Chapter 4
Her genin had figured the test out on their own pretty quickly, meaning Ren was still stuck in-village for quite a while, Mei asking for her to give a longer start to them. She was to fill out a team progress report in the next few weeks, recommending testing, rearrangement, or remedial training.
Once they started working more together, it wasn’t the worst thing.
“Line up.”
All four lined up but had learned not to do it too close – she had trained that out of them quickly. Get too close to an enemy and you would lose a hand.
“Lay out the protocol for genin missions in peacetime.”
“You don’t know?”
Ren rolled her eyes, flicking a Water Needle at Suzume. “I know the protocol. I need to know you lot know.”
Takeshi stepped forward. “We will be responsible for the strategy, the execution, and the aftermath of the mission. You will, if all goes well, not be seen or interact with the mission. We are to do our best to complete the mission on our own talents.”
“And?”
Takeshi had recited the mission manual to the letter, but he had missed out what she had tried to drill into them over the last several days.
It was Kimiko that stepped up. “And afterward we will debrief and discuss what we need to improve on, or how to take what we did well and make it better.”
Ren nodded. “Good.”
That was a starting point.
*
Hiroshi marveled at Konoha. His parents had always said that one day they would get him there. That he would see the city they still had fond feelings for, even after everything. They never had, and it was bittersweet seeing the village without either parent with him. Still, there were some things off-putting.
Shinobi ran around with their hair down bothered him, for one. Not only was it somewhat… condescending? He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about it that was picking at him. It just wasn’t done in Kiri. Your hair was put back by a headband if it was long, at the very least, but more usually the minimum was a tied back tail.
The amount of color everywhere was another thing. Even the bands on hitae-ite here had a whole range of colors. While there was some variation in Kirigakure, there was reason for the colors of cloth each shinobi had to hold their forehead protector in place. Colors outside of blue or black were special – they were something your teammates or your significant other or your closest friends picked for you, something that was a gift when you reached Jonin. Shinobi in Kirigakure didn’t just pick a color anytime they wanted, which seemed to be the system here from what he could tell.
As were all the smiling faces. He knew that peacetime bred complacency, but he also couldn’t help feeling something was going to try and kill him and the others any second now. He couldn’t trust the calm in the village. Mei pulled him aside as they were shown to their lodgings. “You don’t have to be so jumpy. We are here for three days, and Konoha are still technically our allies.”
“Yeah.” Hiroshi nodded. He just wanted to be back underground with R and D testing things that probably shouldn’t have even left the design process, but that made for an interesting challenge nonetheless. “I mean, yes, Mizukage-sama.”
Mei nodded before gathering her things. “I’m having dinner with the Hokage tonight to open discussions. You three stay here. You understand, I’m sure, the general protocol.”
Hiroshi nodded. There was a small seal paper. If it started burning their kage needed them to seek her out and defend her. She would burn it as soon as she felt necessary.
“I still don’t like this.” Chojuro was still a bit antsy, as he had been notoriously throughout the war, but he had gained some level of confidence from his teammates. “Even if you will be close by, why is it you have to meet her alone the first time?”
Mei clearly understood his question’s intent. “It’s a show of trust. We are negotiating one of her own shinobi – one that was left with us so long as to be legally ours. This could have started a war with past regimes, with past leaders. It needs to be handled very carefully. And the best way to do that is to build trust in the beginning with a one on one dinner between the two of us.”
Chojuro was appeased enough to stay silent, but Hiroshi could still see the tension in his muscles.
*
The dinner was meant, more than for trust, as a way for Mei and Tsunade to talk without interference. It would be easy for discussions to get derailed if their advisors were let into the discussion.
It was also a moment for Mei to meet the Nara family head, to meet Ren’s father, and express her condolences. It was common practice when a shinobi changed hands to do so, to apologize for splitting their family. Maybe one day Ren would be able to walk into Konoha, be able to visit her family, but there was no guarantee.
In the Warring Clans era, Kiri would make transferred shinobi swear off ties – as barbaric to the soul as the graduation ritual later imposed – to their former family. Mei had no intention of letting that continue, just as she was amending the Academy curriculum to allow for just as vicious a person to graduate without having to kill members of their class.
But the dinner didn’t start for several hours, giving her a chance to make an important stop.
*
Their first mission was a 2-week D-rank assignment to one of the satellite villages on another island. It was a three-hour run, with minor sessions of running over the thicker, open rivers cutting throughout the mass of islands that made up the Land of Water.
Ren ran behind them a few yards. She knew she was only supposed to supervise, but she could already tell she would be more hands-on than some Kiri Jonin-supervisors were. She had come from a culture where the supervisor was a sensei – she couldn’t shed the value of that experience so easily as to follow rote the procedures and systems she had witnessed and that had been explained to her in Kiri.
They would reach their station by nightfall. She would have to check in and get their tasks for the next day, but her genin – who were wearing out even if they tried not to show it – would be able to rest.
*
She had left early, and she had found herself at the Nara clan compound. Nara Shikaku was the Konoha Jonin Commander – he would be present at the dinner.
But Nara Yoshino was a Chuunin only returned to active duty in the last few years, if her intelligence was to be believed. She wouldn’t be there, she wouldn’t be part of the discussion. Even though Ren was adopted – and she had to be with that blood red hair and those bright green eyes. That coloring that was either Uzumaki or Terumi – Yoshino had mothered her. She had raised her for who knows how many years, holding her close and training her and coaching her on how to stand back up after someone knocked her down.
Mei remembered her own mother. Her mother had watched her youngest child die, watched her waste away and there was nothing they could do about it. Her sister had gotten sick when Mei was only eight. When she had just started at the Academy, her brothers – twins that became increasingly irked with each other as time passed, but had always, always been inseparable until the day of the war – to start the next year.
Mei had watched her mother ache for her children as they left her one by one, some permanently and some just too distant for her to reach, permanently weakened by the disease.
As much as Riko unwittingly let on that as the adopted child she was sure she was less important in the eyes of her clan, it was undoubtedly difficult for Yoshino to know her daughter wouldn’t be coming back. If Mei had to guess, Riko was as much her child as Shikamaru, even if Riko didn’t let herself see it that way.
The Nara that was leading Mei through the compound stopped, hesitating before the door of what had to be Yoshino’s house. As much as Mei was dolled up in her formalwear, her Kage coat over an ornate kimono woven with symbols of Kiri, as much as the dark violet hitae-ite that remained tied around her neck told of the training she had undergone over the course of her life, she felt smaller than the day her mother sent her away to the Kirigakure Shinobi Academy with a demand that she better herself to protect her family.
Nara Yoshino was a tall, imposing woman. Years off active duty hadn’t left her without a presence she had undoubtedly cultivated over years in the ranks of Konoha.
“Mizukage-sama.”
“Nara-san.” Mei bowed low, as apologetic in her posture and manner as she dared let herself be. “May we talk?”
Nara bowed before stepping to let her into the home. “Please come in.”
*
She was right. Nightfall had just struck when they got into the satellite village. The chuunin on guard duty at the gate ran the genin through the standard procedure of entering any Kirigakure satellite before making the signal necessary for her to come out.
She would have to sign off on their entry into the satellite. There would be a small apartment that was used by another group before them and one before that, and it would be sparse, but it would have enough space for the five of them to live for two weeks.
Living with your team was one way to really enforce bonds.
She had made sure they all took one of the two available rooms – she would be taking the other – before she sat at the scarred wooden table to look through their tasks for the next day.
Rebuilding in a village a 20-minute run away. Some fishing to help feed some of the sick and injured that couldn’t seek their own food out after the war.
They would have a few hours helping with the night watch as well, meaning they would have to finish by mid-afternoon to be back in their assigned village with enough time to get their assignment and plan out their watch. Some insurgents wandered the bogs and swamps of Kiri and attacked smaller villages or satellites, hoping to destabilize Mei’s regime.
A long day, but definitely easier on them than anything they would have suffered or seen in the war.
Sighing, she looked at her own assignments. She would be supervising some of their work in the morning, but their evening watch was the time for her to go out on missions for the village.
A lot more to her work than to theirs. She would have to ration her chakra carefully in the morning.
*
Yoshino was the kind of woman, once she relaxed a bit, that Mei could have been dear friends with if they had been born into the same village and the same type of world.
Sure, they were on the same earth, but her reality had been far darker than Yoshino’s, and something of that stuck to Mei as they spoke.
“I am truly sorry your daughter will not be returning to you.”
Yoshino was still somewhat tense. Likely, Mei considered, she was worried she would offend the Mizukage. Kirigakure had yet to return to a stiff form of manners, and offense was hard to come by in her village. The war had thrown most non-necessary social nicety out the window – the only necessity for events such as when gaining the legitimation of the Daimyo after defeating most of the rebels – and shinobi were fairly direct with each other, at the very least in her village. Yoshino would have no way of knowing this, though. Would have no way of knowing that she was speaking to a leader whose shinobi addressed her as ‘Mizukage-sama’ as often as they did ‘Mei-san’.
“I will miss her. She is dear to me.”
Mei knew when she took this job she was taking on massive responsibilities. She was taking on the lives of her soldiers. She was taking on the responsibility of avoiding wars with the other nations while maintaining a clear capability to survive while both of her jinchuuriki were missing. Facts that were surely known to the other villages by now.
She didn’t have her ultimate deterrent, so she would have to work harder to be sure her conventional forces could withstand a threat without seeming like a paper tiger – a delicate balance, for sure, but one she would figure out.
But more than that, she was taking on people. People with families and lovers and friends and lives. And she had several who had come from far away and who had left people behind.
“Perhaps one day you will see her again.”
Yoshino smiled, setting the tea in front of Mei. “I would like that. I don’t know why she would have reason to come to Konoha, or myself to go to Kirigakure, though, Mizukage-sama.
“It is a sweet thought, though, and I appreciate it.”
Mei bowed, accepting the tea and letting herself talk more with Yoshino.
She had time before the dinner, and it was the least she could do for Yoshino.