Harmonia

by Raye Johnsen

'Naruto' is copyright Kishimoto Masahusi and all associated parties, NOT ME.

Part One

The Hokage of Konoha Village was, on this particular morning, going through the requests for the services of the Konoha ninja corps. Sometimes she did it alone, sometimes with her medical apprentices and sometimes with one or more members of the ANBU corps. Right now, her chief apprentice/secretary/personal assistant, who had been with her for years, was her current audience. She had cheerfully dispatched a group of chuunin off to apprehend a murderer, and sent a training team of genin on a simple information-gathering trip, when she picked up a delicately calligraphed envelope. She read it, and then said, "Hey, Shizune, listen to this:

"To the Hokage of Konoha Village: Greetings, Lady Tsunade.
"I am the idol singer known as 'Cherry', and I wish to hire a team of genin for a bodyguarding mission. This mission will last no longer than two months, and require the team to travel around Fire Country. They will be required to provide physical protection to my entourage while we are travelling on my concert tour, and examine our accomodations and destinations on our journey for traps and dangerous fixtures.
"I would not rate this mission above a 'C' in difficulty. I feel confident in making this assessment, as I was a genin of Konoha under my true name of Haruno Sakura, before an injury in the line of duty forced my retirement. For this reason the mission will not include the defence of my person.
"The reason I am making this request is that I have been receiving anonymous letters threatening me. Although I can protect myself, I cannot protect the support personnel that I require to perform on tour.
"I do not believe that I am being targeted by shinobi from another country, but instead a lone civilian, and so a team of genin should be more than adequate to deal with the problem.
"I look forward to your prompt reply, etcetera, etcetera."

Tsunade tossed the square of parchment towards her desk.

"So, what do you think?"

Shizune looked at the neatly written letter. "I remember Miss Haruno," she said quietly. "Quite a brilliant young ninja. A shame about her leg, really. I'd trust her judgement about this. However..."

"However...?" Tsunade prompted.

"She was Uchiha Sasuke and Uzumaki Naruto's teammate, and she was injured defending them. They might take the issue of her safety... rather personally."

"So I'm likely to find two jounin in my office demanding to go, if they find out. Which means that they don't know. Which means that Miss Haruno didn't tell them." Tsunade commented, a dark grin beginning to creep across her features. "We'll give this one to young Hinata's team."

Shizune blinked. "Hyuuga Hinata's team? But that guarantees Mr. Uzumaki will find out!"

"Indeed it will," Tsunade replied. "Why should I get my ear chewed off when I can feed Miss Haruno's to them?"

"Sometimes, Master Tsunade, you are quite evil."

"It comes with being Hokage."

Sasuke leaned against the wooden post of the bridge that he'd agreed to meet Naruto at. He was early (as usual) but he did not mind waiting. Years of being Naruto's teammate had worn irritation at his quirks into familiar exasperation.

"Saaasuke-kuuun!" sailed across the air, and Sasuke stiffened in sudden shock. But the voice was alto, not a contralto, and the figure jogging towards him was brunette, with her hair tied up in buns.

"Sasuke-kun! I wasn't expecting to see you here!" TenTen said cheerfully as she drew close to him. "How have you been? Heard from Miss Sakura recently?"

"Fine," Sasuke said, dropping into the taciturn demeanour of his teenage years. "She sent a letter a few weeks ago. She's going on tour soon, and she says she's managed to get Konoha on the itinery this time."

TenTen grinned and began to do some stretches. "Oh, Lee will be beside himself when he hears that! Not to mention the rest of the Cherry fanclub. Who would've thought ten years ago Miss Sakura would become Fire Country's biggest idol?"

Sasuke glanced away. "Hn."

"Anyway, I've got to go. Neiji-kun and I are going out to dinner, and I've got to go get ready," she said cheerfully, and jogged off. Tossing over her shoulder as a parting comment, she added, "It'll be good to see Miss Sakura again, neh? Byeee!"

Sasuke sank back against the post. Sakura's absence was a subject that he never liked to be reminded of but constantly hovered in the back of his mind, like a missing tooth. None of Konoha's vistas were complete because none of them included a pink-haired figure with the rest of the village's population.

"Hey, Sasuke!" a loud tenor shrieked from the end of the bridge.

Sasuke grinned. "Naruto."

"Ready for dinner? I hope Hinata-chan's making ramen...."

Sasuke blinked with amusement as Naruto began his soothing prattle, praising his oath-wife's cooking skills.

Hinata and Naruto weren't legally married yet (emphasis on the 'yet') because of a law that had been largely unknown until recent times. It declared that fully-trained shinobi were not permitted to marry until their thirtieth birthdays.

Which had not impacted on the village much until the current group of young ninja had reached their twenties, and started pairing off. Wishing to marry (as a high proportion were orphans and/or had lost at least one parent in early childhood, and they wanted to build the families they missed), they had discovered that they were legally unable to.

Some had chosen to remain as residents of their parents' homes and wait. Some had chosen to move out and set up their own homes, where they could act as they chose, but without contravening the law. And some, like Naruto and Hinata, said, "Stuff it", exchanged rings and promises, and made it clear that they were husband and wife in all but law. The village treated such couples as married; Tsunade made officialdom ignore them; and informed observers confidently expected Hyuuga Hiyashi to start talking to his eldest daughter again any decade now. Sasuke sometimes wondered how Hinata had managed to overcome her natural retience to live so. Then he would be dragged off to dinner or karaoke or something with Naruto, and he remembered why.

They entered the foyer of Naruto's home, and Naruto called out, "I'm home!"

"Sorry for the intrusion," Sasuke added.

"Welcome back!" Hinata's voice called out from the spare room. "I'm just -- UGH!"

"HINATA-CHAN!" Naruto yelled, kicking off his shoes and running into the house.

Sasuke followed at a more leisurely pace, and saw Hinata and Naruto carefully setting down a box full of Naruto's camping gear. She looked up and spotted him.

"Oh, Sasuke-kun!" she said cheerfully. "I'm sorry about dinner -- it'll be ramen tonight, I'm afraid. Lady Tsunade is sending my team out on a mission tomorrow morning, so I have to prepare."

Both men blinked. "What are you doing?" Naruto asked.

"Well, Lady Tsunade received a letter from Miss Sakura. Apparently she's being stalked and she's a bit worried about her tour, so she asked for a bodyguard --"

"She's being stalked?" Sasuke cut in.

"Yes, that's what her request letter said --"

"I'm sorry Hinata, Naruto," Sasuke interrupted again. "I'm afraid I can't stay to dinner."

"Wait up," said Naruto quickly. "I'm coming too!"

Hinata blinked. "Excuse me? Where are --?"

"We're going to go see Grandma," Naruto told her.

"You know you shouldn't call Lady Tsunade that...." Hinata sighed to the swinging door where her husband and his best friend used to be.

"You didn't know?" Tsunade said innocently.

"No, we didn't," Sasuke replied through gritted teeth.

"So tell us, Grandma," Naruto added. "What's going on?"

"Don't call me that, and it's fairly straightforward," the Hokage said. "Miss Haruno has received threats that she believes might affect the support personnel that she's taking with her around Fire Country, so she's asked for a team to bodyguard them. It's a reasonable request, and she says that the nature of the threats lead her to believe it's one person, that they're a civilian and that they'll try to set up a trap rather than generate a group for an ambush. It's a standard C-class mission."

"Okay, that explains why Miss Hinata's genin team, they specialise in spying, stealth and dirty tricks," Sasuke said. "But what about Sakura?"

"Miss Haruno was a genin," Tsunade said. "She may not be capable of major taijutsu, but I seriously doubt she's forgotten how to throw kunai. She says that she feels confident she can protect herself, and who am I to disagree?"

"But she was a genin," Naruto pointed out. "That makes her a security risk."

"An extremely minor one," Tsunade replied. "She's not leaked any information, ever, in the ten years since her injury and retirement. The only people who even know that she was born in Konoha rather than the capital outside the village are her family."

"But she could be forced to," Sasuke said. "This stalker could be a cover for something bigger. That makes it a B-class mission."

Tsunade frowned. "You know jounin don't do B-class missions."

"We'll slum it, Grandma."

"Don't. Call. Me. That."

"Sure thing, Grandma."

"Brat."

"Old lady."

"You're trying to get me riled up, tadpole."

"Is it working, Old Slug Lady?"

"Get out of my sight! Both of you!"

Sasuke grinned. "We'll give your regards to Sakura."

"Do that, bastards!"

"That didn't take long," Sasuke commented.

"Eh," Naruto agreed. "I wonder why Sakura-chan didn't tell us."

Sasuke shrugged. Naruto frowned. It was Sasuke's 'I have some suspicions but I'm not going to tell you' shrug. After over eleven years of working with the other man, Naruto had learnt to read him fairly well, and right now, Sasuke was radiating a fair bit of anger, determination, petulance and protectiveness. A mixture that Naruto had to admit he was feeling more than a bit of himself.

"Anyway, I'm off home," Sasuke broke the silent moment. "Packing to do. Meet you at Miss Hinata's team's meeting spot at dawn?"

"Sure," Naruto agreed, heading towards his own small house. "I'm home!" he called, as he opened the door.

"Welcome back," Hinata's voice floated in from their bedroom.

"Can you pull out my bags too, Hinata-chan?" he asked, walking into the room. "I'm coming too."

She looked up, her pearl-white eyes wide with surprise.

"I... eh heh heh... I kinda said...."

Hinata sighed. "She's kicked you out of the village again, hasn't she?"

"No! Well, kinda," he admitted. "But I told her I'd be going with you, not to the Pervert Master."

"You shouldn't talk about Master Jiraya that way," Hinata said flatly. "You know he's a really good teacher."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd heard what he says about you," Naruto muttered under his breath.

"What was that, Naruto-kun?"

"Anyway, you know I can't let you go off for two months on your own," he said, pulling out his sleeping bag and inadvertently raking his chestnuts out of the frying pan and into the flames.

"What did you just say?" Hinata demanded, her tone saying quite clearly, 'I heard but I'm going to give you a chance to rephrase before I kick you out of the house'.

"I... you know I get lonely without you! I don't want to be alone for that long!"

Hinata's face softened and Naruto let out a sigh of relief.

"Don't get in the way of my team and I, though," Hinata added. "I have a job to do and children to teach, and I really need you to stay out of it."

"Okay," Naruto said, cheerfulness restored. "But you will call on me when you need me, right? I mean, there's nobody in Konoha that can match me for shadow clones and chakra!"

"So let me love you / That's all I want...."

Haruno Sakura, better known throughout Fire Country as 'Cherry', let her head fall forward, whilst the backup band brought the song to a close. It fitted the melancholy tone of the song to have the singer look mournful as she sang, and she played it to the hilt.

It wasn't feigned, either. She'd written the song about the time some ten years beforehand, about her feelings for a boy she'd thought she loved (and maybe she had, as much as she'd been capable of loving anyone at fourteen), and what she thought must have been the feelings of the two boys who'd had crushes on her.

Back then, she'd had her life planned out. A quiet, steady progression through genin to chuunin to jounin, then a successful career as a kunoichi, interrupted by marriage to her crush, brought to an honourable close by the birth of their children. This plan had come to a screaming halt the day she'd chosen to put herself between an enemy far too strong for her and her injured teammates, paying for it with a shattered leg and destroyed ankle and knee. Her injuries had healed well enough for her to walk again (albeit with a pronounced limp) but she would never be able to make kunoichi. She had been informed that it was considered an honourable retirement -- but when all her friends were ninja-in-training, and she wasn't, anymore....

Her mother had been terribly worried by the depression she'd sunk into, and had sent her off to stay with her aunt in Fire Country's capital city, thinking that the change in lifestyle would help. It had, mainly because once there she'd been discovered by her recording company's talent scout. The totally unexpected new opportunity had generated other dreams, and the fact that it required effort had successfully distracted her. If there was one thing Sakura had never been scared of, it was hard work, and she worked at being a good musician as hard as she had at being a kunoichi. Which was why she had hit the top of the charts and stayed there.

In a bittersweet decision, she'd kept contact with her friends in Konoha -- Ino and Hinata wrote gossipy letters full of news, a bouncy missive arrived from Naruto every two weeks or so, and every month Sasuke sent her a full report of his doings (as he wrote, "I don't know how to write letters, only how to tell you what's been happening"). But it had become very, very clear to her that they were now moving in different worlds.

She hadn't yet heard a reply from the Hokage to her request for guards, and she refused to confirm her latest tour until she did. The latest threats had been worrying. Not the ones to her person; she still practiced daily with her kunai, genjutsu and ninjutsu, so she was quite sure she could handle anyone who tried to attack her. But some of the things hinted at in the last few could impact on others, and she would not put civilians in danger.

Sakura waited for the lights to go down. This particular concert had been performed standing, and her leg had passed 'ache' some time back and was now in that special realm of 'numb' where the moment she did anything silly, like walking, she'd feel as though she were being stabbed over and over up and down the length of the limb. Normally, when she wasn't playing her keyboard with its specially-designed seat, she was draped artistically across some plaster rocks or furniture, with a heating pad strategically placed under her right leg. This time, however, the venue hadn't been able to take her equipment, and she'd had to perform without the support. Her gown hid the ankle and knee support bandages she was wearing, but strapping a gel heat pad to her leg would disrupt the line of the costume.

It was well-known to the media and her fans that Cherry had been in an accident as a child that had injured her leg so she couldn't dance the way other idols could. Only her friends in Konoha and her roadies knew the full extent of her injuries, and Sakura wanted to keep it that way.

Finally the lights went down, and after taking her bows, she stumbled along the corridor to her dressing room. Flopping down into the easy chair that had been set close to the heater, at just the right angle to let her aching leg absorb the warmth while not scorching her face, she set her hand down to find a bottle of chilled water right there.

She stiffened and said softly, "Who is it?"

"Who do you think, Sakura?"

Swinging around in the armchair, she blinked to see her old teammate (and, ironically, the crush she'd been singing about) leaning against the wall beside the door. "Sasuke-kun! This is a surprise," she replied. "Did you like the concert?"

"Why didn't you tell us?" he demanded.

/Uh-oh,/ Sakura thought, and decided not to play dumb. "I can take care of myself," she replied. "Why are you here? It's a C-class mission and you're jounin now."

"Really. I was able to walk in here, totally rearrange your room, and watch you for a full minute before you spotted me, and you can take care of yourself."

"Thank you for switching on the heater," Sakura said calmly. "For the rest -- I'm a highly paid entertainer, someone normally comes in and cleans up my dressing room for me. Your alterations weren't screamingly obvious, so I dismissed them as the maid's work. And you're jounin now -- when you hide your chakra, I can't spot it unless I'm actively looking for it. Plus, I trust you. This wouldn't happen if you were my stalker."

Sasuke snorted, and then the door opened.

"Sakura-chan!" Naruto yelled, bouncing into the room, followed by Hinata, who said, "Hello, Miss Sakura."

"Hello to both of you!" Sakura replied. "What brings you both here?"

"I'm in charge of the genin team that has been assigned to your contract, Miss Sakura," Hinata replied. "Naruto-kun and Sasuke-kun, however, are here because they had a fight with Lady Tsunade when she wouldn't assign them to get rid of your stalker."

Sakura gave the two young men a slit-eyed look as Naruto added, "So we're here to do it anyway!"

"Why am I not surprised," Sakura murmured.

"Her security is woeful," Sasuke told Naruto firmly, ignoring the two women. "I came back here during the concert and I wasn't accosted once."

"And how stealthy were you attempting to be?" Sakura demanded.

Sasuke gave her an injured look. "A reasonable level of stealth," he said reproachfully. "No jutsu."

"We were trained to melt into the shadows without jutsu," Sakura commented. "It doesn't count."

"Ne, ne, aren't you happy to see us, Sakura-chan?" Naruto asked, giving her his best puppy-eyes.

She sighed. "Yes, of course I'm happy to see all of you," Sakura replied, including Hinata in the smile she gave. "It's just, I don't need a babysitter!"

"I never said you did," Sasuke said in an aggrieved tone. "I'm just saying, you need more security than you have. But we're here now, so you don't have to worry anymore. We'll take care of you."

"Miss Hinata," Sakura said quietly, in tones simmering with anger, "tell your husband and his best friend that I am perfectly capable of protecting myself."

Pearl-white eyes met jade-green, and while Sakura could read wry sympathy in the other woman's expression, she also saw an unyielding strength. "I'm sorry, Miss Sakura, but you know Naruto-kun and Sasuke-kun as well as I do. They'll do it with or without our permission. At least if you say yes you won't be tripping over them in the middle of the night."

Sakura shut her eyes and sighed. "All right," she conceded grumpily. "Fine. We're all going on tour."

Author's Notes:
1. The 'no marriage before thirty' law is not canonical, but rather my way of accounting for the fact that there are no young married couples floating around Konoha.
2. I have done my best to translate the Japanese honourifics appropriately, but there is no really good way to translate either '-chan' (because the English equivalent(s) are either too intimate or too condescending to cover all the usages) or '-kun' (because it can mean either a person of equal rank, or an extremely high-ranked person, higher than '-sama'). Thus I have left them alone.
3. I know Hinata is a lot bolder here than she is in the canon series. This story is set ten years after the manga, though, and I think Hinata will gain confidence as she gets older and grows up, especially as she now has Naruto on her side. I've tried to show that she's still very polite and diffident with people she sees as equals and superiors, but that she's confident in her ability to do things she knows how to do -- such as teaching a genin team.