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mixelation · 4 months

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oh yeah i also wrote some of the fall out of the chunin exams from minato's pov

the [...] marks an unwritten scene or two lmao

***

Minato looked at the genin’s report first thing in the morning, opening it even before his assistant brought him coffee.

He was surprised it was in Tori’s handwriting and not Itachi’s. Itachi had always been picky about reports (and everything else anyone might do), and Minato often found his notes even on subordinates’ individual reports. Surely Itachi hadn’t told Tori to do the report. But the alternative also seemed strange. Who could convince Itachi not to at least write his own notes?

The format was also non-standard, but Minato didn’t mind it. Tori had somehow condensed the entire mission into a single page, front and back, with important events succinctly outlined in a logical, easy-to-read flow. To this page she’d stapled twenty-seven pages of what seemed to be notes on the conversation they’d had to produce this report, which were more detailed but not in an order that was easy for an outsider to follow.

The contents of the report turned out to be insane.

Minato had talked in length with Kushina about her version of events. He knew the details of the actual exam, their plan and Iwa’s eventual attack. He knew that, somehow, Itachi would end up rescuing Kushina alone while Tori and Deidara had gone after Morino. He knew what Itachi had deemed important for him to know immediately, which was that Tori had elected to make several decisions to manipulate Konoha’s international relations.

He had assumed the way they’d accomplished these things would be wild. He’d somehow underestimated how wild.

For one thing, apparently Deidara had fought the Tsuchikage. This was stated very matter-of-factly in the middle of a paragraph with no particular fanfare, and made Minato choke on his coffee.

There weren’t even any supplementary notes about this fact. Deidara had barged into the Tsuchikage’s box, screamed to a bunch of foreign dignitaries about Iwa kidnapping his sensei while everyone was distracted by the tournament, and then he’d fought the Tsuchikage. That was it. No further comment.

Deidara had also done this with enough skill to then leave the battle site in sufficient chaos that no one had been able to immediately follow him. This at least had detail; Deidara had simply broken enough of the building that the Tsuchikage’s guard he hadn’t killed needed all hands on deck to save their important foreign visitors from its imminent collapse.

Jiraiya had linked Deidara to a lot of destroyed structures– and buildings which were only partially destroyed in very sophisticated, calculated ways– but what the fuck. Deidara was eleven. A team of Iwa demolition experts couldn’t pull that off nearly as cleanly.

Part of Minato’s assumptions had been that Tori and Deidara had stayed together. Tori was extremely clever, and probably much more talented in fuuinjutsu than she let on, but she was very demonstrably not well-skilled in combat, and she’d shut down her own chakra in a last-ditch effort to stave off her own poisoning. That she would stick to a more combat-oriented person in a support role had been her MO as long as Minato had known her.

This, it turned out, was an incorrect assumption to the degree that Minato wasn’t even really sure how Tori had accomplished what she had. She had… simply walked into Iwa T&I, if he was reading this correctly. The report simply said she’d “infiltrated it through the back door.” Her supplemental notes clarified she’d done this via “the super secret jutsu of being twelve and unintimidating.” Then she’d called on a random T&I employee that she described as “looking slightly confused about his job (you know the type)” and convinced him they were meant to be relocating prisoners to help her move Morino.

These… these were not normal infiltration tactics. Minato had no idea what she was talking about.

At least with Itachi, Minato knew he was one of Konoha’s best and brightest. Minato would never order him to infiltrate a place by himself, but he understood how he’d done it with ample abuse of genjutsu and murder. He didn’t understand how Itachi had known where Kushina would be, and this was never commented on, but this question was extremely low priority.

Minato called back in his assistant and asked for a second coffee, and for her to schedule an all-day meeting the next day with Team 4 and some of Konoha’s leadership.

He probably wouldn’t keep everyone there all day. But he wanted everyone available.

The rest of his day was spent in more meetings on the Iwa fiasco. Morino was stable and talking, which pleased him. Tori’s report was copied and passed around to various offices for record-keeping and analysis, to see if anyone could divine Iwa’s motives and goals from their actions.

Shikaku sauntered into his debriefing with Minato with a copy in his hand.

“What the fuck is this?” he said, waving it.

“Team 4 is… resilient under stress?” Minato tried.

“More like Team Disaster,” Shikaku snorted, then dropped into a chair across from Minato.

Minato liked Shikaku. He’d call them work friends, maybe, as much as a Kage and his subordinate could be work friends. Shikaku was several years older and had usually been stationed in different parts of the war from Minato, but their sons were the same age, and Shikaku was always open for commiseration about the joys and challenges of fatherhood. Minato didn’t really get invited to afterwork events, but sometimes when they were both working late, Shikaku would show up with a couple beers and a few moments of friendly chat.

Today Shikaku’s friendly observation was, “Do you think they’re lying?”

Minato stared at him, nonplussed. “About what?”

Shikaku slapped the papers he was holding with the back of his free hand. “All of it. Some of it. It’s pretty unbelievable. A team of our best Jounin couldn’t pull this off.”

Minato frowned down at the original report, laid out on his desk. It did… well, it had occurred to him that some of Tori and Deidara’s parts, which neither Kushina nor Itachi had witnessed personally, might be exaggerated.

“Itachi was with them when Tori wrote the report,” Minato said finally. “He wouldn’t put up with a story he didn’t find believable.”

“He’s a genius, but he’s still only thirteen,” Shikaku said. “I’m not saying it’s likely. I’m saying it’s possible. Both Inoichi and I agree you didn’t do enough to vet those two.”

Minato sighed and leaned back in his seat. They’d been over this. He, too, would have liked to vet Tori and Deidara more and give them a longer probation period, but he’d also needed them for this mission.

“Let’s assume it’s a true and fair report of events for today,” Minato said at length. “I’ll let you and Inoichi grill them to your hearts’ content tomorrow.”

Sikaku raised his eyebrows. “And grill them I will,” he promised. “Fighting the Tsuchikage and his guard in close combat? Being twelve no jutsu? C’mon.”

They moved onto what Minato actually wanted Shikaku to talk about. It was unclear what Iwa’s motive was, or what their plan had been, if any, and for how long they’d been planning it. Their many, many analyses of Iwa’s movements and communications leading up to the chunin exam had borne no major red flags.

Tori’s report had made the astute observation that the window for synthesizing and then implementing the chakra poison before it broke down was quite narrow. Iwa would have had to produce it all during the week prior to the tournament, which meant there was some advanced planning, but they theoretically could have made these plans after Team 4 had arrived.

“They would have had to arrange all the equipment and ingredients too,” Shikaku pointed out. “That would have taken months.”

“Unless they already had it for other reasons,” Minato said. This idea, unfortunately, raised a bunch of other questions about why.

“True,” Shikaku replied. “But they’ve never used it before, and we have no intel on what they might need it for that they couldn’t get some other, less convoluted way.”

Shikaku had also gone through the reports on the exam itself, both the half-page Tori had dedicated to it and Kushina’s sprawling initial report she’d penned while babbling to Minato about how she was okay, she promised.

“There’s at least four places I believe an assassination was attempted,” Shikaku concluded. “Your Team Disaster just… didn’t notice, somehow.”

“Oh,” Minato said. He… also hadn’t noticed.

“The first is during the second phase of the chunin exam,” Shikaku said. “Kushina-san states that Tori was attacked by six other participants.”

“Oh,” Minato repeated, now seeing the problem. This had really been a blip on his radar too; Kushina had not expended an ounce of concern for her weakest student. This detail had only made it into the report as an example of Tori making friends immediately with a Kiri-nin in line for the Seven Swordsmen.

But no, actually, they had split up the Konoha genin and sent them off with inadequate weapons. This would have seemed immediately suspicious and unfair, if only it had slowed any of the genin down remotely.

“If I’m right that they were assassination attempts, the earlier attempts are sloppy,” Shikaku observed. “They might have been less well planned. A rushed decision, maybe.”

“Why?” Minato asked.

Shikaku stared at him meaningfully. “You waltzed one of their pet project kids right in there and said he was yours.”

Well.

“That reason doesn’t explain the poison synthesis,” Minato said finally.

“True,” Shikaku agreed. “It’s not the best theory. But we don’t have a best theory yet.”

The last item they discussed was the one that gave Minato the most anxiety.

“The reason they chose chakra poisoning…” he started. The main reason villages had started trying to stock it during the war was that it was one of the very few ways to reliably take down a jinchuriki.

Shikaku let out a long, tired breath.

“We’ve had no known intelligence breeches on Kushina-san,” he said finally. “My current theory is that because she’s a wildcard and all they really knew was that she has high chakra reserves, they wanted something guaranteed to work. But I have no way to verify this.”

“I get Jiraiya on it,” Minato decided.

The Tsuchikage’s communication on the matter arrived by hawk late in the evening, which was about the fastest turnaround time Minato could have expected.

Minato was, at least, in a decent mood when he received it. Kushina had brought Naruto and a home cooked meal up to the office for dinner, and he’d had a good forty-five minutes of laughter and a good-bye kiss from his wife. Shikaku hadn’t come by with a beer, but Akimichi Chouza’s wife had sent a tin of sweet sticky rice treats up to the other two thirds of Shika-Ino-Cho, also working late on this, and a couple of them had ended up on Minato’s desk.

The Tsuchikage’s letter was brief. He did not mention Kushina at all, offering no apology, explanation, or even acknowledgement his village had done anything to her. Instead, he wrote condolences for Minato’s out of control team and forgiveness for their incredible feats of property damage.

As an act of good faith, we will not request monetary compensation for said damages, only that your team be appropriately disciplined, the Tsuchikage’s secretary had written. We do request an international statement from you, disavowing the heinous and untruthful lies your genin chose to shout at our guests in what we could only assume was a poorly considered prank.

Damages listed all but outright admitted that Deidara had indeed personally attacked the Tsuchikage and then sauntered off largely unharmed. Minato couldn’t help it. He laughed.

What the fuck?

xXx

[...]

xXx

Two things of note happened the following week.

One, the Mizukage sent him a letter, penned by her own hand.

I have heard a terrible rumor, which if true, we in Kiri find most sympathetic, the letter started. Further down the page, she continued, Of course, Kiri must discourage any unnecessary retaliation, especially given… [here, Terumi Mei listed a non-exhaustive list of six different post-war treaties] …but know that should this escalate, Kiri is ready to honor its alliance, if we find this rumor to be true.

Terumi Mei then requested Konoha’s official statement in a tone that Minato would venture to call gossipy, and hinted that she wanted to know if he wanted her to contact the Tsuchikage or not. She’d left a lipstick print next to the Mizukage seal, which… Minato was not going to unpack.

Their alliance with Kiri wasn’t especially strong. Kiri had switched their allegiance from the Konoha-Suna side to Iwa-Kumo midway through the war; they’d only negotiated from a peace agreement up to something more like an “alliance” when Terumi Mei had taken over. Their shinobi still regularly clashed along the border, and all their alliance meant was that Minato and Mei just sort of politely looked away and didn’t escalate. On top of that, one of the post-war agreements, as insisted upon by the leader of Ame who’d strong-armed his way into negotiations last moment, was that no shinobi village could enter into an alliance which would require them to join another village’s declaration of war. In other words, an “alliance” didn’t mean Kiri would fight with them, or even lift a finger for them, should the need come.

But it was probably the most positive letter he’d ever gotten from another Kage.

Kiri’s support was also, notably, not something Oonoki seemed to believe Konoha had achieved in his communications. This was a definite win for them.

Nice job, Tori, Minato thought.

Then he buried his face in his hands at the thought. No. Tori could never find out that had worked the way she’d thought it would, or else she would interpret this as carte blanche to do whatever she wanted.

The second thing that happened threw their entire intelligence department for a loop.

He received a letter, not by hawk, but in the form of an animated, flying paper crane. It landed on his desk and then just sat there while his entire ANBU guard descended upon it. Minato was shuffled out of his office while a total of ten experts verified it was safe to touch.

Eventually, someone unfolded the paper to discover it was a letter.

Ame has uncovered some information you might find interesting, a feminine hand had written. We invite you to visit to talk it over. Attach one of your Hiraishin to this paper and come by whenever you wish.

Under it she’d written:

You may bring whoever you like. Your Team 4 seems interesting, for example.

“There’s no way that’s not a trap,” Shikaku said when Minato read it outloud. “Definitely don’t do that.”

Shikaku was right. No one in their right mind would invite Minato to send in a Hiraishin marker. Still, Minato pouted about it to Kushina in bed.

“No one ever invites me,” he complained. Hiruzen had visited other villages plenty of times. Other Kage regularly got to go show up for Chunin Exams, at the very least. But nooo, everyone politely suggested he just send a representative, because he was the scary guy who’d just plant markers to break in again whenever he wanted and kill everyone or whatever they thought would happen.

“I wouldn’t plant a Hiraishin marker on an ally,” Minato said.

Kushina looked up from her second attempt to get through the most recent Icha Icha.

“Yes, you would,” she said bluntly.

Minato pouted some more.

#reborn au #idk sometimes i write characters processing events before i actually write out what happens because. like.#it helps me categorize what i need to make happen and how it could happen #so the actual details might change and the scene might get cut for redundancy but here u go #also i legit forgot danzo is still around being a nuisance so pretend one of the missing scenes is him showing up to undercut minato #while minato goes: AAAAAAAAAH

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