Please leave a comment or PM if you have any questions, suggestions, concerns, or just compliments. For the sake of this work, the elemental balance will go earth}lightning}water}fire}wind. Thanks to SmallFountainPen for betaing chapters 57-73. Thanks to SoaringJe for betaing beginning with chapter 116.
Once, when Rin was much, much younger, her father had taken her to the balcony of their apartment, cradling her against his hip, and pointed out the houses in the distance.
"One day," he'd said, "you'll own one of those. You'll be rich, and strong, and you'll know so much, and anything you want to do you'll do." He'd smiled at her, smiled so wide. "You'll do so, so much. Your mother and I know that. You're such a good child, such a smart child, and your mother and I will make absolutely sure you get every opportunity. And you'll take every opportunity, and you'll be perfect." Her parents had been, after all, relatively uneducated. Her father had married into their clan, an uneducated man from a small Fire village who hadn't even been fluent in Kunise at the time, and her mother had struggled too much in the Academy (even with clan help) to remain until graduation. And so, when she started to grow up—when her father saw her—when they'd seen just how much she could do, they'd decided that would be exactly what she would do.
Everything.
Rin knew why that memory stuck with her so much.
The next week her father was diagnosed with cancer.
Some cancers, Rin now knew, were curable.
Many early-diagnosed cancers, actually, had become curable in the time since, as they'd figured out how to cut out the bad bits and burn out the bad cells with chakra. It was a horrible, long, painful treatment—months and months of work, but it was worth it, to survive.
But when she was little, when she was six—
Cancer had meant death.
And her father had cancer.
She'd watched, in the coming months, as her father lost more and more weight, slept longer and longer, stopped being able to eat at all.
She'd watched as he died.
Her mother—
She'd lost herself, for a few months, after that.
Kind-of fell into a fog that she didn't start clawing her way out of until she realized she'd forgotten Rin's birthday.
Been okay with the day-to-day stuff, with pushing through work and putting food on the table, but always went to bed hours early, never did anything more than what she had to do.
In the meantime, though, Rin had kept dreaming about that day on the balcony.
On what her father had expected of her.
It had become kind of an obsession, during the Academy, to do her best, be her best, be at the top of the class, prove her father right.
He'd never see her achieve anything, but she would.
She would.
…And she'd do it by being a medic, by curing the very disease that had killed her father.
(She didn't know how, even now. His cancer remained one of those that was almost never diagnosed quickly enough to stop. But she'd figure it out.)
In the meantime, in the meantime Rin would live up to her father's expectations in other ways. Would take on his expectations with pride, and surpass them, and not struggle under the weight, not stay up some nights wondering if she was doing enough, if she could keep up her current momentum.
She was standing, now, dressed in Konoha's new medical-nin dress uniform. Kakashi was to her left dressed in what he'd haltingly admitted was the Hatake Head haori. Obito stood to her right with a black bandana around his eyes—he'd wanted to 'freak people out'—and the standard Uchiha formalwear, which he'd actually forgotten to pack but thankfully another Uchiha of his build had a spare set.
She and Obito were eighteen now, were old enough to have finished their growing, old enough to no longer result in double-takes.
Kakashi was thirteen.
His voice squeaked no matter how much he tried not to let it, he had acne and body hair that he was equally powerless against, and he had such a bad growth spurt last month that he'd had to completely re-learn his balancing and taijutsu.
The three of them, together, each in different dress, none anywhere near as old as the other representatives behind them—
The three of them were the primary representatives of Konoha.
Obito would be emphasizing Konoha's sealing aptitude.
Kakashi would be emphasizing Konoha's martial aptitude.
Rin would be emphasizing Konoha's medical aptitude.
And their ages—their ages would emphasize that Minato's generation did not make up the last flames of Konoha; the village hidden in the leaves was still burning bright and would do so for generations to come, so Iwa had made the right—had made the only—choice.
Rin smiled as the doors to Iwa opened, picturing her father's pride if he saw her now.
She might not yet be living up to his expectations, but it was a good start.
.
Konoha may have just become best friends with Iwa, but that did not mean they were experiencing peace.
Why would it?
Shikaku glared at the stupid Lightning mountains, daring them to give up.
The mountains didn't even flinch.
The attack force running full tilt towards the frontline a mere five hundred meters in front of him seemed similarly undeterred.
Well, let's see how they felt about Konoha's new surprises.
(In truth, they would have liked to give it some more time, some more training.
(In truth, they'd certainly rushed things in their drive to respond to Kumo's sudden aggression following their—as it turns out quite temporary—disengagement following the public announcement of the Iwa/Konoha alliance.
(In truth, this had been the quick solution, the solution easiest to implement, but that did not mean it was the best.)
There was a flash of blinding light, and then in front of Hyuuga Kurushimi a massive white bear appeared, roared.
And Shikaku watched with no small satisfaction as the whole Kumo force hesitated, watched with no small satisfaction as Konoha took advantage of the reaction, downed multiple foes in the millisecond before they remembered they'd just entered pitch battle.
And the bear—
The polar bear—
Ten feet tall and eager for a fight—
Dove in.
(Kurushimi was as-yet the only Konohan who had managed to convince a polar bear to fight alongside him. He'd come back from the spirit realm scarred and starved, but he'd also come back with a summon no one else could lay claim to.
(Shikaku was more than happy to leave the polar bears to him.)
In about half an hour the next summoners would be sent in—four grizzly summoners who would come along the edges of the battle, hunt down Kumo-nin who were attempting to sneak by.
It would be violent.
It would be deadly.
It would be effective.
And all of this—
All of this carnage—
That was only the distraction.
That was only the quick, easy-to-implement solution.
Shikaku's grin widened, and he turned to head back to the Central Tent.
Kumo had sent a great deal of infiltrators in the past months, and not all of them had been completely successful remaining uncaptured.
Which meant Konoha had information.
Kumo had been careful, thought ahead—these infiltrators weren't told anything that Kumo wasn't comfortable getting out.
But that's the thing about the infiltrators: they were Kumo-nin.
They might not have been told anything, but they lived in Kumogakure. They had friends, some with looser lips than others, and families, who were much the same, and workplaces, where—shockingly, completely unexpectedly, who could have guessed—people again spoke more freely than they would if they were in enemy territory.
And now Konoha knew things.
Not as much as they'd like, it was true, but Konoha had something every other hidden village did not: Konoha had the Yamanaka clan.
In the past, only knowledge that was truly tactically interesting was considered, but it was never the only information Konoha gleaned.
And now—
Now—
It was time for Konoha to use that information too.
Even as Kumo and Konoha clashed on the battlefields, Konoha's summoned finches flitted by well out of sight, each and every one having the coloring of a native Lightning bird and a tiny little paper storage seal painstakingly clutched in their digits.
Even as Kumo scrambled to deal with Konoha's new bear compatriots, the birds would fly to one village or another, detach the seal, allow it to touch dirt and in doing so self-immolate, leaving behind only a pamphlet of Kumo secrets.
Leaving behind only a little bit of psychological warfare.
And then the birds would reverse-summon, and Kumo—
Kumo would have to deal with the consequences.
(If this worked—
(Really truly worked—
(Then warfare would change forever.
(Konoha would have summons indistinguishable from native fauna, and seals that were by their nature un-copyable, and the ability to make far more, and far more dangerous seals in the future.
(Kumo… Kumo had several anti-summons approaches, all of which were by necessity or by their quantity confined to the hidden village and the Capital, with sensors at the border as the only other tool.
(Even their fancy blood-identification sealing system only worked for people; summons slipped by completely unnoticed, a fact which Konoha had used before.)
And so Shikaku was more than happy to start using the bears before they became the far deadlier wall of force that enough summoners would allow them to be.
The bears, after all, were nothing—
Nothing compared to what Konoha could do.
And the longer it took for Kumo to realize that, the more secrets that got out before Kumo even had any idea anything was wrong—the better.
If the birds were able to leave information, after all…
Then they were also able to take it.
The only thing Shikaku disliked was playing their hand as much as they were, leaving the information at all, but Minato wanted this war over, and that meant Kumo had to realize that something was wrong now, not months into the future.
.
It really, truly wasn't fair.
It had been a coin flip. Akihiro had seen it himself—his team and Team Eleven had both shown up at the same time for one last mission before the internal promotion tests and the chuunin assignment registrar looked back and forth between the two of them, before shrugging and handing out two scrolls at the same time, clearly uncaring of which team got which.
They'd just been unlucky:
Team Eleven went to Frost to fight against Kumo,
And they went to Iwa.
To be 'diplomatic' and show Konoha's 'confederate' spirit.
Bah!
They were ninja; they were deadly assassins of the highest order!
…And now Akihiro was dressed up all formal, and Sensei was glaring at him, and he was supposed to be watching the kabuki show, but he didn't want to be watching a kabuki show!
Akihiro wanted to be running, fighting, killing, throwing around jutsu as easy as breathing!
His cousin Asahi had fought on that train that was attacked, and loads of people had died!
And another cousin—he'd had his whole right arm chopped off, just last month! Akihiro had seen him in the hospital, working with a physical therapist on how to move all his fingers again, and the massive scar at his shoulder—it was the coolest thing Akihiro had ever seen!
And here Akihiro sat.
Listening to music and watching people dance.
Awful.
Out of the corner of his eye—because he wasn't allowed to look away from the performance—he could see one of the Hokage's students. Akihiro knew exactly who Hatake Kakashi was: he was the container of the Six Tails.
Just think about that!
What Hatake Kakashi could do with that power!
Akihiro bet he was always on the frontlines, tearing down enemies in every direction. Really, everybody in Iwa should be running and screaming!
…Except that they were allies now.
Of course.
Kiri gone before he was even out of the Academy—
Suna and Iwa allies—
There was only Kumo left.
Only Kumo.
(And, maybe, the westerners, but who cared about then?)
Maybe when he was chuunin he could manage to convince somebody to let him see a fight, but—
Well, the thing was…
The problem was…
The hangup was…
Akihiro wasn't actually very good at fighting, really.
Didn't have the talent for it, according to his Academy teachers. His Sensei. Even his own clan.
He'd try, and try, and try, and his kata were perfect, and he'd spend hours working on every jutsu anybody would teach him—
And then he'd be fighting, and he just wouldn't win.
No matter how hard he tried, no matter how many hours he put in—
His mom's younger brother (not an uncle, because uncles were nice) had once told him he had the battle-sense of a blind robin.
Nobody wanted him anywhere near fighting, and Akihiro had been asking. The Security Bureau didn't want him, said he could test if he wanted but they already knew he'd fail. The Pursuit Bureau didn't want him either—"you have to be able to defend yourself!"
The less said about Operations the better.
He'd even talked to the Detention Bureau, because prisons had to have some excitement some of the time, but they had been lukewarm at best, said he was considering them for the wrong reasons.
And everybody, absolutely everybody, wouldn't shut up about how he needed to make a choice.
Start studying.
Start talking to them about taking on an apprenticeship until he could test into employment.
But the only thing Akihiro wanted to do was fight.
And the only people who said "there's no way" were the combat divisions.
Everybody started laughing, but Akihiro hadn't been paying enough attention to know why. He laughed anyway—Sensei might kill him if he didn't.
Uchiha were like that.
What else was there, but fighting?
That's why he'd wanted to be a ninja, after all.
That's still why he wanted to be a ninja.
And he was good at the kata! And the jutsu! And even weapons training! He was good at everything! Absolutely everything!
…Until the spar started.
Then he sucked.
They'd be here for a week, then they'd take the slow route home.
Back in Konoha by the end of the month.
And then—
And then it was testing, and promotion.
Akihiro had run out of time.
He'd run out of time, and he'd run out of all the ways to delay acknowledging the obvious:
He would not be allowed to fight, and that would never, ever change.
Akihiro laughed, and for the first time since before the Academy he actually wanted to cry.