Ibiki grinned at Hoku as he sat down.
Most of the other prisoners had… an opinion. About him.
Some, most, just wanted to avoid him.
Others—few, but problematically many—were straight-up angry at him.
Had been taken down by shinobi, maybe even shinobi as young as him.
Maybe even him.
They didn't like him, didn't like shinobi, wanted to take it out on him.
And then there was Hoku.
Hoku just saw him as a child.
Knew that he was a child trained in chakra, a deadly sort—
But still a child.
He'd sat next to Ibiki the first day, when Ibiki first came to the cafeteria.
Made sure the riskier-looking inmates left him alone.
Ibiki appreciated it.
"Hey, Hoku!"
"Hello, Ibiki. Think you're doing well?"
Ibiki shrugged. "Who knows? It's T&I."
Hoku snorted. He probably knew better than Ibiki—he'd apparently developed something of a reputation for looking after the T&I apprentices. "Easier to tell when you've got something to hide, I'd say."
Because most T&I recruits were given information to hide, to make sure no one got.
Ibiki'd skipped that step—he had Yamanaka-clan training, which meant that it "wasn't worth the effort."
Ibiki shrugged again. "I'm happy."
Hoku smiled. "Plus you got the easiest of the prison options, right?"
"Right. You don't agree?"
Hoku pursed his lips. Paused to eat some more rice. "Yes? I guess so, anyway. The last T&I recruit said he was hoping for the foreign-nin prison, because they treat you really well when they think you have information… but he also said once you ran out of it, or just refused to give up any knowledge, everything got a lot less kind."
Ibiki considered that. "Maybe," he said.
"You don't agree?"
"I've heard that's what Kumo does. Suna, too, or at least that's what the rumors say. Iwa, though, they treat foreign-nin real nice—they want them to entice other people to, like, defect too."
"Do you know what Konoha does?"
"I think officially we do the second. I haven't heard from anyone who's gone through it, though."
"So you think it's a lie?"
Ibiki shrugged. "Dunno. Iwa doesn't let foreign-nin into their hidden village, either, so… dunno."
Hoku grinned. "Do you think I'm one of your instructors? The guy… three back, did."
Ibiki considered. The thing about Hoku, though, was that he wasn't very 'shinobi'. The firefly larva reported that he didn't seem to have trained chakra, he was pretty overweight without any clear bloodline to explain such, and he didn't seem particularly perceptive.
On the other hand, he was nice. He spend a lot of time talking to Ibiki, befriending him.
Ibiki remembered his Yamanaka lessons well. That was exactly the most effective sort of information gathering.
"No, not really. I mean, they might be watching my interactions with you and stuff like that, but I don't think you're a ninja yourself… might be an informant, though."
"I was, you know," Hoku poked at his empty plate. "Before."
Ibiki made what he hoped was an appropriately sympathetic noise; he didn't really know what Hoku was convicted of, but as far as he could tell the man had been in prison for at least ten years and didn't seem to be acting like he'd leave in the future either.
Ibiki wondered if this was the test—pushing for information, for Hoku's official conviction and why he'd been charged—but that felt… wrong.
He didn't ask, instead, because Hoku was pretty uncomfortable whenever it came up.
On the left side of the cafeteria, more guards began filing in—it was time for the open-air rotations to begin.
.
Erigami's device was finally complete.
They wished Sakura had been around to see it, but missions waited for no one.
Instead they presented to all the other Department Heads, placing two heavily-sealed boxes on opposite sides of the room then placing a hammer on one of the seals.
"You activate it by pressing this seal—as you can see, the seal is only one way." They pressed, pushing their chakra out (it was, unfortunately, exceptionally chakra-intensive, but… well, they doubted anyone would find it that easy to complain.)
The gasps were music to his ears.
"Is it—a body flicker technique for objects?" the Finance Head asked.
"Is it based on the Hokage's new hiraishin jutsu and seal?" the Commander asked.
"Yes, Hokage-sama created the majority of the necessary seal work. That said, these are very different seals. As you know, Hokage-sama has been unable to teach anybody else how to use his technique. This seal can be used by anyone—with sufficient chakra—as long as the boxes are within twenty-six and a third kilometers. The seal also only works on non-living things—even plants cannot be transported by the seal. It just… doesn't work." Which was true, but also—they hadn't tried very hard. It was a lot easier to reduce risk when living cells couldn't be transported.
"Still insanely useful," the Commerce Head murmured. "Insanely. I—oh, there are so many applications."
"How easy would it be for someone to make a copy using only the finished product?" the Commander asked.
Erigami grinned. "Very, very difficult. Downright impossible, I'd say."
.
Sakura squinted. "Is he… alive?"
"He was, definitely," Minato said. "And his body still is. His mind… yeah, that's gone."
"I wonder what his name was?"
Minato winced.
The—the man, it was a man (it was once a man)—writhed.
"Oh, that's bad."
"Tsunade's been working with me, but we're in agreement now—there's no bringing him back."
Which not only meant the man was gone—in and of itself not good—but also that they could gather no more information about how this had come to pass.
"Kushina must not be taking this well."
"…yeah. It's all I can do to get her to visit Konoha; if Kakashi wasn't there I think she'd just have moved here. It… it's not doing her well, to see… this."
"And the beast? Is it…"
Minato grimaced. "If it's any more sane than… than him, then we can't tell."
Sakura frowned. "Which means very little, given how little we know about the tailed beasts to begin with."
"Well, yeah."
"What's the plan, then?"
"The most important thing is that no one not loyal to Konoha can ever know." Because, of course, people would not react well if Konoha turned out to have three tailed beasts—the two they already had was enough that, until the plague diverted their plans, all three remaining major villages had been planning to destroy Konoha.
A third?
From Kiri, the hidden village Konoha had completely eviscerated (according to Konoha's own propaganda)?
That would have… very negative effects.
"But there's no way his body will live much longer."
"Well, no. That's—Tsunade's been working with me since Kiri's defeat, trying to… I mean, ideally, contain the beast in some manner that doesn't involve a human being. And, ideally, would allow us to communicate with it."
"Ideally."
"It's possible!"
"I'm not saying it's not… but you aim high, don't you?"
Minato grinned. "So do you."
.
Kohana rolled her neck. She was happy to be back in Uzu, happy to be back to normal.
She was… recovered.
(Mostly.)
And she was back to work, which was great.
Mostly.
There were, however, downsides.
One downside: the Kurosoki family.
They'd been Mist immigrants.
They'd also been Mist criminals.
A whole crime family, and now they had settled in place enough that they were trying to set up shop in Uzu.
Which was… unacceptable.
And Kohana had basically entrenched herself, at this point, as the de-facto 'leader' of Konoha's clans in Uzu (the Uchiha would no doubt be coming for that position soon enough, but their clan leader's push for them to return to Konoha had so far stayed their hand).
So people kept coming to her and asking what the Yamanaka were going to do about it.
Which…
Kohana had absolutely no clue what she wanted to do about it, and Inoichi was on a mission, and Sakura was on a mission, and the Hokage was busy, and all the Konoha Departments were restructuring, and—
And really, this was just something the stupid Uchiha should be dealing with!
Not the Yamanaka!
(She'd asked the Uchiha. They hadn't been eager.)
She grit her teeth.
People were stupid.
People were stupid, and Kohana couldn't leave things as they were.
The problem: what the Kurosoki family was doing danced around the legal threshold.
Technically, officially, stores paid them for 'protection.'
Protection from them went unsaid.
The problem was proving it.
And that, that was why everyone had gone to the Yamanaka.
It had taken more than a little paperwork (paperwork that Kohana had more or less figured out herself, because Inoichi was still busy, still in Kiri, and the elders were occupied with keeping everything else running), but Kohana had managed to complete the forms to allow a Yamanaka to 'examine' a civilian criminal.
(Usually it wasn't considered worth the resources, which… fair, for some crimes, but also there was just so much evidence that the Kurosaki family had started killing store owners that refused to pay for 'protection').
Now Kohana sat in a chair along one of the Uchiha police building's hallways, waiting for her… fifth cousin? To finish his work.
She'd promised to send him back to Konoha by the end of the day, and there was only an hour and forty-seven minutes left before it technically become tomorrow.
She listened to the papers rustling, to the incomprehensible yelling of someone who was being put in the drunk tank.
There weren't many people working this late, just the jail guards and the patrol officers.
They left her alone; she'd been there when their shift started, which meant she wasn't their business.
(As far as she could tell.)
When she was younger—
That felt stupid to say.
She was still young.
But, it was true.
When she was younger, she'd watched her younger sister Sakura running around, doing one hundred and eighty-two things, and she'd wondered how she managed it.
Now she knew:
She didn't.
Sakura, like Kohana, just tried to do what she could, and hoped that whatever plates that got dropped during the mad dash weren't too important.
(She did not want to be in charge of the Yamanaka territory in Uzu. She definitely did not want to be the de facto leader of Kaiso. For some reason, though, whenever she told people that they just seemed all the more eager to force her into leadership roles.)
She wasn't a kunoichi.
Everybody—every single person—that was in a remotely-similar position to hers was a ninja.
Not her.
She knew a lot of people (even a lot of her own kin) didn't believe it, assumed that she was just ANBU, or something, but it was true.
She was not a kunoichi.
She jerked, stood as her Yamanaka kin and the detective left the interrogation room, their mouths set such that it was clear they'd gotten exactly the information they expected to.
She looked into the room, saw the Kurosoki man glaring at her.
She was not a kunoichi.
But maybe it was time to start learning some more self-defense.
