Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

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Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. ― Søren Kierkegaard

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"Okay," Sasuke said, jaw tensed and shoulders tight. "Bring it down."

I pressed my hand to the security seal, aligning the key and forcing the defences around the building to collapse.

Then I hesitated, darting a glance at Sasuke. "Are you sure? We can always-"

The look he gave me in turn was sardonic. He didn't even answer, just stepped forward and pushed the entrance door open.

Helplessly, I followed.

And then we were the first living people to set foot in the Uchiha Police Station in over five years. After the initial flurry of duty reassignment and information grabbing, the buildings had just been… locked up and sealed to prevent looters (or unauthorised information grabbing).

It had taken a bit of wrangling to get access to the security key but no one could exactly argue that our assignment didn't give us authorisation. It was more just that the key itself had been in the far reaches of the poorly organised archive and only half a dozen people had known that – finding the right person who knew the right things was half the trick of getting anything done in the tower.

For a building that I had never set foot in before, it was startlingly familiar. For a second, all I could see was that reverse world red-and-black overlying it.

Here was where I had stood, unable to move, as Itachi had entered the room. There was where Tokimi Uchiha had been working at her desk, had looked up, had stood, one hand braced against her desk, had caught a kunai through the neck and gone down, chair tipping over and clattering—

I looked away. The desks in the bullpen had been pushed against the walls, drawers pulled out and stacked on top, riffled through and emptied of important content. There was a corkboard on the front wall, hastily pinned notices and flyers — 'Social Club Drinks on Friday at 5pm', takeaway menus for local restaurants — the detris of an office building. The windows had been covered with black tarp, the power was off, the air was musty and stale and full of dust.

"We could probably hire some minions to clean," I said, voice surprisingly steady, if dull. "I mean, genin." My heart wasn't in the joke, but that was okay. Standard, pro-forma.

Sasuke snorted. "Yeah, they can probably find the rest of the security systems too. With their faces." He sounded about as steady-and-detached as me.

I wished we'd brought someone else with us. But Sasuke had wanted to, or maybe needed to, do this alone. Just the two of us.

Or maybe he just didn't want to have these reactions in front of anyone else. I didn't either.

"Okay, LED seal?" I asked, slapping one to my forehead and lighting it up like we hadn't already prepared for it to be dark in here. We'd prepared for a lot of eventualities, treated the whole thing like a serious ANBU mission which was completely unconnected to us, as people.

"I guess we should start down here," I said as I edged forward into the room. Even the chakra muffling of my cat's foot technique didn't really stop the dust from puffing up over my shoe. "Or maybe find a broom."

Sasuke applied his own headlamp seal and looked critically around the room. "Maybe a wind jutsu?" he said, thoughtfully.

I looked around critically too. "A really minor one, maybe," I said, because really the only wind jutsu I was familiar with was Temari knocking over trees. Somehow I didn't think that was a good idea in a confined space. "Like… the one for dispersing mist and poison."

Which technically wasn't really even a wind jutsu, just an agitation of chakra that in turn blew stuff away.

Sasuke nodded seriously. "Right," he said and flared his chakra, swirling it around him in a circular motion, picking up all the dust and debris on the ground.

And I realised our critical mistake as everything lifted into the air. Calling it a 'storm' was a bit of an exaggeration, because it wasn't exactly violent but all the dust that had been on the floor was now in the air and moving.

We dashed for the door, coughing, and fled outside, leaving the door open hopefully. Some of the dust followed us out, swirling and sticking to us and falling out the open door to dance prettily in the mid morning light… But not enough of it.

I picked ruefully at my dust covered vest. Gross. It was everywhere, even in my eyelashes. "Well," I said and tried to brush some of it off. It only stuck to my hands instead.

Sasuke looked faintly sheepish. And also very covered in dust. His hair was almost grey. "Right," he agreed. "In hindsight 'it needs to go out the door' is… obvious." He looked at the door. "Maybe a push from the other side of the room?"

I coughed. "Firstly," I said and waved a hand at us. Though, it wasn't like we could just go home and get changed. Not without resetting the whole security system first, because leaving it open like this was bad security protocol.

Maybe if—

I gently gathered some chakra in my hand, letting it seep out onto my skin - just onto my skin and no further. The dust stirred and shifted. Then I used the same agitation technique to disperse it into the air, pulling my chakra quickly away from my skin.

The dust exploded into the air and I yanked my now clean hand out of the mess. My skin tingled a bit and felt strangely dry but that was acceptable. "That works," I said, satisfied, and proceeded to use it on the rest of myself. Hair and clothes were a little trickier than straight skin, but not so much as to make it unusable.

"Huh," Sasuke said, watching me. "Kind of like scent blocking, but you use it to get stuff off instead of to keep stuff in?"

I paused. "Yeah, actually, that's not a bad description. Hey, I wonder if that's how the Hyuuga always get away with wearing white? Insta-clean jutsu?"

Sasuke smirked. "I wouldn't put it past them," he said. "And I guess we're going to find out in a minute." He motioned at the still open door. Inside, the dust storm had not even remotely settled.

Maybe a wind jutsu to blow it out the door? But the door was a comparatively small target and air would have to get back into the room to replace what was being blown out, which could cause problems.

"Maybe if I seal it?" I suggested, somewhat doubtfully. "I could make a seal just smaller than the room size — empty out the middle. It wouldn't get everything but it would make things a little better."

Sasuke shrugged. "Sure. We already tried my bad idea. You're due one."

"Thanks a lot," I said wryly. But I made a chakra bubble around my mouth and ducked back into the room to measure out the size. The insta-clean blocking technique did, in fact, seem to work pretty well against dust storms.

Sealing away a cube of air wasn't something I'd done before but it also wasn't hard to modify a seal to do, either. The sudden vanishing of air caused a bit of a vacuum and for more air to rush in from outside and stir everything up again, but it did get rid of the vast majority of our problem.

"Right," Sasuke said, also with full chakra protection on, surveying the room critically. "Maybe we should start upstairs. Since we accidentally triggered one of the building defences down here."

I picked up my scroll and dusted off my hands for show. "That is absolutely what we did," I agreed solemnly.

And if both of us skipped the second stair, where Koyane Uchiha had bled out… well, that was easy to bury beneath the foolishness of what we'd just done.

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Upstairs — where we didn't create any more dust monsters with ill-conceived jutsu usage — was the office of the Chief of Police. Sasuke hesitated at the door, brushing his fingers over the plaque with his fathers name on it, but pushed open the door without a word.

The office actually had still functioning security traps from back when the police existed. We didn't have security keys for those, because they hadn't been filed with the village, but between my chakra sense and Sasuke's sharingan, we did pretty good at spotting and dismantling them.

I suspected that much of the security had relied upon, y'know, the presence of people. Even when we did trigger an alarm, there was no one here to hear it and respond.

It was a disheartening thought, even if it did make our job just that little bit easier.

By evening, we had mostly cleared the building; there had been at least one filing cabinet that had been supremely resistant to lockpicking and a safe that seemed like it would destroy its contents if we tried to compromise it. We would probably have to call in a professional if we wanted to know what was inside them, because my offered solution of 'cut them open with the lightsaber' was considered and rejected. We hadn't had time to really look at anything we were picking up, but we were searching by LED light and there was no reason that we had to do in depth analysis in the Police Station.

So we didn't; just sealed everything away in stacks of relevance and took them back to my house to work on. After dinner we took over the living room floor and spread them out, and started idly paging through it all.

Shikamaru was out on a mission — something easy with Ino and Chouji, which he'd seemed pretty eager to go on — but Dad had finally returned from the border, to my delight. He and Mum spoke quietly (and Kino had paroxysms of joy every time he caught sight of him) but Dad seemed more exhausted than I'd ever seen him, and I … very much didn't ask anything about how it was out there.

He retired early with an admonishment to Sasuke and I to get some sleep that we agreed to and then proceeded to ignore. It wasn't like this was particularly urgent stuff, and it certainly didn't need us to pull an all nighter to go over it right this instant. It had waited five years, and we were still four months off of our absolute minimum deadline — and yet, when ten o'clock rolled around I put the kettle on for another pot of tea without even asking.

Sasuke gave no indication of leaving, or of intending to go to sleep.

It was going to be a long night, either way, and probably one better spent awake.

"There's a bunch of unsolved cases," Sasuke said, licking his thumb and flicking through a whole stack of files. "They look like they just got… forgotten about. Do you think we should… look into those?" he asked, uncertainly.

I blinked. "Um. We could, I guess," I said, even though I had no idea how we would actually go about investigating cold cases like that. "Couldn't hurt."

But the thought of all those case files sitting there just gathering dust because the officers who had been working on them, who had maybe known the answer to their riddles, had died and taken all that knowledge with them made something in my ribcage twist and ache.

So much lost. So many things left unfinished.

I cleared my throat, then realised I didn't actually have anything to say when Sasuke looked up and raised an eyebrow questioningly. "Just… thinking," I said, lamely, ducking my head back down and pulling another sheath of paper closer. I had a notepad and drummed my pen against it like I was intending to make notes.

Eventually the bureaucratic minutia, divorced of tragedy and reduced to black ink on white paper, made the night hours creep by. Before dawn, just before anyone upstairs started to stir, I yawned and stretched, moving to the kitchen to start making breakfast.

Sasuke blinked, like coming out of a daze or a dream, his own mechanically steady notetaking grinding to a halt. "Need a hand?" he rasped.

"Sure," I said, with a shrug, dumping rice into the rice cooker. "We'll go feed the deer in a second."

Morning chores were quick and easy with two people doing them, and the cold crisp air outside was refreshing after an all nighter staring at paperwork. We stopped in the backyard and did a quick morning warm up, though the lights inside started coming on before we turned it into sparring.

"Morning, kids," Mum said, Kino held against her shoulder. "Are you still working in the living room?"

She had to have seen the paper all spread out, so that was probably more of a hint than a real question.

"Uh, yeah," I said, ducking into the kitchen to flick the kettle on. I got Mum's tea leaves down and the jar of strong coffee that Dad preferred on hard mornings. I suspected he would want it.

"Our Mother-Baby Group is coming round this morning," Mum said, which probably explained why she wanted it all cleaned up and tidy. "Though if it's going to be a nice day we might take the meeting outside."

"We'll clean it up," Sasuke promised. "We're close to done, anyway."

For a given value of 'done' meaning 'I've had enough' rather than 'this task is accomplished', anyway. I wanted to yawn just thinking of continuing, so it was definitely time to take a break on it. Which meant it was no real hardship to seal it all away and have the place tidy again.

Dad had to go to the Tower, because the work of the Jounin Commander waited for nobody, not even those who had just returned from the front. Sasuke left to go home and change (he really should just have started keeping stuff here, or in a storage scroll like I did, honestly) and I walked to the tower with Dad because I could. We stopped and got nikuman buns from Hironobu's bakery on the way.

"Don't tell your mother," Dad said, winking, just like he had every time we'd done this when I was a kid.

I grinned back. "She'd tell us to eat more breakfast."

I swung by Intel while I was there to pick up anything for me — nothing interesting — and then headed to the Team 7 training grounds to do a proper morning workout.

Sasuke was already there.

"What took you so long?" he asked.

"I didn't realise I had an appointment," I said dryly, because we hadn't said anything about meeting here. Probably because it had been obvious.

Sasuke scoffed, not even deigning to answer that.

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After training (and cleaning up after training) we went home again because we'd done good work on the police stuff and were motivated to keep going. It was a good idea until the threatened Mother-Baby Group arrived. I hadn't realised how much of a big deal it was going to be until a dozen women started arriving in dribs and drabs — laden with babies and strollers and carry bags.

The two of us retreated to the porch where the shogi table was.

"So I think we're going to have one major problem," I said thoughtfully, tapping the notes I'd made.

Sasuke nodded. "Manpower," he agreed.

I paused. "I was going to say 'money'," I said. "But I see your point. Two major problems then."

"What's the money problem?" Sasuke asked.

"I was suspicious when I couldn't find much in the way of budget filed with the Tower," I said. "And the files from the station only confirmed it. The Police were an Uchiha Clan subsidiary, the same way Nara RnD is part of the Nara Clan. Which means that largely? They were funded by the Uchiha Clan." I tapped the paper again. "I mean, there was some income in the form of fines and other fees but not enough and, frankly, funding a police force through fines isn't really a very good solution. You end up having to make a certain quota of fines in order to keep the police running which … crime doesn't exactly happen on a schedule. And therefore you might end up handing out fines for things that don't, strictly speaking, meet the criteria."

Konoha really didn't need to add 'police abuse of power' to its list of concerns.

"Ah," Sasuke said, in understanding. "So… we need the village to fund it."

"Yup," I said, popping the 'p'. "Which they're probably not going to like very much, but to be honest, at this point claiming it's a clan subsidiary is silly. It shouldn't have been in the first place, really. You can't claim that it only served the Uchiha Clan — RnD is different because we sell everything we make, so it does only serve the Nara Clan, even though the things it makes end up all over the village. Same with the Aburame or the Akimichi or the Inuzuka."

Sasuke nodded. "That's kind of the point with manpower too," he said. "All the police were Uchiha."

And now there are no Uchiha, I finished silently.

We sat in silence for a bit, as Mum hustled the other women and kids outside with picnic blankets to sit on the grass. "Can you grab the food from inside, dear?" she asked, sounding faintly harried, as she stepped past us.

I guessed she'd decided to have the meeting outside afterall. It was probably a good idea given how… noisy inside was getting.

"Sure," Sasuke said, rising to help. I twisted our notes into hammerspace because it wasn't exactly classified, but it wasn't not either, and I didn't feel comfortable leaving them lying around when there were so many people here.

I vaguely knew some of the women Mum was meeting with — they'd been around before for playdates with Kino and stuff, and she'd gone to other meetings — though they were mostly younger than her, first children or kids with smaller age gaps than our family. Some of them were kunoichi, though none that I knew personally — they just moved, reacted, had chakra smoothened and sharpened like kunoichi. Some of them were civilians but married into ninja families; I assumed there were different groups for totally civilian parents.

The idea started to percolate in the back of my brain, while I stepped carefully around the bags and babies filling the room and carefully loaded up some plates to take outside. Sasuke balanced the tray with the teapot and cups on it on my head, to the startled laughter of one of the more civilian-feeling ladies.

I winked at her and made very sure it was stuck with chakra before I moved.

Outside, I dropped my writing desk out of hammerspace to use as a low table to set the food on instead of just putting it on the ground, then absolutely retreated back to a quiet corner out of the way. And by 'corner out of the way' I meant, 'branch in a tree not easily seen from the house'.

Discretion was the better part of valour, as the saying went.

"So?" Sasuke asked, once he was done also helping — and possibly after having been coerced into holding babies while everyone moved from the house to outside. Which I'm sure he hated to the very bottom of his soul.

"So?" I echoed, raising an eyebrow back.

"Manpower," he prompted, continuing our earlier conversation. "We're looking at, what? A hundred, a hundred and fifty people, preferably trained shinobi — without draining resources from War Operations or even really from General Forces." He looked frustrated. "There aren't that many unemployed shinobi just… hanging around in Konoha."

"You think?" I asked. Not sarcastically, but because the idea had already turned itself over in my head. I looked past him, back at the group of women with my mother.

Some of them were kunoichi. Most of them — if Mum was any indication — would never return to active duty.

Sasuke tilted his head. "Okay," he said slowly. "But…"

But there was a reason they would likely never return to active duty.

I nodded. "Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be easy. But, like, the Police Force is Konoha based, doesn't leave on long missions, and has regularly scheduled shift work, right? Add in a few perks like a daycare, after academy training for older kids, or half shifts and we might be able to lure in enough of them. Maybe even… open up some of the old district as housing to offer as an additional incentive? That would appeal to non-clan shinobi, I think."

I glanced carefully at Sasuke to see how he took that suggestion, but he looked more thoughtful than offended.

"Regardless of who we get there's going to be a lot of retraining," I said, getting into my stride. "Crowd control and deescalation are different tactics to pretty much anything we do in the field — a think there should be a standard: barrier seals, maybe a few paralysing genjutsu, maybe a few other containment practices. You don't have to be very high rank to manage those. And while it'd be good to have some higher level ninja on hand, there's also the option of just sending a runner to the Jounin Relief Station for backup if a confrontation contains actual jounin."

"So it doesn't matter if we recruit people who've been out of the field for a while," Sasuke said.

"Right," I agreed. "As long as they're willing to meet whatever minimum standard we set…" I swung my legs off the sides of the tree branch, mind spiralling in a hundred different directions. "Besides, how many ninja would think twice if they know the police are going to show up and it'll be their mother."

That made him smirk. "We'll, it'd work on you and your brother," he said.

"Damn right it would," I agreed. I hummed thoughtfully. "The after school training might actually be really useful."

I'd thrown it out under the idea of 'childcare' but the more I thought about it, the better it seemed, especially if we were shifting our focus to non-clan shinobi — the ones without the extra at-home training that gave kids the edge at the Academy. Not just as a selling point for the parents, kids with more experience in what the police force did would be more likely to join it themselves when they graduated.

"I don't think we could employ academy students," Sasuke said doubtfully.

I waved a hand. "That's not what I meant. Not like that." More like… a Boy Scouts, JROTC type thing. Not that Sasuke would know what that meant. "Junior Police Training? Though actually, now that you mention it…" I narrowed my eyes thoughtfully, staring blankly to the distance.

"I really don't think we could employ academy students," Sasuke repeated.

"Not those ones," I said, trusting him to keep up. "But what if we added another year onto the Academy program? Called it… internships or something. Do a three month rotation in, say… the police, the hospital, the tower and village guard duty? While still getting class time with a teacher or some kind of individual training program? Technically they'd have graduated and be genin, or deferred genin or something… it'd free up higher ranked shinobi, extend the graduating age, provide them with safety to get better training, introduce them to different aspects of the village…"

Sasuke was nodding along with me, looking amused. "I think Hokage-sama told us to fix the police, not the Academy."

I shrugged a shoulder, smiling brightly. "Always going above and beyond, that's us."

I really didn't think Tsunade would protest. Particularly not if it kept us occupied for her allotted time frame.