Chapter 51: What Hands Are For.

The first thing a bad situation needed wasn't strength. It was someone to look at.

Mikoto had learned that in the war. Panicked people didn't need orders so much as they needed a point to organize around, proof that someone had arrived who knew what to do. So when Team Mikoto came down off the ridge into Hanawa's failing light, she walked into the middle of the village, onto the well platform where everyone could see her, and raised her voice.

"Hanawa! Konoha has arrived!"

Every head in the village turned. Shovels stopped. A woman with mud to her shoulders froze halfway out of a dig pit.

"My name is Mikoto Uchiha. I'm a jonin of the Hidden Leaf and a medical ninja, and this is my team." She let her voice carry, calm and orderly. "You've held this village together for two days on your own. That's over. You're not alone anymore. Here is what happens now: anyone injured comes to the square. Anyone who knows where a missing person might be buried talks to my students. Everyone who has been digging since dawn eats something and sits down, because you will be no good to your neighbors dead on your feet. We will take it from here tonight."

For a moment nobody moved. Then an old woman near the well, small as a sparrow with a voice like a hinge of iron, clapped her hands twice.

"You heard the shinobi!" she barked. "Injured to the square! Fumi, get the soup back on! MOVE!"

The village moved. And Mikoto brought her hands together in the tiger seal.

"Water Clone Jutsu."

A dozen Mikotos formed from the moisture in the air around her. The village gasped as one. The clones spread across the square without needing to be told: a Mikoto walking beside every knot of frightened villagers, pointing them to the square, a Mikoto at every dig site already rolling up her sleeves, a Mikoto helping an old man carry a bucket he'd been struggling with for two days. A tenth of her strength each, but a tenth of her was still worth more than most, and there were a dozen of them.

The real work went to the real ones.

"Tsume. Nose up, use your nose to find as many people as you can before digging them out. Nawaki, attempt to sense the chakra of anyone buried. Yoshino, take Kuromaru and work the east edge, he marks, you two dig. Go."

They went straight onto a hundred meters of settled mudflow in the dark, without a flicker of hesitation. 

The wounded were already gathering in the square. Two days of amateur rescue had a cost: crushed fingers, wrenched backs, a leg broken when a wall shifted, feet sliced by hidden debris, the deep purple bruising of people who'd been dug out on day one and hadn't stopped hauling since. Two dozen of them, easily, in the light of hastily gathered lanterns.

A year ago, she would have gone bed to bed. It would have taken half the night.

Mikoto stood in the middle of them, wove signs, and pressed both palms to the air.

"Mystical Healing Field."

Green light washed out from her hands like a slow tide, pooling over the whole square, settling onto every hurt body in it at once. Two dozen small wounds began to close together. Cracked fingers knit. Swollen backs eased. The broken leg she'd handle by hand in a moment; the field's work was wide and shallow, not deep. But around her, a village that had been grinding through pain for two days felt it lift all at once, and the sound of relief and sobs rose from the square.

"Ninjas…" the iron-voiced old woman said faintly, "simply beyond comprehension..."

"It's nothing much." Mikoto smiled to put her at ease. "Who's injured worse? Point me to them."

The slide stank of everything at once, and that was the problem.

Mud, pine sap, split wood, spilled cooking oil, a dead chicken somewhere, smoke from the cook fires, forty sweating villagers, and under all of it, faint as a whisper in a festival crowd, the smells she was actually hunting. Tsume crouched on a broken roof beam, closed her eyes, and fed chakra to her nose instinctively.

The world lit up.

That was the only way she could describe it. Chakra to the nose and the whole valley became a map: every scent a thread, every thread a direction and a distance and an age. The dead chicken, eighty meters, two days old, ignore. Cooking oil, ignore. And there, and there, and there, human, under the mud, some fading-

Her eyes snapped open.

"HERE!" she shouted, lengthening her claws.

She started digging immediately, chakra strengthening her claws so they tore through the packed mud like it was loose sand. She followed the thread of living scent down through the dark press of it, flinging earth back between her legs, a meter, then more, until her claws scraped wood. A beam, lying crossways over the smell. Too heavy to shift from down in the hole.

"Sensei! I need a lift!"

One of the water clones was already there. It dropped into the hole beside her, set its shoulder under the beam, and pushed it up and aside with a groan of wet timber. Tsume dove into the gap before it finished moving, and her fingers found cloth, and the cloth moved.

"GOT YOU!" She screamed. 

It was a man, mud-caked, one arm bent painfully, gulping air in whoops as she and the clone hauled him free. A woman across the slide started shrieking his name. Another of the sensei's copies was already kneeling beside him, hands glowing green.

Tsume stood on the lip of the hole, filthy to the eyebrows, heart going like a drum, and grinned at the dark. "I’m on to the next one, sensei!" She took off on all fours.

She worked the slide for six hours. She found four more alive that night. She also found the ones who hadn't made it, and she marked those spots too, quietly, and the clones dug those out just as carefully as the living ones, and the village women washed the mud from still faces by lantern light and wept.

Nobody had told her a C-rank would be like this...

She kept her nose working. There were more people that needed saving.

Kuromaru was, Yoshino decided somewhere past midnight, the only teammate she had who actually followed orders. Nawaki didn’t count. He was usually giving her orders just because he was a genin longer.

The huge puppy put his nose along the folded wall of a collapsed house and barked hard at the corner. She didn't just pull at boards recklessly to reach whoever was under there. Even she knew how a collapsed house held its weight. If she pulled the wrong board, the person underneath could get crushed.

It didn't take long. She worked the boards free in the right order, one at a time, and pulled an old man out of the building alive, dusty and blinking and complaining about his hip.

Yoshino wiped the sweat from her forehead and allowed herself four seconds of feeling before standing up and dusting off.

"Let's get the next one, boy."

By the second day, she had acquired a following.

Children. Village children, the ones too young to dig, who had discovered that the small scary Leaf girl with the loud voice was the single most interesting thing in Hanawa. They trailed her at a distance of three meters like a school of fish. They mocked her bossy voice, badly, with enormous joy followed by shrieking giggles. One of them, a gap-toothed girl of about six named Momo, kept solemnly handing her things she had not asked for. A pebble. A snail. Half a rice cracker, pre-bitten.

"I don't want that."

"It's for you."

"It has a bite out of it."

"I had to make sure it tasted good first."

“Ew…” Yoshino nearly tossed it in disgust. Nearly.

With all those little eyes staring at her, against her better judgment, she ate the cracker. And the fish-school of children cheered like she'd performed a jutsu, and before the smile reached her face, she had to turn away and snap "Kuromaru, next!"

They didn't respect her when she told them to go away while she was busy. They adored her, which was worse, and involved many more weird, annoying gifts.

"Your dog likes me best." Momo informed her on the second afternoon, petting Kuromaru while he wagged happily at the attention.

"He's not my dog. He's my teammate's dog."

"Then you can like me best."

"I’ll like you more after I’m done working. Now stop bothering me. We can be f… friends later."

"Okay, bye Bossy Ninja Girl!" Momo waved while leaving with the others.

Nawaki worked the slide on his knees, one patch of mud at a time.

Sensing wasn't much of a gift for him. A faint knack, Mikoto had called it the first time she noticed, maybe a trickle of whatever had made his great-uncle Tobirama so terrifying, and she'd drilled it anyway: sit still, sink your own chakra down until it's quiet, and listen for anyone else's. He couldn't do it standing up. He couldn't do it from more than a few meters away. He had to have his hands on the ground, and he had to be still. At first it had been like trying to hear a whisper in a storm. But now, on his knees in the cold mud with both palms flat on the slide and his eyes closed, he could feel them. Faint flickers under the earth, like candles burning low behind thick paper.

Living people had chakra. That was the cruel, useful thing about it. The dead had none at all. Where Tsume's nose found everyone, his hands found only the ones who could still be saved.

"Here," he said quietly to the nearest clone, and pointed, and when the clone hesitated at the tilted wall of a half-buried storehouse, he got up and put his own back under it and held the whole thing off the ground while the clone crawled underneath and came out with a teenage girl, grey with cold and coughing mud, but breathing.

He found three that night. Each one, he held the weight while someone else did the pulling, and each time he set the wall back down afterward a little more gently than he had to.

The children were scared of him for the first day, and Nawaki understood completely.

He knew what they saw. A big kid with a real sword and a face that looked melted on one side. He’d stared at it in the mirror enough times himself. He couldn’t blame them for staring too. One little boy had burst into tears when Nawaki walked toward the soup line, and Nawaki had simply changed course, no offense taken, and gone the long way around.

You couldn't argue anyone out of being afraid.

So he worked. He put his back under beams and stood up with houses' worth of weight. He carried a grandmother across the mudflow so gently she patted his cheek at the far end. He hauled water and reset support posts and lifted a cart out of a ditch with the farmer still gaping at him, and when the littlest kids peeked at him from behind the well he pretended, elaborately, not to see them, which somehow made small children decide you were safe.

It took two days before they finally had enough of staring and screaming.

He was sitting by the cook fire with a bowl when the fish-school that usually orbited Yoshino re-formed around him instead, close, closer, until Momo, ambassador by virtue of having no fear whatsoever, planted herself directly in front of him and pointed at his neck.

"What happened to your face?"

"Momo!" a village aunt hissed, scandalized.

"It's okay." Nawaki smiled at the lady and set down his bowl. It was okay, mostly. It had taken months to become okay, but the kids didn't need to know that part. They were looking at him with the ruthless honest curiosity of small children, and he'd learned there was exactly one right way to answer it: straight.

“I did something dumb on a mission. Really dumb, super dumb, crazy dumb. And because I didn’t listen to somebody who knew better than me, this happened.” He pointed at his face.

The children were absolutely silent. Momo's eyes were enormous.

"But I had the best medical ninja in the whole world with me." He smiled, easy. "My sensei. The one in the square with the creepy eyes. Don’t tell her I said that though.” He whispered. “She put me back together. It took a long time, and it left these, and you know what? I look at them every morning, and mostly what I think is: I'm still here. I get to eat breakfast. I get to do this." He gestured around, at the fire, the village, the mudflow they'd spent two days beating. "Scars just mean something tried to stop you and didn't finish the job."

Silence. Then:

"Can I touch it?" Momo asked.

"Momo!!"

"Sure," Nawaki said, and bent down, and seven village children touched the scars on his jaw with careful fingers, one by one, like touching something they'd thought was scary and found wasn't. And after that he could not get rid of them for the rest of the mission. They fought over who got to share their food with him as thanks. Two of them tried to lift the end of a beam "to help." The little boy who'd cried at the sight of him fell asleep against his arm at the fire, and Nawaki sat very still for an hour so as not to wake him, and across the fire his sensei looked at him with a smile. He blushed and quickly looked away, embarrassed.

Sae's son had been rescued on the first night, before Konoha even arrived. A boy of six named Daigo, dug out of the edge of the slide by his neighbors with nothing worse than scrapes. His mother had pushed him toward high ground when the hill came down, and the hill had taken her instead, and for four days the boy had been a small quiet ghost at the edge of every dig site, asking everyone who passed if they had found her yet.

By the third morning of the rescue, most of the village had stopped meeting his eyes. Four days under a slide. Everyone knew what that meant. Nobody would say it near the boy.

Tsume smelled something at mid-morning, at the deep end of the slide where the mud had piled thickest, and her head came up.

"Alive! I think there's someone still alive here. It's hard to tell for sure…" she shouted.

Nawaki was there in seconds. He dropped to his knees beside her and pressed both palms flat to the mud, and closed his eyes.

"Faint," he said finally. "Really faint. But it's there."

What followed was the most careful hour of the mission. The scent came from under a collapsed house under four meters of settled flow, and four meters of wet earth does not move quickly no matter who is lifting. Nawaki cleared the overburden in stages, beam by beam, while Yoshino crawled through the wreckage around the edges, checking for anything that might shift, and Mikoto knelt at the gap they opened and reached down into the dark with one glowing hand.

Contact range was for ordinary medical-nin.

The green light left her palm and traveled, a narrow beam of it, down through the gap, through the crawl space of the ruined house, to settle on the woman curled in an air pocket beneath her own kitchen table, and begin, from four meters away, to keep her heart beating. Dehydration, crush injury to both legs, a body four days deep into giving up: she held all of it together while her team took the earth apart above.

When Nawaki finally lifted the kitchen table's slab of roof away and the morning light fell into the hole, Sae turned her face from it and whispered, cracked and barely audible, an apology. For the trouble. For all this fuss.

They brought her up into the light, and Mikoto poured healing into the ruined legs, deep-tissue work, and someone had already run for the boy.

Daigo did not cry out. He came through the crowd at a dead sprint and then stopped, one pace away, suddenly terrified to touch her, terrified she wasn't real, this small polite boy who had spent four days asking everyone about his mom. And Sae opened her eyes and said his name, and then he cried his lungs out.

Yoshino smiled at the good work. Tsume was trying not to cry, and failing terribly. Nawaki stood with his hand on Kuromaru's head and smiled in relief, and Mikoto worked on Sae's legs while a mother and son cried into each other.

They saved eleven people from under that hillside across three days.

They also carried out five who had been beyond anyone's saving since the first night, and Mikoto stood with the village at the burial ground on the third evening while the iron-voiced old woman, the headwoman, whose name was Kane, spoke the dead into the hill's keeping: an elderly couple who'd been asleep when it came, a young man who'd gone back in for his neighbor, a farmer named Jun whose brother had dug for him for three days straight and had to be led away from the grave by both arms.

"Konoha sent us the help we needed," Kane said to her afterward, gruff, her sparrow-small hand gripping Mikoto's forearm with surprising iron. "We asked for help, and they sent us more than we ever expected. I'll make sure your Hokage hears about this."

"Thank you, Grandma." Mikoto bowed to her.

"I can't repay you." Kane had a small smile on her face as she rubbed Mikoto's head.

"I wouldn't accept it, anyway." Mikoto cheekily smiled.

Kane nodded once, satisfied, and stumped away to bully the soup line.

…

There was one more thing to do.

On the last evening, with the rain clouds building again in the west exactly as promised, Mikoto walked alone up the raw brown scar of the hillside, and the whole village gathered below to watch.

The slope was a wound waiting to reopen. The next hard storm could send the rest of it down onto what remained of Hanawa. A village of farmers could no more fix that than they could move the moon. It would hang over them every wet season for the rest of their lives.

Unless.

Mikoto stood at the head of the scar and began weaving handsigns. The amount of chakra needed for this would have emptied most jonin three times over.

She clapped her hands into the final seal and drove both palms into the earth.

"Earth Style: Living Terrace."

The hillside groaned.

Below her, the whole slope moved, reshaping, mud and rock flowing like slow water under her will. The raw scar folded itself into wide, stepped terraces, each one packed dense as fired brick. Ribs of bedrock rose out of the deep ground and knitted through the slope like the bones of a hand, anchoring soil to stone. Channels formed along each terrace to carry rainwater aside and down in stone-lined runs instead of letting it soak and slide. The loose, hanging mass at the crown of the hill compacted with a sound like a giant settling into a chair, and went still.

When she opened her eyes, the dusk light showed a hillside that looked as if it had been terraced by a hundred masons across a hundred years: stepped, drained, rooted to the bones of the earth. Ready for planting, if they wanted it. Safe to sleep beneath, either way.

The village below cheered.

Mikoto stood at the top of the slope she'd remade, happy to help.

Her genin were staring up at her with their mouths open. That was the lesson she'd wanted them to see.

Later, at the fire, Tsume demanded to know why sensei had never mentioned she could do that.

"You've spent years learning that your chakra can break things," Mikoto said. "Enemies. Obstacles. Whatever stands in front of you. I want you to remember this instead. Chakra and jutsu can be used for more than violence and fighting." She looked around the fire at the three of them, mud-stained, rope-burned, adored by an entire village. "Killing is the smallest and usually easiest thing shinobi arts can do. This week, you did something bigger. How does it feel?"

Silence, while three children thought about it.

"It felt good…" Yoshino said quietly.

"It felt a lot better than I thought. All those people were complimenting me and being nice to me and stuff. Not even my clan members treat me like that! They treat me like a little kid!” She grumbled. “But helping people can be pretty nice too." Tsume said, with Kuromaru barking in agreement on top of her head.

Nawaki simply smiled.

…

He slipped away from the fire after the others had settled, down to the stream at the edge of the village where the water ran clear again for the first time in days. He sat on a rock and watched it go by.

Mikoto found him there a few minutes later and sat down beside him without a word.

"You looked happy today," she said eventually. "With the kids."

"I was." He picked up a pebble and turned it over. "Tsume and Yoshino keep saying I'm weird for liking D-ranks. Maybe I am. But this is the kind of thing I wanted to do when I said I wanted to be Hokage. Well, not at first. Before the war, and before all of this…” He pointed at his scars. “I did want the glory, the fame, everyone cheering and praising my name. But now, not so much…" He tossed the pebble into the stream. "Is that stupid?"

"No." Mikoto watched the ripples spread. "It's the best reason I've ever heard. A lot of people want to be Hokage because they want to be the strongest or coolest or most popular. You want to be Hokage because you want people to be able to sleep under a hill without being afraid of it." She paused. "You'll be a great one, Nawaki. I really believe that."

He didn't say anything for a while. When he did, his voice wobbled in a way he couldn't quite hide.

"I'll keep working hard. I'll make you proud, Sensei."

Mikoto shook her head.

"Don't follow your dream to make me proud. Don't worry about living up to my expectations." She bumped his shoulder gently with hers. "Follow it because it's yours. Focus on Nawaki Senju's dream, the one he had from the beginning. That's the only thing I want from you."

He looked away from those glowing red eyes, out at the dark water, and he cried.

She stayed beside him until he was done.

They'd start for home in the morning.