On the far edge of Konoha's territory, where the village's outer structures gave way to dense forest and the treeline thickened into something that would later be known for reasons that had nothing to do with tonight, a valley cut through the land. Inside it, a cave had been prepared. The Anbu had done the work quietly and quickly, under direct orders from the Fourth Hokage. The entrance was marked with a barrier frame of modest construction, a sealed gate set into the mouth of the valley with the kanji for "seal" inscribed across its center lintel. The barrier it anchored was small but sufficient.
Three Anbu stood guard outside.
Uchiha Obito watched them from the shadow of a tree trunk.
Four days of moving through Konoha without being seen had settled his nerves in the operational sense, the part of him that needed to know how the terrain worked and where the variables were. The other part of him, the part that had grown up in this village and had stood in his childhood courtyard under an apple tree two days ago, had not settled at all. He'd been managing it by keeping his attention on the task rather than the surroundings.
"Fewer guards than I expected," he murmured. Three Anbu. No outer perimeter beyond them. Inside: Minato Namikaze, Biwako Sarutobi, and a medical ninja attending to Kushina.
The logic was defensible. A large guard presence invited attention. The entire point of this location was that nobody was supposed to know it existed. More guards would have advertised the secret better than no guards at all. The people who knew were trusted, and the people who were trusted had behaved accordingly, going home at normal hours, performing normal visible activities, showing no pattern that would indicate something unusual was being protected somewhere.
It was, Obito thought, a professional piece of operational security that happened to have a gap he could fit through.
He turned his attention back to his purpose and set everything else aside.
Inside the cave, Kushina was giving birth.
Koharu Utatane had already left for home earlier in the evening, her presence having served its purpose. Now there were three people standing between tonight and what was going to happen, and Minato was one of them.
"Fewer guards means less work," Obito said, to no one.
He sank back into the tree.
In the Sarutobi household, on the covered corridor that ran along the inner courtyard, Sarutobi Hiruzen sat cross-legged with a cup of tea going cold beside him. The rain fell in the garden. He was watching a particular section of the outer wall, or rather, watching the direction beyond it, the general orientation that happened to point toward where Kushina was.
He hadn't moved in some time.
"If it's bothering you that much, we could just go check," said the young man standing behind him and slightly to the left.
Before Hiruzen could respond, a second man, older, standing to the right, reached out and knocked the first one gently on the head with two fingers.
"Asuma," said Sarutobi Shinnosuke.
Asuma curled his lip and didn't push further.
He was the youngest of the family, which had meant, when they were children, that he was the most indulged. Biwako had given him the particular attention that the youngest always receives, and Hiruzen, who was busy with things that required a Hokage's attention, had compensated for that absence with occasional overcorrection when he was home. The result was a young man who had the instincts and the talent of the Sarutobi line and the disposition of someone who had never been given a reason to suppress them.
His adolescence had been eventful in ways that had made Hiruzen's jaw go tight on several occasions. He was not a bad person. The things he'd done were the things that a young man with ability and no sufficient outlet tends to do, which made them annoying but not catastrophic. Konoha's better families had opinions about him that were not uniformly positive, which Asuma had found useful as a social filter and Hiruzen had found professionally uncomfortable.
In the past two years something had changed. He'd quieted. Not subdued, not reformed exactly, just quieted, the way something settles when it finds its level.
"I'm going to the Fire Temple," Asuma said. The announcement had the quality of something he'd been deciding when to say.
Hiruzen finally moved. He picked up the tea cup, held it without drinking, looked at Asuma.
"What for?"
"A friend of mine asked me to come. He has something to discuss."
"You've been a Jonin for how long?" Hiruzen's voice had the restrained quality of someone choosing words carefully. "You want to leave on personal travel when you've barely been in the rank?"
"A few weeks won't make or break anything."
"It's about the principle of the thing."
"I'm aware of your principles," Asuma said.
Hiruzen's face went briefly through something. "If you're running away because you and the Yuhi girl had another argument—"
"I'm not running away," Asuma said, with the flat tone of someone who doesn't want to discuss what they are doing. "That's it. I'll be back."
He turned around. A cigarette appeared from his jacket pocket and went between his lips, and he was reaching for a light when his brother's voice came quietly from behind him.
"Asuma."
He stopped.
"Be careful going." Shinnosuke's voice had its usual unhurried quality, the gentleness that wasn't softness. "And you're young. Best not to pick up habits you'll have trouble putting down later."
Asuma looked at him for a moment. Whatever was between him and his father was complicated and had been complicated for long enough that it was structural now. What was between him and Shinnosuke was not complicated. It was the simplest relationship in the household, which was a kind of gift that he didn't think about very often because he was eighteen and wasn't yet thinking about things that way.
He put the cigarette away.
"Fine," he said, and he meant it, and he left.
The garden was quiet for a moment after the sound of his footsteps faded.
Hiruzen exhaled through his nose. "If he had a quarter of your common sense."
Shinnosuke looked at the garden and smiled. "He'll have more common sense than I do, when he's ready. I've thought this for a while."
"Your generosity toward him would be touching if it hadn't enabled half his nonsense."
"I taught him what he needs to know about how to be a person. The rest is his." Shinnosuke paused. "Honestly, sometimes I envy him."
Hiruzen looked at him.
"There's a version of being young that involves doing whatever you feel like," Shinnosuke said, in the tone of someone who had considered this carefully. "He got to have that. I didn't, particularly. I don't begrudge him."
Hiruzen was quiet for longer than the statement seemed to require. He looked at his eldest son, at the Konoha Anbu captain standing in the corridor of the family home with his hands loose at his sides and his face settled into that particular calm that had been his natural expression since he was a child. The one that came from being the eldest, from having understood early that certain choices had been made for him by his position in the family, and from having decided, somewhere in his youth, that he was fine with that.
"You've worked hard," Hiruzen said, and the words came out slightly differently than he'd intended them, the Hokage inflection dropping away into something more direct.
Shinnosuke blinked, then smiled. "I'm the eldest son of the Sarutobi family. It comes with the territory."
He said it without resentment. He meant it exactly as literally as it sounded.
They sat in the quiet. The rain continued. The moon was partially visible through the clouds, the light diffused by the water vapor into something ambient and soft.
Asuma, walking some distance away, had taken out the cigarette again and was staring at it without lighting it. The Fire Temple. Half a month. Some time away from this house and its gravity.
He put it back in his pocket.
He didn't know why. Old habit. The sound of his brother's voice.
He kept walking.
In the corridor, Shinnosuke's eyes had drifted back to the courtyard when his expression shifted. It was a small change, the kind that required knowing him to read. His arm moved without him seeming to direct it, the sleeve pulling back, exposing a section of forearm.
Three marks. Thin, dark lines inscribed into the skin like a tattoo, the ANBU captain's trace-marks, linked to the three shinobi he'd assigned to guard the birth location.
Two of them were gone.
The third disappeared as he watched.
"Father." His voice was level, but the contents of it were not. "The Anbu I assigned to protect the Hokage and Kushina. They're dead. All three."
Hiruzen's head came up. His eyes went sharp immediately, the calm they'd held a moment ago recalibrating into something operational.
Minato was there. That was the relevant fact. The Fourth Hokage was on site. If what was attacking was something Minato Namikaze could handle, it would be handled.
What Hiruzen could not do was leave the village without someone to think about it.
"Alert the Jonin squads. Get the Anbu assembled and ready. Begin evacuation preparation for the civilian districts." He was already standing. "Go."
Shinnosuke was gone before the sentence ended.
Hiruzen moved through the house. He went to the bedroom, closed the door behind him, and stood for a moment looking at the wall across from the bed. The wall where, for years now, a set of armor hung on fitted brackets, the layered green construction of a style that had not been fashionable since the era when ninja villages were new and the battles that defined them were still fresh.
He'd had it cleaned, periodically. He'd kept it maintained. He'd told himself, each time he looked at it, that he hoped it would never need to come down.
"I really did hope," he said, to the armor, or to himself, or to the general proposition that some things could be true.
His hands found the brackets and lifted it free.
He began to put it on.