A/N: Do my stories all sound like this? …I feel like I've written this before.
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Twelve
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The line we meet at is the beginning of life.
-My friend Brit.
They made it.
It's odd to think of a beginning as a finish line; especially when the reception is a gaggle of corpses.
Their finale; the ending of an era… They feel a hundred years old, though the group of twelve [twelve] can't be far from their teenaged years; another ending.
A platoon; four times three. Four three man squads with members who slip seamlessly between the movements of their peers. This is a secret weapon that their village never knew they had. A team of such size, whose talents complement each other and whose lives are so so valued by the others.
They are a force.
Protectors in their own right, they stand together.
There are onlookers; those who have aged and are no longer so spry. They reminisce of their own victories and failures and the people who stood by them once; as well as the man whose rank they had not yet filled.
The Kage and the teachers, the trainers of heroes looked on in pride. As the failures, the rookies who weren't supposed to make it: the class of geniuses with too much pride for their own good, the one with the books marts but no follow through, with the delinquents and the hopeless. The ones so perfectly mediocre.
Those were the people who became the greats, who grew and changed because they found each other.
They are the proof that the world changes.
If you shake things up enough.