Tora the cat was an S-rank demon wearing a bell.
Officially, Tora was a pampered pet with a tracking ribbon and a "gentle temperament." Unofficially, I was on my fourth sticky-ink tag of the week and my patience had spiritually flatlined.
"Okay," I muttered, pressing the paper to the wall of a narrow alley. "Tag number four. If this doesn't work, I'm declaring war on the Daimyō's wife."
The seal flared faintly under my palm as my chakra sank into it. When I pulled my hand back, the patch of brick just above ground level felt subtly wrong—tacky, like paint that hadn't dried.
"SYLVIE!" Naruto's voice echoed somewhere ahead. "HE WENT THIS WAY!"
No kidding.
I shoved my glasses up my nose and jogged toward the sound, sandals slapping the cobbles. My light brown hair stuck to the back of my neck in sweaty curls. The fake schoolgirl top—white with pink trim, one size too big—flapped annoyingly around my hips, and my dark pink shorts kept trying to slide down despite the black belt cinched tight.
Note to self: next mission pay goes to clothes that actually fit.
We burst into the alley at the same time, from opposite ends. Naruto skidded around the corner, wild blond spikes, orange eyesore of a jacket, arms out like he could just grab air and have it turn into cat.
"I SEE YOU, YOU FURRY MENACE!" he shouted.
Tora streaked past me in a blur of white and brown and homicidal intent. The cat had that special, vibrating fury only rich people's pets and feral gods possessed.
"Left wall!" I yelled.
Tora leapt, aiming for his usual escape route: a neat little series of crates leading up to a windowsill. Instead of launching off the brick, he hit my seal.
There was a tiny, satisfying sound when his paws met chakra-infused ink.
Tora stuck.
For half a second.
Then all hell broke loose.
The cat twisted, hissed, and detonated into pure weaponized fluff. He ripped free with the kind of strength you only got from generations of inbreeding and rich-person food. Naruto lunged, arms outstretched—
"GOTCHA—OWOWOWOWOW—"
He did, technically, catch Tora.
Tora also caught him. With every single claw.
By the time the dust settled, Naruto had the cat in a victory grip and approximately thirty new scratches on his face, arms, and stomach. Tora looked like someone had personally insulted his ancestors.
"All part of the plan," Naruto wheezed, staggering toward me. "Totally worth it."
I winced and reached for my little medical pouch.
"Hold still," I said.
He grinned. "You gonna heal me with your weird art jutsu?"
"Going to try," I corrected. "Emphasis on 'try.'"
I dabbed ointment on the worst of the scratches and pulsed a bit of chakra under the skin, coaxing the torn tissue to knit a little faster. It was basic, clumsy stuff—couple of Academy-level techniques plus anything I'd spied from hospital medics—but it helped.
Naruto flinched and yelped. "IT BURNS—WHY DOES IT BURN?!"
"Because infection is worse," I said sweetly. "And because Tora hates you on a spiritual level."
The cat hissed in agreement.
We did that dance a lot.
Catching Tora. Returning Tora. Listening to the Daimyō's wife sob about "my precious angel." Watching Naruto get emotionally and physically mauled by six kilos of cat.
Between that, we got the full buffet of D-rank misery.
We weeded a field for an old farmer whose chakra felt like dry soil and disappointment.Naruto complained the entire time.
"Why are we doing this?" he groaned, yanking a stubborn root with all the subtlety of a demolition jutsu. "I'm gonna be Hokage, not a gardener!"
"You're not even doing it right," I said, kneeling nearby. Sweat dripped down my temple. My glasses kept sliding. My hands ached. "You're just ripping the tops off. They'll grow back."
"They fear me too much to grow back!"
"Plants don't have fear, Naruto."
"Then what do they have?"
"Better work ethic than you."
He sputtered. "HEY—"
I sat back on my heels and squinted at him. "Serious question, Loud Menace. Why aren't you just using clones for this? I've seen you deck a teacher with one. Pretty sure you could bully a few weeds."
Naruto froze, mid-yank. "…I tried."
I raised an eyebrow. "And?"
"And the stupid farmer yelled at me!" he burst out, pitching his voice into a cranky old-man impression. "'No weird ninja tricks in my field, you'll bruise the soil, kids these days don't know the value of hard work—'"
From a few rows over, the old man grunted, which I chose to interpret as confirmation. The chakra around him crunched like dry leaves.
"Also," Naruto added, muttering now, "Kakashi-sensei said if I used Shadow Clones to cheat on 'endurance missions' he'd just make me do more of them. 'Train your actual body, Naruto.'" He mimicked Kakashi's bored drawl with impressive accuracy.
That tracked, unfortunately. Kakashi did have "90s dance instructor" (but a ninja) energy when he felt like it.
"So if I use clones, I get yelled at, and then I still have to pull weeds, and then I'm tired twice," Naruto finished, scowling at the dirt like it had personally betrayed him. "It's discrimination."
"Against laziness," I said. "A tragic injustice."
Sasuke, a few rows over, methodically pulled weeds with the blank focus of someone who had decided to be good at everything out of spite.
He didn't complain once.
Which was somehow worse.
"Why are you good at this?" I asked him, wiping dirt on my already ruined shorts.
He shrugged without looking at me. "You either do the job right," he said, "or you do it again."
Naruto groaned into the soil. "Why are both of you like this."
We walked twelve dogs at once.
Naruto got dragged down the street like a kite tail.
I layered tiny reinforcement seals over the cheap leashes, trying to make sure they didn't snap when the biggest one decided to go to war with a squirrel.
Sasuke, of course, somehow had three obedient pups trotting in perfect formation at his heels like he'd bribed them with the promise of vengeance.
We cleaned a whole neighborhood's worth of trash out of a canal.
Naruto threatened to unleash a "Massive Water Style: Screw This Jutsu" and almost fell in twice.
I used it as chakra endurance training, cycling energy through my hands to lift heavier loads, trying not to throw up when my reserves burned low. My knock-off uniform was soaked and smelled like pond.
Sasuke glared at a soda can stuck in the reeds until it seemed to move out of sheer fear.
We babysat.
That one was the worst.
The mission sounded easy: "Supervise three civilian children for the afternoon." How hard could it be?
By the time the parents came home, one kid had a self-inflicted haircut, another had attempted to climb the bookcase "like a ninja" and nearly face-planted, and the youngest had somehow gotten hold of my ink and painted the words "BUTT" and "POOP" across an entire wall.
Naruto thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen.
Kakashi made us repaint the wall.
"It's good teamwork practice," he said, lounging on the porch, nose in his orange book. "And handwriting practice, Sylvie."
"I hate everything," I muttered, scrubbing.
After about a week of this, Naruto snapped.
We finished returning Tora (again), battered and bleeding (again), and filed into the Hokage's office to report.
The Third Hokage sat behind his desk, pipe in hand, mountain of paperwork around him. He looked at us over steepled fingers, eyes mild.
"Tora has been safely returned, I see," he said.
Tora, nestled in the Daimyō's wife's arms, shot us a look of pure malice.
Naruto twitched.
"That's it!" he exploded. "I can't take this anymore!"
"Naruto—" Kakashi started.
"No!" Naruto stomped forward, claws and bandages and all. "I'm not gonna become Hokage by chasing a stupid cat and cleaning trash and babysitting demons in toddler form! We're Genin now! We should be doing real missions!"
"Demons is harsh," I said mildly. "They were more like very tiny bandits."
Naruto pointed at the Hokage with all the righteous fury of a kid calling out a teacher.
"Old man!" he shouted. "Give us a real mission! Something exciting! Dangerous! Cool!"
The Daimyō's wife squawked. "How dare you speak like that in front of—"
I stepped forward, heart thudding but mouth already open before my risk assessment caught up.
"Lord Hokage," I said, bowing as respectfully as I could manage in a shirt stained with alley dust and cat hair. "With all due respect… at this point, I know more about that cat's escape routes than actual field work."
Sarutobi's gaze slid to me. It was heavy, thoughtful, weighing more than my actual weight by a factor of "being in charge of a village."
I swallowed, but kept going.
"I understand we're new," I said. "I get the need to build discipline. But we have been training. We've passed Team 7's test. Naruto and Sasuke both used real combat techniques against Kakashi-sensei. Sir."
Behind me, I could feel Naruto's chakra bounce between "angry" and "hopeful" like a pinball.
Kakashi lifted a hand, half-heartedly, like he was supposed to be shutting this down on principle.
"Now, now," he said. "Missions are assigned based on rank and—"
"You didn't exactly hold back on the bell test," I said under my breath.
His visible eye curved. Traitor.
The Hokage watched all three of us for a long moment.
Naruto, radiating indignation and raw longing.
Sasuke, arms crossed, silent, but with that razor-wire tension that said he wanted a mission where he could actually hit something.
Me, standing between them in my too-big, too-bright clothes, ink stains on my fingers, deliberately not fidgeting.
Kakashi, hands in his pockets, pretending to be bored and failing to hide how he was watching us too.
Sarutobi exhaled slowly, smoke curling from his pipe.
"It's true," he said at last. "You've been performing well on your… less glamorous assignments."
Naruto perked up. "So you'll—?"
The Hokage's eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger, but in calculation.
"Perhaps," he said, "it's time we evaluated your capabilities on something… a bit more challenging."
A little thrill ran down my spine.
The narrative gears clicked in mind.
This was it.
Probably.
Sarutobi set his pipe down and reached for a scroll.
"Kakashi," he said. "I believe I have a C-rank mission suitable for your team."
Naruto whooped so loudly the windows rattled.
Sasuke's mouth didn't move, but his eyes sharpened.
I pushed my glasses up, heart pounding, and tried very hard not to grin like an idiot.
Boring side quests were over.
Here it was. The moment the training-wheels missions ended and something real began. The kind of mission that would teach us about the world, about ourselves, about what it meant to be shinobi in a place that pretended war was over.
After the children and the bridge builder were gone, the tower finally remembered how to be quiet.
The door clicked shut behind Kakashi's retreating students; their chakra signatures receded down the stairs—Naruto's bright and jagged, Sasuke's tight and coiled, Sylvie's strange, layered thing that never quite behaved like anyone else's.
Hiruzen Sarutobi let his shoulders sink a fraction. The pipe sat warm in his hand. The office still smelled faintly of damp fur and alley dust.
Kakashi hadn't left with them.
He lingered by the window instead, one hand in his pocket, the other raising that ridiculous orange book halfway before he seemed to think better of it and tuck it away. He watched the street below with his usual slouch, but the line of his back was too straight to count as relaxed.
"Excited kids," Kakashi said at last. "Terrifying force of nature, really. You just gave them exactly what they wanted."
Hiruzen made a noncommittal sound and set the pipe in its stand. "Within limits."
"Mm. Limits." Kakashi's visible eye curved, faintly amused, faintly something else. "You know Naruto yelled something like that at me the first day we met. 'I'm gonna be Hokage, believe it,' and so on. I suppose this is what passes for consistency."
Hiruzen's gaze drifted to the door.
The echo of Naruto's voice still hung in the wood.
Old man! Give us a real mission!
Kushina had once shouted something similar at him, red hair blazing, when he refused to send her on a mission beyond her clearance.
She'd gotten her way, too.
"I expected this confrontation eventually," Hiruzen said. "I did not expect… assistance." His mouth twitched. "From a girl covered in cat hair, lecturing me about field experience."
Kakashi huffed, the ghost of a laugh. "Sylvie does seem… committed to editing reality to her liking."
He said it lightly, but the phrasing lodged under Hiruzen's ribs. Editing reality. The girl did talk about the world as if it were a story she could revise, and herself as both character and commentator. Disconcerting, in someone her age.
Useful, in moments like today.
Hiruzen reached for a file on the edge of his desk, shuffled it without really seeing the words, and then stopped pretending.
"They're too clever," he murmured. "All three of them. Clever enough to notice when adults are lying. Or… omitting."
Kakashi's eye slid from the window to him. "Is this about the mission… or the last twelve years?"
The words landed without accusation. That was almost worse.
Hiruzen let out a long breath.
Smoke didn't follow this time. Just weariness.
"When Minato asked me," he said slowly, carefully, as if the room might be listening, "I agreed to two things. To protect the village, and to protect his son. I have honored the first promise. The second…"
He trailed off.
There was a long stretch of tower silence. Distant footsteps. The whisper of paper from the outer office. The faint clatter of some clerk's teacup.
"What we did," Hiruzen said at last, "what I allowed… wasn't protection. Not entirely. Not in any way a child would recognize as such."
Kakashi did not rush to fill the space. He simply shifted, leaning his hip against the window ledge, mask tilted Hiruzen's way. Listening.
"When I forbade anyone from speaking of the Nine-Tails," Hiruzen went on, "I told myself it was for Naruto's sake. So he would not grow up knowing he was a vessel for the thing that slaughtered their parents. I thought, perhaps, if they were not allowed to name it, their hatred would fade." His hands curled briefly on the desk blotter. "Instead, it festered unspoken. An open secret. Whispers behind his back instead of explanations to his face."
Kakashi's eye lowered. "People fill in blanks with monsters when you don't give them anything better."
"Exactly." Hiruzen's voice sharpened, a fleeting flash of the man who had once been called the Professor. "I constrained the words but left the fear. I constrained the truth but left the grief. And in the spaces between, we left a child."
He could see Naruto at four, standing outside the orphanage he'd been expelled from for 'behavioural problems'—translation: existing. He could see the way shopkeepers' faces went carefully blank when the boy walked past. The way adults took half-steps to the side, just enough to avoid brushing shoulders.
He had seen it. Through his crystal ball, through reports, in person.
And he had told himself, over and over, that intervening too forcefully would only mark Naruto further. That a Hokage's visible favoritism would paint a target. That the village needed time.
Time, time, time.
How much time does a child have?
"I watched him," Hiruzen said quietly, "grow up in the gaps between my intentions. Every time I thought to act, I found a reason to wait. A reason it would be… complicated. Politically costly. Destabilizing. I told myself that watching from a distance was enough. That anonymous stipends and hidden guards balanced out the glares and slammed doors. That guilt was proof of concern, even as I signed orders that kept him on the fringes." He closed his eyes briefly. "Guilt without action is just vanity, Hatake."
The corner of Kakashi's eye crinkled, the closest he came to flinching.
"I'm not here to argue it was perfect," Kakashi said. "I didn't exactly volunteer for babysitting duty when he was six."
"No," Hiruzen agreed. "You were busy letting me use you as a blade."
Kakashi's shoulders twitched, a small hit. He accepted it.
"We all made choices," Kakashi said. "Most of mine involved running away from anything that looked like a team. I'm not exactly in a position to give a lecture on healthy childhood development."
Hiruzen huffed, a dry sound.
Kakashi pushed off the sill and walked closer to the desk, hands in his pockets, head tipped. "It's not that I don't think you should feel bad," he said. "I do. That's… appropriate. But you said it yourself. Watching from the shadows and feeling guilty doesn't help him now. Or Sylvie. Or any of them."
Hiruzen's brows rose slightly. "Sylvie?"
Kakashi shrugged. "You noticed it too. They orbit each other. Even when I split the team, they find ways back into each other's gravity well. I've seen Naruto plow through walls for less than what he does for her. And Sylvie… she looks at him like he's not the fox's jailor, or the dead hero's son, or the village's mistake. Just… a boy who is loud and annoying and hers to argue with."
He scratched his cheek idly. "Given how we stacked the deck, Hokage-sama, I'd call that a miracle."
Hiruzen considered that.
Naruto and Sylvie, shoulder to shoulder in his office, one shouting, one choosing her words like blades. Two children who by all rights should have been swallowed by this village's inertia. Somehow, instead, they'd found each other. Built a small, defiant island of loyalty and shared stubbornness.
"A miracle built on chance," Hiruzen said. "Not design."
"Sure." Kakashi's tone stayed light, but there was steel underneath. "But it's still there. Naruto could have ended up clinging to anyone who showed him attention. Some petty thug. Some radical who wanted a walking bomb. Instead he got an ink-stained gremlin who argues with him about ethics and storytelling structure."
Hiruzen's lips twitched, despite himself. "Gremlin?"
"I say it with affection." Kakashi's eye curved. "My point is… we failed him in a lot of ways. Institutionally. Repeatedly. That's real. But he didn't grow up alone. He had Iruka, eventually. He has Teuchi and Ayame. He has you, even if you hid behind paperwork. And now he has a team. Two teammates who can see past the seal. One of them because he's seen monsters before, and one of them because she seems offended by the very idea that a person could be reduced to a plot device."
He tapped the headband over his Sharingan. "I've seen worst-case scenarios. Children turned into weapons and nothing else. Compared to that? This is… salvageable."
Salvageable.
The word sat in Hiruzen's chest like both balm and wound.
"I don't want 'salvageable,'" he said. "I wanted… I thought I could give him something better than your childhood, at least. Better than his father's. I failed at that, Kakashi."
Kakashi tilted his head. "Maybe. But you still can make sure it doesn't stay that way."
Hiruzen studied him. Beneath the slouch and the lazy tone, Hatake Kakashi was painfully, relentlessly observant. It was why Hiruzen had chosen him for this team, apart from the more obvious qualifications. Kakashi could see broken things and, when pushed, mend them.
"Team Seven is… volatile," Hiruzen said.
"Understatement," Kakashi replied.
"And important."
"That part I figured out when you gave me an Uzumaki, an Uchiha, and a girl who talks about 'narrative tropes' like they're actual jutsu."
Hiruzen exhaled, some of the heaviness thinning into something sharper. Resolve.
"I can't undo the last twelve years," he said. "I can't erase the nights Naruto went hungry because a shopkeeper 'forgot' he'd been served. I can't erase the times I told myself the village needed time to heal while he was made the scar. But I can stop pretending that regret is sufficient. The boy demanded a real mission today. He was right to. If I am going to send him into danger, it will not be as a tool we half-starved of affection and training."
He looked Kakashi in the eye.
"I am going to review the Academy. The teachers who treated him as an afterthought will find themselves reassigned. The law about the Nine-Tails stays—for now—but I will not tolerate 'unspoken' persecution. Any civilian or shinobi who harasses him will answer for it. Quietly, if possible. Publicly, if necessary."
Kakashi's gaze sharpened. "That will stir things."
"I am the Hokage," Hiruzen said. It came out quiet, but not soft. "If I cannot endure being disliked for doing my duty, I should retire."
Kakashi dipped his head, conceding the point.
"And you, Hatake," Hiruzen continued, "will not simply train him to throw bigger jutsu. You will watch him. You will watch Sylvie. And Sasuke. You will see them as children first, soldiers second, assets last. When you see the old patterns repeating—the isolation, the self-hatred, the willingness to die for the village because they think their lives only have value as sacrifice—you will intervene."
He paused.
"As Minato would have."
Kakashi's hand clenched, just once, in his pocket.
When he looked up, the lazy curve of his eye was gone.
"…Understood," he said. "I'll do better than I did with the last team."
Hiruzen heard the ghosts in that sentence and chose, for once, not to look away.
"Good," he said. "Because I suspect these three will drag this village into a future whether we are ready or not. I'd prefer we arrive with a little more… intentionality than we've shown so far."
Kakashi's mouth quirked behind the mask. "You mean less 'luck' and more 'actual planning.' Tragic."
"Terribly dull, I know."
They let the small joke sit there, a fragile bridge over deeper water.
Outside, somewhere beyond the window, three genin and one very irritable bridge builder were heading toward the gate. Toward a mission that, if Hiruzen's instincts were right, would not remain a simple C-rank for long.
Naruto would face danger. He would be tested. So would Sylvie, and Sasuke, and Kakashi.
Hiruzen had sent too many children into stories that ended in their names carved on stone.
He could not change the prologue of this one.
But as he picked up his pipe again, he made himself a quiet, iron promise.
He would stop treating Naruto's life as an unfortunate side effect of a necessary seal.
He would stop treating his own remorse as penance.
The boy wanted a real mission.
Hiruzen owed him a real chance.
Kakashi straightened from his lean, hand already lifting in a casual salute. "I'll keep them alive, Hokage-sama. And… I'll try to keep them happy, too. No promises about the cat, though."
"Keep Tora away from them," Hiruzen said. "For the village's sake."
Kakashi's eye curved. "We'll be out of your hair, then."
He flickered away in a swirl of displaced air, leaving the office finally, truly empty.
Hiruzen sat alone with the paperwork, the pipe, and the faint echo of young voices demanding more from him than quiet regret.
He reached for the next scroll—not to bury himself in it, but to start signing different orders.
Stories, Sylvie had once said in that odd, earnest way of hers, don't fix what's already happened. They just decide what happens next.
"Then let's choose better, this time," Hiruzen murmured to no one, and began.