Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

However: Any characters not appearing in published works are mine.

Summary: Team Gai was not the only group of genin to graduate the year before Team Seven. Why, then, is there only one team left by time of the Konoha Chuunin Exam? An extensive exploration of who, why, and what happened to the second genin team.

Note: "Expiry" is a working title. Didn't have any great flashes of genius on what to name it.

Expiry

Taivasalla

Chapter One: Allowances for the Weak

It was as if a mirror had been placed in the fabric of time. Ten minutes ago, the students had been pale and quivering, edgy with nerves. Now the exams were done, and the students stampeded to the gate. Shouts and laughs carried on the afternoon breeze floated into the teachers' room, where the smiles and quiet greetings of the morning were gone, replaced with grim expressions and a dour atmosphere.

Stacks of papers littered the room, taunting the teachers with their perfect whiteness. Iruka finally broke the oppressive silence. "We better get started."

Six rounds of coffee later, the overhead lights had been turned on and the group of chuunin was tiring. "Anyone done yet?" someone asked.

The general consensus was 'no'. Midterms took an inordinately long time to grade, as policy required each test, including demonstrative reports, to be read by two teachers. Nearly everyone had switched by now, but the second set wasn't complete. "Want to go get dinner?" the chuunin suggested.

That merited a firm 'yes'. With a loud scraping of chairs and several groans about aching backs, the fifteen teachers headed for the door. The restaurant was used to the group, because they showed up every year at this time, and at finals and graduation exams, as well as after the first day of school, and quite often in some combination between any of those when the pre-ninja brats got too bad.

The restaurant wasn't too crowded; with soft lighting and the quiet murmur of other conversations in the background, it made for a soothing respite. They pushed an extra table up against a booth table, and arranged themselves in various chairs. Iruka leaned back in the booth, squeezing over to make room for the other chuunin interested in squishy seats. Only the teacher for this year's graduating class didn't make a bid for the soft benches. He stood unevenly at the edge of the group, before he pulled out a corner chair and lowered himself carefully down.

When they were all seated, and had given their orders to the waitress (and gotten the necessary comments about relative prettiness out of the way), one of the chuunin leaned over the table. "Heiji, what's with your class?"

The teacher in the corner seat looked up, retrieving his distracted mind from somewhere not the restaurant. "What?"

"You did a kawarimi practical, right?" The chuunin, Kaito, propped his arms on the table and regarded his colleague with undisguised curiosity. He was one of the more talkative and sociable of the teachers. "And nearly eighty percent of the class got failing grades."

Now the whole table was listening in. "Eighty?" somebody repeated incredulously.

Heiji shrugged. "They did it badly. We're going to do some more practice next week," he reassured the other teacher.

From down the table, the third-year's teacher spoke up. "Eighty's a large percentage, Heiji. How hard were you grading?"

The young teacher turned to look down the table, seeking out faces above the white tablecloth. "If they did it right, they passed." How else would he grade them?

Down the table, eyes rolled. From the far end, the teacher of the year just behind his, Umino Iruka, sighed. He had been appointed as Heiji's advisor. More like caretaker, he thought, and wondered again why the Hokage had himself recommended the man for a teaching job. "Heiji, you can't expect them to get it perfect," he said patiently. "They're still students."

"They're graduating this year, and I can still follow the switches just by looking." Heiji glanced around at the varying expressions of exasperation and smothered laughter at the table. "If they can't do it well, they'll get killed."

The fifth-year teacher next to Iruka patted him on the shoulder as Iruka shook his head in despair. "Leave them something to learn once they become genin, Heiji. It's not like they're going out to war, or something."

That semi-glazed look returned to the new teacher's eyes. He didn't answer. The chuunin who had first brought up Heiji's exams reached out and waved a hand in front of the ninja's eyes. "Hey. I'm cross-grading your papers, and I say you can't fail your whole class. If they can do kawarimi, they pass. Maybe with low grades, but they pass. You and me need to go over your demonstrative write-ups and figure out realistic grades after dinner."

Heiji shook himself back into reality. "You're rewarding mediocrity," he said sharply. "Passing them says that it is acceptable to do things badly."

"They're just kids," someone reminded him. "Don't we have this conversation with you every month or so? Wake up, Heiji. This is the Academy, not ANBU or something."

Heiji stood quickly. The food hadn't yet come, but he fumbled some cash from his pocket to pay for the bowl of noodles he had ordered. "I'll meet you back at the school. I forgot to do something." The fourteen other teachers watched in disbelief as he limped out of the restaurant.

Outside in the clear night air, Heiji turned his face to the sky. Grey clouds scudded across the sky, backlit by the gibbous moon. It was chilly, as midwinter usually was, even without snow coating the ground. He shoved his hands into his pockets, stubbornly holding them in the warm fabric even as instincts screamed that it made him vulnerable. Screw instincts. He was an Academy teacher now. Instincts were making him do his job badly.

How the other teachers could stand to let their students continue to perform so far below standard was beyond him. Every time he saw one of the children botch a simple jutsu like the kawarimi he flinched. They were getting better, sure, but they moved so slowly, so imprecisely. Heiji could list dozens of scenarios when such carelessness could get them killed.

Even after numerous lectures from Iruka and the other teachers and even field trips to view genin missions, Heiji was still preparing his students for what he believed they would experience after graduation. It was just too unbelievable to him that genin would only retrieve lost cats and weed gardens. Ducking his head against a sudden whirl of wind-blown grit, he supposed that was what happened when one was a jounin among chuunin. Most of his coworkers were older than he, but thirteen years ago he'd already had a higher rank than most of them. And they'd had relatively peaceful lives since.

Heiji blew out a hard rush of air into the wind, trying futilely to dent the currents. The night laughed in his face, running drifts of air through his short hair, twisting the strands into strange shapes. It would take the rest of the teachers a while to finish dinner; he had time to walk around.

Moving slowly through the darkness, he wandered towards the Hokage tower, but turned aside before he reached the tall red building. The streets were beginning to empty at this hour of night, but it wasn't late enough for the loneliness of true isolation, especially since a shinobi village never entirely slept. A few ninja still loped across the roofs; civilians stooped their heads into the wind as they hurried home in the spotlights of streetlamps. Heiji watched them with part of his attention, keeping tabs on whoever got close. But mostly he tried to decipher how to be a normal teacher. The Hokage had entrusted him with this job; after what Sarutobi had done for him, wanted or not, he owed it to the Sandaime to do it well.

An hour later, and still confused, he made his way back to the Academy and picked up his red pen again. A few minutes later, he heard the rest of his colleagues enter, feet tramping carelessly down the hall and voices raised in loud conversation. Kaito dropped a Styrofoam container in front of his nose when they all began to take their seats again. "Eat, Heiji." It was his noodles from the restaurant.

"Thanks." He offered Kaito a smile, then pushed the box to the side, finishing checking down the row of multiple-choice responses.

Kaito pushed the food back at him. "I told you to eat," he ordered, pulling a chair up beside him, then going back for the demonstrative reports from Heiji's kawarimi practical. "You can't go around skipping meals."

Heiji shrugged his thin shoulders. "Not that hungry." Food just didn't appeal anymore.

Kaito inserted a clean pair of chopsticks into the hand gripping his grading pen and delicately removed the writing instrument. Lifting the noodles, he put them into the teachers' old microwave and hit the buttons for two minutes. "You are going to eat them, whether you're hungry or not," he insisted, "Help me here, Iruka."

Iruka looked up from his own papers, and took in the stubborn expressions adorning both faces. Oh dear. "Do it, Heiji," Iruka sighed. "Or the rest of us won't be able to get any work done with the arguing."

Kaito grinned triumphantly and ruffled Heiji's hair. "See? Even Iruka agrees."

The jounin pursed his lips and ignored the hand on his head. Kaito was his same age—twenty-five—making both of them a year older than Iruka, and Heiji outranked everyone in the room, but they still all treated him like a clumsy little brother. Maybe because he was the newcomer to the group, the teacher who couldn't teach worth a bucket of moldy glue, and rank or no, he was as helpless as a rookie on his first day in the field.

The microwave beeped, and Kaito stuck the steaming noodles between his hands again. With a sigh, Heiji picked up a few of the slightly congealed strands and put them in his mouth. Kaito grinned widely at him. "Good work, Heiji-kun. You get an A."

Heiji scowled at him and rubbed his leg where the bone had begun to ache again. "Can we just get on with it?" he muttered.

Kaito riffled the stack of reports in front of him. "Sure. First is Hyuuga Neji." He glanced at the grade. "Wait, you failed him?" Kaito was incredulous, and Iruka, listening with half an ear to their conversation brought his head up in shock. Heiji nodded, and pointed to the handwritten notes beneath the grade. Kaito read aloud. "'Slow execution.' Slow? A Hyuuga slow? 'Faulty weight approximation.' Heiji, did he do kawarimi?"

"Badly."

"Give him a seventy." Kaito crossed out the offending '55' Heiji had printed neatly at the top of the evaluation, and replaced it with a passing grade before signing off. "Next."

Heiji watched unhappily as Kaito systematically passed over ninety percent of his students, then got Iruka to sign off on the modifications. "They're going to think they're good enough if you do this," he warned Kaito.

"For now, they are."

The teachers dispersed soon after midnight. Most still weren't finished, but no one was looking forward to teaching tomorrow on no sleep at all. Heiji didn't really care when they stopped, but he stood with the rest of the teachers and waited as Iruka locked the main doors. They exchanged 'good nights' and a few laughed 'good mornings' and headed off into the darkness to return to their separate homes.

Heiji knew he wasn't going to sleep tonight, tired or no. His leg ached fiercely; every uneven, limping step he took sent a wave of pain rising up to break into frothing tendrils against his hip. As Iruka, the last to leave, was swallowed by the shadows of the street, Heiji braced his back against the single tree in the yard. He waited for the pain to subside, as it usually did if he took the weight off the limb. It didn't.

The medics had warned him about times like these. Heiji had a packet of pills tucked in his shuriken pouch strong enough to erase that pain, and strict orders to take them. His face creased into deep lines and he let the tree guide his body as he slid to the ground. His nerves screamed as he straightened the leg. Pain flared into agony.

Heiji didn't want to take the pills. They messed with his senses and set his mind free to wander past the tight restraints he always kept it in. Maybe if he stayed here, and didn't move, it would fade. Then he could go home and spend the rest of the sleepless dark in his bed.

"Heiji-sensei?"

A kunai flew into his hand as the jounin sprang to his feet. Then he nearly collapsed back to the ground. "Tenten-chan?" he gasped. Red fire throbbed up his leg and into the space behind his eyes.

The brown-eyed girl regarded him steadily. "Did you sleep here, sensei?" Behind her, dozens of students were flowing into the school building. It was morning.

He slid the kunai discreetly back into its holster. "Congratulations on your exam, Tenten-chan," he said, smoothly avoiding her question. He hadn't actually passed her before Kaito's interference, but right now he didn't care. Pain could do that. "I'll be returning them in class today. You did well. Run along now."

A flush touched her cheeks, and she nearly glowed with pride. "Thank you, sensei!"

He watched her join the stream of pre-ninja, and admitted to himself that he was not going to make it through the day without painkillers. He wasn't going to be able to move away from this tree without painkillers. And coffee. Lots of coffee. Dozing restlessly under a tree through the deposition of chill dew and immediately slamming his limbs through those acrobatic contortions had done no good for his leg. Waking full of adrenaline and with a kunai in his hand had done no good for his psyche. He was shivering with suppressed chakra that sparked through his pathways with chemical-fueled intensity. Maybe coffee wasn't a good idea.

"Heiji?"

He spun around again, almost drawing another kunai. "Kaito."

The ninja's sharp eyes ran over the creased and damp uniform, then back up to his face. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine."

"You went home last night, didn't you?" Heiji found the oilpaper packet with trembling fingers and slipped it from his shuriken pouch. He palmed two pills and swallowed them dry. In a few seconds, he'd be able to straighten his knee. Then he'd be able to take a step towards the classrooms. "You didn't. You stayed here all night," Kaito stated flatly.

Heiji shrugged. Yes, his knee bent now, without even the normal bone-deep ache that lived even in his sleep. The relief that should have brought was negated by the faint fuzziness along the borders of his limb, as if the leg were not quite sure where it ended. Damn high-strength chakra-affecting pills. But now he could hurry away from Kaito. Too bad the other teacher followed right beside him, matching each step. "Is something wrong, Heiji?"

"Have you ever gone out stargazing, Kaito? It's truly amazing."

"Yes, I have, and the light pollution here is too bad to see much of anything."

Heiji grinned, a fake lift of his lips and curve of his eyes. "Here's my classroom, Kaito. I'll see you later." He ducked in the door and shut it behind him. Kaito blinked for a moment at the barrier, and briefly considered going in after him and pressing the issue. But Heiji had a distressing habit of avoiding questions he didn't like. All the jounin did. Kaito turned away and headed down the hall towards his own classroom. It seemed part of the qualifications to make the rank. Kaito was perfectly happy as a chuunin; he at least still had friends.

Heiji's students were already present when he made it into the classroom. In the half-second between brushing Kaito off and facing the students, Heiji snapped up a henge. It smoothed out the wrinkles in his shirt and the mixture of condensation and dirt on his pants and vest. "Morning, class."

"Good morning, sensei," they chorused.

He looked them over with a renewed sense of despair. There, in the back, Rock Lee, the boy who was probably not going to graduate and should have dropped out years ago. Over by the window, Hyuuga Neji, who going to get someone killed if he didn't lose that attitude that he was better than everyone else. Maybe he was the Hyuuga prodigy, but Heiji could still beat him unconscious with one hand. If a cripple could do that, the boy would get slaughtered in the field and probably take his whole team with him. Sitting in the front row, and still radiating happiness, Tenten, desperate enough for approval that she followed any order and would likely be one of those that got killed by people like Neji. His eyes darted over the other faces, young, eager, doomed. Involuntarily, he categorized them all. The ones who would be competent enough, only to die by someone else's mistake. The ones who would make the mistakes. The ones who just wouldn't be good enough. This was why he hated pain pills. He'd rather live in agony than keep thinking like this. "I'm returning your midterm exams today." The stack of papers riffled in his hands. "Then we're going to practice the kawarimi jutsu again."

The classroom was nearly empty, late afternoon light dripping through the smudged glass. Kaito swung his legs off the edge of one of the front row desks; his heels knocked an uneven, hollow rhythm against the wood. School's out, thud, school's out, thud, summer missions, thud, summer missions, thud. Heiji leaned back in the bench of the adjacent table, his own leg extended stiffly in front of him. At the teacher's desk, Heiji's desk, Iruka was shuffling papers around. "So I've got the jounin team assignments here," he said, removing a single sheet from the stack of new genin profiles and test scores Heiji had assembled for him yesterday. "The Hokage approved it this morning. Take a look." He extended the paper to Heiji, but Kaito snatched it out of his grip.

"Uh-huh. That's fine." He skimmed farther. "Hyuuga and Rock Lee on the same team? Are they crazy?"

Iruka shrugged and Heiji stared disinterestedly at the wall. "It's supposed to be based on scores," Iruka reminded Kaito.

"That's bullshit," Kaito sniffed. Then his jaw fell open. "Oh sweet hell."

Two sets of eyes fastened on the third teacher, who hadn't yet seen the list. Heiji glanced between them and frowned. "What?" Kaito passed it over in silence. He read it through quickly and kept his face expressionless, until his eyes found the final listing. "Is this some sort of joke?"

Iruka rubbed the back of his neck and laughed awkwardly. "No. Apparently the Hokage thought you might do better with genin than Academy students."

Heiji's dark eyes found Iruka's soft brown and locked. "You suggested it." It wasn't a question, and Iruka didn't deny it.

"You'll do well teaching genin," he said instead, smiling tentatively. "And you didn't seem happy here."

Heiji slammed the paper down to the desk and half rose from the seat. "I'm a cripple, or hadn't you noticed?" His voice rose, and Iruka drew back. "I haven't taken a mission in thirteen months! I can't mold chakra in my left leg, how the hell do you think I'm going to lead genin?"

Kaito blinked. Couldn't mold chakra in his left leg? What?

"The medics said they gave you medicine for that."

"You talked to the medics, too? Who gave you the right to stick your nose in my life, Iruka?" he snarled. "It doesn't matter if I was happy here or not, at least nobody was dying!"

Iruka had never seen the jounin raise his voice before, let alone exude this level of rage. "I think it matters, Heiji. The Hokage thinks it matters. He cares about all his shinobi, every last one of them."

"The Hokage would have kept his nose out of my life if he cared."

Iruka glared. "Don't talk like that about the Hokage! He was trying to save your life!"

Heiji stilled. "What don't you know?" he asked quietly. Black eyes froze over. "Anything? Have you known this all along?" He sounded as if his last ally had betrayed him, and perhaps he had.

Iruka shook his head. Kaito was unmoving in his seat, gaping at his two colleagues. "I didn't know until now, and I wasn't prying. I'm sorry if you didn't want anyone to know, but it came up when the medic was certifying you for duty. And he says you're mission-fit, Heiji. If you'd just take the medication."

The jounin sank back in his chair. Kaito ventured a single word question into the painful silence. "What?"

Heiji's glare made him reconsider whether he really wanted to know. "I'm not taking the medication, Iruka, so you can just take me off that list," he informed the chuunin quietly. "Find someone else."

"It's too late, Heiji. Hokage's seal is on these teams. I know this is going to be a hard transition for you, since you just came from your first year teaching, but most jounin don't have any experience when they get a team."

"Don't patronize me, Iruka."

"You know, they might not even pass the second test. So don't get all worried yet," Kaito chipped in.

Heiji's expression smoothed out. "I had forgotten about that test."

"I'll be overseeing your exam, since this is your first time," Iruka added innocently. "The Hokage suggested it." The jounin didn't believe a word of it. No one else was having their exam double-graded. The Hokage just didn't want him failing the genin to get out of teaching a team. "The rest of the jounin should be here soon to pick up the files for their new genin. You could talk to them about the best methods for the test." His suggestion fell flat into the hostile silence. The three Academy teachers waited for the group of potential jounin-sensei to arrive without speaking anymore.

The relief Kaito felt when a boisterous voice was heard in the hallway was boundless. "Finally it is our chance to share our Flames of Youth! Smile Kakashi! The names of your youthful students will soon be revealed!"

"Hm."

A moment later, six jounin in green flak vests filed into the classroom. "Hey, Iruka," one of them greeted politely. "Your class again?"

Iruka shook his head. "Just supervising. They're Heiji's students this year." He gestured to the brown-haired man slumped behind a desk.

"Nice to see you, Heiji," the man said, sticking his hand out. Heiji shook it briefly, running his eyes over the assembled jounin. He knew Gai vaguely, the man had come in a few times in the past year to ask about the progress of one Rock Lee. The green-clad ninja waved happily at him. He had seen the other four around the mission office at one time or another; most jounin knew each other at least by sight.

But hovering at the back of the group, his orange book in front of his masked face, was a legend. He lifted a hand. "Yo." Heiji's eyes narrowed. The grey-haired ninja spoke without looking up. "Haven't seen you around lately."

"You left first, Hatake-sempai."

"True. So you've got genin-brats for us to look at?"

Iruka swept the files up from the desk and began to hand them out according to the team assignments. "Yosh!" Gai shouted. "Youthful power has prevailed!" Heiji assumed he had just read Rock Lee's scores on the graduation exam, which, all things considered, hadn't been as bad as expected. He'd passed, after all.

Kakashi blinked at his dossiers, then stuck them under his arm. "So we meet them tomorrow, right?"

Heiji nodded. "Back in this classroom. Don't be late."

Kakashi's grey eye narrowed. "Still haven't gotten over it yet, kouhai?" Disrespect came naturally to his lips, especially when faced with an asshole like the one lounging in front of him.

Gai interrupted by throwing an arm around Kakashi's shoulders and dragging him over to Heiji so he could do the same to their age-mate. "You know each other! What a happy coincidence!"

Kakashi ducked out from under the friendly embrace and Heiji scowled. "That's not a good thing, Gai," Kakashi said, with a smiling eye curve. "You know, Heiji, maybe someday I'll figure out why they let you into ANBU, because I certainly can't tell now."

Forgotten on top of his desk, Kaito felt his eyes widen. ANBU?

Kakashi watched the asshole sharply through his smiling eye, waiting for a cutting comeback. Instead, he seemed to crumple in on himself, not physically moving, but withdrawing into empty eyes. "Maybe," was all he said. Then he levered himself off the bench and limped heavily over to Iruka. "Can I have the scores for my team?" he asked the teacher.

Iruka handed him the files. "You need to stay here, though, Heiji. Answer any questions the jounin have about their teams."

He ducked his head sharply, and glanced at Hatake. "Any questions, sempai?"

"No." He hadn't even looked at the names, but he didn't want to stay here any longer. With an inrushing of air and a distinct lack of smoke, he disappeared.

"I've got a question," one of the other jounin said. "It says here that Fuchida passed the jutsu practical with barely a seventy out of a hundred. Anything I should know about that?"

Heiji leaned back against a desk and considered. "Fuchida's not strong on seal formation. He gets the forms right, but transitions have been giving him trouble. Half the time he screws something up. They pass the jutsu practical if they can successfully complete the technique, but the score gives you a better idea of real skill; in Fuchida's case, not much."

"Does he just need more practice?" the jounin asked, glancing down at the report again.

The teacher shrugged. "Practice would help, but he's not all that motivated to work. If he doesn't pass your test this time around, I think that one's going to drop out."

"Oh. What about Suzuki? Anything special there?"

"Suzuki? No." Iruka shot him a look. He elaborated. "Average scores, average skill. A little more ambitious than average, but couple that with below par playing-in-the-sandbox skills, and he's nothing special."

The other teacher cut in. "Suzuki's father was a chuunin before he retired. The son is competent on kunai and a few more advanced weapons. He could be a very good shinobi." Heiji snorted quietly, and Iruka glared. Faith was a quality spread quite unevenly among the men in the room; Iruka certainly had a surplus of conviction in his students.

The jounin nodded, and turned away to spread his papers out on an empty desk and take stock of his decidedly not-special team. Gai filled the pause with a barrage of questions about Rock Lee, Tenten, and Hyuuga Neji. Heiji answered them all as best he could, and let Iruka add what he knew whenever the chuunin decided he was being too apathetic.

It was hard to work up the level of excitement Iruka and Gai seemed to expect from him while Hatake's words were still pounding in his skull. Can't tell why—maybe someday—kouhai—and then from longer ago, a deeper, older voice—you'll do well here, kid—don't worry, we trust you—and he didn't know who to believe or where he still stood in this world, especially because only one of those voices was still alive, and it was the wrong one. Gai wasn't helping, either, with his blinding smiles and friendly embraces, while all Heiji wanted was to disappear.