Ibiki hung the next round of bandages out to dry.
They were going across the country, now, him and his team, giving out vaccines and treating ailments.
More propaganda-work, but much more interesting than the time they'd had to spend schmoozing up to nobles.
(Though watching samurai march was always fun—it was shocking, how perfectly in sync they could become, and Ibiki was more than a little happy shinobi had never bothered with that sort of thing.)
This time they were just focused on the everyday people of Fire, as Sensei called them. The people that were afraid of shinobi, who feared them no matter their age.
(On their first day in this village a boy had walked right up to Ibiki and told him about how his oldest brother had tried to bully a genin, before, had been knocked up, down, and everywhere else.
(The boy had asked for tips, and Ibiki had taught him how to throw a punch.
(What was the harm?)
For all that they were afraid, though, they were also more than willing to ignore the fear in exchange for medicine, and everybody in the world knew who Tsunade was.
So the four of them were kept busy—the boys doing all the orderly tasks and maintaining the waiting room besides, and Misaki and Sensei always, constantly, busy.
They were taught at night, under the light of the stars and moon, and even then only for a few hours—
But that was okay.
Ibiki was learning a lot, anyway.
He'd spent time in other countries, in Frost and Tea and even Cloud; he'd spent time with nobility, and cannon-fodder samurai, and with academics and clan shinobi and clan-less shinobi and merchants and peasants.
It had been jarring, sometimes (often), how different people could be, but it had also taught him a lot.
Taught him psychology, and history, and philosophy, and economics, and how to argue, and when not to, and all the little things.
Some of his earliest memories—not including those few hazy ones of his mother he still held onto, still desperately hoped were real—were of how difficult he found people.
Didn't trust them, didn't understand them, didn't see how it was worth the effort.
And his guardians, they had made absolutely sure he'd learned how to deal with them anyway, how to learn how to understand them.
And then they'd taken him abroad.
And then he'd been a genin, and left Konoha by himself.
(Well, with his team, but close enough.)
And—
Ibiki still wasn't sure if diplomacy, necessarily, was what he wanted to do, but he loved information, and even Sensei had praised him for how he'd managed to get it out of people, have conversations so engrossing that his target didn't even realize what they were saying.
It was sort-of a game to him, but he'd been knocked up-side the head by a few too many authority figures to forget that they were people too.
It wasn't combat, obviously, but Ibiki thought there was something to be said for the importance of the skills he was learning anyway.
Sadao, meanwhile, had absolutely no clue what he wanted to do, had absolutely no clue where he'd go when they were promoted.
For the time being, he just stood as a sign of the Uchiha's bravery and watched the ground very, very carefully.
Ibiki wasn't much help, there; Sadao needed to figure his life out himself.
Later, much later, when the only people besides them in the commandeered hall were those who had to be watched overnight, Sensei shouted for them.
Ibiki eyed the disappearing slug with interest—it was carrying a sealed scroll, and not headed back towards Konoha, which would have been unusual except that it had been happening nearly every day—then looked at the scroll still in Sensei's hands.
"The next international chuunin exams are being held by us this summer. I've enrolled all of you."
Misaki stiffened. "You think we're ready?!"
"Yes."
Ibiki agreed with Misaki, to be honest. "I thought we couldn't be chuunin until we were thirteen," he pointed out. "And by next summer I'll only be eleven."
Which was true enough.
"Well, your team will be thirteen, won't they?"
Which…
He knew Misaki was—her birthday was just before the new year—but Sadao too?
He glanced at the Uchiha.
The Uchiha grunted. "My birthday's this summer. August."
"Which—regardless of when the chuunin exams begin—means you'll be old enough to be promoted. Then Misaki will go to the hospital—they need more hands—and I'll be busy… somewhere else."
"What about me and Sadao?"
"Sadao?" Sensei asked
He shrugged. "Police, probably. They need more of those, too, and I've never been a powerhouse; they'll make the best use of me."
He'd decided that easily? All that whining and moaning all fall and winter about how he didn't know what to do, and he just decided?
"And you'll apprentice with T&I," Sensei finished, turning to look at him. "That's a very Yamanaka thing to do, T&I, and those skills are transferable to just about any other specialty if you decide on something else later."
"But—" Ibiki said. "It will only have been a year!" It had only been six months, now.
Sensei, finally, sagged. "I know. And I know it's not fair, but all of you have done—are doing—really good diplomacy work, which will help all of you out in your future professions. I can't explain why, but I need to be somewhere else, and I won't be able to maintain a genin team. Shit, I'm not sure I'll even be able to keep being your Sensei until then."
"But you've always been busy!" Misaki argued. "Why do we have to change?"
Sensei didn't answer, just grunted.
"Does it have to do with Water?" Ibiki asked. He'd watched the direction her slugs went. She gave him a sharp glance, but didn't respond to him either.
"Look," Sensei said, "None of you are going to be combatants, so really all of your jobs—medical, law enforcement, T&I—could have just started straight from the Academy, except we needed more diplomacy ninja and so here we are. Now you can all be diplomacy ninja whenever we need one in a pinch, and otherwise this year has just been a bit of a… detour. You're good kids, the lot of you," Sensei coughed, just once, "and so I'm going to make sure you give a good showing at the exams. We'll start with twenty laps around the town—go! Go! Go!"
As Ibiki ran, he pretended the wind was what made his nose burn, his eyes water.
It just—
Didn't seem fair.
.
Ren didn't have time to deal with the Hyuuga—not with his recent promotion, with the workload which had just been dumped onto his lap, with the upset Uchiha making snide comments just within earshot—but, well.
Most of the Hyuuga he hated interacting with weren't exactly alive.
Had died in the byoki attack.
And the Hyuuga twins—and you could only tell which one was Clan Head by how they wore their leaf symbols—were far more amenable to his demands than they'd ever been.
So he didn't have time, but he made some anyway, because getting their existing seal out of use as fast as possible could only be a good thing.
When Co-Head Uchiha caught him popping an energy pill, he'd asked if sleep issues were genetic.
Rento had no idea.
Perhaps they were.
He hadn't, however, spent all that much time thinking about genetics since aunt Sakura (and what had she suspected, exactly?) had steered him away from Orochimaru, towards Weapons and Materials Research?
And now he was Deputy Head.
He understood why so many people thought it was a nepotism promotion.
It was a nepotism promotion, for one thing, or at least had elements of one.
From the minute he'd gone into research, everyone had watched him twice because of who his aunt was. It had barely taken any effort on his part at all to get promoted to chuunin—he'd submitted an idea, it had worked, and he was promoted.
He knew that for most others it wasn't nearly that easy, that for most others it was months if not years of effort, of trying to stand out enough that others in the department took notice, helped you out.
He'd gotten help right off the bat.
Of course, he'd also worked hard.
Had to, really, with so many eyes on him. With so much help.
It would've been insulting to every single person who had taught him, leant him a hand, even every single person who was passed over because of his familial connection, if he didn't give his job everything he had.
And so he had.
And, as it turned out, his expertise was in the one thing that his aunt was notoriously bad at (by the standards of the Research Department, anyway): fuuinjutsu.
And fuuinjutsu was definitely going through something of a renaissance, incited by the need to replicate at least some of what Uzugakure had accomplished, to regain at least some of what was lost.
And now Rento was redesigning a seal for use by the Hyuuga.
Well, three seals, actually—after the attack, the Nara and Akimichi wanted their own tracking seals too—but if the family didn't have an eye-related bloodline then the selawork was much more simple, so it was only the byakugan that was giving him trouble.
He would figure it out, though.
He had to.
.
Just as the first tendrils of spring began to appear from the ground, the first new reports came.
They at once satisfied and worried Minato.
"At the speed the pox is moving…" he trailed off, looking at another letter from an informant in Wind Country, one who had been helpful enough to draw some of the giant 'Keep out! Plague!' signs which stood in front of all three cities he'd tried to sell his goods in.
"It's deadly, it's catching, and we have the vaccine," Hospital Head Nara said.
"We do, but do we have enough for every Fire resident?"
They both knew they didn't.
Even at the highest rate of production—which they had been at, since Jiraiya and Tsunade had holed up with the false body clones for two weeks and figured it out—they would only be able to, at best, vaccinate a quarter of the country by the year's end.
And the plague was to arrive in weeks, not months.
"And then there's the international chuunin exam," the Hospital Head said.
"Yes," Minato agreed absentmindedly. It was, based on all reports, a very, very good thing that they'd already started vaccine production. They'd even sent genin teams out to all of the major cities to mass-vaccinate many people at once, had several teams going from town to town along the more popular trade routes vaccinating people there too.
People who had Fire citizenship didn't have to pay.
It would put them into even more trouble from a financial perspective, but they didn't have the people to lose—
Debt was possible; life after death wasn't.
(Probably.
(And even if Minato had some ideas on how he could pull it off with the right seals, now wasn't the time.)
"I wonder…" Minato said. He pulled out one of the recent Research proposals, this one from chuunin Erigami, and skimmed. "I wonder if you could prevent germs from going through?"
"Some sort of non-living requirement?" The Hospital Head suggested. "Would limit use, but that would be useful enough even without it."
"True," Minato said, and then suddenly remembered that they'd been in the middle of a meeting when they'd been interrupted by the reports. "Right, you were saying? About the dialogue between us and the Capital's University?"
"Oh, yes. They had some interesting ideas about the effect of cleanliness…"
