Naruto sighed as he readjusted the rainproof tarp which his sleeping bag rested on half of, with the rest folded over it to form a makeshift shelter. The rainstorm raging above the desert sands halfway between the Fire Country border and Suna had seemingly popped up out of nowhere, but since it was Winter, something like that was to be expected. He would've been resting in the nearby tent, but...

He'd heard rumors about these kinds of teams, but seeing one firsthand was kind of disturbing. It wasn't nearly as disturbing as it could've been though. His temporary teammates for the Chunin Exams were consenting adults who were above even the civilian age of consent, so there wasn't really a problem there. Due to the fact that he'd been a student of one of the Legendary Sannin and experienced the often too swift nature of wartime promotions where survivors tended to be bumped up in rank until they found a mission that killed them, the sensei was nearly the same age as his students and was pretty much only sensei in name alone at this point. So, it wasn't like his teammates were the victims of some pervert twice their age who'd been taking advantage of them for years.

All in all, nowhere near as disturbing as it could've been, and knowing what shinobi life was like, he could see how it had come about even if he didn't approve. Battle tended to either bring people together or tear them apart. Many marriages had been made on the battlefield, and a large number of those marriages had fallen apart off the battlefield when the fight for one's life and one's comrades' lives was over and the realities of daily life such as who'd go and get the groceries, and exactly who would be cooking dinner amongst other things set in. Some marriages that had their roots in war or missions gone either horribly right or horribly wrong hadn't fallen apart shortly after everyone got home and was stuck living together however.

Considering the ages of his temporary teammates and their sensei, it was entirely possible that this team was one of the couples/groups that had fallen for each-other during the war and stayed together since, though what they had couldn't strictly be called a marriage in the legal sense. If it wasn't for that whole all-guy thing that was giving him the creeps due to his own preferences which were firmly hetrosexual, he'd almost think it was cute how they'd tried to stay together since the war. Sabotaging their chances for promotion when they took the Chunin Exams so they could stay together with their "sensei" who'd risen through the ranks about as swiftly as Kakashi who was about a year older than him rather than be separated by differing missions wasn't cute at all in his opinion however. For one, odds were that they'd sabotage things this time around as well, and it would put his chances for promotion, which he was actually serious about, at risk.

Grumbling over the fact that he'd gotten assigned to someone's group marriage rather than a proper ninja team, Naruto drew something in the damp sand in front of him more for something to do because he wasn't exactly feeling tired.

Mitokado Homura knew that he should've left hours ago, but there was always another excuse that kept him from leaving, and now the hour had grown very, very late. Though they were at an age when it would mostly be ignored or thought of as cute, there were those who wouldn't overlook his being here most if not all of the night. With him holding as high a position in the village as he did, the rumors that would result from this could be ruinous for both of them.

"I-I really should be going." he said as Hitomi offered him another cup of tea.

"Nonsense!" Hitomi replied, her eyes flashing dangerously as she pulled one of the senbon she used to hold her silver bun in place from said bun. "If you think I'm going to let you go out there in that freezing rain and catch your death of cold for the sake of our reputations, then you're an idiot."

"Besides," she added in a softer tone. "It's going to start snowing soon."

He blinked at her in surprise, wondering what had made her say that. Fire Country was mostly centered in the sort of climate where it usually rained late-Autumn to early-Spring and then dried out in preparation for a long, hot Summer. Konoha was smack dab in the middle of this region. Snow was a rarity that Konoha usually saw maybe once or twice in deep Winter if at all.

Hitomi laughed and said "Don't tell me you've become so dependent on those newscasters who use those newfangled devices that are wrong half the time to tell you what weather's supposed to be that you've forgotten our old lessons!"

Remembering the lessons that Hitomi had been talking about Homura closed his eyes and put everything but his immediate environment out of his mind. He breathed out, and then he breathed in. Despite the fact that he was in a warm house that smelled of many things including tea, furniture polish, and Hitomi, he could faintly sense that edge to the air that was seeping into the house from every opening it could find which he'd long-ago learned meant that snow was on the way.

As he listened, he could hear the sound of raindrops growing fainter and fainter as things froze until eventually...

The flakes started off small, but steadily grew until they were larger than his thumbnail. There was just enough ambient light coming from the house and the nearby street lights outside that he could make out just about each and every snowflake as they drifted towards the earth which was slowly but steadily turning white.

"Shall we?" Hitomi asked as she picked up the teapot and their mugs and started to carry them towards the back porch.

Smiling, he got up and followed her.

While Naruto had been getting rained on, and Homura and Hitomi were watching the snow, Shimura Danzo had been taking his late-night sleep break so he would be able to function the next day. Should he find room in his schedule, he would take another similar break during the slowest part of the day and be up and ready for the busiest part of the night. Considering the nature of both sides of his work, he was usually careful enough to schedule his sleep around the least busy parts of the day.

This didn't always work out to his satisfaction however. There were any number of times which he missed one or more sleep breaks due to the fact that the Hokage who himself was bored would often assign him to menial tasks or degrading missions because he "obviously looked bored and needed something to do". That, and there were sometimes unforeseen events which needed to be responded to immediately that would catch him out of the blue.

Tonight was one of those nights.

He'd managed to get no more than three hours sleep before one of his agents who he'd put on assignment came in and personally reported yet another problem with the target he was tracking.

Great, he thought sourly. I haven't even gotten the team yet and they're already causing me trouble.

Hauling himself out of bed, he dressed and headed towards the ROOT infirmary where one of the members of his future Genin team had been brought.

While Hiruzen had been scrambling to find enough Jounin to cover the potential teams from the remedial class that would be graduating in January, he'd thrown his own name into the pool. It hadn't immediately been rejected, though he had gotten a look and a comment that his new students would not be ROOT. He accepted the Hokage's terms, and Hiruzen had placed his name down on the list alongside those of a couple of other "retired" shinobi who'd stopped taking missions in order to give the younger lot a chance, but had never actually filed the paperwork that made things official.

After collecting and going over the profiles of the students who had been returned to the Academy for a second and last chance at being on an active ninja team, he had selected the three students that he would be openly teaching. Not being as foolish as the number of young Jounin who put their names in in the hopes of either getting students from one of the major clans and the prestige that came with training them, or getting the best and training them to be the next Sannin, he took care not to select any that stood out too much, or came from families who would kick up too much of a fuss if he found it necessary to break his students down before he built them back up. After selecting his team and a couple of potential alternates should unforeseen complications arise, and flat out informing Hiruzen that these three would be his students, he had set a watch on each of them.

The watch on the boy named Hibachi who'd fallen into a downward spiral since his father's demise had come to inform him that he'd been forced to bring the boy in for treatment for Hypothermia due to the fact that the brat had rather stupidly sat by his father's grave through a bout of freezing rain which had turned to snow until he'd collapsed.

When he arrived in the medbay, a rather weak Hibachi who had a heated blanket wrapped around him lay there giving him a sullen glare.

"The next time you try to dishonor your father's memory by not showing the sense that even a chicken is born with, I will leave you outside to freeze to death." he said, deciding to let the boy know what was what from the get go, since he didn't have the time or the patience to deal with the boy's self-pity.

The boy gave a barely audible grumble which was either an expression of ingratitude or a typically adolescent "What do you know about my suffering?" type remark.

Though he was sorely tempted to give the boy what for, everything he'd read about the boy and everything the observers had seen had indicated that this would be the wrong response. He decided to tell one of his more "inspiring" stories instead. This approach had worked well with "Shin", though the boy was far more emotional than he would like.

"When Konoha first started, people had been stunned when the Senju and the Uchiha had joined together to found a village." he said. "When they allowed other clans to join them and didn't try to force the newcomers to become a subservient underclass, people began to believe the Senju and the Uchiha had gone soft. Believing that Konoha was vulnerable and that they had a chance, the first band of raiders tried their luck when I was three. My grandfather was killed in the ensuing fight."

This statement seemed to catch the boy's attention, and then lose it, as he probably sounded just like one of those older people who told someone who recently lost someone about their loss in order to prove that things "Will get better".

"Ten years later, another band of raiders decided to test the village's defenses, and it was my father's turn to die." he said. "Several years after that, the Nidaime himself gave his life so my and the Sandaime's teams might live to fight another day."

That last apparently rather startled the boy who it would seem did not know the exact circumstances surrounding Senju Tobirama's death. Everyone knew he'd made a noble sacrifice and had made his enemy pay for killing him in blood, but that was about all the general populace knew about what had happened.

"On that day, I vowed that Konoha would never be as vulnerable as it had at that point in the First War and every point prior to it. I vowed that nobody would ever be as strong as us, and that if anyone tried to take any of our territory, they would have to pay for every inch of that land in their own blood." he said, finishing his tale which was true but left one or two details out.

Based on the look in the Hibachi boy's eyes, he may have gotten to him.

For now.

Whether or not what he'd told him would stick remained to be seen.

Either way, the boy would not be seen in the ROOT infirmary for hypothermia a second time.