is summoned.
"Do you have one?" Naruto asked curiously. "Shikako?"
"Me? Ah, no. I don't have the chakra for it," I said. "I might sign one when I'm older though. They're pretty neat."
I was struck by just how bizarre and domestic this scene was. My hand trembled on the counter and I clenched it into a fist to stop the shaking. Yesterday… we were fighting for our lives. We were… at war. This morning I'm cooking breakfast and we're chatting like nothing happened.
There was just a sense of … unreality to it.
I breathed in and shook it off.
Of course I was cooking breakfast. We needed to eat before we could go and help the clean up or whatever was going on this morning. Simple. Logical.
I dished up the rice and miso soup - a simple but traditional breakfast - and added an extra bowl since I could feel Mum stirring awake upstairs. She'd come in late last night and I had the vague feeling that Dad had come in even later and left extremely early this morning.
Naruto had gone back to talking and I was glad, as I carried the food out and sat at the table, because it had covered my awkward silence.
"- but Gamabunta couldn't hold onto the sand, because, y'know toads don't have claws, so he was like 'well, we'll have to do a Combination Transformation Jutsu' and I was like 'what?' and he was just 'think of something with teeth and claws' and heck, I couldn't think of anything but then I thought of Kyuubi, so that's what we turned into and hey, he has teeth and claws-"
Sasuke frowned. "Why on earth did you think of the Nine Tailed Fox?"
Naruto froze. "Ehehe, well… uh…"
I nodded encouragingly at him. Shikamaru and I knew. I thought it would be a good thing if Sasuke did too, being as how he was our team mate.
"Uh, well…"
"Spit it out, dead last," Sasuke ordered.
Naruto took a deep breath. "Well. Y'know how Gaara was the host of the Ichibi?"
"Obviously," Sasuke said, a touch sarcastically. "Since that's the whole reason we had to fight him."
"I'm the host of the Kyuubi." Naruto said it in such a rush, as though saying it faster would make it easier to get out. Then he looked down at his soup and didn't look back up.
There was silence.
I glanced at Sasuke cautiously. His face was frozen in a combination of confusion and disbelief.
"It's not quite the same, though, is it," I said tentatively, trying to direct the conversation to a safe end. "I mean, you can't do the same… transformation thing, right?" Or not until much, much later anyway.
"Well," Naruto said uncomfortably. "It's not like I've ever really tried. I mean, the only times I've used it were when the pervy sage threw me off a cliff and … in Wave Country when…" he trailed off.
"And in the Forest of Death," Sasuke said, as though adding things up. "When you attacked Orochimaru. Your eyes… they were red. He said something, too… I wasn't paying attention at the time…"
"When your anger is roused, some of the Nine Tailed Fox's chakra is released. What an interesting childhood you must have had."
I was kind of surprised I remembered what Orochimaru had said, but his voice had a way of burning itself inside your brain.
"Yeah, so," Naruto coughed, awkwardly, clearing his throat. "I didn't even know about it till after graduation." He shrugged. "It … yeah."
"You two already knew," Sasuke stated, looking from me to Shikamaru and back. It wasn't even a question.
"Remember how I told you about running into Gaara at the hospital?" I asked. "It came out then. I figured that it was up to Naruto to tell you, and we didn't exactly have time what with everything else."
"The adults all know," Shikamaru added. "Most of the kids don't, but I guess some of them will put it together after that."
Naruto shrugged uncomfortably. "Yeah, I guess."
"But it's not such a big deal," Shikamaru went on, a teasing glint in his eyes. "I mean, it's Naruto."
"Hey! What's that supposed to mean?" Naruto protested.
"Oh, like you don't know," Shikamaru retorted.
I tuned out their bickering and turned to Sasuke with a raised eyebrow. He gave me a slow nod. "It makes sense," he said.
Right, so that was one drama out of the way.
"Morning, kids," Mum said, coming into the room.
"Morning," I said reflexively as she sat down. I couldn't help but stare, just a little bit.
I knew she was a ninja. She trained with us, taught us, and it had never been a secret that she had been a Chunin. But seeing her dressed in blues and flack jacket for the first time that I could remember really make it real.
It might have even been the first time I had seen her wearing her headband.
My mother, the shinobi.
With Dad, I had always known there was no separation between home and work. He was a shinobi was a shinobi was a shinobi. It wasn't a bad thing, but we talked about shogi and missions and books and morality with no clear distinction between the topics.
But Mum had always been 'home'.
I wasn't really sure I liked this.
She looked up and caught my eye. "In a state of emergency, all able-bodied ninja are expected to be ready for duty. Since you two are out of the house, that includes me," she said by way of explanation.
I nodded silently. I knew the protocols. But the way Mum said it made it sound like she knew from experience, not from rules.
"Wait…" Shikamaru drawled. "State of emergency?"
"You haven't heard? No, of course you haven't. The official word went out late last night," Mum said tiredly. "The Hokage… is dead."
"What?" Naruto croaked, looking like the world was falling down around his ears. He shook his head. "No. Nonono…"
Because, while to us the Hokage was a leader and a powerful figure, to Naruto he was a person.
I knew him as the guy behind the missions desk, the guy that gave speeches at the Academy every year, important but distant while Naruto knew him as a grandfather that took him out to ramen and told him off for pranking.
I hissed a breath.
"How?" Sasuke asked dully.
"Orochimaru was disguised as the Kazekage and managed to isolate him during the battle. They fought. Hokage-sama used, or attempted to use, a suicide jutsu. Orochimaru was heavily wounded, but managed to escape." Her tone was flat and matter of fact, as though reciting a report. All the important facts were there but…
"Why did it take so long?" I asked. Surely that had happened before we got back. Why hadn't we found out last night? Not that it would have been better but…
"While battle protocols can run perfectly fine without the Hokage, or a lot of the upper ranks, bureaucracy is a little slower after battles. It took a while to sort out who was in charge, what was happening, and what to do about it. A lot of people knew by word of mouth before the official announcement went out," she said.
"Oh. No wonder Dad was out so late," I said.
"Yes. He's going to be very busy for the next few days." Or weeks. Or months, she didn't say, but there was a frown creasing between her eyes that said she knew it.
The rest of breakfast was spent in awkward silence. Naruto was silent, grieving. I wanted to comfort him, but wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't been exactly surprised with the information. I had hoped that enough had changed but…
Well. A suicide jutsu was a suicide jutsu. The clue was in the name.
Outside, one of the first things I noticed was that the flags were all flying half-mast and that they were all the red of 'state of emergency'. After seven, the message system started repeated a blip every half hour of 'Hokage down. State of Emergency in effect. All ninja report to temporary stations'.
Well, at least they'd given us time to sleep. That was unusually kind of them.
Therefore it was unsurprising to see the area around the Hokage Tower flooded with people. The Mission Assignment Desk had been moved outside and there were lines of people in front of it, with flustered Chunin trying to hand out assignments. There were several message boards posted around the area and we meandered over to one.
Like the check in station last night, there was a map of damage, a list of injured and a list of casualties. There was also an announcement sheet.
State of Emergency Enacted…
Death of the Third Hokage…
…remain calm… complete duties…
…Memorial tomorrow…
It was cold. I was glad that Naruto hadn't had to find out like this, even if the news hadn't exactly been broken easily.
We joined the queue. They were actually moving pretty fast despite the large number of people involved. You had to give ninja that; they were efficient. I thought about asking Shika if he wanted to wait for Team 10, but there was no guarantee that we would be sent out in teams anyway. Mum got split off from us to go and relieve one of the Chunin patrols and she left us with an admonished 'be good' that made Shika roll his eyes.
"Rank?" The Chunin at the desk said, sounding rushed.
"Genin," we chorused.
His eyes flickered up and took us in before making a snap decision and snagging a scroll. He took down our ID numbers, hastily scribbling them on the assignment sheet before throwing it to us. "Clean up. Sector 9-b. Next!"
We scampered out of the way and unrolled the scroll. It had directions and instructions. What to do, who to report to, where to go.
I almost expected Naruto to protest about being on clean up duty, but he didn't say a word.
"Troublesome," Shikamaru said.
Sasuke shrugged. "Let's go."
Walking through Konoha this morning was a little disturbing. We hadn't noticed it last night, too late and tired, but there were scorch marks, and knife marks and blood splatters on the buildings and streets. There was evidence of fighting.
The worst of the damage was along the wall, where a giant snake had apparently crashed straight through it but the rest of the village wasn't unscathed either. There were destroyed buildings and jutsu damage everywhere.
Like seeing Mum in uniform… it was just wrong.
We reported in to the Chunin in charge of overseeing Sector 9. He looked tired, like he'd been working for hours already, but apart from being a little gruff accepted us easily. "Alright, you're on clean up duty. That means; picking up loose weaponry, removing them from walls, plastering over holes, cleaning up glass and noting broken windows, and washing away blood splatters. There's buckets, plaster and water over there." He jerked his thumb to the side. "If you see a trap, or think you see a trap, come get me and I'll dismantle it. The boundaries of your area are marked on the map, so you shouldn't have any problems. With the four of you, it should take about an hour, maybe a little longer, which is good. This is a residential area, so we'd like to have it marked 'safe' before the civs get back."
He vanished, presumably to go and repeat the speech to others in other sectors.
There was a reason that this was a job given to Genin rather than civilians. Even though it wasn't dangerous we were still handling weaponry, and also… wall walking made the whole thing about a million times easier. I took an empty bucket and started filling it with discarded weapons, and then as an afterthought grabbed a can of plaster and a trowel so I could fill in the holes while I still knew where they were.
After a bit of boredom, I started using chakra strings to pick up the loose kunai on the ground. I wasn't quite coordinated enough to use them to yank out embedded ones, but it saved me from having to go right down to pick them up.
Thy name is laziness.
We found kunai and shuriken and senbon. A few tanto and a tachi and a wakizashi. And, in one memorable case, a dead body that had been missed during last nights clean up.
It wasn't a trap, but we got the Chunin anyway since we had no idea what to do with it. If civilians were going to be coming by, we really didn't want to leave it around.
"You kids never made a body scroll before?" He asked with a sigh. We shook our heads. "Figures. Alright, watch carefully. It's pretty similar to any other kind of storage scroll, in any case." He pulled a blank scroll out of one pocket and a brush and some bottled ink out of another.
He spread the scroll out on top of the body, bleed into the ink and started writing. Given the surety of his movements, I had the feeling he'd made more than a few of these in his time. The symbols were fairly familiar, particularly to the storage seals you used for food, which made sense because bodies were organic and you didn't want them to decompose. There were stabilising seals that helped account for the size since the body was bigger than the paper it was going to be sealed into.
"Seal," the Chunin commanded, clapping his hands down on the scroll. There was a puff of chakra smoke and the body vanished. The ink sort of… twitched and swirled before settling with the kanji for 'corpse' appearing in the middle of the sealing circle.
He rolled the scroll up with an expert flick of his wrist, and painted a quick black band around the edges of the scroll. "The black band doesn't do anything," he said, noticing our looks. "But it lets people know there's a body in there, so they don't go around opening it to find out. Sort of a polite thing to do, yeah?"
He chucked it into one of our buckets and told us to get back to work. It didn't actually take us long to finish up. The worst part was trying to scrub the blood off. I'd never found cleaning very fun, and knowing what I was cleaning up wasn't really helping.
But we did it, and the Chunin made a quick check over our sector before nodding and signing off on our mission scroll. "Good work. Thanks."
We trooped back to the Mission's Desk, which wasn't any quieter now than it had been before. I guess that was to be expected. Not only was there increased patrols, and clean up duties, and whatever else had been produced by the invasion, but the village still had to run itself with day to day administration and we were still taking on missions. And, I guess, pacifying the nobles and lords that had come for the Chunin Exam and ended up in the middle of a battle.
This time we were split up. I got assigned to go run supplies for the hospital, while the boys got sent off to haul rubble or something for the construction site.
The hospital actually had sub-basement storage where all the extra supplies were kept (or most of them, anyway. There were probably other supply depots around the village just in case) but the hospital staff were so run off their feet that people were needed to transport them from the storage rooms, up the stairs and into the places where the nurses and doctors could get at them.
I reported into the receptionist, who directed me to the Head Nurse, who gave me a code for the doors and a list of things to bring up, all in between snapping someone for messing up … something, giving orders to three more orderlies and drinking her coffee. Now that was multitasking.
I weaved my way through bustling crowds and slid off down the stairs before I gained her ire. Everyone in the halls had the same kind of harried and stressed expression on, like they'd had one cup of coffee too many, one hour of sleep too few and the end of the world was right around the corner.
It took a few moments to orient myself in the huge storage basement, but I did and I started gathering the supplies for the pharmacy, since having the right drugs on hand was kind of crucial. I made doubly sure to check the names on the bottles - long and confusing though they were - to make sure I had the right stuff.
Then I hauled the very heavy box upstairs, unloaded it in the pharmacy under the watchful eye of the on duty nurse who made sure everything went in the right place when she wasn't filling orders for everyone else.
Then I went back downstairs to do it all again.
It was dull, boring work, but it needed to be done and I was a Genin which practically translated to dogsbody or gopher or possibly minion if they were feeling generous. Besides, I wasn't so sure I could handle anything exciting right now.
It was about an hour later when I'd been moved on to transporting bed sheets from the laundry to the linen closet that I ran into Sakura.
"Oh!" She made a little sound of startlement.
"Sakura?" I asked in surprise as I opened the door to the linen closet - that was the size of a small room - and put down the basket of white cloth. "What are you doing here?"
She was wearing her usual red dress, but she had a white smock thrown overtop complete with the red medics mon with the qualifier 'in training' underneath. Her hair was tied back in a low ponytail and I nearly hadn't recognised her.
"Working," she explained, hands fluttering. "Yesterday… all of the trainees were called in to help, even those of us who had just started. I mean, we weren't working with the patients or anything, just doing fetch and carry basically. To free up hands to deal with the serious stuff. Every bit counts, right?"
"Hey, I'm folding laundry. You don't have to convince me." I gave a pointed shake of a white sheet as I creased it together and slid it onto the shelf.
She gave a quick smile. "I'm making beds, so I think we're even." She hesitated. "You know, yesterday… I kept wondering if next time I went past the ER it would be one of you guys. That someone I knew would be brought in…" She gave me a searching look.
I didn't want to think about how badly messed up some of those people would have been, or how very, very easily that could have been us.
I leant forward and gave her a quick hug. "We're all fine. I'm sorry I didn't think to contact you or anything. I can't promise it will never happen… but for now we're all fine."
However close it had been, we were all fine.
Sakura shrugged, but she looked much happier and calmer. "I was here all day, so it'd probably have been hard for you to find me," she excused. "It was pretty crazy in here; everyone was run off their feet all day. I think I'm starting to see why there are four different coffee machines in the nurses lounge."
"Coffee makes the world go round," I said, amused. Not that I tended to drink it here. Twelve year old taste buds did not like. I'd give it a few years.
"You'd fit right in," she joked. "But… I better get back to it. I'll catch up with you later, okay?"
"You bet," I said.
I finished up at the hospital and went back to the Missions Desk to get assigned to gopher paperwork around the Hokage Tower. That let me stick my head in Dad's office and wave on my way past, but he looked way too busy for me to stop and chat.
I kept wondering if I was going to be asked to give a debriefing on what had happened in the forest, but other than the brief written report I'd handed in automatically, nothing came of it. Then I had the face smacking realisation.
There were far more important things going on.
It was strange to think that the fight - the decision - that had been life or death for us was barely a sidenote to the rest of the village. They had been focused on the Hokage, on the giant summoned snake that destroyed the east wall, the legions of ninja darting through the village streets. That we had returned alive, and that Gaara had not rejoined the fight seemed to be all that they cared about. If they even registered that it happened at all.
You are not the centre of the universe.
Right. Like I needed a reminder about that.
Still, it was good to keep things in perspective, wasn't it?
Shaking my head, I finished my gophering and returned to the Missions Desk, noting that the village was starting to become more lively as civilians were 'un-evacuated', a process that sometimes took as much effort and coordination as the evacuation itself.
It might have seemed cruel and needless to keep them in the evac shelters for what was essentially two days, give or take - I didn't know when they'd gone in, but it was probably the night before the Chunin Exams, so that none of the visitors would notice - but there had been the threat, however vague, of a second attack, or of booby traps or a dozen other things that could have endangered everyone. The evac shelters weren't luxurious, no, but they were designed for worst-case-scenario long term use.
Now that clean up was almost done, barring the more destroyed areas that would need to be rebuilt, and patrols re-established and all the other things that would keep the village safe, it was safe for them to come back out.
Civilians that live in Hidden Villages are a curious bunch. They aren't ninja and it shows; there's a huge divide between the shinobi and the civilians. But they know ninja. Almost everyone has a brother-sister-uncle-best friend-cousin-next door neighbour who is a shinobi. They understand us from the outside. And because of that they have their own kind of courage.
They walk the streets with murderers and they know it. They sell fruit to a guy that can burn down buildings with an exhale, clothes to people that will only rip-tear-shred-bleed on them. People race over their rooftops at all hours of the night. And when the call to evacuation goes around, they calmly pick up their emergency bags and go.
And when it's over, they come outside, take stock of the damage, breath a sigh of relief, and move on.
They're not ninja. But they don't let it phase them.