Yondaime Patch Notes
A/N: Just a series of things Minato suffered as Yondaime (every Hokage does, really). Set in Icarus because the verse where no one dies is my happy place.
Day 61: Soft Diplomacy (with your own ninja) is hard
The Third Hokage has a way of speaking about failure that makes it sound less like confession and more like weather.
It is late when Minato finds himself sitting across from Sarutobi in a room that still smells faintly of ink, smoke, and old paper. The office is smaller than his own, though perhaps that is only memory playing tricks. The lamps are turned low. Outside, the village has gone blue with evening, the last of the light thinning over tiled roofs and power lines and the slow dark line of the wall in the distance. Somewhere below, footsteps cross a corridor. A kettle has gone cold between them.
Sarutobi turns his teacup once between both hands and says, with maddening calm, “There are decisions I made because I thought I would have time to correct them later.”
Minato says nothing. He has already learned, in the months since taking the office, that the old man does not speak like this unless he means to be listened to very carefully.
Sarutobi’s eyes remain on the tea.
“Later,” he says, “is a very arrogant word in government.”
The line sits between them.
Minato looks down at his own cup. The tea inside it has long since cooled. A pale ring clings to the porcelain where he set it down too long ago and forgot to pick it up again.
Sarutobi exhales through his nose, a soft sound, almost amused at himself.
“There were policies I thought would stay temporary,” he adds. “Concessions I thought I could revisit. Men I thought I could manage until I had more room to move. Some of them outlasted the conditions that created them. Some of them became habits. That,” he adds, almost mildly, “is one of the less charming qualities of institutions. They calcify fastest around the compromises one is least proud of.”
Sarutobi does not look tired, exactly. Not in the ordinary sense. He looks older in the way only very long office can make a man look older - worn at the edges by years of being required to decide, daily and often badly, where the village could afford to be flexible and where it could not.
“The council was one thing from the Hokage’s chair,” Sarutobi says. “It is another from inside the room.”
There is a brief, dry note in his voice now. Not affection. Certainly not admiration. Just the weary acknowledgement of an enemy whose methods one has had to study too long.
“I used to think they were simply stubborn,” he sighs. “Now I know they are also afraid.”
Minato leans back slightly, not enough to be called a movement. “That does not improve the outcome.”
“No.” Sarutobi’s mouth shifts, very slightly. “But it explains the posture.”
The room is quiet for a while after that. The kind of quiet that does not ask to be filled.
Outside, the village keeps moving in small sounds. A gate sliding somewhere below. Distant voices. The muted clatter of a cart wheel over stone. Konoha at evening, shedding daylight and not yet prepared to sleep.
Minato says, eventually, “If you had the chance again--”
“If I had the chance again,” he says, “I would have pushed harder earlier. I would have refused more things when they were still refusals and not precedent. I would have spent less time assuming good sense would eventually prevail if everyone was given enough time to calm down.”
Minato’s mouth twitches despite himself.
“It never does,” the old man says. “That is another lesson office teaches very efficiently.”
Something about that - the plainness of it, perhaps, or the fact that it is spoken without any effort to redeem himself - settles heavily in Minato’s chest.
He had expected advice, not regret.
Sarutobi studies him for a moment, and when he speaks again his voice is lighter, though only by a degree.
“You are listening too hard,” he says.
Minato blinks. “Is that a criticism.”
“It is an observation.” Sarutobi lifts his cup, then seems to remember the tea is cold and sets it back down. “You do that face when you are trying to fit three political consequences and one moral conclusion into the same thought.”
Minato says, after a small pause, “That is a very specific accusation.”
“It is a very specific face.”
That, more than anything else said tonight, is what makes Minato laugh.
Sarutobi smiles into the edge of it. Then, because he is still Sarutobi and not entirely interested in letting a conversation end on warmth when it could instead end on usefulness, he says, “You should also know that a council rarely bends because it wants to.”
Minato’s attention sharpens again.
Sarutobi continues, “It bends because it has already been made to. By pressure. By visibility. By cost. By the simple fact that enough people have started looking in one direction at the same time.”
He lets that sit.
Then he adds, with the calm cruelty of a teacher who knows exactly when a lesson has landed, “A Hokage can issue orders. That is not the same thing as movement.”
------🐸------
Shikaku is seated across from the desk with one ankle over the opposite knee and a report in hand, looking like a man who was born tired and then forced to become useful anyway.
Minato gets as far as the threshold.
Shikaku glances up once. Then says, without preamble, “That bad.”
Minato closes the door behind him. “Was I that obvious.”
“Yes.”
That is, unfortunately, fair. Minato crosses to the desk, sets down the file he is carrying, and remains standing for a second longer than necessary, as if sitting would make the conversation official in a way he is not yet ready to tolerate.
Shikaku watches this happen with all the sympathy of a man watching weather gather over someone else’s field.
“Well,” he says at last, “either the council has become more irritating than usual, which would be impressive even for them, or the old man said something useful and now you’re thinking too hard.”
Minato looks at him.
Shikaku shrugs, “You have a face.”
“I’m beginning to resent how many people say that to me.”
“It’s a very informative face.”
Minato sits. The chair creaks softly under the shift of his weight. Outside, somewhere down the hall, a door slides shut. The sound comes and goes without reaching the room properly.
For a little while, Minato says nothing.
Shikaku lets him.
That is one of the things Minato values most in him: Shikaku does not rush other people’s thoughts just because he himself has already arrived.
Finally, Minato says, “The Sandaime thinks one of the reasons the council resists change is that they are afraid.”
Shikaku’s expression does not change, “That sounds right.”
Minato leans back slightly, gaze drifting not to Shikaku but to the darkened paper screens beyond him, where the village is only visible in pieces: one lantern, one roofline, the faint broken geometry of home and office laid over each other in shadow.
“He said,” Minato goes on, “that they do not bend because they want to. They bend because enough pressure has made refusing more costly than yielding.”
Shikaku is quiet for a beat. Then he sets the report down across one knee.
“That also sounds right.”
Minato exhales, “The part I can’t stop thinking about,” he says, “is that he made it sound less like authority and more like posture. Visibility. Cost. Where people are already looking.”
That gets Shikaku’s full attention. Something in his stillness firms, as though a piece has clicked into place.
“There it is,” he says.
Minato looks at him. “There what is.”
“The real problem.”
“That is encouraging.”
“No, it isn’t.” Shikaku folds his hands loosely. “But it is clearer than the one you came in wearing.”
Minato waits. Shikaku studies him for a moment, eyes narrowed not in suspicion but in thought. Outside, the Tower has gone almost fully quiet. The village beyond it feels farther away than it is.
Finally, he says, “The old man governed from authority.”
Minato says nothing.
Shikaku continues, “You don’t.”
There is no accusation in it. No praise either. Just a statement, laid down flat.
Minato frowns very slightly. “I do have authority.”
“You do.” Shikaku nods. “That’s not what I mean.”
He shifts in his chair, gaze drifting briefly toward the window, toward the village beyond it, and then back again.
“The Sandaime was legible as office,” he says. “You’re legible as a person.”
Minato is quiet. Shikaku, because he is very rarely kind but often honest, goes on.
“People don’t just obey you. They look at you.”
The sentence lands with far more weight than it should. Shikaku notices this and, being Shikaku, does not soften it.
“You were given the hat because you were brilliant,” he says. “But not just because you were brilliant. You were given the hat because civilians know your face. Chūnin know your name. Academy students can point at you in the street. The village already understands you as reassurance.”
Minato’s fingers tap once, lightly, against the edge of the desk. Not a fidget. Just motion seeking form.
Shikaku points, very slightly, with two fingers, “That matters.”
Minato looks down at the desktop. At the grain of the wood. At the corner of a map. At a brush that has rolled half an inch and stopped.
“It also sounds exhausting,” he says.
“It is exhausting.”
“That is not a persuasive sales pitch.”
“It isn’t a sales pitch,” Shikaku says. “It’s your problem.”
Minato laughs once under his breath. He leans back further now, eyes lifting to the ceiling for a second before dropping again.
“So what,” he asks, “is the difference.”
“Between you and the old man?”
“Yes.”
Shikaku does not answer at once. When he does, his voice is quieter.
“The old man was respected,” he says. “You’re watched.”
The office goes very still.
Minato says, after a long moment, “That sounds worse.”
“It’s riskier.”
“Shikaku.”
“It’s also useful.”
That, more than anything else, brings Minato’s attention back cleanly.
Shikaku folds his arms. “If people are already looking at you,” he says, “then you don’t wait for institutions to tell you where influence is. You already have it. The problem is whether you know who’s actually carrying the village under you.”
Minato studies him.
Shikaku lifts one shoulder. “The council is one layer. Department heads are another. But the village you’ll actually be living with in ten years?” He taps one finger lightly on the desk. “That’s the people coming up now.”
That thought unfolds very quickly in Minato’s mind. The young Jōnin. The newly promoted cohort. The ones starting to settle into real command patterns, real loyalties, real reputations. The ones who will not just execute village policy, but embody it for everyone beneath them.
Kakashi. Gai. Asuma. Kurenai. Rin. Obito. Genma. The others orbiting near that center, not all equally stable, all increasingly important.
Minato sits with that.
Then says, slowly, “I know their files.”
Shikaku does not even pretend to accept that as sufficient.
“That’s paperwork.”
Minato gives him a look. Shikaku returns it without regret.
“You know where they’ve served,” he says. “Who they trained under. Which missions they’ve cleared. Which recommendations got signed.” He pauses. “That’s not the same as knowing them.”
The room stays quiet after that in the way rooms do when the right sentence has already been spoken and everyone involved knows it.
Minato looks down at the desk again. At the pile of reports, the village seal, the neat and exhausting architecture of administration. Then past it, in thought, to faces. Habits. Strengths. Fault lines. The ways people carry stress when they do not yet know anyone is looking for it.
He says, eventually, “Then I should know them better.”
There it is. The terrible, beautiful instant in which a good intention begins to take visible shape.
“That,” Shikaku replies carefully, “sounds expensive.”
Minato looks up. “It does.”
“It also sounds social.”
Minato says nothing. Shikaku, having known him too long to mistake silence for retreat, continues anyway.
“If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, I want it on record that I already disapprove.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I do.”
Minato’s mouth twitches. “That’s arrogant.”
“It’s efficient.”
For one brief second the room almost feels light again.
Almost.
Then Minato says decisively, “A dinner.”
Shikaku puts the paper down.
Minato presses on, “Not formal.”
“Worse.”
“Not a briefing.”
“Still worse.”
“Just--” Minato gestures once, small and frustrated, as though the right shape of the thought might still be retrieved before it becomes embarrassing. “A chance to talk to them outside assignments. See how they are with each other. What the group dynamics actually look like when they’re not reading off rank.”
Shikaku lowers his hand from his face and looks at him with the particular expression he reserves for situations in which intelligence has begun collaborating directly with disaster.
“You want to voluntarily gather fifteen Jōnin and adjacent near-Jōnin in a room with food.”
“When you say it like that---”
“I am saying it exactly like that.”
Minato ignores him, which is one of the privileges of office and one of the reasons Shikaku is always tired.
“It matters,” Minato says. “If I’m going to rely on them, I need more than deployment records.”
Shikaku does not answer immediately. When he finally does, his tone is flatter than before, which means he has already moved from opposition into grim support.
“Well,” he says, “you’ll certainly learn something.”
That is not agreement.
It is, however, close enough.
Minato reaches for a blank page. The lamp throws warm light across his hand, across the clean paper, across the beginning of what will almost certainly become someone else’s problem before it becomes his own.
He starts listing names. Some are obvious. Some are there because they matter more than they yet realize. Some are there because excluding them would itself become politics, which is a kind of answer no one needs with meat involved.
Minato sets the brush down.
Across from him, Shikaku looks at the list. Then at him.
Then says, with the grave resignation of a man recording the first tremor before collapse: “Dinner should not be this dangerous.”
Minato allows himself a very small smile.
“It’s just dinner.”
Shikaku looks at the names again.
Then back at Minato.
And because he is, among many other things, a prophet when irritated, he says:
“No,” he replies. “It really isn’t.”
------🐸------
The invitation reaches them separately and still somehow feels coordinated.
Obito gets his first. He unfolds it in the training yard, reads the short neat line once, then again, and brightens with the immediate, wholehearted delight of someone who has just been handed written proof that life occasionally does reward him for existing.
“A dinner,” he says.
Rin, sitting on the low wall nearby with her med kit open beside her and a roll of clean bandage half-wrapped around one hand, looks up. “That’s what it says.”
“No, but a dinner,” Obito says, turning toward her with the paper held out like a sacred object. “Not a briefing. Not a mission review. An actual dinner.”
Rin takes the note from him, reads it, and hums once, thoughtful. “That is unusual.”
From the tree above them, Kakashi says, “It’s a bad idea.”
Both of them look up. Kakashi is stretched along the branch with the offensive ease of someone who had obviously been listening on purpose and sees no reason to apologize for it. His own invitation is already open in one hand.
Obito squints. “How is this a bad idea.”
Kakashi lowers the paper just enough to look at him over it. “Because it’s fifteen Jōnin and near-Jōnin in one room with food and alcohol.”
Obito waits.
Kakashi waits back.
Rin closes her med kit with a soft click. “That does sound structurally unstable.”
“Thank you,” Kakashi says.
Obito throws up both hands. “No, it doesn’t. It sounds nice.”
“It sounds well-intentioned,” Rin nods.
Kakashi’s expression does not change, “That is the worst part.”
Obito points at him. “You think everything is worse.”
“No,” Kakashi says. “Just groups.”
Rin tries not to smile and fails. Obito folds the note and tucks it away like a man storing future happiness on his person. “I think it’ll be fine.”
Kakashi drops from the branch and lands lightly enough to make the whole motion irritating. “You think mission explosions are fine if they start small.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing.”
Rin rises, dusting her hands off. “I think,” she says carefully, “that Hokage sama is trying to know people better.”
Kakashi looks at her.
Then at Obito.
Then back at the invitation in his hand.
“Yes,” he says. “And I think that’s admirable.”
Obito beams. “See?”
Kakashi tucks the paper away. Then says, with the flat certainty of a man reading tomorrow’s weather off a disaster only he is taking seriously, “I also think one of you is going to embarrass yourselves in front of him before the appetizers.”
There is a pause.
Then Obito says, offended, “Why are you looking at me.”
Kakashi starts walking.
Rin follows, smiling now.
Behind them, Obito hurries to catch up, still arguing the point to no one willing to acquit him.
------🐸------
The barbecue place is exactly the sort of establishment that makes people believe they are being more civilized than they are. The room is broad and warm with charcoal heat, meat smoke, spilled beer, and the permanent lacquer of old noise. The tables are thick dark wood scarred by years of elbows, knives, cups, and bad judgment. Grill smoke rolls low through the room, clinging to hair and cloth and the undersides of rafters. Every few seconds there is a hiss from somewhere near the back where fat hits hot metal and flares. The glasses sweat. The plates arrive fast. The drinks arrive faster.
And for one brief, humiliatingly hopeful stretch of time, Minato thinks he may actually have done something right.
The newly promoted Jōnin bunch are careful at first, but not stiff. The mood loosens without losing structure. No one is posturing too hard yet. No one is trying to impress him quite as much as they could be, which in itself feels like a small miracle. The talk begins where he had hoped it would: not in mission report language, not in formal rank-bound fragments, but in the untidy middle ground where people start sounding like themselves.
Asuma is more thoughtful than his posture suggests, one arm over the back of the bench, glass loose in hand, voice easy until it catches unexpectedly on something real. Kurenai speaks only when she means to, but each time she does the shape of the conversation subtly reorganizes itself around her. Obito, for once, talks just enough rather than too much, which is perhaps the clearest sign in the room that everyone is still making an effort.
Gai is trying so visibly to behave like a normal person that the effort has itself become a form of noise. Genma has settled into that lazy, dangerous ease of his, the one that makes people relax before they understand that relaxing around him is how they end up in side bets, confessions, or both. Kakashi sits slightly apart even while being physically present, answering when asked, not volunteering much, but clearly listening to all of it in the infuriating way he listens to everything.
And Rin--
Rin is doing what Rin always does. Watching. Listening. Stepping in only when the conversation needs correction, precision, or the kind of calm intelligence that lets everyone else believe they have arrived at a good thought naturally when in fact they have been quietly guided toward it.
Minato asks questions.
They answer.
He learns things. Real things. The shape of early ambitions. The difference between how people speak about responsibility and how they carry it in the body. Who is hungry for command. Who is wary of it. Who is still half in disbelief that the title of Jōnin now applies to them even when no one older is in the room to confirm it.
He learns that Asuma dislikes speaking about his father until he has had enough alcohol to resent the silence more than the topic. He learns that Kurenai has already started tracking who gets interrupted in briefings and by whom. He learns that Obito wants, with almost painful sincerity, to become the kind of shinobi people stop underestimating before he enters a room rather than after. He learns that even Kakashi, under sufficient social pressure and grilled meat, can be drawn into a conversation if one approaches him at the angle reserved for suspicious animals and bomb tags.
It is useful.
Worse, it is enjoyable.
Minato notices this and makes the fatal mistake of relaxing.
That is when the second round settles in properly. The plates are messier now, the wood tackier under forearms, the smoke thicker where it hangs beneath the rafters. Someone at the next table laughs too loudly. Another round lands in the middle of theirs with a wet clink of glasses and a smell of cold soju cutting briefly through the heat.
Asuma gets louder first, though not offensively so. Not yet. He simply begins speaking from slightly farther back in the throat, with the loose certainty of a man whose internal editor has started taking breaks.
Gai’s responses gain brightness and volume in equal measure, which in his case is less an escalation than a weather pattern. Genma’s expression softens around the mouth in the way it does when he is becoming an active danger to the dignity of others. Kakashi, who had been drinking with the careful indifference of someone refusing to participate in the species, develops the alert stillness of a man who is now, against all better judgment, finding this funny.
For a while the topics stay respectable. Then someone makes the mistake of comparing field habits in tones men usually reserve for rivalries they are pretending not to enjoy.
Someone says the word strength. No one remembers who.
Later, Minato will consider this one of the village’s many failures of recordkeeping.
What matters is that the word lands in the space between Asuma and Gai and immediately becomes combustible.
Asuma sets his glass down.
Gai looks over.
Across the table, Genma’s eyes brighten with the unmistakable pleasure of a man hearing the first crack in a dam and deciding to stand closer for a better view.
“No,” Minato says immediately.
Several people look at him. This, unfortunately, creates the illusion that they are listening.
Asuma rolls one sleeve, slow and deliberate, because apparently at no point in his upbringing was he taught that some gestures are visible admissions of intent.
“I’m just saying,” he says, already too pleased with himself to be safe, “if we’re being honest about who’s actually physically the strongest at this table--”
Gai straightens like someone has reached into his bloodstream and rung a bell.
“Strength,” he says, brightening with terrifying speed, “is a multifaceted discipline.”
“Oh, good,” Genma murmurs. “Now it’s educational.”
Obito, who should under no circumstances be permitted to manage an argument, a line, a public event, or any situation involving countdowns, leans in so fast he nearly knocks over his drink.
“No, wait,” he says. “No, this is easy. We settle it.”
Minato feels one fresh white hair arrive behind his left ear.
“We will not,” he says.
Obito nods at him with alarming solemnity, as if respecting the sentiment while preparing to violate it immediately.
“Arm wrestling.”
There is a beat. Then Gai slaps both hands on the table and declares, with the joyous conviction of a man greeting destiny in open daylight:
“AGREED!”
Asuma grins like a problem.
Kakashi, without changing expression at all, says to Genma, “Two hundred on Gai.”
Genma reaches into his pocket before the sentence is finished. “Done.”
Minato turns very slowly toward them.
“No one,” he says, “is betting on my Jōnin.”
Raidō says, from three seats down, “Too late.”
Aoba lifts his cup with the quiet moral vacancy of a man choosing the wrong side with excellent timing.
Kurenai closes her eyes, despite the grin on her lips. Rin says, in the calm tone of a medic marking the exact point at which a patient has ignored all instructions and removed their own sutures, “I would like it noted that this was inevitable.”
That should have been the point at which the evening peaked.
It is not.
Because once Asuma and Gai lock hands over the table and Obito appoints himself referee, the rest of the group begins shedding restraint in sympathetic layers, the way a room loses heat after one window opens.
Genma, who has found his element, starts setting side bets with the speed and grace of a man whose soul was always supposed to work in vice-adjacent finance. Kakashi, who should not have become financially involved but has, begins adjusting odds in a voice so even it somehow makes the corruption feel more insulting. Raidō and Aoba enter the market. Ebisu looks scandalized until the exact moment someone asks if he wants in, at which point outrage visibly begins negotiating with opportunity.
Obito stands between Asuma and Gai with one hand raised like a magistrate in a village with no laws.
“On my count,” he announces.
“You should not have a count,” Minato says.
“I absolutely should.”
“You absolutely should not.”
Obito points at him, “You are too close to this, hokage-sensei.”
“That is not a sentence you’re qualified to say.”
“Three!”
The whole table surges. The benches scrape. Glasses rattle. Half the table leans in as if collective body weight might alter the outcome, while the other half immediately begins treating the match as both sport and social referendum.
What follows is a prolonged, deeply earnest contest between two extremely competitive idiots with strong forearms, bad self-restraint, and far too much audience participation. The table creaks. Plates jump. Someone shouts. Someone else pounds wood in support. The smoke hangs heavier now, carrying the smell of caramelized sauce and heat and the first clear scent of an evening passing beyond governance.
At the far end of the table, another form of disaster has been maturing more quietly - another administrative oversight.
While Obito invents refereeing law out of thin air and Gai and Asuma attempt to settle metaphysics through forearm strain, the other end of the table continues under a different and far more dangerous set of rules.
Kurenai and Rin had, wisely, split off early into the side of the evening where actual information lives. Their conversation has drifted through the practical architecture of being women in the field: uniforms cut for someone else’s body, mission gear designed by men who assume “adjusting” is a female hobby, the social tax of staying visibly competent without being labeled difficult, the strange and exhausting labor of remaining palatable enough to be heard but not so palatable that one is dismissed as ornamental.
This should have remained the safer side of the table - had anyone been paying attention to Rin’s drink.
No one is paying attention to Rin’s drink.
This is because Rin is composed in a way that inspires terrible trust in other people. She does not get sloppy. She does not wobble. She does not raise her voice. She simply becomes more direct, more exact, and less interested in disguising her opinions for the comfort of the room.
The first sign is not loudness, in her case.
It is stillness.
Rin sets her glass down with surgical care.
Across from her, Asuma - flushed, straining, halfway through losing both the arm-wrestling round and his better instincts - says something offhand about women being “pickier” about gear because “the rest of us just adapt.”
It is not the worst thing anyone has ever said. Under sober conditions, it might have earned only a cool look and a correction later. Tonight it lands on alcohol, fatigue, and accumulated female memory.
Kurenai sees the impact before anyone else does. Her whole posture changes.
“Oh no,” she says quietly.
Rin smiles. It is a neat, pleasant smile with all the civility of a medic about to remove something painful in one clean motion.
“Asuma,” she says softly, “would you like to repeat that.”
The table shifts. Asuma, to his credit, realizes immediately that he has walked into danger. To his discredit, he is too drunk to retreat correctly.
“I didn’t mean--”
“No,” Rin says. “I know. That’s what’s making this so interesting.”
Kurenai puts one hand over her face.
Minato turns from one disaster directly into another and feels a second white hair arrive in solidarity with the first.
“Rin,” he says.
She turns toward him, still smiling.
“Yes, Hokage sama.”
“Stay seated.”
Rin considers this. Then, in the mild tone of a woman accepting instructions she has no intention of respecting in spirit, says, “Of course.”
She says it with such polite sincerity that he has exactly enough time to be betrayed by hope.
For one miraculous second, it looks as though the evening may yet survive.
Then Obito, who has been following only half of the conversation and all of the emotional danger, makes the mistake of trying to help.
“No, but,” he says, still half-turned toward the arm-wrestling match and full of the doomed confidence of a man about to die for free, “I think Asuma just means kunoichi are more intense about gear stuff--”
Kurenai closes her eyes in pre-emptive doom, “Obito.”
He does not stop.
“What? I’m helping--”
Rin turns her head. Slowly.
Minato feels his soul leave his body in self-defense.
Because staying seated, as it turns out, is not the same as remaining nonviolent.
Rin simply leans across the table instead.
What follows happens fast enough that half the room misses the mechanics and the other half sees them too clearly to ever relax around her again.
One second Obito is trying to explain sexism like a man assembling his own funeral pyre out of spare vocabulary.
The next, Rin has him by the front of his shirt and is using his body as a practical demonstration of why no one should ever volunteer interpretive support within range of a drunk medic.
He hits the bench hard enough to rattle glasses.
Gai shouts something supportive and completely unusable. Asuma laughs once, then visibly regrets still having a throat when Kurenai turns her head toward him.
Genma nearly loses the betting napkin and has to dive for it with the full-body commitment of a man protecting family documents. Kakashi moves his glass out of range with cool, practical survival instinct. Kurenai says, “Rin.” Rin says, “I heard you.”
By then the smoke has thickened, the table has shifted half a foot from its original position, and the entire back section of the restaurant has developed the watchful excitement of people pretending not to witness something memorable.
Then the door slides open. Cooler night air cuts through the heat and smoke in one clean draft, and Tsunade steps into it like consequence given human form.
She stops just far enough inside the restaurant to take in the room in a single sweep: the haze of charcoal smoke, the raised voices, the locked arms, the betting economy, Rin with Obito half-pinned, and Minato standing in the center of it all like a man realizing too late that leadership and social engineering are not the same skill.
There is a beat.
Then Tsunade says, “Ah.”
Another beat.
“Team building.”
Behind her, Orochimaru surveys the room with the cool and frankly offensive curiosity of a man attending a symposium on unstable young adults.
“How educational,” he murmurs.
Anko appears a breath later, spots the room in full, and lights up with the bright delight of a woman who has stumbled into exactly the kind of bad decision she most respects.
“Oh,” she says. “This is disgusting.”
Shizune, behind her, looks like she has already started regretting her own species.
From that point on, the evening loses even the pretense of salvageability. The room does not so much descend as reorganize itself around failure, each new arrival finding a way to make the existing chaos brighter, louder, or more technically indefensible.
Tsunade, having decided almost instantly that this is the best thing she has seen all week, begins critiquing stances between drinks with the serene brutality of a woman who has trained better fighters and buried worse men. Anko, meanwhile, starts stealing food off other people’s plates with the casual entitlement of a scavenger deity. Shizune attempts, briefly, to restore some kind of social order, but gives it up as a structurally unsound ambition almost at once.
Orochimaru does not touch the food. He only watches, which is somehow worse. His attention moves around the table with enough fascinated calm to make everyone he pauses on feel like an interesting infection. Across from him, Obito - having survived Rin and learned absolutely nothing - resumes officiating the arm wrestling with a slight crease in his collar and no reduction in confidence. Asuma and Gai, both now too invested to lose gracefully, agree to a rematch on principle.
This, naturally, revives the betting. Genma and Kakashi continue in lower voices now, which somehow makes it more criminal rather than less. Raidō and Aoba drift back in with the exhausted ease of men who know better and have chosen profit anyway.
At the far end of the table, Rin settles back into her seat with the eerie calm of someone who has already committed one act of corrective violence and no longer feels any urgency about the rest of the evening. From there she begins answering direct questions with such ruthless honesty that half the room stops making eye contact for self-preservation.
And through all of it, Minato keeps trying. By now he is no longer drinking so much as holding a glass for camouflage and the illusion of authority.
That is the tragic part.
He does intervene. He says no. He says sit down. He says stop betting on each other. He says that does not count as listening at least twice.
And the drunk Jōnin do listen. They look right at him. They nod. They answer with complete sincerity.
Then they pull the same nonsense anyway, just with slightly better manners.
At one point Minato tells Obito, “You are not the referee,” and Obito nods gravely and says, “Understood,” before immediately announcing a grip reset in an even louder voice than before.
At another point he tells Genma and Kakashi, “No more bets,” and both of them agree so pleasantly that for one full disastrous second he believes them, only to discover minutes later that the betting has simply become subtle and therefore, somehow, more criminal.
By then even the rest of the restaurant has stopped pretending the back section belongs to ordinary customers. Eventually, by the time the owner approaches, the air has gone thick with heat and smoke. The table is a battlefield of skewers, empty glasses, stained napkins, leaning shoulders, flushed faces, and one deeply injured sense of purpose that belongs entirely to Minato.
The owner has the careful, respectful look of a man trying very hard to remember that one of his current problems is technically the Hokage.
“Hokage sama,” he says.
Minato blinks. This does not improve anything, but it is emotionally correct.
“Yes.”
The owner glances at the table. At the arm-wrestling bracket Genma has apparently drawn. At Obito’s shirt. At Rin. At Tsunade. At the visible shape of whatever civic and spiritual weather is currently occupying the back of his establishment.
Then he looks back at Minato and says, with exquisite caution:
“With respect, would your group please leave.”
There is silence.
Then Anko makes a delighted choking noise.
Tsunade smiles into her drink.
Orochimaru’s mouth curves by half a degree, which is somehow the most offensive reaction in the room.
And Minato, because there are no dignified options left to him and dignity is no longer recoverable from the evening, says:
“Yes. Of course.”
------🐸------
The next morning, the Uzumaki-Namikaze house smells like tea, Kushina's miracle headache powder, and consequences.
Rin is on the couch with a folded cloth over her eyes, one arm over her stomach, and the still, determined misery of someone trying to survive without moving enough to become aware of her own body again. Beside her sits a tray Kushina has assembled with the terrifying competence of a woman who has cared for hungover shinobi before and sees no reason to be sentimental about it: water, broth, tea, something salty, something medicinal, and one bowl placed with the exact energy of you will eat this or I will become involved.
Kushina sits across from her, bright-eyed and far too awake, with the expression of someone who has already decided the entire situation is worth keeping alive through retelling.
Minato, who looks better than he feels and worse than he wants to, stands near the low table with a cup of tea in hand and the thousand-yard stare of a man who attempted leadership and got a restaurant expulsion in return.
Kushina waits until he has taken one sip. Then says, with lethal calm, “Start from the beginning.”
Rin makes a small sound from beneath the cloth, “Please don’t.”
Kushina looks delighted. “No, no. You’re staying. This is witness testimony.”
Minato takes a breath. Then, because he is married and therefore not under any useful illusions about escape, begins.
By the time he gets to arm wrestling, betting, Tsunade’s arrival, and the restaurant owner asking the Hokage of Konoha to please remove his Jōnin from the premises, Kushina is already shaking with laughter.
“Orochimaru was there.”
“Yes.”
“At your Jōnin dinner.”
“Yes.”
There is a beat.
Then Kushina says, with deep satisfaction, “Excellent.”
“That is not the correct response.”
“It is my response 'ttebane.”
On the couch, Rin groans. “Please kill me.”
Kushina points at her without looking. “No. You don’t get death until I reach the good part.”
Rin makes the pained noise of a woman realizing the morning intends to be longer than her strength.
Kushina laughs anyway - with the full delighted betrayal of a woman whose husband has gone out to do something respectable and come home with a cautionary tale instead.
“And Rin,” she says, once she can breathe again. “What exactly did you do.”
Rin, from under the cloth, says, “Corrective action.”
Minato pinches the bridge of his nose, “That is not how I described it.”
“It is,” Rin says weakly, “how I experienced it.”
The room settles only a little after that, the laughter burning down into warmth. On the low table, the tea steams quietly. Rin’s broth remains untouched. Morning light has crept across the rug in slow pale stripes while the house smells faintly of headache powder, salt, and consequences.
Kushina turns back to Minato, still grinning. “Did they learn anything.”
There is a pause.
Because despite the meat smoke, the arm wrestling, the betting, the drinking, the violence, the Sannin contamination, the public humiliation, and the fact that a restaurant owner had to ask the Hokage of Konoha to remove his own Jōnin from the premises--
Minato lowers himself into the chair opposite Kushina and sets the tea down.
“Yes,” he says at last.
Kushina’s smile shifts.
He does not recount the evening again. He only gives her the shape of it.
Asuma talks once drink gets him past pride. Gai means everything he says and does not know how to be otherwise. Kurenai watches everyone even while pretending not to. Genma jokes when rooms get tight. Kakashi notices more than he ever wants acknowledged. Obito performs certainty when what he wants is reassurance. Rin gets more honest, not less.
And all of them, under enough heat and noise and idiocy, orbit one another in ways he would never have learned from reports, mission records, or clean offices.
By the time he finishes, the room has gone quieter.
On the couch, Rin lowers the cloth from her eyes by one inch. “So,” she says hoarsely, “you did get your leadership insights.”
Minato looks at her, “Yes.”
Rin considers this. Then pulls the cloth back over her face and says, “That feels rude.”
Kushina laughs again, softer now.
And Minato, looking between his wife, the wrecked medic on his couch, the untouched broth, the miracle headache powder, and the absurd wreckage of a social experiment that somehow produced usable data, thinks that Sarutobi had warned him about institutions, but had neglected to mention newly promoted Jōnin under the influence.
Later, when he writes it down, the note is brief.
Incident Result: socially catastrophic. Secondary Outcome: useful.
And because that is, infuriatingly, true, he hates it on sight.