As promised, Kakashi met Sakura on her way to the training grounds again the next morning. They worked through the sequence again at the secluded field. As promised, it was easier the second time. When they rejoined the boys, Kakashi had Guruko chase all three on an eight mile sprint across the town. The dog took to the task with enthusiasm, Sasuke yelping inelegantly when he didn't start fast enough and teeth raked his calf.
Kakashi stretched quietly while he waited for them to get back, testing out the range of motion in his knee. It was healing. It still hurt when he put torque on it, but it was a manageable hurt. Those goats had been brutal.
When the genin sped panting back into the field, he set Sakura and Naruto to working together, and took Sasuke aside to talk about the sharingan and non-visual sensory genjutsu. Sasuke glowered, but at least seemed to be listening.
Around noon, he gathered them all together, stuck a kunai in the top of a training post, and told them to retrieve it.
An hour later, he tugged the kunai out of the wood, sheathed it, and led his three sweaty, muddy, laughing ducklings to the mission office.
Iwao came with Sakura to check her father into the clinic. When the forms were signed and handed over, a staff member came to guide him from the lobby, deeper into the building. He hesitated, and turned back to Sakura. "I'm going to do it," he said. "I'll see you soon." He was thin and shaky, with papery skin stretched over sunken cheeks, but he sounded sincere. Sakura reached out and hugged him, pressed her face into his bony shoulder. "I love you," her dad said.
"I love you too." Sakura took a deep breath, then stepped away. "And I believe in you."
He blinked away what might have been tears. "I'll see you soon."
When he had disappeared down the hall, Iwao and Sakura left out the front door. Outside, Iwao put an arm around her shoulders. "You okay?"
Sakura nodded, brushing at her eyes. "Yeah. This is good for him."
"It is." Iwao squeezed briefly. "Do you need to meet up with your team this afternoon, or are you free?"
"We're taking an evening mission. Kakashi told us to take the day to get rested up."
"Then what do you think about stopping at Shichirobei-san's fruit stand, getting some picnic food, and having lunch in the park?"
"Okay." Sakura agreed, but her heart wasn't really in it. She helped him choose a handful of plums, and spared a moment to wish Shizuka were home. Shizuka loved fresh plums, especially those from Shichirobei-san's orchard. Iwao popped into another store on their way, but Sakura stayed in the street, holding the bags and watching people go by.
In the park, they spread a blanket on the grass under a wide-branched tree, and Iwao spread out the food. Plums and rice balls, orange juice and -
And someone was walking across the grass, shoulders broad and straight, a grin quirking scarred lips, dark blue uniform and the ubiquitous coil of white straps around one thigh holding up a holster, short red hair firey in the sun. "SHIZUKA!" Sakura bellowed, and surged up from the grass.
Shizuka braced herself as Sakura came bulling into her, spinning her around to lessen the impact. She ruffled Sakura's hair. "Hey kid."
"Welcome home," Sakura said. Iwao was walking over, more sedately, and Sakura stepped back to let them embrace.
"Right on time," Iwao said. "Office said your debriefing would be done early morning, so I thought noon would be about right. Come, eat. You must be starving."
Shizuka chuckled. "You are a wise man, love." She leaned in to kiss him.
Sakura grinned, rocking on her heels a little impatiently. "Alright, enough," she finally interrupted. "You can't eat Uncle Iwao. Lunch!"
They broke apart, though Iwao's fingers lingered on Shizuka's cheek, before he reached for her hand and led her back to the picnic blanket.
"So?" Shizuka asked as they settled down under the tree and began to hand around food. "What's happened while I've been gone?"
Kakashi was waiting at the training ground when the three genin straggled in at dawn, yawning and blinking. "What, tired?" he asked, cheerfully.
Sasuke glared balefully. Naruto took the bait. "We were out until two in the morning harvesting those stupid flowers! In the dark! What kind of stupid flowers bloom at night?"
Sakura sighed. "Night-blooming water crocus, Naruto."
"I know!" Naruto wailed. "I was there!"
Kakashi smothered a smile. "Are you saying a D-rank mission was too much for you? I suppose I should return this C-rank to the mission office then." He dangled a scroll between two fingers, and made a show of putting it back into his belt pouch.
Naruto squawked, and lunged for the scroll. "No no no, not tired, not tired! C-rank? What mission? We have a mission? Where are we going?"
Kakashi flicked the scroll open with one hand, fending Naruto off with the other. "This, my cute little students, is a blank scroll." Naruto groaned. "But! I have decided that it is time to try our hands at another C-rank." He rolled the scroll up with another flick and bopped Naruto on the head with it. "Off to the mission office!"
The chuunin on the mission desk flipped through the stack of open requests, frowning. "I'm sorry, Hatake-san, I'm not seeing any C-ranks open right now that fit your team. Perhaps a D-rank?"
Kakashi leaned over the counter, reading upside down. The chuunin glanced up, but swallowed his disapproval, too intimidated to tell him off. Kakashi flipped a couple pages. "We'll take this one."
The chuunin, hands waving ineffectually over the papers, gulped like a fish. "Hatake-san, that's a specialized request, two chuunin, earth-type, civil engineering experience -"
Kakashi slid the mission request away from the man. "I have a great deal of intimate experience with the inner workings of dams," he said placidly. "And all my ducklings know at least one earth jutsu." He was already filling out the form. "Right, ducklings?"
The chuunin did not look convinced. Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura, arrayed behind Kakashi, all attempted to look competent and earth-like. From the corner, another jounin pretending to read a magazine snickered.
Kakashi pushed the form back, and beamed at the chuuin. "Here you go."
"Hatake-san," the chuunin pleaded, not taking the form, half-standing up.
"I'm worth any two chuunin," Kakashi said softly, still smiling. "Or do you doubt it?"
The chuunin gulped, and began to gather paperwork.
"So, we don't actually know any earth-jutsu," Sakura pointed out, when they were an hour out from the Village, packs strapped across their backs, heavy with gear for two weeks of travel. Kakashi had given them the rest of the day to prepare, and they'd set out at the following dawn, when mist curled off the ground and the light shifted color from grey to pink to orange to simply bright.
"You'll learn," Kakashi said easily. "We have a long trip."
"Why are we going so slowly?" Sasuke asked. "We could cover the distance in four days."
"They don't need us until the river gets lower," Kakashi said. "So why rush? We'll enjoy the beautiful landscape, relax, learn some things."
"You're going to teach us a new jutsu!" Naruto crowed. "Hah!" He danced forward, spinning around to walk backwards and beam at the rest of them. "When? Now?"
Kakashi, hands shoved in his pockets and slouching along at an easy pace, smiled. "What do you know about elemental techniques?" he asked, instead of answering.
Sasuke answered. "By matching the elemental nature of his chakra to the ambient energy inherent in the world, a shinobi can use jutsu to turn the world around him into a weapon, expending far less energy than it would otherwise require. Every person has an inborn elemental nature, often inherited. Such as the Uchiha fire."
"And can you only perform elemental jutsu of your own nature?" Kakashi asked.
"No," Sasuke said, but there was a hesitancy to his answer.
"Why? Sakura?"
"Resonance," she said, then catching Naruto's blank expression, continued as if she had always meant to. "Your affinity makes it easier to work with your own element, but you can change way your chakra moves to work with other elements. It's harder, and not as efficient, but anyone can do it."
Kakashi smiled. "So. We're all going to learn an earth jutsu! Pick up some dirt!"
Soon all the children had a good handful of dark, loamy soil. Kakashi kept walking.
"Uh, what are we supposed to do now?" Naruto asked.
"Commune with the dirt."
"What?"
At the end of the day, as they set up camp, and washed dirt out from under their nails and behind their ears, Sakura still had very little idea what Kakashi had meant. All day, he'd had them picking up dirt, carrying it for a few miles, then swapping the handfuls out for new ones. She'd carried sandy soil from a ravine, silty soil from a riverbed, crumbly soil and sticky soil. She'd carried a rock, and a wet cup of mud that had dried to a solid film on her hands that had cracked when she stretched her fingers.
They ate as the sun set, while Naruto chattered and Sasuke chipped enough to start an argument. Kakashi gave himself last watch and retired to his bedroll, and Sakura declared the first watch for herself, leaving the boys to clean up the meal and get their first shift of sleep.
The days passed slowly, calmly. They picked up dirt every mile or so, seeing the change in types as the passed from forest to meadow, the lee of a windy hill to the sunken hole left by a root ball where a tree had blown down. In the evenings, they practiced genjutsu, or sparred hand-to-hand, or simply talked. A quiet sort of routine grew, softening the sharp edges between them all.
On the fifth day, Kakashi stopped them in a brushy field. "Tell me about the dirt. Naruto."
Naruto crouched down, digging a handful of soil up from under a scrub bush. "Sort of damp. Maybe from the rain last night. Kinda dense, but not super packed?"
Kakashi nodded, and turned a questioning eyebrow to Sasuke. "Sandy subsoil," the other boy added.
He glanced at Sakura, then, who nodded in agreement, and added, "Probably only a foot or so deep, considering the bedrock showing on the rise over there."
Kakashi smiled, approvingly. "Good. Alright, watch." He did the hand signs slowly — a sequence of four anchored by a Ram — and a wall of earth a foot thick and five feet high shuddered up from the ground.
Naruto's eyes lit up. "Woah."
"You have to know what you're working with," Kakashi said, poking the wall. A shower of sand dislodged from the side and rained to the ground. "It would take a lot more effort to make a thicker wall, since we only have a thin layer of soil to work with. With the sand, if this takes much impact, it'll fall apart."
"Like a sand castle at the playground!" Naruto poked the wall too, grinning.
"Exactly." Kakashi repeated the final hand sign, and the wall broke apart into chunks and collapsed. "Try."
Their first walls were more like molehills; the next fell apart at a breath. But they practiced as they traveled, in clay and mud and sand and every other type of earth they walked over. By the end of the two weeks, they could each make a wall.
They entered the village on the morning of the fifteenth day, a little muddy but feeling confident that they could help with their newfound skills.
A surprising amount of the first week had been nothing but math. The village headman, the site foreman, the chief engineer, Kakashi, Sakura, Naruto, and Sasuke sat on tatami mats in the headman's home, circling maps of the valley, soil composition reports, water usage estimates, peak flow histories from previous seasons. Elders and farmers from around the valley filtered in and out, offering detailed knowledge about the water table or historic flooding in particular areas.
They rechecked the calculations for spillway volume, probable maximum flood, the runoff coefficient for the slopes. The formulas were new to Sakura, but the numbers ran easily in her mind. And in a way, the planning for the dam was like planning during simulation missions during Academy. What were worst case scenarios? What were the emergency exits? What resources were at hand, what skills did each team member bring?
Sasuke sat a little remove, pretending to be disinterested in the minutiae of infrastructure. Sakura had expected Naruto to fidget his way out of the room, and the first day he had. But Kakashi had taken him aside in the evening, and when he'd come back to the room they shared in the little village inn, there had been a fire in his eyes. "If I want to be Hokage, I have to understand this stuff," he'd said. Since then, he'd kept himself in the meetings. Every hour or so, he'd step outside, and there'd be a puff of chakra smoke from the hallway. A Naruto would come back in the room, looking determined, and sit down next to Sasuke with a pout of intense focus on his face. Whichever clone had gotten too fed up with sitting would be joining the men in digging out the reservoir, and a new one would take over the infinitely more difficult job of sitting through the interminable meetings.
Sakura enjoyed it all. On the fifth day, she was actually disappointed when the Kakashi added his sloppy signature to the final plan underneath the chief engineer's neat kanji, and they all bowed to each other. Naruto whooped and pumped his fist in the air. "We're gonna build a dam!"
They were moving pipe to lay the drop inlet overflow when the crane began to break. "The cables!" Sasuke bellowed, sprinting towards the swaying platform. Kunai flew from his hands, wrapping silk-thin wires around the precarious load.
Villagers hauling baskets and bricks dropped their loads and scattered with shouts of alarm. Sasuke shoved chakra from his feet, counterbalancing himself against the crane's mast as he tried to stabilize the platform. A cable snapped.
Poorly restrained, a pipe slid free and crashed down on a pile of framing timber. A man's scream cut through the chaos. Sakura had been running towards Sasuke, hoping to help brace the load; at the sound, she jackknifed and yanked on her chakra. A sandbag thunked into the ground where she'd been, and she dropped to her knees in the mud beside the man trapped under the fallen beams. "Sakura!" Sasuke shouted; she looked up, another pipe was sliding towards the edge of the platform.
A wall wouldn't be enough; she slammed her hands through signs and modified the final seal; a half-dome of earth tore out of the ground around them, arcing over their heads. The thunk of the metal hitting earth reverberated through the ground beneath her feet; dirt plummeted down around them in fist sized clods as the pipe bounced and rolled off their shelter. Sakura glanced through the gaping holes torn in her dome, then at the villager. She couldn't move him without freeing his leg; she couldn't free his leg without moving all the fallen wood, and there was no time.
"It's not going to hold!" She could see Sasuke struggling with the lines through the gaps in her protective shell. The whole crane was beginning to sway, wood creaking under the mis-aligned weight.
"Naruto!" She screamed his name, not sure if he was close enough to hear. The rest of the pipes were shifting now, the platform tilting as they slid between loosened straps. If the rest of the straps failed, the whole load was going to come down on them. Her dome wouldn't hold. She made the seals anyway, raising a second shell around the first, but her chakra was overstrained already, and she knew it would be too thin. Sasuke strained to keep it level, but he was slipping. The wooden handles on his wire drove into his hands, the wires slicing bloody lines where they cut between his middle and ring fingers.
The sharp crack of a broken cable released the rest of the pipes down on their heads. Sakura flattened her body over the villager's head. Dirt rained down on them, the pipes crashing and ringing down to the ground. In the following silence, the man's chest heaved with terrified breaths beneath her, and Sakura slowly lifted herself to her knees.
Dozens of Naruto clones stood around her, raising their hands to the dirt walls that paneled a faceted dome above her own. They turned to look at her, grinning hugely. "We did it!"
The walls began to crumble, chunks of dirt smacking clones in the faces and poofing them out of existence, until only one Naruto stood next to Sakura, the both of them covered in dust and surrounded by a circle of fallen pipes and heaps of dirt. Sakura reached out and braced herself on Naruto's shoulder. "Good timing."
He smiled back at her. "I saw your circle, but I didn't know how to do it. So I made a bunch of walls," he said. "I'm glad it worked."
"Me too."
Sasuke, still standing on the crane, shouted over to them. "I can't let go of the platform until you get out of there," he said, annoyance clear in his voice. "Get out of the way."
Naruto flipped him off, before creating a dozen new clones to free the villager. Supporting him between them, Naruto and Sakura hurried out of the danger zone, and Sasuke let the crane crash to the ground. Villagers hurried over to the injured man, lifting him onto a stretcher and bearing him away to the healer's house. Sasuke joined his teammates a few moments later, wiping blood from his hands.
Sakura slung her arms around the boys' shoulders. She had to reach a little, and she smeared dirt all over their necks, but it was worth it. "That was good teamwork," she said.
"That was a poorly built crane," Sasuke said. He twitched his shoulders under her arm, but didn't move away.
"I'm hungry," Naruto said, reaching his own arm over Sakura's shoulder and poking Sasuke in the ear. "Can we get lunch before we start work again?"
Sakura smiled into the star-flecked darkness above the slowly filling reservoir. The lights of the village twinkled in the water on the far side. Lanterns hung around the village square, their red and orange and yellow glow highlighting the swinging, spinning rush of dancers, making the villagers look like a fire themselves, bodies reduced to flickering movement by the distance.
She sat on the top of the dam, resting her chin on one bent leg, the other dangling over the edge, the rising water still meters below her foot. A path ran along the top of the dam; a few tools lay scattered or stacked along the side, remnants of wood and spilled sandbags.
He moved quietly despite the darkness, but she felt the heat of his chakra long before he arrived. He stopped behind her left shoulder, too far to touch, too close to be alone.
"Is Naruto still at the celebration?" She didn't really need to ask; if she closed her eyes and focused, she could feel his presence from across the lake. It was wild and bright, and it made her smile again. The story of the crane accident had grown in the telling over the last week, Naruto glowing enthusiastically at its center.
The question seemed to release him. Sasuke made his decision, and carefully lowered himself to the concrete block beside her. "Yes."
She bit her lips on another smile, at the relaxed set of his shoulders, at the way he drew a knee up as well, linking his hands around his shin and looking out over the water. "I'm glad. He deserves the accolades. To have someone recognize him and his work." And he had worked, so hard. With his clones descending like helpful locusts on any physical task, and himself and the rest of the team shifting earth with jutsu, the work had gone quickly and well.
Cloth rustled beside her; she glanced to the side without moving her head. Sasuke had turned to look at her, his eyes dark shadows against the star-pale skin. "So do you," he said.
She huffed out a startled breath. The silence stretched on; he was still watching her. Finally, she shrugged. "We all helped. I don't need the attention, though. The people who matter already know what happened."
"The people who matter?"
"You. Naruto. Kakashi."
"It doesn't bother you at all, that he gets all the credit?"
"Does it bother you?"
She listened to his breathing as before answered, felt at the edges of his chakra presence, half expecting to feel him close down, to deflect the question. But he just laughed, a single amused breath of air. "No. These people don't matter to me. This was nothing."
She jabbed her elbow into his side. "Don't keep minimizing what we do together. Honami-san would probably be dead, if any one of us hadn't been there."
He shrugged. "Maybe. You didn't answer the question."
"What question?"
"Does it bother you."
She considered. The lilting strains of a biwa carried faintly from across the water. "No. If I want success, the evidence will come from our mission reports, from Kakashi's recommendations, and from the team we build together. Naruto…Naruto wants something more than that." She chuckled. "And I'm glad not to have to spend my whole night being polite to people."
"Hmm."
"You know what I am most glad about, though?"
"What?"
She gestured at the dark water below them, at the dam they sat on top of, at the lights of the village. "This. What we did here. It feels good, doesn't it?"
He was silent for a long time. Sakura breathed in the smells of wet concrete, of stirred mud, listened to the slap of water against the wall, of insects buzzing along the shore. She felt the pleasant tightness of well-worked muscles in her back, the warmth of the summer breeze on her cheeks. She thought about the things that were lacking — the taste of blood, the sharp pain of torn skin and the throb of bone-deep bruises, the sounds of grief. Was he thinking of the same things?
"Yes." The word was hesitant in his mouth. She waited, listening to the space the syllable left the in air, the pocket of happiness growing in her chest. "Yes," he said again, and it was more certain this time. "This was…good."
This was good. She leaned her head back and smiled with open-mouthed joy at the sky. She was here with her teammate, her other teammates safe in the village across the lake, enjoying the laughter and the music and the food — a celebration for a job well done, a dam built, an accident avoided. This was good.
The gates of the village loomed large as they stepped out of the trees and into the cleared ground before Konoha. Kakashi let the kids race ahead, and sauntered slowly after them, a book held open in one hand. The paperwork wouldn't take too long, and then he could go…home, he supposed. There were extra guards on the gate, but they looked relaxed, so there couldn't be any emergencies.
The genin were lit up by the afternoon sunlight, glowing with high spirits. Did he want to go home? Maybe he could throw a change of clothes together and take a quick trip to the hot springs; out and back by tomorrow, no one would even notice he was gone.
"Hatake!" the gate guard hailed him. "Message for you."
Kakashi looked up from his book. He didn't recognize the man, but he was pushing a sealed paper across the counter of the little roofed gatehouse. He picked it up and stuffed it in a back pocket. "Okay."
"Welcome back, sir," the man said. Kakashi grunted, and walked past the threshold.
He unrolled the paper when he was out of sight of the gate. It was a summons to a meeting with the Hokage. So much for the hot springs. The kids were halfway down the street already, on the way to the Hokage tower. They knew by now how to write their reports. He didn't need to babysit them. Sighing, he crumpled the paper back up and translocated away. He'd wash up, change clothes, maybe read a bit. It wouldn't do to show up early.
Asuma wasn't smoking. That was the first thing Kakashi noticed, after checking the exits and noting the positions of the three ANBU gurads. Neither was Sarutobi, his pipe cold on his desk. All faces turned to him as he entered. He catalogued Kurenai's clenched jaw and Asuma's tight lips with a flick of his eye. "Lord Hokage."
Sarutobi smiled, gestured him to the third chair. "Thank you for joining us, Kakashi." The chastisement was affectionate, but his eyes were tired.
Kakashi slouched carefully back in the hard chair. "So what's this about?"
"You will all be recommending your teams for the chuunin exams at the meeting tomorrow."
Well, that explained why Asuma and Kurenai were so tense. "They're not ready." Apparently the other two jounin had already made all these arguments, because Sarutobi just sighed.
"I know." He raised a hand to forestall another protest. "But Sand is sending their jinchuuriki. And Sound is participating for the first time ever. We need eyes in the exam. Kurenai and Asuma's teams are particularly suited to gaining intelligence, and will be able to give us information even the proctors will not."
"And my team?" The image of Naruto attempting surveillance on enemy genin made Kakashi cringe internally.
"Your team," Sarutobi said seriously, "is excellent at drawing attention. With Team 7 in the running, the eyes and tongues of our honored guests will be on Naruto and Sasuke."
"And not on our teams," Asuma mused.
Sarutobi nodded. "Gai will be recommending his genin, I am sure. And we have several other Konoha teams preparing. However, all of them are, to some extent, known variables. The foreign teams will have been briefed."
"So you're exploiting the fact that our genin are too new to have records." Kakashi kept his voice perfectly level. Beside him, Kurenai tensed.
Sarutobi steepled his fingers. "Yes." They locked eyes, and Kakashi saw that Sarutobi knew exactly what he was thinking. He considered saying it anyway, laying out the names and the dates and the ages, and watching his Hokage refuse to flinch. He probed at the old memories, turned the words over on his tongue.
"They're not ready," he said, softly, voice catching. "This will hurt them."
"I know." The Hokage held his gaze.
Kurenai broke the silence. "Can we tell them? Explain why they're entering, that we don't expect them to make it through?"
Sarutobi shook his head. "You will debrief them after every stage, without interfering with their performance."
"You want a show," Asuma snapped. "You're hoping our jinchuuriki will show up theirs." He leaned forwards, jaw jutting out. "You can't intend to pass them."
"That will depend entirely on their performance. It is unlikely any of them will make it past the second exam. But that is as far as we need them to go. Everything else," and here he smiled, humorlessly, "is public."
Kakashi adjusted his slouch. "You expect trouble."
"I expect nothing. But I will be prepared." With that, Sarutobi stood. "I will see you at the official meeting. Do try to be on time."
The three jounin left, quiet and angry. Kurenai seemed to be resigning herself to the situation, and even managed to offer, "It will be good experience for them."
Kakashi snorted softly. This was going to tear his team apart. He could see the end already. Sasuke and Naruto desperate for a promotion, blind to the potential of the exam as a chance to learn. Sakura, facing down opponents far beyond her skill, her fragile confidence cracking.
Maybe he could get them disqualified. A minor head injury, timed properly, would require bed rest. "Kakashi." He blinked over at Asuma, and saw his friend shaking his head. "I don't know what you're planning, man, but don't. It's a bad idea."
Maybe it was. But wasn't this the whole point of peace time? That they didn't deliberately send the green children into death matches? That promotions could wait until they were ready, not until the village needed another body to hold the lines?
What kind of teacher was he, if he stood aside and watched his students end up the same as himself?
"Kakashi." Asuma had stopped, now, and even Kurenai was watching him, her red eyes sharp.
"It's fine," he said, and gave them both a smile. "It's fine."