Orochimaru slouched in the corner, furious beyond belief.
Sakura tried very, very hard not to look at him.
She and her nephew had been working hard on the idea of people tracking in the past weeks, and had at last made a surprisingly successful breakthrough—tracking seals that could be placed directly on skin, were powered by a person's innate chakra, and could act as homing beacons to the tracking device now held by one of the ANBU—two days before.
They certainly hadn't expected the Hokage to respond to their progress by turning around and placing the newly formed, untested seal on his own student.
Though, in hindsight, Sakura supposed she wasn't as surprised as she could have been.
Ever since three weeks ago, when the Six-Tails was captured and Orochimaru had successfully been tracked to what was clearly a used lab deep in the woods of Fire, the former Head of Human Research and Engineering had been kept on a tight leash.
Now, it was just… more literal.
She was just happy it had worked.
With Orochimaru clearly being watched, however, and unable to get away, Sakura had been more than eager to turn to any of her many other projects, make progress with them—but she hadn't had the time.
Peace took a lot of effort, and even as most of the Researcher's projects got pushed to the backburner (bombs were less important when not actively fighting a Major Nation) many more immediately jumped to the front, and Sakura had, once again, been roped in by both the current and future Heads to assist.
They finally had a plan of action hammered out, a working system to keep everything running as smoothly as possible, when the current and future Heads were called to a meeting.
Sakura wasn't technically invited, at least not based on the messenger's words, but Future Head Uchiha had gestured for her to follow anyway, and so she had.
(It was becoming increasingly clear to her that, at least within Research, she would have much of the power of a Head, official appointment or no. She'd been shocked to find that she was gratified by it, appreciative that her ability hadn't gone unnoticed or unused, and she and Future Head Uchiha balanced each other well—his militant attention to detail combined with her far broader knowledge base and insured that, alongside the current Head, at least one of them was able to respond to any situation appropriately.)
When the three of them had arrived, there had been no comment made, and Sakura had relaxed until she'd caught sight of her former boss—his official lab having been officially disbanded after his unofficial one (a lab she still knew nothing about, was still being actively secreted away) was found.
Now, as she stood in a room with just about every important ninja in Konoha, listening to Minato as he gave his report on the Peace Treaty on the likelihood that Kiri and Kumo would soon declare war, she attempted to ignore Orochimaru's unending glare and consider the implications.
Well, for one, the Research calendar had to be completely rewritten again.
Even still, the wave of utter relief that washed over the room as Peacetime was officially declared was—well, Sakura had no doubt week-long parties would start the second the Hokage made the public announcement after the meeting wrapped.
After Minato finished the Hokage stood. "It has been a difficult past few years, but despite that Konoha has continued to grow and prosper, and for that I thank each and every one of you." His eyes swept the room, seeming to hit on every individual at least once before continuing. "As planned, now that the war is over and I know Konohagakure and her people will be in safe hands I will begin the process of turning over the government to Jounin Namikaze."
A low murmur—more poignant than anything else—filled the room.
The Hokage smiled. "Fear not; I will not be leaving today. Or tomorrow, for that matter; this is itself a time of great transition and it feels unwise to add additional stress upon the various Departments, many of whose Heads I know are planning to retire alongside me. The Hokage's hat will officially be handed to Minato on Konoha's 44th anniversary; almost six months to revert to Peacetime governing, plan the various changes of leadership, and settle in for what should, hopefully, be a very stable future."
More murmuring, more positive but also—well, it remained the end of an era.
"In the meantime," the Hokage continued, "Minato will be working on quite a few personal projects while continuing to assist with the transition. This will, after all, be the last part of his life that isn't spent behind the Hokage's desk—best to stretch his legs while he can."
Polite laughter.
"Now, while I'm sure you are all eager to settle in for one of our oh-so-productive meetings, I think that today is too much about celebration—I will be making a formal announcement in half an hour that any non-essential personnel have the next three days off. We will meet the day after that, to get back to the nitty-gritty of everything."
More grins; it had been some time since anyone had had a day or two off.
"So, for the final time today—and for the rest of the weekend—dismissed."
The room quickly emptied, Sakura eager to relax for the few hours her body would let her before she felt compelled to go back to work. As she was one of the last ones out, however, she caught the Hokage's eye—
And wished she hadn't.
.
Asuma grimaced as Ibiki, sitting next to him and utterly relaxed, pumped out yet another perfect heating tag while Sensei Hyuuga grumbled over Asuma's latest attempt.
He'd been in a bad mood all week—he'd been happy, at first, when Peacetime had been declared, remembering his father's promise to spend more time with him when he retired, except then his mother told him his dad wasn't even retiring until winter, and then served beans, his least favorite meal for dinner, and his older siblings were fighting, and class was boring, and he'd said something to be mean to Kurenai and she still hadn't forgiven him, and—
So he hadn't been having a good week, and then they got to fuinjutsu class to find out they were due to start actually injecting chakra into their own seals.
Sensei Hyuuga—who had been teaching for well over three decades now, who never shut up about how much he hated the profession—warned them all not to blow themselves up, then had them start with the heating tags they'd been working on over the past several weeks, sketching out each step over and over and over again until, finally, they had dozens of seals with only one or two markings left before activation.
And Asuma, for a moment, had been delighted. Eager, even. Except his first hadn't worked.
And neither had his second.
And Ibiki's seemed like they never even considered failing.
That was one thing, bad but not awful, because Ibiki wasn't going to be a frontline fighter like Asuma. It was okay that Ibiki was good at this, because his aunt was and he lived with her anyway.
But just in front of him he could see Uchiha Rosoku, his rival and his only true opponent in taijutsu fights, just as expertly pushing out tag after tag after tag.
Rosoku had already awakened his sharingan, was considered one of the Uchiha's current prodigies, and had used the stupid eye thing to memorize and replicate each line with ease, an ease that made the Hokage's son all the more furious.
Rosoku was also mean, always teasing Asuma about how he was nowhere near the genius his father was, about how he was raised by faceless men and an in-practice single mother, about Asuma's far weaker control over jutsu—he was strong, but needed multiple tries to get the result he wanted…
Rosoku always seemed to know just what buttons to push, and no matter how many times Asuma and his friends rebuffed him—
And Asuma had been miserable all week, was perfectly aware of that—certainly his friends hadn't hidden how tired of his behavior they were—and Rosoku had been making more side-comments, and today at least they were finally progressing in seals, and even now Rosoku held his latest functional one up as if to inspect it, throwing a look at Asuma's empty 'successes' pile as he did so.
Asuma grimaced, took a deep breath.
Ibiki tapped the table next to him—a sign, of companionship and empathy.
Asuma made himself tap back—he didn't want two of his friends to stop speaking to him; Kurenai was bad enough.
(They used to sit next to each other, and Ibiki sat next to Genma. They'd swapped after—
Well. Asuma knew he shouldn't have said it.)
His next tag worked, but the heat wasn't nearly as uniformly distributed as Ibiki' or Rosoku's, and it was too hot besides; Sensei Hyuuga tsked over it before moving on.
Asuma wanted to cry.
He was crying, actually, or at least could feel tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.
Ibiki tapped again, more rapidly, and then went to his next seal.
It failed.
The worst part was that Asuma knew he'd done it on purpose, knew Ibiki had made it fail out of pity for Asuma's still-too-small pile, and yet he still felt the rush of schadenfreude, still felt unfairly pleased that at least he wasn't the only one failing.
Genma, too far back and likely not paying attention, crowed as his second one gained a nod of approval from Sensei.
Rosoku dashed out another seal, not even a prepared one, and flushed it with exactly the right amount of chakra.
Asuma tapped the table.
He'd rejected Ibiki's offer of fuinjutsu tutoring earlier in the year, hadn't wanted any additional education when it felt like his entire life was spent trying to live up to the abilities of his older siblings, his father, and now he regretted it.
He hated feeling weak.
Rosoku held up yet another perfect seal and Ibiki cleared his throat.
"Is there a reason, Sensei Hyuuga, that not all Uchiha seal regularly?"
"Oh, many do." Sensei Hyuuga said, bending over another student's work as he absently answered. "Their clan makes the majority of seals in use, in fact."
Rosoku smirked.
Asuma flushed angrily, wished Ibiki had kept quiet.
But then, why hadn't Ibiki asked before?
"Of course, the Uchiha do have one large failing in that respect—they're terrible at making new seals."
Rosoku froze.
The other Uchiha children, scattered around the classroom, looked up too.
"They all revert to the sharingan the second they can, you see, and doing something perfectly the first time is helpful—definitely less dangerous—but it also means there's little chance to experiment, see what incremental changes cause. Plenty of Uchiha do end up in Research anyway, but those that do usually only got their sharingan after they started sealing—the allure of perfection is a hard one to resist."
Rosoku wasn't writing out his next seal anymore, and Asuma's eyes no longer prickled.
"Anyway," Sensei said, and as he passed over Asuma's work without comment (not that he'd managed much more to comment on) Asuma considered for the first time that Sensei might be aware of Rosoku's actions, might actually care about them despite how much the man proclaimed his hatred of children, "It's still entirely possible to do a great many things with seals without the creativity to create new ones—your guardian is proof enough of that, Morino."
"Thanks for the information, Sensei." Ibiki said, and he'd definitely already known before he'd asked.
Rosoku clenched his hands and Asuma's spirits lifted further, and he tapped the table again, more sedately.
After class, when they all dispersed throughout the school for lunch (they had a morning fuinjutsu class, and the rest of their electives were still to come in the afternoon) Asuma slumped next to Ibiki, watching Genma and Kurenai sit under a tree mere meters away from them.
"How did you know that would work?"
"Didn't, before," Ibiki said, stuffing his face with everything that had been inside his bento all at once. "But Rosoku mentioned this morning—Aunt Sakura and Rento created some seal that the police think will be really helpful, and Rosoku said something about how he bet he was only a year or two off from inventing those sorts of seals, and that sealing should just be left to the Uchiha because they're better at it." A swallow—thank the kami—and Ibiki continued. "So I figured he if was bragging that much about how good he was at sealing then clearly he'd be upset to learn that his oh-so-special sharingan was a hindrance."
"It was really cool."
"Yeah," Ibiki grinned. "I'm awesome." Then he frowned, following Asuma's gaze to where their other two friends were trading desserts. "You need to apologize, soon."
"I've tried."
"Try harder, then. Genma and I are getting really tired of having to do everything separately."
"Yeah, yeah," Asuma picked at his bento, decided he'd eaten enough. "Genma's with me tomorrow, right?"
"Uh-huh. If you're not forgiven by the end of next week we're both with Kurenai, though. You really shouldn't have called her that."
"I just wanted her to shut up."
Ibiki snorted. "You succeeded there!"
"Shut up!"
"You know it's true!"
Asuma grinned, embarrassment and shame and frustration and good humor and appreciation and love battling inside him. "Thanks. For, for sticking with me."
Ibiki rolled his eyes. "We're your friends, dumbass. Even Kurenai's your friend. We all just—mess up, sometimes. And that's okay."
"You're sure you're not going to end up a therapist?"
A snort. "No, thanks. I'll make you guys feel better with all the phrases I've memorized from therapy, but I much prefer making people feel bad—T&I's gonna be great."
"Only two more years."
"And being a genin."
"That, too."
.
There'd be an official meeting over who should be mandated to have the tracking seals on them sometime next week, and Sakura assumed it'd be prisoners and genin at least, but immediately after the festivities were over Inoichi had moved to require it of all Yamanaka.
Sakura had balked, remembering, well, a lot from Arden's world.
Her worries—privacy, independence, the very very untested nature of the seals—had been dismissed.
Every Yamanaka would be marked by the end of the year at the latest, from the youngest up.
The Hyuuga showed up less than ten minutes after the announcement.
Sakura hadn't been invited to the initial discussion—hadn't expected to be invited at all, or even known about it until the next day—but apparently her input was worth ordering her to appear as the Yamanaka representative for the more productivity-focused meeting three days later.
"So… you have a seal, already, without the tracking function, and you want to add the tracking function, but you won't let me—or any other non-Hyuuga—see the seal, and every Hyuuga sealer says they can't modify it."
"Not that they can't…" The Hyuuga across from her was a branch-house Hyuuga—that much was obvious—and carefully stepping through each sentence. He was also, actually, one of the Hyuuga's relatively few sealers—every main member knew how to create the Hyuuga seal at minimum, apparently, but sealing by the branch members was limited to only three men, each of them carefully monitored for reasons the Hyuuga across from her couldn't say.
Sakura knew anyway.
The caged-bird seal had come up… three times, maybe? In Arden's memories so far.
Arden's memories of Naruto—because that's what she called this world—were still unfortunately and thoroughly scattered throughout the ocean of memories, but Sakura had gotten better and better at picking out fragments as she slowly drained the ocean into her more organized mind.
As she had the caged-bird seal had been one that had forced her to stop and process for a few days.
She hated it, hated that it existed, that it was used, that clan politics meant she had almost no chance of doing anything about it.
And then the Hyuuga had shown up.
And they wouldn't have shown up just to say 'actually no, we won't let you work on our existing seal, sorry, nothing's possible after all.'
They wanted the tracking function.
Sakura—or, more accurately, her far more fuinjutsu-adept nephew—had created said function.
She could work with this.
"If not can't, then what?"
"It's an ancient seal," The Hyuuga—she knew his name was Kou, but he'd never actually introduced his personal name to her—started, and Sakura felt obliged to interrupt.
"The first recorded use of a seal directly on a human was less than two hundred years ago. More ancient than that?"
"Well, no."
"So, what, a handful of generations? I thought the Hyuuga traced their lineage back at least six hundred years."
"We do, eight hundred actually, but—"
The Hyuuga, Kou, was nice, really, and surprisingly gentle-spoken given Sakura's past interactions with Hyuuga, but he was also—
"You're a branch house Hyuuga, aren't you?"
The Hyuuga's eyes darted to her, before flashing back down to the visible part of the tracker design. It had two portions, actually, with the latter covering the former—made it harder to copy. The former portion couldn't even be seen on the sketch on the table—Sakura hadn't bothered to include it, had just wanted to give the Hyuuga an idea of the complexity of the seal.
(Rento was very, very good at coming up with new seals—his were the first functional large bombs since the Uzu—but from speaking to other seal masters she also knew her nephew's work was painfully complex, and likely incredibly redundant.
It worked, though, and that was not something every experimenter could claim.)
The Hyuuga still hadn't spoken.
It was obvious, it wasn't even a secret, but he knew why she'd brought it up—branch Hyuuga had no power in their clan government; he could make no deals, offer no information.
He was here to see if she'd just hand over Rento's books and notes, give them a major leg up to try to modify it themselves.
Sakura stood, bowed appropriately. "It was a pleasure meeting you."
The Hyuuga—for all that Kou really didn't fit the stereotype—hastily rose to copy her, bowing himself. "And you as well. I—" He didn't know how to finish the sentence.
"I look forward to meeting with a member of your Main House in the future." An obvious statement, and one that was likely expected.
He bowed again, and they left the Yamanaka meeting room.
She hated politics.
She really needed to talk to Shin.
