The Midnight Guardian

But he’d brushed them off. He’d always done the testing on himself, had always done it alone. Back before Konoha, nobody had seemed to notice or mind so much. No one else in the Senju clan had cared much for jutsu creation unless it was to make use of the final product, and few people had wanted to be around Tobirama then anyway. It was easy to hide the injuries, the evidence of his misfires, the residual side-effects of imperfect healing jutsus.

He'd thought that by now he had enough experience to know what was a relatively safe experiment and what wasn’t.

Apparently not.

All he could remember was that he’d been trying to adjust the hiraishin’s range. He’d made a few adjustments to the seal and calculated that—in a worst case scenario—he either wouldn’t travel anywhere at all, or it would just take him to the nearest seal-mark.

Again, apparently not, given that the last thing he remembered was activating the seal and then everything going black. And now he was awake, looking up at the ceiling…of a cave? It was hard to tell. His eyesight had never been great, and now that he was trying to focus on something, he became aware of the pounding in his head, the ache of his entire body.

He also became aware of the muttering.

“He’s awake. I saw him move, ‘ttebayo.”

“Sakura, don’t. Stay back.”

“But I need to change his bandages—”

“He could hurt you. We can’t…with sensei like he is, we can’t afford to—”

“Shut up, teme. Sensei’s fine.”

“Besides, he’s the Nidaime.”

“He just looks like him. The Nidaime’s dead.”

“Not yet, he isn’t.”

There was a small shuffle, a heavy sigh, and then an Uchiha face appeared in Tobirama’s line of sight.

Izuna, he thought immediately, tensing, because the boy was the spitting image of his old enemy. But he was just that—a boy. A child. Maybe as young as ten. Certainly not much older than that, at least. Izuna hadn’t been a child in a long time; this wasn’t him.

Then who is it? Obviously an Uchiha, but Tobirama knew all the active duty Uchiha in the village, even the young ones.

“Sakura is going to look at your bandages,” the Uchiha boy said, and though his expression was bland, there was something wary and on-edge in the set of his mouth. “If you try to attack, I will slit your throat. I don’t give a damn if you were the Nidaime Hokage.”

Nidaime Hokage? His curiosity was piqued, but that was a question for another time. When the child was feeling less threatened. Instead, Tobirama nodded ever so slightly, a motion the Uchiha boy repeated, and then there was pink.

Pink hair. On a shinobi. Huh.

Sakura, presumably, and she was just as young as the boy, maybe even younger. It was hard to tell between the impractical hair and the wide green eyes. She was careful, though, and efficient, unwrapping the bandages patched around his torso. They came away red.

Fuck.

“What’s my current condition?” he asked, trying to keep his voice gentle. These were just children, and they were obviously trying to help, but he needed to know how critical it was.

The Uchiha boy scowled—maybe that was his default expression—but Sakura answered immediately, even though her voice shook, “You appeared in a flash of light just outside the cave about 16 hours ago. Lac-lacerations across your t-torso, but not too deep. Cracked ribs. I don’t-I don’t think there’s any internal bleeding, but I’m not sure. I’m not a tr-trained medic yet.”

Not unlike some of his earliest tests with the hiraishin, then. That probably meant that his adjusted seal wasn’t stabilized properly, which meant he was on the right track. It’s functional, at least, he thought. But if he’d been out 16 hours and surrounded by children he didn’t recognize though they wore the Konoha hitai-ate, too, that was certainly concerning.

“What treatment have you administered?” he asked.

“All wounds have been cleaned. It...it was a lot of blood, so I stitched up your abdominal wounds, covered with a poultice to prevent infection, and wrapped them.”

That was…surprisingly good for a child field-medic of little training. The stitching was probably rough, and he’d undoubtedly scar, but it could have been a lot worse.

“The poultice?”

A third child, blond with blue eyes and strange little whisker marks on his cheeks, scrambled up to his side, holding out a small jar. “Yarrow, chamomile, calendula, and tea-tree oil.”

“You made this?”

The three children glanced at each other, before Sakura tipped her head at the blond and said, “Naruto did.”

What smart, resourceful children. So few nin were able to provide adequate field medicine—it had been one of the Senju clan’s strengths, but only because of Hashirama’s mokuton and Tobirama’s experiments—so it was good to see these children well-prepared. They’d had a good teacher, obviously, which begged the question: where was their teacher now?

They were Konoha shinobi, but they were too young to be out on their own. They had to be a genin team, but if that was the case, then their sensei should have been with them.

“You did a good job. All of you,” he said, and watched as some of the tension eased from their shoulders. “Thank you for keeping me alive.”

He didn’t think that of all things would be the thing to set them off, but the Uchiha boy’s face crumpled, Naruto’s eyes squeezed shut as he ducked his head, and Sakura burst into tears.

(Tobirama wouldn’t get the whole story until later. After he’d seen their sensei laid out on a bedroll beside him, alive but barely, having been stabbed clean through the shoulder so viciously he’d nearly lost an arm. After he’d regained enough chakra to offer some healing, and after he’d had to subdue the injured Hatake man and reassure him a dozen times over that he wasn’t going to hurt the kids.

Then he’d hear about the Wave Mission. The kids’ first mission out of the village. The lying bridge-builder who’d all but led them to certain death. The missing nin—A-rank—who had come out of nowhere, too strong and too fast. The Hatake’s chakra reserves failing him. The kids trying their best but not able to keep their client alive. Escaping to live another day only because their enemy couldn’t be bothered to kill them.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Tobirama would think, angry. Konoha was supposed to make things safer. In the shinobi world, there were no guarantees, of course, but something like this should have never happened.