Sora followed Teju's father inside.
Teju's mother had passed years ago, and the house wore its absence openly. Unwashed dishes sat stacked on the table, the kitchen a quiet chronicle of two males getting by. A retired bachelor and his son, muddling through one day at a time.
Teju's father sat down heavily, looked at the two boys, and after a long silence forced the words out. "Do you know Yuhi Shinku? The jonin?"
"Yes, Uncle," Sora said.
He glanced at Teju, who still wore a blank, unsuspecting expression.
"His daughter. When did you two start getting close to her?"
"We were classmates, but we barely spoke at the Academy. Never more than a few words. Four days ago we were assigned to the same squad. We've been seeing each other every day since, for missions and training."
Teju's father paused. "So it's just these last few days that you've been spending time with the Yuhi girl?"
"Yes."
"All right, Sora. I understand. It's late. Head home and give your mother my regards."
"Yes, sir." Sora caught Teju's face as he turned to leave. The color had drained from it. Maybe it had finally clicked. Sora walked out slowly, unable to think of a single useful thing to say.
Back home, the unease wouldn't settle. He sat for a few minutes, then went back out into the street and planted himself near Teju's front door. He didn't know what he was guarding against. It was just something to do with the dread.
He knew that if he walked in now, he'd see Teju at his most humiliated. But the worry gnawed at him, and every few seconds he almost reached for the door.
He paced the alley instead, back and forth, restless.
Then he saw them. Teju and his father, walking out of the Sarutobi clan compound.
How did it come to this?
Why? Why drag the boy there to be humiliated like that?
All Teju had done was develop a crush on the prettiest girl in their class. He was ten years old. That was a crime now? If the Sarutobi clan had concerns, they could have passed along a quiet word. Teju would have buried the feelings and moved on. Why go this far?
Graduation scattered classmates like leaves in the wind. Having old friends on the same squad, still seeing each other every day, that was rare luck. How many kids transferred to distant postings and drifted apart, the bonds of years fading to silence? What was so wrong about Teju caring for Kurenai?
And even without interference, time would have done the work. As Teju grew older, he'd realize on his own that they didn't fit. Feelings were a two-person affair. One side's devotion didn't entitle anyone to anything.
Teju spotted Sora in the alley. He reached over, gave Sora's arm a single pat without lifting his head, and walked into his house.
His father stayed behind.
"Sora." The older man's voice was flat, wrung out. "A Sarutobi jonin, Sarutobi Nobuhiro, came to see me today. He told me the Hokage's second son had been asking about Teju. Turns out Asuma has his eye on Yuhi Kurenai too. Nobuhiro made a joke of it. Said Teju and the Hokage's boy were rivals now."
He lit a cigarette, the ember flaring in the dark.
"Rivals. As if that were possible." Smoke curled from his lips. "I took my son to the Sarutobi compound myself. Went to see Nobuhiro in person. You're young. You don't understand what it means to cross a major clan during wartime. It would put a target on Teju. On your whole squad. I only have one son. I'm not asking him to achieve great things anymore. I just need him to survive this war."
What could Sora say to that?
"I understand, sir. We'll come back alive."
"If you ever need equipment, anything at all, come to me. I'll take care of it."
"Thank you. This will pass."
He watched the man disappear back inside and tried to picture the two of them in there, father and son, sitting across from each other. They probably wouldn't exchange another word tonight.
Behind him, the Sarutobi compound blazed with light. It always blazed with light.
And the Sarutobi were considered the friendly ones. The clan most sympathetic to civilians. Hiruzen couldn't have held Konoha with the Sarutobi alone. He'd needed to cultivate talent from the common ranks to counterbalance the other great clans. Two of his three students, Jiraiya and Orochimaru, were clanless civilians, and he'd entrusted them with enormous responsibility. All three now commanded entire fronts in the war. Only Tsunade had a surname worth anything.
Yet even this clan, the most approachable of the great houses, loomed over civilians like something vast and ancient. No one dared show the faintest disrespect.
Sora wandered Konoha's streets with no destination in mind. The village felt hollow at night now, nothing like the noisy evenings of two years ago. The border skirmishes had bled the life out of it. Every district was quiet, every lane half-empty.
War did this to people. Its shadow had made a loving father choose to bend his spine alongside his son, the two of them bowing together.
Between this life and the last, Sora had forty years of living under his belt, and this was the first time he'd felt war press in this close. In his old world, he remembered the moment he'd looked up from a history book and realized his homeland had gone three decades without seeing smoke on the horizon. Future historians might call it a golden age. He hadn't appreciated at the time how lucky, how impossibly fortunate, that peace had been.
In the history books, war was the default state of the world. Wars of blades. Wars of commerce. Wars of propaganda. Endless, overlapping, without reprieve.
On Konoha's streets tonight, most of the faces he passed belonged to women and children.
This is real. He was going to a battlefield. Not the neat phrase in a manga, "the Third Shinobi World War," a line you could read in two seconds and move on. Like every war in his previous life, what history reduced to a name, the people living through it experienced as catastrophe.
Those born after a war always romanticized it. The reality grew abstract, theatrical, until the next war came and taught a new generation what it meant to fear for their lives.
In this world, countless people had tried to end conflict once and for all. Every attempt had failed.
The only thing that had ever brought temporary peace was strength, wielded by someone who understood that a strong person's true limit was defined by the weak. When the most powerful figure in the world chose not to crush those beneath them, the fighting stopped for a while. Senju Hashirama had done it. Someday, Uzumaki Naruto would do it again. And so the first step toward controlling war was the same as it had always been: become the strongest.
Sora turned back toward his own alley. He didn't care what kind of mood Teju was in right now. He stopped in front of his friend's house and shouted at the closed door.
"Tejuno! Early training tomorrow, you hear me?!"