Sensei's final message to Shin—"remember your career"—was not one whose meaning was readily apparent to Sakura, and upon relaying the message to Juro (an alive chuunin Juro, thank the kami), she found he knew just as little.

Shin clearly understood the message, though.

The closer they got to the Capital, the more distracted Shin grew. He'd never been the best at keeping watch—that was Sakura's job primarily, though all three were supposed to at least look out for their immediate surroundings—but now he seemed to rely wholly on Juro and Sakura, lost in his own head every hour of the night and day.

They were less than two days out from the Capital, maintaining a descent clip among the trees of their home when Shin finally seemed to reach his pique. He made two gestures—'talk, secret'—and in seconds, chinmoku had slowed to a stop, verbally deciding to rest up there so they'd arrive at a good time at the Capital. Sakura sent out her chakra to doublecheck their seclusion and, after several minutes of nothing, nodded at Shin. They were as sure of their isolation as they could be.

With the camp prepared, meals set out over one of Sakura's heating tags, and environment thoroughly examined, Shin spoke.

"I'm a diplomacy apprentice." Neither Sakura nor Juro pretended ignorance. Instead, they waited, tense with anticipation, for the rest of the explanation. "I'm not just a diplomacy apprentice."

Simultaneous focuses were rare, but they did occasionally occur. Juro's father was a frontline and tracking specialist, for instance, absolutely ideal for chasing after particular targets in the field until they were properly disposed of. Sakura's mind raced through the possibilities of Shin's secondary, but he was already speaking again.

"I'm also… sabotage."

Everything—Sakura's thoughts, Juro's furrowed brow, even her chakra sense—paused.

Sabotage was… and with Diplomacy… well, it had implications. Big implications.

"So here's what's going to happen. We're going to go to the Daimyo, give him the information we have on the new bloodline—it's not new, by the way, and the family name is Yasai—and explain that as we go into spring, now is the time to push, to use the information and changing weather to our advantage. Then we will give him the formal request for his own forces—his Samurai—to be sent to the frontline instead of continuing as just border patrol.

The Daimyo's not going to agree. You know that, I know that, let's assume the Sandaime Hokage knows that too. But the important thing is to get him to be more likely to agree in the future, and to get him to like me. So one of you has to piss him off."

"So that you can act as savior."

"Exactly. Now, I don't mean you have to be intentionally rude or anything like that—it wouldn't work if you were—but just, less politic, then you otherwise might be. And it's only necessary for one of you to do it; both might be too damaging."

"It should be me." Sakura said. "Juro is big and burly and I'm… not. That sort of thing matters, in the Capital."

Shin nodded. "Now, this conversation—this knowledge of my focuses, of everything we've talked about since we've stopped—this didn't happen, got it?"

"Got it." Juro and Sakura chorused.

A diplomat with sabotage training, who was clearly supposed to make inroads in the Capital… Sakura preferred not to think of the implications, but it seemed she had no choice.

.

Sakura had become suspicious of Shin's future career path during their first, and longest, journey to the Capital.

He'd taken Diplomacy in the Academy, of course, had learned about all the bits and bobs it was said to entail, but hadn't seemed particularly interested; it had come as a surprise just as much to him as it had to her when their team had been chosen as that year's Delegation assistants.

And then they'd gone to the Capital.

It had begun, the suspicion, when Sakura, Shin, and Juro visited their first noble. It had solidified with the second, third, fourth, and all subsequent visits.

There wasn't anything in particular that made her think Shin would become a diplomat, no sudden drive towards the job as there was with her or an innate interest in what it entails as there was with Juro.

Instead.

Instead, it was the little things.

The majority of talking at the Capital, or at least among the denizens chinmoku interacted with, contained a minority of communication. That wasn't to say there was no purpose at all, just that the purpose was to communicate that which Sakura (and everyone else, honestly) thought could actually be aptly said in a word or two.

One's subservience to the other was something that took an average (she'd counted) of ten phrases for every ten minutes of communication, for instance.

Sakura'd hated it.

Juro hadn't minded.

Shin hadn't either, but then he also seemed far better at it than either of them.

Sakura had put it down, at first, to the additional practice—after all, he was the one actually in court the most, so the assumption seemed quite reasonable, but that consideration had seemed insufficient by the end.

Still, it wasn't as if other focuses weren't possible.

And then there had been the mission to build the school.

That had been interesting, if only because Sakura hadn't done anything like it before or since.

It had also been interesting because Shin had taken an interest in the locals, and had tried his best to be friendly with the lot of them.

This practice remained across the rest of their missions. Whether they were running background checks on new immigrants for the Daimyo or background checks on employees for a business owner, whether they were clearing shrubbery around a frequently used road or hunting down wolves that were aggravating local sheep—whatever they were doing, Shin always seemed to be smiling, to be getting to know whoever hired them, whoever worked in the area, whoever happened to be watching with interest as they did their jobs.

And then there had been the silence.

Secret apprenticeships were rather common when it came down to it. For some, especially those in infiltration, it was so that they could disappear from notice as soon as possible. For others, it tended to be more a test of their ability to keep secrets—T&I was most infamous for using it, but many others did too (including Research, actually, but only occasionally; Sakura's Yamanaka heritage when combined with their desire to have another genin who could deliver messages in public had exempted her from the practice.)

So the secrecy wasn't the odd part.

It was the length of the secret-keeping which had been odd.

Diplomacy was also not necessarily the first focus to spring to mind as a user of that particular apprenticeship style: while it was possible in just about every focus, a good chunk of the point of diplomacy was to be known, and the sooner, the better—nearly the opposite of infiltration's goals, in fact.

So that had derailed her suspicions—or, more accurately, refused to allow them to crystalize into certainty. The suspicions had remained.

Well, she supposed that she now understood Shin's career path—or, at least, enough of it to feel as if there was no longer a fog of uncertainty over a person she considered so important.

(She wondered, when she had the time, what the rest of those who trained at Training Ground 40 were up to.)

They arrived in the Capital in the morning, just when the city started to move. They were eyed with interest—clearly shinobi, and shinobi were rarely anywhere but the Palace in the city—but the onlookers were still too sleepy or busy or both to care.

They were shown to the very same set of rooms they'd occupied last time.

And then they waited.

.

"So what have you been up to then?" Sakura asked. She picked at the ramen—it was pork ramen, and well made, but she wanted it to last given that it was the tastiest thing she'd had in months.

"Well," said Juro, "I've been working at a prison since I was promoted."

"What's that like?" Asked Shin. He'd already finished his meal, and was now looking with no small amount of covetousness at Sakura's. (Juro's, despite being twice the portion of either of theirs—the Akimichi were well known in the Capital—had also quickly disappeared.)

"It sucks." Juro said. "Lots of blood and gore and patients who are miserable and guards who are miserable and almost never any free time either. They're bringing prisoners straight from the battlefield, too, so usually they've had injuries that have been untreated for hours. Not exactly the sniffles I was originally supposed to deal with when I got promoted, but what can you do." He paused, hesitated, then glanced at Shin. "What have you been up to?"

Shin shrugged. "Went straight through Wind's desert—I don't recommend that, by the way—then like five other minor nations until Sensei and I arrived at the Land of Silk. We were traveling in the open, so at least we got to stay in hotels and the like after we left the desert. That part wasn't so bad. The Land of Silk is one of the West's minor nations, and once we got past Sand, our description of the bloodline led us straight there.

"Silk was nice, actually; great weather.

"Anyway, the Yasai had been very high-up nobles in Silk, but after a couple scandals were bumped down a few pegs. Iwa noticed this and decided to take advantage; the clan was offered a bunch of very, very good shit to join the Hidden Village, so they did. Simple as that. Also, there's no way, or at least no way anyone in Silk knew, to fix someone who'd been affected, so that's out. Here's the good news: the Yasai are really, really weak.

"Like, their bodies barely work weak.

"It's why they're not one of the dominant Western clans. They apparently have an incredibly difficult time building up any muscle mass, so whenever they're in battle, they always have to be protected by a bunch of other, more physically gifted, ninja.

"After we found that out we immediately started going home as quickly as possible—the weakness is probably one Konoha would have guessed, given enough time, but now that we know it, it'll be much easier to get them, at least, off the battlefield. Preferably dead." Shin glanced at the two of them, then Sakura.

"Your turn."

"You were stabbed." Juro said before she could answer.

Both turned to him.

"You were stabbed, and poisoned, and you stopped an assassination attempt but you were stabbed and poisoned."

"Yes." Said Sakura, but Juro wasn't done.

"And, and then it came back that you and Sensei were dead." He'd turned on Shin now. "And you weren't, and that's great, but Sakura was stabbed and you were presumed dead and so was Sensei."

Silence.

And then,

"I'd have preferred not to have been stabbed, to be honest."

"I also didn't particularly enjoy the desert trips, and Sensei started straight-up cursing he hated it so much."

"I'm not saying—I'm not saying you enjoyed it, I'm saying do you know how it feels? To worry that you might very well be the only chinmoku left?" Juro jolted to his feet, staring down at them as his face went red. "Do you know how many nights I cried?"

"I got the same message you did." Sakura said. "And that was the same message where I was told one fo my brothers—Aoi—was presumed dead too. I don't know how many nights you cried, but I know I stopped counting how many nights I did."

"You were stabbed?" Shin said, turning to her abruptly.

"Yeah."

He stared at her, and she sighed.

"You heard about Iwa's retribution on us targeting the Yasai?"

"Sarutobi."

"Right. So, my General—you've met her—is Sarutobi. They sent an infiltrator in to assassinate her—not much chakra, poisoned tools—but I spotted him first. We had a quick fight, me and a guard against him, and then a Nara showed up and took control, but not before the infiltrator stabbed me."

"He was sent to my prison," Juro said from his position above him. "A Yamanaka there went into his brain. It took some time because I guess it seemed like a lot of his training had been in how to avoid giving away information, but then she and the others finally figured out that he thought you were dead. It was two days before confirmation came that you weren't."

"What were you poisoned with?" Shin asked. His arms wrapped around his stomach.

"Mercury."

"Mer—" Poisoning by metal was rare among shinobi; plants and venoms were much more common. Shin didn't seem to enjoy their enemy's ingenuity.

"They figured it out quickly, though." Sakura said. "So instead of acting as guard I got to lie in bed and work on my inventions, and it was fine. And anyway, you haven't explained yet how sending a message—something like 'hey, I'm alive, and so is sensei'—would be too difficult, considering you were staying in hotels and all."

"What part of giant desert is so hard to get? If we wanted to send messages, we'd have to do it through Suna, and—" Shin froze, then glanced at both of them. "And that would be a bit too much trust."

"Well, next time trust them." Juro said. "I don't want to lose anyone else."

"It wasn't my choice!" Shin said. "But even if it were, it would be the right one!"

"The point is," Sakura said, "we're all safe now."

"That's not the point." Juro said. He sat, finally, and glanced forlornly at the empty bowls in front of them. "I don't know what the point is, but that's not the point."

There were a few minutes of silence.

It had begun to drizzle outside, just barely enough above freezing not to snow instead, and the large splats could be heard hitting one by one and two by two on the roof.

Shin cleared his throat. "So, you're still inventing?"

Sakura grinned. "When I have the time. Finally got a model of my typewriter, too, so that was cool."

.

Three days later, they were finally granted an audience.

It went, more or less, exactly like they'd expected it to.

The meeting was held in the Daimyo's throne room, and chinmoku entered in the early morning and were summarily ignored in favor of other (in their view lesser) issues until just before lunch.

After the usual introduction (Shin introduced all of them as chuunin, and she wondered if she'd been promoted without anyone telling her), Shin explained the situation and made his plea.

And then the Daimyo cut him off as quickly as he was socially allowed.

Which meant it was time for Sakura's turn.

She took a breath, added quite a bit of desperation in her voice, and spoke. "You have to understand!" She said. She thought she might have to say something else, but she hesitated nonetheless—the less words, the better.

It was good that she had.

The Daimyo drew himself up, his ridiculously extravagant robes billowing around him (there was a children's song that Sakura and the others in Konoha had used to sing when they were exceptionally bored, called 'what is in the Daimyo's robe,' which had involved listing each theoretical material individually and singing about it. 'The old Daimyo has a robe, yes he yes he does, and his robe is made of gold, yes it yes it was. It shines in the throne room, it shines in the gardens, it even shines in the sewer where the Daimyo keeps his head.' It wasn't a particularly kind song.)

"You are my subjects, are you not? My loyal subjects? So then my word—the word of your Daimyo—should be accepted without question. No matter what you or your… Sandaime Hokage may wish, I will not be forced down any route.

My family has held rule over Kuni for so long historians can only pretend to know its inception; your little experiment, on the other hand, has yet to last a lifetime. But please, tell me again how I must understand. I do understand, child, and my decision will not change."

"I—" Sakura began again, but before she could get any further, Shin interrupted her.

"Perhaps it would be best if my comrades left." He shot them a clearly chiding look. "You are entirely right, your imperial majesty; her words were quite out of line, and I can assure you that no such comments will ever be made again."

The Daimyo sat, appeased.

"In truth, your imperial majesty," Shin continued as Juro and Sakura were led out of the room, "while Konohagakure could use your strength, we understand…"

Shin did not come home until early the next day, as Juro and Sakura were packing up to leave. They looked at him.

He looked back.

He grinned.

"Unfortunately, the Daimyo is unable to offer us aid at this time." Shin said. "However, he understands that Konohagakure may have gotten over its head, so the Daimyo is considering sending some number of troops come spring, assuming the conflict is not over by then."

"He said he'd consider sending troops?" Sakura said. She was honestly surprised; the Daimyo never liked promising anything, even consideration.

"I get the idea that the Daimyo doesn't understand the current state of the war." Shin said. "I think he's hoping he can send some token troops in after winter is over and then claim part of the victory which he thinks will already be underway."

"He thinks we're about to win?!"

"He—I think so, yes."

"Well, he's about to have a rude awakening."

"As cruel as it sounds, that's what we need. Once he becomes… more aware, I think the Daimyo will be very, very eager to protect his territory. For now, though, we haven't yet suffered enough."

"What a macabre thought." Sakura said.

Juro agreed.

.

Chinmoku had just barely left the Capital, had barely turned towards Konoha for a pitstop on the way back to their more permanent positions, when Sakura shouted.

"Konoha nin ahead!"

Chinmoku came to a stop.

The Konoha nin didn't.

They barreled past the younger shinobi, heading towards the Capital at such a pace that it was clear they cared for nothing but speed.

Chinmoku turned around and followed them.

They may have been younger, but they were also fresh. The older team seemed to have run straight from Konoha without stopping. It took little time for Sakura, Shin, and Juro to catch up.

One of them—an Inuzuka, going by the dog sprinting beside him—drew in a breath, then began shouting against the wind buffeting their faces.

"Assassinations… Sarutobi… over… a third… dead."

Chinmoku picked up speed.

As terrible as it sounded, this was exactly the sort of catastrophe Konoha needed, and it was time for Shin to make use of the comradery he'd spent the last few hours developing.

If he didn't…

If the Daimyo still refused to act…

The Capital appeared in the distance.

All six put on another burst of speed.