Chapter 42: Small Beginnings.

The proposal took shape over several afternoons.

Mikoto met with Tsunade and other medical nin in Konoha Hospital, the many of them surrounded by scrolls and casualty reports. Tsunade brought the medical knowledge and the institutional weight. Mikoto brought the field experience, medical record, and the proof that the training could be done fast and done well.

They argued. They drafted. They revised. Tsunade wanted the training centralized at the hospital. Mikoto wanted it spread into the Academy so it started early. They met in the middle, an early-identification program at the Academy feeding into advanced training at the hospital, with Mikoto as the bridge between the two. By the end of the week they had a document worth putting in front of the council. It wasn't a guarantee. Hiruzen had only promised to consider it. But it was written down, and it had several notable names on it, and that was a start.

Mikoto also made time for Kushina. There were dango runs and hot spring trips and training sessions. Two years of friendship crammed into the gaps between duties.

Then her squad's first mission came in, and the real work began.

…

"A mission," Tsume said, vibrating with excitement. "Our first real mission! What is it? Assassination? Princess protection duty? Bandits? Are we fighting someone?"

"It's D-rank." Mikoto happily said.

Tsume's face fell. "...What's D-rank?"

"D-rank missions are the most boring missions." Yoshino said. "Risk-free tasks. Manual labor, errands, household chores. The village subsidizes them so genin have something to do while we build experience."

"That sounds BORING!"

"Boring is good." Mikoto said. "You're new. You start small. Everyone does." She unrolled the mission scroll. "Our assignment is to recover a missing pet. A dog named Kuma, belonging to a woman named Yori in the merchant district. The dog has a habit of escaping. Our job is to find it and bring it home."

"A dog? I'm the best at catching dogs!" Tsume claimed.

"I want the team to recover the dog." Mikoto corrected. "Together. As a unit."

"This is gonna be a piece of cake! Just follow me, guys!"

"This is our first mission. Make sure to take it seriously, please." Mikoto rolled the scroll back up.

Yoshino tilted her head. "This is a tracking and capture exercise disguised as a chore, isn’t it?"

Mikoto simply smiled without answering.

…

The dog never stood a chance.

Yoshino started planning out the best way to herd the animal into a dead end. She got three sentences in before Tsume dropped to all fours, chakra surging through her limbs, and was gone.

One blur across the market. One pounce. Kuma was pinned under a nine-year-old who'd been chasing dogs since she was a baby. The dog hadn't even registered it was being hunted before it was already in her arms, licking her face, betraying every instinct a runaway should have had.

"Piece of cake! Like I said." Tsume said, grinning over her shoulder.

Yoshino sighed. "I had a plan."

"Don't need a plan about catching dogs when you've got me!"

"We don't 'have' you, you ran off before I finished talking-"

"And I caught it! Plan worked! My plan!"

"It wasn't your plan, you didn't have a plan, you just ran-"

Nawaki laughed as he rubbed Yoshino’s head. "She's not wrong, though. Dog's caught."

Yoshino's eye twitched as she pushed away Nawaki’s palm. “Show off.” She crossed her arms.

“Yep!” Tsume agreed without shame. The dog seemed perfectly happy in Tsume’s arms and completely unaware of Kuromaru’s growling. The mission, technically, was complete.

…

Then they got a farm mission. 

Weeding, hauling water, mending a fence the old farmer had been promising his wife he'd fix for the better part of a decade. Tsume complained the entire time and worked twice as hard as anyone, tearing through rows of weeds. Kuromaru dug holes that may or may not have been helpful. Nawaki carried water without any issue at all and fixed the holes made by Kuromaru with earth style.

"You missed a spot." Yoshino pointed out.

"I didn't miss anything!" Tsume declared.

"That spot. There. Are you blind or just lazy?" Yoshino pointed.

"Why are you always trying to boss someone around?! This isn’t the academy! You aren’t top of the class anymore, you know?! We’re equals now!" Tsume pointed out.

"Equals..." Yoshino seemed somewhat bothered despite how factual it was. 

She crouched, yanked the offending weed herself, and held it up like evidence at a trial. "Do it right or do it twice. Your choice."

Tsume bared her teeth. Yoshino stared her down without blinking. After a moment, Tsume went back and fixed her row, grumbling the whole way.

Nawaki, watching the two of them from across the field, leaned toward Mikoto where she sat in the shade pretending to supervise.

"These two are a lot cuter than my old teammates."

"What was wrong with Nonō?" Mikoto tilted her head.

"Ah! So even you admit Emi had an attitude problem!" Nawaki shouted.

“I said no such thing.” Mikoto turned her head. She would not speak badly about any of her students to her students.

“But you can definitely agree Emi isn’t cute at all right? Like what boy would want such a foul-mouth, arrogant, mean, jerk of a girl? Right? Right?” Nawaki pressed.

“...” Mikoto was momentarily taken aback as she tried to think of Emi’s good traits. “She has her good points…”

“Name one.” Nawaki challenged her.

“She’s very motivated and determined.” Mikoto said proudly. She certainly worked hard.

Nawaki rolled his eyes. “You know I’m right.”

Mikoto refused to respond as she walked over to the girls who were playfully arguing with each other. Nawaki took it as his victory, Mikoto simply didn’t want to bother with such a meaningless discussion. All of her students were cute in their own way. Even the problematic ones.

…

A delivery run that crossed the village twice because the address was wrong the first time.

A morning painting a merchant's storehouse that ended with Tsume and Kuromaru painted nearly head to toe. Mikoto cleaned them off with a water jutsu while avoiding the shaking aftermath as they dried themselves off.

An afternoon clearing a drainage ditch that left all three of them filthy and the dog filthier and Yoshino threatening violence when Tsume tried to shake mud off near her. Mikoto cleaned them off with a water jutsu again.

They got faster and better with morning training. Nawaki settled into the space between teammate and authority, the one who stepped up and called the shots when Mikoto drifted to the edge of a job to watch them handle it alone.

"Tsume, left side. Nawaki, take the top. I've got the base."

"Why do you always get to call it?"

"Because I'm smarter than you. Now move."

Tsume charged her. They started fighting again. It was a regular occurrence. Mikoto didn’t stop it. Rivalries were good for developing children. Especially Nawaki. After being left behind by Nonō and Emi, he was pushing himself to the limit sparring against her every day. He was growing so fast that she was positive he was close to being ready for chunin. He just needed the right opportunity to prove it.

…

Then there was a babysitting mission. A merchant couple, an evening out, a single toddler who took one look at his departing parents and began to scream like the world was ending. He did not stop. He screamed through Tsume's attempts at playing, which only wound him up further. He screamed through Nawaki's funny faces. He screamed through Yoshino flatly ordering him to be quiet, which worked about as well as one could expect.

Twenty minutes in, Kuromaru was wishing the mission would be over already. Tsume looked close to pulling her hair out. Nawaki had run out of funny faces and game ideas.

Then the kid, exhausted and red-faced and utterly out of options, stumbled across the room and latched onto Yoshino's leg, sobbing into her knee.

She crouched, gathered the wailing toddler up against her shoulder, and her voice dropped into a voice that none of them had heard from her once in two weeks of barked orders and threats of violence. She rocked him. Sang to him. Stroked his hair with a tenderness that did not match a single thing she'd shown them across a dozen missions.

The toddler's screams faded to hiccups. The hiccups faded to slow breathing. He was asleep against her shoulder inside a minute.

Tsume's jaw was somewhere near the floor. “What was that?!” She softly exclaimed.

"What was what?" Yoshino said, not looking up, still swaying gently side to side.

"That! The voice! The soft thing! You're never soft! You called me blind and stupid three days ago over WEEDS!"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Yoshino rolled her eyes.

"You little faker… I thought you were bad. I thought you were tough like me. You ain’t bad! You ain’t nuffin!"

"Tsume..." Yoshino's eyes flicked up, and the strict edge snapped back into place like it had never left, sharper for the contrast. "If you wake this child, I will bury you in that drainage ditch myself."

Tsume clicked her tongue and gave her the middle finger. “You’re lucky you’re holding a baby or I’d shove YOU in the ditch.”

Across the room, Mikoto turned away to hide her smile. So it turns out that Yoshino could be sweet and gentle. She wondered if Emi had a side like that. 

…

The week's sign-ins came and went with no fanfare. A lacquered tea set. A sack of good flour. A decorative hair comb she gave to her mother and a folding paper fan she didn't need but kept anyway. She put the flour in the kitchen.

A month of several D-rank missions. The kind of missions Nawaki said were pretty relaxing and super different from the war. Mikoto agreed, having spent two years watching men, women, children, and elderly die in the mud at the front. She'd healed children with their limbs torn away and held the hands of shinobi who didn't live to see morning. And walking back through the village in the evening light, listening to three kids argue about whose turn it was to carry the supplies and whether vegetables counted as a real meal, she understood, all the way down, what the fighting had been for.

This. The quiet. The small things. Children who got to stay children a little while longer before the world asked more of them than they should ever have to give.

She'd protect it for as long as she could.