"Here — the intelligence on Iwagakure." Tobitake Tonbo held out the scroll, unbothered by the weeks of borrowed memory it had cost him to assemble.
"Mm." Kakashi took it and was gone before the word finished leaving his mouth. Not a syllable wasted.
Tonbo watched him go, shaking his head. Not even Obito and Rin have managed to thaw him out yet.
Inoichi had handed him this particular errand himself — not because it needed doing personally, but because Tonbo had been reading so many minds so cleanly that even his captain worried what all that borrowed memory might be doing to his own. Every hand still had to earn its rest during wartime, so out he went, carrying the Analysis Team's findings to the Yellow Flash's own student. Kakashi was already a jōnin by then, trusted enough to run missions on his own.
"Traffic between the front and the Analysis Team's picking up," Tonbo noted afterward, turning the pattern over in his head. The Battle of Kannabi Bridge, unless he missed his guess, was close.
He didn't miss it. Half a month later, word came down the line: the Yellow Flash's strike force had cut Iwagakure's supply route clean through at the bridge, and his name grew a shade brighter across both armies for it. Konoha pushed the counteroffensive hard on the back of that success, determined to settle the whole front before Iwagakure could regroup, and even Analysis Team ninja like Tonbo got pulled forward this time, sensory range put to work hunting stragglers instead of reading them after the fact.
He learned quickly that being useful in a real fight and being comfortable in one were entirely different things.
A chūnin patrol broke cover ahead of them. Tonbo's hands moved through the seals before he'd finished deciding to use them, and the enemy squad went down screaming, faces twisted around whatever agony his genjutsu had planted there — grief and torture and old deaths, all of it borrowed from strangers, none of it his own, and none of that made it easier to watch land. Shimon finished them with a kunai apiece while they were still lost in it.
"Your genjutsu just keeps getting nastier, you know that?" Shimon said, not quite masking the unease under the grin.
"Don't stand around admiring it. There's another squad coming from three o'clock."
Small fry, all of it, next to what the main clash must have looked like — and still it left him wrung out both ways by the end of it, chakra thin and his own head aching from the backwash of borrowed pain. Combat was never going to be the bulk of his job. Reading minds was. He only ran into enemies when the skirmishing came looking for him, and he intended to keep it that way as long as the war allowed.
"That Tobitake Tonbo boy is something else," Meguri told Inoichi, once three months of watching him had built into a real report. "Reading, fighting, even the trap work back before we relocated — he's sharp at all of it, and young for it besides."
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Inoichi only nodded, unsurprised. "The Will of the Third doesn't ask twice. I've already put in the paperwork — he's earned chūnin."
Tonbo heard about his own promotion secondhand and nearly dropped the scroll he was holding. Chūnin. Just like that.
"The Hokage-sama made the exception himself," Meguri told him, plainly pleased on his behalf, bandages doing nothing to hide how wide he was smiling. "And the fighting with Iwagakure's done, all told. We head back to the village in a few days."
"Finally." Tonbo let the breath go he hadn't known he was holding. All those borrowed nightmares had earned him that much, at least — there was no such thing as an easy posting for a ninja, not even a sensory-type tucked away in intelligence. When there were no minds to read, there was still the perimeter to walk.
He couldn't help envying, in an idle way, anyone fortunate enough to be born into an easier era, with peace around them instead of survival clawed out one borrowed memory at a time. By his own count, the war still had six months to a year left in it, maybe more. Minato had likely already gotten Kushina with child, if the timeline he remembered still held. And somewhere out there, unless he was very wrong, Obito was probably already being groomed into something else entirely, under a very different teacher than the one he thought he had.
The road back to the village ran through hard-packed dirt, wagons creaking past under a loose escort of Konoha ninja, everyone's guard down a fraction now that the fighting behind them was finally, officially, done.
"Thank the Yellow Flash — Iwagakure folded faster than anyone expected," one of the escort was saying.
"His student too. White Fang's boy, Kakashi — already a jōnin, and they say he's built a jutsu of his own."
"Shame about his teammate, though. Sacrificed themselves out there."
"That's war for you. I've outlasted three whole squads myself."
So it was true, then. He really was gone. Tonbo chewed through his dry rations without tasting them, turning the news over the way he turned over everything these days — for whatever use he could wring out of it. Kakashi would be carrying that Sharingan now, whether he wanted it or not, planted in an eye that hadn't been born with it — a bloodline handed over for free, which some would call a gift and others a debt no one asked to owe.
Not one he'd have taken himself, given the choice. If a working Sharingan fell into his lap tomorrow, he'd sooner trade it away outright for a handful of the old Second Hokage's genjutsu — the ones built specifically to unravel it. No sense staying a rung below on the ladder when there was a way around the whole climb.
He already knew the broad outline of the years ahead, after all, better than anyone else walking this road. Better to stay small inside the Analysis Team and let the ones built for the spotlight carry the weight of it. According to everything he remembered of how this all played out, he and Shimon and Meguri all lived to see the finale.
The finale. His stomach dropped clean through. Not the end of this war — the other one, years off yet, the one that ended with the Ten-Tails driving a Tailed Beast Ball straight through the Allied headquarters and everyone standing inside it. He had work to do before then. A great deal of it, and none of it optional anymore.
"What's got you so quiet, Captain Tonbo?" Shimon knocked his shoulder, grinning.
"Just Tonbo is fine. Drop the 'Captain,' please."
"Why? Has a nice ring to it." Shimon looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Tonbo said nothing, mostly because admitting why it bothered him — the title sounded overwrought, all swagger and too grand by half — would only make it worse. Shimon had called him that without fail since the promotion came through, and showed no sign of growing tired of it.
"Eyes on the road. Don't get comfortable."
"Comfortable? Iwagakure's done. I'd bet Orochimaru-sama's side of things isn't far behind, either — the way our luck's been running lately."