Really, Sakura should have seen the trouble coming. She'd been far too caught up, in truth, with hours and hours of theories and data and formulae to be prepared for everything—there was a reason she'd turned to Aiko—but it had been she, not Aiko, who had been a diplomat before. And it was her mission regardless.
So really, she was the one who should have seen the obstacle before it was staring them in the face.
They'd be traveling on a single wagon instead of the train used for envoys to the Capital. Part of it was the difference in respect, part of it was the lack of resources.
Either way, one wagon.
Both Mitokado—the 'guard'—would be pacing alongside the wagon for the duration; no problem there. As the dignitaries, Aiko and Sakura would be inside: because it was a diplomatic mission, the shinobi acting as such couldn't pull the wagons themselves.
So that left the two genin to lead the horses.
And, given how they'd already be upsetting Mushroom norms by having women in prominent roles, there was no way they could go even further to have Aiko's female relative be the one taking the reins: in polite society, anything equestrian was, by nature, male-only work.
Thus, the problem. (Though, to be fair, it would have existed even if it had been Utatane Hisa who'd had to take the reins.)
Rento had only seen horses from a distance before, and now he stood, gaping, as Sakura patiently explained what had to be done to lead them.
"They're well trained, really, so it won't be much effort, and I've checked: all the bridges on our way are in good condition—"
"Can't you do it?! It's not like they'll see until we're out of Fire!"
"You need the practice."
"We could bring a driver then!"
"There aren't any to spare." That was true enough; with the increased fighting and cycling of shinobi between Konoha and the frontline, their carts of injured were already regularly full, and winter would make that worse, not better—and that didn't even account for the food stores that needed to be moved. They'd only gotten the wagon itself because the Hokage had personally ensured it, and even then, it hadn't been ready until dawn that day—the genin who worked at the stables needed time to clean the blood out.
"But—I—"
"Look, Rento, you're doing it. I'll help you while we're in Fire, but we're making a bad enough impression with Aiko' and my female-ness already—no need to add to it."
Rento, at last, gave in; as a ten-year-old genin there was little else he could do.
(That was another thing, actually; Rento was only ten—Hisa would be eleven in three months, which barely made her any older. At least she'd graduated the past winter, though, had nearly a full year of a genin's training already done. Rento had only graduated that summer, which left very little time for him to be taught much of anything. While that was true for all genin, given the pace the General was having them move up ranks, it did leave Sakura feeling somewhat wary over her for once far younger charges.)
The Mitokado cousins jumped, one after the other, onto the ground from the back of the wagon. "Everything's packed." The one closest to her said.
"Great, thank you." They nodded. "Time to go, then."
Rento swallowed.
Hisa, who had been talking with her own relative on the other side of the horses, jolted as the animals shook themselves in response to Sakura's increased volume.
Two children.
Sakura didn't know how any jounin-sensei dealt with three.
.
It took only a couple hours for Rento to get the hang of horse handling—they were well trained, and the route was free and clear—so Sakura 'meditated' instead, going over her own memories and Arden's and her theories once more.
It was a bit hard to concentrate, though.
Rento was one thing. He was family, he was kin; he knew enough about her to know to keep quiet and just keep doing as he was told unless something unexpected came up. The Mitokado were similarly easy to ignore; they paced the wagon, acting as guard and not in any way reacting unless there was something to react to.
Aiko and Hisa… they were a bit more difficult.
Aiko had never really learned the benefit of silence, so as she worked her way through Sakura's notes—she would, after all, be expected to understand at least some of what they were sent to teach—she kept a running commentary under her breath, making everyone in the vicinity constantly aware of just what she was thinking of at any given moment.
Hisa—and perhaps it was an Utatane thing, always wanting to share their current thoughts and emotions—was slightly better, in that she wasn't saying anything out loud, but she was also slightly worse, in that she was more physically confused; as she tried to parse through both Sakura's notes and Aiko's comments she would jerk, shuffle, bounce her knee, whimper in confusion, try to pace…
The worst part was sensing.
Sakura had to sense.
There wasn't really any getting around it; it was too valuable a skill not to use.
She didn't have to have it constantly on, at least, sent a pulse out every ten minutes to both check and act as an internal clock.
Most times, nothing came back.
Other times the samurai—usually at regular intervals, occasionally unexpectedly as one of their intentionally more random patrols made their way down the road—would tickle at the edge of her senses, patrolling as they were with rather large and trained groups of chakra and ensuring that groups as small as Sakura's could feel safe even if they neared the border.
The worst, though, was her own people.
Rento twitched, reacting as Sakura jerked beside him.
"Everything okay?" He whispered.
Sakura hummed, forcing her jaw to open, then answered. "Shinobi group—three genin and jounin—to our right. Non-aggressive."
She couldn't sense it, but she knew Rento's head had turned, looking out into the thick woods that made up most of Fire Nation.
"How far?"
"Closer than you think." Even as she said that, though, it ceased to be the case—the jounin was taking his team in the opposite direction of the wagon, following the curve of the road but staying out of sight as his students valiantly tried to work past their exhaustion and keep jumping from tree to tree.
Sakura's training kept her from going on high alert—their movement wasn't dangerous, and the jounin's especially implied that they were training, not in the midst of a mission or even coming back from one injured—but,
It was still a group.
A group that the Mitokado didn't sense.
And that was why they had sensors, after all, why the skill was so coveted, but she could still feel the stress of the job beginning to build in her muscles.
She forced herself to relax. "Going back under." She muttered the comment, more to completely reassure Rento of the lack of threat than anything else, and then dove back into what Arden knew of historical economics during war—an especially relevant thread she'd found only a day before, well after meeting with her superiors to go over exactly what her job in the Land of Mushrooms would be.
By the time they arrived at the Land of Mushrooms, they'd fallen into a comfortable space with each other. The Mitokado cousins, for all that they followed their clan's emphasis on stolidness wholeheartedly, were also consummate experts on how to guard wagons and how to cope with Mushrooms' terrain—they'd been following this route, and ones like it, since the start of the war.
(They'd been genin teammates, Sakura learned some days in. Their third teammate—a Shimura—had sacrificed himself for the good of the village. Any more details were too private for them to offer up, and no one was about to ask.)
Hisa and Rento, both feeling well over their heads and studying together to allow the more senior shinobi to keep on forging ahead, found themselves suddenly, terribly overcome with one of the worst aspects of puberty: crushes.
As long as they both kept doing their jobs—and they were far too well trained to do anything stupid—neither Sakura nor Aiko saw any reason to help them out of that particular quagmire.
Aiko…
Aiko thought Sakura was certifiably insane.
She hadn't found out about Arden, or anything, but apparently the sheer number of concepts, theories, mutually exclusive hypotheses, drawn out equations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera was obviously a sign of madness.
Sakura chose not to mention that (despite Arden providing more than a bit of a boost) her journal was, at best, half as bad as the worst of the Researchers'. She doubted Aiko would believe her.
Arriving in the Land of Mushrooms changed their status quo somewhat.
It was…
In the Land of Fire, a combination of the natural effects of the dense temperate forest and tradition meant that most small villages—the kind of villages where just about the only job was farming—were kept close to but not quite visible from the main road, with small secondary roads jutting out to actually lead you to the body of the houses.
In the Land of Mushrooms, they were dealing with different pressures. Namely, their environment severely limited the arable land.
Just about all houses, it seemed like, would probably be able to be seen from one of the three main roads that crossed through the country, intersecting as they did in the Capital.
Sakura, when she'd gone to war, hadn't seen much of the roads at all—wrong angle, wrong direction, so instead, they'd slogged through the thick undergrowth and water.
When she'd come home, she'd been inside the wagon, for the most part, and expressly forbidden from sensing.
Now the reality of the war on the smaller nation was blatantly obvious.
The people—those that were visible—came in two forms. The first eyed them wearily, keeping well away from the packed earth, and looked gaunt and tired and justifiably terrified of every kind of soldier which saw their land as a battleground. The second clustered close to the road, marketing their wares using every technique imaginable even when they didn't have anything to sell, doing their best to earn what they could from the constant traffic.
Signs of battle—from when Iwa broke through their lines, from rebels within Mushroom who had grown tired of foreigners in their land, from Mushrooms' own samurai, trying desperately to keep the peace—were not exactly constant, but they were there. Some were years old, others mere months.
The worst was a town, a whole village of two or so dozen houses, empty.
Razed.
Not a single soul lived there anymore, Sakura could tell, and it had been some time since they had.
Now, in addition to the Fire Samurai and Shinobi, a new patrol was introduced: The Samurai of Mushrooms.
Sakura had known of them, the Mitokado cousins had worked side by side with them, Aiko had at least heard through the grapevine—but the genin knew no such luxury.
Rento yelped, nearly leaping out of his seat and dropping the reins as a massive black beast appeared from around a bend in the road several dozen meters ahead.
Sakura opened her eyes. "Careful."
"I—I—what is that?"
"Summons. Maybe. They kind of use them interchangeably with the actual beasts."
"Use what?!"
Sakura eyed the approaching Samurai with interest.
The beasts they rode on really were larger than could ever be easily described, larger than any cow, dark black, and with horns easily twice the length of the skull—each.
Water buffalo, or at least those used by the Land of Mushrooms' military, were something to behold.
"Water buffalo."
"They're really really really big." Rento said. Hisa and Aiko appeared behind them, staring out themselves as a second samurai riding his own buffalo appeared behind the first.
"Was not expecting their size, I'll be honest." Aiko said.
"Is it a genjutsu?"
"No, they're just… big."
The first of what was now clearly a line of three Samurai gestured, and Sakura signaled for Rento to bring the wagon to a stop.
He didn't notice.
"Rento!"
"What? Oh, right."
They came to a stop.
The men on the buffalo were upon them shortly, and they eyed the wagon's path with distrust. "Headed to the Capital?"
"Yes." One of the Mitokado cousins answered. "We are expected."
"Huh. We weren't told you were coming."
The Mitokado—and the rest of the shinobi—kept quiet. It was entirely possible that they really hadn't been told, but it was also entirely possible that this was some sort of demonstration of power, like refusing to acknowledge the women or children in the wagon. Best, then, to let them continue the conversation.
As two of the buffalo blocked the path of the wagon, the other trotted around, the man on its back eying every aspect of the wagon he could see.
"Why should we believe you?"
The Mitokado remained expressionless. "What reason would you have to disbelieve us?"
The man snorted, then glanced at the two other Samurai. "Fine, fine. Follow us." He steered his buffalo around, turning to lead them down the road the wagon had already been making its way down.
Just a demonstration of power, then. Lovely.
That—that had been something that had been emphasized a lot, actually. The Land of Mushrooms hadn't been treated particularly well by Konoha throughout most of the war, and knew it. That, combined with their long distaste for shinobi, their strict gender boundaries, and their terrible current situation—
Well, Sakura wasn't about to be the most popular personality in court, and there was little she could do to change that.
.
Shin grimaced as he rolled over, once again, on the futon his sister had set up for him.
He'd arrived the day after Sakura had left.
Of course.
At least he had his biological sister, but then she'd just been promoted to run Konoha's wall guards, so she was busy, and her husband was running around doing something too, so he was busy, and his nephews (only seven years younger than him) had the Academy, were nearly graduated, and—
And everyone was busy.
Obviously.
And what few friends he had who should have been here—Sakura, Aiko—they were gone too.
(Not that he blamed them, of course, it wasn't like they knew he was coming home, and if they had, they probably would have taken him along too, but still.)
Juro was a frontline medic, Yasuo was guarding wagons, Bokuso was helping in a prison camp, Sachiko was undercover—everyone was busy.
He, on the other hand, was on a weeklong break.
He'd spent the first days visiting the various shrines and cemeteries. The war had hit hard, but so too had their first major illness since Uzu's destruction; there were many to visit, many of his own relatives, too soon gone, to pay respect to.
The cemeteries were busy, too, but it was a different kind of busy.
He'd taken his time, helped the children and elderly assigned to keep everything in order, and prayed.
After that, he'd wandered around his compound until a jounin uncle had taken pity on him and let him tag along to a meeting with several other jounin—they were watching the next batch of Academy kids that they'd be assigned in mere weeks, trying to figure out how best to get them into fighting shape.
There was a lot of drinking for what was ostensibly a work function.
Shin had had fun.
Then he'd gone and visited his clan head.
After that—and it had not been a fun visit, the man still well in the throes of grief over his daughter's passing—Shin had gone back to the shrines.
Then he'd visited the deer.
He wrote a bit, but writer's block kept him from being particularly prolific.
He volunteered for cleanup duties.
Less than twenty-four hours left, however, and he was reduced to lying in bed in the middle of the day.
At least, that is, until the alarms started to ring—Riot! Riot! Riot!
Well, Shin supposed he couldn't curse what he'd just wished for.
He jumped out of his window instead, and followed all of the other bodies towards what looked to be the marketplace.
At least this meant he'd have stories he was allowed to tell when the Mushroom mission came back—writing letters without saying anything of value had been hard enough.