The dam came down on the first of April.

There wasn't much Konoha had to do to prepare—it was not their city that would be flooded, after all—but a contingent of genin and chuunin had nonetheless been carted to Suna to help deal with the effects of the suddenly re-birthed river.

In exchange, Suna sent even more wind-jutsu users to Konoha's Eastern front, where they were the most needed.

They still couldn't protect the coast of every nation against Kiri's continued gas attacks, but by now they had several types of gas masks (both physical and seal) and enough of a force to keep most attacks ineffective.

Kiri, too, was beginning to suffer from its own strategy. The islands that made up the body of the Land of Water were lush, sure, had plenty of important natural materials…

But not much land.

Almost none, in fact.

They had, historically, relied almost as heavily on trade as Suna had; needed grains and rice constantly, and the upper class wanted something other than fish to pad out their daily dinners.

And now they'd just spent months literally killing off any and all good will they had with their former trading partners.

Until April, however, they'd had one saving grace: the Land of Lightning.

Until April, they'd gotten the food and goods they needed from Lightning, managed to continue on despite the sharp decrease in trading partners.

And then…

Iwa was out of the war.

Iwa hadn't been a major part of the war from the beginning, hadn't been run well—the Third Tsuchikage had 'stepped down' already, his nephew taking his place—but they had been there. They had been allied with Kumo. They'd even delivered supplies across the Bay, kept Kumo stocked with necessary weapons and medicines for all that manpower hadn't been nearly as fluid.

And now Iwa was out.

And Kumo was scrambling, had no doubt relied on some promises that would no longer be kept.

And it was time for Kiri to respond, to respond to their increasingly less reliable partner and their increasingly less deadly attack method and their increasingly more powerful opponent.

The dam broke in April, and by May the war had changed completely.

It wasn't a peace treaty, not like with Iwa, but Kiri had backed off, still patrolled its waters but no longer attacked regularly, were clearly waiting for any sign of weakness.

Kumo had chosen a similar strategy, were on the backfoot and knew it. They also knew, however, that Konoha still hadn't figured out how they tracked everyone in their country—they turtled, were no doubt working over time to find or make an advantage before it was too late.

Konoha still jabbed out, still monitored the North and East fronts of the war, but…

It had been over a year.

They'd barely had a peacetime between the wars.

They had to deal with the Land of Canyons switching alliances, deal with the bad blood brought on by destroying the Land of Grass's most important infrastructure, deal with feeding their own army and putting down all of the bandit camps that had sprung up in the absence of most of the shinobi and so on.

General Nara, therefore, enacted a wait-and-see tactic, had every defensive position further bolstered, then sent many of the shinobi home—with the radio and telegram they could arrive back fairly quickly if necessary.

The Konoha public—which had spent most of the last few months arguing for more decisive action, for General Danzo to come back and go on the offensive—seemed to suddenly forget their prior stance, busy as they were with the influx of people and the new opportunities, both social and commercial, they provided.

Time passed.

A deal began to be worked out with the Land of Grass. Yamanaka Sakura, alongside Communications Head Nara, came up a series of overhead cables which would transport mechanically operated cars across the river. Their smaller size would make them less useful for military attacks, but they'd put in dozens up and down the river—not ideal, but Grass agreed, and Konoha was the only village with the necessary information to repair them.

The Land of Canyons, now deeply regretting their leap to Iwa's side, was dealing with their own issues; with no Great Nation to back them up (Earth's Daimyo had decided to wipe his hands of the whole affairs) they were now coping with attacks from the Land of Mushrooms and the Land of Rice, each eager to expand their territory while they could. Fire and, by extension, Konoha would likely form an agreement with them again… in a while.

The annual cycle of tending the fields was going off well, too. The Second Great War had been far more deadly, even with the Battle of Kannabi Bridge. The trade routes were less disrupted now, too; all the island nations that had been allied with Water were eager for any new trading partners they could find, and were willing to offer steep discounts too.

The bandit camps were more troublesome, if only because—despite the ceasefire—many shinobi had to be left at the coast and Frost's border and the rest were due a break. Still, it provided effective training, and genin teams and chuunin groups were regularly sent out to wherever the latest reports suggested.

Life went on.

.

Ibiki wriggled, nudging closer to his recently arrived guardian as Shin read through yet another coded report. "Missed me?"

"Yeah."

"Looking forward to your third year at the Academy?"

"…I dunno. I hope we rotate groups again. My latest one is boring."

"Oh, yeah—your teacher splits you lot up into teams, right?"

"Yeah. Mostly it's good, but I don't like it when I'm paired with Hyuuga or Mitokado, and this time I have both and a civilian-born girl besides. It sucks."

Shin held back a snort. "You can still learn from them, right?"

A half-shrug. "Maybe? Dunno what they can teach me, though." A pause. "Can we play ninjas and bandits?"

Shin hesitated, looking down at his stack of papers, then the intentionally wide-eyed look of the boy beside him. "Only for a little while."

.

Yamanaka Yoriko scrambled up the mound of dirt. She was disgusting, but her one saving grace was that Nara Kosuke and Akimichi Chihiro were no better off.

Sensei Uchiha, on the other hand…

Yeah, not a speck.

"I doubt you'll do much better if we keep going. Meet again at dawn tomorrow; we have a mission."

Yoriko whimpered.

Chihiro looked no better off.

Kosuke was already down the mud pile they'd been running sprints on for the whole afternoon, halfway to the nearest tree to pass out under.

Yoriko groaned, then rolled down the mound herself; she was far too dirty already to worry about a few more smears.

Kosuke was already snoring.

Chihiro rolled their eyes, but that didn't much matter; if Kosuke wanted to be later for dinner that was up to him.

"See you tomorrow!"

"Tomorrow!"

Twenty-five minutes later Yoriko was showered, changed, and in front of her paternal grandparent's house.

Ibiki, her cousin, was setting the table.

"Hello Yoriko." Her aunt Kohana nodded. "Eating with us tonight?"

"If that's okay. My mom was called away about something, and my Dad just started the night shift."

"That's fine. Himari, Sakura, Juro, and Shin are eating with us too. One more setting, Ibiki."

Yoriko thanked her aunt over Ibiki's groan.

Dinner was fun. Juro didn't talk much, aunt Sakura didn't either—was lost in thought, according to aunt Kohana—but Ibiki was noisy and loud and aunt Himari and aunt Kohana were having a whispered fight in between bites (aunt Kohana was apparently planning on moving in with her boyfriend, and aunt Himari wasn't thrilled about it), and the food was good.

Eventually, though, she had to go home.

Kaa-san was usually home when she was finished, but all she'd left was a note and she still wasn't back even after dinner was over. Tou-san wasn't supposed to be home—he had no young kids anymore, so it was considered less important for him to be home at normal hours—and Rento moved out when he started working in Research.

It was just her, then.

Yoriko didn't like being alone. She'd thought the ceasefire would help, but her mother seemed even more busy in the past weeks and her brother and father had never really left in the first place—they were just always away.

Really, she should start thinking about moving out herself, maybe getting an apartment with a few other genin girls who didn't want to room with their male teammates. She was just twelve, though, didn't feel old enough yet.

Life, though, would continue on without her.

Perhaps it was time to make a change.

She went to bed.

.

Yamanaka Inoichi was hiding.

He might've been a clan head, he might've been one of the most powerful shinobi in Konoha, but he was hiding.

His mother wanted to talk weddings, and he wanted to have nothing to do with that.

He'd thought he still had time, a year or two at least, but now his mother was talking about which flowers to put on the tables, and his girlfriend was nodding along, and all the elders were going on about his duty to bring in the next generation.

It was too early! He wasn't ready!

So he was hiding.

Like a child.

A sixteen-year-old, far too young to be a husband, much less a father—no matter how much he liked Kohana.

"Hey."

He did not react. It might've looked like he reacted, but he'd gone through his family training at seven, trained any kind of automatic flinching out of him. It must've been a trick of the light.

It was just his father that saw, though, so that was okay.

"How'd you know where I was?"

"This is where you've been hiding from your mother since you were six."

"You never came up here before."

"You seemed like you wanted the privacy."

Inoichi shuffled back, giving his father the room necessary to climb into the attic himself.

"What are you hiding for this time?" A look. "I mean, I know—but put it in your own words."

Inoichi groaned, then shuffled again to a more upright position. "I just—I feel like I'm not ready, you know, but life keeps on—and everyone expects me to marry, and have a dozen kids, and—"

"You don't have to do any of that immediately."

"Don't I? Kaa-san expects me to, the elders do too, even Kohana doesn't seem against it—"

"Have you talked to Kohana?"

"…no. She didn't contradict—"

"Your mother? The mother of the clan head? The elders? All of whom she's been trained her whole life to treat respectfully?"

"…yeah."

"Despite how it may seem, you can actually postpone your wedding for quite some time yet. In fact, it's rather expected. It is true that the latest of the Nara and Akimichi had children rather early, but that was only due to the demand that Ino-Shika-Cho heirs be raised together and my… generational lag on that front. And if that happens again—if one, or two, or all of you choose to wait until later? The world will continue on you know. Besides that, there is certainly no pressure for you to have children soon. Are either of your teammates in relationships?"

"Not at the moment, no."

"Then that's your defense. Everything's tradition, you just need to work it to your benefit. And, you know, talk to Kohana."

Inoichi sighed. "Okay. In a little while, though. I think I want to stay up here a bit longer."

"That's fine too."

.

The Police Department lead a recruitment drive two weeks after the Western Front of the war ended. It had been in the making for several months—at minimum biweekly meetings since Sakura had initially pushed for a more diverse department—and her efforts finally saw fruit.

In exchange for several existing inventions and an agreement for the creation of a half dozen more, the Police Department would be attempting to double their number of non-Uchiha employees.

They would be recruiting from other clans, recruiting from the clan-less ninja, and—most contentiously—even recruiting no-name civilians.

Sakura highly doubted that more than one or two of the latter would get jobs at all, but it was something.

The recruitment drive was barely up for a day, however, when it began to have certain… effects.

The Hyuuga called a clan meeting, pressing angrily against what they saw as the diluting of necessary societal castes.

Several other clans agreed. Not Ino-Shika-Cho, there was an upside to being a clan head's former tutor and future sister-in-law, but… more than she'd thought would.

The Aburame, especially, were in lock-step behind the Hyuuga; they worried over how the civilians would even be capable of doing their job, over whether they and others with bloodlines would be discriminated against.

The Shimura were upset too, had many of the same arguments, but were more or less ignored—the details about the rumor-campaign had spread among the elite of each clan, and Danzo's actions now had his entire family treated with suspicion.

The meeting lasted weeks, going on every night for three to four hours a day.

The civilians, too, were not exactly thrilled about the change. A lot of it was confusion—why the recruitment drive? Why now? What's the cost? —and a lot was wariness; they understood how the Uchiha ran the police—would the new recruits act differently?

Despite that, despite the backlash from both sides, there were far more applications than expected; the Uchiha got to pick the cream of the crop.

The new inventions—chakra identifiers, shock weapons, collapsible ladders, metal sensors—were also huge helps and, for all that none were exclusively being used by the police, they'd all certainly become associated with the internal law enforcement uniform.

It was a rockier start then she'd hoped, particularly given her hope that the recent reduction in warfronts would buoy people's moods, but it was a start.

She just hoped it was enough.

.

Tsunade winced as her niece's clanking startled her into alertness.

She shouldn't have drunk that much—she should never drink that much—but such a judgment call was always easier to make in hindsight.

She forced herself up, forced her eyes to open despite the throb behind them, and gave herself a minute.

She could use her chakra, she supposed, to reduce many of her symptoms.

She only ever did that when she had to—it felt too much like deserved punishment to get out of it otherwise.

Another minute, and she was out of bed, dressed, and mostly back to normal.

She moved to the main room of the inn suite she'd rented, smiling as she saw Shizune trying to quietly set out breakfast—she'd clearly gotten the meal from the innkeeper downstairs, and wanted to surprise her.

"Good morning."

"Oh! Hi! Look—I, I mean—it's breakfast!"

"I see that, that was very nice of you. You know I don't like you leaving without me."

"I only went to the kitchen, downstairs."

"Just—ask, next time."

"It was supposed to be a surprise."

Tsunade winced, hating to see any sadness in her child's eyes.

"Just… be careful, alright?"

She'd stopped being monitored as closely since the start of the war, a matter of distribution of resources, but now Iwa was out, and Tsunade was sure that, if they thought they could easily get away with it, every single ANBU who watched her was under orders to 'retrieve' Shizune whenever possible.

It wasn't…

She knew she shouldn't have left, shouldn't have taken Shizune with her.

She'd just been tired of the war, of the death, of the pressure.

She'd wanted Dan back, and the closest she could get was his niece, and so…

It hadn't seemed so bad at the time; she'd be happy, the arguments over custody with Doi and over everything else with Orochimaru and Jiraiya would be over…

Shizune didn't mind much, either, got over it relatively quickly; she was only three then, after all, only six now.

She still asked about Doi, about Konoha, but she seemed happy about their current life.

Was happy.

Probably.

She'd just—

It had been too much, she'd had to leave.

And she couldn't go back, not now, no matter how much the Hokage kept on making it clear that he'd accept her back.

She was still too broken, she supposed.

There was a paper on the table.

"Where'd that come from?" Tsunade asked. Had Shizune brought it with breakfast?

It seemed, however, that the child hadn't noticed it either. "Oh, I don't know."

Tsunade's jaw clenched. She approached slowly.

It was a seal.

A storage seal.

"Let's have breakfast." She said, and ignored the paper.

Later, much later—when Shizune was already in bed, when Tsunade had checked and double-checked every entrance and exit—she finally opened the seal.

Scrolls tumbled out, dozens of them.

She opened one, reluctantly.

Clones.

Clones to be used as false bodies, to be used in place of human lives for medical testing.

Months of research, it looked like, months of progress—actual signs of progress, too.

She sat, finally, almost fell onto one of the two chairs the room came with, and began reading.