In the Hokage's office, the afternoon had been quiet.
Minato Namikaze worked through the stack of documents on his desk with his usual efficiency, the pages turning at a pace that would have been impressive under any normal circumstances. The room held only the dry sound of paper and the occasional scratch of a pen. He was, by any visible measure, focused.
He was not focused.
The small smile kept finding his face when he wasn't watching for it. He'd look up, notice it, return to the document in front of him, and within a minute it would be back. He'd spent most of the afternoon alternating between genuine concentration and the quiet, helpless distraction of someone whose mind had somewhere it very much wanted to be.
He told himself, several times, that he was the Hokage. The village was his responsibility. The documents were real. The work had to be done.
Then he looked at the clock and thought about Kushina.
At six o'clock precisely, the clock hands arriving at the position he'd been tracking since approximately four-thirty, Minato Namikaze closed the folder in his hands and set it down with the deliberate care of someone pretending they were not doing what they were doing.
"Six o'clock," he said, to himself, quietly. "That's the working day. Leaving at six is... that's responsible, isn't it." A pause. "That's not dereliction of duty."
He was still looking at the document stack with the expression of someone checking that they'd genuinely finished rather than simply stopped, when the knock came at the door.
He considered, briefly and uncharitably, pretending he was already gone. He was, after all, practically gone. The Flying Thunder God Technique made the distance between the office and his front door roughly the same as the distance between his chair and the door he was now looking at.
He couldn't do it.
"Come in," he said, with the resigned tone of someone accepting a sentence they'd earned.
Sarutobi Hiruzen entered with the ease of a man who had every right to be in this office and several additional rights accumulated from years of having run it. He took in the closed folder, the abandoned pen, the posture of someone who'd already made up his mind, and he smiled the smile of someone who had seen this scene before from the other side of the desk.
"Is there a day when Minato can't wait to leave?" he said, with the warmth of someone who found the situation delightful.
Minato scratched the back of his head. The expression on his face was the precise expression of a student caught skipping by the teacher he respected most. No guilt about the act itself, considerable guilt about being transparent.
"I was going to, I mean, I had a..." He stopped. There was no version of this sentence that improved his position.
Hiruzen waved a hand, the gesture settling the matter before it became a conversation. "I'm teasing you. I came because I saw what time it was and wanted to catch you before you left." He crossed to the sofa and sat with the unhurried quality of a man who had stopped being in a hurry some years ago and found the change agreeable. "This is about Kushina."
Minato straightened. "What's happened?"
"Nothing yet. That's exactly the point." Hiruzen folded his hands across his knee. "The due date gives you a window, not a guarantee. She could start at any time in the next few days. Given that you're Hokage, given how the days have been going lately, the concern is that something happens while you're in this building and she's home alone." He paused. "Biwako has suggested that Kushina move to the birthing location now, ahead of time. Biwako and Koharu will both stay with her. Between the two of them, she'll have experienced hands there whatever hour it happens."
Minato was quiet for a moment, then nodded.
The birthing location was a Konoha operational secret in the true sense of the word. A facility constructed specifically, known only to a controlled list of people, its location not shared beyond absolute necessity. This was not a consideration extended to Kushina because she was the wife of the Hokage. It was extended to her because she was the Jinchuriki of the Nine-Tails, and the moment of childbirth was, for a Jinchuriki, a moment of acute vulnerability. The seal weakened. The beast within could sense the loosening.
The precautions existed because the risk was real.
What was not a serious source of worry was Kushina herself. The Uzumaki clan had produced shinobi with vitality that made the word seem insufficient. Kushina's physical endurance was something that her colleagues had long since stopped attempting to find analogies for. A normal Jinchuriki would not survive the forced extraction of their tailed beast; the shock alone would be fatal. For Kushina, the calculus was different. She could survive an extraction and remain operative afterward. She could perform demanding sealing techniques at the far end of her endurance, when anyone else would be beyond performing anything. She could do these things having given birth in the hours preceding them.
That was not a normal body. She had passed the relevant inheritance along.
Minato had been thinking, on and off through the afternoon, about the fact that Jiraiya had left more than two months ago. Back to his travels, his networks, his perennial work moving through the world gathering intelligence. Before he'd gone, the house had felt occupied in a way that was difficult to precisely name, the particular texture of a household where a third person's presence is so large that even their occasional absence is felt. Now the house held just the two of them, and shortly it would hold three, and Kushina was alone during the day when Minato was here.
He had been worrying about that specifically.
"It's a good idea," he said. "I was thinking about her being at home when I wasn't there." He nodded again, more settled. "I'll take her tonight."
Hiruzen smiled. "That's everything I came to say." He glanced at the remaining stack on the desk and raised an eyebrow. "Is there anything left that needs to be cleared before you go? I can sit here for a while."
Minato started to object on principle and stopped himself. He thought about Kushina. He thought about six o'clock and the closed folder and the clock he'd been watching for two hours.
"I would be deeply grateful, Sandaime-sama," he said, with the sincerity of someone dropping a performance they'd been maintaining for entirely too long.
Hiruzen's laugh was brief and genuine. "Go home."
Minato was not in the room when the laugh finished.
Hiruzen settled into the chair, pulled the nearest document toward him, and looked at it for a moment before his gaze went somewhere else. He'd sat in this chair for a very long time, across more years than most people's lives. He'd sat here when the village was a different shape. He'd sat here through wars and through the slow reconstruction that followed wars, through the passing of people he had known long enough to stop remembering when he hadn't known them.
He was very glad to be sitting here now as the retired man helping out rather than the Hokage who had to stay until the work was done.
"It really is something," he said, to the empty office. "Being young."
He picked up the pen.
The Uchiha clan's territory in Konoha was extensive, an acknowledgment written into the village's physical geography of the clan's historical position. One of the two founding families, one of the primary reasons Konoha was possible at all, and the clan had grown in the generations since to fill a role that would have been impossible for a smaller group: the entire security apparatus of the village ran substantially on Uchiha personnel, and still the clan had surplus. Itachi and Shisui had both gone to ANBU in addition to their other functions, and the cases were not exceptional. That was what the Uchiha clan looked like when it was ordinary.
Along the edge of the territory, where the central activity of the district thinned out into quieter streets and yards that saw less foot traffic, there was a small house with a courtyard. The paint on the exterior was old. The gate hung at an angle that indicated it hadn't been touched in some years. Nothing grew in the courtyard except the apple tree, which grew regardless of attention because apple trees were like that.
Uchiha Obito stood under it.
He had been standing under it for some time. Long enough for the afternoon light to have shifted noticeably, the angle of it changing the shadows under the branches.
The house had been his. His and his grandmother's, after his parents were gone, until his grandmother was gone too, and then just his, until he had died on a mission in the Land of Grass and the house had become nobody's. The Uchiha clan had not taken it back. He had been a war hero, cited in the formal records, given the memorial that the village gave to shinobi who didn't come home. Taking back the house would have been a statement about how much that actually meant.
So they had left it, and it had sat here unchanged, because no one had any reason to change it.
The furniture inside was where he remembered it. The courtyard was as he remembered it. The tree was taller.
His grandmother had sat under this tree. He had a specific memory of her in a particular chair, in a particular light, knitting with the focused attention she brought to things she cared about. He had asked her once whether he looked more like his father or his mother. She had considered the question with the same seriousness she brought to everything and said: both, a little. He had found that deeply satisfying at the time.
She had wanted him to be kind. She had said it directly, in the plain way she said direct things: be a gentle person, be helpful to people, let that be what you're known for. He had thought about this on the shopping street, helping the vegetable seller with a delivery, feeling like he had understood something.
He remembered her voice saying he was a good boy.
The apples on the tree were the same color they'd always been. The light hit them the same way.
Obito stood there for a long time, not moving, while the memories ran.
When the tears came, he didn't stop them. There was no one in the courtyard to see them. Beneath the mask, in the private dark that the mask created, he let them go.
"We can't go back," he said. The words were barely at the volume of breath. "Grandma."
He stood there for another moment. Then he opened his eyes, and what came back into them when they opened was something different from what had been there when they closed.
He reached up and took an apple from the nearest branch. He lifted the edge of his mask with one hand, put the apple to his lips, and bit.
The taste was exactly as he remembered.
He held it in his mouth for a moment and could not have told anyone why it was so difficult to swallow.
A breeze moved through the courtyard, disturbing the grass and lifting one or two fallen leaves from the ground. When it passed, the courtyard was empty. The gate hung at its familiar angle. The apple tree stood where it had always stood.
On the ground beneath it, a bitten apple lay in the dirt, the exposed flesh already beginning to go brown at the edges.