[Konohagakure — Hokage Tower Plaza, October 30th, 5:49 PM]
The sundown came in low and orange, the kind that made the wet tiles of the plaza look like they'd been poured from copper. The chestnut vendor had his fire going. The dango woman had expanded to two crates. The thrush in the plum tree outside the Yamanaka flower shop was running its evening catalog of complaints, which had been ongoing since approximately the Third Hokage's second term and showed no signs of resolution.
The plaza was full in the way it had been full for every ranking reveal — that specific density of bodies that had nothing to do with being required and everything to do with the simple fact that the scroll, whatever else it was, made things feel like they meant something. People came because the scroll had a way of saying out loud the things a village had been thinking quietly, and there was, it turned out, a significant appetite for that.
Naruto was at the front. He had eaten breakfast. He had eaten lunch. He had told Iruka he would definitely be at dinner afterward and Iruka had said fine, and then said bring Sasuke, and Naruto had said Sasuke doesn't need to be told to eat, and Iruka had said bring Sasuke, and so Sasuke was here too, standing three paces back with his cloak pulled around his shoulders in the autumn evening, pretending to watch the scroll while actually watching the crowd, which was a thing he did and had never explained.
The scroll unfurled with its gold-edged whuff of displaced air.
MOST LIKELY TO CHANGE THEIR OWN STORY.
Naruto: Here we go.
Kushina: NARUTO DID YOU EAT
Naruto: MOM YES
Kushina: All of it?
Naruto: Sakura-chan watched me eat it so yes.
Sakura: I did watch him. He ate it.
Kushina: Good. Now I can enjoy the ranking.
The scroll's voice came through the evening air, unhurried.
"Most Likely to Change Their Own Story. Ranked by the documented distance between what a subject was on their worst day and what they chose to become afterward. The scroll notes that this category is not about the worst day. It is about the choice."
TENTH PLACE.
The portrait that formed was not one that Konoha recognized immediately. A young woman, late twenties, dark hair braided close to her head, with the hitai-ate of the Hidden Rain village worn around her upper arm rather than her forehead — a personal choice that the Rain's tactical doctrine discouraged and she had apparently made anyway.
KONAN.
In the plaza, someone said "who is that" to someone else, and someone else said "the Akatsuki paper woman, I think," and then the scroll began to speak and the plaza got quiet fast.
"Konan of Amegakure. Ranked tenth on the basis of: the decision, made alone, without witness, and without any reasonable expectation of success, to stop protecting a dead man's plan and start protecting a living boy's chance. The subject's change was not dramatic. It was not announced. It was made in a single afternoon in a rain-soaked village and has not been rescinded."
The chat went quiet. Not empty — green dots everywhere — but the typing indicators appeared and disappeared without resolving into messages, which was what the chat did when people were feeling things they hadn't yet figured out how to say.
Then:
Jiraiya: ...Konan.
A pause.
Jiraiya: I'd heard she'd broken with Akatsuki. I didn't know the full of it.
Naruto: She protected Nagato's body.
Jiraiya: Yes.
Naruto: She fought Tobi alone. Paper vs. Kamui. She didn't win but she didn't run.
Jiraiya: I know, kid.
Naruto: She changed her story.
Jiraiya: Yeah. She did.
"Reward: one sealed letter, authored by Nagato Uzumaki and delivered through the scroll's courier function, written at the scroll's request. Contents between the recipient and the sender."
In a village fourteen hours northeast of Konoha, in a room above a noodle shop that she had been occupying for three weeks while she figured out what came next, Konan held a sealed letter that had appeared on the windowsill between one blink and the next. She sat with it in her hands for a long time. She did not open it in public. She was not someone who did things in public that could be done in private. That had always been true. The story had changed; the person had not, entirely, which was perhaps the point.
NINTH PLACE.
Gaara of the Sand.
The Sunagakure section of the plaza reacted with the controlled dignity of a delegation that had been briefed on emotional regulation for public events, which lasted approximately four seconds before Temari made a sound that she would later characterize as a cough and Kankuro would later characterize, to anyone who asked, as the most Temari thing that had ever happened.
"Gaara of the Hidden Sand. Ranked ninth on the basis of: arriving as a vessel for organized hatred and becoming, through the specific and non-transferable experience of being nearly killed by a child who refused to hate him back, a person capable of leading his village. The scroll notes that Uzumaki Naruto has a gift for making things grow in places they were not planted."
Naruto: I don't know if that's about me or gardening.
Sasuke: It's about you.
Naruto: How do you know.
Sasuke: Because the scroll said "Uzumaki Naruto" in the same sentence. That's how.
Naruto: Oh. Right.
Naruto: Gaara! Hey! You made the list!
Gaara: I can see the chat, Naruto.
Naruto: I KNOW but I wanted to say it OUT LOUD.
Gaara: ...Thank you. For what it said.
Naruto: I didn't do anything I just talked at you.
Gaara: Yes. That's what I'm thanking you for.
The plaza processed this in the particular quiet way it had learned to process Gaara-related information — which was to say, with the combination of complicated feeling and complete inability to articulate it that Gaara had been producing in people since his first Chūnin Exam.
"Reward: one set of commemorative administrative seals, custom-designed for the Kazekage's office, with the Suna fan in the center of each. Also: one personal message from Shukaku, delivered via the scroll's internal beast-communication channel. The scroll declines to repeat the message aloud, as it contains language inappropriate for a public forum."
In Suna, in the Kazekage tower, the administrative seals materialized on the desk in a neat stack. The personal message from Shukaku arrived a beat later, into Gaara's awareness rather than on paper, and made him press two fingers against the bridge of his nose in the expression he used when Shukaku was being emotionally sincere in the most aggressive possible way.
He stood in his office alone for a moment.
Then he sat down, picked up the new seals, and went back to work.
EIGHTH PLACE.
The portrait formed and the plaza inhaled.
Neji Hyūga.
In the front row, Hinata made a very small sound and looked at the ground. Beside her, Kiba started to say something and stopped when Shino put a hand on his arm without looking.
"Neji Hyūga of the Hyūga clan's branch house. Ranked eighth on the basis of: arriving with a complete philosophical architecture built around the impossibility of change, and dismantling it in a training ground in full view of his peers, at age thirteen, because a boy with no reason to believe in anything refused to stop believing in him."
The plaza was quiet.
Tenten, three rows back, had her hands pressed flat on her thighs and her eyes fixed on the portrait with the particular expression of someone who is very carefully not crying in a public space.
Lee, beside her, was not exercising the same restraint. He was openly weeping and seemed to consider this appropriate to the occasion, which it was.
"Reward: one personal letter from Hinata Hyūga, written at the recipient's request, to be delivered through the scroll's courier function. The scroll notes that this letter was written six months ago, before the ranking, because the writer did not require a ranking to know what she wanted to say."
In the front row, Hinata looked up at the portrait of her cousin. She had written the letter in one sitting, at the kitchen table, in February, because the grief had found a shape that night and writing had been the only way she knew to give it somewhere to go. She had not told anyone she'd written it. She had put it in the scroll petition box at the Hokage tower the next morning, feeling slightly foolish, and had not thought about it since.
She thought about it now.
She was glad she had written it.
SEVENTH PLACE.
The portrait formed. Jiraiya, standing in the middle of the plaza crowd, looked at it for a moment, turned, and walked away.
Not fast. Not with distress. Just walked, with his hands in his pockets and his white hair catching the last copper light, through the crowd and out the plaza and down the road that ran along the base of the wall.
He walked the wall's perimeter. It took forty-five minutes. When he came back, the ranking had moved on, and he stood at the edge of the plaza with his scroll in his hand and read what he had missed, and said nothing to anyone about what the seventh-place portrait had looked like.
He did not need to. Everyone had seen it.
OROCHIMARU.
The scroll had said: "A subject who has not yet finished changing. Ranked seventh because the story is still being written and the direction has shifted. The scroll does not forgive. It observes. It has observed something worth observing."
The chat, for the seventh-place announcement, had been silent for a very long time.
Then Tsunade had written: I need a drink.
And Jiraiya had written nothing at all, because he had already left the plaza, and was walking the wall, and thinking about a boy who had eaten the shells along with the rice.
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