Warning(s): AU, language and mild imagery, non-explicit sexual activity, exactly three OCs (two of which are never even seen), and canon & non-canon pairings.
Fifty colons (::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::) indicates a scene shift.
POV: 3rd person for the most part, and rotates between seven characters.
Duty Always Comes First
Prologue
Lord Third always said Konohagakure was a family. He said the Hokage was the father, or in his case, grandfather, and it is his job to protect the family. No matter what has to be sacrificed, Konoha and its king must be protected.
I never imagined I would be Hokage. Never really wanted to be. That was always Naruto. Heh. Damn idiot wouldn't shut up about it.
He's gone now. Him, Sai, Lady Tsunade, Kakashi-sensei, about a quarter of the Land of Fire...
...And you want to know the worst thing about it? We weren't even deliberately attacked. It was a new disease somebody had the misfortune to discover. That unlucky person was the first of millions to die from it.
When people think about a Kage dying, they usually envision him or her going out surrounded by the bodies of their enemies stupid enough to attack their home. Not Naruto. The man survives a village that feared and hated him for something completely out of his control, a murderous, sociopathic "best friend", a whole gang of psychopaths, saves the world twice, becomes the youngest Hokage in Konoha's history at twenty-one against all odds, and what happens four years later? He drowns in his own fluids, alone in a hospital bed, in a quarantine ward, while Hinata and one year old Boruto are forced to stay in the Hokage Mansion to keep from getting sick. There's gotta be a joke in there somewhere. I know there is.
Somebody saw fit to make me Hokage soon after instead of letting someone who actually knew how to run the place, like one of the older shinobi. I'd have been happy with Shizune. But country-wide panic and mass hysteria was setting in, some people even killing those who so much as coughed. Shizune was pretty much unknown, despite having been with Lady Tsunade for years. People knew my face from the War, even though I didn't actually do anything noteworthy. For some reason, the council thought they would "trust me more." Whatever.
Under different circumstances, I would have fought. Loudly. Probably should've. But I didn't. And I'll live with it.
Dammit. Have you ever tried fighting something you can't see, can't touch, but you know it's there? Ever tried to make a strategy to track, contain, and destroy an enemy that will kill you before you can get anywhere near it? Sounds impossible, doesn't it?
It very nearly was. The average citizen, hell, the damn daimyō, has no idea how close to failing we were. It was by pure chance Sakura and Ino managed to find a cure. A small sample of the virus we'd collected had gotten mixed with a sample of blood that belonged to one of two hundred people we later found out were naturally immune to it. The antibodies in the blood began killing it right away.
Two years. Two goddamn years, and a fumble with equipment saved us. There has to be a fucking joke here. Has to be.
In the end, in some roundabout way, I did my job. I protected my family. I made sure the king survived. It was my duty, and duty always comes first.
So what if it wasn't this family I had in mind when I spent countless hours with Sakura trying to fix this damn mess before it spread to other lands? So what if I gave that one up because I felt I had an obligation to someone else? So the fuck what?
Like I said, duty always comes first.
Note(s)
1) Will be my final Naruto story, so I wouldn't expect an update anytime soon if I were you.