They were sent to the lambing barn today.

Kosei loved the lambing barn, was already very good at bottle-feeding the orphans, didn't mind the noise, but today he was… distracted.

So was Kaede.

Itoku should have been next to them, shoveling out feed while Kosei fed and Kaede cleaned.

He wasn't.

Inuzuka Hige was nice enough, but not Itoku.

And then—

Itoku was there.

He was running, grabbing a broom, dusting the floors. "Sorry I'm late, guys," he said.

But he didn't explain why, didn't say anything else.

They went to Kaede's afterwards.

Kaede's mom served tea then left them alone.

"They—" Itoku started. He seemed… not unhappy. More, disbelieving. "They asked if, if I wanted… another job. A secret job, on top of bodyguard."

He did not elaborate.

Kosei smiled anyway, because Itoku was smiling at them, was trying to suppress how happy he was.

Kaede still asked. "Doing what?"

"They told me about it," Itoku said. Stopped. Kaede and Kosei got the message.

"I told you, didn't I? I told you that you needed to try harder?"

Itoku flushed.

"How will they pay you?" Kaede asked, because money isn't secret.

"They told me that too," Itoku said. Doesn't elaborate.

He's smiling, though.

Smiling, and Kaede hadn't expected this, hadn't expected—

But it makes sense, doesn't it?

Ninja.

Secrets.

And Kaede wondered if the reverse was true, too, if there was a ninja job that was actually just farming.

…It wouldn't hurt to ask.

.

Konoha didn't take in all orphans, but ever since sealing had begun to be industrialized—now that ink and paper and education was so much easier to produce en masse—the Hidden Leaf Village did take an awful lot of them.

Utatane Akihiro, loyal genin of the leaf, yelped as a five-year-old's elbow dug into his back.

"Sorry, sir!" The child shouted, scampering further back into the railcar. They were almost full up, now—dozens of kids from across Leaf's larger north-western towns. (Smaller places… they didn't get orphans from them. Either they were noticed too late, or else someone in the village took them in, had them work. Sometimes they were sent onwards, to the towns, and Konoha collected them then. Otherwise… there was some comfort in the familiar, Akihiro supposed, and even if your parents were dead you might still have other family to rely on. So they stayed, didn't become ninja, and Akihiro felt sorry for them.)

"Is that it?" Akihiro asked. Sensei, stepping into the car, nodded.

His teammates were on the roof, playing lookout, and Akihiro tried not to get too excited.

It was probably nothing that Sensei set up two watchers instead of just one, after all.

Probably nothing.

But Akihiro was itching for a fight, itching for anything other than the monotonous drudgery of collecting just-potty-trained kids, and so he couldn't stop the adrenaline from leaking.

(This, in hindsight, was probably why Sensei didn't give him first watch.)

An hour passed, and Sensei still required two watchers, and didn't even pretend to relax, and Akihiro—he just knew, that around the next bend, the next fork, there'd be enemies.

Another hour passed.

Sensei switched with the two genin, had him and her keep watch, and usually Sensei didn't keep watch at all, just had them do it, and he knew—

Except.

Except there, in the distance, was Konoha's station.

And Akihiro's stomach began to sink.

And there, on another track, was an utter wreck of a train, almost not worth still keeping the title.

And Akihiro's last hope was crushed.

Their train rolled to a stop, and a bunch of adults and other genin were around, were ready to grab the kids and settle them in while Akihiro's team reported mission complete, and Akihiro glared resentfully at the train scraps on the neighboring track.

Some people had all the luck.

.

There were signs that Orochimaru might be back in Suna. Hizashi scanned the rest of the encoded note, grinding his teeth as he read.

'Signs'.

What did that even mean?

Jiraiya, probably.

It was usually Jiraiya.

Jiraiya did this, that, or the other, and—

And what?

And reported that Orochimaru was headed east again?

That much was obvious.

The man had kept on lurking in Wind so long for a reason; he clearly wasn't about to abandon this side of the continent.

And yet—

And yet no details.

Nothing to work off of.

He watched, still staring at the note, as the rest of his team began to fidget.

Passed the scroll off to one of the Inuzuka.

Stared at the vast empty nothing that surrounded them.

"No change to our plan?" she asked, finishing the note.

'Plan'.

Another nonsense word.

They were basically just walking on top of every inch of Wind, hoping that eventually some sort of sign would appear, point the way to the man who had tried to murder Hizashi's brother.

…He needed to calm down.

"Yes, we'll continue," he said.

Within, the battle continued to rage.

.

Ibiki had just started on summoning his fireflies—they love the chakra, eat it up, get stronger, but they are still miniscule individually, and so every day he spends half an hour summoning two hundred one by one, allowing most to gorge themselves and return home while keeping a select few for himself while his aunt walks around him on her way to work, muttering about repetitive movements and carpal tunnel—when he heard his aunt coming downstairs.

Well, good.

That was his plan, right?

(Right?)

And then the next thing he hears she's outside and—

"Hey," he said. "Um, wait a minute."

His aunt stopped. Waited.

And that means he couldn't.

"I—um." Could postpone, though. "Is there a time we could talk?"

"Now works," Aunt Sakura said, like she knew exactly what he's thinking. "And I think it works for you, too, right? You don't have work until the afternoon."

He hated that she knew that.

Summoned another firefly.

"I just. Wanted to talk to you. Um, about my dad."

"Oh. Yeah, we can do that." She gestured—"how many more do you have to summon?"

Ibiki does the math in his head, accounts for the fact that he's more distracted than usual today. "Fifty?"

"Alright, come inside when you're done," his aunt said, and then walked inside like she wasn't supposed to already be at work.

Ibiki took his time with the last fifty, does an extra ten just to be sure. Most of his fireflies are already gone, already full, but two stay, secure themselves in the helix of his ear.

He went inside.

Aunt Sakura had made tea.

"I don't know much," she started, so he didn't have to. "Your mother never gave very many details. I think… she was embarrassed."

Ibiki nodded, understood. His mother had been young, very young, when she'd had him, so that was unsurprising.

"He was a boy from the Land of Swamps," she said next, and Ibiki tried to picture his western father, tried to remember if he'd met anyone from the Land of Swamps before. "He was a manual laborer, with no education." Not a ninja. Surprising. Ibiki had always pictured him as a ninja. "By the time she'd realized she was pregnant he'd left to help his family with cranberry growing, and wasn't supposed to be back until the fall."

"By which point kaa-san left."

"Yes."

It…

His father…

Didn't know.

Not didn't know in the way Ibiki had always suspected, hearing his mom's friends speak of him. He actually didn't know. Ibiki—it hadn't really... occurred to him that that was a possibility. He'd just thought, ninja, right? He had to have known.

But.

Not ninja.

Didn't know.

And Ibiki—

.

Sizuki grimaced, reading the note the runner had handed to him. One of his student's fathers had committed suicide, too bereaved after his wife's passing to think clearly, and the child was being moved into his aunt's home, would be back in school by the end of the week.

He hated the many tragedies his students had to suffer, the very many ways their lives were imperfect.

But that didn't mean he wouldn't give his kids the best childhoods he could.

He stood, moving to the window. It was still early enough that only a couple academy students were hanging around the yard; mostly civilian-born kids who couldn't train at home. He watched as they raced up, down, and around the jungle gym, yelling fake ninjutsu out as they played.

They were young, and he couldn't really see them as adults yet, but his oldest students were already chuunin, were wearing vests and hitai-ate proudly, were self-sufficient and calm under pressure.

Sizuki leapt out of the window, making sure to keep himself unseen as he moved to where the kids were. He could only see two of his students playing: a civilian girl with shockingly competent taijutsu and his newly-minted Nara student, Kumiko.

Kumiko was, interestingly, the only one who noticed his presence, who felt him standing on 'her' grass and looked up.

He smiled, though she could not see it, and stepped onto the track instead, making himself invisible to her.

She frowned.

Handy, that.

He'd have to figure out how to incorporate it into tracking and concealment training… without letting any other student notice.

But the Nara kids, of course.

He was reasonably sure they either already knew or else couldn't be bothered to figure it out.

The kids, from closer up, had clearly tired of generic ninja play. Instead Kumiko and an Akimichi boy were having a fake 'wedding' that the other kids had to protect from invisible attackers.

Sizuki, recently dumped, would have preferred a different subject matter.

The sun had finally risen enough to turn the whole sky blue, and Sizuki noticed the Ame trio approaching.

…He knew they had Jiraiya's support.

Knew they were tested by the Yamanaka.

Infiltration wasn't his worry.

His worry was how they didn't seem to have any loyalty to Konoha, how they held themselves like they were in, at best, neutral territory.

Sizuki turned to look at them when—

"Kakashi-Sensei!" several students shouted.

Hatake Kakashi slouched into the jungle gym.

"Alright, what do you want to learn today?"

The kids had clearly been informed of the rules, because they didn't start immediately begging for ninjutsu; instead, shouts about shuriken-practice, taijutsu, and trap-setting overlapped.

"Yeah, alright," Kakashi said. "I think we haven't done trap-setting before." Even as he began to lead them to the copse of trees on Academy property, he briefly doubled, and shortly after an invisible version of him was standing next to Sizuki.

"Hello, Sensei," the boy said. "Sorry about stealing your students."

"It's fine," Sizuki said. It wasn't as if it was class time. "I didn't know you were interested in tutoring additional students?"

There was a long silence.

"I… may have done something that upset my Sensei," he admitted. "This and paperwork is my punishment."

Sizuki winced. He quite liked teaching, but he knew more combat-focused kids tended to find it mind-numbing. "Sorry about that."

He sensed the boy shrug. "I deserve it."

"Have you noticed anything about the kids you'd like to bring to my attention?"

The boy hummed, then began listing off certain attributes he'd observed.

Sizuki smiled. Most he—and the other kids' teachers—would likely already know, but how academy students acted around the clan head was no doubt quite different to how they acted during class time, and he'd take any advantage he could get.

And then, of course, the sirens started going off.