Please leave a comment or PM if you have any questions, suggestions, concerns, or just compliments. For the sake of this work, the elemental balance will go earth}lightning}water}fire}wind. Thanks to SmallFountainPen for betaing chapters 57-73. Thanks to SoaringJe for betaing chapters 116-154.

Asuma grinned widely as he and his team came upon the next town; he kept his body relaxed, like Sensei told him to, and he wore the clothes Kurenai picked out—bright colors, non-threatening.

Beside him his teammates tried to give off the same air.

None of them quite succeeded, but their relatively young age helped there.

Sensei was much more of a natural.

Or much more practiced.

Either way.

Very quickly they were led into someone's house—the de-facto leader for the small village.

There Sensei began her pitch, while the three of them sat quietly and nodded along.

Later, assuming they were allowed to stay, the teens would have much more active roles—moving amongst the kids and young adults, hyping up the victory celebration that would occur on the forty-sixth anniversary of Konoha's Founding—generally trying to get as many bodies into Konoha as possible.

It wasn't—

It wasn't so much that he didn't like the job.

Ideally he'd be fighting, but as the son of the (former) Hokage, that was always going to be a battle. He would get there, become combat focused—but probably not as a genin.

It wasn't even as if he was bad at it; while Sensei thought Kurenai was doing the best job—and had made her swear, repeatedly, that she wasn't using her increasingly brilliant genjutsu skills on the populace—both he and Asahi were no slouches, and had had particularly good luck with the sons of merchants, who tended to be much more amenable to the idea of Konoha as a money-making opportunity than their warier fathers.

It was just…

He and Ibiki had gotten their most recent assignments on the same day, after Ibiki's team had been pulled back from the front explicitly for his new assignment.

They would be visiting all the various nobles of Konoha, starting with the most amenable, and doing the exact same thing Asuma was… just to a different audience.

An audience Asuma was far, far more used to.

He knew it was because of the Sannin Tsunade that they had been called—she was very popular amongst many noble women, more than sufficiently high in acclaim to satisfy any public complaints nobles could make, and, well, was a woman, so any nobles that Konoha maybe didn't want to come would be sufficiently scared away by that fact alone.

It all made sense.

But it would've, to Asuma, made more sense for him (and Kurenai, of course) to have Tsunade as their Sensei.

He'd had the childhood of training for it, after all.

…It wasn't… he knew he was being unfair.

He knew he was being unreasonable.

It just felt, a lot of the time, like he had to keep all the negatives of being the Hokage's son—increased kidnapping chance, almost no combat opportunities, lack of one-on-one time with both parents, manifold assumptions made before people even met him—and none of the positives.

None of the good food.

The gifts for simply 'stopping by' (bribes, of course.)

The respect, when people connected his last name to his father's.

The last still happened, probably always would, but now Sensei was telling him not to give his last name—first names only, because his last name might cause the villagers to clam up and focus more on acting appropriately to someone 'of his rank.'

Asuma understood that.

He'd complied.

And still, he felt this knot of resentment welling up inside.

The meeting broke up; it was time for Asuma to begin his pitch with the younger folk.

As he stood, Kurenai met his eye.

He grinned, and felt his shoulders fall just a bit further down.

It was time to spend more time with Kurenai too.

.

Everyone who could was working for Sakura's vision to come true.

She hadn't actually expected so much support; but it turned out that when everything was in shambles, people were more than willing to listen to any suggestion of how to pull back a bit of normalcy.

That Sakura's suggestion basically amounted to a gigantic party didn't hurt either.

Minato had already agreed to let any Fire resident in free of charge—anyone from any other country (and there would be visitors, for both commercial and information-gathering reasons) would have to pay.

And people were coming.

Teams had been sent out far and wide to encourage Fire residents of all sizes to come, to see Konoha at its best.

Sakura still walked past rubble on her way to work every day, so even if they managed to get all the edifices up in time—which they were on track to do—'best' would be a lie, but that was okay.

As long as everyone began trusting in Konoha's power to claw their way back, that was okay.

The party planning well under way, Sakura turned to other concerns which had been on the backburner for far too long.

Namely, Genin Takeushi.

After the second spy had been found—and had actually managed to successfully kill himself before T&I could have so much as a minute with him—the importance had only increased.

Yamanaka Hana spread the papers out in front of her and Jiraiya, gesturing to each in turn.

"Obviously he tried to kill himself immediately too, but Nara Uta kept him constrained long enough for Yamanaka Anzo to get this information out of him.

"Unfortunately it looks like he'd been trained in a seal-less suicide jutsu so we only had a few minutes before it went into effect, but it's still a lot."

Sakura frowned, lifting up her Yamanaka kin's sketch of Orochimaru based on the now-dead spy's memories.

"He looks…"

"Deranged." Jiraiya's eyes were soft, not hard.

He seemed to be tired of having to hunt what remained of his former teammate, but resigned to the effort.

Sakura put the sketch down, turning instead to the few other sights the Yamanaka had managed to see before the suicide jutsu went into effect.

"Wind, you think?"

"It would explain why we haven't found him yet. I've mostly been targeting my network towards Konoha's more obvious enemies… clearly my network needs a bit of brushing up, given this and the other signs that Suna isn't doing its part in the alliance."

Sakura hummed and picked up the list of priorities drawn out of the spy's mind. "I seem to have left an impression."

Jiraiya gave a low whistle. Technically, many things were listed first—Konoha technology, access points into Konoha (which were already being patched, thankfully), information on bloodlines—

But she (and her cypher) were listed fourth.

"You're still doing a lot of training, right?"

"Not really since the war ramped up—I've been too busy." She barely had time to sleep, much less practice.

"Well, you'll need to get on that."

True enough. Sakura rolled her neck, handing him the priorities list as she picked up the list of information that Orochimaru had almost definitely received.

Jiraiya read over her shoulder. "Less than I thought," he remarked.

"Turns out the storage seals were worth it," Sakura agreed. "Hotaru'll be happy to hear that."

"Any notes on Orochimaru's book cypher?" Jiraiya asked. They still had most of Orochimaru's texts, after all, or at least those that he was willing to leave behind.

"Not that I see," Sakura said, "but that makes sense; the spy was clearly sent to be captured, to see how long it would take us to find him."

Which…

Jiraiya grimaced, agreeing.

Both, at the same time, looked up.

There was nothing to look up to—no clock or window—but their internal timekeeping had alerted them that the first major meeting since the end of the war was about to start.

This would have to wait.

Yamanaka Hana, silent while they sifted through the papers, resealed them, and Jiraiya and Sakura went up the stairs and into the already-bustling conference room.

It was time to suffer.

.

It started easily enough; the Akimichi spoke first, outlining their plan to increase acidic food production—cheese, seafood, processed meats, granola—and a representative from the Health Department confirmed that Tsunade believed areas with more acidic diets were dealing with less fertility issues than the average Fire citizen.

No one had an issue with the plan, and Commerce agreed to look at tariff levels and see if the ones for acidic foods could be lowered without unduly discouraging internal production.

Then—just as the elders moved to intervene—Minato turned to Juro, who was visiting from the Capital with a report. His placement there, and his ability to save children that chakra-less medicine simply couldn't, had endeared him to many of the Capital's residents, and—as Shin's own interactions with civilians showed—fear of shinobi was decreasing.

(Unspoken was the help of the byoki in that decrease—for all that it hurt them too, the civilians seemed to be relieved that there were certain things even shinobi couldn't control.)

Minato was pleased at the progress, and told Juro a letter extending his stay would be sent to the Capital shortly.

Again, the elders went to speak. Again, Minato ignored them.

Instead he made a short announcement—the former Hokage was busy with work in what was formerly the Land of Water (the Daimyo was dead, and whatever it was they'd killed had been the sole leader for at least a year), and so would be unable to join.

The elders didn't even have time to bring their topic to the front before Minato segued into the next topic—the Gold standard.

"Unfortunately, as many other signs have shown over the past weeks, Wind seems to believe we are too weak an ally to remain loyal to. They are now deliberately using their monopoly on gold to hurt our currency. Sakura, would you explain your paper voucher proposal from a while back?"

"Yes, okay, so the paper would be a promise from Konoha to its holder that Konoha will give him or her something—for instance, gold…" Sakura continued, explaining as best she could how a paper money system functioned and why it worked (because she knew that, under the right circumstances, it would work) to a largely-distrustful audience.

But Minato was the one that had the final say, and something—likely the anticipation of the upcoming fight over what to do with Water (never mind that everyone had already agreed)—meant he seemed determined to emphasize that.

"Sounds good to me. However, instead of backing it with gold, let's back it with copper; that's something that Fire has a near-total monopoly on, at least in the east. How long do you need?"

Sakura considered. She considered the horrible backlog the research team already faced, the exhausted sealing factories—who would no doubt be brought in to make the money, so that it would be difficult to counterfeit—and she thought of Minato, staring right at her, demanding the best.

"Prototype within… three weeks. Figuring out mass-production… three months?"

"Great." Sakura glanced around, but no one objected. It was easy to see why; they didn't believe she'd be able to accomplish the feat. "Alright, we'll finish with clan reports now, then Department Heads, then elders. Shimura clan, I believe you also submitted a report?"

"Ahem, yes. We believe that it is necessary to censure Sakura for her role in the deaths of the byoki attack."

Sakura knew it.