The Way Into Mist Village (Naruto)

1: Departure

[OP: "The Valley"--The Oh Hellos]

Four weeks had passed in Leaf Village since their mysterious, other-wordly friends had disappeared to go to their own world, with the promise of return.

Leaf had not had a day's rest with recovering from the war. New reports came in every week of more problems outside the village as well. The losses had been heavy everywhere.

The current biggest fear of the kage was that the smaller shinobi villages that didn't have kages would take this chance to stamp out their larger rivals. 

The Kazekage's hope was that they would prevent this by strengthening the ties between the 5 kage villages, that if they all came to each other's aid, with their more powerful fighters, the other shinobi would not dare to attack.

United, they were strong, he said.

His plan to help with this was to travel from village to village and discuss things further and get to understand each others' situations more.

It would be the first ever diplomatic tour attempted probably since Hashirama Senju had captured the Tailed Beasts, and that hadn't be quite the same anyway.

Gaara was taking a more humble approach, at least if you asked his village, by trying to understand the other villages' situations more.

If you asked the Stone or Cloud, he was taking the cheekier approach, thinking his visit was so important. But they would humor him.

Well...sort of.

Only Mist Village was really welcoming him with open arms. Stone was on the condition that Mist went well, and Cloud, whose Raikage was a tough man to impress, had said only if it went well on the first two would he even consider it.

Gaara took it as encouragement that they agreed at all.

He had been making preparations to leave his village in the hands of trusted advisors. He'd check in, and so would his two siblings, every so often.

Their Leaf allies who were accompanying them--Shikamaru Nara, Ino Yamanaka, Naruto Uzumaki, Sai (no last name), Hinata and Neji Hyuga, and last and most surprising, Sasuke Uchiha--had been waiting for them to return to Leaf.

And for the DJ team to return, but they were already a little later than expected, and now Temari had sent word that the Sand might arrive later than they thought too.

Granted, only by one day, but Shikamaru's mother said it was a bad omen to be delayed at the start of a journey.

She already wasn't that happy about him going off, considering his father had just been lost to the war.

Shikamaru felt bad for her, in his way, though she was a tough woman...but also, he felt like the break from seeing his family's house, without his father in it, would be welcome. He had so much to do in Leaf, it couldn't always feel crushing, but grief would intrude at odd moments.

Losing both his teacher and his father in the same year...well, it made a man feel lost. Unprepared.

Ino, in the same position, also looked forward to the distraction. It was hard not to feel forlorn when no one in her clan ever had much to say to her about his death.

Privately, Ino believed that it was because she was a woman. An only child, she wasn't blind to the fact that it was usually the oldest sons who got the most jutsu taught to them by their fathers in the Ino-Shika-Cho clans, and it had been for many generations.

Her father had never spoken of it to her directly and had trained her the same as any son, at least on the surface, but, even so, she got remarks or overheard them from other people in the family. People thought that girls just couldn't sustain as much chakra.