Chapter Thirty Two: Interlude

As the village slowly rebuilt itself from the ground up, a funeral was arranged for Hiruzen and all of the other fallen shinobis. The entire Sarutobi family was present, including Hiruzen's eldest son and wife, who were both civilians, along with their son Konohamaru. Asuma had chosen to stand among the crowd rather than to join his family, to avoid the pitying looks that the villagers shot at the Sarutobi family.

Kurenai placed a comforting hand on Asuma's shoulder as the funeral commenced. He clenched his fist, his teeth gnawing at his bottom lip in an effort to not cry. Konohamaru had no qualms and tears openly slid down his cheeks during the entire service.

The Sarutobi family said a few words about their father. Jiraiya recounted one of the funniest memories of his sensei, making the crowd chuckle, but wasn't enough to dissipate the somber atmosphere. The Konoha elders also had a few choice words to say about the loss of their dear friend. Shikaku was the last to speak, offering a few words of comfort and a motivational speech about the future that they had to look forward to.

At the end of the ceremony, the crowd scattered, returning to their respective jobs. Civilians to help with the rebuilding efforts. Shinobis to their respective missions and guard duties. Kakashi and Rin went back to the hospital to tend to the injured, with Sakura in tow. Jiraiya slipped out of the village, taking Naruto along with him as he went on the journey to find Tsunade.

All of their hearts were bleeding, but only time could heal their wounds.

While Team Seven was temporarily disbanded, Izumi took Sasuke under her wing to teach him the tricks to the Sharingan. Team Asuma, Team Kurenai, and Team Gai continued to take missions as a team. When they weren't out on missions, they were assigned D rank missions to help with the rebuilding effort.

Shikaku volunteered to help with amping up the security in the village. A group of Anbu were sent to Oto, to demolish the remains of the village. Raiding every last Orochimaru's laboratories, they found many things that sickened them, including many human experiments as well as plethora of notes detailing how he planned to achieve immortality.

From that point forward, Oto was no more and the remaining of Orochimaru's subordinates scattered all across the world, blending in with other villages. None of them dared to approach the Land of Fire.

True to his word, Jiraiya had successfully brought back Tsunade after a two week long trip. According to Naruto, it had taken a bit of a beating for him to knock some sense into the woman, but Tsunade eventually agreed to become the Fifth Hokage. A ceremony was conducted for her inauguration, but no one was really in the mood to celebrate. Tsunade wordlessly took the hat and began her duties as Hokage.

The rebuilding process and security measures under Shikaku's leadership had been handled brilliantly, but he didn't dabble into the other duties of Hokage. The first order of business was to determine who to promote to chunin. Based on the files and accounts from various jonins, Tsunade decided to promote all of Team Seven for their efforts during the invasion as well as Shikamaru, for his performance in his match.

Then came the reassignment of duties and teams to compensate for the positions left empty from those who died. It had taken Tsunade an entire week to get through all of the paperwork that had accumulated.

By the end of that week, Tsunade desperately wished that she was drunk and was starting to regret becoming the Hokage.

By the end of the month, the rebuilding process finished and everything went back to normal. Or as normal as things could ever be.

Shizune became the new head of the hospital, revamping the entire system to be able to accommodate for a large scale invasion in the future. For once, there was a semblance of order, much to many of the lower level ranking medic's relief.

Jiraiya decided that it was time to head back onto the road to continue his research. Before he left, he sought out Kakashi, asking for permission to take Naruto with him. Kakashi waved him off, stating that Naruto wasn't under his care anymore as he had been promoted to chunin. When Jiraiya asked Naruto to accompany him on his journey, Naruto readily agreed.

The remaining members of Team Seven sent him off, waving at his backside as the blob of orange and red became smaller and smaller until the two figures disappeared from their line of sight.

Both Sakura and Sasuke were free to do as they pleased now that they were chunins, but both members were adamant in sticking together. When Kakashi was free, he would still act as team leader for both of them, taking them out for C and B ranked missions while training them along the way.

As Kakashi was busy most of the time, Sasuke was left to his own devices. For the most part, he would train using the instructions that Kakashi left behind or he would seek out Izumi when she was in the village. In the three years that Naruto was gone, Sasuke mastered the use of his Sharingan, lightning nature chakra, and kenjutsu.

If Kakashi was busy, then Rin was equally as busy as both of them were roped into being Tsunade's right hand man for all sorts of missions. From time to time, they would be roped back into doing Anbu missions as well, due to the shortage of Anbu since many had died in the invasion.

That left Rin with little time to train Sakura, so Sakura sought out Shizune to perfect her medical ninjutsu and chakra scalpels. The older medic had been surprised to hear that Sakura already had a thorough understanding of poisons just from training with Rin for a month. Upon hearing the raving compliments from Shizune about the girl's capabilities, Tsunade had taken Sakura under her wing to help her perfect her monstrous strength, which Sakura had begun to learn under Rin.

On the days that Rin was in the village, she aided Sakura with her sensory skills and recommended her to seek out Kurenai for help with genjutsu. Sakura did.

By the time Naruto returned three years later, with a perfected Rasengan and more wind jutsus in his arsenal, Team Seven was stronger than ever.

And ready to take on any obstacle in their way.

A/N: Hi!

Early update because short chapter so there will be an actual chapter on Friday. Sort of a transition to Shippuden era and from next chapter out, we will rapidly be moving towards the ending (finally, right?!) haha.

So I've gotten some comments about Naruto being almost the same personality as canon and that he should be different and I agree, to an extent. Since he does have people to care for him this time around, he's less of a troublemaker and doesn't seek attention as much as he does in canon. However, that doesn't mean he still can't have the same optimistic/ambitious dream outlook. Anyways, I am basing this off of memory and I don't recall any particular instance where it seems like he's attention seeking? If there is, please feel free to point them out to me. :)

Either way, if I were to edit this story, there's a lot of things I would change, including Team Seven's role in the story. I guess a fair warning is in order: the upcoming chapters will not feature much of Team Seven at all as they are not the heros/mains of the story.

Oops, I promised that I wasn't going to ramble on this author note since I tend to write a lot (thanks to the few people who do read them!) Might seem annoying to you, but I like the feeling of being able to have a convo with the readers so it's not just strictly posting for the sake of the story. I dunno, that's just me lol.

Thanks for reading and see you Friday!

-MM