The scroll said twelve hours and the village took it at its word, which was the first mistake.
Twelve hours in scroll-time was not twelve hours in Konoha-time. The chat learned this within the first ninety minutes, when Tsunade — who had volunteered to chase Kabuto the previous chapter and had been packing in the Hokage office ever since — found that her travel scroll would not seal. She slapped it. She slapped it harder. She tried a different brush.
Tsunade: The hell is wrong with this thing.
Shizune: Lady Tsunade, the seal is fine. It's the air. The chakra in the air feels — heavy.
Tsunade: Heavy how.
Shizune: Heavy like before a storm. Heavy like the scroll is holding everyone still.
Mei Terumī: She's right. I tried to leave for Kiri an hour ago. My summoning hawk wouldn't take off. Just sat on the perch and stared at me like I'd insulted its mother.
Ōnoki: My back stopped hurting. That has never happened in forty years. Something is wrong.
Gaara: The sand is quiet. It has not been quiet since I was six.
A (Fourth Raikage): I am still spinning. I have been spinning for two days. I would like to register a formal complaint with whatever is running this.
Tobirama: The scroll is preparing. It said twelve hours. It meant twelve hours of preparation, not twelve hours of waiting. We are inside the preparation.
Madara: Hmph. The little brother is correct again. Twice in one day. Mark the calendar.
Tobirama: Stinking monkey, I will mark your face.
Hashirama: Both of you. Please. There is a child grieving in the Uchiha compound and you are bickering about calendars.
The Uchiha compound had, in fact, gone very quiet.
Itachi had not moved from the engawa. The scroll-mirror was in his lap, dimmed but warm, and the authenticated footage was sealed inside a small bone-white token the scroll had spat into his palm an hour ago. He had not opened the token. He had not put it down either. Sasuke was asleep against his shoulder — actual sleep, not the pretending kind, his breathing finally slow — and Itachi was looking at the moon over the compound wall with the patience of a man who had decided to wait twelve hours for the rest of his life to start.
Inside the house, Mikoto was making tea. She had been making tea for forty minutes. The pot was on its third refill and no one had drunk any of it. Fugaku stood in the kitchen doorway and watched his wife pour water over leaves and pour it out again, and he did not say a word, because the last word he had said aloud, two hours ago, had been Shisui's name, and he had not trusted his throat since.
In the council chamber, Hiruzen Sarutobi was alone.
He had asked for the room to be cleared. Koharu had argued. Homura had argued harder. Hiruzen had said, very quietly, "I sealed Danzo in a bunker on the testimony of a piece of paper. I would like ten minutes to decide if I am also going to sit in there with him." The room had cleared.
The pipe was unlit. Hiruzen did not remember setting it down. He looked at the desk where he had signed the order for the Uchiha Massacre thirteen years ago — different desk now, the old one had been replaced after Pain, but the room was the same room — and he tried to do the arithmetic of his own life and kept arriving at a number he did not like.
Outside the window, a hawk that had not been summoned by anyone was sitting on the eaves. It had been there for an hour. Hiruzen had a strong suspicion he knew who would eventually be carrying messages on it, and he had a stronger suspicion he was not going to like what those messages said.
In the Pure Land, Hashirama Senju sat down on the grass and did not get up.
Mito brought him water that did not exist in a cup that was made of memory and he drank it anyway and it helped, the way memories do. Tobirama paced. Tobirama had been pacing for an hour and the grass under his sandals was not getting flatter because the grass under his sandals was not real, but he was pacing anyway because the pacing was real to him.
"I trained him, brother."
"I heard you the first time."
"I should have killed him at twelve. He looked at the village the way a butcher looks at a calf. I thought it was loyalty."
"It was loyalty," Hashirama said. "Loyalty is the most dangerous thing a person can have, when it is loyalty to the wrong shape of an idea."
Tobirama stopped pacing. He looked at his brother for a long time. Then he said, very softly, the way he had said almost nothing in his life, "I am sorry."
Hashirama did not ask what for. He just held out his hand. Tobirama took it. They sat there in the not-grass and did not say anything else for a while.
Madara, ten feet away, was sharpening a kunai that did not exist with a stone that did not exist and was being conspicuously silent about it. Izuna, beside him, leaned over and whispered something. Madara grunted. Izuna whispered again. Madara, with the air of a man being forced at swordpoint to perform a kindness, walked over and sat down on the not-grass next to Tobirama without a word.
Tobirama looked at him.
Madara looked back.
Neither said anything.
It was, Hashirama would later reflect, the closest thing to peace the three of them had ever managed.
The chat, sensing the hour was sacred, had gone quiet. Even Naruto, who had typed and deleted four different versions of "Sasuke are you okay" in the last forty minutes, finally just sent:
Naruto: I'm here. When you want to talk. I'm here.
Sasuke, asleep on his brother's shoulder, did not read it for another three hours. But when he did, he read it twice.
The hawk on the Hokage tower roof shifted its weight and waited.
The scroll, in its parchment quiet, counted down.
[Eleven hours, forty-six minutes.]
[First Place, preparing.]
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