"The Fourth Hokage gave his life fighting the Nine-Tailed Fox. Until a Fifth is named, I will carry the burden of the Hokage's seat once more."
Hiruzen Sarutobi stood on the platform above the square, his robe snapping in the wind, and said what half of Konoha had already guessed and refused to believe.
A silence settled over the gathered crowd, heavy enough to feel.
Minato Namikaze had held the title less than a year. That a man in the prime of his strength could be gone so suddenly left shinobi and civilians alike uneasy in a way the war itself, for all its losses, had somehow never quite managed. No one had expected the fighting to spare him only for the Nine-Tails to finish what enemy shinobi could not.
Tonbo stood among the ranks beside Dokuraku Meguri, watching the old man on the platform and turning over the same question half the crowd was surely asking. Why hadn't it been the Third who paid that price? Between the forbidden techniques left behind by the Second and whatever else the Village had developed since, there should have been some other way to manage a beast that old.
The Nine-Tails had existed for a thousand years. There was no reason it should only prove uncontainable now, in the one generation Tonbo happened to be living through.
Perhaps the Third simply lacked the skill for the sealing the moment demanded, and the burden of containing the beast in Naruto had fallen to Minato alone because there had been no one else capable of it. It was a thin theory, and nothing in his fragmentary knowledge of the future confirmed it. For once, his borrowed knowledge gave him nothing solid to stand on.
"So we finally end one war, and now everything's unsettled again," Hijiri Shimon said beside him, sighing.
"Rough times ahead," Tonbo agreed.
He wasn't exaggerating. The deaths of Kages carried weight far beyond the funeral itself — the Third Kazekage's disappearance had helped tip the whole continent into the last war; the Third Raikage's death in battle had cost Kumogakure the war outright. Now the Third Hokage's return to power would leave Konoha thin at the top for a while yet, and the Land of Fire and its neighbors, watching a Hokage die less than a year into his rule, would think twice before trusting the Village with their coin and their secrets. Fewer missions meant slower growth for every shinobi under this roof, and the consequences of that would ripple outward for years.
Rather than risk another untested Hokage so soon, the Village's leadership had chosen the safer path: let the Third spend what strength he had left holding things steady.
With him back in the seat, the work of mourning the dead began in earnest. Between the Fourth and the jōnin lost fighting the beast, there were more names carved into the Memorial Stone than Konoha had lost in most single battles of the war just ended, and grief and anger gathered there in equal measure, week after week, as families came to sit with names that would never answer them again. Iruka and Kakashi seemed to feel it hardest of all, though neither spoke of it much in front of others.
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Tonbo had already sat through more than his share of memorial rites; they came, without fail, after every war. His own family, at least, had come through whole. He came to the Stone mainly for the Fourth's sake — he had liked that bright, easy Hokage, and his wife besides. There had been something genuine in the two of them that was rare enough in this line of work.
Time did what it always did. The living kept living.
A year and a half after the Third's return, Tonbo was seated with a copy of Theoretical Research on Barrier ninjutsu when an Anbu appeared without a sound.
"Hokage-sama requests you at his office."
"Anything I should bring?" Tonbo asked, closing the book.
"No need."
He walked out into a clear afternoon, turning over every reason the Hokage might want him personally. He had made Special jōnin by then, his Psycho Mind Transmission technique having long since outgrown even Inoichi's own version, and the Analysis Team rarely saw combat worth the Hokage's direct attention. An escort assignment seemed the likeliest guess — the sort of mission that needed information pulled from someone's head as fast as possible, the way he and the others had once done with a captured shinobi from the Hidden Mist.
He knocked at the office door and was waved in. Papers stood in a small mountain before the Third, two aides working quietly at his side.
"Hokage-sama."
"You've filled out well these past years," Hiruzen said, studying him.
"Filled out is generous. Taller and better-looking, certainly. Sturdy might be a stretch."
Tonbo had never carried much bulk, whatever the compliment implied.
"Ha. My eyes aren't what they were." The old man's mouth twitched. This one never let anything go easily.
"I called you here to give you an assignment." Hiruzen set his brush down. "The war and the Nine-Tails between them gutted Konoha's core strength, and we still haven't recovered it. Your record and your experience in the field have earned my confidence, and the Advisors', for something I need done properly. I want you to take a genin team fresh from the Academy. What do you think?"
Tonbo hadn't guessed that one, for all his turning it over on the walk here.
He would have preferred to keep developing quietly within the Analysis Team, but a man who claimed to carry the Will of Fire couldn't very well refuse a request like this one. And it had been a long while since he'd had reason to step outside its walls.
"No objection. Konoha needs new wood for the fire, and I'm glad to provide it."
Hiruzen looked satisfied, the way a man looks when a private judgment is finally confirmed. He had marked this one as someone who carried the Will of Fire a year and more ago, and nothing since had changed his mind.
"Good. Here's your team."
Tonbo took the list and opened it: Iruka Umino, Mibu Shinobu, Tessen Togekei.
Iruka's file he half-expected already — strong marks in theory, average in the field, solid grounding in the Three Basic Jutsu, ordinary taijutsu. Mibu Shinobu's record read much the same, though his photograph showed a boy who wrapped his head the way Tonbo did, with only a few tufts of hair escaping the bandage. Tessen Togekei's file was the strongest of the three by a wide margin — excellent marks across the board, a talent for Space-Time ninjutsu and tool work well ahead of his year, and a face in the photograph that carried an odd echo of someone Tonbo half-remembered from a much later Konoha.
So he'd be teaching Naruto's future teacher, more or less — though on these marks alone, Iruka looked better suited to a classroom than a battlefield just yet.
Mibu Shinobu, he decided, wrapped his head out of nothing but vanity, and did it worse than Tonbo managed. Tessen Togekei's family, judging by the early skill with Ninja tools, had money behind it, and probably no small talent among the parents either.
Whatever else waited for them, Tonbo thought, closing the file, these three would do.