Done sending off the "avatar," I stood before the mirror, studying myself with mild contemplation. A certain someone's newfound hobby had done a number on my look. Well, mostly just my hair, which had graduated from "grew however it wanted" to "a barber spent ten seconds running a comb through it." Now I had a center part, and a few strands fell across my face just below the eyes, lending me something of an air of mystery.
Narcissism session concluded, I made my way through the house. Soon enough I was out on the balcony of my Konoha residence, scanning the cityscape of hundreds of high-rises, and connected to the Empire to check on the latest developments.
The Empire: my depersonalized, unconditionally loyal mind, existing as a controlling construct woven through a web of thick chakra lines that carried, well, chakra. The Empire had effectively brought the planet's entire natural energy under my domain, filtering it much like the Juubi once did. It supplied me with enough chakra for my experiments and, by now, left me orders of magnitude stronger in raw energy than I'd been during the clash with Isshiki.
Beyond that, the Empire also served as an intelligence network, limited as it was. But it was precisely thanks to it that the phrase "the Empire is watching you" was entirely literal.
Finding nothing that demanded my attention, I gave a satisfied grunt. Then I turned around and headed back inside. I had something else coming up soon.
As I walked the corridors, brief flashes of recent events drifted unbidden through my mind. Compared to my own expansion, relatively little had happened.
The fate of the Uchiha had been settled, and rather tragically. Itachi never shared his reasons for wiping out his own clan, and when he finally faced his brother in battle, I suspect he let himself lose. It gave Sasuke the chance to live in a new world without the weight of the past dragging him down, just another combat shinobi serving the Empire now.
Pain had put in enough work to earn his healing. Nagato, restored to his true body, now handles the occasional flare-up of rogue shinobi considerably better. Or summons rain where it's needed. After I finished studying the Rinnegan, I returned it to him.
Kisame had been kicked out of prison and put to work.
Zetsu remained sealed, while the Otsutsuki bodies hadn't been put to work either; they stayed with me as valuable subjects for various experiments.
That was only a fraction of what had transpired. But I wasn't left alone with my thoughts for long.
"You're back!" Karin launched herself from behind a door with a wide grin and immediately hooked her arm through mine. Right, we had a date planned. "Okay, let's go, let's go. You've been in there all night…"
As she dragged me down the corridor, I found myself admiring her without really meaning to. After her physical enhancement, Karin had truly come into her own. Her curves were fuller, firmer, and in some respects had surpassed what nature originally provided. But it had only truly started to pull at me now that she'd grown up in more than just the physical sense.
"What?" she asked, catching me looking.
"Just admiring. You get more captivating with every passing year."
"Hmph! Well, obviously!" She arched her back and continued down the hall with a thoroughly self-satisfied strut.
"So… did it work? Did everything go alright?" she asked, her tone shifting to something more serious.
Karin could sense my emotions clearly and almost certainly already knew the answer, but worry still slipped through her voice. As my assistant, she was deeply embedded in my affairs and understood what the completed Avatar experiment meant.
"It all went smoothly."
She gave a nod, and we carried on.
Over the years, Karin's personality had changed little, same as Hinata's and Sakura's. But each of them had found their calling, and that had transformed them in its own way. Our lives didn't revolve entirely around one another. Pursuing our own ambitions, building something of our own, that's what made us happier.
Sakura had been the catalyst, the moment she decided to prove something to herself and to the world. That fire spread to the rest of them.
Karin had inherited her mother's perceptiveness, and from me she'd picked up a certain ruthlessness. She had grown far beyond a mere lab assistant. Trained under my supervision by Danzo and Orochimaru, she had taken on a role not unlike the head of Root, but on a global scale: intelligence, information gathering, and control. Under her command ran a network of operatives spanning institutions and laboratories the world over, all in service of my long-standing goal to consolidate humanity's achievements into a single pair of hands.
Intelligence work had suited her perfectly from the start. Since childhood, Karin had perceived people through their chakra. She was used to watching, tracking reactions, anticipating. Now it was her vocation.
The door before us swung open, revealing my wardrobe.
"Drop your pants, heh-heh…" she snickered with deliberate ambiguity.
Right, another one of Karin's passions: fashion. She now curated outfits for our whole, well, you could call it a family.
Before long, the four of us were strolling down a paved road, dry despite the snow blanketing the rooftops all around. December had come in cold, but the ground beneath our feet was warm. Heated roads had become one of the new innovations of Konoha's reconstruction, and for that, credit went to the pink-haired girl walking beside me. Sakura headed something resembling a Ministry of Innovation, where they were marrying electrical engineering with fuinjutsu.
"Mm-mm-mm…" Karin eyed our group with visible displeasure, her nose scrunched up.
"What's wrong?" Hinata asked, speaking far more freely than she might have four years ago.
"I spent an hour putting together our outfits, and then this stupid winter forced everyone to throw a coat over everything!"
None of us saw fit to point out that she could have simply looked out the window before we got dressed.
"The scarves look great, though," I noted.
Hinata went just slightly pink. She'd knitted those herself.
"And the perfume is perfectly chosen," Sakura added, eyes half-closing. "Freshness, warm smoke, something sweetly astringent… Very harmonious."
Karin had been into perfumery long before we met; she's a remarkably layered person. We suspected that was probably where her suddenly acquired obsession with style had its roots.
As we walked down the street, nobody bothered us. Leveraging my authority and absolutely zero shame when it came to protecting my private life, I had issued a decree: hefty fines and even a couple of weeks in a holding cell for anyone who dared disturb the Emperor and his Heralds outside of official audiences. Generous, I know.
At the restaurant, our reserved table was already waiting. Beige walls, framed winter landscapes, spruce branches in vases, and the soft notes of a piano drifting from somewhere in the depths of the dining room. The food arrived immediately; we'd ordered in advance.
"A genuinely brilliant invention, Sakura," I said between courses.
"You're exaggerating…"
I wasn't in the least. In three years, her brainchild had grown to such a scale that I suspected a minor cult had formed in her honor. The idea had come to her by accident: Sakura once asked about my network, the one distinguished by obelisks scattered across the entire globe. I explained that I used them to transmit natural energy chakra. She had been looking for something she could make her own at the time, something where she wouldn't be lost in my shadow. The thought struck her like lightning: what if you built something similar, a network, but tied it to electronics?
The concept wasn't entirely new. Electronic communication had existed here before. It just wasn't anywhere near global, otherwise people wouldn't still be using hawks to deliver messages.
A year of experiments later, with my help, a network running on neutral chakra had spread across the entire planet. In essence, Sakura had invented the local internet. And I got a rather pleasant bonus on top: control over the network and access to all data passing through it, both directly and through the Empire's oversight, within the bounds of its very real, if rarely acknowledged, limitations.
"What should we talk about?" Karin suggested once we'd finished the first course.
"Something stupid?" Sakura mused, pressing her chopsticks thoughtfully to her lips.
"So… work, then…" The redhead smiled like a predator. "Remember the look I gave my Scarlet Shadows?"
I recalled the Fire Country intelligence operatives under her command: black pants, and everything else a deep blood-red. Vests, cloaks with high collars, masks…
"Poor people," I sighed. "What did they ever do to you?"
"Karin, red is known to heighten irritability," Hinata began. "It has a measurably negative effect on—"
"But it looks amazing!" she cut in. "Anyway, they were complaining about how hard it was to blend in. So I added more red! That way they'll have to sharpen their skills and come out better for it!"
A pause settled over the table.
"…Not funny, right?"
"Sadist," Sakura stated without blinking, poking her in the ribs with a chopstick.
"Hey!"
"Learn to value your people," Hinata added gently.
"Hmph. Look who's talking."
And on that point, Karin wasn't wrong. Hinata oversaw all of pedagogy, from the shinobi academies to general public education. She'd taken it on for reasons that were almost heartbreakingly earnest. "I-I want to be a good mother," she had confessed at the time, turning crimson.
But the "good mother" had since revealed herself to be a merciless administrator. Sometimes I think my presence just gradually turns everyone around me a little bit evil.
That quality in Hinata had fallen hardest on her own father. Hiashi, whom the boredom of old age had bitten hard enough to push into a teaching position at the academy.
As it turned out later, Hiashi had only overhauled his attitude toward the clan and a handful of close family members. In general, he remained every bit the difficult man he'd always been. Working with children, the most psychologically wearing demographic there is, had only worsened his condition.
Operating in a way that was distinctly not by the book, Hiashi managed to clash badly with some elderly but surprisingly formidable Academy instructor. The academy director, thoroughly terrified, somehow managed to discover that we happened to be in Konoha, and set off in search of the ultimate solution to what rumor had it was the Emperor's father-in-law: namely, the Emperor himself and his Heralds. He barged into the building and interrupted my private date with Hinata.
That day, despite her usual gentle disposition, Hinata revealed that somewhere inside her lurked a dark, ruthless entity: the administrator. She threw the director out of the building and sent him straight to Kakashi so he could deal with his own unruly shinobi himself.
I could have burst with pride when I saw that.
Her father, though, got the full brunt of what came next. His "professional development program" had already stretched over a year: twenty-six countries and regions, over a hundred educational institutions. He made it home once every couple of months, for a week at most. Old childhood wounds, it seemed, hadn't healed. Hinata had developed a taste for it and seemed not to even notice that it had become a matter of principle: see it through to the bitter end. Fortunately for Hiashi, there weren't many regions left.
Hinata, incidentally, hadn't stayed confined to pedagogy for long. Far from it. She was a chakra wielder, and she had developed a hunger to understand the human mind. She took up psychology, and somewhere down the line it just happened that she brought the Yamanaka clan under her wing. Or rather, they brought themselves under it once she asked to borrow some of their more interesting reading material.
"It didn't exactly work out with the outfits this time," I said, steering the conversation back. "But there's always next time. Maybe we'll make up for it in Keishi?"
"The capital of the Fire Region?" Sakura asked, her tone half-statement, half-question.
"It's been a while since we've gone anywhere together. Just a couple of days? Clear our heads, hit some shops…" I glanced at Karin. "I'm sure you need some… things? For your work?"
It was a weak excuse, and I knew it.
"Things?" She arched an eyebrow, but her eyes were already lighting up. "Well… actually, yes. There's a new shop in the capital that carries rare incense ingredients. It's a great reason to have some fun after…"
From there, the mood lifted considerably. We talked through our plans for the trip. Though once Karin's double entendres started flying, the girls began exchanging glances: Karin with mischief, Hinata with a blush, Sakura somewhere in between but keeping a studiously neutral expression.
Look, I understood the jokes. Almost everyone was nearly eighteen by now, except Hinata. But the details… I knew the girls had been having their little "councils" without me lately. Through the Empire, finding out what was discussed would have been trivially easy. But I'd decided to leave them their right to secrets. I'd only ever received a single mental image from the Chakra Network of a meaningfully nodding head, pointing in the general direction of those "councils."
The trip happened soon after, and we came back loaded with new souvenirs and buzzing with a kind of energy we'd all needed.
Then came a very particular day.
In this world, birthdays are a family affair, and we were no exception. Our unusual little family, me and my girls, had honored that tradition ever since we all moved under one roof. Now that each of us had found our place in something larger and was so often busy, moments like these mattered all the more.
Today was December twenty-seventh, the day Hinata turned eighteen.
We celebrated the way we always did: in stages.
Morning was just us, the inner circle, wallowing in good food and each other's company.
Then we moved to Hinata's parents' home. A proper family table waited for us there, her relatives, endless dishes, the same indulgent excess, just in a more formal setting.
And in the evening we came back to ours and welcomed guests: old acquaintances, mostly former classmates. Guy's team had worked their way in too, and broadly speaking, that was the full list.
The conversation was easy: who'd served where, who'd accomplished what, who was living how. Truthfully, the lives of most of my peers had turned out far more ordinary than the stories of my girls. Nearly all of them had followed the standard shinobi track. Everyone had made chunin; jonin was a much shorter list, Neji, Lee, and somehow Shikamaru.
Lee had opened his own martial arts school, where he taught people how to properly punch their neighbors in the face.
Shikamaru had followed in his father's footsteps. Well, his mother had made him follow in his father's footsteps, straight into the analytics division. He'd actually taken to it, since there were no major conflicts in the world at the moment, meaning he could spend a lot of time at work doing absolutely noth… resting.
Ino had become, hmm, Hinata's dedicated flatterer, which left my sweet Hyuga with genuinely mixed feelings. Hard not to, when someone was constantly trailing you to ask if they could fetch something, bring something, or maybe offer a shoulder massage. Though it was clearly more of a bit they were both in on, and neither girl minded the strange dynamic one bit. They hadn't spent much time together back in the day, but that had changed. They'd found meaningful common ground in psychology and the workings of the human mind, building a solid friendship on it over time. Both girls also shared a fondness for flowers. Yamanaka just expressed her genuine care in this particular theatrical way. It was honestly amusing sometimes to watch Ino playfully "groveling" in a mock attempt to quietly edge her father out of his position, since Hinata had, after all, absorbed their clan into her sphere of work. The blonde still knew exactly what she was worth, just like back in the Academy.
When the guests finally trickled out and the house fell quiet, Hinata and I stepped onto the balcony. We stood together, arms around each other, looking up at the night sky in silence. I was in simple trousers and a shirt; Hinata wore a shirt too, along with a skirt and those charming suspenders.
Midnight had already passed. Technically, her birthday was over. But for us, it lasted until we closed our eyes to sleep.
The stars reflected in Hinata's eyes.
"The stars… What do you think about when you look at them?" she asked softly, her voice coming from just beneath my chin. I turned and rested my cheek gently against her blue-black hair.
"Nothing," I answered quietly. "I just enjoy being here with you."
"Is that so…" Her voice dropped even softer.
She went quiet, but I felt a tension gather in her posture, as though several feelings were locked in combat inside her all at once. Mostly shyness and resolve.
"Hinata, is everything alright?" I asked.
"Y-yes… it's just…" She shifted slightly to look up at me.
A second passed. Then another. The hesitation in her was building, but I wasn't so oblivious that I couldn't read what was happening inside a girl's head.
My face began to move closer, slowly, deliberately: a provocation. And it worked. Hinata, looking for all the world like someone who'd decided to dive headfirst into an ice-cold river, let out a sharp exhale, squeezed her eyes shut, took my face in both hands, and pressed her lips to mine.
In our unusual arrangement, where I was the only man, certain questions had resolved themselves quietly, without words. The question of jealousy, for one, born from the understanding that I was perfectly capable of giving my full attention to each of them. And the question of turns had resolved itself the same way. It would have been too cruel to leave Hinata on the outside looking in while the rest of us moved on, especially given that my bond with her was the oldest of all. So we had all been waiting for this moment.
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