Angels taking flight

Chapter 1

A little more than 2 years passed, and we'd rebuild quite a bit of the village; there was always more to do, but the village, Mochizuki as it was called, had started to look a lot better. A lot more alive.

Yuuto had turned 11 last month, while I, myself, had turned 16 around 7 months ago; Whitey had arranged celebratory dinners for each birthday, everyone's, not just ours (he'd even arranged it for his own birthday a few a few days ago, where he'd turned 19), and it'd become a nice tradition, where we'd join up and eat in the main dining room, the large one where several hundred people could sit, before retreating to the drawing room where we'd be playing games or hear stories by the fireplace. I didn't really like celebrating my birthday, but having everyone happy and safe, playing games and laughing; well, that was something I could appreciate.

They'd all come to view the village as their home, something that made me strangely happy; they were all safe and happy. Sure, some of them had started to grow bored, but we were slowly taking care of that.

The Hokage had mostly been studying in the library, trying to help Naruto with his fuinjutsu, trying to convince me to let him organize my parents' office, and gotten to know people in the different villages. He and Zabuza, the cow skin man, had sat up an information collecting system, and the Hokage and I had started to slowly establish our village as a hidden village; we only took on smaller missions in or near the Land of the Moon, just so that we could send back up and such as quickly as possible, but we were slowly getting more and more well known. The Hokage and I were the ones to arrange it; I put a lot of effort into not leaving behind any trace of us and keeping our identities as secret as possible, to keep everyone safe; Hinata was the only one using her actual name as she wanted her father to know, but she was sensible enough not to let anyone see her face and to erase all other trace of her.

I'd helped the Hokage get a message to his son in Konoha and the plan was to somehow, someday, move his whole family, and maybe some others, to our village; a plan that was slowly being chiseled in stone as we heard more news about how bad things were getting in Konoha; leaving when we did had been one of our best decisions.

The Hokage put a lot of effort into keeping him being alive secret for anyone outside our group and his own family by, amongst others, making us call him grandpa, which had been Naruto's idea, and I wasn't too good at it as it felt slightly disrespectful to me, he seemed to like it though and he was very insistent, always sighing at me when I called him Hokage and he really hadn't liked it when I'd tried calling him by his name with a tacked on Sama; he was especially firm about keeping himself a secret after the news about the happenings in Konoha reached us, the place really was falling apart, rotting away from the inside...

Yuuto had gotten himself a couple of teachers, maybe I'd had a slight hand in that, and he was learning how to be a shinobi in his own might, I'd spoken to him about our parents' titles, and taken him to see our parents grave-statues but hadn't voiced it to any of the others, and he'd decided that he wanted to be my body guard, when I took back the throne, which I really hadn't even considered doing. It made him actually try at practice though, so eventually I stopped shooting his idea down.

He'd grown a lot and had become a lot more independent, which was bittersweet, though I really was proud of him; they'd all grown up quite a bit these past two years and matured a lot, I was rather proud of all them to be honest.

Haku, the masked boy, slowly turning a man, and Sasuke, the brood, who really didn't brood all that much anymore, were co-senseis for Yuuto, sometimes Zabuza joined them, and they easily worked together to teach him. They'd grown to be great friends, though Sasuke's best friend was Naruto, the two of them had a friendly rivalry going that always ended in laughter.