Naruto: Starting by Reading Minds in Naruto

Time moved on the way it always did once the fighting stopped: quietly, and faster than anyone noticed while it was happening. Tonbo worked his rotations, filed his reports, and kept his evenings at Ichiraku as faithfully as ever. His conversations with Ayame stayed easy, unremarkable in the way he’d wanted them to be.

It was around then that Orochimaru returned with his team, Minato Namikaze among them, an army left behind on the border to discourage anyone tempted to test Konoha while its guard was still down. Orochimaru himself skipped the welcome home entirely — no surprise there, Tonbo thought; the man had never struck him, even secondhand through a dozen borrowed memories, as someone who cared for crowds.

”It’s finally over,” he murmured, more to himself than to anyone standing near him.

Peace now, for a good long while yet — nothing left ahead of Konoha but the one disaster he alone remembered was coming, and that lay years off still. He let himself look toward the escort instead of dwelling on it, and there was the Yellow Flash himself, bright and easy exactly the way Tonbo’s borrowed memories had preserved him. The size of the crowd cheering his name revealed how far his reputation had already spread.

Tonbo had seen what he’d come to see. He turned for home without waiting for more.

There was no reason to linger over it. He had no ambition to attach himself to men that large — Inoichi Yamanaka was patron enough, and safe besides, the whole Ino–Shika–Chō line already understood well enough to back whoever ended up wearing the hat rather than gamble on any one candidate too early. That kind of quiet, established loyalty carried its own weight in the Village, and it suited him fine to stand a little behind it.

The funerals came not long after, grand ones, every rank from jōnin to genin turning out at the cemetery to see their dead off properly, rows of fresh markers standing pale against the turned earth. Tonbo went with the rest of the Analysis Team and found himself looking, for once, at faces he’d only ever known through other people’s dying memories: Orochimaru, Minato, Kakashi, Might Guy, and others besides, all of them younger than he’d pictured them, Orochimaru still boyish, Minato barely twenty, none of them yet carrying whatever the years ahead would eventually put on them. Uzumaki Kushina stood among them heavily pregnant, her chakra alone enough to press against his senses from yards away — hard to mistake that hair, or the weight behind it, for anyone else.

The Third didn’t preach the Will of Fire that day. He only stood with his head bowed through a long silence for the dead, and let that stand in the theory’s place.

Konoha settled back into its old rhythms once the funeral had ended, and within the month word began working its way down through the ranks that the Third meant to step aside at last. A month of deliberation later, the answer came: Minato Namikaze, Fourth Hokage.

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The whole village turned out for it, buzzing in a way Tonbo hadn’t seen since before the war. On the day itself, everyone stood watching that Hokage’s robe catch the wind, and the smile underneath it — the kind that made outright refusal of him seem almost unreasonable, barring whatever quiet objections a handful of Konoha’s less sociable elements might have kept to themselves.

Orochimaru wasn’t there to see it. Whether he’d taken the succession badly, or simply had better things to do with his hours these days, Tonbo couldn’t say. Danzō didn’t show either, and some part of him regretted that more than he expected to — a man like that, root and all, was someone worth a look, if the opportunity ever came around properly.

”Better not to go looking, all the same,” he muttered, and let the thought go. Ramen sounded like the better use of the afternoon.

At Ichiraku, Teuchi greeted him with a professional smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes — the old man had never fully warmed to the idea of a Ninja circling his daughter, whatever his manners said otherwise — and set down a bowl of tonkotsu without being asked twice.

”Thanks, Uncle. Where’s Ayame?”

”Delivering noodles to an old woman down the street who can’t get around much anymore,” Teuchi said, already busy with the next order.

The shop was crowded and short a pair of hands. Tonbo offered his own, and Teuchi turned him down flat — reputation was reputation, and he wasn’t about to let an untrained Ninja anywhere near his broth — so Tonbo settled instead for kneading dough, ninja strength making quick work of what usually took both of Teuchi’s arms.

Flour, water, the right give under his palms — he’d watched this counter long enough that his hands already knew the rhythm, and a sensor’s feel for texture filled in whatever watching alone hadn’t taught him.

”You’ve had training. Don’t tell me this is your first time,” Teuchi said, more grudging than accusing, hands never slowing on his own work.

”Just a good eye, and a lot of evenings spent watching you do it,” Tonbo said, and meant it mostly.

Pleased despite himself at how quickly the boy had picked it up, Teuchi began walking him through the finer points as they worked — proportions, timing, the exact moment a batch needed to rest before it could be pulled again — thinking privately that a son-in-law who could actually run this counter wouldn’t be the worst thing to come out of all this.

The door swung open on a blond-haired man and a red-haired woman heavy with child.

”Fourth Hokage-sama.” Tonbo was on his feet and bowing before he’d finished the thought — inaugurated less than a day, and already out for noodles with his wife.

”You’re a Ninja?” Minato’s own perception was sharp enough to have already placed him as one, headband or no.

”Analysis Team, sir. Under Inoichi Yamanaka, Dokuraku Meguri’s squad. Tobitake Tonbo.”

He kept his eyes carefully where they belonged. Kushina was a Jinchūriki, and there was no faster way to earn a Hokage’s suspicion than to let his gaze linger somewhere it shouldn’t.

”He saw I was shorthanded and lent a hand, Hokage-sama,” Teuchi put in quickly, not wanting the boy blamed for anything.

”Kushina’s carrying awfully high these days — not long now, is it?” Minato said, as warm as Tonbo’s borrowed memories had preserved him.

Kushina smiled and pressed a hand to her belly. ”Not long at all.”

Minato filed the name away without comment, then ordered for them both, and Tonbo went back to the dough with nothing on his conscience. He was, in his own quiet way, as true a believer in the Will of Fire as anyone in that room. But there was no profit in courting men this large, and every reason to stay exactly where he was — a decent Ninja, doing decent work, and nothing more than that.