Chapter 198: Konoha Year 64 — Three Years Gone
A waterfall dropped straight from the cliff face into the pool below, and where sunlight caught the spray, a soft rainbow bent across the mist.
A girl sat at the pool's edge with her trouser legs rolled up, feet in the cool water, moving them idly. Her green eyes looked through the water's surface at the stone beneath it with an expression that landed somewhere between contentment and mild frustration.
Three years since the last shinobi war.
Konoha had healed fast, fueled by generous war reparations — chakra armor research accelerating, administrative reform taking shape. The rest of the shinobi world was moving slower. Three Kage had died in the same conflict: the Raikage, the Kazekage, the Mizukage. Not long after, word came from Sand that Chiyo had died too.
Gaara, son of the Fourth Kazekage, ascended to the Fifth Kazekage with Ebizō's support. Killer Bee took the Fifth Raikage seat in Kumo. Utakata became the Fifth Mizukage in Kiri. The era of the Fifth Kage had apparently arrived.
Only Konoha and Iwa hadn't yet named a Fifth.
Iwa's situation was its own business. As for Konoha's Fifth — the entire ninja world already knew the answer. Even children on the street.
The girl kicked her feet slowly, spraying small arcs of water. Then she lay back in the grass and stared at the cloudless sky.
The war had just ended. Nobody wanted another conflict. The world seemed, for the moment, almost peaceful.
Konoha Year 64.
A year the original story would have found unrecognizable.
Akatsuki had receded entirely from public view. But she knew — they were simply waiting. Three-Tails reconstituting. The moment it re-emerged, the fragile quiet would break.
"Hey!"
"Sakura!"
A voice, buoyant and familiar.
An orange tracksuit and gold hair appeared in her field of vision.
Three years had changed Naruto considerably. Taller, broader — under Sakura's sustained dietary intervention ("no instant ramen, I will know"), he'd somehow managed to grow to 170 centimeters. No longer the 160-centimeter person she'd first met.
Seeing him, she sprang off the grass with a carp-flip and landed standing on the water's surface.
Red and white tracksuit hanging open over black mesh armor. Black pants rolled to below the knee, showing pale skin and bare feet she'd been drying. Pink hair loose. Her face as striking as it had always been, the violet Yin Seal on her forehead adding something specific to the picture.
Three years of yang-release cultivation had been at work. The effect was visible.
Naruto blinked at her.
"You—"
She looked at him.
"Three years."
"Do you have any idea what these three years were like for me?"
His face did the expression of a person who knew he'd caused trouble and was hoping it wasn't as bad as it looked.
"I mean, it wasn't like I wanted to take this long—"
Nine-Tails Chakra Mode required confronting one's own inner darkness. He'd managed the confrontation part — the darkness was right there, he'd been looking at it for three years. Passing through it was the part that hadn't happened yet.
In the source material, with Killer Bee's guidance, this had taken approximately one day.
Three years. Without Bee.
Kushina.
What are you waiting for? Come help your son.
Sakura crossed the pool toward him, watching his expression cycle through guilty and hopeful. She raised one finger.
Naruto had witnessed many repetitions of this gesture over three years. The sight of it produced a Pavlovian cold sweat.
She'd suppressed Nine-Tails rampages more times than she'd counted. Whatever the Nine-Tails in full expression actually felt like from the outside, the aftermath always looked like scenery had been through a blender, and Sakura's face afterward was always the same: mildly inconvenienced.
Naruto had quietly accepted that mastering Nine-Tails Chakra Mode might not actually make him stronger than Sakura.
Haruno Secret Technique — Single Flick.
Pale fingers struck his forehead protector with a force entirely disproportionate to how casual the motion looked.
The protector launched off his head.
Naruto squeezed his eyes shut, bracing.
Nothing.
He opened one eye. Sakura had turned away, sitting back at the pool's edge, wiping the water off her feet. Already reaching for her shoes.
"Sakura?"
"We'll get there," she said. "Slowly. We'll manage."
"Also — I need to head back. Jiraiya will bring you when the time comes."
She pulled her shoes on and bounced lightly on her heels.
"You're leaving again?"
He picked the protector up from the ground, a grin tugging at him, moving to her side.
These three years, she hadn't been constant at Turtle Island — she'd rotated between here and Konoha, handling the village's growing administrative needs while Hiruzen's health declined. But she came back.
"Can't stay here forever."
She gave him a light push away from her side, already oriented toward departure.
"Yeah, okay..."
He couldn't stop her. He watched her draw a black hair tie from her pocket and bind her hair efficiently before running through a seal sequence.
"Summoning Jutsu!"
White smoke. A large hawk materialized — the one she'd found on her first trip to Turtle Island, which had initially tried to take her for its chicks' dinner. The negotiation process had involved two rounds of being beaten before it had agreed to the summoning contract. It served, now, as her preferred long-range transport, being that she still couldn't fly independently.
The hawk's cry split the air. It took her skyward, and she shrank to a dot, and disappeared.
Naruto stood watching the empty sky for a while.
"Standing around with that face won't accomplish anything."
Jiraiya materialized at his shoulder, apparently having been there for a while.
"You don't understand, Pervy Sage."
Naruto looked sideways at him and shook his head.
You don't understand.
Jiraiya's expression did something complicated.
I understand exactly.
This is what he and Tsunade had been. This is what Naruto and Sakura were. The comparison had been in his head for a while.
And the gap between them — it was larger than the one between himself and Tsunade, honestly.
"Stop moping. You have training to do."
He reached out and flicked Naruto's ear.
"We're going back to Konoha soon, anyway."
"Why suddenly?"
Naruto had made several trips back over three years, but there was always a reason.
Jiraiya stroked his chin, expression shifting into something teasing.
"The Fifth Hokage's inauguration ceremony, naturally."
Fifth—
Hokage?
"The Fifth. Your—" he raised an eyebrow— "let's call her your beloved."
Naruto went still.
Sakura.
He stood with it for a moment. Then his face rearranged itself into something bright and uncomplicated.
"Of course she is. She's always been this incredible."
Jiraiya watched him and felt something ache a little in the chest.
"Naruto."
He put a hand on the boy's shoulder.
"Let it go."
"Sakura and you — you're not from the same world."
He'd said similar things to himself, once, about Tsunade. He knew where these feelings ended up. Buried somewhere you could almost not feel them most of the time, until you were old enough to remember them with something approaching fondness rather than pain.
Naruto apparently hadn't heard any of this.
He'd turned to Jiraiya with a face full of uncomplicated joy.
"Sakura's going to be Hokage! Does that mean I get to do whatever I want in the village from now on?!"
Jiraiya looked at him.
This kid.
He really is just like me.
Hokage Building.
Brisk footsteps across the lobby.
The staff, mid-conversation a moment ago, went uniformly silent and returned to their desks at near-simultaneous speed.
Green eyes passed across them once, then turned toward the stairs.
From the break room, a small figure barreled out clutching a cup of osmanthus tea.
"Senior Yamanaka, I just brewed—"
The woman named Yamanaka Gen had already buried her face in a document stack.
Can't see me. Can't see me. Can't see me.
The small figure — new to the administrative staff, less than three days on the job — looked around in confusion. A moment ago, lively. Now, uniformly industrious.
Then she found the pink-haired woman's gaze on her.
"Lady Sakura..."
She was not going to cry. Probably.
She'd heard the stories already. Everyone called this one "the Witch" in quiet voices, which had seemed odd to her given how objectively beautiful the woman was, but the reason had become clear after she'd seen the annotated files.
Three years ago, Hiruzen had started letting Sakura process the village's daily administrative work. Every document since had included a detailed record of which department had failed to handle something it should have handled at its own level and why that was unacceptable.
The entire administrative apparatus had been operating under low-grade anxiety ever since.
"Hm."
Sakura looked at her for a moment, decided this wasn't relevant to her current trajectory, and continued upstairs.
The room collectively exhaled.
"Senior Yamanaka." The new girl set the tea down beside him. "Here."
"Xinzi." He pressed a hand to his chest. "You nearly ended me."
"Was that really because of Lady Sakura? She seems really approachable. And she's so beautiful—"
He looked at her with the expression of someone who had been in this office long enough to have opinions about the future.
Wait until she actually takes the seat. Then you'll understand.
The Hokage's office.
She pushed the door open and found a white-haired old man bent over his desk, squinting at documents.
"Sakura's back. Come have a look at this one—"
"Cough."
"I told you," she said, moving to the window before she could stop herself, "you're not young anymore, and you won't put that pipe down."
"Do you want to live a few more years or not?"
Hiruzen looked up at the sixteen-year-old girl fussing at him with exactly the expression of a man who was deeply entertained by this.
She opened the window to clear the smoke, then immediately remembered: cold snap outside. She closed it again. Looked at him coughing. Draped her jacket over his shoulders.
"Fine. Let me look at it."
She took the document from in front of him.
South Heoka River tributary — contamination, odor, residents unable to use for drinking water.
She looked at the old man. Looked at the document.
"Go home. I'll finish this."
Hiruzen smiled, pulling her jacket tighter.
"Then I'll leave it to you. The old man needs his rest."
He shuffled out, and the ANBU shadow fell in behind him before the door closed.
He wasn't performing when he called himself an old man anymore. The administrative burden over decades, the accumulated combat injuries from decades before that — the three years since the war had called in every debt at once. She'd tried supplementing with yang-release applications every few weeks, but he'd declined that eventually too.
Living and dying are just what people do, he'd said. Don't put energy into delaying it.
She watched the door.
Then she looked at the document in her hand and let the fire she'd been sitting on release itself into her pen.
Annotation:
Trace the source. Find the cause. Remove it.
Hire water-release and earth-release specialists. Clear the waterway. You have three days. If it isn't resolved in three days, bring me your resignation.
I will inspect South Heoka River personally in three days.
The Hokage seal came down hard.
The sun reached the low-gold angle that meant late afternoon.
Sakura set down the last document, stood, and looked out at the village in the fading light.
"Was it like this for you, when you were Hokage?"
The empty office answered.
"Honestly — the village had just been founded. Administration was more or less functional. We didn't have quite so many..." A pause. "Small concerns."
Tobirama materialized at her shoulder, wrapped in the dark ANBU robe he'd been wearing for three years.
She'd kept the Impure World Reincarnation running continuously. Dissolving it and re-summoning him later meant another death-row prisoner, and the risk of Orochimaru getting to him first in the interval.
"So you had it easier."
She gathered her papers and prepared to leave.
Tobirama watched her, and felt something that wasn't quite what the dead were supposed to feel anymore.
Hiruzen had devoted his entire life to this. A young man in his twenties, full of conviction, and somewhere between that beginning and now, the same person had become an old man with failing health, still sitting in this same room.
A lifetime given to one small office.
"One thing."
She paused at the door and looked back.
The white-haired figure of the Second Hokage, against the Konoha skyline through the window.
"What is it?"
"Would you be interested. In living."
...?
Tobirama's brow drew together.
"What do you mean?"
Is there a technique for actually reviving the dead?
That would be more absurd than Impure World Reincarnation itself.
"Literally what I said."
She confirmed it.
He stood with the question for a long time.
His gaze settled on the village in the darkening light — the place he'd spent himself building.
"...No. Let it go."
He shook his head.
"I've been dead for a long time. There's no reason to hold onto a world that doesn't belong to me anymore."
The door closed. The office was quiet.
Tobirama stood alone with the view.
He'd turned her down.
And yet the question was still there.
Living.
Staying.
Watching the village you gave everything for, for a little longer.
Could I really say no.
Night came in slowly. The lights of Konoha came on one by one across the distance.
The question she'd left behind stayed with him in the dark.
Haruno residence.
"I'm back."
Sakura set the fruit she'd picked up on the way home on the side table and reached for her shoes—
A small figure launched itself at her from somewhere inside.
"Sister!"
"Welcome home!"
Pink hair. Green eyes. An exact miniature of herself, three years old, throwing both arms around her neck.
"Oh — it's Mirai."
"Did you miss me?"
She didn't manage to get her shoes off first; she just scooped the small weight up with one arm and carried her to the couch.
The small human she'd once been mildly resentful of for the sheer concept of competing with her for inheritance had turned out to be extremely good. Healthy, enthusiastic, and deeply attached to her older sister.
"Yes!"
"Missed sister SO MUCH!"
Mirai pressed her face against Sakura's cheek and made a small animal sound of contentment.
Sakura sat down with her, reached for the remote.
"Small Mirai is going to sleep with sister tonight."
"Sure, absolutely."
This particular request Sakura was constitutionally incapable of refusing. Mirai had discovered this and deployed it accordingly.
From the kitchen doorway, Mebuki caught sight of the shoe — one shoe, on its side, halfway onto the mat, abandoned in the scrambling haste.
"SAKURA."
"I'm playing with Mirai," Sakura said, not looking up.
A pause from the doorway. Kizashi appeared, read the situation at speed, sprinted to the entryway, and arranged the shoe. He turned back to Mebuki with the expression of a man who had just successfully defused something.
Mebuki observed this, let the fire go, and returned to the kitchen. Kizashi followed immediately, already talking, already helping.
Sakura sat on the couch with a three-year-old using her neck as a perch, and pointed the remote at the television.
A familiar face came onscreen.
Koyuki. The film — "Snow Princess: Ninja Scroll," finally broadcast.
She watched her for a moment.
In a few days, Hiruzen's formal nomination goes to the Fire Daimyo. Hiruzen would send Homura in his place, given the travel difficulty. Koyuki would send separate backing from Snow Country — technically the Daimyo of two nations aligned on the recommendation.
Fire Country and Snow Country were not equivalent in weight. But Konoha's protection of Snow Country made the endorsement matter more than it looked. Any Daimyo with functioning judgment would accept the nomination.
And there was only one candidate.
The Fifth Hokage seat was, at this point, a formality.
"Wow, that sister is so pretty!"
Mirai's eyes were wide.
"Obviously." Sakura looked down at her. "Not as pretty as your sister, though."
Mirai turned, beaming at her.
"Sister is the prettiest!"
"The correct word is handsome," Sakura said, and flicked Mirai gently on the forehead. "Get it right."
☆☆☆
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