"What are you doing here?" Tonbo shot him a look meant to send him packing.
Shimon either missed it or ignored it outright, one eyebrow raised. "It's the Hokage's inauguration. Whole village is out celebrating, so I thought I'd take in the market myself." A grin spread slow across his face. "Didn't expect to find you out here with a girlfriend, though."
Ayame's face went red, and her hand twitched in his, half a mind to pull free.
"I — I'm not his—"
"What business is it of yours if I have one?" Tonbo tightened his grip on her hand, and let his gaze settle on Shimon without the bandages to soften it. Whatever Shimon saw there, it was enough to drag up the memory of their last spar. "Keep pushing your luck and you'll get a proper taste of Pain next time we cross blades."
"Tch. Fine, I'll go find my own, then. Not talking to you." Shimon beat a fast retreat and was gone into the crowd.
"Colleague of mine. Hijiri Shimon. All talk, mostly harmless," Tonbo said, by way of introduction.
"Mm. Dragonfly does suit you," Ayame murmured, still pink in the face, turning his own words over — what business is it of yours if I have one — for the rest of the walk. She stayed shy and quiet the whole way home, nothing like her usual self.
Behind them, Shimon trailed the two at a careful distance, tracking skills put to their least dignified use yet. Showing off right in front of me. Just because he made chūnin doesn't mean he gets to lord it over the rest of us. Next time, I'll find someone of my own and see how he likes it.
The night ended there, an interlude and nothing more. Life went on. Nothing came of that evening, given their age, but whatever stood between Tonbo and Ayame only grew steadier for it. He went back to work, back to his father's cooking every night, a girl on his mind besides.
Then, a mission — reading a chūnin out of Hidden Mist, memories of assassination and espionage and half-formed ninjutsu pouring past him through the tunnel of another man's mind. Somewhere in the middle of it, one thread caught and held: Hidden Mist had moved something across the Land of Bears border, under heavy guard, and the intelligence was already days stale.
He pulled the amplifier off and went straight to Inoichi's office.
"Inoichi-sama. Two days ago, Hidden Mist moved something across the Land of Bears border into the Land of Fire, disguised and under heavy escort. That's what the memories show."
"Details." Inoichi's attention sharpened at once — his people didn't report things this urgently without reason.
"An elite escort, from what I could tell. And with the Seven Swordsmen already gutted the way they are, I'd guess Hidden Mist means to hit back at Konoha somehow. Except the Village has never been stronger than it is with the Fourth in office, which leaves one thing worth smuggling in that kind of secrecy." Tonbo laid out the raw memory first, his own reading of it after — no sense letting his conclusions color what his superior saw for himself. "A Tailed Beast."
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"A Tailed Beast." Inoichi went through it once on his own, then again along the same line Tonbo had drawn, and came out the other side no less alarmed. The timing alone was ugly. "Write up the intelligence and your analysis. Wait for word."
He was out the door before he'd finished the sentence.
Tonbo let out a slow breath once he was alone. This was it, likely — the day Kakashi's hand found Rin instead of an enemy. There was only so much warning could do this late, and by his own reckoning the thing had probably already happened before his report ever left the building. He hoped anyway, more for his own sake than any real belief it would help. Pity for a classmate he barely knew, mostly, and a small selfish comfort besides.
Inoichi carried both memory and analysis straight to the Hokage's office.
Minato ran it through on his own — Rin, a Tailed Beast, Kakashi, the Land of Bears, Hidden Mist — and didn't like where it led. "Gather the ANBU and the Sealing squad. Now. With me."
Half a day's run from the village, in a stretch of forest gone quiet with the aftermath, lightning cracked loud enough to startle birds out of the canopy. Kakashi's eyes had gone wide and small at once, his hand already through Rin Nohara's chest before the sound had finished rolling off through the trees. Behind her, the Hidden Mist jōnin who'd been about to finish what Kakashi had just stopped broke into a cold sweat and said nothing at all.
Minato covered the distance at a dead sprint, the Body Flicker pushed harder than he'd ever dared risk it, the ANBU trailing behind him doing everything in their power not to fall out of formation — nothing would go wrong on their watch, not with the Fourth himself out ahead of them.
What he found when he arrived was ruin: craters, splintered trees, shuriken and kunai scattered through torn earth, the bodies of Hidden Mist ninja among them, and Kakashi on his knees in the middle of it all, Rin lying in front of him.
"Kakashi."
The name alone brought some flicker of life back into his eyes. Minato looked once at the girl on the ground and closed his own for a moment.
"Sensei. I — I killed Rin." Kakashi's voice came out hollow, directed at no one, his eyes gone somewhere Minato couldn't follow.
Tonbo finished his own report not long after and filed it away with the rest. Kakashi's grief wasn't his to carry, and there was little enough he could do for it besides — not with Madara and whatever Black Zetsu was still steering from the shadows still years off, still well past anything he could touch yet.
Running from it wasn't a real option either way. Pain would bring the whole weight of the future down on Konoha someday, and hoping Naruto's stubbornness or some late change of heart in Pain himself would be enough to stop it wasn't a plan Tonbo trusted with anyone's life, least of all his own. Better to find some way to weather that Almighty Push before it ever came, or else make certain the man who could summon it never got the chance to try.
Kakashi's grief only sharpened the same old lesson. Some things came at a man sideways, no warning, no way to brace for them in time. He could keep himself clear of the worst of it, given enough care, but his father couldn't. Neither could Ayame, nor Teuchi, nor anyone else he'd come to count on these past months. All the more reason to keep building, quietly, without drawing eyes he didn't want on him.
There was another shape to the problem too — Tailed Beasts, Ketsuryūgan, and whatever other monstrous gifts the years ahead still had waiting. Ordinary ninjutsu ran up against its limits fast against that kind of scale. He'd turned over the idea of grafting a Ketsuryūgan onto himself outright, once, and set it aside just as quickly — the difficulty alone put it well past what his current path could support, and a bloodline like that demanded years of technique built up around it besides.
Better to look toward secret arts instead. Techniques built to amplify genjutsu at its root, the way the Ino–Shika–Chō line had always kept their own inherited jutsu close and hard to copy.