Obito walked without hurrying. The road out of the Rain Country was wet even on a day without rain — the ground held moisture the way the country held everything, stubbornly, long after the source had stopped.
"Talking at him won't work," he said. Not frustrated. Observational.
"Then what?" Black Zetsu asked.
"Someone that sunny, that full of hope—" Obito paused for a moment, watching the road. "That doesn't fit what we need. Not yet."
Black Zetsu waited.
"But it doesn't matter," Obito said. The corner of his voice softened into something that might have been wistfulness, if the rest of him hadn't been so thoroughly hollowed out and refilled with colder material. "I was like that once."
White Zetsu made a sound of vague curiosity.
"So what you're saying," Black Zetsu said, "is that you want him to go through what you went through."
"Maybe," Obito said. Just the one word. He kept walking.
Several days later, in the Hidden Rain Village.
The courtyard was large and well-maintained, which in the Rain Country meant the drainage was good and the stone had been laid to a standard that discouraged pooling. A dozen ninjas stood at regular intervals along the walls, posture correct, eyes moving. None of them were relaxed, because relaxed was not a condition that Hanzo of the Salamander permitted in people assigned to guard him.
Hanzo himself sat at a low tea table in the center of the courtyard, cross-legged, a ceramic cup in both hands. He had left the gas mask off for the tea. The lavender mist that coiled from his breath was faint in the open air, barely visible, but every person present wore a mask regardless. You did not take chances with Hanzo's poison on the assumption that the air was moving in your favor today.
A ninja from the village was half-kneeling before him, delivering a report.
"They refused, Lord Hanzo. Akatsuki has rejected the order and has resumed operations."
Hanzo exhaled slowly, and the purple tinge in the air thickened briefly. "Stubborn," he said. Almost fond. Almost.
The kneeling ninja looked up at him, hesitated, looked down again. His hands were very still.
"You have something to say," Hanzo said. It wasn't a question.
"I—" The ninja stopped. Whatever he had been about to ask — probably something about reconstruction, about the villages that still hadn't been rebuilt, about why the war ending hadn't translated into any visible effort from the Hidden Rain Village's leadership — he swallowed it. "No, Lord Hanzo. Nothing."
"Rest," Hanzo said, and dismissed him with a gesture.
He understood what the man had wanted to ask. He simply didn't find the question interesting enough to answer. The Rain Country's people were suffering; he was aware of this; it was not the most pressing item on his current list.
Power was the pressing item. It had been the pressing item for some years now.
Hanzo set down the cup. "Yura."
A woman stepped forward from behind him — the kind of step that suggested she had been waiting for her name without needing to show it. Yura was not a large presence physically, but she had the quality of someone who took up exactly the space they occupied without wasting any of it.
"The Rain Country cannot hold two voices," she said, before he'd fully formed the question. "That's the answer to whatever you're about to ask."
Hanzo allowed himself a brief pause. "They haven't done anything wrong, technically. They're from this country. They've been rebuilding, while I—" He stopped.
What he didn't say: while I have not. What he meant, more honestly, was that the calculation of openly moving against people who had committed no visible crime had political costs he was currently unwilling to absorb. He had not become cruel. He had become careful in a way that looked very similar to cruel from the outside.
Yura knew how to read this. She had been reading it for years.
"A divided Rain Country," she said, "is a weakened Rain Country. Whatever damage is done in removing that division is less than the ongoing cost of letting it persist. The sacrifice, Lord Hanzo, is necessary."
The framing was elegant. It replaced I want them gone because they threaten me with unity requires difficult choices. Hanzo could work with that framing. He had been working with that kind of framing for most of his career.
He nodded. "The organization itself isn't weak, though. If it becomes a direct conflict—"
"Their weakness isn't combat capability," Yura said. "It's structure. The entire thing runs on three people. Primarily one." She paused. "An organization that only functions because of one man's personality isn't an organization. It's a following. Remove the man, and it disperses."
Hanzo touched his chin. "Kill all three of them."
"That's what I'd recommend. But the opportunity doesn't currently exist. It has to be created." Yura's tone was even, practical, the tone of someone proposing a route adjustment rather than a murder. "If Lord Hanzo extended an invitation — peace negotiations, a meeting to discuss using Akatsuki's communication channels for inter-country dialogue — Yahiko would accept. He'd consider it a victory. And once they're in a controlled location, under controlled circumstances..."
"I'd need a partner," Hanzo said. "Someone to absorb the dishonorable aspects of it. I can't afford to be publicly attached to something like this."
"Correct," Yura said. "And then there's the secondary opportunity: if the partner takes the blame, not only is Lord Hanzo clear of it, but you can announce that the meeting was attacked by outside forces. Take over what remains of Akatsuki under the banner of avenging their leaders." She let him work through the rest of it himself.
He did. "Take over their membership. Their networks. Their reputation in the country."
"And consolidate everything under your authority. Yes."
Hanzo sat with this for a long moment. There was something that might have been discomfort in his expression — a ghost of the man who had once been capable of genuine magnanimity, watching what he had become do the arithmetic. Then it passed.
"This partner who takes the blame," he said. "You're not going to suggest someone to me. You're going to let me say the name."
Yura smiled faintly. "Lord Hanzo already knows."
"Danzo Shimura." Hanzo turned the name over, tasted it. "The dog that doesn't bark."
The Konoha intelligence man had been making approaches for years — careful, non-committal, feeling out the edges of a working relationship without committing to one. Hanzo had kept him at arm's length because there had been no common ground that outweighed the risks of trusting him. That calculation had now shifted. Danzo needed a useful fiction. Hanzo needed an untraceable partner and a scapegoat. Both problems had the same solution.
The plan assembled itself in the courtyard's quiet: invite Akatsuki's leadership under the pretext of negotiations. Danzo's people provide the ambush. Akatsuki's founders die. The public story: Konoha attacked the meeting in an attempt to sabotage a peace arrangement. Hanzo, the survivor, steps forward to avenge his partners and absorbs their organization from a position of moral authority.
Danzo receives whatever arrangement he had originally wanted from Hanzo. Neither party's hands are visibly dirty. The Rain Country has one voice.
The part about actually avenging anything, or delivering on any arrangement with Danzo beyond the minimum — those were concerns for after the operation succeeded.
"Contact him," Hanzo said. "Tell him I've reconsidered his earlier proposal."
"Yes, Lord Hanzo."
Yura moved. Hanzo picked up the teacup again, blew across the surface, watched the lavender gas curl through the steam. The tea turned faintly purple from his breath alone. He drank it without hesitation.
Konoha. Land of Fire.
Namikaze Minato walked the corridor of the Hokage Building with the particular energy of a man who cannot stop smiling and has been trying to look more dignified about it for the past several minutes. The white robe of the Fourth Hokage was still relatively new on him, not yet worn to the comfortable ease it would eventually take on. The guards at the entrance greeted him with a sharpness that said Yondaime-sama before the words actually came out.
He thanked them, meant it, and kept moving.
Sarutobi Hiruzen was in the office when he arrived — on the sofa, a cigarette in hand, in the posture of a man who had spent enough years behind that desk to know exactly how the light came through the window at this hour. He wasn't Hokage anymore. He was here because Minato was still finding his feet, and because Hiruzen's idea of retirement was apparently sitting in the office he used to occupy and making himself available.
Minato didn't resent it. He didn't have the kind of personality that looks for reasons to resent things.
"You look pleased," Hiruzen observed.
Minato realized he was still smiling and made a modest effort to dial it back. "A little bit, Sandaime-sama."
"Share with an old man."
"Kushina said—" Minato started, then laughed at himself for laughing before he'd gotten to the part worth laughing at. "She wants a child."
Hiruzen's expression settled into something warm and genuine — not the political warmth that high-ranking ninja learn to produce on demand, but the real kind, the kind that came from having been married once yourself and remembering what that news felt like. "Congratulations, Minato. Truly."
Minato nodded, bright and slightly pink, and then the brightness shifted into the particular expression of someone who has just remembered a complication. "But — she's a Jinchūriki. Will it—"
"Be very dangerous?" Hiruzen let the question sit honestly for a moment before answering it. "Yes. Lady Mito said as much herself, years ago. A Jinchūriki's seal weakens significantly during childbirth. When the time comes, it cannot be common knowledge — not even inside the village, beyond the people directly involved. You'll need someone trustworthy present, experienced, someone whose discretion is absolute." He tapped ash from the cigarette. "Biwako has delivered more difficult births than most. She'll help."
"Really?" The relief that moved through Minato's face was unguarded and complete. "That's — yes, that's exactly what I'd hoped."
He laughed again, quieter this time, and reached up to scratch the back of his head with the slightly sheepish awareness that he had been getting ahead of himself.
"It hasn't even started yet," he admitted. "I'm planning a birth before there's a pregnancy. That's—" He shook his head. "Anyway."
Hiruzen smiled and said nothing. Some news deserved to be celebrated early. There was nothing wrong with it.
Outside the window, Konoha went about its afternoon, unhurried, the war newly behind it, the peace newly ahead.