And So Life Moves On
Terumi Mei looked at the file in her hands. Two of the only people who knew about the girl were in the room, watching their Mizukage intently.
“How do we send her back? She’s been so close to broken, and from what I can gather she’s barely holding it together. How do we throw that into a peaceful life again?” To be fair to Riko, most Kiri shinobi, particularly Jounin who had seen some of the worse battles, were barely holding it together.
Mei had seen peace. And more than that, she remembered how surreal it had been, seeing peace after so much war. The idea that she didn’t have to look over her shoulder nearly as much, that she could (theoretically) relax. It was an alien concept, to go from war to peace, with nothing in between.
Even more so for someone like Akagi Ren that had killed and destroyed more than she had built and created. A shinobi like Nara Riko, who had come into this from being a peacetime shinobi - an all together different experience from being a wartime shinobi. Nara Riko, who had spent so long undercover as Akagi Ren, Mei couldn’t see anymore where one ended and the other began. There was nothing she could look to that would tell her that Akagi Ren and Nara Riko were really two separate people.
Ao sighed. “She’s a brat. What do we care?”
Zabuza huffed a laugh. “She’s a fucking strong brat, is what she is. That’s why we care.”
Mei rolled her eyes. Men. Sometimes they got on her last nerve. “She’s a fucking strong brat we all have an attachment too, and who was one of several of those insane enough to help us win this war. So, do we keep her here or do we send her back?”
“Do both.” Zabuza leaned towards the file. “Keep her here as part of the rebuilding effort, and when we think she’s stable enough, or we’ve rebuilt enough, we send her back.”
Ao raised an eyebrow at him. “And how do we tell Konoha we’re keeping one of theirs longer than we intended?”
“They don’t know the progress she’s made, and if we send her back now, she won’t be able to use a shit-ton of her arsenal because it’s completely tied to Akagi Ren.
“She had just made chuunin when we got her. If we say we have a couple more things we want to train her on, who are they to say no? When we send her back, we put together some believable intel she could have gathered and then we let the tree-huggers do their thing from there.”
Mei looked Zabuza in the eye, piecing together parts of his plan. “What do we want to train her on? She should have something extraordinary if we’re keeping her.”
“How the hell should I know? You’re the Kage, you think of something.”
“How much do you think sending one of the Seven Swords into Konoha would improve relations?”
Ao scoffed. “All due respect, Mizukage-seonsaengnim, but are you fucking nuts?”
Zabuza looked thoughtful. He opened his mouth once before closing it. When he finally decided, he looked towards the window. “We have a lot of genin in the field that would benefit from an instructor, and we have enough stability now to start making teams and running them on rebuild missions. Make her a jounin instructor first, then give her a sword. If we play our cards right, maybe we can keep her indefinitely.”
The three of them settled in, knowing this would be a much longer conversation than they originally planned.
One of the first things Nara Riko – more Ren than not most days, but she could still feel that Konoha spark beneath all the scarring and anger – noticed about the Land of Water was that, outside of those who did business on the mainland, the language most people used wasn’t Japanese.
Ao and Zabuza had shrugged it off, having grown up on the islands and never thought about it. Haku, however explained a theory of his as it having to do with the isolation and how their language developed differently after having a couple hundred years with minimal mainland contact.
It was Suigetsu, in all his patriotism that explained it to her and then refused to use any other language with her, forcing her to learn it. “You’re a Kiri shinobi, now, you’ll damn well talk like one,” he had said. Nevermind he knew she would one day be going back to Konoha.
According to Suigetsu, who had learned about it from his brother, when Kiri started to become alienated from the other villages and get a reputation for bloodlust, their dialect came to be mocked quite a bit as one more ‘oddity’. With that, some of the civilians just let it slide around and become its own thing. Instead of learning Japanese proper, they claimed their language was different, that it operated by different rules. With time, that not only came to be true, but the language and culture evolved into something separate. The isolation of being a nation of islands a decent distance off the coast of the mainland certainly helped. So, while all the shinobi learned Japanese and conducted the majority of their business in it, it wasn’t uncommon within the Land of Water to hear shinobi merge the two languages, overlapping addresses and formalities within their home.
It was Chuseok – a purely Kirigakure holiday, and the only one where the shinobi were given what could amount to a day off in all the aftermath of the war. For what was maybe the third time since coming here, Ren was in the village-proper, her team being called in to meet with the Mizukage in the middle of the afternoon.
It as also the first time since she left Konoha that she was wearing anything close to nice or ceremonial. The hanbok Haku had found for their team were all nicely colored; dark enough to not stand out, but enough color on it that they didn’t feel like clothing they would wear in the field.
It had taken her several tries to get the gown on, and even then it took Suigetsu scoffing “Dongsaeng…” and coming over to help her. Haku had helped her pin her hair up (she hadn’t needed the help, but Haku had asked her help with his own hair and wanted to return the favor).
Her normal braided bun was more decorative for the event, with hairpieces pinned in, her braids twisted to rest lower on her neck than normal held in place with a senbon needle and decorated with flowery clips. Haku had been slapping her hand away ever since when she went to touch it.
To be fair, it wasn’t often she had her hair done up fancy anymore.
“We will be late if we don’t hurry. You three must stop dawdling.” Haku’s stare was one that promised long training sessions filled with pain if they didn’t hurry up.
“Seonbae,” Ren glanced up from where she was buying a sweet bun, “We won’t be late. Promise.”
Haku wasn’t convinced. He glanced at Suigetsu, stressing his words as he addressed Ren, “You and Chojuro aren’t the ones I’m worried about, Deongsaeng.”
When she had become “Younger Sister” or “Sibling” to them she couldn’t remember, but it was their default way of addressing her if they weren’t in the field. At this point, when they were in the same station, it was relatively rare for the four of them to split up if they could avoid it; the four of them had, like several other Kiri teams, become bound together in a way that peace couldn’t bind a team. They were as much protecting each other as they were the village, and their patriotism wasn’t as much to the nation or village as it was to each other and their way of life.
Ren understood Haku’s loyalty to Zabuza a lot better.
Riko understood her sensei a lot better now.
Ren grabbed Suigetsu’s collar, dragging him with them. “Oppa, you can’t keep holding us up. I don’t want Haku trying to stick me with a needle just because you’re curious.”
Suigetsu scoffed. “He wouldn’t.”
Haku’s glare promised nothing less than pain.
At some point, Ren had stopped hoping for the day she went back to Konoha and just accepted it was imminent. She wanted to go home and see her family, she wanted to leave behind the war and bloodshed and try to be productive.
But she also had precious people here, and she didn’t want to leave them behind. She had left enough people behind for a lifetime.
“We need to get an apartment.” Suigetsu glared at his hanbok. “If we’re gonna start having nice shit we should have a place to keep it. Wanna split rent?”
“Sure,” Chojuro shrugged. “It’s probably a good idea anyway, considering.”
The smile on his face seemed foreboding. It didn’t help he was smiling at Ren. Again. “What the hell, Chojuro? What are you hiding?”
He laughed at her, the other two smirking at her ire. It had been this way for two weeks and at this point she had given up.
She would get the information out of them sooner or later, anyway. They had stopped trying to hide things from each other.
The four of them trailed up the Mizukage Tower, Ren moving her skirts carefully so she wouldn’t trip. She didn’t really want to ruin her only hanbok at this point. Not when she might (one day) wear it again.
The good thing about the hanbok Haku had bought was they were designed for shinobi. From weapons pockets, to being significantly looser, so as to accommodate an under-layer of clothing for battle, the hanbok were also reinforced with a mesh layer for protection.
Ren bowed with her compatriots before the Mizukage.
“Akagi Ren, to your left is your genin team. You will teach them in between the higher level missions I send you on. On occasion, you will take them with you on higher level missions, as dictated by me. Is this understood?”
Ren froze. She had promised Hanabi, Chie, and Aimi to be their sensei. Well, Riko had, anyway.
If she wasn’t getting a Genin team, she probably wouldn’t be going back. At least, not anytime soon. She might not get to be the Jounin instructor to Hanabi, Chie, and Aimi. She might not get to be recognized for her skills in her home village. She might not be there to see how far her teammates had come.
Who knew how long would pass before she saw her family?
But she looked at the three girls, all of them in hanbok, looking to her expectantly. All three had seen the tail end of this war, and knew what they were signing up for. All three of them knew she potentially held their career in their hands. A jounin instructor could up their chances of promotion, it would refine them as a group for the Chuunin Exam, and having her specifically as an instructor would give them a certain amount of credit in a fight, given her reputation.
She wouldn’t get to be her cousin’s instructor, and those three little psychos in Konoha would have to deal with it. She had to deal with the had life gave her, and this was one way she could damn well make the best of it.
“I’ll do it. You three, starting tomorrow we meet by the river on the South side of town. Be there at dawn.”
The three looked to the Mizukage, waiting. Mei nodded at them, and in a flash all three stood up, bowing and exclaiming “Ne, Seonsaengnim!”
“Alright then. You three are dismissed. Ren, you will go with your Genin. Keep an eye on them and join in the festivities with them. Haku and the rest of your team will be staying here.”
The three girls filed out, Ren behind them, while Suigetsu became more engaged in the conversation. “So, whatcha need us for, Seonsaengnim?”
Mei smiled. It was no secret she was pleased at being called as “teacher” by most of her soldiers. She was on the track of changing the reputation of the Bloody Mist, and being called a teacher by her constituents made it seem like her goal was that much closer.
“I have a plan for Ren. You’re going to need to start pushing her in your team training though, and I don’t just mean by our normal standards either. I want her ready to take on the Kiba swords by the end of the year.”
“Seonsaengnim, are you sure?”
The Mizukage didn’t look much like a teacher as she leveled a hard gaze at him. “I’m positive.”
Konoha had been calm without Team 7 around. As loathe as Tsunade was to admit it, it had also been boring.
Currently, the only one who had returned was Uzumaki Naruto, who stood in front of her babbling about his training mission, while she paid enough attention to follow while she finished paperwork.
“Hey, are Ri-chan and the bastard back?”
Tsunade looked up from her papers. She had hoped he wouldn’t ask about that. “Not yet, though Riko is due back soon.”
“Really?! I can’t wait to see them again! Hey, Baa-chan, do ya think I’m stronger than them now?”
Tsunade smiled. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Oh, you’re no fun, Baa-chan!”
At least one of the brats was back. Maybe that would liven the place up a bit.