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Chapter Text

It was the spring after Orochimaru's death, when three Konoha ninja found the last of the secret laboratories.

They found it at the base of an old umbrella pine. The entrance had been sealed with rocks and filled with pine needles, and it was almost lost in a thicket of red bracken, but almost was not good enough for three Konoha ninja already excited by the prospect of returning home, and eager to finish their job.

"Are you sure this is it?" Gobo brushed away the charred bracken from the rocks and thanked his lucky stars he was wearing his gloves. The stones were hot from the katon jutsu Ninjin had used to clear the bracken.

"No doubt about it." Ninjin lifted a rock from the entrance and wrinkled her nose. "Smell that? It smells like all the rest of them."

Gobo sniffed tentatively and immediately recoiled. The cold wisp of air floating up from the hole was sharp with ammonia and the bittersweetness of chlorine. His nose stung, and as Daikon and Ninjin continued to shift rocks from the entrance the smell grew, and grew more textured – there was an undertone of mildew, a top note of something fruity, and shot throughout something acrid and poisonous.

"Here goes the fun part," said Daikon, his smile typically dry.

He dropped the lantern down the entrance. It landed on the floor below with a clatter and fell on its side.

They held their breath and waited, straining their eyes for signs of movement in the dark.

"Nothing," decided Gobo, after listening to his heart drum in his ears for three minutes.

"Nothing," agreed Ninjin, "but be careful."

They levered themselves down the entrance and Daikon picked up the lantern. They walked down the corridor of the complex in silence. It was small compared to other laboratories they had seen, which was a good sign. It meant there was not enough room to house large experimental subjects, at least not more than one or two. Another team sent by Konoha to a cave in the west had found thirty or so subjects lying in their own blood, and not all of them had been dead. Gobo, Ninjin and Daikon had been lucky so far.

Ninjin opened the first door they came to with a gentle push of her fingertips. When nothing was triggered, they moved in. Gobo was mildly surprised. He had been expecting a surgical theatre, a rack of sharp-toothed instruments on the walls, but this was more like an intensive care unit for a single patient. A bed took up the centre, with the corners of its sheets turned down, and it was surrounded by screens and machines and bunches of tubes. Gobo had done his stint as a practical medic-nin before switching to research. He recognised life support and dialysis machines when he saw them.

"Daikon, you stay here and take stock of the equipment. Gobo, let's move on the next room," Ninjin said briskly. She lit an old torch in the bracket before leaving.

Apart from a bathroom, (Gobo wondered how Orochimaru had managed the plumbing) there were three more rooms in the complex. One was a store cupboard which he left to Ninjin, because he couldn't stay there without his stomach heaving. The next was a lab bench, with a rack of staining chemicals, an incubator and no doubt microscopes packed away in the cupboards. The last was a study. Gobo stopped there. He was here to collect up research papers that Orochimaru had written. As mad as the man was, he had been a genius scientist and his research would be invaluable to Konoha medicine if they could get hold of it. Kusagakure had been making moves to demand papers as compensation for their genin who had been killed in the chuunin exams.

He was filling his bag with the contents of one of the filing cabinets when Gobo heard a breaking of glass. It had come from the store room.

"Ninjin!" he cried, sliding into the doorway and covering his face with a mask against the smell. "What's happened?"

"It's alright!" Ninjin held up her hands. "I was just checking what was in this case and dropped one of the vials. No need to worry."

Gobo shivered. The temperature in the store cupboard was well below any of the other rooms. Perhaps there was some sort of seal in action, withdrawing heat from the air. "This is Orochimaru's laboratory. Of course I'm worried."

She scowled at him but bent down to the floor to pick through the glass. He crouched down beside her. There was a cap with a label, the stroke of the number already bleeding purple out of black. "One?" he read.

"They're numbered up to ten," Ninjin said, glancing through the case of vials again. She pulled out another one and peered into its cloudy contents. "Stab vials. He's storing bacteria in them."

"What kind?" asked Gobo.

"You think my eyes are microscopes? How the heck would I know?"

"Are you two ready to go?" called Daikon, bending his head round the doorway.

Ninjin wiped her hand across her face and sneezed. "Almost." She packed the rest of the vials into her bag. Gobo went back to the filing cabinet, trying to crush the feeling that something had just been done, that something had just been committed, and to convince himself that the chill running down his back was the air from the refridgerated storage room and not cold sweat.

When the last of the folders and files were strapped to the sleigh, Ninjin, Daikon and Gobo began to make their way back to Konoha, the entrance to the laboratory sealed once again, against rogue ninjas who might plunder it, and wild animals who might be tempted by the smell of decay.

Ten days after their return, Gobo was in his hospital office. He was still trawling through Orochimaru and Kabuto's papers, sorting through for projects that were within the Konoha ethical code of conduct to continue. There were, surprisingly, quite a lot. Orochimaru and Kabuto had both had their scientific training in Konoha and their educational background was clear in the meticulous precision of their methods and their sourcing of resources. Orochimaru's papers said that his subjects were all either volunteers or death row prisoners, sold to him by the other nations in exchange for the results coming out of his laboratories. In that respect, Gobo was sad to admit, Konoha wasn't all that different.

He adjusted the mask around his nose and mouth and coughed gently. It was early in the morning. There was nobody in the office yet, apart from himself. Truth be told, he wished he was still in bed. He had been feeling very out of sorts lately. Every so often he would break out into a fit of coughs, and in the past few days those fits had become heavy and wet with mucus. His limbs felt heavy too, heavy and even a little painful. His joints ached when he did even the more basic exercises in their ninja fitness regime and he was finding it increasingly difficult to write. It wasn't his grip that was losing strength. His extremities were going numb. Sometimes he had to check to make sure his toes were still there. It was a terrible case of flu, if ever there was one!

He hid it well though, Gobo told himself, as he proceeded through the stack of papers. As a ninja, hiding pain was trained into them as a survival skill.

The door opened behind him. "Gobo." It was Daikon, pulling down his face mask with a cough. He'd come down with a cold. His face was pale. "I need to talk to you. What did Ninjin do in that store room at Laboratory Number Twenty Nine? She broke a vial, didn't she?"

A twist of fear clenched Gobo's guts. "What's happened to her?"

"She started coughing up blood in her office. They've taken her to Ward 12."

Ward 12 for unknown infectious diseases, a hurried, trembling voice informed Gobo, somewhere in the depths of his brain. Ward 12. Gobo's hands were trembling. He couldn't feel his fingers, so he set down his pen. "I knew it," Gobo gasped, pulling off his glasses to rub his eyes, "I knew this was going to come back to bite us. Somehow, I just knew – "

Nervous laughter bubbled up from inside him and Daikon reached across to put a hand on Gobo's shoulder. "Hey, Gobo, calm down, man – "

The nervous laughter changed to a thick, hacking cough, and the next instant Gobo was starkly aware of something wet and slippery lodged at the back of his throat. His mouth tasted salt, a mineral quality like iron or copper, and then his hands and the paper in front of him, were dripping with blood.

Daikon's hand flew off Gobo's shoulder.

Gobo was dimly aware of Daikon locking the door of the office. There was a dull ringing in his ears, a pressure behind his eyes. He held his hands in front of him with his spoonful-worth of blood cupped in their palms, and stared.

Daikon was dialling a number on the internal communications system. "This is Office 306," he was saying into the device, "one medic-nin showing the same symptoms as Nemoto Ninjin, request assistance to transport to Ward 12 with full hazard precautions, and – "Daikon coughed, loud and thick, and he paused, suddenly very silent. "Make that two medic-nin showing the same symptoms as Nemoto Ninjin. We are isolated together in Office 306. Thank you."

He switched off the device and turned back to Gobo. There was blood running from the corner of Daikon's mouth, turned up in a painful, nervous smile. "Help's on it's way," he said. "We should wash our hands."

But three days later, Nemoto Ninjin, Hijiki Gobo and Tsukemono Daikon were already dead, and their beds in Ward 12 were filled with another round of patients, checked in for a strange and unknown illness spreading rapidly through Konoha.

It was the spring of Kimimaro's Plague.

Chapter Text

"Sakura-chan? Are you awake?"

There was a knocking at her bedroom door. Sakura opened her eyes. The cool grey light of dawn was pushing through the curtains. On the bedside table, the alarm clock was lying on its face. She must have switched it off, but, for the life of her, she couldn't remember when she had.

"Sakura-chan?" called the voice outside her room again. The knocking grew more frantic, until her mother flung open the bedroom door. "Sakura-chan!?"

Her mother saw Sakura sitting up and rubbing her eyes, and stopped in the doorway. The colour slowly returned to her white face. She breathed out slowly with her hand to her heart. "Please, Sakura-chan," her mother said, smiling wearily, "answer the door when I knock. I thought…I thought…"

Hearing the tremor in her mother's voice made Sakura want to curl up in bed again, but this time in shame. Her mother worried about her enough as it was, what with Sakura's work in the hospital, and the breath of the Plague in the air. She shouldn't have to needlessly worry every morning that her daughter had died in the night.

"Sorry, Mum," Sakura said, stretching as she stepped out of bed and yawning. "I'll get dressed now."

"How are you feeling today?"

"Fine," she replied quickly, and then realised Mum was still waiting in the doorway, and so added, "No coughs or throat tickles, and I can feel all my fingers and toes."

She watched Sakura tie up her hair for the day and sighed. "I'm being silly, aren't I? Nobody just keels over from the Plague. I need to stop worrying and remember the stages. You would've thought the mum of a medic-nin could at least do that."

As her mother earnestly chastised herself, Sakura smiled. "There's a poster on the fridge door to help you."

"I'm well aware of that, young lady," her mother said primly, but at last she turned away. "I'll do your breakfast. It's the least I can do."

There once was a time when people thought plagues and agues and poxes were caused by malevolent demons and lurking sprites, unleashed by unwitting sins or the displeasure of the gods. Then there was the time when they said diseases were foul mists, deadly miasma that oozed from the ground and the pores of the infected.

As Sakura travelled through the streets of Konoha, she felt she could understand those beliefs. There was a tension in the empty streets like a breath unbreathed, a living anticipation that was coiled and dangerous - the silence of birds when a wolf was crouched in the ferns. It was a settled and heavy unease, unmovable as a fog.

She saw were figures dressed head to toe in cloaks and the council issued visors. They were the ninjas - the genin in yellow, the chuunin in blue, the jounin in red and the medic-nin in black. Only their eyes were visible and those eyes were usually cast down to the ground as they went about their missions. Little was spoken in the early morning apart from the formal greetings.

The non-ninja civilians were just beginning to open their shops. As she ran past the local convenience, the owner was rolling up the shutters. He was an old scowling man who smelt faintly of tobacco and mackerel.

"Morning, Teranaka-san," Sakura called out.

Teranaka turned around and lifted his greying eyebrows. "I didn't recognise you in your medic gear. You doctors look like witches in your all blacks. Any chance you could magic some ninjas back to life?"

She laughed, despite the bitter note to his joke. "How are things?"

"Less customers, so less business," Teranaka said, looking grim. He rolled up his sleeves and finished pushing the shutter up above the door. "You run along now. Go do your job and save some ninjas. That'll save me and my old shop."

There were shops closed all along the street. Many of the civilians with ninjas in their families had fled the town before Konoha had been quarantined and now the glass windows of their shops were pasted over with newspapers. More fool them, thought Sakura a little bitterly, because they had taken the Plague with them and died anyway. Nobody was leaving Konoha anymore. Either the gates of the other towns were closed to them, or the Plague was already there. Besides, when picking between a village, with only the local healer, and Konoha, with the most advanced knowledge of ninja medicine in the Land of Fire, Sakura thought it was obvious which the better option was.

The receptionist was already at the hospital desk, shuffling feebly through papers. She looked up when Sakura signed in. By the looks of it, she had been at the desk all night. "The meeting's in the Mochizuki Room, Fourth Floor," the receptionist told her flatly, before going back to her papers. She was ticking off the addresses of patients, the ones who had died in the night. Someone would have to go round from the hospital later to, on the face of it, offer condolences, but in actuality check for signs of infection in the rest of the family. Sakura hoped she wasn't doing rounds today.

As she climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, there was the sound of running footsteps. Shizune appeared at the top of the stairs looking as pink in the face as Tonton. "Oh! Sakura-chan!" Shizune cried. "Thank goodness. I was about to send a messenger to your house. Come on. Hurry. Nearly everybody else is here."

"Who's missing, Shizune-san?"

"He's not missing. Kakashi's just bleeding late, as usual," Shizune muttered. "Now come on. Tsunade's on her third cup of coffee already."

It was nearly a week after the first three cases of the Plague. Tsunade had announced a formal meeting to bring together results of their research and decide on new measures. Shizune pushed open the door to the Mochizuki Room. "Found her on the stairs," Shizune announced, as Sakura followed her in, thinking that the circle of medic ninjas sitting about the table in their black visors and hoods looked like oversized crows crouched about a body.

"What kept you? Never mind. We'll have to save cards for another time," Tsunade's voice came from the largest figure in black at the end of the table. She packed away the cards she had been shuffling in her gloved hands and motioned for Sakura to sit at the empty space to her left. Shizune took the empty seat to her right.

There were several jounin in red cloaks at the table too. One was petting a large grey dog. Another sat with his arms crossed. Sakura could see the edge of a scar near his eye through the slit of his visor – it was probably Shikamaru's dad. There was one empty seat at the table waiting for Kakashi-sensei.

A gloved hand touched her wrist. Sakura looked up to find Ino sitting next to her, pens and paper ready to take notes. "He'll be here soon," Ino said. "Don't worry."

"Now that Sakura's here, let us begin," said Tsunade and she clasped her hands in front of her. "The first item on the agenda is our research on disease prognosis. Shizune-san, would you please stand?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Shizune stood from the table with a stack of notes. "From a study of approximately three thousand patients in collaboration with the head physicians of Ageha and Tateha," she nodded then to two figures in black at the end of the table, "we have made the following observations. The disease acts over a course of ten to fourteen days, the majority dying around day thirteen. After initial infection there is an asymptomatic latent period of three days, in which the patient is not infectious. This stage is followed by five days in which the patient is highly infectious and experiences chronic coughing and a reported dulling of the senses. As the disease progresses white sputum is observed. The patient may experience a generalised pain in his limbs and lose sensation in the extremities of his body. In the final stage of the disease, Rasmussen's aneurysm tends to be a major cause for haemoptysis – "

There was a sheepish knock and Kakashi entered the room. "Sorry, sorry. I fell in a plague pit."

Tsunade tutted impatiently and gestured for him to take a seat. Sakura felt the tension in her chest finally ease away and uncapped her pen to take notes.

"- haemoptysis," continued Shizune, "and this is followed by rapid multiple organ failure, and death. Throughout the course of the disease, physicians have noted fevers, chills, night sweats and weight loss."

She sat down and took a deep breath. Public speaking wasn't one of Shizune's strengths and she was sweating under her cloak.

"The identity of the pathogenic organism itself I shall discuss with the aid of my two apprentices," Tsunade said, looking round the table and then nodding at Ino and Sakura. "We found that the cell walls did not take up a Grams stain, but appeared red under a microscope with the Ziehl-Neelsen. Looking at the lipid rich cell walls and the similarities in its pathology, we have identified the pathogen as a hypervirulent strain of Mycobacterium."

One of the medic-nin raised a hand. Tsunade nodded at her to speak. "Have we found out why it's only infecting ninjas and not the civilians?"

Tsunade looked to Ino, who cleared her throat and spoke. "On testing the Konoha civilians, we actually discovered that a lot of the civilians are infected, but the disease has not progressed to its infectious stage. The bacteria don't multiply in their bodies, because the bacteria only multiply in response to a very particular environmental stimulus." Ino shivered and gripped her notes. "The bacteria multiply in the body with chakra use, and they multiply faster the stronger the chakra of the infected ninja."

There was a muttering from the ninjas around the table and frantic scribbling of notes. A medic-nin stood and shouted out, "This would explain why the chuunin and the jounin are the most affected groups, as opposed to the young children and the elderly."

"That is correct," Tsunade said with a nod as an appreciative mutter arose again. She then tapped the sheet of paper under Sakura's nose with her pencil and raised her eyebrow. This was Sakura's cue to stand and speak. "My apprentice will now take us through the proposed origin of the disease."

As all eyes turned on her expectantly, Kakashi's eyes glittering, Sakura breathed in and turned to her notes. After Hijiki Gobo had died his notes from Orochimaru's laboratory had been sterilised and passed to her and a team of medic chuunins, along with a case of cloudy vials found in Nemoto Ninjin's office. She had been up all night summarising their results.

"Laboratory Twenty Nine," Sakura began, swallowing nervously, "was the laboratory in which Orochimaru was overseeing the care of a single patient, Kimimaro of the Kaguya Clan. At some point during his errands for Orochimaru, Kimimaro was infected with a rare kind of chakra bacterium. From the laboratory reports, it was a disease with a very slow effect, a chronic disease, but the effects were the same as what we are experiencing now. The disease affected Kimimaro and not Orochimaru, nor Kabuto because of the quality of Kimimaro's bloodline limit.

"A unique limit that enabled plastic control of his osteoblasts and osteoclasts, Kimimaro's chakra system was constantly adjusting and readjusting as he transformed his body. It was in these stages of system adjustment that the old strain of the disease multiplied."

"I'm not entirely sure I understand – " began a red cloaked jounin.

"It means if the chakra use is accompanied with some kind of physical transformation," Kakashi whispered to him, his eye half-lidded as he listened. Sakura noted that the pen and paper in front of him remained untouched.

"Orochimaru valued Kimimaro highly and set Kabuto to find a cure for the disease. In the meantime," Sakura turned over the page of her notes, "in the meantime, Orochimaru took the Mycobacteria strain from Kimimaro and developed a range of hypervirulent strains with the potential for use in biowarfare. Nemoto Ninjin infected herself with the first generation of the hypervirulent strains. The other nine in the case were even more virulent and deadly than the disease we are dealing with now."

"Question," said Nara, raising his hand amidst the angry and scared buzz of voices. Tsunade gave him permission and he lowered his hand. "Do the elders know that Konoha has a powerful set of bioweapons in its possession?"

"They will know after this meeting," Tsunade's eyes gleamed, "that I burnt the case myself to stop it falling into the wrong hands. Continue, Sakura."

Nara Shikaku relaxed his grip on his armrests and seemed relieved. Sakura took up her notes again. "The only known patient of the old strain being Kimimaro, we propose that the old strain be henceforth known as Mycobacterium kimimarosis, and the strain we are dealing with now as Rapid Action Mycobacterium kimimarosis. In short, RAMK."

She sat down as the medic-nin talked around her. Kakashi gave her thumbs up. Sakura smiled but then couldn't help but wonder what Kakashi and the Inuzuka woman beside him were doing there. Nara Shikaku was there to give advice on devising a strategy to combat disease spread. There was a jounin with milk-bottom thick glasses from the treasury and a chuunin in blue from the Konoha Publications Office. The Publications Officer was recording the meeting into a scroll seal and was responsible for making the pamphlets and editing the Konoha Times. There were lines around his eyes and bags of fatigue. His forehead was greasy. The previous officer had died only two days ago and the thought no doubt weighed on his mind.

"The Kazekage has said he is will gift us medical glassware and fine-filtering masks, but apart from that notice, we have heard nothing from the other nations," Tsunade informed the ninjas in her crisp, brisk tone. "The Raikage and Tsuchikage, however, have recently put out orders to kill foreign ninjas and burn their bodies on sight. We shall see what the Mizukage has to say soon. Unfortunately, it will only be a matter of time before RAMK reaches them."

There were dark murmurs of agreement and knowing smiles. Kakashi raised an eyebrow and Sakura had a feeling that he very much disapproved of the gallows humour. The meeting moved on to discuss the Konoha economy and the lack of clients coming to Konoha to employ their ninjas. It seemed to be of some concern to the treasurer, who kept on pushing the glasses up the bridge of his nose, and sweating and stammering, but Tsunade, Sakura knew, was only half-listening. Shizune knew that too and had pulled out a seal scroll to record what the man was saying.

The hands of the clock slid round and touched eight. When they finished talking about the state of Konoha's coffers, Tsunade spoke up again. "To stop the spread, our best course of action is to take advantage of the three day latent period before the patient becomes contagious. Hatake Kakashi, you had a proposal for this?"

Kakashi started and blinked. "I did?"

"This is no time for games, Kakashi," snapped a medic-nin.

"Forgive me, Hokage," Kakashi said with a mild smile. He clapped his fist in his palm and raised a finger. "Yes, now I remember!"

"Watch where you're going!" a man hollered, picking up the end of the stretcher he had just dropped. Through the visor of his black robes, the man's eyes glinted icy and sharp.

"Sorry!" Naruto shrank back to let the man pass by into one of the many ranks of tents set up outside the hospital and then looked around the hospital grounds in bewilderment. "What the hell's been happening here?"

He had been in the Myoboku Mountains when the news reached him about the plague and, as soon as he heard, he had made the preparations to come back. Naruto couldn't stand the thought of being away, safe and sound and oblivious, when all the people he knew were fighting for their lives back home here in Konoha, where his friends lived.

They had let him in at the gates, although the ninjas had tried very subtly to urge him away. Nobody had said anything about stopping idiots trying to get into a plague-ridden city, only those trying to get out. Not that there were many of those anymore.

The first thing that had taken getting used to were those accursed robes the ninjas were all wearing, as though they were afraid of the very air around them, which they were. He could see it in the lines about their eyes and the heavy purpose of their movements, like they didn't know when they were seeing the last loaf of bread in their hands or whether they were touching the doors of their houses for the final time, lighting their final candles. Naruto recognised Rock Lee first. Those thick black eyebrows were a dead giveaway behind his visor.

"Bushybrow!"

Rock Lee glanced up and his eyes watered. "Naruto! Naruto, my fellow comrade in the vigours of youth-dom! Why? Why have you come back?"

"You think I could stay away?" Naruto laughed. The laughter sounded a little hollow in the street, but he ignored the disapproving looks turned his way with the ease of habit. "I heard about the Plague. I'm here to help."

Lee grasped his hands and shook it fervently. "That is so noble of you! But I'm afraid there is little that you can do here. There's little any of us can do, if we're not medics."

"I'll do anything I can," Naruto said, looking down the street. Three ninja were pulling a wagon loaded with long, lumpy objects wrapped in sheets towards a thin column of smoke beyond. He swallowed, the Adam's apple bobbing in his throat uncomfortably. "I'll do anything. What are you doing?"

Lee pointed to the wicker basket strapped to his back. "Delivering rice. A lot of ninja families are shutting themselves up in their homes – the one's with children. The Plague doesn't touch the children, but it gets their parents and Konoha doesn't want any more orphans, if we can help it. Anyway, no clearer show of the power of youth!"

"You want help with that?" Naruto asked, as Lee strode on with his shoulders hunched under the basket, frowning with determination.

"I shall see my rice delivered if it be the last thing I do!" said Lee stubbornly, but his eyes were smiling. "Haruno-san and Yamanaka-san are at the hospital. They'll be busy, but they'll be happy to see you back. And if you want to do something, the hospital will find you something to do."

"Thanks, Bushybrow."

Lee suddenly stopped and looked over his shoulder. "As much as I admire your fashion sense, Naruto, you'll have to get a suit from the hospital to move around town."
"Nah, I'll be fine just as I am," said Naruto, putting his hands on his hips. "I don't need no cloak and hooded mask to make me the handsomest ninja in Konoha village."

"But you'll get infected, and with your high levels of chakra - " Lee began to stammer and Naruto was alarmed to see huge globs of tears welling in the corners of his eyes.

"Lee, chill, I'll be fine. Trust me. I'm …" Naruto stalled and scratched his face. How could he explain to Lee that the nine-tailed fox sealed in his belly protected him from chakra illnesses, making Naruto immune to the Plague? As much as he hated to admit it, Jiraiya had been right. Jiraiya had advised Naruto from going back to Konoha. He said that it would be difficult for Naruto to explain his immunity, but Naruto had imagined that so long as Tsunade and the jounins understood he would be able to get by just fine.

Naruto settled for putting his hand on Lee's shoulder and looking him in the eye. "Because I'm too stupid to be killed off by some bug, right?"

"Right!" agreed Lee, and he wept fervent tears. "Because you are a truly moronic ninja, Naruto-kun! I salute you in your gutsy stubbornness!"

And bidding Naruto goodbye, Lee strode away down the road, still happily weeping. Naruto stared after him until he turned the corner of the road, before making his way to the hospital.

It took him half an hour to find Sakura amongst the tents pitched outside, or rather, she found him. The wards in the hospital were overflowing. There was no more room inside for patients, so they had set up these emergency wards in the open air. All around him, the medic-nins looked the same, flitting around in their black canvas robes and visors, and just looking at them made Naruto's skin crawl. The suits for the ninjas were practical, but they made the doctors look like shadow figures from nightmares.

"You're looking a little lost," said a dry voice behind him, when Naruto had finished glancing into a tent full of gaunt and pale men, lying still, very still, on low reed bedpans, feeling sick to the stomach.

He whirled round and grinned shakily. "Sakura-chan!"

"Naruto, you idiot. Why didn't you stay up on the mountain? No, don't even bother answering." Sakura sighed and slapped her forehead with her palm. "Anyway, you're here now. Better make yourself useful. We can't have you lounging around, dreaming about ramen, when you've got a thousand times the energy of the rest of us. We'll have to find you a suit…" she trailed off and looked at him critically. "I don't think we have any for genin in your size…"

"Don't worry, I won't need one!" Naruto told her jovially. "They're optional, right?"

"That's only because we didn't think anybody would actually be stupid enough to opt out, but, somehow, I reckon you'll be alright. Things have a silly way of working out for you, don't they?" Sakura began to walk towards the main hospital building. Naruto followed, still marvelling at the sights of the strange robed figures carrying stretchers, holding clipboards, shouldering packs and baskets and bedding, drifting all around them like coloured ghosts. It didn't look like Konoha anymore. This version of Konoha was an alien country to him.

"What do you think of it?" Sakura asked, as she caught sight of him staring. "Do you think this is Hell?"

"It isn't Hell," Naruto said firmly, clenching his fists. "It's still got our people in it. It's still got all our friends in it. And it's got Konoha ninjas helping other Konoha ninjas like only Konoha ninjas know how. It's a battlefield, Sakura-chan, but not Hell."

It suddenly struck Naruto that he didn't actually know if Konoha did still have all their friends in it. He had met Lee and now Sakura. Lee had talked about Ino, but he knew nothing about what had happened to the others. What about Shikamaru and Chouji? Neji, Tenten and Hinata? What about the jounins? How were they all holding up?

That moment when he couldn't even ask Sakura if their friends were dead or alive, Naruto finally realised what the feeling clawing its way up his throat since he stepped through the Konoha gates had been. It was dread - the dread of standing at the edge of an ocean and seeing the rolling crest of a very dark wave coming to the shore.

Strangely enough, they could hear the sound of barking dogs coming out of Tsunade's office. Sakura knocked on the door and they stood in the corridor, waiting to be let in.

Naruto thought of Kakashi-sensei and his pack of ninken. He thought of his friends, and then his thoughts turned to the men at the gates who had laughed when he had entered the village and told him he wouldn't be able to get out again.

At least, Naruto told himself, I have a village, even a sick one, because in the village we all look out for each other.

His thoughts turned to the ninjas who were village-less and on the run in the forests of the Land of Fire, being hunted as rogues or criminals.

"I wonder where he is?" Naruto murmured, as a medic-nin ran past them with a fistful of painkillers.

Sakura looked up at the ceiling, and the barking from Tsunade's office seemed to get louder. "Sasuke-kun? Who knows. But the other nations are killing all strange ninjas on sight now. He won't be able to go very far."

It was night on the road and the mosquitoes were already whining. Three figures in long coats were waiting in a hawthorn thicket, killing their breaths. There was a rustle in the grass, and another figure joined them.

"Finally, she's here!" one said, pushing himself up with the help of a giant sword. "How long does it take to buy some grains?"

"Shut it, Suigetsu," the last figure snapped. "It was hard enough getting past the guards. The town was much better guarded than usual and I could hardly find a shop open to steal from. I'd like to have seen you do better!"

"Enough," said another, rising to his feet. "Let's move."

"One moment." The figure who had been to the town coughed into her fist, cleared her throat and then coughed some more.

"Are you alright?" asked the largest figure in the group.

"It's just a cold," she replied. "Sasuke-kun, please, don't worry on my account."

"Sasuke isn't worrying about you," muttered the figure with the sword. "That was Juugo. Are you deaf as well as blind in the dark, Karin?"

"Enough," said the figure already quickly moving along the road. "Let's move on."

The four figures melted into the darkness as shadows.

Chapter Text

In the darkness of a cave, a man was sat in the palms of a huge wooden statue. The cave dripped. The wood creaked and expanded with the moisture. The man was alone, and he was thinking such thoughts that he wondered why they weren't echoing in the cavern as violently as they were echoing around in his head.

Outrage, the voices were whispering. The insolence of it all.

The man took off his mask and turned it over in his hands. For all his plots and powers, for all his scheming, there was no denying that he was beginning to feel uncomfortably, intolerably, human.

An eye glowed red in the dark.

He was as close to god as a man could be in this crab bucket of a world. To think that he was being reminded of his mortality by a little bit of fat and protein, a hoop of DNA, things too small to be seen, an enemy too small to be struck down with a knife!

To think that the source of it all was one of Orochimaru's pets. He grimaced and traced a hand down the life-line of the palm beneath him.

How could this have happened? Everything had been going to plan. All that he had left to do was to capture the Nine-tails and the Eight-tails, and then the Moon's Eye would have opened.

The masked man had never factored for natural disasters. As far as he was concerned, he himself was a natural disaster. He was, after all, the force that would reshape the world.

The Zetsus he had sent to spy on Konoha, as the village panicked and scrambled in the initial outbreak, had melted into white puddles of bubbling sludge on their return, much to the alarm of the original Zetsu. Zetsu was now lying low somewhere, avoiding all ninja contact. Sasuke's team were having difficulties as well. The last the masked man had heard of them, their movement towards the Land of Lightning had nearly ground to a halt. It would be a long time before he had the Eight-tails in his grasp.

He clicked his tongue behind his teeth. That boy, Sasuke, if he was going to be of any real use, he was going to have to learn to cut his ties. He should have left behind the sick if they were slowing him down, not let them drag him into the dust.

This was, of course, assuming that Sasuke was not one of the infected and not the one drawing his last rasping breath in a ditch somewhere.

The man in the mask scratched his head and stood. The boy had his uses. He was honest and expected others to be honest with him. He was so naïve it almost hurt, but that made him wonderfully easy to make dance to whatever tune the masked man liked.

It was hard to find people that willing to be danced with these days and the masked man, whatever his real name was, hiding behind the name of Uchiha Madara, was not finished with his entertainment quite yet.

The man jumped off the hand of the statue and vanished in a swirl of air.

The paperwork in Tsunade's office had been pushed to the edges of the room and Shizune was pressing herself to the wall. When the door finally opened, Naruto took an involuntary step back and Sakura stared.

"Oh, hello, Naruto, you've come back," said Kakashi blithely, raising a hand from his place by Tsunade's desk. Naruto blinked. He wouldn't have recognised him under that red hood and cloak, but the voice coming from the figure was undoubtedly Kakashi's. The man even had his thumb tucked into a small, dog-eared paperback, which he had tried to hide unsuccessfully behind his back.

"Naruto?" Tsunade whirled around, her eyes flashing. She sighed then slammed her hands on the desk. "You little fool! Why the hell have you come back?"

"Give me a break! Why does everybody keep asking me that?" Naruto raised his hands as though warding her off and squeezed into the office. "I came back because I'm a Konoha ninja, of course. This is where I'm supposed to be. You know, helping other Konoha ninjas."

"Hah! Big words. If you think words mean so much, you might make a politician yet," Tsunade snapped, and she turned away from them to face out of the wide window that overlooked the town. "Welcome home, Naruto."

"Thanks," he replied, and then he looked around the room and said, "but, before we get started with the welcome home party and stuff, why are there so many dogs in here?"

Every inch of floorspace was taken up by dog. Twenty or so dogs lay around the room. They snuffled and tracked his movements with yellow and brown eyes. There were big ones, small ones the size of teacups, lithe ones sleek as sardines, and three that were identical and timbered like wolves, sitting at the feet of a woman in chuunin blue. Kakashi was surrounded by his own eight ninken. The smell in the room was a combination of wet dog and dog breath. Naruto wrinkled his nose.

"You got a problem?" said one of Kakashi's ninken. "We're here because the Hokage asked us to be here, unlike you, blondie."

"Now just wait a sec – " Naruto bristled.

"Sakura-chan." The woman in blue stepped forwards. She had eyes that were bloodshot and tired. When she was standing in front of Sakura, she bowed her head. "Thank you for everything you're doing for my brother. Mum told me you were up all night with him yesterday. I'm Hana. Inuzuka Hana."

Naruto saw Sakura's eye slide towards him before she took the woman's hands. "It was the least I could do for a friend. I'll be doing the same tonight. I thought your mum was going to be running the Hellhound Program?"

"She passed it on to me. Mum's more of a warrior, whereas I'm a vet and a medic, so she said it would be more useful if I helped Kakashi-san. And it would stop me moping about the house," said Hana. She reached down to ruffle the head of one of her wolves, or huskies, and it nuzzled its head into her palm.

"To be honest," said Kakashi, "I'm very glad that I'll be working with Hana-san instead of Tsume-san. Forgive me, but your mother – "

Hana laughed. It sounded brittle. "She has that effect on men. Don't worry. Our dad didn't last long in the house either. He ran away with his tail between his legs and his ears chewed off."

The dogs growled in unison and Naruto had a sneaking suspicion they were chuckling at the memory. Tsunade cleared her throat. "Anyway, welcome back, Naruto. I suppose now you're here, we'd best find you some work to do."

"What's the Hellhound Program?" Naruto asked eagerly, looking about the room full of dogs. "Can I help with that?"

"We're going to use dogs to sniff out the ninjas who are latently infected and bring them in before they become infectious and put them in isolation," Tsunade explained and folded her arms across her chest. "Kakashi came up with the idea. He will be teaming up with the Inuzuka clan to train the dogs. Essentially, it has a nice name, but the Hellhound Program is just a specialised dog training project. We were just finalising the details, Naruto, when you and Sakura arrived."

"We'll have our whole clan working on it," said Hana with pride, smiling affectionately at the dogs lolling about her. "It'll be the most efficient sniffer-dog operation ever seen in Konoha."

Naruto crossed his arms. "Guess that means you won't need me then."

"Don't sound so put out, Naruto, there are plenty of things that need doing around here," Tsunade said briskly. She picked up a file on her desk and looked at the cover. "Jiraiya sent me a message saying your chakra speciality makes you incapable of picking up chakra illnesses. Am I correct?"

"Yep." Naruto nodded. "So I won't need one of your stuffy suits either."

"Don't ask, because you won't get a straight answer," Kakashi said to Hana, as she looked about to say something. She closed her mouth, but was clearly more than a little nonplussed.

Tsunade chewed her lip in thought. She looked out of the window again. Beyond the woods edging the town, there were several pillars of smoke winding slowly up to the clouds.

"On behalf of my student," said Kakashi, clearing his throat. "No."

Tsunade coloured red. She looked down at the file in her hand again and came a decision. "You know Hyuuga Neji, don't you, Naruto?"

Neji? Of course Naruto knew Neji. When Naruto nodded vigorously, Tsunade looked pleased. "Good. Then for now you can work with him. He's supposed to do his job in a pair, but his partner died three days ago and according to this report Neji's been trying to do his work solo since."

"What does he do?" Naruto felt a pang of sympathy for his friend.

"He's on the Grey Cross," said Tsunade evasively.

"Okay. What do they do?"

As Tsunade began to fill Naruto in on the details, Sakura crossed the room to Kakashi, picking her way carefully between the bodies of sleeping dogs. Shizune was taking Hana through a series of forms and handing her sheet after sheet of guidelines and checks.

"Sensei," Sakura whispered. Naruto and Tsunade behind her started to raise their voices. "What was Tsunade-san thinking about assigning Naruto to?"

"Burning bodies at the plague pits."

She tried to hide her alarm but failed. Kakashi raised an eyebrow. "Naruto can't be infected by RAMK. He'll be fine no matter how many bodies he handles, and there aren't enough people on the job anyway."

"Why don't we ask the civilians?" Sakura turned over the possibilities. "They don't get sick. They – "

"But they get infected, and most of the men already at the pits are civilians, Sakura. They're volunteers, but we can't expect them to stay charitable for long. Having a ninja alongside them would stop them thinking we're sitting back and making them do all the unpleasant dirty work."

"But they're not – " Sakura started to protest.

"Anyway, the point is, Naruto won't be going there," Kakashi said with finality. "He'll be on the Grey Cross, and he'll be with a friend. It could be worse."

"The Grey Cross isn't much better, Sensei," Sakura retorted.

They watched Naruto and Tsunade arguing over something on a form she was making him fill. In an office piled with looming stacks of paperwork detailing the spiralling health of the sick and dying, Naruto seemed like a bright bird blown in by a hurricane from a far off continent.

"Well," said Kakashi with a shrug, "we'll just have to see what happens."

Tsunade gave Naruto the rest of the day off, which part of him felt somewhat indignant about. Part of him wanted to get stuck in, there and then, and do his bit, but another part of him, the part he would never admit to, least of all in front of Sakura, was grateful for the time off.

Sakura stayed in Tsunade's office to discuss something with her master and Shizune about treatment and new research, something about antibiotics, so Naruto followed Kakashi and Inuzuka Hana out of the room. Until Hana left them in the hospital reception, to go home and gather more members of her clan, Naruto felt as though he was wading through a river of dogs.

"Since it's your first day back, why don't we go for a spot of lunch?" suggested Kakashi, and he flicked his thumb in the direction of a street that Naruto knew very well indeed. "I think I can guess where you'd like to go?"

"That would be fantastic," Naruto agreed, "but aren't you supposed to be training your dogs?"

"I don't need no training," said the ninken with a mane like a Mohawk gruffly, winding its tail about Kakashi's knees.

"That'll start later in the afternoon when Inuzuka-san comes back. Until then, I'm a free man," said Kakashi lightly. He pushed Naruto out of the reception. "Come on. There might never be another chance. Every meal, you've got to think it might be your last."

"That's depressing," Naruto muttered.

"What? I thought you'd be pleased your last meal was a bowl of Ichiraku's tonkotsu special."

Naruto tried to scowl but he found he couldn't. He followed Kakashi out into the street and thought the man looked oddly imposing in his long red robes. Was he still wearing his mask underneath the visor? Kakashi's ninken stayed to mill around the hospital doors and didn't come with them.

The ramen shop was just as he remembered it, or so he thought until he came closer and saw a large sign at the side of the entrance.

BEFORE ENTERING:

PLEASE REMOVE ALL HAZARD ROBES AND VISORS

STEP IN THE DISINFECTANT TRAY
USE THE ALCOHOL HANDWASH

They had a put up a bench outside the shop and a stand like a coat hanger. Kakashi sat down and pulled off his visor. Lazy-eyed, face-masked, silver hair standing on end, Kakashi hung up the visor on the stand. "These visors get pretty stuffy."

"Says the person who covers half his face all day."

Kakashi handed Naruto the bottle of concentrated alcohol without a word.

"Welcome and good day!" called out the usual greeting as they entered, and an old, wonderfully familiar, man looked up. Teuchi was chopping apples. When he saw Naruto, his face shone. "Well, what do you know! Our favourite customer. Come in, come in. Take a seat."

He tossed the apples into the pot of stock bubbling behind him. As Kakashi and Naruto made to sit down, Teuchi set down glasses of water and hot handtowels in front of them.

"Where's Ayame-san, ojisan?" Naruto asked, once the old man had taken their orders.

"She was away with her aunt in Ochiba when Konoha was quarantined. Her aunt decided to keep her there,"Teuchi said, putting on new gloves. "I can manage the shop fine on my own. Only the civilians come, and they don't eat half as much as you ninjas do. Having said that, it does get lonely from time to time."

"Well, I'm back now, so I'll make sure you have company every day!" said Naruto magnanimously, swallowing his water in a gulp.

"Oh yes, forget about the Grey Cross," Kakashi rolled his eyes, "you can do your bit for Konoha by shoring up the small business economy."

Teuchi paused in slicing the char-siu pork. "The Grey Cross? For Naruto?"

"That's right! Believe it!" said Naruto.

"That's brave," remarked Teuchi. He exchanged a glance with Kakashi, then pushed two bowls across the counter. "One tonkotsu with extra nitamago, one soy. I'll leave you two gentlemen to it."

"What did he mean by brave?" Naruto wondered out loud, as Teuchi disappeared into the back of the shop. "Kakashi?"

"He's probably just saying you're brave to come back to Konoha."

Naruto wasn't sure he was entirely convinced. As far as he had heard from Tsunade, the Grey Cross wasn't much different from what Lee was doing – the Grey Cross was the name for the volunteer corps of ninjas who went visiting around houses. What was so brave about that?

He was suddenly aware that Kakashi had stopped slurping his ramen.

"Naruto," said Kakashi, suddenly serious. "Shall I tell you the real reason I dragged you here?"

"You didn't drag me. I wanted to come here – "

"I promised your old teacher, Iruka," Kakashi folded and unfolded his hands on the table, "that when you came back, I would bring you here and eat ramen with you in his stead."

"In his stead? What do you mean?"

Kakashi was silent. Naruto froze. He looked up with wide eyes. The slice of pork slipped from his chopsticks and splashed into the soup.

In Iruka-sensei's stead.

"I don't believe you," Naruto heard his own voice as though at a distance, as though through a glass window. "I can't believe you. No."

"You'd rather nobody ever told you?" Naruto was horrified to hear a tremor of anger in Kakashi's voice. "You'd rather I lied and told you that a number of your friends have all simultaneously and spontaneously gone on a permanent holiday?"

Naruto set down his chopsticks, suddenly feeling shaky. "I didn't say that."

Kakashi hesitated and breathed out slowly. "I'm not angry at you, Naruto. I know I sounded it just then, but I wasn't."

Naruto nodded, because he knew what Kakashi was really angry at. He was angry at the Plague of course, at RAMK, at the smoke in the air from the pits, at the shadow of the sickness that hung over them, at the emptying streets, at the heavy canvas robes that denied ninjas both their individual and professional identity.

"Please tell me, Kakashi-sensei," Naruto said quietly, "who else…who else from the people we know?"

"Yamato," started Kakashi without a pause. "Sai got it very early on. The whole Akimichi family went within a space of three days. Inuzuka Kiba has been in hospital for the past - "

Naruto reached for his ramen bowl. He tipped it up and drank down the soup. His mouth was wobbling and his eyes stung.

He put down the bowl. "That was a bit saltier than usual."

"I'm sure it would be if you're crying into it," said Kakashi. "Teuchi's soup is that good, eh?"

Kakashi turned away from Naruto, tugged down his mask and picked up his bowl too. Naruto remembered a time when a trio of misfits had spent a day trying to see what was behind that mask.

"You're right," Naruto heard Kakashi say. "It is that good."

The machine bleeped quietly next to the bed. Akamaru lifted his head as the entrance of the tent opened up and whined.

"Good boy, Akamaru," said Hana, as she came in. Outside it was getting dark. Medic-nins were lighting lanterns along the rows of tents. "Evening, Sakura-chan."

Sakura looked up. She pulled the stethoscope from out of the earflaps of her visor. "Evening, Hana-san. It's alright. You can bring in your dogs. The other patient won't mind."

The patient was no longer capable of minding. The equipment around him was dark. Sakura was alone in the tent because the other medic-nin had left to find a wagon, or a stretcher. By tomorrow morning, he would either be ash or a specimen for the pathology department.

"They said they'd rather stay outside," Hana replied. She smiled. "You don't want to hear them talk about the smell of death."

"Hana?" Kiba's hand moved across the sheets. He sucked in a deep breath. "Hana? Where's Mum?"

Hana went down to her knees beside him. She exchanged a look with Sakura. "Mum's at home with the pack."

The skin of Kiba's face was taut across his bones. His lips looked too thin. His eyes were hollow, and would have looked huge if they hadn't been closed from weariness. The clan tattoos on his face looked faded.

Hana smoothed back the hair from his forehead. "Your friend Naruto came back today," she told him conversationally.

Kiba frowned. "What? Why?"

Hana shrugged. The frown on Kiba's forehead eased away as he said softly, "He's such a moron."

"Don't we all know it," agreed Sakura, checking something off her list. "You're not doing too badly, Kiba. There's not so much sputum inside of you anymore. Who knows? You might be the first ninja to survive the Plague."

"Yeah," breathed Kiba, opening his fierce, dog-like eyes, "yeah, I might."

"That's right, Kiba," said Hana, taking up his hand in hers. "You might be coming home soon. Sakura-chan's working so hard to take care of you. When you come back, you can help me on my new project. Your sister's got her first big public job. Isn't that crazy?"

"Yeah," Kiba sighed, "yeah, that is crazy. Hana?"

"Yes?"

"I can't feel your hand," he rasped, "I can't even smell Akamaru anymore. I…I'm not as stupid as Naruto. I know what that means."

Hana's breath caught in her throat. She looked up at Sakura, who met her gaze and held it levelly. Sakura hated the Plague and how powerless it made her feel. She had trained as a medic-nin to be useful but the Plague made her redundant. No matter how much effort she put into a patient, the final result was the same. There didn't seem to be any point her being there.

Kiba's breathing hitched.

The machines that Sakura had gathered for her friend went silent.

He didn't cough. He didn't gasp for breath. Blood pooled at the corners of his mouth and trickled quietly down his chin, down the side of his neck, and onto the sheets below.

Akamaru leaped to his feet and began to whine. Sakura exchanged one more look with Inuzuka Hana, who was still clasping her brother's limp hand. Then Sakura reached up and brushed her hand lightly over Kiba's face, closing his eyes.

Somewhere in the forests, four young ninjas had set up camp in a cave. One was sitting in the entrance, looking up at the stars, feeling his chest fill with something cold and wet, and trying desperately to tell himself that it was the cold stopping him from feeling the ends of his fingers, and the cold that was sapping his strength. He had heard the birds talking. They had talked about smoke rising from holes in the ground. They had talked about fear, and an invisible hawk that was flying amongst the flocks of men.

Another was resting against his sword, sleeping apparently fitfully, but he flinched every time the one on the floor breathed.

The one on the floor was breathing. Just.

The last one was standing in the tree above them, looking back in the direction of a town he had left behind and sworn to destroy. The wind blew against his face. It was cold. Perhaps he smelled smoke, but he wasn't sure.

Chapter Text

Air stirred. Something brushed past him on its way towards the entrance. Suigetsu opened one eye, but whatever it was had already gone.

He stretched, yawned, and leaned his head against the cool handle of the blade in his hands. It was still the early hours of dawn. There was a thin film of condensation on the metal and the air was fresh.

From the back of the cave came a loud cough and a shuddering breath.

"For crying out loud, Karin, just chuck it up already!"

"Shut up, Suigetsu," she croaked back. Karin raised her hand and stuck up her middle finger at him. She was lying under her longcoat, with Suigetsu's longcoat rolled up and pillowed under her head. "Go outside. You're making my head ache just being in here."

"You know what? I think I'll do just that."

Suigetsu pushed himself to his feet, then stopped, and suddenly looked wide-eyed around the cave. His eyes fell to the ground, where a line of footsteps curved their way out of the cave, just grazing the spot where he had been sleeping. Had not Suigetsu been a ninja and trained in how ninjas walked, he would have missed them. They were light and barely scuffed the dust.

Suigetsu dashed to the mouth of the cave. He stared out at the pines and the grass, but there was no trace of a ninja's passing. The only sounds coming from the forest were birdsong and creaking branches.

"Sasuke's gone."

Juugo was leaning against the cave mouth with his cloak wrapped about him against the chill. The man was shivering.

"He's gone?" Suigetsu repeated blandly. "Where?"

Juugo squinted up at him. "He's not the kind who says."

Suigetsu looked around the clearing one more time then sighed. He stabbed the blade down into the soil. "So, he's finally gone and left us. Hah!" he laughed. "Great! That suits me fine! I'll start getting my things together then. It's about time this band of crazies split up."

"He'll be coming back."

Suigetsu narrowed his eyes. "How do you know?"

Juugo indicated something in the cave with a jut of his chin. "He left his chokuto behind."

There was a large flat stone near the cave entrance, and Sasuke's blade was tucked beneath, bundled up in his Akatsuki cloak. Juugo coughed gently into his fist and closed his eyes. Suigetsu frowned. "You think he'll come back for that?"

"Sasuke's officially a rogue ninja. It would be dangerous to leave behind traces of camp," Juugo said levelly. "And he wouldn't leave behind clothing that could be used to track him by scent."

Juugo burst into a stream of coughs. He turned away from Suigetsu and buried his face in his hands. Suigetsu glared at him in disgust. "What the hell is wrong with you and Karin anyway?"

Juugo wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "I'm not sure I want to know."

"Well, I hope you both die," said Suigetsu gleefully, beaming at Juugo. "Out of everybody I've ever met, I hate the two of you the most, you and Karin. I hate this whole freak troop. I especially hope you die, Juugo."

Juugo scowled but Suigetsu could see he was smiling. "You're going to watch over the two of us and make sure we do, eh?"

"Yep," said Suigetsu, sitting down at the cave entrance. "Until Sasuke gets back, I'm going to sit here, and get my full entertainment out of seeing you two dying, slow, boring deaths."

It wasn't as though they actually were going to die, Suigetsu told himself, as Juugo took another wheezing breath. It was just a cold or a flu that Karin had picked up from one of the towns they had passed through to get food. He'd probably caught it himself by now. His chest was feeling a tight and he was clearing his throat more often than he usually did.

Suigetsu cleared his throat then lightly coughed into his hand.

The light of dawn filtered down through the trees. Inside the dark cave, Karin tasted blood in her mouth. She told herself that she must have bitten her tongue in the night. She had to hold out, she urged herself, she had to hold out. She refused to die at a time when Sasuke wasn't there.

The Grey Cross meeting point was outside the Hokage's office in a large white tent. As Naruto waited outside, twiddling his thumbs behind his back, he noted the appearance of the people going past him. There were a lot of chuunin blues and several jounin reds, but what struck him most was the number of people there from the Hyuuga clan. There were blank silver eyes everywhere he looked.

Naruto was beginning to wonder if he had accidentally walked into a clan meeting when a voice called his name. He looked up to see a tall figure in red coming towards him and waved, "Hey, Neji! Long time no see!"

Neji's eyes were about as expressive as pebbles, but Naruto could tell that, just for a moment, Neji had smiled. "It's been a while, Naruto, but we will have to save the catching up for later. Follow me."

Inside the tent were rows of tables with a small queue of ninjas at each one. At the sight of Naruto without a cloak and a visor there were some stares and pointing fingers. Naruto had expected that. Tsunade had sent round a message to the leader of the Grey Cross explaining that he had chosen to opt-out of the hazard suit and visor. What he hadn't expected was the looks of pity instead of the hostility he usually garnered.

"Why are they looking at me like that?" he whispered to Neji as they got in line at the third desk from the entrance.

Neji glanced over his shoulder. "They pity you for being so stupid and reckless that you're dashing towards an early death."

"Hey, easy on the stupid!" retorted Naruto.

"Ignore them, Naruto," said Neji, turning back to face the front. "They'll give you space once you start working. Space comes from respect."

The man at the counter was a silver-eyed Hyuuga. He gave out a small file to every pair that came to the desk and handed one to Neji when they reached him.

"Ah, a new member," the man said, when he caught sight of Naruto. "Wait a moment."

He leaned under the desk and fumbled in a box. When he came up, he was holding a strip of grey linen in his hands. "Here's your armband, young man."

"Thanks." Naruto took the linen and stared at it. "Hey, Neji?"

"What is it?" Neji stopped flicking through the file and looked up.

"This cross symbol, isn't this the Hyuuga Caged Bird seal?"

"Let me guess. The Hokage told you everything about the Grey Cross, but it's all gone in one ear and out the other?" As Naruto nodded frantically, Neji closed his eyes and sighed. He held out a wicker basket. It was the same kind as the one Lee was carrying on his back the other day. "Get this strapped on. I'll humour you just this once."

Naruto felt cheated. He had thought the Grey Cross was a kind of goodwill service. He had thought they went knocking to check up on locked in ninja families, see how they were coping, be a morale booster and reassure them that the outside world still cared about them. To be honest, he had found it hard to imagine Hyuuga Neji on such a corps, but who knew how people had changed since the Plague had begun.

As they walked through Konoha, Neji told Naruto a very different story.

"Do you know about the Runners?" Neji began, as they began to come out of the main town and into the residential area. The streets were quiet. "I take that as a no. They're volunteers distributing packages of rice and amenities, like soap and toothpaste, to the locked in ninja families."

"Like Rock Lee," Naruto said, after a thought.

"Yes," Neji confirmed with a nod, "like Lee. And Guy-sensei too."

The first requirement for the family to declare themselves locked in was to install a flap at the bottom of their front door, like a cat flap or a letter slot. When the Runner arrived, he would ring the doorbell, push his package inside the house, and then listen for signs of life on the other side. If he heard no response or got no indication that the parcel had been collected, the Runner would paint a large grey cross over the door.

"That's where we come in," explained Neji. He took out the file they had been given in the tent and held it up for Naruto to see. "This is a list of houses marked with a cross by Runners in this district. At the beginning, the Grey Cross was made up fifty percent by my clan. We would travel – one Hyuuga and one non-Hyuuga – around the marked houses, and use the byakugan to see inside the houses of the potentially infected family and find out what the situation was. The byakugan could identify ninjas in the second or third stage of the disease from changes in their chakra system, and find out who was alive or dead."

If the family was dead, the Grey Cross ninja would break into the house and prepare the bodies for wagon collection. If they were dying, they would make a report, take it to the hospital and put them on a list for the traveling medic-nins to visit. If the Runner had made a mistake, then the Grey Cross ninja could happily paint over the mark on the door and move on.

Once the Hyuuga started succumbing to the Plague, the Grey Cross began to employ any ninja with talent for sensing chakra, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find recruits. Neji had heard terrible stories from his cousins about what they had found behind the doors of locked in families. No doubt those stories had filtered into the awareness of the Konoha populace. That was unfortunate.

Neji gripped the strap of his basket. Naruto, training up in the Myoboku Mountains, had not heard about what Grey Cross ninjas came across on a nearly weekly basis. Neji wanted to feel bad that Tsunade had made use of Naruto's ignorance, but he couldn't and he didn't.

"Are you listening, Naruto?" he snapped.

Naruto looked round from reading one of the posters pinned on the wall. "Sure I am."

"Liar," said Neji shortly. "Try repeating what I just said."

Naruto sucked in a deep breath. "The Cross uses chakra sensors to see into locked in houses to find out if people are dead then break in to get the body out."

Neji shot Naruto a look of intense irritation. They came to a block of flats. "Good," Neji conceded, "and the official term for a member of the Grey Cross is a - ?"

"Hyuuga?"

"A Marksman," Neji intoned. "Because we follow the marks the Runners leave. Remember it. Now before we come to the first house on our list, any questions?"

"Neji," Naruto started somewhat awkwardly, as Neji checked the address in front of him with the one in the file. "If there are a lot of Hyuugas in the Grey Cross, is Hinata a Marksman as well?"

At the mention of Hinata's name, Neji flinched. His grip on the address sheet became white-knuckled. "She isn't a Marksman," he said, after a hesitation. "Hinata's at the main house."

Naruto felt a giddy rush of relief that Hinata was alive, but there was something in Neji's tone that made him ask, "How come? Is she alright?"

"She's perfectly healthy," said Neji, fixing Naruto with a steely glare that dared him to argue. "Thanks to the Konoha elders."

The Konoha elders had been against the Grey Cross being set up from the very instant it had been proposed. They feared the political influence the Hyuuga clan would gain from it. There was speculation that the Hyuugas would develop the Cross into their own private army and take advantage of the chaos of the Plague to seize control of Konoha. It was same fear the elders had had of the Uchiha clan.

On the other hand, every ninja was a weapon to its village and with the mighty sharingan now few and far between, the only great doujutsu left was the byakugan of the Hyuuga. The Konoha elders wanted to preserve it for the sake of Konoha's security. If they had had their way, they would have locked up the entire Hyuuga clan away from contact with the sick.

After a meeting between the Hyuuga clan head and the elders, they came to a compromise – only half of the Hyuuga clan would be involved in forming the Grey Cross. The other half would be locked away and protected in the main Hyuuga house. It was chosen by lucky ballot. Neji still remembered the moment he opened his slip of paper and the moment Hinata had opened hers.

"We Hyuuga Marksmen are exiled from our own clan effectively," Neji said bitterly, as they climbed the steps to the fourth floor. "We sleep in the Grey Cross tent at night. It's where we get our meals too. We'll be heading back there for lunch after this."

"At least Hinata's protected, Neji," Naruto remarked.

Neji snorted. "One of the first things you learn as a Marksman – you can lock yourself in all you like. It won't work for long."

"God, Neji! You make it sound like there's no point even trying. You're sounding like the destiny bore you were at the chuunin exams," Naruto cried out, throwing his hands up in exasperation.

"The Plague is inevitable for every ninja here. Your fate is sealed the moment your throat begins to tickle and your fingertips freeze. When Tenten found out I'd been balloted into the Grey Cross, she signed up to be my partner. Her father had wanted her to go into technical support with him to help them make more equipment for the hospital. She would've been away from all the sick and the dead if only she hadn't found out about the Ballot result." Neji's face twisted beneath the visor with unreadable emotions. "I still don't understand why she signed up to be my partner, but…Everybody hoped she would pull through. I tried to hope as well, and I learned that hope in plaguetime has an inevitable end in disappointment."

The first thing Kakashi did was divide up his own ninken and distribute them amongst the Inuzuka's dogs. Whatever the Inuzukas said about being able to understand their partners, and their partners them, it wasn't particularly helpful if Kakashi couldn't talk to them, so his own ninken would act as interpreters.

Inuzuka Hana had got together some of the more patient members of her clan, the less wild, the more steadfast, to help them. Between them, they chivvied the huge pack of milling dogs into eight smaller teams.

Next, Kakashi had to teach them the smell of the infected, and for that he was going to take them one group at a time amongst the hospital tents. He introduced the dogs to wet cough patients in stage two, and asked them to describe what they smelled. He took the dogs to the patients in stage three, which was the easiest stage to identify – the dogs bristled at the smell of blood. Many of the Inuzuka dogs cowered as well, saying they could smell Approaching Death, which, no matter how hard Kakashi tried to get them to describe, they could never do so.

"It's navy and cold, with iron and…slowness," one dog apparently said, wrinkling its nose. "It's like a butterfly," said another.

Finally, he took the packs of dogs to visit a group of civilian volunteers, who had been tested positive for a latent infection. The dogs snuffled at their hands. Their whiskers tickled their palms and many of the civilians burst into fits of giggles. The sound was somewhat jarring to Kakashi's ears in the midst of hacking coughs and gurgling breaths, so he quickly and quietly ducked out of the tent.

While he was standing outside and Hana took over the handling of the dogs, there was a gentle padding of paws, and Pakkun the crumpled-looking pug appeared beside him.

"Hello, Pakkun. Enjoying the training?" Kakashi said wryly, as he bent down to scratch the dog between his ears.

"Sure I'm enjoying the training," Pakkun deadpanned, before fixing Kakashi with an expression so serious Kakashi thought he was about to get bitten. "I've been thinking about this disease sickness plague thing, Kakashi…"

"What about it?"

"When you took us into the room with the third stage patients, I thought, just maybe, but, by the time we got round to the latents, I knew I was right," Pakkun continued cryptically. He locked eyes with his master. "I've smelled this sickness before, boss."

"It's a new strain, Pakkun. You can't have."

"A new strain? That must be why it smells a whole lot more vicious than before. "

Kakashi knelt down beside the dog and locked eyes with him. "You might have smelled the old strain then. Where do you think you smelled it?"

"The place where Sasuke fought with his brother," Pakkun said. "The rain had washed most of the traces away, but there was some of Uchiha Itachi's blood left on the ground. I remember it now. It was that. Uchiha Itachi's blood. That guy was infected with the old type bacteria, and well into the third stage of it. He must have been chucking up blood all through the fight. He was probably dying where he stood."

"Uchiha Itachi had the same illness as Kimimaro? Now that is interesting," said Kakashi to himself. He stroked his chin. All of a sudden, he felt as though he saw something. A flash of inspiration. A bolt of genius. Could it possibly be that….?

"Pakkun?" Kakashi said, feeling a strange electrical thrill of energy pass through him. "Tell Hana to repeat what I did with all the other packs and that I'll be back to test all the dogs later."

"Sure thing, boss. Where are you going?"

Kakashi's eye sparkled. "To visit Tsunade and tell her just how wonderful a ninken you are."

The name under the flat number read 'Tsuruya'. Beside the door was a small window of marbled glass. A lace blind had been pulled across it. Neji tried ringing the doorbell. There was no answer. Naruto tried ringing it three times more, but not a single sound came from the flat.

Above the doorway was a grey-white cross. The paint had run and dribbled down the face of the door, all the way to the bottom.

"Ready for this, Naruto?" Neji murmured out of the corner of his mouth. "Your first marked house."

"I came back to help. I have to be ready."

Neji closed his eyes. When he opened them, the blood vessels around his eyes were bulging: "Byakugan!"

He stared through the door. After a minute of hearing nothing but his own heart, drumming as though against the back of his mouth, Naruto tapped Neji on the shoulder. "See anything?"

Neji ignored him. He dropped down to the ground and pushed open the parcel flap at the base of the door to peer inside the flat. The blood instantly drained from his face.

"We need to break down this door immediately!"

Chapter Text

The door fell into the corridor with a bang. Neji lowered his palms and stepped forwards, walking over the door with Naruto close at his heels. The door rocked under their feet. There was a heady sourness in the air that burned his nostrils and seemed to cling to the back of his mouth.

Clenching his teeth against rising bile, Naruto stopped to look around the hall. Framed bromides on the wall showed a smiling family of four. Pictures done in colouring pencil drew Dad in a jounin flak jacket and Mum with a kunai between her teeth. The floor was so well polished that the dirt from Neji's boots stood out like the grease of fingerprints on glass.

There was the sound of a door being opened, a weighty pause, and then Neji reappeared at the end of the corridor. He came quickly toward Naruto with stiff, hurried steps, breathing through his nose.

"Neji – "

"Just one moment," came the shaky reply. Neji continued down the hall, back over the door and stopped outside in the landing. He tore off his visor from his head and gasped for air.

There were two reasons why Neji cut his hair. It didn't take a genius to realise that the Hyuuga clan traditional long hair wasn't practical for daily life under the visor. The Hyuuga clansmen in the Grey Cross, however, liked to give an additional reason – they said it displayed their commitment to their work and their acceptance of effective exile. Neji ran his hand over the inch of thick brown thatch left behind by the scissors, urged himself to focus. He breathed in deep through his nose and closed his eyes.

Naruto came back to the flat entrance. "What's in the back room?"

"Leave that to me," Neji said. "You go to kitchen, Naruto."

"What? Why?"

"There's someone still alive in there."

Naruto began to grin before suddenly frowning. "I don't even know if that's a good thing anymore – "

"Talk to him, check if he's sick and find out what happened. I'll come and find you when I need you." Neji pulled the red visor back over his face, squared his shoulders and headed into the flat again. "Don't come until then."

Naruto had a sneaking suspicion that Neji was trying to be kind. The thought was so odd he found himself obeying his orders without a word. He would admit it freely – he felt like a lost explorer who had stumbled into a river so fast he could barely keep his footing. All he could do was wade downstream with the flow and hope things on the bank would begin to look more familiar.

Pushing through an archway strung with beads, Naruto found himself in a neat little kitchen.

At first he thought it was empty. He listened, listened carefully, and heard wispy breathing from the other side of the kitchen table. A small boy was sprawled on the floor next to a fallen chair. Naruto hurried to his side.

"Hey? Hey, kid?" Naruto tapped the boy on his face to get some kind of response. It worked. The boy's eyes flickered. "Come on. Focus on me. Look. Don't be scared. I'm not sick, I promise. What happened to you?"

The boy whispered something. Naruto leaned in closer. "Wanted to get out…wanted the house key…" the boy murmured. His voice was hoarse and his lips were cracked.

Naruto looked up. There was a small shelf on the wall. Naruto raised his arm, felt around the shelf until his fingers touched something cold and metallic and pulled it off - a key strung to a bell and a spoon-shaped amulet. Seeing as the knocked over chair was just underneath it, the boy must have been trying to reach the shelf and overbalanced.

"How long have you been lying on the floor?" The boy flicked up two fingers. "Two days? Did you hurt something?"

"Both my ankles," the boy whispered. "But I only fell because…no food…no water..."

The beads in the archway rattled and the boy screamed. It was the first sound louder than a whisper he had made since Naruto found him and it obviously hurt, because the boy stopped quickly with a whimper. He was staring past Naruto at the silver-eyed man in blood red hazard gear who had stepped into the room. Then the boy's eyes rolled upwards in his head and he fell back, unconscious.

Neji raised an eyebrow and seemed bemused. "I think that's the first time I've been screamed at by a child."

"The kid just fainted at the sight of you," Naruto said incredulously.

"Locked in children tend to react badly. A lot of families locked themselves in before the council developed the hazard cloaks after all."

Naruto looked at Neji and couldn't resist a smile. "You are so taking that personally."

"He's dehydrated, starved and probably infected with the Plague. Of course he'd faint," Neji said brusquely but there was a thin blue vein twitching in his temples. He glanced around the kitchen then turned to Naruto. "I've finished examining the other room, so the next step is preparing the bodies. Since it's your first day, you'll just be watching and learning."

"Sure, but what about this little guy?" Naruto pointed at the white-faced boy on the floor.

"Bring him. I doubt he'll be waking up any time before he reaches the hospital."

Wrapping his tracksuit top around the boy, Naruto gingerly lifted him up in his arms and followed Neji out of the kitchen. The smell of decaying flesh intensified when they reached the door of the master bedroom.

There were three bodies in the room – pale and waxy, frozen in the positions they had died in, their skin softening and the gums beginning to recede from their teeth. When Neji had first opened the door, flies had filled the room in a scintillating cloud of blue and green. The mother lay in the bed with her eyes closed. She had black lines of blood at the corners of her mouth and when Neji tapped her chest, he heard a gentle gloop of fluid inside. Her cause of death was obvious, but the father and the older brother lying at the foot of her bed were a mystery. The older brother held a training kunai with its blade buried in the soft part of his father's throat. His face and shoulders were black with blood. How the older brother had died was answered when Neji pried open the father's fist and found two vials – one stoppered, one opened, and the stoppered one filled with small black pills the size and shape of lentils.

At lunch Neji pulled out the stoppered vial and pushed it across the table for Sakura to look at. Naruto and Neji had gone back to the Grey Cross tent for lunch after dropping off the Tsuruya boy at the hospital and Sakura joined them at the canteen bench. She had been curious to hear about Naruto's first morning on service, but when she asked she regretted it almost immediately. Naruto seemed shell-shocked.

"It's konseigan - the poison Shikamaru was talking about," Neji told Sakura as Naruto finished his curry. "I found a letter in the flat, signed by the Sixth Repentance, with instructions on how to use it."

"What do you mean by the Sixth Repentance?" Naruto asked, his spoon stopping on the way to his mouth.

Sakura sipped her barley tea and looked grim. "They're an end of the world cult, Naruto. We don't really know much about them, but they've been gaining a huge amount of influence in the past week alone. We only found out about them because of the deaths they've caused. The Sixth Repentance think that chakra was something stolen from the gods, that the Plague is a punishment for that sin and that this is the final retribution before the ninja world ends."

Naruto spluttered on his food. "That's crazy. I don't get why people would believe any of that."

"They target the vulnerable and the locked in families are horribly vulnerable. They only know what's happening outside of their houses from the occasional Runner who stops to talk. The Sixth Repentance deliver this poison, the konseigan, to the locked in families, and they tell them that the world is ending and that the gods are out to kill anyone who uses chakra." Sakura tapped the butt of her paper cup on the surface of the table as Naruto stared. "The Sixth Repentance say parents should kill their children before they start using their chakra systems properly, then the gods will forgive them and the children won't go to Hell even if their parents do. If the parents truly want to repent, they said that the parents should take their own lives as well."

Naruto surged up from his seat. "Are you actually serious? Suicide and murder? When everybody's trying so hard to just live, there are people trying to make people kill themselves?"

"Some people don't need to be made," Neji remarked pensively. "The Cross is only famous because of the number of whole family suicides we've walked into. When they'd rather die of any way but the Plague, they make their exits."

"Most Plague deaths are very peaceful," Sakura said, when Naruto looked aghast, "but there have been a couple of very high profile cases where the death was…very bloody, and looked painful."

Naruto's knees give way and he fell back into his seat. He felt worn and old. "What is it with you guys?" he sighed, rubbing his face with his hands. "Kakashi decided to drop a tonne of horrible things on me yesterday lunch. Can't a guy eat his lunch any more without a side order of morbid stuff to bulk out his meal? Is there nothing else to talk about apart from how much Plague sucks?"

Sakura pursed her lips, thought for a moment, and then hated herself for saying, "On that note, Inuzuka Hana wanted me to tell you that you've both been invited to dinner at the Inuzuka house. Kiba's wake. Everybody will be there, apart from Hinata-chan, of course."

Naruto dropped his head to the table. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

Neji eyes flickered down to his new partner then went back to the vial of poison in the centre of the table. "Pull yourself together," Neji said, glaring at the konseigan, "we've got four more houses to get through this afternoon. After that you'll be helping me put together our reports. We're Marksmen. We don't have time to laugh or cry."

Near Yotsuba village was a system of caves that none of the villagers dared to approach. Once, in those caves, thirty warriors had been cornered by their enemy and in their final desperate moments each and every one had taken his own life. Now their grudging spirits haunted the hill still, roosting in the caves during the day and hunting the woods at night. Nobody who went to those caves or woods, the Yotsuba villagers whispered, ever came back.

Which was why those caves made the perfect hideout, thought Kabuto, as he made his way back from another burnt out laboratory. The villagers were, in one sense, very accurate. The warriors had died in the caves – he stumbled across a new skeleton, bleached and grinning in old leather armour, almost every day – but Kabuto didn't believe in ghosts, and even if he did he wasn't afraid of them. His life floating between different nations and blending with different natives had turned him into a kind of ghost himself. He felt right at home in the caves of the Yotsubaoka Thirty.

He trudged through the undergrowth, swearing and muttering under his breath. Curse those Konoha ninjas. Most of his lifetime's work had gone up in smoke and flames. They had gotten more earnest since the start of the Plague, perhaps mindful of its origins from Laboratory Twenty Nine. The only paper that he could extract from the ruins he had visited was about squalamine use in Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva treatment, but with Kimimaro dead that line of research was essentially redundant and, more specifically, it wasn't the research he was looking for.

He was so engrossed in his muttering and cursing that he did not notice the man in the mask sitting over the entrance of the cave.

"Yakushi Kabuto."

Kabuto started and looked up. He wondered what would have happened if he had been a Yotsuba villager. He might have mistaken the man for a warrior ghost and died of fright. His lips curved up into a sly smile. "To what do I owe the pleasure, man who goes by the name of Uchiha Madara?"

"Business," the masked man said, regarding Kabuto down from his perch on a rocky ledge. "I have come to hire your services."

"As a spy, medic, or assassin?"

"As a man of science." The masked man's eye shone red. "I want to make a cure for the Plague. I am looking for a man to perform the research and to do it for me privately and exclusively."

Kabuto snorted. "I didn't realise that even Uchiha Madara quivers at the sound of a little wet cough."

"The Plague is disrupting my plans," the masked man said, chuckling with amusement but Kabuto had a feeling he wasn't amused so much by Kabuto's words, but by Kabuto's attempt at posturing. "The cure will help me get back on track. Your master worked on developing the bacteria. What man is more fitting to develop the cure for the illness than his apprentice? And you must know something of the research your master carried out."

"No doubt you already know that I was only taking care of Kimimaro, not studying him. I know very little of the strains Orochimaru developed from his illness. That was one of my master's pet projects," Kabuto raised his hands and sighed, "and the main files on Sasuke are buried under rock and rubble. Without those files or the boy himself, there is very little I can do, and with him being one of your favourite toys I doubt you'd be happy to let him go."

The masked man's legs dangling over the side of the ledge stilled. "What has Sasuke got to with anything?"

Kabuto returned the man's cold, bright gaze. "If you want me to carry out the research, then you will have to give him to me. If you are not prepared to do that, Uchiha Madara, then I'm afraid you shall have to look elsewhere." He pulled his brown travellers hood over his face and adjusted his glasses. "Good luck with that search!"

A breeze rushed past him and suddenly the masked man was before him, blocking Kabuto's path.

"If you can explain why you need him and justify it suitably," the masked man said, his eye gleaming, "you might find the boy yours, Yakushi Kabuto."

In Tsunade's office, Danzo was trembling with rage, so much so that the two civilian thugs he had hired to be bodyguards were wondering whether they should step in. They were there to protect Danzo from harm, after all, and attempting to attack Tsunade was near certain death.

"You destroyed them?" he whispered, his voice low and guttural. "The most powerful weapons for biological warfare were in our grasp and you burnt them?"

"With a katon jutsu," Tsunade told him playfully. "All the little vials went pop, pop, pop in the flames."

Danzo pushed back the chair and surged up like a cloud from a volcano. "You will regret this, Tsunade," he said. "The Mizukage has already announced cases of RAMK in the fishing villages closest to our borders and the Raikage and Tsuchikage have expressed disappointment with our quarantine measures. Soon they'll decide that Konoha is to blame for the disease and when that happens…" Danzo took a handful of dog biscuits from Tsunade's desk and crunched it in his fist, allowing the crumbs to fall onto her reports. "We will expect you to take full responsibility, Tsunade."

Tsunade threw back her head and laughed. "I am touched by your conviction that I will live to see the day when the Plague ends. I am touched, I really am."

Danzo snarled and raised his hand when a knock sounded at the door. Kakashi opened it and peered inside. "Tsunade, are you busy?"

"Not anymore," Tsunade said cheerfully, raising an eyebrow at Danzo. "Lord Danzo was just on his way out. Thank you so much for your advice, Danzo. It really was invaluable."

"Always willing to be of service to our lady Hokage," Danzo said silkily, bowing his head. He swept out of the room without another word, his civilian bodyguards jogging to keep up with him.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Tsunade scowled and slumped over her desk. "Why do conversations with that man always have to be so exhausting? You know what I want right now, Kakashi? I want a beer, and a pack of cards, and a lovely big roulette board spinning in front of me with the little white ball falling exactly where it's supposed to fall. How's the Hellhound Program?"

Kakashi slouched into the chair Danzo had vacated and pulled off his visor. "One of my ninken, Pakkun, came up with something rather interesting."

Tsunade raised her head. "Go on then."

Kakashi told her what Pakkun had told him, about Uchiha Itachi, and how he had been in the late stages of kimimarosis when Sasuke had fought him.

"So like Kimimaro, Itachi was infected with the old strain and it developed into the full blown disease," Tsunade said once he had finished, putting her thumb and forefinger to her chin in thought. "It makes sense. The disease developed from the infection when chakra use was accompanied by a physical transformation. Uchiha Itachi used his Sharingan and his eyes were constantly transforming. Whenever he switched between the Mangekyo, the triple tomoe, and his normal eyes, the bacteria would have proliferated, but why is that of any importance now?"

"Because it is likely that he infected Uchiha Sasuke with the old strain of bacteria during their fight," Kakashi replied and he leaned back in the seat. "M. kimimarosis doesn't cause a disease at all if the ninja's chakra use doesn't need a physical change. Sasuke uses his Sharingan - He might be starting to show the effects of the old type of disease. Now, from what little I learnt of microbiology from that fascinating board room meeting the other day, this could be of some use to you?"

"Of some use? What I would give for a living sample of the old strain!" Tsunade cried, thumping the desk with her fist. "It would be safer to handle than RAMK. We'd be able to do real research on its pathological action. We may even be able to develop a vaccine. By the gods, I would kill for a sample of MK!"

Her eyes fell on Kakashi sitting smugly in the chair. "Out with it. What do you want, Kakashi?"

"Permission to leave the village with a team of ninjas, of course." Kakashi's eyes sparkled. He fiddled with the edge of his red cloak and steepled his fingers together. "To find and bring back Uchiha Sasuke to Konoha for research purposes. Oh, and can I just mention that my ninken Pakkun is wonderful? I did say I would."

Not long before sunset, Suigetsu pricked his ears. He heard the sound of something big crashing through the undergrowth. It must have been a civilian. Any ninja who didn't make a habit of moving without a sound quickly would quickly find himself face down in a pool of his own blood.

He stood up from the fire he had lit to warm the cave. Voices floated out from the dark.

"I beg you, please, let me go. Take me back to my village – "

A small man, greying and bespeckled was shoved roughly into the clearing. He was shivering and rubbing his arms and covered in cuts and scratches. He looked behind, squeaked, and hurried forward. Sasuke followed him into the clearing with a kunai in his hand. He had made the man run through the forest, herded him forward with his kunai like a cattle prod.

The man saw Suigetsu by the fire and stopped running. He swallowed and, turning to Sasuke, suddenly said, "If I do as you wish, you'll let me go back to my village, won't you?"

Sasuke gave one short nod. He turned to Suigetsu. "Karin and Juugo?"

"In the cave," Suigetsu answered and pointed at the man. "Who's he?"

"A doctor from Ageha."

Suigetsu leaned on his sword, looked between Sasuke and the doctor, and whistled. "You kidnapped a doctor from one of the villages just to check up on those two?"

Sasuke led the doctor into the cave, and muttered over his shoulder. "They're useful to me. That is all. Don't think of this in any other way."

"Sure," said Suigetsu breezily. He gulped down a mouthful of water from his flask and stared at Sasuke's back, standing in the entrance of the cave as he watched the doctor examine Karin and Juugo. "How are you feeling by the way?"

Sasuke looked slowly round. His face was set in its usual blank mask. "Fine." He hesitated, then asked, "And you?"

"Never better," Suigetsu lied, holding back the dry cough.

Sasuke narrowed his eyes then turned his attention back to the doctor. "Good."

"What about Madara's orders?" Suigetsu asked him. "What are we going to do about catching the Eight-tails? At this rate, we're never even going to make the border of the Land of Lightning until autumn."

"We continue on," Sasuke said simply.

Suigetsu scoffed and shook his head. "Thought you my say something like that."

The doctor soon finished. He came out of the cave, wiping his hands on his handkerchief and his face pallid. When he reached Sasuke, he fell to his knees and lowered his head until the back of his neck was exposed.

"What are you doing?" said Sasuke coldly.

"Your companions have the Plague," the doctor said. His hands on his knees were shaking. They twisted the fabric of his trousers. "I can do nothing for them. I am sorry, but now that I have done as you wished, please, I beg you, kill me here."

"Plague? What plague?" Suigetsu demanded. He rounded on Sasuke. "You've got a real talent for picking up the freaks with death wishes, haven't you? What kind of nutjob is this guy?"

"A doctor of Ageha who was refusing to treat plague victims," Sasuke said, taking up his chokuto from under the flat rock and unsheathing it with barely a whisper. "I don't know about any plague. I heard he was sitting around at home, so I imagined he could do with some exercise."

That was why Sasuke had driven him forward at blade-point instead of casting him under a genjutsu with the Tsukuyomi, Suigetsu realised suddenly. The doctor was still kneeling on the ground. Sasuke stood over him with his sword in hand.

"There is no point for a doctor to see victims of the Plague," the doctor stammered, and he gazed up into Sasuke's eyes. "There is no cure. There is no treatment. There is only infection, and spread, and death. There is no place for doctors in that. And now, thanks to you, stranger with a blade, I am infected. The least you can do for me is to end my life now before I can go on to infect others."

"There is no place for doctors in ensuring the comfort of their patients, in reassuring their relatives, in helping people who don't know what the hell is going on with their bodies understand what is happening to them?" Sasuke's face twisted angrily and the tip of the chokuto touched the base of the doctor's neck. "You call yourself a doctor?"

"I call myself a father!" the doctor snapped, his cheeks quivering. "That is all that is left for me now. I have nothing but my wife and my daughter, and I will protect them with my life. Here, right now, I demand that you kill me. Use that blade, because I refuse to take this foul pestilence back to my family and see my daughter die."

"You think your family will thank you for dying for them?" Sasuke snarled, standing over doctor with his eyes blazing red. "You think self-sacrifice is honourable? Plague or sacrifice, you will be dead. Death is death. Your family will never know your real intentions."

"Yeah, because, if you die out here, we're not going back to your family to tell them about all this," Suigetsu said with a mirthless grin.

"I'm infected!" the doctor roared, spit flying from mouth. "I can't go back to them -"

Sasuke raised his blade and brought the pommel crashing down on the back of the man's head. The doctor's eyes flashed open, then he exhaled and pitched forward unconscious onto the ground.

"And the subject of payment?" Kabuto continued, clearing his throat when he had finished his explanation. They had shaken hands. Kabuto's palm itched from the masked man's touch.

"Is not Sasuke enough?"

"Sasuke is a necessary resource. You could give him to me, but it doesn't mean I have to apply my skills to him. I could simply sit and drink tea and keep him as a pet. To buy my skills, I would need something else," Kabuto said, watching the masked man carefully. He was gambling on the man's desperation to carry out his plan to bend to his request, but there was sweat behind Kabuto's ears. His skin was prickling. Every hair of his body was singing that the man before him was mad and dangerous.

Uchiha Madara straightened his shoulder and held out his arms. A wind whipped about them, picking up the fallen leaves, and when it cleared there was a large dark shape in his arms. "Is this sufficient payment, Yakushi Kabuto?"

Kabuto breathed in sharply and dropped the basket he was carrying. He laughed. He laughed so loud his voice echoed in the caves of the Thirty Dead. "I do believe that would be sufficient. Yes."

Chapter Text

When they finished their rounds, Neji led Naruto back to the same tent where they had collected their files in the morning and started to show him how to fill out the reports. He asked Naruto to cross-check details, sign the reports to show they had both witnessed each other doing their work as a Marksman honourably (without stealing from the houses of the dead and the ill, maltreating the bodies, or refusing to help the needy) and then got Naruto to copy out the report on the Tsuruya flat. Neji pursed his lips at Naruto's crabby handwriting, as opposed to his neat, rounded symbols, but said nothing and rolled up the report to tuck into his cloak.

It had felt like one of the longest days of Naruto's life, but thankfully the four houses in the afternoon were nothing like what they had found in the morning. In two of them the whole family had become bedridden with the Plague, but were alive. Another was eerily empty. Neji suspected the family had run away from the village, so Naruto copied out the report on that flat too to deliver to quarantine control. The last house of the day was a happy mistake. The very flustered wife explained through the door that when the Runner had come round, her husband had been in the bath and she herself had been meditating with her children. The children had thought it was a joke that the mother hadn't noticed the Runner arrive and had kept quiet as well.

Naruto sat back and stretched his hands. They were cramping. Outside the sun was setting red and warm and the volunteer canteen were pushing trolleys and steel barrels into the Grey Cross tent for dinner.

"That's it for today," announced Neji briskly, tapping the edge of the reports on the table. "We have an hour and a half or so before Kiba's wake. I'll deliver these to the Quarantine Guard and the Keepers. Normally I'd say you take one report and I'll take the other, but it's been a tough first day for you. Get some rest. I'll see you in the evening. Good work today."

"Thanks, Neji." They clasped hands and Neji left the tent.

For Naruto there was only one place he could think of to go, so he turned his feet towards the hospital and set off in the evening light.

When he came to the reception desk, the receptionist was taking a nap on the pile of paper with her head in her arms. "Excuse me," he said and she started and looked up, "I'm looking for the room or the tent where they brought in a little boy this morning? About four. Tsuruya something…"

The boy had a room in the hospital on the third floor. He didn't share it with anyone, but these days that meant somebody had been bundled up in a sheet and thrown on a wagon. They had put up curtains around his bed to give him some privacy, and his bed was beside the window.

The boy's eyes widened when Naruto pushed the curtains aside. "You're that guy from the morning," the boy gasped and, to Naruto's dismay, promptly burst into tears.

"Oh come on, I'm not that scary!" Naruto didn't know how to handle boys gushing tears like they were trying to save a nation from drought. Well, he knew how to handle himself, but, little kids half his size were a completely different question altogether. "Hey, I'm nice. Really, I am. I'm not wearing a scary costume like my friend, see?"

The boy raised his head from his fists and looked at him. His eyes were red and shiny. "Everybody's wearing those things. I can't tell who anyone is anymore. They all look the same. It's creepy."

Naruto sat down by the boy's bed. "Don't be scared."

"But it's like the town's been taken over by demons," the boy continued and his lip trembled dangerously.

"Well, I'm not going to wear some scary suit even if somebody tried to make me," Naruto said with a bravado he didn't entirely feel, but it seemed to work. The boy stopped crying and looked thoughtfully up at him. "My name's Naruto. What's yours, kid?"

"Yabane," the boy replied. "I'm four years old," he added out of what seemed like habit. "Nearly five." Yabane blew out his cheeks and scowled sullenly. "Why have you come to see me? Is it because you feel sorry for me? If you do feel sorry for me, go away."

"You're not especially cute are you?"

"I don't want to be cute," Yabane muttered, narrowing his eyes.

Naruto smiled. "I just wanted to check up and see how you were doing since the morning, that's all. You're talking more now, so I guess they hooked you up to a drip. Here's a tip - if you act cuter, the nurses are a lot nicer. Are the doctors nice?"

"Yeah, but…" the boy grimaced. "They keep asking me what happened in my house."

"No go zone?"

"I don't know," Yabane admitted and he stared up at the ceiling where a moth was fluttering. "Dad made us go to Mum's room where she'd been sleeping for ages. He made my big brother Yasaki swallow something, pinched his nose and grabbed his head and everything. Do you know what that was?"

"Yes," said Naruto truthfully, thinking of the konseigan and noting Yabane's interest, "and I'll tell you if you tell me what happened in your house. A swap. Like trading cards."

And so Naruto listened as Yabane told his story in a string of broken sentences, how his older brother told him to run to his room and hide and not come to the bedroom again until Yasaki said so; how their dad had tried to grab Yabane by the head as well, but Yasaki had blocked the hand with a kunai; how Yabane had waited for a day in his room until he started to get hungry and the house began to smell, when he finally dared to venture out.

Naruto could only listen and feel useless. What good was the Rasengan if the enemy wasn't something he could see and punch? Here he was, the Jinchuuriki of the Nine-tails, but you couldn't burn out madness and flush out fear with sage mode. You couldn't crack open panic with a handful of kunai. The Plague couldn't be solved by any jutsu. For all his skills, the only thing Naruto might have been able do was turn into a woman to make people laugh.

That was what he was best at after all, when you stripped away his ninja skills - making kids laugh. Adults took a bit more effort to crack, but once they realised they were still kids at heart, Naruto had them, even though they tended to laugh at Naruto rather than with him. He wondered what this kid would look like laughing. Yabane was sullen and serious, and for a flickering instant, as Naruto observed him, it was another dark haired boy from another unfortunate family talking to Naruto from the hospital bed.

Then Naruto realised why he had come to see the boy – Yabane was alone. He was an orphan, just like he was, just like Sasuke. He seemed desperately bewildered, as though a bridge had given way beneath his feet and he had only then realised that beneath was nothing but a chasm. Naruto had known that bewilderment for most of his life.

"The Plague doesn't touch the children, but it gets their parents and Konoha doesn't want any more orphans, if we can help it," Lee had said, when Naruto had met him in the street, and Neji had told Naruto that, "Locked in children tend to react badly. A lot of families locked themselves in before the council developed the hazard cloaks after all."

Naruto was the only ninja who could go around Konoha safely without a cloak and visor and by the sound of it there was a steadily growing population of parentless ninja children scattered about the village. Who was taking care of them? Naruto knew better than anybody that children could slip through the system and, come to think of it, he hadn't seen any children of Academy age since coming back. Even the genins in their yellow cloaks and visors were hard to come by.

"That's it!" Naruto cried, snapping his fingers.

Yabane flinched at the sudden noise then and scowled. "What is?"

There was something Naruto could do in Konoha after all.

People often asked what the Keepers actually kept. Shikamaru thought it was obvious. They were there for the comfort of the people. They kept whatever it was that needed to be kept and whatever people wanted them to keep. If people wanted to believe they kept the peace, then that was what the Keepers kept. Nara Yoshino who ran the organisation liked to say they kept order, but from reports of the past few days Shikamaru was beginning to wonder if their job was to keep Konoha sane. Keep its cool, so to speak. Because people weren't confident they could keep it themselves.

Much like the Hyuuga clan dominated the Grey Cross, the Nara clan were instrumental in the formation of the Keepers. It was a police force in all but name. Nara Shikaku had been worried that there would be looting, panic buying of water and rice and potential stampedes over the hazard visors when they were handed out. He had suggested that the shadow binding techniques of their clan could be used effectively to freeze up mobs.

"Another family taken in by the Repentance?" Shikamaru read through Neji's report. Trouble upon trouble, just piling up like storm clouds. He signed the bottom and then put his fingers together in thought. "This is getting – "

"Troublesome?" supplied Neji dryly.

"I was going to say repetitive," Shikamaru sighed. "But that would work as well. How's Naruto? He's your new partner, isn't he?"

Neji didn't hide his surprise. "News gets around quickly. He's surprisingly reasonable, if a little lost. Loud and as likely to overreact as ever. I told him to take an hour or so off before going to the Inuzuka house. When are you planning to go?"

"I might not be able to make it."

Neji looked thunderous. "You're not going? But he was your friend!"

Shikamaru glanced at the clock on the wall. Cousins and distant Nara relatives with traces of their kekkei genkai were bustling around the room looking anxious. "It's the Repentance."

"What about them?"

"They're finally going public," Shikamaru steepled his hands on his desk in dark, fearful thought and a chill ran up Neji's spine. "They sent us a message – tonight around seven, they're going to be holding a gathering."

"That's a challenge to the Keepers," Neji agreed, taking the piece of paper Shikamaru had slid across the desk to him and reading the memo.

REPENTERS' PARADE

COME ONE, COME ALL!

TONIGHT, WE WALK TO HEAL

Neji's eyes fell on the vial of konseigan he had brought to Shikamaru from the Tsuruya flat and he clenched the memo in his hand. Rage swept through him in a white-hot current. "This is disgusting."

"We're all preparing to be on duty tonight," Shikamaru took out a lighter from his pocket and began to play with its cap. "Don't misunderstand me. I would do anything to be at Kiba's wake, but knowing Kiba, he'd want me to 'take down the bad guys'. If I didn't try to take down these fruitcakes, he'd come back as a ghost to haunt me."

Neji remained silent. He looked around the office once more, at men from the Grey Cross coming and going with reports for their respective Keeper connections, at the jars of concentrated alcohol at the end of every desk, at the huge banner over Nara Yoshino's head bearing the slogan of the Keepers: "Keep the Calm, Keep the Peace."

"Keep safe then," Neji said at last, making to leave. "Make sure you come to the wake later. Naruto would be happy to see you there."

"Keep safe?" Shikamaru scoffed and closed his eyes. "That's probably the one thing Keepers can't keep."

Tsunade had gathered quite a team. Kakashi recognised ANBU when he saw it, even when they had their brands covered by the sleeves of their shirts. It was in the way they tried to move without being noticed, to be more normal than normal. It took effort for them to make to tread with a noise. He didn't recognise any of these three by name, but he was alright with that.

Usually at the prime of their life, the most powerful of their generation and brimming with chakra, the ANBU had been decimated by the Plague and it was even rumoured that Danzo had disbanded them, for Konoha's sake. It seemed that was partially true. These three had volunteered as soon as Tsunade had put up a notice like they had been itching for an opportunity.

"Let's see," Kakashi peered at them over his book, running his eye over them critically. "Any names I'm supposed to remember?"

The woman with an eye-patch saluted smartly. "Aokage, sir."

She elbowed the round-faced, wide-eyed woman next to her, who saluted too. "Kurimi, sir!"

Leaving the man, who lifted his hand somewhat reluctantly and grunted, "Sekitoba."

They had dispensed of their ANBU code names with unemployment. Kakashi shrugged. "Right. Well, in that case, I'm not going to bother remembering them. You're Black, Brown and Red, understood?"

The three agents looked nonplussed but not altogether surprised. "Yes, sir."

He shifted his pack on his shoulder and began to set off down the dirt track to the East Gate. "Alright. it's time to move out – "

"Kakashi-sensei!"

A blonde thatch of hair, orange and black tracksuit, and pinwheeling arms and legs – Naruto was running towards them, red in the face and huffing. He slid to a stop in front of Kakashi. "I saw you from Tsunade-bacchan's office window! She said you were going…that were you going on a mission to bring back Sasuke!"

Kakashi smiled. "That's right."

"Then who are these three bozos?" Naruto gasped, pointing at the three ANBU agents with him. "Why are you taking them? It should be me, you and Sakura. We should be bringing him home – it should be us as Team 7, right?"

"We're not bringing him home, Naruto," Kakashi looked Naruto in the eye. "We're bringing him in to be a biomedical resource. It's like collecting herbs."

Naruto gaped at him. "You can't seriously think that."

"You can't seriously expect a welcome home party for a rogue ninja, Naruto. Besides, don't you and Sakura have things to do?" Kakashi said, indicating the Hokage's office down the road. "For example, what were you talking about with Tsunade?"

Naruto balled his hand into fists. "Don't change the subject."

Kakashi sighed and nodded at the three ANBU agents. They started to walk ahead. "I'm trying to tell you that you have things to do here. You've found something to do, I take it, seeing as you've just been to visit the Hokage and," he squinted with amusement at Naruto's Grey Cross armband, "done some doodling."

"It's an Uzumaki swirl and a smiley face! Can't you see?" grumbled Naruto, folding his arms. He seemed, however, rather pleased with himself. "I went to get clearance for my idea – I'm going to find all the Plague orphans, get them together, and make sure they're being looked after. Run some play groups or something. I mean, it won't be great for Neji, he'll have to find another partner, but -"

"But there we have it, my point proven." Kakashi smiled and his eye twinkled. "You have things to do here."

"Yeah, I do, but – "

Kakashi put his hand on Naruto's shoulder. "What you want to do, Naruto, is not just bring back Sasuke, but to rehabilitate him and that takes time that we don't have anymore." Kakashi let each word slowly sink in, noted that Naruto had registered them before adding, "Be happy we're bringing him back. To bring Sasuke home, however, you'll have to make him realise Konoha is his home. How you're going to that, I'll be leaving to you. Try and think of a way perhaps while I'm gone."

Naruto looked down at his feet and frowned, but then a thought occurred to him, and his face cracked into a smile. Kakashi nodded, seeing his determined grin. "Good. Then until I come back, take care! And have fun building up your gang of graffiti artists!"

Kakashi darted off down the road, waving with the back of his hand, and as he left Naruto behind him, he felt his resolve solidify, his goals become clearer, the world simplify again to that battlefield logic so familiar to a ninja mission. And how freeing it was to go out on a mission, to finally run without the hazard gear again!

"Boss!" Pakkun had appeared from one of the side alleys and was running beside him. "Sorry! It took me ages to get away from that Inuzuka pack!"

"Never mind. Sasuke's scent – do you remember it?"

Pakkun clicked his tongue and huffed, "Since when have I ever forgotten a scent?"

Kakashi smiled.

Ino was there already, Sakura noted, as she signed in the book for Kiba's wake, but aside from that none of her friends had arrived. Naruto was probably late, but Neji she had expected to be there first. Sakura had imagined that he would make a special point of being there, since Kiba wasn't only a friend, but also Hinata's old team mate and with Hinata locked in Neji had to be there at the wake in her stead. Sakura turned the pages of the register. No, Shikamaru hadn't arrived yet either. Ah, here was Rock Lee! The second name in from the top. Sakura smiled. Typical Lee. Always keen.

But Sai was gone, Tenten was gone, Choji was gone, and Shino's family had upped and left in the middle of the night when the body-burning started. The Aburame insects just hadn't coped with the smoke. Now Kiba too. Sakura felt tears prick her eyes, and hurried to the next room.

"Sakura-chan," Ino called out as she entered, the room filled with ninjas in formal black. People were milling around before the ceremony started, speaking in hushed voices. The red banner with the clan crest was pinned up on the wall. Beneath it was a photo of Kiba, grinning with fanged teeth and glowing with vitality. It was a far cry from the withered and whitened shell that Sakura had last seen in the tent. Green-white flowers had been arranged all around in rosettes and chains. Incense had been laid ready for burning. The absence of a body for viewing was the norm these days, when they all went straight to the pits.

Ino was sitting on cushion on the floor. Sakura kneeled on the one beside her. "How long have you been here?"

"Only a couple of minutes. Did you hear about Akamaru?"

Sakura shook her head. Ino narrowed her eyes. "They're putting him down after the wake."

"It's the Inuzuka clan tradition." Smiling sadly, Hana appeared beside them, all in black. Sakura looked up aghast. "We bury every clansman with his partner, so that they can go together to whatever comes next. When I go, my Haimaru triplets will come with me, and when Mum goes, Kuromaru will follow. Is this spot free?"

"Please go ahead," Sakura stammered.

"I heard an interesting rumour at the hospital," Hana continued, kneeling down on the cushion and clasping her hands on her lap. "Tsunade's putting in a ban on chakra-use for all infected?"

"I heard that too," cried a voice from the other side of Ino. It was Lee, his bushy eyebrows aquiver with interest. "It's such a simple idea. Why didn't we think of it before?"

"The Hokage thought it was impossible, so Shizune's been testing it all week," Ino answered him, leaping to Tsunade's defence. She raised her voice, "You'd be surprised how difficult it is, Lee. Shizune realised that she was using chakra everywhere – lifting a heavy shopping bag, drying her hair, reaching higher shelves, running faster up the stairs. It's going to take a huge conscious effort to stop. Shizune's even setting up a workshop program for it."

"Come to think of it, I've sometimes used chakra in my voice just to shout at the dogs," Hana murmured thoughtfully. "So if we stop using chakra and keep it under really tight control, what does that do?"

"It'll slow the bacteria proliferation and disease progress," Ino replied, her eyes shining. "If the person's just got it latently, then he might not even go on to the infectious stage. He'll probably live without infecting anybody else!"

"But, doesn't that mean," Lee twisted his thumbs together and stared, "doesn't that mean we won't be able to train any new generations of ninjas anymore? Doesn't that make us…the last ninjas of Konoha?"

"Maybe," Sakura admitted. There was a weighty pause for thought, before she continued. "But a lot of children at the moment carry the bacteria as a latent infection, and as they grow older and their chakra systems develop, the Plague might come back. We might be the last ninjas, but this won't be the last Plague."

"Think ships, carrying the bacteria into the future," Ino said.

"Plague ships," Hana breathed darkly, looking at her knees.

At that moment there was a loud bark and a growl at the door. Heads flicked up at the guttural noise.

"Is that the dog at the door?" Sakura asked Hana, thinking of the big grey dog with yellow eyes sitting at the entrance. It had sniffed her as she went into the house.

"He's turning away people who are latently infected," Hana said. "None of us are wearing hazard gear here, so if somebody started coughing during the service we would be in trouble."

There was still time before the service started. Sakura rose from the cushion, along with Ino, and Lee scrambled up to follow them out of the room and back into the corridor, past the register table, back to the entrance, where men and women were shrinking away from a tall figure still in his red cloak and visor. The big grey dog was barking at his feet. The figure was glaring down at it with unimpressed silver eyes.

"Neji," Lee gasped, standing behind Sakura.

"First children, now dogs," Neji grumbled. He tried to move into the house, but the dog leapt forward and barred the entrance with its body, baring its teeth and snarling. "What is this?"

"Quit messing around," barked a sharp strident voice – it was Inuzuka Tsume, the formidable clan matriarch, marching down towards the door. She pushed past Sakura, Ino and Lee and stood in front of them with her hands on her hips. "The dog says you're infected. Latent, but infected. Get out of here."

Neji took several paces back before freezing on the spot and staring, wide-eyed, finally realising what had just been said. "But I…how…?"

"You dare to suggest that an Inuzuka dog's nose is wrong? You dare to insult the Inuzuka house on the night of my son's funeral?" Tsume roared, the mane of her hair bristling. "You dare to bring the Plague into my house, Hyuuga boy? Get out of my sight. You shame your name by being here, when I already ordered you to scram!"

Neji wasted no more time. He spared one desperate glance at Lee, Sakura and Ino clustered behind Tsume, then turned stiffly on his heel and walked away from the Inuzuka house. As he walked away, another boy came running from the opposite direction, panting, blonde and orange. Neji lowered his head and hid his face in the shadow of his visor, so that Naruto wouldn't notice him as he ran past, because, at that moment, Neji's shoulders were shaking and he didn't want to be recognised.

Thump. The fistful of earth crumbled over her glasses. Juugo scooped up another handful from the mound beside him, dropped it, and then scooped up another. Suigetsu quickly lost patience and began to push soil into the ditch with the blunt edge of his sword, grumbling about how the great Kubikiribocho had been reduced to a makeshift shovel. His brother would have wept.

"It was cold last night," Juugo said, his voice muffled by the collar of his cloak. "That must have been the last straw."

"Shouldn't we burn her body?" Suigetsu said.

Sasuke shook his head. "No. We'll bury her and go."

They didn't have the time to spare. Sasuke had delivered the doctor to a crossroad just outside of Ageha. He might have already reported them to the local authorities. Besides, the ground was wet with morning dew and a rolling fog was spreading thick along the road. It was too damp for fire and it would have taken too much time for the body to burn.

Juugo continued to pat down the mound of earth with his hands. He pressed it down until it was neat and smooth and tidy. The birds were already singing, but perhaps his ears were failing him, because he could no longer pick out what they were saying. There was a bitter taste in his mouth.

"Well, that's one freak biting the dust at last," Suigetsu remarked before he cleared his throat and tapped his chest. "One less crazy, loud-mouthed, clingy…" Suigetsu trailed off and coughed into his hand.

Sasuke stared down at the mound of earth. The fog must have been dampening the sounds of the forest. It was eerily quiet in the shadow of the pines, despite the birds and the whistling wind. He looked upwards to the sky, scowled, looked down at the mound, scowled, and then turned away to step back onto the road.

"We move on," he said, without looking over his shoulder. "Juugo. Suigetsu."

"Alright, alright, give me a break already!" Suigetsu slung the sword over his shoulder. "You coming Juugo?"

Juugo was still kneeling beside the mound. His hands were clenched in the folds of his cloak, and as Suigetsu looked on they curled into white-knuckled fists then relaxed. His hands dropped to the ground, palms turned upwards.

Suigetsu lowered his sword from his shoulder. He looked at Sasuke, who stepped forward tentatively towards Juugo's kneeling form. Bending down, Sasuke looked into the man's face. Everything below his lower lip, his chin, his throat, the neck of his shirt, the collar of his cloak, was red with blood. There was a perplexed frown on Juugo's face. Juugo had been caught by surprise.

Sasuke put his fingers under the man's neck and closed his eyes. No pulse at all, not a throb, even though the skin was still radiating warmth. Something began to hum in his ears - a sound like a string being snapped taut and pulled.

He shrank back from Juugo's body, pushed it over, twisted his fingers through a series of familiar seals and lifted two fingers to his lips. Glowing hot spirals of flames spewed from Sasuke's mouth. Slowly Juugo's cloak, then the rest of him, caught fire.

"I thought you said we weren't burning the bodies," Suigetsu said with a sharp-toothed grin.

Sasuke turned up the hood of his cloak and folded his arms. "Like I care."

"You just couldn't be bothered to bury him," Suigetsu needled him. "We're going have to stand here for hours now, waiting for that thing to burn out. You just didn't like the idea of getting your hands dirty."

You just couldn't handle the pain of feeling a death, Suigetsu wanted to say. You're scared because you don't know what to do. You just want to turn away and close your eyes in the darkness. Isn't that your specialty, Sasuke? Running away into the night, never looking back, never seeing ahead, just anger lighting the way and colouring your run in false, pretty colours?

Sasuke's face was as inscrutable as ever.

They watched the curls of grey smoke rise.

"Suigetsu."

"What?"

"How are you feeling?"

Suigetsu shrugged and the pus and blood in his lungs sloshed. "Fine. Obviously."

Chapter Text

"We don't how many they are, or where they will be coming from, or what they look like, but that won't matter," Nara Yoshino told the Keepers assembled outside their headquarters from the back of her big russet-furred stag. "The Repentance will make themselves known to us. That they have promised. Keep your heads and do nothing that will provoke an attack. If there is trouble, send the signal. Remember, we keep the peace. We meet back here at sunrise. Mounted Unit One, with me!"

She dug her heels into the sides of the stag and it took off into the dusk, snorting thick white smoke from its nose. Eight Keepers followed at a fast trot in a cacophony of jangling bits and clicking cloven hooves.

Shikamaru found it difficult not to sigh whenever the Keepers rode out into the streets on the Nara-bred deer. Deer kept a hundred years for precious medicine had been strapped under saddles and bridles. Instead of roaming the Nara forest, they were kept in the Keeper barns. He sighed too when he noticed ninjas adapting to the habits of mounted soldiers. What had happened to the shadowy light-footed assassins who had leapt from tree to tree, leaving barely a whisper of their passing behind them? Konoha ninjutsu was fading in more ways than one.

He took up his reins. "Come on, Kohibari." Shikamaru nudged the buck beneath him into a trot. Three Keepers followed behind him and together they set off due west. The other Keepers dispersed into the streets.

Yellow lights had been turned on in the eaves of houses and outside shop fronts. Shikamaru was pleased to see that the Keepers were casting long shadows in their light. It was one of the reasons they had taken to riding deer. A human on a deer cast a bigger shadow than a single man and it helped them save energy when binding the shadows of a mob.

"Not a man on the streets," said one Keeper riding up to trot alongside Shikamaru.

"I haven't even seen a cat, let alone a person," said another, the voice sounding like one of Shikamaru's distant cousins.

A window open on the second floor of a house, releasing steam, snapped shut as they passed and suddenly Shikamaru was all too aware of eyes – eyes peering out from behind curtains, through blinds, between shutters, watching the Keepers going by.

"News must have got out about the Parade," Shikamaru muttered, and the unseen eyes of the villagers tracked their progress.

Deer harness leather creaked. The saddle cloth rustled. Their breathing sounded loud and heavy in the silent streets.

"Hey, Kaneda," said one of the other Keepers suddenly, "don't stop in the middle of the street. I nearly rode into you."

The young woman jolted in her saddle. "Sorry. My mind just went black for a bit."

She glanced once more over her shoulder. Shikamaru followed her gaze, until it reached a small, neat-looking house, with a pale grey cross splashed across its front door.

"Did you know the family?" he asked, facing forward.

"My old teammate's little sister lived there with her daughter." Kaneda's voice took on a quiver of emotion. "I promised him I'd look out for her."

Shikamaru's grip on tightened on the reins. "Focus on the task. Don't give up on them until the Cross have checked inside."

They went on through the darkening streets, listening and watching, but the night closed in without a single trace of the Parade. The air grew cool. The Keeper walking alongside Shikamaru began to shiver. No Keeper troop elsewhere had sent up a signal. This wasn't the only district being eerily quiet.

Shikamaru stared forward between his buck's ears, at the buck's bobbing head as it walked, on and on without complaint, puffing steam from its nostrils. He wasn't going to make it Kiba's wake. By now, the main rituals would have finished and the guests would have started to go home.

The moon was climbing the sky. He was just considering whether it would be wise to visit the Inuzuka house in the morning when a strange figure walked out across the end of the road.

Shikamaru pulled on the reins and brought his buck to a halt. "Did you see that?"

The other three Keepers nodded. They stopped at a distance to watch. The first figure was closely followed by a second and then a third. A column of people were walking past the end of the road, dressed head to toe in hazard gear and swinging pale blue lanterns. Their hazard cloaks were white. The jounin red, genin yellow, chuunin blue and medic-nin black dyes had been bleached out of them, leaving blotches and ugly smears of the old colour behind, but on the whole they were pale as ghosts. They walked with slow purposeful steps and their heads held high, their faces covered in masks of silvery foil.

"If we take the next road, we could intercept them," Shikamaru whispered. "The moon will be behind us. We'll have plenty of shadow to freeze them."

The Keepers turned their deer into the side alley and moved along it, staying parallel to the main road where the figures in white were walking. Past a flower shop and a newsagent, they found an opening, and they turned out into the road, just in front of the head of the long white column.

With the Keepers on deerback, their black shadows stretched out before them in the moonlight like a herd of strange shadow centaurs. Shikamaru fumbled for the Keeper's horn at his waist, but before he could announce who they were and demand the Parade to stop, a clear, commanding voice sounded out from amongst the walkers.

"Welcome all," said the voice, ringing out in the street, "to the first Repenters' Parade."

Shikamaru nodded at the Keepers beside him and soon their shadows were lengthening, stretching into whip-thin tendrils of darkness that rushed down over the surface of the road, to cling to the shadows of the walkers and wrap about their ankles. The column froze as one less than five metres away.

"Are you the leader of the Repenters?" Shikamaru shouted, searching the crowd for the speaker. He wasn't the best of chakra sensors, but as soon as his shadow touched the Parade he had felt something that had driven an icy wedge of shock through his chest. The Repenters were all civilians. It was essentially an anti-ninja rally.

"See, my friends, those who use their ill-gotten chakra to suppress the innocent," the voice rang out once more. "See the hubris of the ninjas who dare to defy the peaceful gods by corrupting their powers for war. With chakra, the magic of creation, these most sinful of our kind pit man against man, use their gifts for oppression and domination. They bully those who do not partake in their sin."

The silver faces stared back at the Keepers, apparently unmoved, but through the interlacing shadows Shikamaru felt a strong ripple of feeling from the crowd - pity. They pitied the Keepers.

The voice continued before Shikamaru could speak. "The sinful bully the righteous. You are experiencing it for yourselves. At this very moment, our very shadows are being invaded and used against us. There is little hope for these children of sin and war. Now, however, at the end of days, the gods are on our side. The gods have sent us their Demon to smite these men and punish them, through the very chakra they cling to. Now is the time that we help our brothers. The gods have made it so."

"Do we have to listen to this?" the Keeper next to Shikamaru muttered. "What do we do? They're not even giving us a chance to reason with them."

"We will not fight the children of the sin," the voice resounded from somewhere in the column, but damn those masks! Shikamaru couldn't see where. "We will help them repent. If they themselves cannot see what they need to do, then we will guide them towards it. The first repentance is the Word, the second is the Earth – "

"- the third is the Fire, the fourth is the Iron, the fifth is the Spirit and the Sixth is the Cry," chanted the Repenters, men and women, their silver faces turned towards the Keepers.

"Yes," said the voice, sounding satisfied, "yes, that is right. Keepers! The gods have decreed that the world is ending. Do you repent the sin of your chakra? Do you vow to take your life as acceptance of your sin?"

"Don't say anything," Shikamaru muttered to the three Keepers around him and they pursed their lips in silence, bristling with anger. "We don't want to provoke them."

"The first repentance of the Word has been forsaken," the unseen speaker declared.

A flash of white lit up the sky over the Eastern part of the town, followed by another to the North, and another to the North East. There was a rush of rustling darkness and the walls of the street were suddenly swarming with huge leaping shadows, shaped like deer.

Kaneda cried out, "Shadow deer! It's the signal! A Unit's been attacked – "

There was a sizzle and a pop and the street went white.

Shikamaru yelled. The Keepers reeled. The deer reared and bellowed at the flash bomb set off in their eyes. Bright white light seared away the darkness. It burned away the Keepers' binding shadows holding the Parade and all of a sudden there were hands all over him, tugging at his robes and his arms, ripping him out of his saddle, pulling him to the hard stone of the road.

"The second repentance is the Earth," said a thin, reedy voice in his ear. Shikamaru was blind. He knew that his eyes were open. They were throbbing and weeping tears. They had pulled off his visor and there was a hand at the back of his head, pushing his forehead to the ground. They rubbed his face into it. They had his hands, they had his legs. His eyes! His eyes saw only streaks of red and white and flashing black spots.

"He has bowed to the gods and been reminded of their power in the Fire of Light. Now he may choose to repent by the Iron, the Spirit or the Cry. Which will it be, child of the sin?"

The shadows had all gone, dispersed and broken by the flash bomb, or turned into shadow deer and sent across the city to find a unit of Keepers for back-up. Shikamaru was helpless. He heard screams, gasps, and the thuds of heavy objects hitting the ground. A warm liquid flowed around his knees and seeped into the cloth of his trousers. It was blood. He was sitting in a puddle of blood.

"If the gods have struck him dumb then may it be Iron – "

There was a clang of metal on metal and a burst of warm liquid splattered across his face. The hands holding Shikamaru to the ground sprang away. New hands clasped his shoulders and pulled him up to his feet. Shikamaru blinked, the water cleared from his eyes, but he still saw nothing. He could hear running though, the sound of fleeing feet, and his flailing hand touched smooth clear film – a visor. His saviour was wearing a visor, not a tin foil mask.

"Who is it?" he spluttered. "Who is it? I can't see!"

"It's me. Calm down," came Neji's voice from beside him as the quiet of night returned to the street. "They're gone. I saw them off. What happened? I saw a light like lightning and when I came they had a kitchen knife to your throat."

"The other Keepers, Neji – look at them. Are they dead?" Shikamaru said, breathing in deep and instantly regretting it as his nose filled with the smell of blood. "They killed the deer too, didn't they?"

"Slit their throats."

"The Keepers or the deer?" Shikamaru persisted. Neji didn't reply. "Why are you here anyway? Shouldn't you have gone back to Cross HQ after Kiba's wake?"

"I was taking a walk," said Neji and there was something fragile in his tone that made Shikamaru narrow his eyes. Neji hummed and clicked his tongue, as though considering what to say next. "They turned me away at the door."

Shikamaru knew what that meant without needing to ask, so instead, he raised an eyebrow. "And you were walking around the streets the whole time afterwards, knowing a bunch of anti-ninja religious fanatics were going to be out en masse?"

"Lucky for you I was," Neji snapped, propping up Shikamaru with his shoulder, "or else you'd have been stretched out repenting on the ground like your friends. Now come on, where can I take you? Where's the nearest Keeper safehouse?"

Shikamaru gave him directions and let Neji pull him away, away from the smell of blood, and the wet warmth of steam smoking off the deer carcasses. His eyes ached like they were swollen in their sockets. It hurt to weep, but as he thought of the shock, the failure, the dead Keepers and those dreadful silver faces, he couldn't stop.

The spread of the Plague in the towns surrounding Konoha had been a surprise to all the physicians who lived in them, but when the doctor of Ageha came to think of it, there should never have been any surprise at all.

True - Konoha was the only town that based its entire economy and income on providing specialist chakra services, through training ninjas. There was no town in the Land of Fire with a higher density of chakra users, but where all ninjas of Konoha were chakra users, not all chakra users of Konoha became ninjas. Many failed the preliminary exams to enter the ninja hierarchy in the first place and, when that happened, it wasn't uncommon for that person to leave Konoha and settle elsewhere.

After generations of migration, there were whole families of chakra users in almost every town in the Land of Fire, each plying their trades. In Kareha there was a famous family of window cleaners, who exercised what chakra they had to walk up walls, instead of using ladders, as they washed the windows. Jutsus were beyond them, of course, but the chakra control in their feet was extraordinary! In the medical academy in Ageha, there was a special course for chakra-based medical techniques for those who came from chakra-rich families. The doctor of Ageha's family had been chakra-using doctors for generations and the day he watched his daughter practice the family techniques for the first time he had never been prouder.

The doctor wasn't a fool. He readily admitted that there was something very different about ninjas and artisan chakra-hands like himself and the window cleaners. Ninjas often passed through Ageha on their missions. They were steely like the blades their kept up their sleeves and as dangerous and captivating as fire. It was always fascinating when they came to his door, to buy medicines or seek emergency aid, but, generally speaking, the doctor preferred them to keep their distance, because fire up close tended to burn.

Then in the space of a week he had been visited by two. The first had been a wild, red-eyed, vicious young thing; half-mad and feral – the worst kind of ninja, the doctor remembered with a shudder. No doubt what Konoha called a 'rogue'. That one had dropped down from a tavern roof to press a knife into the small of the doctor's back, before herding him into the forest.

The second arrived two days after the doctor had been found unconscious at a crossroad, and although the second ninja had been civil, the doctor of Ageha took it as a principle not to trust men who hid their faces behind masks. There had been a light knock at the door. The doctor had thought it was another Plague victim coming for antibiotics – after his night in the young rogue's cave he had reopened for business, much to his daughter's delight – and so when he opened the door and seen a masked , one-eyed ninja, sleek and conditioned for battle, on his doorstep, words had failed him.

"Oh dear," the ninja had said with a chuckle, "that must have been a truly terrifying experience you had with Sasuke. I apologise on his behalf."

And then there had been questions, lots of questions – about the young feral ninja and his companions, about how the doctor of Ageha had been treated, about the state of mind of the group, about what direction they were heading and how fast he thought they would be able to travel.

The doctor had answered truthfully and efficiently, as his profession as a medic demanded, and the ninja had left soon after.

He poured himself a cup of tea and readied himself for another long night. Patients came at all hours and from all parts of the town. Death and disease didn't have schedules. The tea helped steady his nerves and disguise the tickling of the Plague in his throat. He found himself clearing his throat more frequently these days. No doubt his daughter already knew about his condition.

There was a brisk knock at his door. The first of his evening's patients, the doctor of Ageha thought wearily, before he was struck by a curious sense of déjà vu. Again his daughter and wife were busy nursing a patient in the other room, again he was going to the door with a cup of tea in his hand, and again he pushed it open to find a masked and one-eyed ninja standing tall on his doorstep.

Again he was stunned into fearful silence and the ninja seemed to find that amusing.

"Ah," said the ninja, a different masked man from the last, "seems as though the governor was right. Sasuke must have given you a pretty rough time. For that, I am sorry, I really am. Now I was wondering if you could help me by answering a few questions."

When the sun slipped below the horizon, one of Hinata's many cousins rang a bell, and the whole Hyuuga house went to bed, to wake up in the early hours with the rising sun.

The locked in Hyuugas lived by a strict routine. In the morning, they gathered for an assembly, where they prayed to the Hyuuga ancestors for the passing of the Plague. Prayer was followed by meditation - quiet contemplation of one's mortality, or, as Hanabi cynically called it, 'preparation for the worst'. Lunch came after sparring, which they did only to keep fit and flexible, and in the afternoon they did whatever chores and tasks they had been allocated to do by the older members of the clan. That particular afternoon, Hinata and Hanabi had finished repapering the shouji walls and doors in the East wing of the house. Their mother and other Hyuuga matrons had been in the North wing, stitching and dyeing newly made hazard cloaks red, blue, yellow and black, to pass through the hatch to the Runner who came in the evening.

As far as Hinata was concerned, there was no better Runner who came to the Hyuuga house than Rock Lee. Lee not only brought food and toothpaste and tissues, but he also liked to spend fifteen hilarious minutes going red in the face shouting the week's news through the thick wooden door. It was fun to watch and it was the only time the locked in Hyuugas got to hear what was happening beyond the house walls. Many of the Hyuugas muttered that he was only doing it under obligation because Neji had been his teammate, but they were thankful nonetheless.

Hinata was curled up in bed, a little light-headed from the glue vapour she had been inhaling all afternoon but not exhausted enough to sleep, when the door of her room crept open. Hinata looked over her shoulder. There was a small shape standing with an oil-lamp in the doorway.

"What's wrong, Hanabi?"

"Nothing's wrong," Hanabi shot back quickly, squaring her jaw. "I was just checking on you, to see if you were scared, that's all."

Hinata sat up in the bed. "Why should I be scared?"

"Didn't you see the white lights?"

"What white lights?"

Hanabi's eyes darted to the window with its thick black blinds and then back to Hinata. "Can I come in?"

Hinata nodded and patted the spot beside her on the mattress. Hanabi rushed across the room, set the oil-lamp on Hinata's desk, and leapt onto the bed.

"I thought it was a thunderstorm, but I didn't hear any thunder," Hanabi whispered, as Hinata wrapped the covers about Hanabi against the chill of the night. "But it was just like lightning. This huge white light kept on flashing outside. It flashed four times, all over Konoha."

Hinata went to the cupboard and took out another pillow, another blanket, and then another extra thick blanket for good measure, and brought them back to the bed. "And you weren't scared?" she asked, as she sat down beside Hanabi again.

"I wasn't. Not one bit," Hanabi spluttered indignantly, but she pulled the blankets tighter around herself and lowered her voice, "Do you know when Lee-san's coming next with the news?"

Hinata thought hard to come up with an answer, but with the monotony of routine and the unchanging flow of daily life, every day could just as easily have been the other. The days of the week and the dates of the month had all blurred into one grey stream of time.

When she didn't reply, Hanabi lowered her head into her arms and muttered, "A war might have started out there and we're just sitting around the house, stitching and papering and not knowing any better."

The oil-lamp flickered on Hinata's desk, its soft yellow flame wavering and small. The daily life of prayers and chores was a forced peace as forced as the loyalty ensured by the Caged Bird seal. A small voice at the back of Hinata's mind muttered insidiously that such a peace was too fragile to last for long.

The sound of delicate breathing touched Hinata's ears and woke her from her thoughts. Hanabi had fallen asleep on Hinata's bed, with her head still in her arms. Hinata smiled. She tucked the covers around her little sister and blew out the light.

"Sasuke," Suigetsu called out, stopping and wheezing, "can we take a break now?"

Sasuke continued on, walking ahead without any change of pace or posture.

Sasuke hadn't spoken a word since the morning when they had risen a little before dawn. He had insisted on moving onwards in silence, pushing forwards, but Suigetsu was beginning to doubt if Sasuke actually had any idea where they were going or where they were trying to get to any more.

"Sasuke," Suigetsu tried again, shuffling after him, "come on, man, let's take a break!"

Suigetsu rubbed his hands together, breathed puffs of air hot with fever onto his fingers, and jammed them up the sleeves of his cloak. He couldn't feel them. He couldn't feel his toes. Every limb ached. Every joint screeched as he moved and his lungs - he didn't want to know what was going on in there.

"Right," Suigetsu said at last. His blade slipped from his hands and landed point first in the mud. He crossed his arms. "I'm going on strike. I'm stopping right here, right now. You hear me, Sasuke? I'm on strike!"

Sasuke halted in his stride. A tremor ran through him from head to toe and for a dangerous moment Suigetsu wondered if he had stepped too far. Sasuke didn't look round. He said, "You can do what you like."

"Fine," Suigetsu grinned at him toothily, even though that final bitter taste of iron was crouching at the back of his mouth, "fine then. Well then, here and now, I'm on strike."

"See if I care." Sasuke took three steps forward, hesitated, and then took another three, planting each step firmly into the mud. He listened for footsteps behind him, or a weary sigh, or a resigned cough, but when Suigetsu made no sign of following, he bristled and spun round with a glare.

Rippling fingers made of water were stretching out towards him. Suigetsu's hand was reaching out to tap Sasuke on the back. His arm was a colourless bar of flowing water, his body a wavering column, the outline of his eyes and the bridge of his nose had been reduced to pale lines of shimmering light and his hair had turned to fine white foam.

Sasuke didn't dare breathe. The fingers quivered before his nose. The mass of water droplets held Suigetsu's shape for a heartbeat. Then a breath of wind rushed through the trees and Suigetsu dissolved in a burst of spray.

Drops splashed across his forehead. Sasuke's eyes widened, then widened some more, and in the suddenly lonely silence of the forest the whine in his ears reached a fever pitch, the string grew taut. He focused on the pile of empty clothes and the empty air before his eyes where moments earlier a man had turned to water for one last time. Sasuke couldn't bring himself to move, and yet he could feel the hands coming for him, the hands in the shadows that he had been running from, reaching out to seize his head and force him to look back over his shoulder towards everything he had been trying to leave behind. He hovered on the balls of his feet, poised to flee but unable to do so.

A figure, light-footed as a cat, dropped down from the trees to land on the path beside him.

Sasuke looked up and the string snapped at last.

Chapter Text

"Here you go, Uzumaki-kun." The Marksman handed Naruto the report and smiled with her eyes. "I think it's a very good thing what you're doing. Good luck."

"Thanks," Naruto replied with a wide grin. The woman moved away to collect her folder of addresses for the day and Naruto leaned back feeling pleasantly warm. It was a good feeling when you had a job to do.

By eleven in the morning Naruto had a pile of reports at least an inch thick. He was sitting at a desk in the Grey Cross tent, under a proudly pinned up flag he had stayed up painting the whole night before. Tsunade had spoken to the Hyuuga captain who ran the Grey Cross and, by morning, a memo had been circulated around the Marksmen. Reports of cases where children had been left as orphans were to be copied and taken to Naruto, or, as the memo phrased it, 'the blond idiot in orange, looking fresh as a spring roll', as soon as possible.

He was scanning through the latest report when somebody pulled up a chair on the other side of the table. "Morning," said Neji gruffly.

"Morning," Naruto replied. He looked up and paused. There was something different about Neji today. It took him a moment to work out what it was. "What happened to your child-scarer costume?"

No hazard gear, that's what had taken Naruto by surprise. There was a disposable mask hooked around Neji's ears to cover his nose and mouth, but the more important thing was that Neji was neither wearing his hazard visor nor his cloak. He was back in his plain coloured tunic.

Neji scowled and said tartly, "The council take away your gear once you're declared latent and send it off to get burned. If I'd been declared latent a few days ago, they would have put me in isolation. As it is though, with the Zero Chakra order, things have changed. You'll be seeing more gearless ninjas around in the next few days I imagine."

"Oh, yeah," Naruto muttered awkwardly, remembering what Sakura had told him during Kiba's wake, about Neji being turned away from the door. "How's that going?"

"You mean, how's knowing I might only have ten days left of life going? Peachy," Neji snapped, glaring at the floor. He tossed his head imperiously. "It's fine. I got a schedule from Shizune-san this morning for her Zero Chakra course, to stop subconscious daily chakra use."

"But if you can't use chakra, then you won't be able to use the byakugan anymore. What are you going to do on Cross visits?" Naruto shuffled the reports on his desk.

"I've resigned from the Cross. I gave my uncle my letter of notice an hour ago. I am forbidden from using chakra under the Hokages's ban for the latently and actively infected, but also, if I am infected, then I'm infected due to some careless mistake I must have made on a visit. A Marksman shouldn't make mistakes like that."

Effectively exiled from the Hyuuga clan, and now effectively exiled from the exiles of the Hyuuga clan – Naruto could only imagine how much that hurt the proud and loyal Neji. He poured a cup of barley tea from the jug on the table and pushed it across to his friend.

"Thanks," Neji muttered, pulling down his face mask to take a sip.

"I've got an idea," said Naruto brightly, leaning across the desk. "You're like me now, Neji. You're not wearing that scary hazard suit that freaks out the locked in orphans. Why don't you team up with me on my project?"

"Your project?" repeated Neji, and his eyes flickered up to the garish flag strung behind Naruto's head. "What is that symbol supposed to be? An electric snail?"

"A tiger, of course!" replied Naruto heatedly, folding his arms. "Orange and black is the way to go! We're going to be the Konoha Tigers! We're going to find all the locked in orphans, and we're going to bring them all together, so that they never have to feel lonely. That's what we're going to do."

Neji snorted. "You say 'we', but I haven't agreed to join you yet."

"You're not going to refuse," said Naruto with conviction, putting his hands behind his head and smiling winningly across the table.

And Neji, despite himself, found he was smiling too. He crushed the paper cup in his hand and sighed, "I have nothing better to do, I guess. Fine, I'll join you. I refuse, however, to wear an orange and black tracksuit like yours."

Naruto punched the air and crowed, "Konoha Tigers! Hear us roar!"

"And," Neji breathed, closing his eyes, "I refuse to go around shouting that."

Once Naruto had doodled on Neji's old Grey Cross linen and given him half the reports to look at they set off into the streets, drawing looks everywhere they went with their ninja forehead protectors and contradicting lack of hazard gear. The people of Konoha skirted around them in the streets, as though they were poisonous, but Naruto had no problem with that. He had dealt with it all his life. Neji, on the other hand, was finding it a somewhat more uncomfortable experience.

When they came to the edge of the town centre, Naruto created twelve shadow clones. To each one he gave the addresses of orphanages they were to visit and several names of orphans to enquire after. The troop of clones saluted and went leaping away across the rooftops.

"We're going to do the same," Naruto told Neji, who was glaring at a civilian housewife who had stopped to stare at them from across the road. "Neji, ignore her."

"It's people like her who make up the Sixth Repentance, Naruto." Neji's silver eyes followed the woman as she turned down an alley with her groceries. "You must have heard what happened to the Keepers yesterday night."

"Well, yeah, it's awful, but – "

"The kitchen knife she's going to use to gut that mackerel," Neji continued angrily, "that might be at our necks tomorrow. They nearly killed Shikamaru last night in the name of their ridiculous Repentances!"

"Yeah, I know, and we're all angry about it, make no mistake." Naruto had been enraged when he had heard the news in the Grey Cross tent. Naruto put a hand on Neji's shoulder. "Cool it, Neji. She's just staring at us because we're too good-looking for our own good. Don't go picking random fights with civilians to get revenge or anything like that, alright?"

"Who do you take me for? Uchiha Sasuke?" Neji snapped, shaking off Naruto's hand, but when he saw Naruto's wounded expression he realised with a start what he had said. He muttered, "Apologies."

"It's fine," Naruto said sincerely. He didn't blame Neji in the slightest for wanting to stalk every hostile-seeming civilian in sight in case they might lead to a Sixth Repentance base or gathering place after what had dealt with in the night. Bodies had been cleared away by the uninjured Keepers in the morning, but the bloodstains weren't going to wash out of the paving until the next downpour and there was little they could do about the memory of the incident – a dark, clotting blot on ninja-civilian relations that wasn't going to disappear in a hurry.

But soon Naruto had found something frustrating of his own to gnash his teeth at, when the first of his shadow clones vanished and sent him its collected information. The clone had gone to an orphanage in the East district, looking for a pair of twin girls, who according to the report had been sent there after their parents locked the girls in a cupboard and abandoned them. A quick interview with the matron, however, had produced a very different story about the girls' fates. At first, she brought out a completely different pair of twins and accused the Grey Cross of having filled out its reports wrong, but under pressure (Naruto was good at pressure) she had cowed and admitted that she had turned out the potentially latently infected Plague orphans and passed them on to another orphanage elsewhere.

The second orphanage had done the same, and passed them on to a third, and when the clone visited the third, the trail went dead. The third orphanage said that the twin girls had never arrived and had simply assumed the girls had found somewhere else to stay, and they had been too relieved to send out a search party. It was as Naruto had feared. Nobody wanted the orphans of the locked in families, in case they began to cough and sneeze and infected the other children already in the orphanage. The twin girls had slipped out of the system and nobody knew where they were.

They weren't the only ones. The reports coming in from his other clones told the same story – a boy here, a girl there, a pair of brothers there. The matron of the orphanage that Neji and Naruto came to cracked under Neji's intense stony glare. She dropped her forehead to the ground and begged for forgiveness, because she had denied entry to a sniffling little girl, even though she knew that the girl was only sniffling due to hay fever. She hadn't wanted to scare the other children, she said.

So much for Konoha ninjas taking care of each other, a small bitter voice rose unbidden from the corner of Naruto's mind, which he hastily crushed. No, the Konoha ninja were taking care of each other – the matrons were just trying to do the best of the families they already had, the ones who they knew were uninfected and still had a full chance at life. The children who came from the Plague families were seen, in comparison, as good as already dead. Why should the matrons care for the dead when the living needed so much attention?

The problem wasn't Konoha ninjas abandoning each other, but Konoha ninjas abandoning hope, Naruto decided. That solved his conundrum (Neji was rubbing off on him, long word like that). They gave up on ninjas as soon as there was even a suggestion they were infected. It was a protective measure because hoping was dangerous. If they gave up earlier on hope, it lessened the effects of despair. They gave up on the latently infected to stop caring about them, and to stop being hurt when they inevitably died ten to fourteen days later.

Except now things were changing – Shizune's Zero Chakra course offered respite for the infected until a real cure could be found and Kakashi had left the town to bring back Sasuke to help develop just that. Neji was walking the streets with Naruto visiting orphanages instead of sitting isolated in a hospital tent, waiting, just waiting for the first wispy cough to escape his throat.

Not all orphanages had turned away children thankfully and when the clones had asked to see the orphans who had been taken in, they tended to be cheerful although a little quiet (unsurprising given their recent loss and trauma), well looked after and healthy. Unfortunately, that still left twenty three children missing, somewhere out in the streets of Konoha.

Neji was shocked. He admitted over a hasty lunch at Ichiraku ramen shop, clutching the chopsticks in his hands so tight he could barely pick up his noodles, that he had delivered a couple of those orphans to the orphanages himself. He had left the children behind as though he were dusting something troublesome off his hands. He hadn't given them a second thought.

"This shames the Grey Cross, Naruto," Neji had said quietly. "And it shames my family, and it shames us as Konoha ninjas."

"Well, now we can start doing something about it," said Naruto with a determined nod. "The orphanages have been busted and they know we have our eyes on them. They won't be hot-potatoing the locked in Plague orphans anymore, and when the kids are signed up on Shizune's course, the orphanages won't have much excuse to keep them out."

Neji adjusted the hook of the mask around his ears. "Naruto, do you know what worries me about Shizune's Zero Chakra course? Eventually the Plague will end the entire ninja system, it's easy to see that, but, before that, I'm worried it's going to divide up ninja society."

Naruto laughed. "You're overthinking things."

Neji, however, looked suddenly grave. "Am I? Shizune's course separates out the latently infected from the uninfected and is designed to keep us alive longer, but even though we'll be alive the latently infected ninjas won't be able to perform our traditional ninja roles. Our only value, if we have any at all, will be in breeding with the genetics of our kekkei genkai. We will be constantly checked and monitored by the uninfected to make sure we don't manifest the Plague. Even if we live, not breathing a single cough, we will not be able to hold public positions, be medics or teachers, or take part in court proceedings because there will always be that risk that we become infectious. They might divide ninja public spaces, like the Academy, Naruto. Do you think uninfected parents will stand for latently infected children being in the same classroom as their children? They'll certainly divide up the surgeries. Nobody uninfected will want a blood donation from a latently infected ninja. The latently infected will be a ninja sub-class."

"Neji," Naruto tried to distract him, "your noodles are going cold."

"When the Plague comes back," Neji gripped his ramen bowl, "because it will, the uninfected will cull us. They'll kill all the latent ninjas on record. You realise that that's the other role of Shizune's course, Naruto? To keep track of the latently infected ninjas and monitor us, so they can corral us in a future outbreak."

Naruto narrowed his eyes. "What were you doing last night when you should have been counting sheep?"

"Taking a long meditative walk around Konoha," Neji replied archly.

"There you go, that's your problem," Naruto sighed, as he paid the bill and they both stood up to leave the shop. "A long meditative walk. That translates to 'too much time spent on self-pitying brooding and I ended up with a headache'. I promise you, Neji, that will never happen. We're going to find a cure in no time at all. You see if we don't! Come on, let's go and find Lee and ask if he's seen any children wandering the streets while he's been out Running."

"Actually," Neji said softly, "I won't see if we don't. I'll probably be dead."

The end of the ninja world. A divided Konoha ninja population. Civilians hating ninjas and ninjas hating civilians. Naruto was determined not to let a single one of those visions of Konoha's future coming to pass. Konoha ninjas were strong. He had faith in Sakura to do some brilliant medical research with Tsunade-bacchan. He had faith in Kakashi to bring Sasuke back. He even had faith in Sasuke to do what was right when it ultimately mattered.

In the meantime, the Konoha Tigers had twenty-three children to find.

Sasuke leapt, but it was already too late. One bound and he was tangled in a web of wires, fine as hair and razor sharp, shot down at him from the trees. Wire whipped about his ankles, bound them together and he smacked down into the wet dirt of the path. As sparks flashed in his vision, dark steel dropped down on either side of his neck - it was the crescent blade of Kubikiribocho. He strained against the wire, winced as it bit into his skin. With all this metal about him, any electricity Sasuke emitted would be instantly earthed into the ground. Dread and shame and anger rode the pulse of adrenaline coursing through his veins, carrying with it the desperate and damning realisation that he was trapped.

Kakashi nodded towards the trees and the three ANBU slipped down from the canopy. It was difficult for Kakashi to recognise the boy who had once been his student. This young man was a rogue – he had the skinny leanness of a hunter-scavenger, more coyote than dog. Hollow-eyed from periods of sleep counted in minutes rather than hours, sallow-faced from travel in the darker hours of the day, this was a young man who lived a hunted life and ruthlessly did anything to survive. Kakashi suppressed a smile as Sasuke glared up at him from the ground. Some things didn't change. Sasuke had always been ruthless in pursuing his own ends, be it ensuring his survival or chasing the shadow of his brother.

"We should snap his fingers, stop him making any seals," muttered the eyepatched ANBU, as Sasuke strained his hands against the wires again. "See. He's trying to free himself. I'd snap his legs for good measure too. The Hokage only said he had to be alive -"

She trailed off as Kakashi turned to her with a cold, dangerous smile. "No snapping fingers; no breaking legs. What do they teach you in ANBU these days? You would have thought we were in the dark ages," he chided her, knowing full well that the ANBU were taught far worse.

The three ANBU ninja exchanged a look of bemusement, but they stood to one side and watched in silence.

"Sasuke." Kakashi crouched down beside him. "It's been a while. You've got sloppy."

Sasuke's eyes whirled, lightened from black to glowing amber but before they turned red Kakashi put his hand over the boy's face. "You're surrounded by four ninjas of jounin ANBU class and there's an executioner's sword on your neck. Use your head, Sasuke. You're in no position to fight."

Sasuke snapped his teeth. He would have bitten Kakashi's hand to the bone if the man hadn't withdrawn it as quickly as he had. "Like a dog," muttered one of the ANBU, before the other two shushed him.

Sasuke snarled, fixing Kakashi with one glowing red eye, the other eye pressed into the dirt.

Kakashi sighed. "There are three things fatal to a rogue - slowing his movements, staying still and having his face seen. Now, I have found you, Sasuke, barely six miles from Ageha, with the help of the doctor you terrorised and he remembers your face very well. Be thankful that we found you first and not a bounty hunter."

It was a miracle they had caught him. Sasuke had been on the run for months. To have caught him not more than a week from setting out from Konoha was nothing short of extraordinary. Kakashi had thought it was Itachi's disease, the Mycobacterium kimimarosis, already exacting its toll on Sasuke's body and slowing the movements of his band. He had been surprised to learn from the doctor of Ageha that it had been Sasuke's teammates holding back his movements and not vice versa.

"But I am in two minds about calling you sloppy," Kakashi mused, observing the twitching muscles in Sasuke's face, as he fought the urge to fight or flee. "You could have left those companions of yours behind when they caught the Plague, and yet! You slowed your movements, set up semi-permanent camps, and even entered a large town to abduct the local doctor. You risked your life for your teammates. Sasuke, I might actually be a little bit proud of you."

A tight knot of emotion rippled over Sasuke's face, a bundle of pain, instinctive anger and flaring fear. On the whole though, he looked insulted. Sasuke's lip curled. "There is nothing to be proud of. I needed them to achieve my goal. That is all."

"Perhaps, but you seemed curiously affected by the death of your remaining tool. Affected enough that you didn't even notice four jounins surrounding you and preparing their trap," Kakashi said lightly and he was rewarded with another ugly snarl. Despite that, Kakashi couldn't help smiling. Perhaps there was hope for Sasuke yet.

He whistled to the pug sniffing at Sasuke's ankles. "Pakkun, what's the assessment?"

Pakkun sat on his haunches and rubbed his nose with his paw. "Nothing, boss."

"No symptoms?"

"No, boss," Pakkun replied despondently. "He isn't infected - not with old strain or the Plague. I'm sorry, boss, but we've hit a dead end. He's about as useful as an old bone."

"He isn't infected with Itachi's disease?" Kakashi repeated. "Are you sure?"

Sasuke stilled and narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean Itachi's disease?"

Kakashi looked up - at the ANBU fingering their weapons, at Pakkun earnestly sniffing again in case he had made a mistake. Kakashi looked down - at Sasuke, ragged and filthy, covered in streaks of blood and mud and pinned to the ground under Zabuza's old sword. Kakashi had to think quickly. If Sasuke wasn't infected with the old strain there was little justification for bringing him back to the village alive.

Sasuke hadn't been a member of the Akatsuki for long. The likelihood he had been made privy to their innermost plans was low. Kakashi doubted Sasuke even cared about what the Akatsuki's real intentions were, so long as the leader helped Sasuke achieve his personal aims. After all, Sasuke had never questioned Orochimaru's ambitions and plans when he went to him, so, as a source of information about the Akatsuki's plans, Sasuke was worth very little. Perhaps they could bring him back to study those unique Uchiha eyes, but you didn't need a live Uchiha to study the sharingan. Sasuke's head, with the brain and eyes intact, was enough.

Then Kakashi's eyes fell on the pile of empty clothes on the road, from the last of Sasuke's companions, the one who had turned to water, and he was struck by an idea.

"Pakkun." The dog raised its ears. "You say Sasuke hasn't got a single trace of the Plague at all?"

"None," Pakkun replied with a shake of his head. "Not even latent."

"That's impossible," laughed one of the ANBU behind Kakashi. "He's been living at close quarters with three infectious companions for weeks, and the RAMK infection rate is 100%, mortality 100%."

"And yet, he's completely clean. Sasuke," Kakashi's tone took on a spring of excitement, "it is important that you answer me truthfully, but have you felt anything wrong at all? At any point during the time you spent with your companions, have you ever felt any difficulties breathing, any tickles in the throat, any chills, fevers, anything out of the ordinary with your chakra?"

"Never," Sasuke shot back. "But what has that got to with the illness that killed my brother?"

"The Plague, Sasuke," Kakashi hummed and put a thumb to his chin as he considered how best to go on, "is a faster, deadlier version of the thing that killed Itachi. Now, we were hoping to collect a sample of Itachi's disease off you, but it looks as though we've found something even better. We've found the one person immune to the Plague in the whole of the Five Nations," Kakashi leaned in closer and smiled. "You're not even latently infected, Sasuke. It's a biological miracle."

Sasuke's eyes widened. He snorted, chuckled softly. "You intend to take me back to Konoha alive and use me as some kind of lab rat."

"By force if necessary, but preferably not. If you cooperate with us, it'll be easier for you to regain your Konoha citizenship. You'll help us to develop a cure for the disease that killed off your companions and the one that killed your brother. You'll be saving the future of the ninja world. You always insisted that you were an avenger, Sasuke. Think of this as having your vengeance against the Plague."

Sasuke's face went still. It was as blank and unreadable as a stone mask. For several minutes, he soundlessly turned over Kakashi's words. The extending silence unnerved Kakashi. The longer Sasuke brooded on something, the more it took on a distinctly Sasuke-flavoured logic that often meant trouble.

Kakashi cleared his throat to break the silence. "I'm surprised you say 'lab rat' with such distaste, Sasuke. We both know you're no stranger to being a lab rat. I can't imagine Orochimaru missing the opportunity to conduct a little bit of experimentation on you the three years you were with him - "

Laughter echoed out into the road. Kakashi closed his mouth.

Despite the sword around his neck, laughs were shaking the length of Sasuke's body. His mouth was wide open, his eyes were closed, and his laughter was wild, high-pitched, and derisive. It was an ugly sight to behold. The three ANBU slipped knives into their palms and prepared to act if necessary.

"Cooperate with you?" Sasuke's shoulders trembled. "Cooperate with Konoha? Vengeance on a disease? I wish I was sick – I'd vomit blood in your face and then maybe you'd understand how I feel! Your words make me sick to the stomach!"

Kakashi gestured at the ANBU to stand down and lowered his voice, "Sasuke, calm down. Listen – "

"I don't need to listen to you!" Sasuke said shrilly, his eyes spinning red and black. "I've heard all I needed. This Plague of yours is destroying Konoha! It's burning down the whole corrupt ninja system! Finally wiping those stupid smiles off those stupid, ignorant faces! This is wonderful! Perfect! The best news I have heard in years!" Blood ran down the side of Sasuke's neck where the skin had touched the blade. "And you come to me, asking for my help. Don't make me laugh. You're telling me I carry the cure. All I have to do is deny Konoha the cure and Konoha will die. My refusal to go with you will be as good as setting every Konoha ninja on fire. The Plague is my perfect revenge!"

"Let me knock him out," hissed one of the ANBU, sliding lead plates over her fingers and eyeing Sasuke with disgust. "We're wasting time trying to get this one to come willingly. I've seen rogues like this before. His mind's gone, sir. He's no better than a talking animal."

"I object to that!" Pakkun snapped.

"If you try to run from us, where will you go, Sasuke?" Kakashi said soothingly, trying to coax him back to earth. "You will be alone. You won't last long."

"I have always been alone," Sasuke hissed. "And it was Konoha that made me that way, when they ordered my family dead and used my brother! I'll tell you where I'll go. You said I'm the only ninja immune to the Plague in all Five Nations. That means the Plague's international. If the other lands want the cure as much as Konoha, then they'll take me in, and when they do, I'll say they can have me on one condition. They can have my body on the condition that Konoha never has the cure, on the condition that Konoha is destroyed!"

"So you'll sell your body to get revenge on Konoha, like you sold your body to Orochimaru to get revenge on Itachi." Kakashi stared at him, this foaming, snarling red-eyed thing, wondering where things had gone so wrong, when Sasuke's hunger for vengeance had been redirected against Konoha and how Sasuke had sunk so low. "And innocent people will pay for whatever grudge it is you have against the town, probably for something they know next to nothing about. Sasuke, that isn't revenge. That is a massacre. You will be little better than your brother Itachi."

"They are guilty in their ignorance!" Sasuke roared. "And don't you dare speak of Itachi to me, Konoha dog!"

A flash of purple and twisting chakra – the wires binding Sasuke exploded off him in a cloud of glittering metal. The sword flew from his neck, spun through the air and struck one of the ANBU agents on the hip as she attempted to dodge its path. It landed point first in the bank of the road and the ANBU collapsed.

Kakashi leapt back at the first instant he had seen Sasuke's sharingan twist, but even he wasn't fast enough. He shielded his head with his arms, and when he lowered them, his arms were ragged and bristling with razor-thin metal. There was metal embedded in his shins, in the front of his flak jacket. Of the three ANBU, one was lying where she had fallen when the sword had sliced through her hip, and the other two were covering their eyes with their hands and whimpering. Pakkun had dived under the pile of clothes left by Sasuke's companion.

Surrounded by a boiling cloud of thick purple chakra, almost fluid in its quality, Sasuke was standing at the centre of a giant rib-cage. For a moment, he looked as surprised as Kakashi felt. Eyeing the ghostly bones about him, Sasuke took one tentative step forward. The ribcage followed like a shield. A smirk rose to his face and Sasuke was laughing again – that high, cold, mocking laughter.

"Tell the Hokage, Kakashi! Tell her, from Uchiha Sasuke!" Sasuke cried, his face lit up with manic glee. "From now on, every Konoha ninja who dies of the Plague - I killed him! The Plague is my fire and the purifying flames of the Uchihas!"

He jumped, and the rib-cage leapt with him, up into the trees, and then Sasuke was running, fleeing, flying away from the road, leaving only a glowing trail of purple chakra behind him. It hung like a band of smoke and shone dimly in the half-light of dusk.

Kakashi watched Sasuke escape. He couldn't follow Sasuke. The three ANBU officers were injured. Irrespective of how much he liked them, whilst he was the mission leader their safety and lives were his responsibility.

"Pakkun."

The pug wriggled out from under the pile of Akatsuki robes and saluted with its paw. "On it, boss."

As Kakashi knelt to check the two ANBU officers' eyes, Pakkun put his nose to the air and scampered into the forest, following the burnt ozone smell of Sasuke's acrid chakra.

It turned out that many Runners had seen gangs of children on their outings. At the Runners headquarters near the hospital, Guy and Lee sat Naruto and Neji down at a table and spread out a map, indicating where the Runners had seen the gangs and, in some circumstances, had to fight them off.

"They've learnt that the Runners carry the basics they need to survive, so Runners make rich pickings for the child gangs," Guy told Naruto with a solemn nod. "These days, they seem to target the chuunin Runners especially. Lee's had some nasty brush ups with a group in the East district. They avoid us jounins, no doubt intimidated by the aura of power we exude from every pore like sweat."

Guy tapped a spot near the third orphanage the first of Naruto's clones had visited. Naruto realised with a jolt that the gang sighting hotspots were clustered in the neighbourhoods of the orphanages where the children had been turned away.

"Can you tell us more about the gang in the East district, Lee?" Neji asked, apparently realising the same thing as Naruto. "Do you remember anything about the gang that attacked you?"

Lee's eyebrows bristled like caterpillars rearing to protect their territories. "There were seven of them attacking me! It was most unfair. They were led by a boy, about ten years old, and a pair of twin girls around eight. I won't forget them in a hurry. I demanded a fair fight, and one of the girls took off my visor and tried to put chewing gum in my eyebrows to…" he dropped his voice darkly "…wax them off."

After sympathising with Lee and promising that they had never heard anything so scandalous in their lives, Naruto and Neji said their goodbyes and left Guy and Lee to finish their short break before their Running shift. They made to the East district of Konoha, Naruto tracing the way his clone had took earlier that day. Neji had suggested they disguise themselves as Runners, to draw out the gang, but Naruto had firmly refused to do such a thing. He didn't want the children to think they were liars out to fool them. They had been let down badly enough by adults already.

Several hours of searching, however, and Naruto was feeling a lot more favourable towards Neji's idea. There wasn't a trace of a child to be found, although plenty of shops they stopped to ask questions at complained of things being stolen from their stalls.

"Cream buns," complained one shop assistant in a convenience store, as he stacked the shelves. "They come in here and the next moment we're out of cream buns and sweets."

"I guess that's not surprising if they're children," Naruto said to Neji, who was taking notes of all the shops that had suffered thefts and muttering under his breath about compensation.

The shop assistant looked up and noticed Neji, and the face mask covering his nose and mouth. The assistant gave Neji a nervous smile. "Not meaning to be rude, sir, but we get a lot of ninja customers in here. Would you mind going outside? No hard feelings, but we rather we didn't have latents coming in -"

"You turn him out, you turn both of us out," cut in Naruto loudly, and he spun round Neji and frogmarched him out of the shop, making sure the shop door slammed behind both of them so hard that the dust fell from its lintel.

"Did he say something?" Neji said in surprise, closing the notebook and pocketing it.

Naruto grimaced and lied, "He insulted my dress sense."

"Ninjas," came a high-pitched whisper. "Forehead protectors! You're real ninjas! Not wizard ninjas!"

Naruto and Neji turned, hardly believing their ears.

The small dirt and dust-streaked little boy, around six years old, was peering out from a nearby alley. He was panting and white in the face. He was staring at Naruto and Neji as though ready to burst into tears. He launched himself at them across the street and seized Naruto's front in his little fists. "You've got to come with me. Please."

Naruto glanced at Neji who gave him a small nod. Neji recognised the boy's face from one of the reports. Naruto turned back to the boy and ruffled his hair, "Got it, kid. We'll go with you."

The boy looked ecstatic. He nodded and pushed up his glasses, the right lens of which was cracked and shattered, then dashed back into the alley, beckoning for Naruto and Neji to follow. He was fast, in an obvious hurry. There were bloody scrapes on his legs and cheeks. Naruto and Neji followed him as closely as they could. The boy took them down twisting alleys, through the backs of gardens, along the edge of a canal. He wriggled through a hole in a chain-link fence, which Naruto had to enlarge with his kunai for him to get through too, and finally the boy was running across a small yard in the shadow of a crumbling concrete building.

EAST KONOHA MUSEUM OF TRADITIONAL CIVILIAN CRAFTS

Naruto had never heard of it. He doubted East Konoha had even heard of it. As Neji hacked the hole in the chain-link fence wider so that he could follow, Naruto watched the little boy disappear round the back of the building. Soon he heard voices. They sounded incredulous, then excited, and the next instant a pair of twin girls appeared round the corner of the building.

One ran forward and snatched at Naruto's hand. Her sister went to pull Neji through the chain-link fence, and all of a sudden Naruto and Neji were being dragged by the twins to the back of the museum. They seemed to be in as much of a hurry as the little boy.

"Jo's right, Nagira, they're real ninjas!" the girl holding Naruto's hand shouted. "They're not wearing those scary hoods. They'll help us. Jo did good this time."

A group of five children were clustered around something lying in the shadow of the museum wall. Their shirts were stained, their shorts muddy. The boy called Nagira stood up when Naruto came into his view. He was thin, sharp and wiry-looking, one eye closed with gunge from an infection. He barely came up to Naruto's chest.

"What rank are you guys?" Nagira demanded, standing protectively over whatever it was on the ground that the other children were tending.

"I'm a jounin," Neji stepped in smoothly. Naruto's genin status wasn't going to do them any favours here. Naruto, to his credit, kept quiet.

Nagira nodded and stepped aside. "Can you help him?"

The twin girls let go of Neji and Naruto's hands. There was a young boy sprawled out on the soil, his blue T-shirt smeared with chocolate, his face pale and tinged with grey. There was a thin trail of yellowy froth running from the corner of the little boy's lips. It was obvious from a single glance that the boy was dead.

Neji put his fingers to the boy's neck, felt for a pulse and shook his head.

"Dead?" Naruto said, and the eyes of the five remaining children darted towards him in disbelief then back to the body they surrounded.

"Poisoned," Neji declared.

The children started muttering and murmuring, exchanging nervous glances, whispering. Eventually the one with shattered glasses, Jo, blurted, "It's like Marie's gang. They were all poisoned too. We're next. Whoever got them, they're targeting us now!"

"Jo, go wash your face under the tap. It's snotty. The rest of you, shut up," Nagira ordered, and the children obeyed. Jo climbed to his feet and ran away with his head hanging in shame.

Naruto turned to Nagira. He must have been the ten year old gang leader Lee had described. Naruto tried to keep the horror out of his voice when he asked, "What did that kid Jo mean by targeting? Who would poison children?"

He was stunned by a ferocious snarl from the direction of the dead little boy, where Neji was still examining the body. Neji had peeled open the boy's fists and found a fistful of chocolate drops. He held them up for Naruto to see.

"Look at this," said Neji in a low voice that shook with anger. He rubbed away the surface layer of chocolate between his finger and thumb, and out of the centre appeared a very familiar looking black lentil-shaped pill. "Konseigan."

A cure for the Plague? A cure of Itachi's disease? To know now after all those deaths, the irony of the timing couldn't be better, Sasuke thought bitterly as the Susanoo chakra began to fizzle out around him. That Konoha wanted him back in order to help it rebuild itself when all he wanted to see it burn gave him no end of satisfaction, but what Sasuke had said about selling himself to another nation, he wasn't so sure any more.

The adrenaline was wearing off. His head was spinning and using Susanoo had made every cell in his body feel like it was trying to contain a firework. He retracted the mangekyo sharingan and some of the throbbing ache in his head vanished. The giant rib-cage disappeared and he stopped to rest on a branch, but lost his balance and fell to the forest floor, righting himself just in time to land in a crouch on all fours.

He thought of the two weeks he had spent with the dying and the sick - Karin, Juugo and Suigetsu -and exhaustion flooded over him. At last they were all dead. At last he was alone. It was quiet. It was peaceful, he told himself. Sasuke could finally think clearly – no more incessant bickering in the background, no more whining for breaks or better shelter, no more demands to know what he wanted from them.

And yet, how could it be that the silence of the forest seemed louder than those fools? Why did he feel so drained and spent? Was it seeing Kakashi? No, he should not have been affected by that. That mad rush of fire that had filled his mind and boiled his blood and made him declare all those bold things was still burning, but not as brightly. Sasuke was tired with everything. Why was he finally feeling so tired?

He dragged his feet behind him as he walked in the night. Something small and dark flitted across the branches – a bat perhaps. As his swirling thoughts finally settled, suddenly everything became wonderfully clear.

Sasuke was tired because the perfect revenge was within arms' reach and his body was preparing to rest at last.

All he had to do was prevent Konoha getting hold of a cure and it would be destroyed.

All he had to do was stop Konoha capturing him alive.

Sasuke felt for the sword, strapped to his back, and drew the blade. It made more noise leaving its sheath than it usually did, which annoyed him somewhat, but that hardly mattered anymore. He sank to his knees into the path. The leaves crackled under his weight. The damp earth smelled of spices and was as thick and soft as fur.

Forget selling himself to another nation. Sasuke was going to take his revenge now, and get his peace at last, because the dark was still chasing him, and everything in it was howling. Sasuke was going to die, alone and triumphant, on a dark roadside in the middle of forest and the bears, foxes, ants and rats could take apart his body.

Still kneeling, he turned the tip of the blade to his throat and closed his eyes.

There was a rush of wind and swirling leaves.

The trail of Sasuke's chakra and scent grew stronger. Either Pakkun was gaining on him or Sasuke was slowing. Both would have suited Pakkun nicely. He bounded from branch to branch, reading the fluctuating lines of odours and smells drifting in the air. His fur was still standing on end from the moment the Susanoo had appeared and he shivered as he remembered it.

A slip in the scents – the boy had gone down to the path below.

Pakkun jumped and landed squarely on a toadstool, bounced and rolled. The shimmering trail continued down the path for a few metres more, but all of a sudden stopped. He stared at the ground.

Sasuke had been kneeling there, not minutes, perhaps seconds, before Pakkun had arrived.

He could hardly have vanished in that time. Pakkun pointed his nose at the trees, at the bushes, and at the air. He ran further along the path, sniffing for a trail of any kind at all, but there was nothing.

He returned to the spot where Sasuke had knelt in the leaves. Had Pakkun been more fanciful, he might have imagined that Sasuke had turned into darkness, that the shadows had found him and claimed him from the human world at last. His vanishing was perfect.

As it was, Pakkun was Kakashi's ninken and he wasn't fanciful at all. He grunted and glared into the shadows, where there was resolutely nothing at all, no matter how much he stared.

He nodded and said to the darkness, "Well played."

There was nothing in the dark to reply, so the little dog began his journey back to his master.

Chapter Text

The man in the mask set down a bowl of rice and looked down at his charge.

"It's beneath my dignity to force feed you," he said mildly, "as it ought to be beneath your dignity to be force fed."

The boy sitting at the table didn't respond. He stared at the bowl then pushed it to one side.

The man stood behind him. He put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "The offer I am making you is fair. It's fairer than what Konoha offered, isn't it?" The man glanced around the room, the desk, the table, the lighted candles and the doorway without a door. He lowered his voice. "Konoha has never kept its promises. You know this. It has only ever taken advantage of us – our skills, our strengths, our love, the kindness of our loved ones."

He felt the boy flinch under his hand. Good, a response. "And what has it ever done for us in return? What has Konoha ever given us, but disgrace and dishonour? Nothing, my boy. Konoha never pays its dues."

The man paused to allow his words to sink.

"Whereas, I," he gestured at his masked face, "I always pay my dues. If I especially like that person, I will pay them three times over. I will help you achieve your goals, if you will help me achieve mine."

The boy breathed out slowly. "Where am I?"

"Not in a cage," the edges of the single visible eye crinkled upwards in a smile. "I won't keep you here against your will. If you want Konoha destroyed, however, I do strongly suggest you stay."

"I don't need your help." The boy smiled. "If I die, Konoha will destroy itself."

"Such a half-baked revenge, only the feeble would think such a thing would be enough. I didn't expect you to be so easily satisfied. I am disappointed." The man sighed and put his hands behind his back. "Perhaps it is as I feared. Despite your talents, you are still a child."

The boy surged up from the table, but at the sudden movement his head reeled and he dropped back into the chair. "I am not a child!"

"Is that so? The perfect revenge is within your reach. Only a child wouldn't see it! Think about it, boy. To stand over the ashes of your enemy, to take everything that was his, to build your castle where your enemy's once stood, and to build it better than his ever was!" The masked man looked back into the room, to where the boy was still sitting at the table, holding his giddy head in his hands. "To be the last man standing – that is the perfect revenge. And for that, you must live and outlive your enemies."

The boy considered the masked man's words. "You will hide me here then?" he said, peering up at the swirling mask in the candlelight. "In exchange for being your lab- "

"I don't like the term lab-rat. I prefer volunteer," the masked man enunciated, before smiling again. "Or partner. Certainly, if the papers are ever published, I promise, by the names of both our hallowed ancestors, that your name will be recorded alongside my own – "

"Like I care about your damn papers," the boy growled. His hand moved across to the bowl of rice, growing cold at the edge of the desk, and pulled it towards him. He stared at the rice. He had thought he was beyond hunger, but his stomach was starting to feel dismally empty.

The boy gritted his teeth and raised his head. Red glowing eye met red glowing eye, like a challenge. "You can do what you like with me."

"Good, Sasuke. Very good. Then you will be hidden here, under the best barriers and illusions known to ninja history, until either Konoha falls or my colleague gives notice that he has no more need of you and you wish to leave." The man raised a finger and smiled. "But, if my colleague reports that you have been uncooperative in any way, be prepared to face consequences."

Sasuke closed his eyes. He took up his chopsticks. He murmured, "I'll show them who'll be the last man standing."

"I'm sure you will," the masked man agreed, smiling beneath his mask.

Sasuke began to eat and the masked man left, satisfied at a job well done.

Chapter Text

Something hard was tapping against Danzo's window - fingertips, an urgent hand in the night, trying to get his attention. He sat up, waited for the tapping to stop, and when it didn't, he pushed the curtains aside. It was the branches of the birch in the garden, blown against the glass by the wind.

Gentle moonlight filtered into the room. Danzo looked into the courtyard garden below. Winding around tended moss and a small fishpond was a thin white path. He scanned it for scuffs, disturbances and ripples in the gravel that hadn't been there before he went to sleep. Then he ran his fingers over the window sill, looking for changes in the layers of dust. There was nothing. Nothing had changed and everything was still in the night garden, except for the birch, still tapping against his window.

Danzo pulled the curtains shut and lit the lamp on the table.

Someone had been in his room.

Years of paranoia, attempts on his life, dark meetings in dark places had given him something of an instinct for it - the lingering weight of an unfamiliar shadow, a change in the air circulation. Someone had been in his room. Someone had stood over him in his sleep. Someone had been walking around him, touching his books and reading the false papers he left on his desk in case a spy ever did break in.

They were good, he gave them that, but there was no denying the shadow they left in their wake. There was no point asking the guards at the door what they had seen. They were only civilians and whatever had come into Danzo's room would have been beyond them.

He opened the curtains one more time. It really was very still. It shouldn't have been that still at all. Danzo looked at the fishpond and it was then that he noticed the fish, floating belly up in the water, dead in their little black pond.

The first thing Naruto and Neji did with the children was visit the hospital. Nagira's eye was oozing pus, the twin girls had some yellowing cuts and the whole group seemed to have contracted a stomach illness whilst scavenging for food in the streets. They needed a check-up, as well as confirmation of their latency, and the hospital was the place to go.

Once the children were settled in the waiting room, Neji stayed behind to go to his Zero Chakra class and Naruto set off to find the Keepers' Headquarters.

An old manor with a wide wooden arch, high white walls, and a steady flow of Marksmen and ninjas who smelled faintly of something like sheep or horse striding purposefully in and out of the entrance – despite getting lost at a crossroad, Naruto found the Headquarters in no time at all.

"Shikamaru! Neji said you're probably half dead but I don't believe that's true! How are you, my man?" Naruto shouted, throwing open the door.

The buzz in the office dissipated and the Keepers looked up – all except one, who dropped his forehead to his desk and groaned. Naruto smiled and, ignoring the disapproving glares and mutters, weaved his way between the desks towards his target.

"So Shikamaru!" Naruto stood over the desk and folded his arms. "What's up? How have things been?"

"Naruto," sighed Shikamaru, lifting his face from the desk and smiling weakly. "You don't change do you? Will you shut up! My head still hurts. I'd still be in bed if we weren't short of men."

Naruto's smile faltered as he saw Shikamaru's face. "They really got you didn't they? The Sixth Repentance. What happened to your eyes - ?"

"It's nothing permanent," Shikamaru cut in hastily, and he pushed the sunglasses up his nose through the film of the visor. "Just a bad flash burn. So long as we take our aspirin and keep wearing these sunglasses for about a week, we'll all be fine."

"We?" Naruto repeated and Shikamaru indicated the other Keepers going about their paperwork, many of whom were wearing the same dark sunglasses under their visors, including Shikamaru's mother at the head desk. "Damn all those crazies! I'm going to find their leader and – "

"Not if I get my hands on him first," said Shikamaru darkly, before clearing his throat. "Neji sent me a letter yesterday evening. He said that you found out something about the Repentance."

Naruto nodded and told him everything they had learned the day before. The Repentance's activities had extended to killing the ninja children in the streets, handing them poison disguised as sweets. None of the orphanages had reported any strange deaths. Neji had spent the evening conducting interviews with the matrons, whilst Naruto had looked after Nagira's gang in the Grey Cross tent. It seemed as though the Repentance had been specifically targeting the unsupervised street children – the easiest prey - first.

"Chocolate-coated konseigan." Shikamaru grimaced with disgust. "What did you do with the boy's body?"

Neji had taken the body to the hospital to have an autopsy done. The poisoned bodies the Marksmen pulled from the locked in houses were usually too old to be useful. The boy's body was their best chance to find out how the poison worked yet.

Shikamaru pulled out a lighter and played with its cap. "Let me know about the results. In the meantime, if the Repenters are out for ninja children, I'll send out a notice to the orphanages to keep an eye out for suspicious adults and to take extra care when employing civilians. Anything else?"

Nagira had told Naruto about the group of children in the North district, poisoned only days earlier. It had been a gang of eleven, led by a tough girl called Marie with a build like a junior sumo wrestler. Nagira's gang had stumbled across the Eleven's hideout by accident, when looking for a new place to sleep. Apart from Marie's bulky body was stretched out by the door, with a line of saliva drying at the corner of her mouth, the whole gang had vanished. Footprints from the scene went down to a nearby canal, where the twin girls had found sandals, a pair of glasses and an amulet snagged amongst the weeds on the banks. It seemed as though Marie's body had been left behind because it was simply too heavy for the Repenters to carry to the water.

"Me and Neji, we were thinking – "

"You mean Neji was thinking," Shikamaru corrected with a smirk.

"I think just fine," Naruto huffed. "We were thinking that since the gang in the North were targeted first, the Repentance main meeting place might be around there too."

"Not much of a lead, but I'll send a group of men scouting there, just in case." Shikamaru put his fingers and thumbs together and closed his eyes. "It's more likely the kids were targeted because they were the largest group of ninja kids on the streets. How many street orphans are left?"

"Lee says that there's a group of five down south living around the paddy fields. They steal from the granaries."

Shikamaru nodded and scratched his head. "I'll try and find them as soon as possible. Damn you, Naruto, why did you have to come and dump all this work on me? I'm supposed to be chronically lazy. I have a reputation to maintain."

"Yeah, but we can usually count on you in a pinch. You've got that reputation to maintain as well," Naruto retorted deftly.

"Whatever you say." Shikamaru leaned his head on his elbow. "Where do I take the kids when I find them?"

"The gatehouse at the back of the Hyuuga estate. That's going to be our Tigers' Den."

"Going to be? Naruto, have you even cleared this with the Hyuugas yet?"

Naruto laughed nervously and avoided Shikamaru's gaze. "Well, technically yes, because Neji came up with it, and he's a Hyuuga so -"

"But with the main locked in clan - no." Shikamaru drummed his fingers on the table, looking unsurprised and very amused. "You really don't change do you?"

As far as Neji was concerned, despite coming from a large family with a whole contingent of cousins and second cousins needing baby-sitting and tutoring, dealing with children was not his strong point.

Neji used to think that until a certain age, perhaps around three or four, children were little better than puppies. When they did something good, you rewarded them with praise and treats. When they did something bad you made sure they were scolded and flicked about the nose. They were easier to deal with as they got older, but even then he often found them baffling. Perhaps it was because they operated on a plane of logic that, although Naruto seemed to find it familiar, Neji could only view as an alien landscape, which was bizarre because Neji knew he must have been through childhood at some point.

Confusing, baffling, bizarre and illogical – that was Neji's summation of children, before they graduated the Academy and had the reality of steel drilled into them. No wonder he felt so uncomfortable sitting with the five children in the Grey Cross common area.

They sat in nervous silence. It could have been worse. He might have had to actually entertain them. One of the Marksmen had found Neji pads of paper and pens from the store cupboard and the volunteer canteen had given them a basket of bread rolls. Jo and the twin girls were drawing and one of the boys was slowly picking at his bread roll like he needed to make it last for a week, but no amount of food and entertainment seemed capable of stopping the looks they shot at Neji as he presided over them at the head of the table, trying and failing to not look intimidating.

"When's Naruto-niisan going to come back?" one of the girls asked hesitantly.

"In half an hour. Keep your voices down. You don't want to disturb the Marksmen."

Names, Neji reminded himself. The girl was Somei Shigure, distinctive by a mole under her eye that her sister Yae didn't have, but otherwise identical. The boy with the shattered glasses was Hidaka Jo. Happily for him, the hospital had given him a new pair during the check-up. The quiet one tearing his bread roll into bite-sized pieces was Tsuchinaka Mogura and, last but not least, the one doing a magnificent job putting Neji on edge was their young leader, Shidare Nagira.

After being drained of pus, one of Nagira's eyes was hidden under an eye-patch. The other was narrowed at Neji with open hostility from the moment they sat down at the table. Neji was waiting for him to make the first move. An hour of staring passed before Nagira got up and came to stand beside him. The girls and Jo looked up with interest.

Nagira opened his mouth, "You're a Hyuuga, right?"

It sounded like the appropriate moment for a cold white-eyed glare. "Obviously."

The young boy eyed Neji critically. "I was just thinking how it was a Hyuuga jounin who took me and Jo to our orphanage. Maybe it was one of your relatives."

"Maybe," Neji agreed, "but it might have been me. Have you considered that?"

"Yeah," Nagira breathed, his one eye narrowed, "yeah, I have. You know, the matron there, when she was trying to work out where she could dump us, she shut both of us in the airing cupboard and prayed that we'd die by morning, to save her the guilt of passing us on? When she came the next morning, saw we were still alive, she just gave us a note with an address and told us to go to some other orphanage. She never wanted us there in the first place, so I don't blame her, but -"

"You blame the Hyuuga jounin,"said Neji, raising an eyebrow. The boy pursed his lips. "Of course you would. It would only be natural. What are you going to do about it? You won't find a fight with me. I don't fight children barely old enough to be examined for a forehead protector."

Nagira shook his head furiously. "I'm not stupid. I'm just giving you a warning, that's all. We don't like you, even if you helped us out yesterday. Got it?"

Neji was about to reply when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up to find just such a Hyuuga jounin Marksman smiling down at him. One of his relatives, but he couldn't recognise who until the figure in hazard gear spoke.

"Neji-kun," the jounin said, and he recognised it as one of his second cousins, "not meaning to be rude, but I was just wondering if you could take your group somewhere outside of the common area."

"We're only going to be for a few more minutes, Hisaki," Neji protested, lowering his voice, "and the children have been quiet. They aren't disturbing any of the Marksmen here."

"It's not the children, Neji," his cousin said, looking over his shoulder. Neji followed his gaze to where a group of Marksmen were sitting around a table with cups of barley tea. They were looking in Neji's direction with a marked distaste that Neji was beginning to find uncomfortably familiar. His cousin continued, "You know what it's like being a Marksman. The common area's a space for us to stop worrying about infection for a bit, and - ah – I hate to say this, but you've been sitting here for quite a while now, Neji. With you the way you are, you're stopping them from enjoying their well-earned rest, if you see what I mean."

"With me the way I am? You mean this?" Neji pointed at his face mask and his cousin nodded with a weak, apologetic smile. "I see. Right."

Neji stood. The children had been watching the whole exchange in a stunned, confused silence. He beckoned and they gathered with surprising obedience to follow him out of the tent.

Neji turned to his cousin, mustered up a smile that failed to reach his eyes. "Let me know how it goes."

His cousin laughed. "How what goes?"

Neji cleared his throat and his cousin leapt back three paces, as though Neji had threatened him with a knife. "How it goes when Naruto gets here and you explain to him why you kicked me and five children out of the Cross common area."

There goes the noon bell, thought Hinata, wiping the sweat and the vapour from her forehead. She was in the North wing of the Hyuuga house that afternoon, with Hanabi and three of her aunts. Unlike the glue vapour that had made her giddy and nauseous, the pungent smell wafting off the vats of dye three rooms down burned her nostrils. They smelt herbal, but herbal never necessarily meant good, no matter how wholesome it sounded. A lot of poisons were herbs after all.

Hinata was chopping and trimming madder root for the red jounin dye, her hair bundled up into a bun behind her head to keep out of the way of her hands.

"You could chop them a little finer, Hinata-chan," chided one of her aunts – the stern one, Hikage, the one Hinata had always been a little bit afraid of. She was stripping leaves off an ai plant like she was hacking off limbs. Hinata and Hanabi didn't agree on many things, perhaps most things, but on this they fervently did. Aunt Hikage wasn't taking the Hyuuga lock in at all well. As she pursed her lips and tutted over Hinata's butchered madder roots, Aunt Hikage's hands were twitching and flexing with nervous tremors.

"Sorry, Aunt. I am trying," Hinata stammered and she bent over her chopping board again.

All of a sudden, the house was filled with the sound of a wailing siren. The three aunts looked up from their work benches. Then Hikage was shaking Hinata's shoulder, hissing, "Hinata-chan, go and find out what's going on."

"Ye-yes, Aunt!"

Hinata leapt to her feet and went out into the corridor. The siren caterwauled in her ears. Slipping and sliding on the polished wooden floor, she ran through the house and soon found a cluster of bemused looking clan manservants. "What's happened?" Hinata gasped, as she approached them, sliding to a stop.

One of them raised his hands in a calming gesture. "It's a false alarm, miss. No need to worry. The siren will be switched off soon."

"A false alarm? Wh-why? What happened? I thought it was only supposed to go off if somebody tried to break in."

The manservant wrinkled his nose and huffed. "Somebody did, miss, but – ah – by accident. Your father's dealing with it right – Master!"

The manservant suddenly folded like he had been bent in half. The other servants hurriedly lined up beside him and followed suite, and Hyuuga Hiashi appeared, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his dark silk robes.

"Hinata," Hiashi's mouth was twisted as though he was fighting back a smile, "can I borrow you for a moment?"

He indicated for her to come along with a jut of his chin and Hinata followed, three steps behind, wondering who could possibly have been stupid or reckless enough to 'accidentally' break into a house locked in under council orders, and as the wail of the siren continued to clamour in her ears, she felt her face grow steadily warmer, because there was only one person she could think of who –

"I'm going to repeat the question," a cousin was saying through the communication hatch carved into the gate, "a little louder this time. Why did you try to break down the door?"

"And I'm going to repeat what I said!" came the voice from the other side, somehow managing to be louder than the siren. "I knocked and nobody answered so I tried the door handle!"

Hinata froze in the atrium and felt the blood rush to her face. She couldn't believe her ears. "Na-Naruto-kun!"

"Ah," said Hiashi, slipping into his sandals so as to approach the gate, "so at least we've confirmed his identity. Ko, stand down and sort out the siren."

Ko dipped his head in a short bow. "Yes, sir!"

He took off at a run towards the back of the house, and Hinata and Hiashi stepped out from the eaves of the manor into the warm spring sunshine. Ko had left the communication hatch open. An indignant voice was still filtering through from the other side: "Hey, hey you! You can't just leave me hanging! Come back here, you Hyuuga bastard, I'm not finished with you yet!"

Hiashi put his hand to Hinata's back and pushed her forwards towards the hatch. "Find out what he wants," he mouthed, before standing back and tucking his hands up his sleeves again.

Hinata nodded, but her mouth was going dry. Within less than a month, her world had shrunk to the several acres of the Hyuuga estate. She had kept to the monotony of the routine, moving with the summons of the bell, letting time flow and herself melt away. It was easier to bear the frustration and the anxiety of the lock in when you forgot the reality of the world outside. The inside world was real, the outside was a dream, and the two were connected by a hatch and Rock Lee's shouting.

Naruto suddenly back and swearing on the other side of the gate forced her to face the truth. Naruto, with all his noise and brightness, was a fierce reminder of the outer world's reality. Hinata had been lying to herself. She hadn't wanted the outside world to fade away, and she hadn't wanted to be locked in in the first place. She hated the lock in as much as Aunt Hikage. She wished she was outside the walls, with her friends, with Neji, and with Naruto.

Hinata wiped her hands on her apron again. Her palms were still stained from the ai plant blue she had been stripping before the madder. "Naruto-kun?"

There was pause in the ranting and railing from the other side. "Hinata? Is that Hinata? Hey! This is perfect! How are you?"

At the same instant, the siren stopped and silence of sorts returned to the Hyuuga estate. There was hammering from where clan members were fixing the roof.

Hinata chewed her tongue. "I'm coping. How have you been, Naruto-kun? Lee told me that you were back in Konoha."

"Yeah, everyone's telling me I'm stupid or a moron for coming back." She could hear him smiling. That was the nice thing about Naruto. His smiles reached his voice.

"Well, I think you wouldn't be you if you didn't come back,"Hinata continued, the words rushing from her mouth. She smiled softly. "Welcome home."

"Thank, Hinata." Naruto cleared his throat, and Hinata couldn't help flinching, thinking of the hundreds of ninjas who had done the same and died choking on their own blood ten days later. "I need your help – "

And she listened as he told her in a splurge of words about other locked in families in Konoha, the potentially latent orphans who had been pushed into the streets, a strange end of the world cult urging ninjas to kill themselves and their children, and Shikamaru's police force being attacked by the cult member civilians. Kiba was dead. Neji was infected – she had heard it all from Lee already, but hearing it again from Naruto seemed to make it more real. Maybe it was because he had spent so long fighting to make people see that he existed, he just seemed to exist more.

"Neji said we could use the gatehouse at the back of the Hyuuga estate to house the kids. They're probably all infected, but he said the distance – Ah, god damn it, he would have come and asked himself, but apparently there's some law saying infected aren't allowed within a thousand metres of the Hyuuga main house. He'd get his head cut off or something."

"He would indeed," said Hiashi at last, sliding into the conversation. "Bringing the infected children within a kilometre radius of this house would make both his head and the children's heads fly, but the gatehouse is on the boundary of the estate and near three kilometres away from the main house. You will be able to keep the infected children there certainly. Not a bad idea, if I must say. That gatehouse has been empty for months."

Hinata stepped away from the door and let her father go to the hatch. The back and forth exchange was surprisingly easy once Naruto adjusted to the knowledge that he was speaking to Hinata's father and Neji's uncle and tossed all caution to the wind, conveniently forgetting that this man was also clan head. She let her father negotiate, agree to send the key to the gatehouse to Naruto's address by the Runner who would be dropping by in the evening, before he began to pick at Naruto for more news on Konoha's situation.

Hinata's thoughts turned to her cousin Neji and the ballot papers they had drawn. She remembered the moment he had opened his slip and she had opened hers. They had opened them nearly simultaneously. Neji had been just that little bit faster.

"Hinata, do you have something to say before we let this young man get on his way?" her father was suddenly saying, as he turned away to go back into the house.

There was. There was something she, of course, wanted to say to Naruto and just to Naruto, but now was not the time. There was something else. Her father knew. Of course he did, he was clan head. He had realised something was off the very afternoon the ballot had taken place and divided up the clan Hiashi had been so desperately trying to bring back together.

"Naruto-kun?" she said into the hatch. "Could you pass on a message to Neji for me?"

"For Neji? Sure. So long as it's good."

Hinata lowered her voice, even though her father already knew what had happened. "Tell him that I was really a-angry when he switched our ballot papers and joined the Cross instead of me, but that," she chewed her lip, "I've forgiven him now." She whispered, "Can you…thank him for me?"

When they had drawn the ballot slips, it had been Hinata's ballot slip carrying the Caged Bird mark of the Grey Cross, not Neji's. Neji's had been blank, but Neji had heard Hinata gasp and seen her momentarily afraid. Before she could move to where the new Cross members were standing, Neji had snatched out the marked slip, thrust his blank into her hands and he had stepped forward in her place. Protecting her. Caging her but protecting her. If she ever got out of the house, Hinata was going to hit him (although the thought made a more than a little bit nervous).

"Sure, I'll tell him. You can count on me, Hinata." Naruto sounded as though he was smiling again. "I don't remember the exact wording, but I reckon I've got the overall gist."

In the end, Neji settled for asking the children where they wanted to go. Nagira suggested a playground in a nearby park. Neji wasn't in the mood to argue, so there they went.

Neji sat on the bench and cast an eye about the playground. He had a clear view of every apparatus in the area – the slides, the swings, the turntable, monkey bars – as well as the entrance onto the road and the doors to the public toilets. If any strange civilian tried to come and hurt the children, Neji would know. He folded his arms and settled to watch Nagira push Yae on the swings. Jo and Shigure busied themselves burying Mogura in the sandpit.

The playground gate creaked. A civilian woman entered the playground. He tensed, then saw that she was closely followed by a little boy and relaxed. It was just another Konoha mother and son. Perhaps Naruto was right. Neji was getting paranoid. There was little reason to suspect every civilian he saw by day to be a Repenter by night, but Neji was finding it difficult to forget those blank silver faces, those dirty white cloaks, and the wilful abandon with which the civilians had put knives to the ninjas' throats the moment the Keepers were down on the ground. Shikamaru had been sitting an inch deep in the blood of his comrades. The Repenters had seemed less than human.

"Would you mind if I joined you?"

The civilian woman was indicating the spot next to him on the bench. She was middle aged, greying, with sunspots on her cheeks and lines around her eyes and mouth. Her shoulders were stooped. She appeared to be a harmless forty-year old housewife who smiled as much as she worried. Perhaps a pressured mother. He nodded and shuffled along the bench to make room, ignoring the shadow of the silver mask that loomed out in the dark of his memory.

"Thank you." She perched on the seat and looked out across the playground. "You're rather young to be a father of five."

Neji felt his face colour instantly, and he found himself spluttering, "You're very much mistaken! I – "

The woman chuckled and Neji bit his tongue. "Just a housewife's joke. I used to have a son around your age and he was always much too serious for his own good. I'd tease him like that, and he'd redden, just the same as you did." She looked up at the sky. "To think it was only four days ago, when I last saw him breathe."

Neji adjusted the mask awkwardly around his nose. What could he say to that? "I'm sorry to hear it."

"He was unusual you know, a ninja coming from a civilian family," he woman continued sadly. The little boy she had brought to the playground was climbing to the top of the slide, holding one of the twin girl's hands. "Perhaps there were ninjas in my family or my husband's family somewhere in the past. In any case, my son was born with chakra and he set out to become a ninja."

"You must have been proud of him," Neji said without thinking and he immediately wanted to kick himself, when he remembered that were it not for chakra nobody would be dying of the Plague and this woman's son would be alive.

"I was at first," the woman said. She twisted her hands in her lap. "We sent him to the Academy, the first boy with chakra from our family. The bullying he had to put up with, coming from chakra-less parents! I couldn't help but think that his chakra was a curse," she shivered in the chill breeze and Neji kept silent. "My husband accused me of cuckolding him for a ninja eventually. It led to our divorce. Now, because of chakra, my son is dead and, but for my little nephew, I am alone." The woman laughed self-consciously. "I'm sorry for telling you all this. We're perfect strangers, but you do remind me of him."

Neji was beginning to feel uncomfortable. There were few things that made him more uncomfortable than being compared to a dead man by the dead man's own mother. He looked to the sky beyond the climbing frame. Columns of black smoke were hanging above the forest from the plague pits. He had only been to the pits twice and he never wanted to go again if he could help it.

He took a deep breath. "Do you think ninjas bully civilians and oppress them?"

The woman nodded. "Yes, I do. It is the truth."

The image of a silver masked Repenter in white reared its head in his mind's eye again. Suddenly Neji was feeling very, very uncomfortable indeed. He took another deep breath, and then another, steadying himself.

"They misuse their powers." The woman closed her eyes and said, as though reciting. "For war instead of peace, to sneak instead of stride, using what should have been a creative gift of good for destruction. My son was taught from four years old to kill before learning to heal. Doesn't that seem wrong?"

He looked up and saw the grey-haired woman's kind, smiling face. The mild and kindly housewife, just concerned and sad for another sick teenager, was making him, for some reason, itch for the kunai up his sleeve. What should he do? Should he refute her? Or should he encourage her on to see where she would go?

"Yes," Neji pushed down his self-disgust and lied, deciding to see what he could draw out of her, "yes, it does seem wrong."

Now how would she respond? The woman's face glowed. "I knew you would see it that way. I saw you sitting here, with your mask and the little children, and somehow I just knew," she opened her little handbag and began to rummage inside, "I knew you would understand the evils of chakra."

The woman was holding out a paper flyer.

Cold sweat broke out along Neji's neck. "The Sixth Repentance?" he tried to sound mildly interested, despite the part of him shouting to tear the little flyer into shreds and shove it into the bin beside him. "I heard they were an end of the world cult? That they think the Plague is some kind of Demon heralding the last days of man, and all that like?"

"The more extreme members do believe that." The woman watched him eagerly as Neji took the flyer off her and pretended to read it. "But mostly it's just ordinary citizens like myself, looking for merciful deaths and salvation for those cursed with chakra. We spread the teachings of the Eye of the World and work towards a future made peaceful without chakra."

Neji looked up sharply. "The Eye of the World?"

The woman closed her eyes and put a hand to her heart. "Our wise leader."

The Eye of the World. What a name. Fit for a narcissist and no doubt fit for a cult leader who urged civilians to exploit the psychological vulnerability of the locked in families, kill Keepers and poison ninja children all in the name of salvation.

"Why are you giving this flyer to me?"

"The Sixth Repentance is the Cry. The Cry is when a ninja gives himself up to the gods and returns his chakra to the heavens it came from. You're so young. You're so like my boy." The woman closed her handbag and rose from the bench, dusting off her skirt. "For the sake of peace and peace of your soul, I would like you to consider it."

"I think I understand," Neji stared at her, feeling sick to the stomach. "The Sixth Repentance. The Cry. That's suicide by chakra exhaustion, isn't it?" When the woman looked troubled, he added hastily, "Where do I find the Repentance…if I'm interested?"

The woman's eyes sparkled, but she shook her head. "You don't find the Repentance, young man. At the next Parade, simply show one of the Bishops this flyer and they will help find the Repentance for you. Any more questions?"

Neji was gripping the flyer so hard he thought it might tear. He swallowed, breathed in again to settle his nerves and tried to smile back. "No, ma'am. Thank you. For your kindness."

"It was a pleasure." The woman turned to the slide, where the little boy she had brought had just opened a packet of sweets. Neji watched the boy put the drops in his mouth before sharing them with the girls. The girls had ruthlessly learned their lesson. They had waited for the boy to eat the sweets first. "Keita, it's time to go. Give the girls the sweets and thank them for taking care of you."

The boy pulled a face but pushed the packet into Yae's hands. "Here you go. Thank you."

He jumped down from the slide and hurried after the civilian woman. She took the little boy's hand. Neji watched them round the playground gate and leave the park, before he folded the flyer and put it in his pocket to give to Shikamaru later.

Give the girls the sweets and thank them for taking care of you.

The boy had eaten from the packet, Neji told himself, watching Shigure and Yae each take a drop from the bag, one green, one red, and begin to move them to their mouths. The boy had eaten from the packet, but who had given them the packet of sweets if not the kindly Repenter housewife?

Before he could stop himself, chakra flowed to Neji's eyes and his byakugan was activated and he gasped. A cloud of dirty-looking chakra, the colour of dried blood, was seething around the packet of sweets like ants. It drifted around the girls' fingers where they held the sweets, seemed to crawl on their skin.

He cried, "Drop those sweets!"

The girls squeaked and the packet slipped from their hands. Jewel-coloured candy drops fell to the ground. Shigure dropped down from the slide and began trying to gather them up from the dirt.

"Don't touch them," Neji shouted, glaring at them with the veins bulging around his eyes until the girls backed away. He took out a kunai and began chipping at a little green drop. It went sticky in his fingers, but he soon found in the centre exactly what he was looking for – a black lentil-shaped pill.

"The civilian kid ate the sweets," Nagira pointed out, peering over Neji's shoulder. "I made sure he did, before he started sharing them out with the girls."

Neji had never looked at konseigan with the byakugan before and, now that he did, the dark red mass hurt his eyes. Now he knew. Konseigan was a chakra poison, designed to wreck chakra systems – a specialised ninja killer, in that respect very much like the Plague. There was nothing more difficult to navigate in an autopsy than a decaying ninja chakra system, so little wonder they hadn't been able to identify how the poison worked.

Neji rose to his feet. He switched off the chakra flowing to his eyes and the byakugan vision faded. "This poison won't kill the boy. It was a trick to get your trust."

To think that the Repentance were using children to deliver poison to other children! Neji threw the drop to the ground and crushed it beneath the heel of his boot. As though that were some kind of signal, Nagira and the girls jumped in and began stamping on the sweets as well. They continued until the soles of their sandals were sticky and the drops were ground into the earth.

"You shouldn't have used your eyes," Nagira said to Neji, as they left the park to go elsewhere, probably back to the Grey Cross tent because they could think of nowhere else to go. "If you're infected you're not supposed to use chakra, right? I thought you were on a special course – "

Neji snapped, "They're not going to penalise me for a little slip up. Besides, it saved the girls."

Nagira closed his mouth and Neji tried not to think about what using the byakugan had done to his body.

Somewhere in a white blood cell, a bacterium divided, and divided again.

Chapter Text

Two quarantine guards were patrolling the edge of the town, on their beat, walking with easy, swinging strides, occasionally glancing over their shoulders into the dark. There were knives strapped to their back, bows slung across their chests, and flares and whistles at their belts.

One guard froze and drew the knife from his back. "Halt! Who goes there?"

Leaves rustled and a man stepped out into the road. Two ninjas followed him, linked to him by a rope looping around their waists. Their eyes were covered in bandages and they carried a stretcher bearing their fourth team member between them.

"Konoha jounin, Hatake Kakashi, returning from a mission," came the reply. "I was expected yesterday. Sorry I'm late, but they really do need to move those plague pits somewhere easier for people to see. I nearly fell in again."

"What's that?" the guard said sharply, pointing at the woman on the stretcher with his knife. "We don't want any more sickness here. If it's the Plague - "

"She's injured, as are the other two. Accidents on the mission." Kakashi held up the pass Tsunade had given him before leaving. "Let us through. We're on Hokage's orders."

The guards squinted at the pass. After exchanging a look and whispers about Hokage favouritism, one of the guards lowered his knife and the other quickly followed. "You can go through," he said, somewhat reluctantly. He shot a green flare into the air to alert the men at the gates.

Kakashi breathed a sigh of relief. The ANBU struck by the flying sword had been treated in Ageha on the way back, but the wound had reopened and he wanted to get all three seen by a Konoha medic-nin as soon as possible.

It was late night but the lights were still on at the hospital. Once Kakashi had left the ANBU with a medic-nin he trusted and recognised, he made his way to the reception.

"I need to see the Hokage," he said to the woman sleeping at the desk. She flicked her finger up and indicated Tsunade's office on the fifth floor, before slumping over her papers again. Kakashi tried snapping his fingers by her ears, but the receptionist didn't stir. She was already fast asleep. "Thank you."

Strange times, plaguetime, Kakashi thought dryly, as he climbed the flights of stairs. Even Tsunade was doing her job properly, even staying up all night to do it. The medic-nin parted before him as he went along the corridors and didn't say a word. He had thought they would react more to seeing a ninja outside of his hazard gear, but perhaps in the ten days he had been absent from Konoha things had changed yet again.

He was about to knock when he heard voices from inside the office and the door opened.

Shizune's eyes turned upwards in a smile. She called over her shoulder, "Tsunade-sama, Kakashi-san's come back from his mission."

Shizune held the door open for him and closed it behind her as she left. Tsunade was sitting at her desk, warming her hands around a steaming cup of tea. Judging by the column of cups teetering to the side of her desk, it was her twentieth or thirtieth cup of a day. There was a wall of paperwork around her desk. Scans, diagrams and proposals were spilling out of her in-tray. Disposable face mask samples were bursting out of the top drawer of her desk. At that moment, Tsunade had her elbows propped up on a pair of medical reviews and seemed to be annotating a map.

Tsunade looked up at the sound of the door closing. "You took your time coming back, Kakashi. Your ninken arrived two days ago."

Kakashi raised a lazy hand. "Hatake Kakashi, reporting back from his mission. Apologies for being slower than a four-legged animal, but I was looking after three wounded ninjas."

"Well, let's not waste time then. Time is life and life is a luxury these days." Tsunade leaned back in the chair and regarded him over the edge of her cup. "What happened, Kakashi? Pakkun said you tried to get Uchiha Sasuke to cooperate. Your mission was to capture him and bring him back, whether he wanted to cooperate with us or not. Let me get this straight - You found Sasuke in less than a week and you had him within your grasp?"

He couldn't help a wry smile. "Netted like a wild duck."

Tsunade fixed Kakashi with a fierce, weary glare. "And now he's vanished like he never existed?"

Kakashi had had plenty of time on his return journey to imagine how this conversation with Tsunade would go. He had hoped sending Pakkun ahead would help smooth things over a little, but apparently not. "In short, yes."

"Excuse me? Kakashi, I don't think you quite understand what you've done. Because of your kindness, your lenience, your sentimentality, you have condemned tens of ninjas to death who might not have died if you had just gagged and bound Uchiha Sasuke and brought him back by force!"

"I know, and I apologise for my conduct on this mission." Kakashi put his arms to his sides and bowed low at the waist, closing his eye. "I am sorry. I regret my actions."

Kakashi kept his head down and waited. Tsunade was silent. The clock on the wall ticked. He could hear the shouts from tents below, cries from the floor above, and the squeak of trolley wheels from somewhere in the wards. A dog barked. It boomed. Probably a mastiff.

Eventually, there was a creak as Tsunade settled back into her chair. "Stop it, Kakashi. I can't tell if you're being serious or making fun of me, and either way I don't like it. I'll accept the apology, but next time, when I send out a squad to look for Uchiha Sasuke, I'm going to think twice before sending you."

Kakashi straightened and massaged the back of his neck. At that moment, there was a knock on the door and Shizune reappeared, holding a tray with two cups. "I thought you could do with some drinks."

She set down one in front of Tsunade and the other she handed to Kakashi, then left as quickly as she had come. Kakashi wondered how Sakura was coping with the medic-nin's work. They all seemed so busy these days.

Tsunade picked up her cup and scowled. "Orange juice? Is she trying to get me off caffeine now that she thinks she's got me off alcohol?" She looked ready to pour it onto the dying plant behind her, but, seeming to have a change of heart, downed it instead. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "What would I give for a little warm shot of sake!"

"At least you have people looking out for your best interests." Kakashi leaned against a tower of folders next to Tsunade's desk. "How has Naruto been? The last I heard he was setting up some kind of orphan play group."

Tsunade's eyes slid to the file at the top of her in-tray, its reports written painstakingly in Naruto's crabby handwriting, and felt a stab of pride. The Konoha Tigers had been doing their job remarkably well.

Thanks to the Hyuugas, they now had a base of sorts. After spending two days cleaning the old gatehouse, taking down cobwebs and chasing out the colonies of mice that had taken residence in the walls, Naruto had insisted on having a grand opening and Tsunade had gone to see the Tigers' Den herself. Naruto had dragged her around a playground he and his friends had made at the back of the house, shown her the dormitories, and introduced her to a bunch of children who absolutely refused to do as Naruto told them.

The next thing Tsunade knew, Naruto had managed to poach Sakura for a whole day from the hospital to get the infected children started on Zero Chakra lessons. There was something about that boy. Whenever he got it in mind to do something, it was near impossible to stop him, and he seemed to pick up people around him like a rolling snowball collected snow. Tsunade couldn't decide whether he was either dangerously charismatic or incredibly irritating, although Naruto probably thought 'charisma' was an exotic dance move.

"He's sticking his head into other people's business, as per usual," Tsunade said, trying not to sound worried. "The Sixth Repentance have been causing problems and he's taking that personally. You know what happens when Naruto begins to take things personally."

They had attacked Shikamaru, urged Neji to consider suicide by chakra exhaustion, poisoned the Plague orphans and, in his brief stint as a Marksman, were responsible for the terrible circumstances of the first marked house Naruto had visited. Tsunade couldn't say that she was too surprised.

"The Sixth Repentance, eh?" Kakashi raised an eyebrow. "Naruto doesn't pick his enemies lightly. On that note, has there been any breakthrough since I was away?"

"One interesting suggestion has been raised." Tsunade slid out a file from underneath the map and handed it to Kakashi. Kakashi took it with interest. He flicked open the cover. Inside were pages of chemical spectra and analyses. When he looked back at Tsunade, her eyes were gleaming. "There is a possibility that somebody very high-ranking in the Repentance, possibly even the leader, is an ex-ANBU officer."

"That is interesting," Kakashi agreed, flicking through the file again. "What's the reasoning?"

"You want the boring details? It's nearly two in the morning," Tsunade muttered irritably, but she steepled her fingers together and leaned forward across the table. "The pharmacology department analysed the chemical composition of the konseigan to work out the ingredients and, when they found out what they were, I asked the Keepers to investigate their recent sales. The poison is being manufactured in bulk, so we expected large orders of the respective ingredients. The Keepers found no such orders in the past three months. Of the five ingredients of konseigan, however, all five were bulk ordered by ANBU within the past year."

"I think I see where this is going," Kakashi cut in carefully, taking a gulp from the cup of water Shizune had left him. "Even though the ANBU have been disbanded, an ex-ANBU officer might have known about those orders, known where they were stored, and might have been able to gain access to the ANBU chemical laboratories to make the konseigan. Have you talked to Danzo about this?"

Tsunade pulled a face as though she had just been made to suck on an especially sour lemon. "He insists that he oversaw the destruction of the ANBU chemical stores himself and refuses to let the Keepers investigate them."

Kakashi tried not to look amused. "Another irritatingly uncooperative ninja. There must be something going round in the air."

"He told me to remember my role as Hokage and focus on how I was going to represent Land of Fire ninja interests against the other Kages at the Conference this weekend. The cheek of it! Danzo telling me how to do my job?" Tsunade seemed to swell with indignation as she crumpled the cup in her hand and tossed it into the bin, where it joined ten or so other cups. "That cup just then? Let's imagine that that was a little bit of Danzo. Any bit you like. Preferably a bit that dangles."

Kakashi pricked his ears. "A Gokage Conference this weekend?"

"The Raikage demanded it. He says that he wants to open talks to coordinate international responses." Tsunade tapped the map with a pencil. "It's obvious what he's really after. He wants to blame Konoha for the Plague, throw a massive tantrum and squeeze us for compensation. I don't know if he's been in talks with the Tsuchikage or the Mizukage, but the Mizukage seems to be looking to do the same. At least the Kazekage says that he'll support us."

The map was covered with pencilled in dates and coloured markers - Plague incidences, where, when and how many in the initial outbreak - and there was a very clear pattern in the stickers radiating out from Konoha.

"Sounds as though it's going to be tricky," Kakashi commented, eyeing the map. "What are you going to do?"

"Well, I was hoping that, as compensation I would be able to offer a vaccine, or demonstrate some research with the potential for a cure, but," Tsunade lifted her eyebrows and looked at Kakashi, "you let your old student escape."

"I see," said Kakashi weakly. Tsunade continued to tap her pencil on the map in the awkward silence that followed, watching Kakashi trying not to shuffle his feet like a schoolboy under her scrutiny. He broke the silence. "Did Pakkun mention what Sasuke proposed to do?"

"No, but I can guess that he's out to cause more trouble," Tsunade muttered, sounding grim. "Pakkun said something about the boy being completely uninfected by the disease. Was that true or did I hear your dog wrong? I was half-asleep."

Somebody seemed to be cleaning the room above them. At odd intervals they heard the bucket drop onto the floor, followed in between by the slow scraping of a mop. Kakashi told Tsunade in brief what Sasuke had said and what they had discovered when they caught him. She yawned as she listened, but Kakashi knew that he had her attention.

Tsunade pinched the bridge of her nose. "Of all the people in the world to be immune to the Plague, of course, it would be Uchiha Sasuke."

"You don't sound surprised."

"I'm not surprised at all. It must be something Orochimaru did. Body modification and enhancement was his speciality and he was always a clever, calculating snake of a bastard." Tsunade looked down at the map showing the Plague spread. She tightened her hands into fists. "Orochimaru must have prepared Sasuke in case the strains really were used for war, so that after he transferred his soul into Sasuke's body, Orochimaru would be able to live in the resulting Plague without being killed by the disease he created. I should have realised he would never have made these weapon strains of MK without ensuring his own safety."

Kakashi suppressed a shudder of disgust. "And I joked about Sasuke being Orochimaru's lab-rat."

"Sasuke says he's going to sell himself to one of the other countries." Tsunade continued, chuckling mirthlessly. "What does he think he is? A princess giving herself up for a political marriage?"

It was difficult to know what Sasuke would do next. The way he had disappeared in the forest suggested that he had had help, but who was helping him? Kakashi had a strong suspicion that the Akatsuki leader himself had spirited him away, but it was also possible that he had been found by a spy from another nation and already brokered a deal with them. In which case, come the Gokage Conference in the weekend, one of the nations would have a very hefty trump card up their sleeves.

"This Gokage Conference, where is it going to be?" Kakashi asked, after Tsunade stopped calling Sasuke various names beginning with S, the most kindly of which was 'shameless'.

Tsunade pointed at the map, where a small island had been circled just within the border of the Land of Lightning. "Hihoutou. I'll be setting off tomorrow evening and, I promise you this, I'm going to sleep the whole journey. I haven't slept since Monday. Oh," she jabbed her pencil at him, "and don't get too comfortable, Kakashi. You'll be coming with me, because I'm leaving Shizune in charge of the hospital, and I refuse to explain our situation with Uchiha Sasuke by myself."

The brackets hammered into the walls of the cave system were new. It wasn't one of Orochimaru's old hideouts, but with the dry walls of yellow rock, the low ceilings and the winding passageways with their uneven footing, as though the ways had been carved by the burrowing action of a giant snake, it might as well have been. All it lacked was the distinctive combined smell of dead animal and disinfectant.

He had been doing stretches before breakfast and the air chilled the sweat on his skin. Sasuke didn't bother with a torch. The chakra ran to his eyes and he let the sharingan guide him through the dark. It didn't take him long to find the room the masked man had told him to report to.

There was light shining out from the crack under the door. No doubt Madara's 'colleague', whoever he might be, was already inside. Sasuke didn't bother to knock. If knocking was a sign of respect for somebody's privacy or authority, then Sasuke wasn't going to give this person the satisfaction of either.

He shoved the door open with a bang and froze in the doorway.

A man looked up and remarked dryly, "You never were one to knock, were you?"

It was a laboratory as well equipped as Orochimaru's had ever been, perhaps even better. Shelves of glassware, incubators, centrifuges, boxes of pipette tips, jars of bovine serum albumen and blood, horse blood most likely, but you could never be sure, and row upon row of books had been set into the cave walls above the laboratory benches. Sasuke felt a breeze. Somehow the room had ventilation, as well as running water. It even had ceiling lighting filling the room with a harsh white glow. There were barrels of concentrated alcohol for sterilisation and a selection of microscopes. Their lens towers had barely a smudge of grease on them. Uchiha Madara had prepared this laboratory well (although he had probably stolen or threatened artisans for everything).

Sasuke looked down at the mild-looking man sitting at the workbench. His lip curled. "You."

"Oh? What did I ever do to you to deserve that kind of reaction?" Kabuto smiled. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his coat. "Good morning, Sasuke-kun. Have how you been?"

"Why are you here, Kabuto?" Sasuke snapped. "Since when did you work for Uchiha Madara? What has he promised you?"

"Look at these facilities," Kabuto gestured at the laboratory. "Everything I could wish for to carry out my research. He really is the most fantastic patron. Our interests happened to collide, that is all. We both want a cure for the Plague, so here we are. Uchiha Madara provides me with the means and the resources, and I apply my skills. It's what tends to happen when faced by a common enemy. Everybody joins hands and unites for the sake of the general good, but not to worry, Sasuke-kun, Konoha will never have the cure."

"Like you ever cared for the general good," Sasuke snarled, closing in on him. "Out with it. What's the price? Because if he promised you my eyes – "

"I would be lying if I said I wasn't interested in the sharingan – the proteins involved in iris pigment change, the mechanisms behind the tomoe formation, I'd be spoilt for choice – but on this occasion, you can rest easy, Sasuke-kun. I have not been paid with your eyes," Kabuto replied soothingly, but he allowed Sasuke a glimpse of a scalpel tucked up his sleeve. Sasuke raised an eyebrow. Kabuto smile only grew wider. "And I'd rather you didn't ask me any more of these kinds of questions. We're on a rather tight schedule."

Sasuke was suddenly aware of a velvety beating of wings by his ears. Three large moths the size of pigeons was hovering at his shoulders. Their feathery antennae tickled his neck. Their wings dropped silvery scales like dandruff, but what particularly drew Sasuke's eyes were the long, curling proboscises tucked neatly under their heads. They gleamed. Like metal. And they looked sharp.

"Our benefactor has allowed me to take certain measures if I were to find you uncooperative. Dogs can be trained to scent chemical and chakra changes in the human body, but there are few animals more sensitive to smell than moths. These moths have been bred to respond to sudden changes in adrenaline levels combined with a fluctuation in chakra." Kabuto suddenly pulled a white capsule from his pocket and crushed it between his fingers. The moths fluttered towards him as though drawn by an invisible thread and settled on his shoulder and knees. "Do you understand what that means, Sasuke-kun?"

Sasuke knew when men who thought they were more intelligent than he was wanted to gloat. It was a waste of breath giving them any indication that you couldn't care less. He said nothing.

"It means if you try to use your chakra with hostile intent, these moths will know, and they will help me keep you in line." Kabuto took hold of one of the moths and extended its proboscis like a tape measure. The moth's proboscis became a slim, tube-shaped blade around the length of a kunai. "After all, we can't have you putting me under a genjutsu or trying to burn me to ashes."

Sasuke eyed the moths with a feeling of intense disgust. He thought about the satisfaction he would get from setting their wings on fire and the moths' antennae quivered. "What will you do with me?"

"Study your physiology and immune system to find out the exact modifications Orochimaru performed that make you immune to the Plague. Of course, it would make things much easier for us if you remembered the details of the procedure yourself,"Kabuto added, looking at Sasuke hopefully.

There had been too many procedures to count and, for a large part of them, Sasuke had been unconscious. A couple had been to enhance his speed and muscle memory, a few to prevent his growth being stunted by the minimal diet Orochimaru had provided, alongside the several making him immune to poisons. Orochimaru only revealed that enhancement after Sasuke had been fed a meal laced with arsenic and he had been sick afterwards anyway, out of instinct.

He shook his head and Kabuto looked momentarily disappointed, but only for a moment.

"Now, I know Orochimaru taught you the basics of pathology and bacteria handling, if only to ingrain it into your muscle memory."Kabuto stroked the wings of the two moths perched on his knees. "I have samples of the RAMK that I'll need to use. Given the highly infectious nature of the Plague, I don't want to handle them so much. I was thinking of leaving that to you. You can help me, can't you, Sasuke-kun?"

Kabuto had always grated on Sasuke's nerves. It was his mild manners and polite smile. The way he cleaned up after Orochimaru's experiments, washing all the scalpels and test tubes in the sink with neat rubber gloves like they were teacups and saucers; the way he only dimly registered as a threat to his senses despite everything Sasuke knew about him. Kabuto blended into the background. He was a grey man, a nobody, a non-entity, as indistinctive as a ghost and Sasuke didn't like fighting ghosts.

"Any move on your part to deliberately infect me with RAMK, and our benefactor will know about it," Kabuto said, returning to pouring jelly into the petri dishes in front of him. "And then your revenge will be over. Wouldn't that be a shame?"

"You talk a lot for someone on a tight schedule," Sasuke cut in. He closed the laboratory door with a snap. Surveying the room one more time, he added, "And I remember more than just the basics of pathology."

"Well, that is gratifying to hear." Kabuto turned in his chair and indicated the other side of the room. Two doors were set into the wall. They both looked heavy and the small window in the right hand door was misted over on the inside. "The room on the left is where most of the supplies are stored. The room on the right is a freezer, but you need not worry about that. Now, shall we fill in the paperwork before we start? I need a signature saying that I have your informed consent. I know you never signed anything like this before, but, our benefactor insists on doing things to as high an ethical standard as possible."

"Why would Madara care?"

Kabuto frowned and peered at Sasuke contemplatively. "Now should I interpret that as being uncooperative to my research effort, or not?"

The moths on Kabuto's shoulders fluttered their wings. Sasuke breathed in, suppressed the urge to burn them to cinders and took the pen that Kabuto offered.

The cheek of the woman! Danzo thought, as he swam back to consciousness from the depths of sleep. How dare she suggest an ex-ANBU could be responsible for that cult of vicious madmen? The ANBU officers existed for the peace and security of Konoha. It couldn't have been more drilled into them than had Danzo taken a real drill, opened the officers' heads and shoved the written instructions inside their skulls.

Not only that, Tsunade had dared to question his rigour in destroying the contents of the ANBU warehouses. Nobody understood the risks of dangerous substances going unsupervised more than he did! Who else could foresee the deadly potential of every possible weapon that could be created from that storehouse? When the ANBU had disbanded due to the danger presented by the Plague, Danzo had overseen the destruction of their storage spaces himself. He had trusted no other man to do it.

And now the Raikage had called a Gokage Conference and that insufferable woman would be attending as Hokage, completely unfit for international politics in an emergency situation and so bound to make a mess of diplomacy that Danzo's teeth ached at the thought of the fallout. Plaguetime was comparable to wartime. By all rights, it should be him attending that conference.

"Sir."

He opened his eye in disbelief. One of his civilian bodyguards had entered his room, looking anxiously at him from the door. Danzo demanded, "What do you want?"

"You told me to check on you when the morning star first appeared," the man said earnestly, "sir."

Danzo stared at him, wondering if the man had been drinking. "I said no such thing, you fool."

"But you did, sir," the man continued. "You told me ten minutes ago. You said, 'The morning star will be out soon, wake me up then'. It was you, sir. Plain as day. You were in the garden for hours before that too."

Danzo faltered and his eye fell to the book on his bedside table. When he had set it down before going to sleep, the front cover had been facing up. Now the bookmark was three centimetres askew and the book had been turned over.

"Fool," he spat at the guard, "you've been had by a genjutsu! And whilst you were chasing some phantom, look! Someone has been in my room!"

He could feel it everywhere – the lingering trace of a shadow of somebody other than himself. It stuck to the book on his bedside table and muddied the air. God damn it, how were they getting in? There were booby traps, pitfalls, poisoned nails on the roof, and yet they were navigating everything through without even breaking a sweat. Somebody was mocking him. Somebody had poisoned his fish and turned over his book just to show they had been there. It was as though they were going especially out of their way to prove to Danzo they existed.

God damn it all, why did Danzo feel so exhausted?

Chapter Text

There was one place Kakashi wanted to visit before leaving for the Conference.

The Hyuuga estate had once covered a very large area of land. It came from the old times when almost every member of Konoha was either in a clan or alleged to serve one, but as Konoha developed and the town grew and shops began to line the streets, land became a luxury that was difficult to keep. The Hyuuga sold portions of their estate to the council and the strange result was that pockets of Hyuuga land was scattered throughout Konoha, isolated from the grounds of the main house, like islands from a shore.

The old gatehouse was on one such far flung patch of land. It had once been the house marking the boundary of the Hyuuga estate. Now it was surrounded by higgledy-piggledy lanes near the edge of a residential district and sandwiched between two shiny new houses – rather like a grouchy, liver-spotted grandmother sitting between two teenage girls.

The wooden door had been varnished, the moss raked off the tiles on the roof and there were muddy footprints going to and from the door. A letterbox had been hammered onto the front and painted a garish orange and black. Kakashi wondered if this was Naruto's idea of daring people not to take notice. It seemed like a challenge.

He breathed out, waited for the steam to clear from the inside of his visor and rang the bell.

A voice called down from above. "Kakashi-sensei!"

Naruto waved from a window on the second floor, but before Kakashi could wave back the boy disappeared. Seconds later, he was replaced by a little girl, who could barely see over the sill. She was aiming a slingshot down towards the gate. She caught sight of Kakashi watching and put a finger to her mouth in a shushing gesture. Kakashi raised an eyebrow.

The gate unlocked. Naruto stuck out his head. "You finally decided to show up! Come on in, come see the Den. It's the best place to be in Kono – Ow!" Naruto whirled around, rubbing the back of his neck and glowering up at the second floor window. "Whoever that was, I am going to get you for that! Just you see! No one throws a pine cone at Uzumaki Naruto and gets away with it!"

"If it helps, it was a little girl," Kakashi said, watching Naruto grind his teeth.

"One of the twins? Fine. I'll just get them back with the old Chewing Gum trick later."

"Naruto." At the sound of his name, the boy looked over his shoulder. Kakashi sighed. "I couldn't bring Sasuke back this time."

The smile faded from Naruto's face. He stared, his mouth opened and closed, for a second too stunned for words, and then he breathed, "That bastard caught the Plague and died on us, didn't he?"

"No! Don't worry. Not at all. He was very much alive and well."

"You found him then?"

"We found him alright." Kakashi remembered Sasuke lying bound and bleeding in wires on a road, eyes glowing, a sword dropped across his neck, and wild laughter echoed in his ears. "But he escaped. I'm sorry, Naruto."

Kakashi regretted not sending Pakkun with the news to Naruto, but at the same time, he felt that this was right. This was how things should be. Naruto was his student and what kind of teacher would he be if he needed a dog to break all the bad news, if he couldn't admit a failure to his own student's face?

Naruto had every right to be angry with him and Kakashi waited for the shouting, the accusations, the disappointment, but they didn't come.

"Come on, Kakashi-sensei! It was totally obvious you were going to fail when it was just you and some ANBU goons going after him."

"Just me and some ANBU goons?" repeated Kakashi incredulously. "Totally obvious?"

"The next time you go on a mission, sensei, me and Sakura will go with you, and then we'll find him and bring him back no problem!" Naruto stood with his hands on his hips and grinned. "We'll probably have to break every bone in his body to do it. He'll probably be kicking and screaming all the way as well, but he'd get over that eventually."

A small part of Kakashi wanted to believe him, the part that didn't want to tell him that push came to shove Naruto would probably be as unable to break Sasuke's legs and fingers as Kakashi had been.

"Right, Kakashi-sensei, are you going to come in the house or not?"

Was that it? Was Naruto going to let him off the hook so easily? Had Kakashi really been so easily forgiven for his failure?

Kakashi smiled. "It had better not be like the conditions of your old flat.

In the window by the door somebody had put up a list of rules. They asked for hands to be washed with soap when coming in from outside, for shoes to be stacked neatly in the racks, for children not to use training kunai outside of their practice times and that umbrellas be left to dry in the stand. That was almost certainly Neji's piece of work. Naruto would never have thought of it, although the rules were probably just as much for Naruto's good as they were for the children.

At that moment the children were having a half an hour break from Zero Chakra lessons and Sakura was in the kitchen, with her head in her arms and her visor off, taking a nap.

Since Neji had suggested getting the children started on suppressing subconscious chakra use as early as possible, Sakura had been coming over from the hospital whenever she had time to spare. The children probably had years to go before they were at any danger of their latent infections becoming active, but Sakura had sat in on Shizune's adult classes and she had seen the adult ninjas struggling. She agreed that it was a good idea.

Unfortunately, since she was also supposed to be testing different antibiotic combinations, checking for the development of resistant RAMK populations, looking after her own patients, handling the relatives of the deceased, running errands for Tsunade, backing up Shizune, keeping an eye on the mental welfare of the other apprentices and doing hundreds of other jobs from the endless list that needed doing at the hospital, Sakura was beginning to feel extraordinarily tired. Napping whenever she could was the only way to cope.

Naruto bent under the hanging cloth in the doorway, saw Sakura sleeping and crept towards the table with a mischievous grin.

Sakura murmured, "We can't have run out of isoniazid already. The mice must have eaten it."

She made a comfortable bubbling noise into the crook of her elbow, before all of a sudden the table was shaking. Naruto was drumming the table with his hands. "Sakura-chan! Kakashi-sensei's come back from the mission!"

Her head shot up. She looked around guiltily, before remembering that she wasn't at the hospital and her supervisor wasn't going to tell her off. She narrowed her eyes at her assailant. "Naruto! Did you really have to shout in my ear?"

"Good to see you, Sakura," Kakashi said, stepping in quickly before the two started bickering. "It looks as though Tsunade's been keeping you busy."

"She has, but Naruto's been keeping me even busier." She cracked a weary smile. "Welcome back, sensei. How was the mission?"

It took much less time than he thought to fill Naruto and Sakura on what had happened. They sat around the table. Sakura got him a glass of tea. Kakashi drew in a deep breath. He told them how he came to hear about a doctor, who had reported to a local authority about an attack by a rogue ninja, and since then had begun practising his trade again. He described the days they had tracked Sasuke along the roads, the days where he steeled himself for the worst every time they turned over a dead body. Kakashi knew why he was going into such detail. He was trying to impress upon Naruto and Sakura the effort he had taken looking for Sasuke and how serious and dedicated he had been in his task, but the details dried up when Kakashi came to the part where they found him.

"So, what happened?" Naruto prompted, when Kakashi stopped to search for the right words.

"Well, I asked him to come back. He refused, violently, and ran away," Kakashi summarised briskly. "Then we came back."

Sakura and Naruto exchanged a look. They weren't convinced. Of course they weren't, but just as Naruto opened his mouth to begin another round of questions, Sakura elbowed him and pointed at the door. There was a boy with glasses peering nervously into the room.

Naruto beckoned and the boy came over to the table. "What's up, Jo?"

"Nagira's getting everybody ready for class in the big room. He asked me to fetch Sakura-san," Jo replied after a hesitation, eyeing Kakashi curiously.

"Oh, it's already time!" Sakura gasped, looking at the clock mounted on the wall. She left the kitchen at a run with Jo, mouthing 'sorry' and 'goodbye' over her shoulder as she rushed away. The opposite side of the coin to sleep deprivation was that she was always in a hurry.

Kakashi watched her go and decided that maybe now was the right time to leave. He pushed back his chair. At the sound, Naruto glanced up. "Wait, Kakashi-sensei, you're going already?"

"Sorry, Naruto, but, I'm leaving Konoha this evening. There are things I need to do."

"What? Why didn't you say so earlier? Where are you going?" Naruto asked, following him to the door. "You just got back from the mission."

"Tsunade wants me with her at the Gokage Conference," Kakashi told him as he pulled on his boots. "It's going to be a long trip. I'm thinking I should get a book to read. Apparently Icha Icha Dynamite's supposed to be fun?"

"Kakashi-sensei," Naruto shouted, grabbing his shoulder as Kakashi stepped out into the street. "You're being weird. You came to apologise about not bringing Sasuke back, but that's not everything, is it? You said that Sasuke was alright, and that he ran away, but there's something up with him, isn't there?"

A pale blue bank of clouds drifted on the horizon. The spring rains were on their way. They looked distant, about perhaps two days away. Kakashi wouldn't have to worry about them when he went to visit the memorial later. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his cloak.

"Naruto, if I told you that Sasuke wants to see everything that means anything to you destroyed, what would you say?"

Naruto blinked. "Did he say that?"

"In so many words."

"Great. Then I say somebody's driving him crazy so that they can use him, like the curse seal did, except worse," Naruto replied simply. He looked at Kakashi in alarm. "Is that what's up with him? I mean, he was always a bit off his rocker but – "

Somebody shouted Naruto's name from down the road. Pedalling an old bicycle, its steel frame muddy and scratched, was Ichiraku Teuchi. He was hunched over the handlebars. The wheels squeaked. Tied to the back of the bicycle was a huge metal case almost as large as the man himself.

Teuchi pushed the bicycle to a stop in front of the Tigers' Den and wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief.

"Morning, Naruto-kun! I brought the usual," he tapped the steel canister on the back of the bicycle and begun to unload it. He dipped his head in Kakashi's direction, greeted him cheerily then picked up the canister using both hands. "I'll take these through to the kitchen."

Naruto shook himself out of his reverie. "Wait – I'll help - "

"Bah! Don't worry. You just finish what you were saying with your sensei." Teuchi winked at Kakashi. He dragged the steel canister up the gatehouse door and went inside.

Kakashi lifted his eyebrows. "Are you having food for the children delivered from Ichiraku Ramen?"

"Neji got paranoid about having people from the volunteer canteen," Naruto explained, folding his arms and looking troubled. "He thinks every civilian is out to poison the kids. I tell him, he needs to chill, but he's also kind of got a point. Anyway, Ichiraku Ramen isn't getting that many customers, so Tsunade-bacchan's got the council to pay him to bring us lunch."

"Well, what do you know? You really are doing your bit to shore up the small business economy." Kakashi slapped Naruto's shoulder, thinking back to the day he had taken Naruto to Ichiraku's for lunch. "Alright, Naruto. Tell Sakura to go to sleep at some point. You keep out of trouble."

"Me keep out of trouble? Sensei, you're the one going to a Conference. You keep out of trouble." Naruto huffed. "Besides, it's not as though I go looking for trouble. Oh, and keep Tsunade-bacchan out of trouble too!"

"Difficult, but I'll try."

"And, sensei, don't worry about Sasuke," Naruto said earnestly. "Once he's back, between the three of us, we'll sort out him out. We'll screw his head back on straight. Believe it!"

Kakashi walked away from the Tigers' Den. When he had walked around two hundred paces, he looked back over his shoulder to check if Naruto was still watching. He wasn't. He had gone back inside the gatehouse. Kakashi turned into a side alley.

Naruto hadn't noticed, but Kakashi certainly had. A man had been watching Naruto and Kakashi in front of the gatehouse from down the road. When he noticed that Kakashi had seen him, the man had indicated the alley with a jut of his chin and disappeared.

Now the man in jounin red was sitting on a bench, pretending to watch the green waters of a fountain fall into its basin, as he waited for Kakashi to arrive.

Kakashi spoke first. "It's unusual to see you without bodyguards, Danzo."

"They haven't been of much use of late," Danzo sniffed. "Chakra-less civilians. All useless, but the other Konoha elders kept their strong, young, susceptible ninja bodyguards and caught the Plague off them. Now, here I am – the other elders are dead and I am all that's left of Konoha's old guard."

"I saw you outside the Tigers' Den gates when I came out of the house," Kakashi said, putting his hands in his pockets and looking down at the man on the bench. "I'm curious. What were you doing there?"

"Observing. I'm within my rights to do so. The idea of our Jinchuuriki setting up a ninja children shelter fascinated me. As a Konoha citizen, I also have an interest in its future." Danzo met Kakashi's cool gaze, "Our children are the future, wouldn't you agree?"

"Only if you are of the opinion that the elderly are the past. I like to think that everyone is the present."

"But to preserve Konoha, our hopes rest with the children," Danzo persisted as though he hadn't heard Kakashi's objection. "Granted, perhaps not those that the Jinchuuriki boy is protecting."

"What do you mean?"

"Those children are all latently infected and future Plague sources. For the sake of Konoha, the logical solution would be to put them all down, every man the instant he is diagnosed as latent. Euthanise them, en masse, humanely of course," Danzo added when Kakashi narrowed his eyes. "As it is, the Hokage is soft."

"She may be soft, but Tsunade is the one going to the Hihoutou Conference and not you," said Kakashi coldly, disgusted. He was sharply aware that he was wasting time, but Danzo had been waiting to speak to him.

Why? Why would Danzo have seen Kakashi and waited for him a bench?

Was there something wrong? Was there something different? The skin visible beneath Danzo's visor was grey and unhealthy looking. Sakura had the same look and it was almost certainly lack of sleep. Or was it worse? Was it something more? The way Danzo held himself seemed almost fragile, like his bones were too soft to support his frame.

Chakra exhaustion, that's what it looked like. Not complete chakra exhaustion, but certainly some aspect of chakra depletion. If Danzo hadn't been advocating the slaughter of all latents minutes earlier, Kakashi might have felt a slight tinge of sympathy. Sympathy for Shimura Danzo! This meeting by the fountain was beginning to feel increasingly surreal.

"Why did you want to speak to me?" Kakashi asked, the noise of the fountain flowing in his ears. "What were you really doing around the Tigers' Den?"

"I would like you to deliver a warning to the Hokage for me. Tell her to keep her spies out of my house," Danzo hissed, spitting out the words from his throat like insects. He folded his hands in his lap. "If Tsunade is so insecure with her position as Hokage that she thinks she is justified in this blatant act of intimidation, then I suggest she consider stepping down as soon as she returns from the Conference. I am more than willing to take the burden of the title from her shoulders - "

"I've got it." Kakashi snapped his fingers and pointed at Danzo's right arm. "I've worked out what's different."

"Excuse me?"

"That right arm of yours was always hidden up a large sleeve or a sling. This is the first time I've seen it in a normal sleeve and acting like a real arm. Just a thought, take no notice. Now, where were we? Oh yes, Tsunade stepping down – "

Danzo, however, was staring at his right arm, as though stunned that the limb was even there. The one eye was wide. Those shoulders stooped with age, but still broad, began to tremble and Kakashi drew back. Closing his right hand into a fist, Danzo stood from the bench, breathing heavily.

"I shall take my leave," he said. "I have urgent business to attend to."

Kakashi was about to point out that he wasn't the one who had been sitting around on a bench waiting to talk, but with Danzo eyeing his right arm as though it was bubbling up with blisters or some other kind of gross deformity, it seemed best to close the conversation. "By all means," Kakashi said, "I've got things to do."

Danzo dipped his head one more time. "I look forward to hearing the Conference results, Hatake Kakashi."

Danzo walked away, looking strangely lopsided, perhaps because he was stretching his right arm as far away from his body as possible.

Forget Tsunade's spies. It was unlikely this had anything to do with Tsunade. She didn't know about his arm. Could it perhaps be one of Orochimaru's followers getting into Danzo's house? That was beginning to look likely. Perhaps a file or two had been kept on the modifications he had ordered on his arm and the follower had read it. Orochimaru had always been a meticulous researcher.

No. What disturbed Danzo the most was that he himself had been oblivious to the change Kakashi had noticed – that at some point since the hazard gear had been distributed by the council, Danzo had stopped wearing the arm braces on his right arm.

Danzo sat at his desk in silence. He searched through his memories. No, he couldn't remember the moment at all. He couldn't even remember when he had last touched his right arm, even though he must have done the evening before, if not that very morning.

After a search through his house, Danzo was forced to another unsettling conclusion.

The person who was getting into his house had stolen his arm braces.

"Sir," said the guard, looking into his room. "Is there anything wrong?"

"No," Danzo snapped. "Nothing at all."

Kakashi opened his eye and the first thing he saw was a page covered in words, too close to his face to be read, but it seemed to be some kind of balcony scene. Then the ox cart went over a bump in the road, the book fell off his face and Tsunade was scowling at him from the other side of the cart.

"Good, you're awake. Put that filthy book away."

"I object to calling it filthy. It's quality literature."

"Jiraiya sends me copies as soon as his babies get published. Believe me. I know what's quality literature and what isn't."

Kakashi squashed the book into the depths of his robe pocket. He glanced out of the window. They had been travelling through night. Whilst he had been sleeping, the sun had risen and the landscape had changed. The pine forests were thinning out. The land was flattening and the road sloped down a scrubby hill towards a gleaming streak of water – a large lake.

"Is that the island?" Kakashi asked, spotting a black smudge in the centre of the lake.

Tsunade nodded. "It is. Apparently there's a tradition in Lightning lore of bad news coming from that island. That's why they call it Hihoutou – the Island of Ill Tidings. It's one of the Raikage's ways of screwing diplomacy and saying he's got a bone to pick with us."

"Why couldn't we have gone to a nice neutral country like Iron?"

"No point when the Raikage has no intention of being neutral," Tsunade replied dryly as the shoreline drew nearer. "Anyway, a Conference on an island called Hihoutou is a cheap intimidation trick. I'm not falling for it."

"A cheap chair still holds up a person as good as a pricey one."

Tsunade took out an envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. "Remember these names and background details before we go in," she said firmly. "It's always good to know thy enemy."

Kakashi wondered if she was only making him do this because she couldn't be bothered to do it herself, but kept that thought quiet. As he ran through the list of Kages and their attendants, noting that he himself had been listed as TBC at the time Tsunade had replied to the Raikage's summons, the ox cart wound down the hill and ground to a stop on a pebble beach.

News had been sent in ahead from border control. When they stepped down from the cart, a ferry was waiting to take them across to the island.

The island had looked like a thunderhead from a distance. Up close it didn't change much. Hihoutou was a black rock shaped like an anvil, bristling with pines, with an old stone house at its top. There were boats moored in a line to the pier at its base. A Kumo ninja, dressed in a strange shapeless coat that seamlessly encased his head, shoulders and chest like a tent, took them up a winding staircase to the stone house, where the Conference was to begin before the lunch.

"Just out of interest, what was the bad news that came from this island before?" Kakashi asked Tsunade, as they signed in at the conference register. "It wasn't a death, was it?"

"Not a death."

Kakashi sighed. "Multiple deaths. Great. Fantastic. Brilliant place for a Conference. I can see this going so well for us."

"Okay, on the count of three." Kabuto was looking at the screen beside him, his face glowing blue white in its glow. He had one hand on a seal. "Three, two, one – "

He pressed his thumb down into the ink and closed his eyes. A buzzing hum filled the room, followed by a flash of violet light. Sasuke hissed with discomfort from the table behind him. Then, Kabuto withdrew his thumb from the seal and it was all over. The light died away. The three giant moths perched on the desk by Kabuto's hands.

"Well, I never," Kabuto murmured, staring at the image that had appeared on the screen. He adjusted his glasses. "That's what I call a result. How are you feeling, Sasuke-kun?"

He was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, stunned by the flash of light. If Sasuke were more eloquent, he might have said that every limb felt like it was made of basalt; that his head swam and made walking in a straight line as difficult as standing on a fast-sailing ship; that his mouth was dry and bitter bile seemed to be permanently at the back of his throat; that the moment the purple light had flashed down from the seal above him, it had felt as though ten thousand white hot needles had been driven into his muscles.

As it was, Sasuke, had always preferred to say as little as possible. He clenched his teeth. "Does it matter?"

"Can you sit up? Avoid your hips, if you can. I know they're still sore," Kabuto noted, turning in his chair back to his screen. "I would have harvested the stem cells from the blood, but that would have taken time we just don't have. Don't you agree?"

Sasuke pushed himself up on the table. Kabuto had been extracting bone marrow from Sasuke's pelvis the night before, collecting stem cells from the iliac crest, and although he didn't need stitches, the pain still lingered.

"What did you just do to me?" Sasuke asked, looking at the screen over Kabuto's shoulder.

"I just took a picture of your chakra system," Kabuto told him gleefully, tapping away at the keyboard. "It works on a similar principle to the X-ray. Chakra is coloured to the trained eye. Different chakras have different wavelengths. All I do is fire chakra energy from the seal on the ceiling at the same wavelength as your chakra, so that it is absorbed by your chakra coils. Where it isn't absorbed, the energy passes through your body to the seal on the table, and here we have it - A negative image of your chakra system."

Kabuto tilted the screen so that Sasuke could see. "This is your chakra system, Sasuke-kun."

"And?" Sasuke wasn't unimpressed, but he wasn't going to show that to Kabuto.

Kabuto flicked through the notes on the desk and presented Sasuke with another image. "This is a picture of the standard chakra system, as found in the most recent medic-nin textbook. Now, let's compare the two images." He held up the sheet of paper against the screen then pointed with his pencil. "Your chakra system has a number of embellishments the standard doesn't have - coils of your chakra system have been wrapped around your lymph nodes. It's a never before seen linkage between the chakra and immune systems. I can only wonder how much surgery that would have taken for Orochimaru to engineer."

"Is there anything else that needs to be done today?" Sasuke cut in, before Kabuto could drift off on a tangent about Orochimaru's unparalleled practical skills.

"I was thinking of taking a sample of alveolar tissue, but we'll leave that for another time." Kabuto pencilled it onto a list of things to do with an earnest nod. "You still seem a little off from yesterday's anaesthetic. I wouldn't want to put you under and have you never come back. Our benefactor would be most displeased. Today, we'll stick to chakra-imaging. How about I infect you with a sample of RAMK and we record live how your chakra system responds to the pathogen introduction?"

"Do as you like," Sasuke replied. He was busy trying to remember how numb he had been under the general anaesthetic and half-wishing that the feeling would return. Then he wouldn't be so tempted to roast the moths on the table as crisp as wafers or put a knife to the smile on Kabuto's face. "So long as there are results."

Kabuto paused. He stopped writing notes into the workbook and took off his glasses. "You really want this revenge of yours, don't you?"

Sasuke said nothing. Kabuto spoke and his tone was mocking, "I hear that Madara has promised you a perfect revenge. Let me tell you this, Sasuke-kun – in my experience, there is no such thing."

The moths' antennae quivered as Sasuke's eyes glowed red. "What would you know about it?"

"Anybody who has studied will tell you the same. You start calling things perfect, you start looking for ideals, and ideals are just impossible dreams of what can never be. Perfection, infinity, beauty, god - all ideals and they only exist in the realms of theory. They are unachievable in practice. What is the point of an unachievable revenge? It's just an endless chase in the dark," Kabuto mused. He flicked a switch. The dark room lit up. "Although perhaps that meaningless chase itself is what you live for."

"Words, words, words," Sasuke sighed. "You've never gone beyond them."

"Having said that, there is one kind of revenge that is, perhaps, as close to perfect as a scientist like myself would admit."

"And what would that be?"

"The last revenge in a cycle of revenges," Kabuto said, replacing the glasses on his nose. "It means a revenge that creates no more avengers."

The screen beeped and Kabuto hurriedly bent over the keyboard to finish annotating the chakra system image. "I could try to kill everybody, absolutely everybody, and leave no survivors who'd come after me. For that revenge to be complete, everyone must die – the whole world, if you want to be thorough. It's impossible." Kabuto looked thoughtful. "On the other hand, I could narrow the focus of my vengeance to killing just one man, and crush him to the ground. Crush everything about him. Push him down so hard that everyone will acknowledge that his death was justified, and no one will come after me."

"That sounds just like you, Kabuto," Sasuke snorted. "A coward's revenge."

Kabuto pursed his lips. "Hands in the dark, Sasuke-kun - The people who want to kill you, the people who want to save you, the trail of regret a path of revenge leaves behind. How much regret do you have following you, Sasuke-kun?"

"I regret nothing!" Sasuke snapped, sliding off the table and going to the door. "I'll be preparing a sample in the main laboratory. Come when you remember how to shut up and do the job you've been paid to do."

"Oh, I will," said Kabuto, smiling. The moths rose to beat about his shoulders. "I've been paid very well after all."

The Raikage rose to his feet, a man mountain moving with the slow gravity of plate tectonics. "So, Hokage, what have you to say about the situation?"

"As a medic, quite a lot. As Hokage, there's not much I can do except apologise."

"Apologise?" the Raikage exclaimed. "I have the dead piling in the streets and you think a simple apology is going to bring them back to life? This Plague spread from Konoha. A rogue ex-Konoha ninja created it, and all the knowledge he needed to make this disease he learnt at some point in Konoha. I think we need something more than an apology."

It was opening everybody had expected and nobody stepped in to stop him. The Tsuchikage was whispering with his attendant, who was a renowned biochemist from his country, and the Mizukage was fanning herself with the agenda. The Kazekage met Kakashi's eye. Although the Kazekage's face was entirely masked by a cloth visor, leaving only two film-covered holes to see through, it was clear that he was finding the Raikage's opening ranting dull and perhaps even a little bit sad.

Every Kage was worn and tired and knew that there was little point in anger. It was obvious that Konoha would have to pay, somehow or other, and Tsunade wasn't going to argue with them.

Tsunade agreed that Konoha bear responsibility for the Plague and that compensation would be given, just as Kakashi expected. The Raikage had pinned up a map similar to the one Tsunade had been looking at in her office and illustrated the distinctive pattern of spread, a spidery web moving outwards from Konoha, and she had no intention of saying otherwise.

She suggested that they compensate with research, made open to all the nations. The Land of Fire, with Tsunade as the Hokage, was currently the leader amongst the nations in medical research. They also had access to Orochimaru's original files on the modified bacteria.

"We would also like access to the original files, if possible," the Mizukage said, after a discussion with her companion – her nation's leading physician.

"On the condition that they are burned, along with all copies made of the files, within a year," Kakashi whispered to Tsunade. "Keep those files and they've got the means to make more strains for biowarfare at some point in the future."

Tsunade repeated what Kakashi said, adding they would be destroyed in Konoha as well. The Mizukage pursed her lips and nodded in acceptance. The Raikage and Tsuchikage did not seem satisfied. They would no doubt return to the issue of compensation at the end of the conference.

The agenda turned to the different Plague measures carried out by the different nations. They discussed the efficiencies of each nation's hazard gear each nation had created. The Land of Wind's visors had good filtration systems, having put to good use their experience gained from desert travel.

They talked about antibiotic trials and treatments and the growing problem of resistant RAMK strains. Isoniazid was failing in the Land of Lightning. Iwa had seen some initial success with a newly trialled antibiotic, but given the number of patients who died because of the toxicity of the antibiotic itself it didn't seem like a solution.

When Tsunade started talking about the Hellhound Program to detect the latently infected and the Zero Chakra courses, however, she was met with a grim, almost resentful, silence. None of the ninja villages liked the idea of training ninjas to stop using chakra.

"It may be worth finding more individuals infected with the original MK," suggested the Kazekage, breaking the weighty silence. "Both Uchiha Itachi and Kaguya Kimimaro must have encountered the disease somewhere in their travels. If we find a sample of milder strain it would be possible to make a vaccine. Isn't that so, Hokage?"

"It would certainly be possible," Tsunade agreed with a nod. "On a related note, I would like to discuss a recent Konoha discovery. We found a young man immune to the Plague."

There was a sharp intake of breath and murmur of interest from the Kages and their companions. The Tsuchikage leaned forward in his seat. "Who is he? Have you got him in protection?"

"Unfortunately, we haven't. My colleague will explain after I have spoken," Tsunade said smoothly, her eyes sliding sideways to rest on Kakashi.

Kakashi started in his chair at the sound of his name. He mouthed, "I will?"

"The young man is a rogue Konoha ninja by name of Uchiha Sasuke." Tsunade noted that the Kazekage looked up with interest. "Hatake Kakashi, my colleague here, was recently sent on a mission to bring him back to Konoha. Unfortunately, he failed, but it is through him that we have this information on Sasuke."

As all eyes fell on him, Tsunade raised an eyebrow, as though to say, That's your cue to talk.

Kakashi rose from his seat. He began to describe the events of the mission, for what felt like the hundredth time. As he did, he watched the Kage's faces carefully, waiting for a reaction. He got to the point where Sasuke said he would sell himself to any country willing to have him. None of the Kages reacted any differently to how he expected. There was no way of telling if one of them was already protecting Sasuke within their borders.

He sat down and Tsunade immediately began speaking. "Sasuke seems to think he can sell himself to any one of you in exchange for what he wants. Now, I understand that as the source of the Plague the Land of Fire is in no position to make demands, but this is one I beg of you." She folded her hands on the table. "As we have already established, Konoha is currently the world leader in medical ninjutsu. I would like to ask that you trust Konoha to carry out the appropriate research to find a cure. I want you all to swear that if Sasuke appears at your borders, offering himself for research, that you do not take him in, but capture him and deliver him to Konoha."

The Tsuchikage shifted uneasily in his seat and grunted. "I can make no such promise, with the lives of my people at stake."

"Neither can I," the Mizukage agreed.

"I have no problems with making such a promise," said the Kazekage, crossing his arms. "The whole of the ninja world is in danger from disappearing. We must come to our senses and set aside our national interests. It is obvious that the medical facilities in Konoha are second to none. I can think of no place in a better position to find a cure and find it quickly. I will willingly admit it – in the time it would take for Suna to amass the materials necessary for research, my people would die out."

"Well spoken," said a voice with quiet amusement.

"Yes, very well spoken, thank you, Kazekage," Tsunade said, lowering her head thankfully, before she realised that the dry, teasing voice had come down from the rafters and looked up with a gasp.

Sitting on the wooden beams, staring down at the conference below with one glowing red eye, was a man in a mask and a cloak patterned with clouds.

The Kages leapt up from their seats as one. "Akatsuki!" the Kazekage cried. Sand snaked out from the gourd on his back.

The masked man held up his hands. "Please be seated. There's no need to stand on ceremony on my behalf."

"How did you get in here?" the Raikage demanded.

"Does it matter?" the masked man said lightly. "I'm not here to cause any harm. If I don't have any hostile intentions, then I'm not a security threat. I'm just here to talk and make you all an offer."

The Tsuchikage thrust a finger up at the man in the rafters. "Why would you think we'd be interested in anything a criminal like you has to say?"

The man in the mask laughed.

"Well, gathering from what I heard, you're all desperate for a cure and I," he leaned forward from the shadow of the beam, one eye gleaming, "I have Uchiha Sasuke."

Chapter Text

The new member Neji's Zero Chakra class was a young man, lithe and well-muscled, who would have been at the prime of his ninja career had it not been for the Plague.

New adults joined Neji's seminar group almost every day. Mostly they were in their late twenties or thirties, the age group hit hardest by the chakra bacteria, but their age tended to range from anything between late teens to early fifties. The balding man sitting at the front of the room was from the Publications Office and was probably around fifty years old. A seventeen year old girl had been in Neji's first session, but her infection had turned active that very evening and she had since been taken into isolation. Neji, at the back of the classroom, was now the youngest there.

The young man joining the class didn't look much older than Neji. He slunk to the back and quietly pulled out his chair, looking as though he was trying to blend in with the shadows. Neji had seen the same look on the face of every new member to his Zero Chakra class. They looked like sleepwalkers, waiting to be woken up from a bad dream they couldn't stop.

The man cast nervous, darting looks about the room. Neji adjusted his face mask. It was almost comical. The Plague had reduced a Konoha jounin-level ninja to a twitching nervous boy.

"Good morning, all," Shizune called out, standing at the front with a giant notepad on a stand. "Thank you for attending this meeting today, and a particularly warm welcome to all our new members. I look forward to speaking to each and every one of you individually at some point during the next two hours. Today, we'll be continuing on from what we were doing yesterday." She held up a piece of string identical to the one on Neji's table. "We will be checking weight reactions. You will be working in pairs. I would like you to tie this string to your hand, like so. Your partner will add these lead weights, one at a time, to your string and then record the weight at which you first start augmenting your strength with chakra. Now since most of you are already well practised in this exercise, I'll be going round class to discuss with each of you your most recent RAMK blood test results as you do it. Is that clear?"

There was a chorus of grunts and replies and the day's Zero Chakra class began.

"Neji-kun." Sakura appeared beside his desk. She was sitting in on Shizune's class again. On the face of it, she was there to learn how they were run in case Shizune ever needed a substitute, but Neji knew better. Sakura was there to keep an eye on the latently infected in case they showed signs of active infection, just like all the other nurses and apprentices walking around the room. The thought made Neji resent Sakura a little, even though he knew that was unfair.

"Do you want me to pair up with the new man?" he asked Sakura.

Neji had been going to Shizune's Zero Chakra classes since the very first one had been held. From that first seminar group of seven ninjas, there was only him and a forty year old woman left. The rest were in isolation. These days Neji often got paired with the younger new members to help them learn the exercises, whilst the woman took the older.

Sakura breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you, Neji-kun."

She left to collect a stack of sheets off Shizune. Neji picked up the bag of weights and the piece of string from his desk and made his way to the young man, who was still shuffling nervously in his seat.

At the sound of Neji pulling up a chair, the man looked up and whispered, "Please don't come any closer."

Neji dropped the weights on the man's desk. "That's going to make things difficult for the exercise, you know."

"I don't need to do any exercises," the man shot back, sounding desperate. "I'm not supposed to be here. There's been some kind of mistake. The nurses forced me to come here, but I'm not infected. I'm not."

"As much as we would all like that to be true, it's highly unlikely," Neji sighed, hating himself as he said it. He noticed that the man's disposable face mask was still in its packet on his desk. Neji picked it up and held it out to him. "I suggest you put on your mask and get used to it."

"I don't need no goddam mask!" The man slapped the mask out of Neji's hand. "Didn't you hear what I said? I'm not infected. Are you that desperate to have everybody dragged down to your level? I'm only sitting here because the goddam nurses won't let me out!"

Cold anger stirred in Neji's veins. His arms began to move instinctively into a familiar stance, before he realised what he was doing and he lowered his arms to his sides. "In which case," he said carefully, chewing on his tongue, "just, do me a favour and put on the mask. It'll lessen your risk of becoming infected - "

"There seems to be a lot of noise coming from over here," said Shizune, approaching them through the tables with a look of concern. "Are you having problems?"

"Listen," the man breathed, drawing himself up to his full height as he rounded on her, "you've got to take me off the register. There's been a mistake. There must have been a mistake! It's nonsense to rely on diagnoses from dogs. It's hardly scienti – what's this?"

Shizune was holding out a sheet of paper. "Your initial RAMK blood concentration, Hakuda-san. I'm sorry, but there hasn't been any mistake. Please keep it for your own personal records, so that you can monitor your progress through the course."

The man took the sheet with shaking hands. He ran his eyes over the table of figures, then made a small, wretched noise at the back of his throat and sank into his seat. He hid his face behind the sheet of paper, sobbed.

Shizune began to gesture discreetly to a couple of medic-nins who had been watching the exchange from the sides.

"Wait, Shizune-san," Neji said, putting out a hand to stop her. "Let him have some space for a moment."

The man sobbed quietly into his sheet of paper. The other members of the seminar continued their tasks, looking somewhat awkward as they pretended not to notice a grown man crying in the corner.

"One more thing, Neji-kun," Shizune said softly, putting a sheet of paper in Neji's hands, "please be honest with me when I ask you this. Have you been using chakra at any point during the last few days?"

Neji avoided her gaze. "I – "

Shizune closed her eyes. "You have, haven't you?"

"Only a couple of times, and only for a few seconds!" he added hastily. "It's my byakugan, it's a kekkei genkai - I can't just stop using it. It's like instinct. I don't even realise -"

Shizune raised her hands and Neji closed his mouth. "I can't say I didn't expect you to have trouble. You're not alone in this, Neji-kun. The other ninjas with kekkei genkais have all said the same thing, but there is a ban on chakra use for the infected for a reason."

"I know," Neji muttered bleakly. "If I'm seen using chakra I'll get taken into isolation for being a hazard to those around me. I know."

At his frustrated tone, Shizune raised her eyebrows. She tapped the sheet of paper in his hand and he looked down at his blood test results. The tests were carried out every two days. Between the last test and this one, there was a clear, stark and obvious rise in the average RAMK count detected from his white blood cells. Words stuck in his throat. He took a deep breath.

"This is a terrible thing to say," Shizune began gently, "but it might help that whenever you are in a situation where you find yourself tempted to activate the byakugan that you think about this little piece of paper."

Neji felt numb. He swallowed. "I will try."

"Also, Neji-kun, make sure you keep coming to these classes. If ever somebody reports you for using chakra, you can use your record of good attendance here to show you've been making an effort to suppress its use. Is that clear?"

He nodded without really listening. Shizune smiled and went to console the new member of the seminar class, who had put his head into his hands and was still shaking it, in total denial.

Every three days, Shikamaru made it his business to visit Yuuhi Kurenai to check on her and her baby. They were both locked in, of course. She hadn't liked the idea, but ultimately persuaded by the council's demands that she thought for the safety of the child, Kurenai had put in a hatch at the bottom of her door and declared her small family locked in.

Shikamaru had had quite a shock the previous week. At the sight of a great grey white cross on a door, his knees had almost given away, before he realised his mistake and noticed that the marked door was Kurenai's neighbour's and not hers.

He rang the doorbell and waited. Not long later, he heard footsteps, a pause as Kurenai looked through the spyhole, and then the intercom crackled. "I still can't get used to you in sunglasses. You look just like Shino-kun."

Shikamaru smiled and pushed the glasses up his nose. "How are you holding up, Kurenai-san?"

"I'm fine, Shikamaru-kun, although the baby's getting livelier." She laughed on the other side of the door. "I thought she had my eyes, but they're beginning to look a lot more like her father's."

"If there's anything I can do for you, just tell me, or tell Lee when he comes Running," Shikamaru told her earnestly, wondering if it was a small mercy that Asuma-sensei wasn't around to see the Plague. He wouldn't have taken being locked in well at all.

There was a pause and then Kurenai said, "Actually, there's one thing you might be able to do. I'm getting a lot of rubbish mail through the hatch. It would be good if you could put a stop to it."

The hatch at the bottom of the door opened. Kurenai's hand briefly appeared, pushing four or so small pieces of paper out. Shikamaru bent down to pick them up. He recognised what they were instantly.

COME ONE, COME ALL TO THE SECOND REPENTERS' PARADE

WE WALK TO HEAL – YOUR CRIES WILL NOT GO UNANSWERED

"Somebody's been putting one through the hatch every day," Kurenai explained.

Shikamaru shuffled the leaflets. He noted that each sheet had a small red number inked into corner. They counted down from six to three, counting down to the date of the next Repenters' Parade. Shikamaru cursed and gritted his teeth.

Kurenai lowered her voice. "Will you be alright, Shikamaru-kun?"

"Probably not," Shikamaru admitted. "The Repentance sent a notice about the Parade to my mum three days ago. They've given us time to prepare, but -"

"That means the Repenters will be preparing too," Kurenai concluded anxiously. The baby burbled in the background of the intercom. "Shikamaru-kun, you said that most of the Keepers you knew had either been killed or temporarily blinded. Doesn't that mean you're short of men?"

"I've got a plan of sorts." It frustrated him that Kurenai could see him through the spyhole in the door, even though he couldn't see her. "Don't worry, Kurenai-san."

She sighed, suddenly sounding far wearier than a young mother ought to be.

"You know, when men say that," - the baby began to cry - "that's when I really do worry."

Danzo cancelled all of his appointments that he had scheduled - a meeting with the head of Publications, a tea with the Third Officer of the Quarantine Guard, he moved them all to a later date – and retreated to his room, telling the civilian guards that under no circumstance were they to enter.

Danzo closed the curtains and switched on the light. His thoughts were seething. What should he do? What could he do? In the end, he settled for meditating, in silence, at his desk, in his chair. He was at a loss as to what else to do. He wasn't an especially religious man either, but as he turned back through his memories, he found his hand reaching for the juzu beads in the bottom draw. The last time he had taken them out had been for Sarutobi Hiruzen's funeral.

Rain was falling in the courtyard garden. He could hear the drops as they landed in the empty fishpond.

"Why can't I remember?" Danzo ran the beads of the juzu through the fingers of his left hand.

On close examination, his memory of the past week was dotted with blanks. There were mornings and evenings where minutes had been shaved out of his day. And all since the day he had taken off his arm braces, although the very moment he had taken them off was completely excised from his memory as neatly as had it been done with a scalpel.

Perhaps it was some kind of mind infiltration jutsu. There were plenty capable of it. The Yamanaka clan made a particular speciality of it. Had he given any member of the clan reason to hold a grudge against him recently? Danzo ran the beads through his hands again. No, this didn't feel like anything the Yamanakas' work. Until the Plague, a Yamanaka had been one of his closest subordinates and he had asked to be put under the Yamanaka jutsus many a time so as to learn how to throw them off. No Yamanaka was going to be getting inside his head any time soon.

More importantly, this attack didn't feel like a matter of politics. The malicious, teasing nature in which the shadow left traces of its passing was undeniably personal. It wanted him to be afraid and it was taking great pleasure in exercising its power over him.

It seemed to have a particularly worrying agenda with his right arm and right eye.

Danzo transferred his juzu beads to his right hand. With his left, he pressed a panel under his desk and pulled out a knife. His reflection in the blade was grey and haggard. He was an old, sickly-looking man.

Still staring at his face, Danzo reached up for the bandages around his forehead. They looked new. He fumbled with the bandages, wondering when he had changed them.

Then suddenly his right hand twitched, jumped, jerked of its own accord, and the fingers flew across his temples. They tore off the bandages with an almost childish glee.

The glowing red eye stared up at Danzo from his reflection – baleful, malevolent as a curse, bright and alive. He saw it then, staring out from the depths of the stolen eye. There was the shadow itself.

The shadow was in his eye.

He cried out a moment later, flinging the dagger across the room so that it landed point first, embedded deep in the wall and surrounded by cracking plaster. The eye throbbed in Danzo's head and his head span…

When Danzo next came to, the knife had been removed from the wall. It had been cleaned and put back into its secret panel. His juzu had been torn apart and the brown beads were strewn across his desk and rolling on the floor. Everywhere around him, the trace of the shadow hung thick like fog.

Breathing deeply, Danzo reached up to touch his right eye. The bandage was back in place.

"Of course, I'll help. You want a hundred shadow clones? You've got them." Naruto grinned and leaned across the table to clap hands with Shikamaru.

"I knew we could count on you and your stupidly high reserves of chakra." Shikamaru sighed with relief. "Thanks, Naruto. I owe you one."

"What's the plan then?" Naruto asked and Neji looked up with interest.

Shikamaru had come to looking for Naruto in the Tigers' Den kitchen. He had wanted Naruto's shadow clones to bulk out Keeper numbers, in preparation for the Repenters' Parade in two nights' time. Shizune had arranged a trip for the Plague orphans to spend the afternoon in the Konoha messenger bird aviary, so the Tigers' Den was quiet. Neji was taking advantage of the lull in activity to fill in some reports.

"The main plan is to intercept the Repenters, kettle them and arrest as many as possible."

"You don't sound too pleased about that," said Neji, noting the disapproval in Shikamaru's tone.

"Kettling and arresting doesn't achieve anything," Shikamaru tapped the tabletop with his fingers and ground his teeth. "And the likelihood of being able to disarm all the Repenters safely is slim, especially now that we've been ordered to avoid using shadow binding against the civilians. Mum says she doesn't want civilian-ninja relations to be strained any further than they already are. Politics is as troublesome as hell."

"But you say that's the main plan," Naruto pointed out excitedly, "so you've got something else in mind, right?"

Shikamaru nodded. "I'm thinking we find their leader."

Neji raised his eyebrows. "The Eye of the World?"

"I've finally looked at the reports from the units that met Repenters on the night of the first Parade," Shikamaru's face darkened, "and there's no doubt about it. There's some ninja manipulating them. They started chanting their rubbish about repentances in four different places in Konoha all at the same time. Word for word the same speech at the exact same moment. It was programmed into the Repenters who were speaking."

"The woman I met in the park mentioned something about Bishops," Neji said, as Naruto grimaced at Shikamaru's words. "They sounded as though they had more power in the cult than the other Repenters. They must have been the speakers in the crowd."

"That's it then," Naruto planted his fist on the table, "we'll just find these Bishops, turn them upside down and shake the information out of them about where their leader is."

"I've got a better idea." Neji set down his pen. "The Bishops are being manipulated at a long distance from their leader. There's a chance that there will be a chakra link connecting them. If there's a link, the byakugan would be able to see it."

Shikamaru put his thumb and forefingers together in thought. He nodded. "My mum's already talking the Captain of the Marksmen to send men, so we'll have some Hyuugas and chakra sensors on patrol. Good. We can use them."

"You know that's not what I meant," Neji snapped, his mouth set in a thin line.

"You are not going out against the Parade using chakra, Neji," said Shikamaru firmly. He closed his eyes as Neji stared at him in disbelief. Those silver-white eyes were still intimidating. Shikamaru shook his head. "I'm sorry, but, you're latently infect – "

"I've cleaned up three houses of mass suicides. I've rescued a good friend from having his throat cut like a pig in the street. I've had a woman offer to help me commit suicide, before trying to feed poison to children right under my very nose," Neji surged to his feet and raised his voice, "You can't make me stand by and watch these madmen do what they like with our town, Shikamaru. All I'll need is a couple of seconds for one look. If there's one last thing I want to do with my chakra, I want to do something to help take the Repentance down – "

"New generation dynamic entry!" came a shout from the doorway, and in a blur of chuunin blue canvas, Rock Lee soared into the kitchen with his fist outstretched. "Apologies in advance to all innocent bystanders!"

His fist smacked Neji on the jaw with a crack. Neji spun round from the table, tripped over the chair and landed on his knees on the tiles.

"Bushybrows! What are you doing here?" Naruto exclaimed.

"A moment please, Naruto-kun!" Lee landed in a crouch on the table, his eyes burning with fury.

Neji picked himself up from the floor. He gingerly touched his jaw, breathing heavily, then glared up at Lee standing above him. "Rock Lee, how dare you - "

"No, Neji-kun, how dare you!" Lee stared down, quivering from head to toe with indignation. "How dare you even think about using chakra! You know what that means for you! You will be condemning yourself to death! To snuffing out your youthful spark!"

"What does that matter? I'm already as good as dead anyway," Neji hissed, balling his hands into fists. "Why can't I choose how I last use my chakra? The Zero Chakra course is only a delaying the inevitable. Everybody knows that the latents on it are just dead men walking and it isn't a life - "

"So you're going to throw your life away like that freak of a Repenter woman wanted?" Naruto snapped angrily.

Neji stopped, looking as stunned as had he been slapped. "No, I just want – "

"To choose the way you're going to go?" Shikamaru supplied with a mirthless smile. "Hah. Funny, because the Repenters gave me a whole menu to pick from."

"That's not what I – "

"Neji-kun, if you get put into isolation, as a Runner and the last member of our team," Lee scrunched up his eyes, but the tears still flowed down his face, "it will be me going to Guy-sensei and Hinata-san to deliver the news. I'd even have to go to Tenten's father. He still asks me how you are! I don't want to tell them you've been taken in to hospital. I don't think I could."

"Neji, we know you want to help, but Bushybrow's right," Naruto cut in, as guilt and misery began to flit across Neji's face. "You might be fine going after the Repenters and dying off afterwards, which, by the way, is one of the stupidest things I've heard since I last spoke to Sas…since I last spoke to an old idiot friend of mine, but the rest of us are definitely not cool with you dying. Got it? Not one bit. We are not cool with having to go to another funeral wake. You say it's inevitable that you're going to die. That's rubbish. Tsunade-bacchan's gone to a conference and, I bet you, she's going to get all the countries working together to make a cure, so you can't give up!"

There was a silence as Neji absorbed his words, his face impassive.

Shikamaru spoke up. "You've already helped us out with the idea on how to find the leader. Besides, there are plenty of things you'll have to do here." He looked around the kitchen of the Tigers' Den. Naruto had pinned up some of the kids' pictures. Mostly they were crayon sketches of children beating up Naruto in creative ways, but there were a couple of Sakura in fearsome shades of pink and, unmistakeably, a few shyly drawn ones of Neji. "Somebody's going to have to make sure the kids don't go out into the streets on the night of the Parade. We don't want any ninja kids getting caught up in the riots."

"Trust us, Neji," Naruto added when Neji seemed about to argue. "We'll find the leader, we'll catch him, and we'll get him back for all of us - for every ninja and civilian in Konoha. Now, shake hands with Lee and say you won't use your chakra until Tsunade-bacchan's gets you cured, and snap of the self-pity. It's boring."

Neji sighed. He relaxed his fists as Naruto spoke. "You're right. You're all right. I shouldn't be so stupid," he muttered, embarrassed that they had seen him in so much despair. The new member in class that morning had got to him more than he had realised. He rubbed his jaw one more time then raised a hand up to Lee. "I'm sorry, Lee-kun. Thank you. I…maybe I needed that. I'll take as much care of my chakra use as I can."

Lee, still sobbing and sniffling, took Neji's offered hand and shook it fervently. "Always a pleasure."

Naruto cleared his throat: "By the way, great timing with the punch and all, but, why are you here, Bushybrows?"

"Oh! I'm here to deliver a map from Guy-sensei," Lee replied quickly and he jumped off the kitchen table to rummage in the basket on his back. He came up with a scroll. He unrolled it and weighted down the corners with some tea cups, then stood back to let the others cluster round. "He thought the Keepers might be interested in this, so he sent me out to inform as many Keepers as I knew, at once, and as quickly as possible! Keeper HQ said Shikamaru had been planning to visit Naruto, so I came here."

"These are the places where Keepers were ambushed by Repenters," said Shikamaru, looking over the map, where there were four large crosses over Konoha. "What about it?"

"May I borrow this pen?" Lee asked Neji, picking up the pen with which he had been filling in his paperwork. Neji nodded.

Lee began to draw on the map. They watched as he drew a curved arc between two of the crosses, then extended the curve to the third, before returning the line to the point at which he had started – a circle appeared and at the centre of the circle was the fourth cross.

For Naruto it was a shape that was very hard to forget. He gasped, "It's a giant sharingan."

"Why would the Repentance do this?" Shikamaru asked, staring at the map. "This, the flyers, the Parades? It's so flashy, it's like they want to be caught."

Neji frowned, glanced momentarily at Naruto, before turning to Shikamaru and lowering his voice. "Do you think the Repentance have something to do with the Uchiha clan?"

"Who knows?" Shikamaru adjusted his sunglasses against the glare of the kitchen light. "One thing's for sure, this whole issue with the Repentance is getting – "

"Troublesome?" Naruto suggested with a sly grin.

Shikamaru paused to narrow his eyes at Naruto. "Yes," Shikamaru relented, when he realised that Naruto couldn't see him glaring because of the sunglasses anyway, "it's getting very troublesome. And it's also getting old."

Chapter Text

The first one who dared to move was Kakashi. Whilst the Kages stared up at the masked man in silence, Kakashi took a step backwards and leaned against the door to the conference room. He tested the handle. He met resistance and looked down, where he saw a dark red stain spreading out from the gap under the door.

He went back to Tsunade and lowered his voice, "We're locked in."

"The guards?"

"Dead. Heaped against the door outside."

Tsunade swore. They returned their attention to the man in the bright orange mask.

"Settle down, settle down. Make yourselves comfortable," the masked man said, patting the air with his hands. Kakashi would have laughed. He sounded like a schoolteacher trying to get nursery children to sit down for story time, but the air was fraught with an electrifying tension and a undeniable sense of danger.

"We will stay standing," said the Kazekage curtly. "You say you have Uchiha Sasuke. What proof do you have?"

A gust of wind blew. The next instant the masked man was holding a long straight-edged blade in his hands and removing its sheath. The one glowing red eye crinkled upwards in a smile. "I'm sure some of you recognise this."

Eyes turned to the contingent from the Land of Fire. The Raikage was breathing down his nose like a bull readying to charge. Kakashi nodded in confirmation. It saddened him as he said, "That's Sasuke's chokuto."

"But that is only proof you have a sword, not Uchiha Sasuke himself," the Kazekage persisted, sand creeping out from the gourd to curl around his shoulders. "If you're lying, we have no reason to listen to you."

"Consider your current situation, Kazekage. I don't think you're in any position not to listen to me," said the masked man slyly, indicating the map of Plague spread with a sweep of Sasuke's sword. "My name is Uchiha Madara. Yes, I am what many of you define as a criminal. I am the leader of an international organisation of freedom fighters - "

" – terrorists," growled the Tsuchikage.

"- clowns?" supplied the Mizukage.

"Oh, if I had any feelings, I think they would have been hurt just then," the masked man put a hand to his heart as though in pain. He chuckled. "But, even if you think all these terrible things of me, I assure you that I want a cure for the Plague as much as any ninja here. There's little point trying to change a world if there is no longer a world to change. Now, Kages, what would your precious ninjas say if they heard that their beloved leaders had tried to kill a man offering a cure for the Plague?"

The Kages exchanged a look of disgust and dismay. Then all of a sudden, the sand swirling about the Kazekage began to slowly, ever so slowly, inch back into its gourd.

The Tsuchikage spluttered, "Kazekage, you can't surely be suggesting we listen to this man -"

"He's saying he has a cure," the Kazekage said, raising his voice, "and we don't have any choice. He's locked the room and the guards are dead. He has no intention of letting us leave until he's finished his business."

The Raikage cracked his knuckles and growled, "Out with it, Akatsuki rat. What do you want?"

"I will keep things simple." The masked man stretched as luxuriously as a cat. "I have Uchiha Sasuke in my possession. I have hired the most capable scientist there is to carry out research on him, with the aim of developing a cure for the RAMK Plague. The research is being carried out within international standards of ethics, so you need not worry about the source of the cure. Sasuke-kun volunteered to take part in the experiments and has signed," he drew a sheet of paper from the neck of his robes, "the appropriate forms of consent. The results have so far been rather promising."

"Do you really believe Sasuke went willingly with this man?" Tsunade hissed out of the corner of her mouth to Kakashi.

Kakashi shook his head, unwilling to reply, but deep down he knew it was probably true. Sasuke had vanished from the forest as though into thin air. This man, Uchiha Madara, was capable of using a form of teleportation jutsu. It was highly likely he had helped Sasuke escape. Not only that, they still didn't know what had convinced Sasuke to join the Akatsuki in the first place. It was possible that the Akatsuki had some kind of leverage, some kind of hold on the boy, that had been used to manipulate Sasuke into obedience.

"I have Uchiha Sasuke, I have access to secret files left by Orochimaru, and my principal researcher is none other than his own right-hand man, Yakushi Kabuto," the masked man continued, noting with satisfaction that Tsunade and Kakashi both flinched at the sound of the name. "My laboratory is closer to finding the cure for the Plague than any other research facility here, and I am willing to give every one of you the cure when it is completed."

"For what price?" the Tsuchikage demanded, as the other Kages began to mutter in discussion with their aides.

The masked man balanced the blade across his knees and smiled.

"The Five Nations can have the cure in exchange for giving me the Eight-tailed and the Nine-tailed Jinchuurikis."

There was a loud crash. Splinters of wood flew in every direction as the Raikage smashed apart his table with his fist and roared, "Akatsuki scum! You will never have my brother!"

"And I'll say the same for the Nine-tailed Beast's Jinchuuriki,"Tsunade said, her eyes flashing with rage. "The Jinchuurikis will not play any part in these negotiations –"

"Now before the Hokage and Raikage rush to defend their respective Tailed Beasts, let me make this clear," the masked man leaned forward from the rafter, "if Konoha and Kumo do not give me the Nine and Eight-tailed Beasts, then nobody will get the cure. Not even Suna, Kiri or Iwa."

The Raikage growled and ground his teeth. He crushed a piece of his table in his fist. "Bastard."

The masked man laughed. "So Tsuchikage, Mizukage, and Kazekage, will you stand by and let the Hokage and Raikage make the decision that will deny the cure to your own peoples?"

"What does the Akatsuki want with the Tailed Beasts?" the Mizukage asked, her voice cutting through the chaos in the room. "We know that you have been extracting the Beasts from the Jinchuurikis. What do you intend to do with them?"

The masked man, for some reason, clapped his hands with delight, as though he was infinitely pleased that somebody had finally asked the question that he had been waiting to be asked all along.

"Let me explain the Moon's Eye Plan."

Hands in the dark.

With the horrifying certainty of a dreamer, Sasuke knew they were there.

He couldn't see them but he knew they were behind him. He could hear them twisting and stretching behind his back. Joints clicked. Skin rustled dry as paper. Arms brushed over each other like snakes in their haste to reach out to him with their translucent fingers and shining white knuckles.

His heart was drumming. His pulse throbbed in his ears. He turned slowly to look over his shoulder. Hands rushed forward and he took off with a yell, throwing himself into the dark.

He was feeling his way with his feet. His bare soles slapped stone that wasn't stone. The path beneath him was paved with bone. The warm shadows enfolded him like water and held him close. He ran, straight and fast, away from the hands crowding the road behind him.

As he ran into the dark, the shadows filling his ears and his nostrils, dripping under his eyelids, warm and numbing, so comforting, he realised that the dark was seeping into him. It was soaking through his skin and claiming him for itself.

He didn't care. He had chosen to run in the dark on the path of bones and if this was what he needed to do to keep running forever, then so be it.

Still the hands were coming closer. He could hear their tendons, tough as cords, creaking as they stretched. He could hear the click of finger-bones even through the velvety darkness in his ears.

Hands snatched at his back. They seized at his arms and legs. Their fingers tangled in his hair, brushed against his face. They dragged him to a halt with his heels scuffing the cool ivory of the road. No, he didn't want this! He raged against the hands as he had never raged before, demanding why they wouldn't let him run, snarling at their ignorant unfairness, shouting that they were nothing more than hands, grasping hands, and they slipped from him, one by one, until only the most persistent remained.

Icy cold fingers touched his forehead and a shock ran through his body.

Sasuke opened his eyes in the dark, still dreaming. The hand drew away from his face and slipped back over his shoulder. It was a hand unlike any of the others. It was cold and slippery, rough with feathery edged ice, covered in fronds of frost as delicate as any filigree, and blue – blue from the ice, and the pallor of a dead man's skin.

His eyes followed its movements. The next instant those hands, slippery with ice, were hooked under his arms and they were pulling at him with the strength of a thousand other hands. They pulled him not only backwards, but upwards, and he couldn't fight them. The hands covered in frost rushed him through the warm darkness, and as he struggled in their hold they were joined by another pair of hands that were white hot and burning gold.

He didn't need to turn to see them. They glowed in the corner of his eyes, as intrusive as sunlight, and together, the hands of frost and the hands of gold, they lifted him up and out from the warmth of the dark into shockingly cold air.

And it was then that he realised - that the warm syrupy darkness he had been running in, that had been filling his nose, eyes, ears and mouth, had been nothing more than a thick wall of blood and the path of bone went nowhere but deeper, deeper down into a bloody well that went on forever.

Blood streamed off his face and arms as he surfaced, and Sasuke knew, with the horrifying certainty of a dreamer, that it was not his own.

The hands of gold had vanished. The hands blue with frost remained, and they touched his forehead one more time, icy and cold.

"If we gave you the Eight-tails and the Nine-tails, you will give us the cure, and all of our peoples will be saved," the Tsuchikage said, sitting down at his table, his eyebrows knitted together, "but only to have you cast them under an eternal genjutsu! This is preposterous!"

The Kazekage shook his head. "Either one way or the other, the world will end."

"Wrong," the masked man said cheerfully. "One way everybody will be alive in a new reality, and the other way everybody will be dead of the Plague. Is the choice so difficult? All I ask for is the Eight-tailed and Nine-tailed Beast, delivered to me within a month of this meeting."

The Mizukage spoke up quickly before the Raikage could shout the man down. "How will we find you?"

"I will contact the Hokage and Raikage directly, after they make the appropriate public announcements, stating their intentions concerning their Tailed Beasts." The masked man sheathed the sword. He stood up on the beam with a smile. "Now, since you have much to discuss, I shall leave you all to it. Enjoy the rest of your conference, although I can't imagine why you should have any problems. A couple of Jinchuurikis, in exchange for the lives of every ninja in the Five Nations? I honestly think I'm generous giving you a month to think about it!"

Air whipped through the conference room, sending notes, fragments of table and sheets of paper flying up to the ceiling. Kakashi shielded his head with his arm. There was a click from the door behind him. Somebody had unlocked it.

When Kakashi lowered his arms and looked up at the beam, along with the Kages and the other aides, the man in the mask, Uchiha Madara, was gone.

Sasuke woke up.

He touched his forehead, and he was startled to feel something cold and wet there before a drop of condensation dripped down from the ceiling. It splashed between his eyes.

He sat up slowly and looked around, trying to get his bearings, and remembered that he was lying on his pallet trying to sleep off the effects of the morning's general anaesthetic. His heart wasn't racing but it felt like it had been. He ran his hand down his face. It came away clammy with sweat. His mouth was dry.

"Damn anaesthetics," Sasuke muttered.

Strange dreams, abnormal heart rates, and a dry mouth? What had Kabuto used on him this time? His head ached like it was going to split. Kabuto would be taking more samples from him later. He had said something about thymus and spleen samples before disappearing to the main laboratory and leaving Sasuke to dose himself with whatever he felt necessary.

Sasuke pushed back the covers and left his room. He met one of the grey-winged moths in the corridor and it followed him closely as he went to the main laboratory.

If you try to use your chakra with hostile intent, these moths will know, and they will help me keep you in line, Kabuto had said.

Despite agreeing with Madara to remain quiet until Kabuto had formulated a working antibiotic, vaccine and cure for latency, Sasuke had never agreed to completely surrender himself to Kabuto's mercy. After the very first day of lab-work, when Kabuto had been too engrossed in his reports to notice, Sasuke had gone looking for potential weapons.

It was a futile effort. Madara had taken Sasuke's attempt to kill himself seriously enough to make the cave complex entirely knifeless. The food in the larder had already been prepared. There wasn't a single can or roll of foil with which Sasuke could fashion a makeshift blade. Stalactites had even been shaved off the ceiling. When it came to laboratory equipment, Kabuto counted up the scalpels, scissors and needles at the end of every day, before doing the same for glassware. He knew Sasuke would attempt to arm himself if he could.

Sasuke refused to think he was vulnerable, but with the constant trials and studies being inflicted on his body, he was physically in no condition to be a threat to Kabuto without a weapon and, infuriatingly, Kabuto knew that too.

He came to the laboratory. Sasuke rested his hand on the handle and, just as he was about to open it, he paused. He found himself staring down at his hand, cold and waxy-looking in the dark.

The hands in his dream had been blue and covered in frost.

"Snap out of it." He pushed the door open with his shoulder and shook his head furiously.

The laboratory was empty for once. Kabuto wouldn't have expected Sasuke to be awake for another hour or so. He must have slithered back to his room. The grey moth fluttered in behind him and went to perch on top of Kabuto's microscope.

Without Kabuto's presence and oily commentary of his work, the laboratory seemed larger than usual. Sasuke went to the work bench where Kabuto had left his notebooks open and turned through their pages. Images of Sasuke's modified chakra system had been inserted under the heading 'Chakra System Immune Memory'. The next few pages were notes on phagosome-lysosome bridging molecules.

Sasuke frowned as he read them. With every page of Kabuto's scrawling notes, every word, every diagram, every arrow and underlining, every journal reference and memo to check a file collected from one of Orochimaru's laboratories, he began to feel unsettled, sick…No. It was worse. He felt violated.

He snorted. There was little point thinking like a victim now. It had been his choice to go under Orochimaru's knife - his choice, now it was his responsibility to live with it.

Sasuke was about to shut Kabuto's notebook when a line of ink on the back page caught his eye. He flipped the book open again. The moth was still fluttering its dusty wings on Kabuto's microscope.

"MK," he read out loud. It was a page on the old strain of the disease. Not even a page. It was largely a paragraph complaining about how difficult it was to obtain a sample.

Sasuke shrugged and closed the notebook. Opening a cupboard, he pulled out a microscope, took off its cloth cover and began mechanically setting it up on the bench behind Kabuto's. He had the time. He might as well check his RAMK colonies and see how they were growing on their plates.

He finished adjusting the lenses and walked across the room to the storage cupboard, where he had stacked the plates inside an incubator the day before.

The room on the left is where most of the supplies are stored.

It was a big hefty door and Sasuke was still getting used to the heaviness of its handle. He started to turn it using both hands, ignoring the stabs of pain coming from his hips and his chest where Kabuto had been taking samples from.

The room on the right is a freezer, Kabuto smiled in Sasuke's memory, but you need not worry about that.

Sasuke stopped. He turned to look to his right, to the door of the freezer, to the small misted up window. It was a very large freezer. He wondered what could be inside it. He had seen Kabuto come out of it once, but Kabuto had never sent him in there to fetch anything.

You need not worry about that.

It wasn't locked and Kabuto had never explicitly said he couldn't go in there. Sasuke glanced over his shoulder. The moth had moved. It had stopped this time on a test-tube rack and was preening its wings under a lamp. It shouldn't react if he opened the freezer door. It had been 'bred to respond to sudden changes in adrenaline levels combined with a fluctuation in chakra' after all, not changes in atmospheric temperature.

He put his hands on the freezer handle. The metal was cool to the touch.

Hands blue from the ice, and the pallor of a dead man's skin…

Sasuke closed his eyes. This had nothing to do with his dream. Kabuto was taking apart his body, bit by bit. If Sasuke couldn't get hold of a weapon to keep Kabuto on edge, to remind him that Sasuke was neither an object nor a laboratory pet, then he could get at Kabuto in other ways, starting with finding out what he was keeping in the freezer.

The handle twisted. There was a hiss as the door opened and cold air rushed against Sasuke's face.

Kabuto picked up the notebook from his workbench. Before he had gone up to his room, it had been left open at the page he was working on. Sasuke must have woken up early and come to the laboratory. The moth that had been watching the boy was fluttering by the sinks, Kabuto's notebook was now closed, and a microscope had been set up on the other workbench. Of Sasuke himself, however, there was no sign.

The corners of his lips turned up in a smile. Kabuto couldn't help it really. There was a chill in the laboratory air that hadn't been there when he had left and, more damningly, the door to the freezer had been left a little ajar. It was obvious where the boy had gone.

Kabuto sat down at his microscope. How should he entertain himself? There was plenty to be doing. He chose a slide mounted with a section of the boy's alveolar tissue, put it under the lens, and waited for Sasuke to come out from the freezer.

Not long later the hinges groaned and the door swung open. A cool gust of air swept through the laboratory, sending the moths into a flapping panic about Kabuto's head.

Slow crunching footsteps approached him. Ice was stuck to the soles of Sasuke's shoes. Kabuto neither looked up nor turned around. He hunched over his microscope, staring at the purple and red lace of the tissue and waited.

The footsteps came to a stop behind him.

"Kabuto," Sasuke's voice was low, guttural and trembled with menace, "why do you have Itachi's body in the freezer?"

Chapter Text

Inside the freezer was larger than the supplies cupboard and ten times colder. Thick frost crunched under Sasuke's feet. He curled his toes as they touched the ice. As the dim white ceiling lights began to brighten he began to make out a long dark shape at the back of the room, tucked up onto a shelf. It was the only object there.

Slipping and sliding on the frost and panels of ice hidden beneath it, his breath fogging the air, Sasuke approached the shape. Each step was cautious, followed by a backwards glance to the freezer door in case Kabuto returned and decided to shut him inside.

When he was not more than a metre from the shelf, he stopped, because the light in the freezer was now bright enough for him to see that the dark bundle, glittering on the shelf, was no ordinary bundle at all, but a man.

Dark folds of fabric stiffened by frozen blood; corroded arms lined with blackening wounds and peeling skin; a face, pale like his own and paler still in death - a face that had haunted his dreams and his life so vividly that he would recognise it even now under a layer of slick blue ice and white frost: It was Itachi.

He had been placed on his back with his arms laid by his sides. His eyes were closed. Were it not for the stiffness of his frozen limbs, Sasuke might have convinced himself that his brother was merely asleep.

Sasuke took a step closer. He didn't know how long he had been in the freezer, but every breath he took was beginning to hurt and his eyes stung.

Dark tracks of blood striped his brother's chin. The ghost of a smile even touched the corners of Itachi's mouth. It was as though Itachi had been preserved at the very moment of his death. Sasuke ran a hand over his brother's forehead. Hair clumped with ice stuck to his fingers and the frost melted away from the forehead protector. Under Sasuke's palm, the struck through mark of Konoha felt as jarring as a scar.

He withdrew his hand.

Black fires, smoke, the burnt ozone smell of a passing thunder bolt, and the wind and the pouring rain – he remembered his last fight with Itachi with painful clarity, but now that he came to think about it, he had never once wondered what had happened to Itachi's body.

He had fallen unconscious beside it. When he came to, he was being tended to by the masked man in a cave, and he hadn't once asked what had happened to the corpse. It was a habit ninjas got into. You didn't ask what happened to bodies on missions. You butchered your own to stop knowledge being passed on to other villages as much as you butchered those you had killed in preparation for research. The fate of his brother's corpse hadn't even crossed his mind. Perhaps he had assumed that Madara had disposed of it or that it had burnt in the Amaterasu flames.

But now here it was. Here was his brother's body, stored away in a freezer, like a carcass kept away for carving, but to Sasuke it appeared as though the freezer was the glass cabinet for a much prized possession.

And the man who was claiming possession of his brother's body was none other than that scum of the earth Kabuto.

"Son of a bitch," Sasuke breathed. His fingers curled into fists.

He took two steps back from the frozen corpse. He couldn't take his eyes off it. Finally he squeezed his eyes shut and spun around, pushing open the great freezer door with his shoulder so that it groaned and squealed at its hinges.

There was the man – bent over his microscope with a smile and deliberately ignoring him – the ghost ninja, the non-entity, the scientist, the man who, for some foul purpose of his own, was keeping Itachi's body in a freezer.

Every step was slow. He controlled his breathing and tried to do the same for his heart rate. He didn't trust his body. If he took a single step faster, he had a feeling he would end up flying across the room trying to land a chakra-laced punch in Kabuto's ribs and bust open his chest cavity, even though he knew the attempt would only be in vain.

Ice was stuck to the bottom of his shoes. His footsteps crunched. Sasuke stopped when he was standing between the two workbenches and directly behind Kabuto.

"Kabuto," he drew in a shaking breath before continuing, "why do you have Itachi's body in the freezer?"

Kabuto looked up from the microscope. He smirked and put down the slide in his hand. "You are a nosy little brat, aren't you?"

"Answer the question," Sasuke snarled. "Or I'll – "

His hair was standing on end. The space around him started to pop and crackle with charge, but before chakra could even start chattering down his arms, there was a whisper of wings and all three of Kabuto's moths were at his throat.

There was one on each shoulder and one stopped on his sternum, finding purchase for their feet in the rough cloth of his clothes. As the static built up about him, their antennae quivered and they unfurled their metal tongues. Three slim blades rested against his carotid artery, jugular vein and Adam's apple, pricking his skin. Scaly wings beat against his ears.

Kabuto clicked his tongue disapprovingly and wagged his finger. He sighed. "No hostile intent of chakra use, Sasuke-kun, if you please."

Sasuke clenched his hands into fists. With an effort that almost hurt he dispelled the electrical charge gathering about his arms. The moths fluttered their wings but didn't disperse.

"Good," murmured Kabuto, regarding him with an indulgent smile. "Good. Well, first things first, curiosity got the better of you at last, did it?"

"You never said I couldn't go into the freezer."

"I didn't, that is true."

"You wanted me to find out eventually."

"Well, I could have done without you knowing, but, I must confess, I was curious to see how you would react," Kabuto replied, observing Sasuke through his glasses like a specimen under his microscope. "And I see that you are angry. That is rather curious. You only have yourself to blame really. If you hadn't killed Itachi, he wouldn't be dead, Madara wouldn't have given his body to me, and I wouldn't have to keep him in special storage. The only reason he is in the freezer now is because of your mistakes. Oh, did that hurt?" he purred, noting Sasuke's stricken expression.

"Madara gave him to you?" Sasuke narrowed his eyes. "I don't believe you."

"Oh, but he did," Kabuto said, with the glee of a torturer twisting a knife. "We have our agreement. I ply my skills upon you to create a cure for the Plague and, in exchange, I receive Uchiha Itachi's body as payment."

"And the subject of payment?" Kabuto continued, clearing his throat when he had finished his explanation. They had shaken hands. Kabuto's palm itched from the masked man's touch.

A wind whipped about them, picking up the fallen leaves, and when it cleared the body of Uchiha Itachi was in Uchiha Madara's arms. Wet from rain and smelling of smoke, it had been perfectly preserved in the masked man's private dimension where time and space were completely under his command. "Is this sufficient payment, Yakushi Kabuto?"

Sasuke demanded, "And what do you want with his body?"

Kabuto's smile widened. "I want everything I can get from it. Perhaps, in your current state, you will now be able to understand that corpse's value. There are some bodies in the ninja world that are unique, so unique that people would kill to uncover their secrets. You, Sasuke-kun, for better or for worse, thanks to our master, are now one of those bodies. Uchiha Itachi's body is another. Itachi was the greatest ninja of our day and age. He had such exceptional physical and mental capabilities he drove Orochimaru into despair. Now that I have his body, I'll be able to study what exactly made him the perfect ninja. I will unlock the genetics of genius, so to speak, and I will be able to apply them to myself."

Sasuke was clenching his fists so tightly his nails were sinking into his palms. The moths shifted the position of their blade-like tongues against his throat. "Apply all the genetics you like, Kabuto. Scum will always be scum."

"You think so?" Kabuto said with mild amusement. He pushed up the sleeve of his left arm and turned it to Sasuke. "Then what do you make of this?"

Kabuto's arm was milky white and covered in a fine layer of scales the size and shape of fingernails. His skin glistened and Sasuke knew that under that skin was blood running cooler and slower than in any normal human's body. It was uncannily similar to Orochimaru's physiology.

So this was what Kabuto got up to in his room – body modification. Like master, like apprentice, thought Sasuke, cold fury uncoiling inside ready to strike, but Kabuto was only just getting into his stride.

"This is what I have achieved with a culture of Orochimaru's cells," Kabuto explained, gazing at his white, reptilian arm with a loving pride that made Sasuke sick. "Imagine the potential I could achieve if I studied Itachi's body? More than that, if I could generate a cell culture from him, imagine the possibilities! Take a seat, Sasuke-kun."

The moths were still at Sasuke's neck. He had no choice but to lower himself into the seat beside the microscope that he had set up. His put his hands, still bunched into fists, on his knees and tried to ignore that they were trembling.

"Are you trembling with concern for your brother's fate? That is touching." Kabuto was mocking him, trying to get a reaction, a rise of any kind. "But there's no need to be so afraid for him, Sasuke-kun. You should be thanking me really."

"I am not afraid for my brother," Sasuke shot back. His chakra was churning inside him. Perhaps beneath that fury was a vein of growing fear, but he wasn't ready to admit that yet. "And why should I thank you?"

"Because through my research, your beloved brother will become immortal."

Sasuke raised his head. "What do you mean?"

"Figuratively speaking only, of course," Kabuto drawled, crossing his arms over his chest. "But once I create a cell culture from him, it's not much more of a push to start creating clones. Then do you know what I could do?" He leaned forward with a wicked smile. "I could farm the little clones for sharingans."

The chair fell over with a clatter as Sasuke rose to his feet. "Say that one more time."

"But could you imagine the trouble I would have to go to in order to get the sharingans to develop?" Kabuto continued, ignoring Sasuke standing over him. "I'd have to keep a facility for rearing all the little Itachis and then systematically exposing them to trauma as they got older to make the sharingan mature. It's a very troublesome kekkei genkai. It may be easier to make money selling the clones to the other nations and letting them carry out their own sharingan research. Either way, the end result would be international political power, wealth to continue funding my works and perhaps even a sharingan or two for myself."

Kabuto took off his glasses and cleaned them. He was giving Sasuke time to mull over his words and understand their terrible implications. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. "You're looking very pale, Sasuke-kun. I am rather upset, you know. I am offering a useful future to that lump of meat in the freezer and you look as though you want to kill me. What have I said to deserve that?"

Starting with calling his brother 'a lump of meat', Kabuto had said plenty in the last few minutes to merit a cut to the throat. Sasuke nearly didn't trust himself to speak.

"You can do what you like with me," he eventually said, trying unsuccessfully to hide his dismay, "but my brother's body is a different question entirely. He spent his whole lifetime being used. I don't want anybody using him after his death."

Kabuto chuckled. He picked up the slide he had been looking at before Sasuke approached him and set it on his microscope again. "But Madara is using him after death to use you, Sasuke-kun."

Glass shattered. Sasuke had swept a jar of culture medium onto the floor without a word.

"Clean it up, Sasuke-kun," said Kabuto mildly without even looking up. When Sasuke didn't move he sighed. "You're just a little boy scrabbling on a road without signs, seizing upon any signpost that comes his way. You're another one of Madara's tools, Sasuke-kun. He wants your abilities and your eyes, not your wit or your reasoning ability," he paused, before adding under his breath, "both of which are somewhat questionable anyway."

With one eye pressed to the microscope, Kabuto opened his workbook and began to draw.

Sasuke lowered his voice to a threatening growl, "I'm not a weapon for Madara to point wherever he pleases. I fight my own battles for myself."

Kabuto scoffed, scribbled something out of his notebook. "Well, I must say, he's done a stellar job pointing you at Konoha. Wasn't Konoha the town your brother loved more than his own clan?" Kabuto looked over his shoulder with gleaming, black eyes. "Didn't your brother die for Konoha? And now you're setting out to destroy the very thing your brother wanted to protect? Forgive me, Sasuke-kun, but I do detect a touch of irony in this situation."

The moths let go of their hold in Sasuke's clothes, curled their proboscises under their chins, and flitted to Kabuto's desk. Kabuto stopped to change slides under the microscope. Either he was waiting for Sasuke to respond, which wasn't going to happen, or he was getting a perverse delight making Sasuke feel as powerless as possible.

A breeze found its way down the ventilation shaft to nudge the sour smell of disinfectant about the room.

Sasuke leaned against the workbench behind him. "Where is Madara anyway?"

"At the Gokage Conference in the Land of Lightning," Kabuto replied. "He's gone to offer the Five Nations the cure for the Plague in exchange for the Jinchuurikis. It seems he got bored of waiting for his subordinates to catch them for him."

Sasuke felt something twist in his gut. "Is he offering the cure to Konoha?"

"He will offer it to all the Nations, but whether Madara will give it to them is another matter," Kabuto continued with the nonchalance of somebody determined to be an observer to another man's madness. He changed slides on the microscope again. "From what I know of the Nations, Madara will never get the Jinchuurikis and he knows it."

"Then why does he bother?"

"It's a way to divide up the nations, turn them against each other and give them one more reason never to unite against him. If he does his work well, we'll be in the midst of a Fourth Shinobi War soon. Then there will be so much pain and chaos that people will be begging to escape this reality and be cast under an eternal genjutsu."

"He lied to me then," Sasuke tried the words in his mouth and they tasted bitter, but he found that he almost wanted to laugh. He smoothed his face into a blank stony mask. "He's broken his end of the deal."

"If it suits his purpose, of course he would," Kabuto said matter-of-factly. "That's the danger of making deals with men who want to change the world, Sasuke-kun. They don't care what happens before they change it because they're convinced that eventually everything will be justified."

"Madara's offered the cure to Konoha and he might give it to them," Sasuke repeated to himself, as though in a trance. He looked at his hands. There was blood oozing from where he had dug his nails into his palms. "And it was Madara who gave you my brother's body."

Kabuto didn't turn around, but Sasuke could almost smell the smug satisfaction oozing off him like sweat. He swallowed, thoughts racing through his head too fast to pick out and too convoluted to unknot. No chakra use with hostile intent, he reminded himself.

"Yes, I am very much looking forward to working on that project," Kabuto confessed, and in his obscene excitement, he overlapped in Sasuke's mind's eye with their old long-tongued monstrous master and the cold fury that had been pawing for Sasuke's attention began to roar again.

"Come to think of it, there is another option I could explore with Itachi's cell culture. I could keep a few clones, let them grow to adulthood, and then harvest their gametes," Kabuto said, putting a thumb to his chin as he gazed into the microscope, deep in thought. "I could sell the gametes to any nation that wants to introduce the sharingan kekkei genkai into their populace. That would be wonderful for you, wouldn't it, Sasuke-kun? You'll have nieces and nephews everywhere! Branch Uchiha clans popping up like mushrooms."

And Itachi would eternally suffer beyond death, Sasuke realised in a terrible flash, after suffering all throughout his life, and suddenly within the torrent of emotions tearing through him, like the calm at the eye of a storm, Sasuke had a moment of perfect clarity.

He looked at Kabuto, whose back was still turned to him, and steadied his breathing.

"And is that everything?"

"Everything?"

"Everything you've got to say?" Sasuke said, feeling oddly at peace, because suddenly it was all so obvious what the right thing to do was.

And perhaps there was something in Sasuke's tone that warned Kabuto about what was to come next, because he even paused in his microscope sketching and began to look over his shoulder.

Too slow and too late. Too self-satisfied.

Sasuke lifted the microscope beside him. He brought it up in one hand and dropped it on the back of Kabuto's head.

After the fiasco of the first day of the Conference, it was decided by the Raikage to halt proceedings for the day and return to formalities the following morning, but the following morning was no better. Shouting followed by periods of awkward silence, and all they managed to agree on was a scheme to look for MK sufferers.

On the third day of the Conference, the Kazekage pushed back his chair and cleared his throat. "On the Jinchuuriki issue, I would like to propose a provisional vote, to gauge current inclinations."

"A vote? It's bleeding obvious how we're all going to vote," snapped the Raikage, folding his arms across his chest and glaring at the Tsuchikage and Mizukage. "Don't even bother."

"Those who would like to agree to Uchiha Madara's offer and hand over the Jinchuurikis to get the cure for the Plague," the Kazekage said, ignoring the Raikage and looking around the room. He counted the Tsuchikage and the Mizukage's raised hands. He turned to Tsunade and the Raikage. "Do either of you abstain from voting?"

"No, Kazekage," Tsunade said, shaking her head. "I never thought there would come a time I would agree with the Raikage, but we both vote for refusing Uchiha Madara's offer."

The Kazekage lowered his head. "Since the deciding vote rests with me, I would like to make a suggestion. I would like the Five Nations to take a moment to remember that the Jinchuurikis are, themselves, loyal citizens of their respective hidden villages. If they are to be part of negotiations, I think it best that the Hokage and the Raikage returned to their villages, spoke to their Jinchuurikis and found out what the Jinchuurikis themselves think of the situation."

There was a murmur of assent and the Tsuchikage spoke up. "An excellent suggestion. What do the Hokage and Raikage say?"

"It is indeed a reasonable suggestion," said Tsunade through gritted teeth, "however – "

"Then what more need be said?" the Tsuchikage said jovially, locking his fingers together. "The Hokage and Raikage will discuss the situation with their loyal Jinchuurikis and then we will all reconvene before Uchiha Madara's month is up to make our final decisions."

Tsunade collected the notes and papers from the desk, nodding to Kakashi to follow her out of the room.

"The Tsuchikage seemed surprisingly agreeable at the end," Kakashi remarked, as Tsunade stalked angrily down the corridor.

"Of course he seemed agreeable," she muttered, hurrying after the Kazekage who was walking ahead of them, "because he thinks he's got what he wanted! Kazekage!"

Her shout echoed down the hall. The Kazekage stopped and waited for them to catch up.

"Hokage-sama," said the Kazekage's aide with deference, bowing his head, when they approached.

Tsunade shouldered past the aide, stopped before the Kazekage and slapped him.

The sound of the slap reverberated along the stone walls of the old house. Kakashi rolled his eyes and muttered, under his breath, "Diplomacy, diplomacy," before adding privately, About keeping Tsunade out of trouble, apologies, Naruto.

"How could you suggest we ask the Jinchuurikis, Gaara?" Tsunade towered over the Kazekage, her hands on her hips. "You know Naruto. You know him perhaps better than many of the citizens of Konoha. If we asked him whether he'd hand himself over for the sake of a cure, you know exactly what he'd say! Loyal citizens of their respective hidden villages! He's the most loyal there is. You know that he'd never refuse to hand himself over!"

The Kazekage stared. Kakashi thought he looked apologetic. "You can't know that."

"But you did know that," Tsunade took one step forward and Gaara one step back, "because you know Naruto. And you made up this stupid excuse that we talk to the Jinchuurikis themselves so that you, you as Kazekage, didn't have to make up your mind there and then on the spot as to which side to take."

The Kazekage ripped off the cloth visor, revealing pale face, a shock of red hair, and an expression that was a curious mixture of rage and painful regret. The red mark from Tsunade's hand glowed on his cheek. "Yes, I know Naruto," he said. "Yes, you may look upon my suggestion as a way for me to stall for time, but a Jinchuuriki has the same rights as any other man and too often have the lives of Jinchuurikis been ruined and determined by the bad decisions of other people. It is time they had some say in their own affairs." He locked eyes with Tsunade. "I will respect whatever decision Naruto makes and I trust him to make the right one."

As the Kazekage pulled his visor back over his face and they exchanged their awkward goodbyes, Kakashi couldn't help feeling that the meeting that was supposed to unite the nations together, in a concerted effort against a common enemy, seemed only to have divided them further.

It was going to be a long ride back to Konoha.

There were many things in the ninja world that could have stood up to a solid five kilogram block of metal and glass being smashed against it – Kabuto's skull was not one of them.

Kabuto slumped forwards into his microscope, crushing his nose on the lens, and slid sideways out of his chair to sprawl between the workbenches. His hair was a mass of red, grey and ivory. His glasses shattered as his body hit the ground. Blood spread out from his head, seeping into the puddle of culture medium that Sasuke had knocked to the floor.

Sasuke stood over him with the bloody microscope in his hands, his shoulders heaving with each ragged breath he took. The moths hadn't moved from their perch on their desk. Of course they hadn't, because Sasuke hadn't used a drop of chakra to kill their master.

He set down the microscope on the workbench. It rattled. One of the parts must have come loose. He tried to wipe the blood off his face, but only succeeded in smearing more blood onto his face than before.

Madara had reneged on his side of the deal and Sasuke was first and foremost an avenger. The masked man may not have given the cure to Konoha, but he had gone to offer it to them, which in Sasuke's books was enough. The man was not as all powerful as he claimed. He had made two mistakes - he had underestimated the force of Sasuke's fury and overestimated Kabuto's ability to resist psychologically tormenting those he considered beneath him.

Kabuto wasn't moving. His face was frozen at the moment his smug smile had slipped to disbelief. His eyes stared up at the ceiling. Madara would never have the cure from Sasuke. Kabuto, who more than anybody else outside of Konoha might have found the cure, was dead and Sasuke was not going to stay with Madara any longer, especially after what Madara had done with Itachi's body.

He had sold it to Kabuto once. No doubt Madara would sell it again to other ambitious ninja medical scientists to hire them too, and the thought made Sasuke's skin crawl. He couldn't let Madara do that.

There was only one thing for it. He had to run and he had to take Itachi's body with him. Now was the time to do it. Madara was away, either on his way to or returning from the Land of Lightning. Sasuke didn't know where their hideout was, let alone how far it was from the Land of Lightning, so Madara could have been returning at that very moment, ducking his head into the cave entrance –

Sasuke shook his head and got to work.

He washed his hands in the sink, dried them and began demolishing Madara's laboratory complex. He scooped up Kabuto's notebooks, Orochimaru's files, the slides made from Sasuke's tissue samples, the vials of stem cells extracted from his bone marrow – everything that had made up Kabuto's project – and tipped them into the man's own travel bag. He slung the large satchel over his head and shoulders and tightened the strap.

Then he went to the smaller laboratories, the imaging room, the operating theatres, the additional library and set each and every one of them on fire the old-fashioned way – pushing a small barrel of concentrated alcohol into each room and dropping a match. Kabuto's own room was booby-trapped at the door, so Sasuke ignored it and moved on. The moths went next. They were slow when they were confused and he caught them with three well-aimed scalpels, pinning them to the laboratory wall.

He went to the freezer and opened the door.

Each footprint he left in the bed of frost on the floor was bright red.

In the end, he decided against burning the main laboratory. He could feel the heat of the fires warming the cave complex air and he needed to get out quick. He dashed out of the door of the laboratory, the cold weight of Itachi's body on his back, ice slipping down the neck of his shirt, and the satchel making him list to one side.

At the cave entrance, he barreled headfirst through the layers of illusions and barriers Madara had cast over it, recalling how Madara had insisted he was free to go whenever he chose to do so. He was right. The barriers gave way with the sensation of walking through a wall of bubbles layered with egg shells and Sasuke was out.

As soon as he looked back over his shoulder, however, he was struck by a feeling of terrible giddiness. The air seemed to be stretching, up and down and sideways, twisting and spinning. Colours slipped up and down the spectrum from red to yellow to vivid purple. Everything flashed technicolour for an instant then faded to monochrome and sounds assaulted him from all sides until he was utterly disorientated and could feel bile climbing to the back of his mouth.

When he was no longer certain about whether he was standing on the sky or falling off the grass, the feeling finally ceased.

He shifted Itachi's weight on his back and looked back over his shoulder again. The cave entrance to Madara's hideout that Sasuke had only moments ago leapt out from was gone. There wasn't even a cliff-face or a mountain behind him. In fact, there wasn't a mountain in sight. Madara's illusions had hidden everything.

Sasuke was standing in the middle of a wood. Rain had come by recently. The ground was still damp and the air smelt fresh.

He walked forwards. Eventually he would get somewhere. For now, there was no going back.

Chapter Text

The day before the Second Repenters' Parade, an advert appeared in all of the Konoha newspapers.

TOMORROW COMES

THE EYE OF THE WORLD SEEKS AN AUDIENCE WITH KONOHA'S FINEST

As soon as the small black and white square was spotted in the back of the Konoha Times, Keepers hurried to the Publications' Office to investigate, but all they found was a building full of editors looking just as puzzled and furious as they were. The editors denied having ever seen the advert before the paper went to print. The Editor-in-Chief went so far as to put his forehead to the ground, in an expression of his deepest regret that the advert had slipped past his scrutiny. The Keepers withdrew, frustrated and more than a little rattled that the Repentance had managed to pull such a public stunt.

Everybody in Konoha knew about the Parade and they anticipated it as they might do a heavy storm.

A day passed. Nara Yoshino finalised plans with Captain Hyuuga, with Shikaku presiding as an advisor. The Keepers went out on one final patrol. They looked for sites being readied for ambush and civilians behaving suspiciously. A confrontation broke out in the market square, when a civilian accused a Keeper of oppressing them with chakra, and what began as an argument quickly degenerated into a short, bloody and messy brawl which didn't stop until Yoshino herself arrived to break it up.

It was a clear windless night. The citizens of Konoha closed their windows, locked their doors, and battened down the hatches. The few shops left on the high street closed early and rolled down the metal shutters. By eight in the evening, the snack bars were closed and their lanterns blown out. By nine, the Runners had already returned to their headquarters, and there was not a man out on the street.

Teuchi took down the shop banner and locked the door to his ramen shop. Once the bicycle was chained up out of sight, he hurried up the stairs to his apartment,washed his hands and slowly lowered himself to his knees before a small shrine set into a cabinet. Looking up at the black and white photo of his old unsmiling wife, he struck a small bronze bell.

"Otsuyu, my dear," he said, closing his eyes and bowing his head, "do me a favour. I understand you keep watch over our daughter, but please, spare some time for our favourite customer and make sure he comes back, safe and sound, to our old shop."

His old arthritic knees ached, but Teuchi stayed praying in front of the shrine for as long as he could stay awake.

"It's looking quiet," muttered Naruto, peering past the blinds of a window in the Keepers' Office. All he could see were empty streets and shuttered shopfronts.

In comparison, the courtyard of the headquarters was bustling with activity. One hundred and fifty Naruto clones were pacing the courtyard, introducing themselves as loudly as possible to the Keeper teams they were bulking out.

An hour earlier, Naruto had a meeting with Shikamaru's mother Yoshino herself to get his orders.

"I want you, the original, with my son," Yoshino had said, her tone accepting neither nonsense nor refusal. The map on her table was being weighted with a large bloodied antler about a metre long and an inch thick. "It's not because you and he are friends. I'm sure your clones would just as likely try to protect my son as you would."

Naruto spluttered, "Try to protect?"

"I need you with him in case the worst happens. If I die, as my son, my men will look to Shikamaru for temporary leadership. You gain the information your clones gathered up until the moment of their disappearance. In this case, the likelihood is that their disappearances will be due to them being killed along with their units." She fixed Naruto with a grim stare. Naruto wondered if this stare was what she had perfected over the years to get her husband and son to become productive citizens of Konoha. Yoshino continued. "With your clones, you will be able to keep my son informed of the outbreaks of violence around the town. If it comes to it, you will also notify him of my death."

What a responsibility to get saddled with, but Naruto swallowed and nodded in agreement without hesitation. It was the same responsibility Kakashi had been burdened with until the day Naruto had come back from the mountains, waiting to tell him about a steadily increasing list of dead of those who were near and dear to him. Naruto had to bear it.

It wasn't death in itself that bothered Naruto. Every time ninjas were hired on anything above a B-class missions it was something they needed to be prepared for. It was an accepted part of Konoha life that not many made it past the age of forty if they remained in full-time service. Ninjas died – frequently, horribly and not always with dignity, but they always hoped to die for something worthwhile. They would die defending Konoha's secrets and protecting their friends and loved ones.

The Plague deaths, and the deaths of the Keepers on the night of the First Parade, however, were different. Those ninjas died for nothing, wasting their lives against enemies without reason. That was why despite their profession as killers for hire, they were all more deeply affected by the Plague and the Sixth Repentance than they cared to admit.

Naruto looked over at Shikamaru poring over a map to memorise their initial patrol route. It wouldn't come to that, of course. Last time the Keepers hadn't known what to expect. They had gone in figuratively blind and come out, well, blinded. This time they were better prepared. They had better numbers and the Marksmen would be joining them and they had their trump card plan of catching out those Bishops.

Shikamaru sighed and folded up the map, slapping it noisily against his desk. He had taken off his sunglasses the previous morning and his eyes were still sensitive to the light.

"Hey, Shikamaru, cold feet?" Naruto teased him.

"Shut up, Naruto. If the Eye of the World's an ex-ANBU officer, we can't afford to underestimate the Repenters," Shikamaru said, glaring at the stack of their flyers on his desk. "We don't what they've been armed with. We don't know what the Eye wants from us or what the point of this Parade is."

Shikamaru had a point but all he was doing was winding himself up, so Naruto shrugged. "The point of the Parade is to mess up the town."

"Then what's the point of messing up the town?" Shikamaru asked, leaning back in his chair to put his feet up on the desk, apparently relaxed but Naruto knew he was far from it. "I'm getting fed up with waiting for the Repentance to tell us what they want us to know only when it suits them."

"Who says we're going to wait?" Naruto looked down into the courtyard again, where his clones were sauntering through the crowd, picking their noses and stretching, trying to keep people relaxed and morale ticking. "We're going to find them, not wait for them to find us, and when we do, we're going to make them spill everything we want. It's all going to end tonight."

Shikamaru looked at him incredulously. Then he smirked. "If only everybody was as much of a fool as you, Naruto."

"Konoha's most unpredictable ninja is a fool and damn proud of it, but, easy on the fool."

"Easy on the fool?" cut in a voice from the side. "So, I take it that stupid, moron, dumbass, blockhead, lummox, dimwit, buffoon, nincompoop, ignoramus and idiot are all still fair game then?"

Naruto and Shikamaru looked up. A young woman in jounin red hazard gear was standing beside them. The red gear was clearly a little too large for her. Safety pins were holding up the folds of the hazard cloak. Her visor had been pinned to the cloak collar to hold it in place. A tatty grey Marksman armband was stitched to her sleeve. The girl in the gear, however, was certainly neither a jounin nor a Marksman.

Naruto exclaimed, "Ino, what are you doing here?"

"I'm here as your Marksman chakra sensor to find the Repentance Bishops. This evening, you've both got to call me Fu."

"But you aren't even a Marksman," Shikamaru pointed out doggedly.

"My cousin Fu is though." Ino pointed at her gear. "This is his hazard gear. He was going to be on your team, but I talked him into swapping. When it comes to chakra sensing I'm almost better than he is anyway, so count yourselves lucky."

When the ANBU had been disbanded, her cousin Yamanaka Fu had, after many years of absence and communication so sparse that his letters were usually just simple confirmations that he was still alive, returned to the Yamanaka family house. He had left for Root a kind and talented boy. He had come back, still kind, immensely powerful, but he was uncomfortable being around so many people again, especially in the loud and straight-talking Yamanaka household.

He joined the Marksman, seeing similarity in the teams of pairs to what he had grown used to in the ANBU, but since his partner had died he had taken to keeping quietly to himself in the Marksmen tent. Nobody spoke to him. His recruitment to Root meant that nobody knew who he was.

It was lonely and difficult adjusting to so-called normal society. It made him reminisce of the close bond he shared with his Root partner. Aburame Torune, however, had departed the town with the rest of his clan. When Ino had approached Fu to demand to take his place, saying that she wanted to go because Shikamaru was an old friend and the only teammate she had left, he had let her take his jounin gear without question. Loyalty to teammates was, in Fu's mind, second only to a ninja's loyalty to Konoha.

"What about the hospital?" Shikamaru asked, staring as she picked at the fraying fabric of grey cloth on her sleeve. "Who's on your shift?"

"Three of Kakashi's dogs," Ino replied breezily. Shikamaru and Naruto looked scandalised. "I was only on night watch duty anyway. They'll probably do a better job than me. Anyway, the point is – if you think my last remaining teammate is going to be heading out against the Repentance, with barely healed eyes, after what happened last time, you've got another thing coming." She slapped her hand down on his desk and Shikamaru started. "Get your head out of the clouds, Shikamaru."

In the Tigers' Den, the lights were on in the kitchen and the kitchen alone. The children were already asleep upstairs, or so Neji hoped. He sat sullenly in the chair, facing Sakura and Lee and going over the same Zero Chakra exercise over and over again, so stiff with boredom he wondered if he had actually died already. He grimaced and Sakura noticed his displeasure.

"Neji-kun, why don't you try a different exercise?" She flicked through the sheets of paper in front of her and pulled out one covered with lots of stick men doing things far too energetic for how Neji was feeling. "Maybe this one? This doesn't look so bad."

"I refuse to do star jumps here," he said mulishly, and he slid another lead weight onto the string tied around his wrist. "It is the kitchen. I will break something. Besides, the children are sleeping."

Sakura and Lee both looked at each other anxiously. Lee had come not long after the Runners had returned to headquarters, sent by Guy-sensei to apparently 'keep Neji company' because 'young'uns left alone and isolated lose the vigour of youth too quickly to be called healthy'. To translate, it meant that Lee and Guy didn't trust Neji to stay put inside in the Tigers' Den whilst Naruto went out to deal with the Repenters.

No doubt Sakura was there for the same reason. She had apparently been given leave from her hospital shift to prepare notes for the next morning, when she would be substituting for Shizune in Neji's Zero Chakra class. Shizune was finding it difficult enough running the hospital in the Hokage's absence. Neji, however, suspected that Naruto had asked her to sit with Neji through the night to keep an eye on him too.

"Oh, brilliant, Neji-kun!" Lee exclaimed, clapping his hands as Neji dropped another weight onto the string around his wrist. "That's already two more weights than earlier and you still – Oh…"

Lee's face fell. The string was turning purple. A small current of chakra, so small Neji couldn't even feel himself moving it, was running down the string. Neji tore the string off his wrist and tossed it onto the table, the weights landing on the surface with a clatter.

"Shhh!" Lee and Sakura both shushed him, fingers to their lips, eyes flickering up to the ceiling.

He scowled and looked to the clock on the wall. It was getting to eleven thirty. "Naruto and Shikamaru should be on patrol by now."

"They will be perfectly fine without us," Sakura said, bending over her notes again. When she saw Neji look sceptical, she sighed. "Don't worry about them so much, Neji-kun. Besides, if the whole of Konoha turned out against the Sixth Repentance it would practically be a civil war. We've got to show some restraint. It's a police issue, not a state one."

Neji wondered who she was trying to convince – him or herself. He kept up a moody silence. Lee began scooping up Neji's lead weights from the table back into their bag.

"Here you go, Neji-kun," Lee said brightly, holding out the little drawstring bag, the weights rattling inside like dice. "Why don't you try that exercise again?"

Snatching the bag out of Lee's hand, Neji glowered and glanced up at the clock. "Perhaps in five minutes."

The fridge hummed. The clock ticked. Water gurgled in a drain and Sakura continued to scribble notes into the margin of Shizune's class plans.

Unable to bear the silence again, Lee pushed back his chair. "Neji-kun, where's the kettle here?"

Neji indicated a cupboard with a jerk of his chin. Pinned to its front was one of the few children's drawings of him. Naruto had joked that it looked like a spider sprouting two huge satellite disks from its back, but apparently the two huge foil circles were supposed to be eyes. Neji decided that he would never be able to understand small children.

"If we're staying up all night, I'm going to make a whole pot," Lee continued to talk to himself, taking out the kettle and putting it on the stove. "Guy-sensei says that caffeine is the lifeblood of every hardworking and high pressured youth of today. We must have tea."

"Neji-kun, where are you going?" said Sakura suddenly, as Neji rose from the table, tucking the bag of lead weights up one of his sleeves.

"I thought I heard something upstairs." When Sakura raised an eyebrow, he asked, "Do you honestly trust those children to stay quiet tonight?"

Sakura got up to follow. "I'll come with you."

Lee continued to watch the kettle boil and Neji and Sakura left the kitchen. They went up the stairs in silence, not a single step creaking and when they got to the landing they were rewarded with the sound of bare feet slapping wooden boards, just as Neji has suspected.

Yae and Shigure, the twin girls, darted out from behind a dresser. At the sight of Neji and Sakura standing tall at the top of the stairs, they screamed and ran in the opposite direction, clinking and clattering with the array of training kunai jammed into their coat pockets. One of them had her trusty slingshot tucked into her trousers.

Sakura was on them in an instant, seizing them by the hoods of their coats. "What are you two up to?"

The twins looked at each other and Neji realised what was going on.

"Ignore them." Neji turned sharply towards the main dormitory. "They're bait."

"Bait?" Sakura repeated.

"They're distracting us from the real escape attempt."

Neji flung open the dormitory door. "Stop where you are!"

Sakura followed with one twin in each hand. She peered over Neji's shoulder, saw shadowy movement inside, and heard a buzz of rapid and alarmed whispers before Neji flicked on the light.

The ten or so children froze and looked up. Some were still in the process of piling spare blankets and pyjamas under the covers of their beds. Others were getting dressed into dark clothes and collecting up their toy weapons. Nagira, the obvious ringleader, and the dark-haired girl they had picked up running the Southern child gang, Tsubame, were both at the window, tying a string of knotted blankets to a training kunai that had been hammered into the floor.

"What do you all think you're doing?" Neji growled, startling even himself with how much he sounded like his own father. He noticed the two twin girls hanging from Sakura's hands flinch.

"What does it look like?" Nagira replied, indicating the rope of blankets with the training knife in his hand. "We're going to help Naruto-niisan. We're going to get back at those Repenters, for every one of us kids they killed - "

"Don't be ridiculous. You think you stand a chance against the Sixth Repentance?"

"We're ninjas," said Tsubame simply. "We can use chakra. Sure we can."

"You don't have the weapons. You don't have the training. You don't have the numbers," breathed Neji, advancing through the futons towards the boy and girl by the window. "You aren't even genins. These Repenters have killed jounins with years of field experience and you think a bunch of Academy students will make a difference? Who came up with this ridiculous plan?"

Tsubame's eyes slid to Nagira and Neji rounded on the boy, raising his eyebrows.

Nagira eyeballed Neji as though the eight or seven year's difference between them was a minor technicality. Neji stared back, matching the boy glare for glare.

"Well?" he prompted.

Nagira spat. "At least we're doing something, rather than sitting around in the kitchen and waiting for something to happen."

Sakura suddenly dropped one of the girls and seized Neji's shoulder as she felt his chakra flare. Neji's balled fists trembled with barely suppressed anger. Even Nagira took an involuntary step back.

In the nervous silence, two of the children went to the window to close it. Nagira shot them a bitter look of betrayal. They ignored him. When the cool pressure of chakra flowing around Neji's eyes, tickling his eyeballs to activate into the byakugan, subsided, he returned to glowering down at the boy who barely reached his navel.

"Do you know what they call officers who lead their men into certain death?" Neji kept his eyes fixed on Nagira and the boy began to squirm. "They call them salesmen, because they sell their men dreams they shouldn't be able to afford but think they can, and salesmen are not fit to be officers. They are merchants, not ninjas. Let me make this clear, Nagira-kun - you are very, very far from being able to call yourself a ninja. Having chakra coils –" he raised his voice as several children looked ready to object "- does not make you a ninja. Understood?"

Nagira flushed beetroot red to the tips of his ears and almost lowered his eyes to the floor in shame, but he wasn't going to go down so easily. He dared to smile. "You're only staying here in the Den to look after us, right?" he said. "If we all went out to help Naruto-niisan, you'd have to follow us, and then you'd be able to help him too."

Neji bent down so that he was face to face with the boy and Nagira could get full benefit of his blank silver eyes that had so often been accused of being cold and uncaring. "Don't try being clever with me. Ninjas bigger and smarter than you have tried that, and I am the one who is still standing and able to talk about it."

The smile disappeared from Nagira's face.

"Now," Neji straightened and looked about the room, "since none of you look as though you plan on getting any sleep, I want you all down in the kitchen where we can see exactly what you're doing. Go on!"

The children started and rushed to the stairs, looking peeved and a couple of the younger ones even frightened. Neji hadn't meant to scare them but a small part of him felt that it served them right. Seeing Nagira preparing to throw a rope out of the window had made him momentarily despair.

Neji brought up the rear with Nagira beside him and the two twin girls in front. When he was about to put his foot down on the top step, a curious thing happened.

Two chimes rang out in the house.

Sakura stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Someone was ringing the doorbell.

Lee came out of the kitchen. His eyebrows bristled. "Neji-kun, were you expecting somebody this evening?"

The children on the stairs turned to Neji with questioning eyes. He shook his head. "Noone apart from the average anti-ninja cultist."

Sakura laughed. "Since when did members of religious cults go around ringing doorbells - ?" She thought for a moment. "Forget I asked that."

Neji took one step back up the stairs and went to the window on the landing, the one from which Naruto liked to greet guests, the one with a clear view of the Den gates. He tugged the blinds. They shot up and moonlight streamed onto the landing and he saw a hundred or so Repenters in ghostly bleached robes and aluminium masks, clustered about the gates. One had his hand outstretched to press the doorbell.

At the movement of the blinds and the appearance of Neji at the window, they turned their blank masked faces towards him like sunflowers to the sun.

"Who is it?" Sakura said from the bottom of the stairs, her nervous whisper carrying through the dark. The children, sensing something was wrong, were silent. "Is it them?"

Before he could reply, he saw one of the Repenters lift something to its face – a megaphone.

"Neji-kun?" Sakura asked again.

Neji ignored her, undid the latch and opened the window so they could all hear.

The Repenter tapped the mouthpiece with a finger to test it, cleared his throat and began: "Good evening, and welcome to the Second Repenters' Parade. Tonight we walk to heal and to bring salvation to the many. May the Eye of the World watch over you, and allow you to see through all illusions."

"Don't say anything back. Just listen, and then we can think things from there," Sakura hissed and Lee nodded in agreement. Neji reluctantly remained silent.

Neji wondered why none of their neighbours were coming to their aid. Surely they could hear the Repenters halfway down the street? The curtains across the road were twitching. People were watching and doing nothing. He gripped the window ledge so tight the edge splintered beneath his fingers.

"We have heard that you have taken in a number of children who were orphaned by the Plague then deemed unfit to remain in the usual orphanages. That was very good of you, but we are sorry to have to point out you made a grave mistake in doing so. These children have already been condemned by the gods. By tending them, feeding them, caring for them as you are doing, you are cheating the gods of deaths that they have already marked as theirs," the Repenter's voice echoed in the street in before the old Hyuuga gatehouse. "We have come to finish their work and correct the course of the gods' grand plan."

"I don't understand what they're saying," one of the twins complained.

"They're saying that we should have died with the rest of our families by the Plague," Nagira said with a brutal bluntness, "and because we didn't, they've come to finish the job."

"But some of our families are dead because of them, not the Plague!" a boy objected, and Neji dimly recognised the voice as Tsuruya Yabane, the little boy Naruto had picked up on his first and only day as a Marksman, now a resident of the Tigers' Den – the boy whose father had been taken in by the Repenters' rhetoric and had tried to force poison on both his sons.

A white light flashed over the East of Konoha, followed by two more flashes like lightning in close succession, over the town centre and a residential area in the North East. Keepers and Marksmen were engaging the Repenters in combat and flash bombs were being detonated. The Repenters ignored the flashing sky.

"We have no particular quarrel with the Konoha Tigers. All we ask is for the children. We ask that you bring them out to us and that they accept their sins. We will then help them on their way to repentance. We seek only mercy for those already marked by the Demon. Please, do not be alarmed."

Neji had once been told by a cousin that the worst killers were the ones who killed in kindness. His cousin had meant it as a warning, that when their roles as a ninjas required them to put a blade to somebody's throat that they didn't delude themselves with empty justifications - that they were right and their victim wrong, that they were good and their opponent evil. A man who killed in the name of kindness, justice, the general good was suffering from terrible delusions of grandeur.

He tapped one of the twins on the shoulder. When she turned around with wide eyes, he lowered his voice and said, "Give me your slingshot."

"Let your children come forth," the Repenter was saying, his voice a whining buzz in Neji's ears. "They will be the first children to be saved. The other orphanage children still have hope for the future, but for these ones, the ones marked by sin, the ones who wrongfully escaped the clutches of the Plague, there is no hope for them – "

A small lead weight whistled through the air and struck him squarely in the centre of his forehead.

The Repenter broke off in mid-sentence. The megaphone slipped from his hands. He crumpled to the ground. The other Repenters turned to look at their fallen comrade then back to the window, from where the silver-eyed ninja in a disposable facemask had shot him down.

Neji pulled another lead weight from the bag up his sleeve. He loaded the slingshot and aimed it out of the window once more.

"We are not interested in anything you have to say!" He felt something catch in his lungs but pushed the feeling aside. Now wasn't the time. "You are not getting the children! You will never have them, and if you want to help them Repent so badly, you'll have to make us Repent first."

At the bottom of the stairs, Sakura and Lee's jaws dropped. For one thing, they had told Neji not to talk to the Repenters and now there he was at the window - shooting them down with his Zero Chakra exercise weights and shouting at them. He couldn't have been more provocative had he stripped to his waist and drummed his chest, shouting, "Come on if you think you're hard enough!"

Sakura buried her face in her hands. "He's been spending far too much time with Naruto lately."

The Repenters swarmed like an angry hive and drew their knives.

Shikamaru's Keeper patrol unit was a group of twelve ninjas. At the front was Shikamaru, flanked on each side by Keepers. Behind the Keepers came the Marksmen, of which there were two in a unit. Ino was to Naruto's right and a Hyuuga man was on the left. Three Keepers finally brought up the back. In effect, they formed a ring of Keepers and Marksmen around a core of Naruto and his three clones.

They were moving down one of the main public thoroughfares when the first flash bomb went off ahead of them, lighting the sky white and bright as day, followed instantly by a second and a third elsewhere.

"That was the town centre," said a Keeper, as they blinked the purple afterglow from their eyes. "What do we do? Do we go closer?"

"Just give me a moment."

Shikamaru staggered towards the side of the road. Doubling over, he pulled off his visor and threw up into the gutter, once, twice, three times until there was nothing more he could bring up and all he could do was dry heave. The Keepers stared.

"Come on, keep it together." Shikamaru felt a supporting hand on his shoulder, turned and found Ino, her face white with concern. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong."

"So says the person trembling at the sight of a flash bomb," Ino said cuttingly, but Shikamaru could feel her hand on his shoulder trembling too. "Was it a flashback?"

"I – " Shikamaru swallowed, the bitter taste of bile as unwelcome as the shocked gazes of his patrol unit, "I don't...Yes, yes, it must have been."

The flash had gone off in the sky, lit up the underside of the clouds, and the next instant he had been assaulted by memories of the First Parade, so vivid he could smell the blood and the wet deer fur, feel the grit being crushed against his forehead and hear the echoes of a cold, reedy voice speaking over his head and into his ears again. His heart was beating so hard it was as though it was trying to leap out of his chest and run away back home on its own. His eyes were streaming with water. The memory had hit him like a sneak blow to the back of the head, catching him unawares. Suddenly he felt vulnerable.

Another hand squeezed his other shoulder, and the pain brought him back to earth. Naruto shook him and spoke in a fierce whisper. "You'll just have to deal with it. Come on, genius. Stop standing there staring at the drain. Your sick isn't that much of an artistic masterpiece."

Ino hooked her arm under Shikamaru's right, and Naruto his arm under Shikamaru's left. After a few staggering steps, Shikamaru took a deep breath and straightened. He nodded at Ino and Naruto to let go. His eyes were aching and there was sweat on his forehead.

"We go to the town centre," he said firmly. "Back into formation."

The Keepers nodded and obeyed. The Hyuuga Marksman still seemed concerned, but said nothing and quietly accepted the orders. As Shikamaru adjusted the visor back over his head, they continued to hurry through the streets.

The night rustled and shadow deer bounded towards them, huge black shadows swirling and leaping along the walls of the houses. They were coming from the town centre. It was the Keeper alarm, sent out by units in danger. If they were encountering shadow deer they were heading in the right direction.

The roads and streets began to feel oddly familiar, as though Naruto had strolled along them or dashed over the shop-front canopies, many, many times before in this very direction.

They began to hear shouts and clashing metal ahead of them. A man in long red robes ran out from a side street - a Hyuuga Marksman. He had seen Shikamaru's unit approaching with his activated byakugan. He dashed towards them and skidded to a stop, bowing his head.

"Reporting the situation," the Marksman panted, blinking blood out of his eye. His visor was torn at the temples. There was a bloody cut under his eyebrow, where a knife had glanced off his forehead protector. "There are about fifty of them, and we number seven. Five of us died in the chaos after the flash bomb. The rest are fighting."

Naruto stiffened as a barrage of images flooded his mind – he felt his arm cover his face to protect his eyes, felt the warmth of the flash bomb light touch his arm, then watched a massive panic of knives unfold as the Repenters used their numbers against the experience of the ninjas, before his clone, defending a Keeper, took a knife under the ear and dispersed.

One of his clones with the unit had just been killed. It wasn't the first that night. He had already detected five other clones vanish – two blinded by flash bombs and had their throats slit, one stabbed in the back with a pitchfork, one with a knife, one set on fire. It made Naruto shiver and rub his throat.

There were now only five fighting ahead of them – two clones and three Keepers. Naruto nodded at the three clones beside him and they ran as a group down the road to enter the battle.

"And," the Marksman continued, wheezing, "we've found out what the Repenters want with the Parade."

Shikamaru stepped closer. The Marksman's voice was dying to a whisper. He could barely hear him over the sound of fighting in the square ahead. The man was weakening. "What do they want?"

"They said they're going to stop ninjas from sinning by abusing chakra, the power of the gods, by using it to fight as a weapon in war, and destroy Konoha's future as a ninja village. They're going to…" the Marksman swallowed thickly and trailed off. "They're going to burn down…"

His knees buckled. He sank to the ground and fell on his side. At last they saw the knife buried up to its hilt in his lower back. The Hyuuga Marksman standing behind Naruto gave a gasp of, "Hisaki!" and pushed past to take up his clansman in his arms, but Shikamaru got their first, and seized the man by the collar of his hazard gear.

"Did you see who the Bishop was?" Shikamaru demanded. "Did you see the chakra link to their leader?"

"Take yours hand off my nephew, Keeper," growled the Hyuuga Marksman. "He needs aid. Let go."

The Marksman, Hisaki, raised a hand to silence his uncle. He looked straight at Shikamaru and nodded weakly. "I saw him, so have the other Marksmen, but," Hisaki seized Shikamaru's sleeve as he straightened, "you can't let him know that you know he's been seen already…not until…not until you've disarmed him…"

Hisaki's hand fell away and he slipped into unconsciousness, his face white with blood loss. The Hyuuga Marksman pulled off his nephew's visor and with a tenderness that surprised Naruto folded it into quarters to tuck under the young man's head.

"I must stay with him," the Marksman told Shikamaru. "He is the son of my sister and if I don't carry out aid immediately he will – "

Shikamaru was already nodding. "Catch up with us as soon as you can. Naruto, do you have enough chakra for another clone?"

He had plenty of chakra. Leaving the two Hyuuga Marksmen under the guard of the clone, they continued onwards.

Feeling increasingly unsettled by the sounds of battle ahead, Naruto drilled his hands through the seals again to make another clone. When it popped into existence and saluted, he whispered, "Go back to the Tigers' Den. Check that they're all okay there."

The clone nodded and leapt away onto the roof.

"So it worked, right? The Marksmen and chakra sensors spotted who the Bishop is. We'll be able to catch him, no problem," Naruto said, grinning with an optimism he didn't really feel.

Ino shook her head. "That guy back there said that we can't let the Bishop know that we know until he's been disarmed. And then he said something about burning – "

"He said 'burn down', so probably a building of some kind." Shikamaru folded his arms gravely. He turned to Ino. "When we get to the fighting, I want you to find out who the Bishop is and relay it to every ninja you can in the area."

Ino nodded. "Long range telepathic broadcast. Got it. I might have to go up to rooftops or the trees then."

With a feeling as though he had been punched in the guts, Naruto felt another clone pop out of existence. He winced, and then…

They were out of the street and into a wooded square that was all too familiar to Naruto, as he finally realised why the roads had filled him with such a heady sense of nostalgia.

The roads led to the Academy.

He had been so caught up in the sights and sounds being sent back to him by the clones, the flashing lights in the sky, the bleeding Hyuuga Marksman and Shikamaru vomiting his dinner all over a roadside that he had hardly taken in their route, but now here he was and there was the Academy and the little square paved with bricks and fat white cobbles was slippery with blood.

Three Keepers and four clones – each ninja was fighting a ring of Repenters, with knives and their wit and their taijutsu skills alone, and not to kill. Nara Yoshino and Captain Hyuuga had been very clear in their orders. They had to minimise civilian deaths, so scattered all about the square were the bodies of unconscious Repenters, knocked out by the blunt ends of kunais and fingers jabbed into pressure points.

"No shadow binding, no flashy chakra use." Shikamaru reminded the Keepers beside him as they assessed the scene from the edge of the square. "We don't want to aggravate them any further."

"Are you kidding, Shikamaru? They're trying to kill us. I don't think you could aggravate them any further," said Ino.

"I have a bad feeling we can," Shikamaru muttered darkly.

There was cry and a yell and suddenly one of the Keepers fell to the ground. He disappeared under an onslaught of kitchen and gardening tools and a thick dark liquid sprayed up into the air.

Shikamaru's unit moved in.

"All of the kids in the kitchen!" Neji shouted down the stairs.

"What? Are you insane?" Nagira screamed at him.

Neji rolled his eyes. He picked the boy up by the scruff of the neck, dangled him over the bannister and dropped him down the stairwell. Sakura rushed to catch him before he could fall. "The kitchen has weapons, barred windows and a door to the old log store, which means an emergency escape route under the house. Do as you are told. You have to take care of everyone else."

The black look dripping with venom Nagira had initially shot Neji dissipated at those final words. He nodded, jumped out of Sakura's arms and ran to the kitchen. Good, Neji thought, turning back to the window. The children were in the safest part of the house. He had borrowed the twins' slingshot and the Zero Chakra exercise weights were tucked up his sleeves. The dead man walking was finally feeling alive again.

Lee dashed round the lowest floor, checking that all windows and back doors were locked and barred, if not with metal security grills like the kitchen, then at least with things that would hinder an intruder, like a fish-tank or a scattering of nails and marbles just beneath a window. He sprinted up the stairs past Neji to set traps on the windows most easily accessible from the ground. Neji looked back out of the window.

The first of the Repenters had climbed to the top of the gatehouse wall. Neji shut one eye, stretched the sling back to his ear until it creaked and let go. The weight hit the Repenter between the eyes. Her mask slipped. The woman tumbled backwards off the wall and into the street.

"Neji-kun, I've checked and set traps on all the windows I can," Lee said, jogging on the spot behind him as he came down from the floor above.

"Good, now – " Neji paused to aim weights at another three Repenters climbing over the wall. With a resounding crack the gates caved in under the weight of twenty or so men leaning against it and the Repenters flooded through in a wave of bleached cloth and gleaming faces. "- Now we go down."

He pulled himself up onto the window ledge and crouched. No wind, he noted. No wind at all. Not even a dry whisper against his ears.

The Repenters were battering at the door. A group budded off to go round the back.

"Konoha Tigers!" he shouted, stopped for a moment, then cleared his throat sheepishly and carried on, hoping that Naruto never got to hear about this: "Hear us roar!"

With an Academy-standard training kunai in one hand and the cloth bag of lead weights swinging in the other, Neji dropped onto the crowd.

Naruto rushed to the aid of the Keeper, snatching the back of a Repenter's bleached hazard gear and pulling him out of the pack. He saw a glint of a metal edge and threw his fist before the man could reverse the grip on the kitchen knife.

Two Repenters took notice of him and pulled away from stabbing at the Keeper on the ground. There was a hungry madness in their eyes, like they had always been waiting, just waiting, for this moment. Which wasn't true, Naruto told himself, as he parried a hammer being aimed at his head then scythed and jabbed so that the Repenter fell back. They had been led to feel that way, by the Eye of the World, exploiting the chakra-less civilians' growing feeling that the ninjas were using them just as the Repenters exploited the weakness of the locked in families.

Another three Repenters came swinging at him with a sickle, a knife, a cloth bag full of stones. He ducked the sickle, felt it stroke the back of his head, dodged the knife stabbing at his eye but he dodged too wide and the bag of stones landed on the side of his chest with a thump and a crack.

Winded, Naruto staggered and fell. His palm squelched against something sticky on the ground. Blood was running between the cracks in the paving.

His clone still fighting alongside a Keeper across the square. It took a pickaxe to the ribs and vanished in a puff of smoke and the information it had gathered came to Naruto in a rush of sensations – the moment the patrol unit had come across the Parade, a Repenter who replied softly and dryly to the questions the Keepers asked him, talking and talking…

The Repenter's words reverberated out of his clone's memories. Naruto froze, not daring to believe his clone's ears, and so it was with a jolt that he noticed the Repenters advancing upon him with their weapons raised.

In a whirl of blue robes, Shikamaru and another Keeper tackled them from the side.

"Get up, Naruto!" Shikamaru yelled at him, pulling him up by his arm. "Ino just messaged me. She's got a lock on. Now she's just confirming that she's right and hasn't grabbed onto bait before she broadcasts."

"Shikamaru, what that Marksman said back there about destroying Konoha's ninja future, I know what he meant."

Shikamaru flipped the kunai round in his hand and rammed the hilt into the back of a Repenter's head. "What did he mean?"

"They're going to stop kids being trained to become ninjas in the first place – that's why they're here at the Academy. They're going to burn it down." Naruto paused, blinked. "I can't believe I'm actually stopping people burning down school."

"Burn down the Academy?" Shikamaru caught the wrist of a Repenter charging towards him and flipped the woman onto her back. He scanned the square with searching eyes then turned back to Naruto with a frown. "The lanterns are out and there's no gasoline. How are they going to - ?"

"Bishop spotted," echoed Ino's voice in their heads, sharp and urgent. Naruto started, nearly fumbled the parry to counter the swing of a Repenter's knife. The blade whistled past his ear. "Man with a sickle fighting Naruto's clone. Reminder from Nara Shikamaru – we can't look as though we're targeting him. Stay discrete. Knock out, don't kill."

There! By the walls of the Academy was a man who looked the same as any of the other Repenters. There was nothing remarkable about him at all. He was swinging a bloody sickle at Naruto's clone, which was circling and looking for an opening. A nearby Keeper head-butted his opponent unconscious and went to help the clone.

Red light shone out overhead and there was a loud, resounding boom. A fierce wind whipped through the streets. Windows rattled. Tiles clattered. The ground rumbled and shook.

"What was that?" a Keeper cried, looking up at the sky in alarm.

"They just blew up the Library!" Naruto shouted, as one of his clones at the site of the explosion, fighting alongside a Keeper unit, was crushed under falling debris.

The Bishop suddenly hefted a second blade into his other hand and roared. He swung blindly with the sickle and the knife and the clone leaped back. He darted sideways, the bleached hazard gear flapping. Naruto's clone and the Keeper gave chase.

"Stop!" Naruto cried, as the Repenter, clone and Keeper approached the Academy gate. "Don't follow him! He's got a – "

Bomb strapped to his chest, he was about to say, but he was too late. The man, the Bishop, hurled himself at the gates of the Academy and, with a crash like thunder that shook the earth and shattered glass, the square was filled with fire.

Chapter Text

In a moment of desperate panic, Naruto thought he had died and gone to Hell, which was frightening, but given how life had never made things especially easy for him wasn't all that surprising. All he could see was darkness lit up by a dim glow of red. Gritty smoke filled his nostrils and there was a hot wind whistling in his ears that sang with fire.

Then he realised that he was staring at the veined underside of his eyelids and that he was, in fact, alive. His mouth could open and close. When he breathed he took in a lungful of dust. He gagged. His ears were ringing. He could barely hear anything at all. He was dimly aware that he was lying on the ground, nose pressed into a crack in the pavement, and that all sounds seemed to have become muffled and distant.

He opened his eyes.

A wall of Naruto shadow clones, their arms and legs locked together in a towering human pyramid, was teetering over him. Forming a barricade against the flying debris and searing hot winds, the clones had taken the worst brunt of the explosion. Their job done, they dissipated.

The Keepers and Repenters lying on the ground began to stir. The clones might have protected them from the largest sections of debris, but there were still many wounded. Some had shiny burns on their faces, large cuts, and shards of wood blasted off the trees embedded in their hazard gear.

Naruto gingerly picked himself up. He shook his head. Echoes from the explosion were still resonating in his ears. Nearby trees were filled with flames, their bark charred black. Red hot bricks and stones rolled about the square.

The Academy was a radiant blaze of leaping flames. The entire face of the building had been blasted open to reveal the classrooms inside like a dolls' house. Billowing smoke glowed red and white under fire and moonlight.

A hand seized Naruto's shoulder. He spun round, and came face to face with Shikamaru, mouthing something at him. He needed to lip read but his head was spinning.

"Can you hear me?" Shikamaru was saying. He gave Naruto a shake. There was grey ash and blood all over Shikamaru's visor. "Can you –hear me?"

"Yeah, yeah," Naruto spluttered at last, as with a pop and a roar sound returned to him, and he could hear the crackling and spitting flames, the thuds as sections of the Academy fell to the ground, and the moans and sobs from the injured all about the square. "My ears are still funny, but I can hear again now."

Shikamaru looked relieved. "I was calling your name and you didn't answer. Well done for the clones. That was quick thinking."

"More like survival instinct kicking in," Naruto muttered. He felt something warm run down his cheek, reached up and found blood from a cut. "What are we going to do? The Bishop here just blew himself up."

"Hospital," said Shikamaru without hesitation, surveying the square. "The fight is over here."

"What? But the Repenters – " Naruto stopped and looked closer at the scene in front of him.

The Repenters were rising to their feet, but the ninjas were rising and getting their act together faster. Of course they would. Ninjas were trained to fight so they were also, some may say more importantly, trained to get back on their feet as quickly as possible. Having chakra helped the ninjas too. With the chakra system pumping additional energy through their bodies, they had additional support, were hardier and more resilient to injury than the civilians were.

Whilst the Repenters were still struggling to stand upright, the Keepers were flitting between them and driving the hilts of their kunai into the back of their heads, until they were all down on the ground, stretched out like corpses.

"That's the last of them," shouted a Keeper, dusting his hands, before staggering and dropping to his knees with a grunt. There was a twist of piping embedded in his calf.

"Good work. You two," Shikamaru pointed at two Keepers who looked relatively uninjured compared to the rest. "You know where the nearest safe-house is? Fetch both the ox-carts from it."

They nodded and limped away from the square. When they left, the surviving ninjas – Naruto, Shikamaru, two other Keepers, Ino and one last clone – went around the bodies lying on the ground looking for those ninjas and Repenters who needed first aid.

"Aid's too good for them," growled one Keeper, as he checked over an unconscious Repenter with burns on her face. "We should just leave them. They're the ones with the death wish."

"How can you say that!" Naruto startled the Keeper with his flare of anger. "They're crazy but they're still Konoha citizens and we're Konoha ninjas. We're supposed to protect them. Even if they go crazy, even if they try to kill us, it's our job to help them out of their mess, because…"

Because we failed to protect them from themselves in the first place.

Naruto trailed off as the Keeper glared at him. Then the Keeper clicked his tongue and moved off to check another one of the bodies.

Shikamaru came to stand beside him. "Not everyone's as forgiving of people who betray their trust as you are, Naruto."

"But you agree with me, right, Shikamaru?" Naruto checked another man on the ground for breathing. "Right?"

Shikamaru didn't reply. He wanted to, but the more Naruto stared at him urging him to agree, the more he found that he couldn't.

The green glow faded from her hands. Ino stood up from the Keeper she had found alive, but bleeding from a gaping wound in his abdomen, and went to Shikamaru.

She took off her visor. Her eyes were shiny. Words began to spill from her mouth. "I'm so sorry I couldn't find the Bishop sooner. Now he's dead and – "

"Don't apologise," Shikamaru cut in quickly. "We've still got a chance of finding another Bishop somewhere else."

"I promised Asuma-sensei I'd look after you and Chouji." Ino brushed tears from her eyes. "I feel like such a failure. What am I doing here?"

"You're here watching my back like a teammate should," he assured her. "Don't say you're a failure, Ino. If there's a sure-fire way of disappointing Asuma-sensei, that's one of them."

Ino's mouth trembled, but she took a deep breath in and breathed out slowly. When she recovered some of her composure, she opened her mouth again. "So the next part is looking for another Bishop?"

Shikamaru was glad that she had pulled herself back together. "We'll find one, and then we'll find the Eye of the World, and then this all ends tonight."

But first, they needed to get the men to the hospital. The Keepers had to ensure the Repenters got treated as soon as possible. The Keepers might have been angry, they might have been vengeful, but with ninja-civilian relations as strained as they were they couldn't afford a civilian dying whilst in Keeper custody, waiting for treatment.

They loaded the ox-carts in front of the burning Academy. They would come back for the dead tomorrow.

A tree crackled with dancing flames and a small spark leapt from its branch to the roof of the nearest shop.

Neji knew he was out of sorts when he began to feel breathless. Ducking and diving, avoiding the flailing knives and hammers being slung his way and swinging the bag of leads at the nearest blank silver faces, he could feel his lungs tightening. He was tiring, far quicker than usual. His fast and fluid strikes that he had always been so proud of were slowing and his joints felt stiff. Neji hadn't moved like this in days, perhaps weeks, and he was feeling the strain.

And doubling the strain was the discomfort of fighting without the byakugan and the Gentle Fist at all. It was as though he was trying to compensate for the byakugan vision by relying on sounds and smells, the warmth of bodies, the rankness of sweat, the squeak of boots on stone. It was even an effort to stop his limbs falling into the stances of the Gentle Fist, ineffectual even if he could use chakra, because the damned civilians didn't have chakra coils in the first place!

A shape dropped down from above. A glowing fist, laced with chakra, sank under a jaw and threw the Repenter off his feet, sending him and the three Repenters behind him crashing back into the gatehouse wall.

"Thank you!" Neji said to Sakura, who had landed next to him with her two fists raised.

"Go inside, Neji-kun. You need a rest." She cracked her knuckles at the advancing Repenters. "Don't put on a brave face, just go. I'll help you up."

She had seen him tiring. She could tell how sorely tempted he was to summon up his chakra to boost up his stamina and fix his balance. The Repenters had backed away from the door at Sakura's appearance, eyeing her glowing fists like they might explode. If Neji was going to go back inside the Den, now was his chance.

Neji nodded. "I'll be back."

Sakura knelt on one knee, cupped her hands. He leapt, stepped off her hands and she boosted him back up to the open window on the second floor. He grabbed the ledge and swung himself inside.

Once she was sure Neji was gone from the window, she turned back to the crowd of Repenters who were regrouping at the splintered gates. Neji had done a bloody job. The training kunai for Academy students were blunt. Only the points were sharp. The only way they could have sliced through an arm or leg was if they were forced through the muscle and tendon by brute strength. Several bodies on the ground were oozing blood from cracked foreheads and smashed in temples.

She heard the tinkling of falling glass at the back of the house. Focus, Sakura told herself, focus on the ones in front of you. Lee was at the back. Lee could deal with them fine. She planted her feet on the steps leading up to the front door.

All of a sudden, tiles shattered and a figure in black and orange landed on the gatehouse wall.

"Hey, Sakura-chan!" the Naruto clone yelled, waving cheerfully. "You look beautiful when you're just about to punch someone!"

As her jaw dropped and she exclaimed, "Naruto!", the clone dropped down from the wall and barrelled its way through the crowd of Repenters. Punching one, and sending another flying with a kick, it soon made its way to the front door.

"They want the children. What happened in town? It sounded like thunder and the ground was shaking," Sakura said as soon as the clone reached the steps.

The Repenters came under sudden fire from a deadly volley of lead weights and drew back to the gates again. Neji nodded at Naruto's clone from the window then ducked back inside the house, presumably to make sure nobody was breaking in from the back.

"I just got the message from my original – two Bishops blew themselves up. They had bombs strapped on them."

"Suicide bombers?" gasped Sakura.

There was a muffled boom and the steps shook under Sakura's feet.

"Make that three Bishops," the clone amended sheepishly, as all eyes turned to the third column of smoke and fire rising above Konoha.

"What?" Sakura cried. "Then how are you going to find their leader? How many Bishops are left?"

"No idea," said the clone weakly, as the crowd of Repenters finally moved into a formation and looked ready to charge. Then a thought occurred to him and he lowered his voice and said, "There might be one here."

Five dashed towards them with their weapons raised. Sakura flung out her arm. A line of training kunai dropped into a line before the Repenters' feet, exploding tags fluttering from their hilts. They blew up in a line of snaps and crackles and the Repenters stumbled backwards.

"There might be one here, but, we can't let Neji-kun know." Sakura glanced up at the window, hoping that Neji wasn't there to hear what was being said. "He's weakening and he'll use the byakugan. It might push him over the edge."

"You're right, but I've got a plan," said the clone earnestly, leaping off the steps to kick a Repenter in the face. Sakura threw another line of exploding tags and the Repenters shrank back. "We strip every one of these Repenters down to his undies and find the one with a bomb strapped to him – "

"You are unbelievable!" Sakura screamed, over the sound of more crackling and popping exploding tags. She dashed forward into the smoking trench to gather up the blades and went back to the steps. "That isn't a plan. That's a lucky dip!"

"You got any better ideas?"

Sakura chewed her lip then struck an idea. "The woman who told Neji about Bishops, didn't she say something about showing them a flyer and the Repentance would help him?"

"So?"

"Do you still have the flyer?"

Neji pushed the body off the window ledge, its eye sockets streaming with blood. He had modified the Gentle Fist precision strikes to target the eyes, nose, throats and tops of spinal column. As far as he was concerned, the Keepers could keep their No Civilian Death Policy. These Repenters were invading private property as soon as they came through the old Hyuuga boundary gate.

The beams above him creaked. Something heavy was shifting about on the floor overhead.

He finished resetting the bear trap beneath the window and went to the next room. Lee was lifting his visor to wipe blood from the corner of his mouth. The window had been barricaded again with a heap of chairs.

"I heard noises upstairs," Neji said. "I'm going to check the kitchen. Either it's one of the children or – "

"I shall boldly go forth to the next floor!" Lee cried and he took off down the corridor.

Neji went to the kitchen and knocked on the door, a coded knock, a series of loud and quiet taps he hoped some of the older Academy students would recognise. They did. He heard footsteps and the door was unbarred.

At the sight of Neji covered in blood and damp with sweat, Jo shrank back from him with a squeak. White faces peered out at him from the darkness, momentarily stunned then displaying a mixture of relief and fear.

"Neji-niisan!" gasped one of the children. He couldn't see which in the gloom.

He did a quick headcount. All the children were present, which, unfortunately, meant that intruders had got in upstairs. He had to go and back up Lee.

"Is everybody here alright?" he asked quickly, just in case, but then he blinked and narrowed his eyes. "What are you two doing?"

Yabane was sitting on Nagira's shoulders to reach the kitchen window, his hand on the latch as though he had just closed it. He was letting the blind fall, but before the canvas dropped over the barred glass, Neji caught sight of a blonde head disappearing from the window.

"Nothing," Yabane trilled, looking far from innocent.

"You think we'd be stupid enough to open the window when we're basically under siege?" Nagira deadpanned, but his eyes drifted upwards.

Neji followed his gaze to the kitchen dartboard. Naruto had put it up to throw shuriken at. He had taken immense pleasure out of flicking shuriken after shuriken at a wanted poster of Orochimaru and had urged Neji to put up something as well. 'Stress relief' he called it, and more in an effort to get Naruto to shut up than actual willingness, Neji had obliged. He had put up the Repenter's flyer…

…which was now gone, one shuriken that had been holding it in place moved aside and the other still in place with a little fragment of paper attached to its tip. Nagira's fingers were bleeding. Somebody had been handling sharper objects than they were used to very recently.

Neji looked at them two boys closely. "Was that Naruto outside the window?"

Nagira lowered Yabane to the kitchen floor. They looked at each other. Yabane nodded and said, "Niisan wanted the flyer. He didn't say why."

"But he told us specifically not to tell you that he had taken the flyer," Nagira said slyly.

"Specifically not to tell me?" Neji raised his eyebrows. "Arm yourselves and keep quiet. Don't open the door unless someone knocks like I did."

With that, Neji left the kitchen, and his silver eyes were gleaming.

"I have this!" Sakura suddenly cried, snatching the flyer from the clone as soon as it had returned from the kitchen window. "I call upon the Sixth Repentance. I am ready for the Sixth Repentance of the Cry. Is there any Bishop amongst you who will help me?"

The clone readied to spring. Sakura was open to an attack, but he was surprised to see heads turn, eyes flicker, and the next row of advancing Repenters halt, as they looked to the back of the crowd.

"You ask for a Bishop?"

The crowd parted. They revealed a man with a beer belly, the bleached hazard gear stretched across his enormous girth. "I am the Bishop here," he announced, his voice ringing in between the muffled shouts coming from the back of the house and fire sparking in the craters at the front.

Sakura and the clone stared, first at each other then back at the great man who had appeared from the shadow of the wall. Identifying the Bishop was the first and easy part. The second part was capturing him and taking him as a hostage against the other Repenters. The third part was disarming him then finally…

"I see you have a Parade ticket. One of our disciples saw you fit to receive our highest Repentance," the man continued to say. He reached out with his hand. "I am a Bishop, one who receives the direct teachings of the Eye. I will see you receive the Sixth Level of the Repentance – the purest and most holy of all. Come here, daughter of sin."

The clone made a noise in his throat halfway between a snort of laughter and choke of outrage. Sakura ignored him and stepped down from the porch, holding out the little flyer. "If I Repent, will you spare the children?"

"No," the man replied simply. "If the gods will not spare those children, then a mere man such as I most assuredly cannot."

Sakura felt a surge of disgust but clamped down on the feeling. "Then will you promise not to harm my friends?" she said, trying to keep talking as she approached him, talking as she scanned him for signs of a bomb, talking to bring down his guard, so that when she was upon him she could loop a coil of wire about his fleshy neck and hands.

The clone remained standing at the front of the house, hovering on the balls of his feet.

"We will not harm them," the man said with a smile. "We will hope that your good example will inspire your friends to also come to us, although they will be judged through all the Repentances that the gods seek of them, from the Word to the Fire."

"But then they will have a choice of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth?"

"Oh, all may choose, but not all may be given their choice. The gods decide and the Eye sees," the man intoned, putting his bloody hands together as if in prayer.

Sakura was nearly upon him. She was so close she could see the man's manic eyes behind the mask. The clone was tentatively stepping down form the porch, ready to back her up.

Just as she was reaching for the wire up her sleeve, her gaze never wavering from the indulgently smiling Bishop in front of her, she heard a light thud from behind and something travelled into the corner of her vision, fast as an arrow, into the crowd of Repenters.

The Repenters screeched, boiled, seethed as one mass like water, then –

"Come any closer and I'll cut out her throat!"

The Repenters drew back. They formed a large ring about the young man who had appeared in their midst.

Neji pressed the tip of his kunai against his captive's windpipe. She whimpered. The Repenters gave him space. He began to step back towards the house, long, hurrying strides, dragging her with him. She struggled and tried to twist her hands out from behind her back.

"That man's the bait!" Neji shouted, as everyone stared, Sakura stopped only metres away from the huge pot-bellied man. "He isn't the real Bishop. This woman is!"

And Sakura knew Neji was right, because the veins around his eyes were bulging and his eyes were wide and bright, chakra flowing to the activated byakugan.

He flipped the kunai round in his hand and rammed it into the back of the woman's head.

"Madam Bishop!" gasped the Repenters, surging forward as she slumped unconscious in Neji's hold.

Sakura leapt back from the decoy Bishop. She threw another array of explosive tags at the advancing Repenters, then, for good measure, drove her fist into the churned up lawn with a pulse of chakra to shake the Repenters to the ground. They wouldn't be able to avoid the explosions this time.

In the smoke rising up from the explosive tags, Naruto's clone darted forward, leapt over the line of charred and blackened bodies, and knocked out a dozen Repenters, swiping left, right and centre. The Repenters retreated and, as the smoke cleared, the clone chased after them. Their attacks were weaker, less coordinated, less certain – it was as though whatever had been holding them together had turned to smoke – or perhaps many of them had never had their hearts in the fight in the first place, perhaps they had only been fighting with the Bishop looking over their shoulders, their only link to the Eye of the World himself.

With a drumming of fast footsteps, Lee came running out from the back of the house. The remaining Repenters saw him coming and realising that, in a ninja vs. civilian fight, four ninjas against ten civilians left the civilians grossly outnumbered, fled, stumbling over their feet to run over the splinters of the gate they had brought down.

Lee and the clone ran after them into the street. When it was clear the crowd of Repenters had scattered into the town and showed no sign of returning, they stopped their pursuit.

"That's it?" cried Lee in outrage, throwing up his hands. "They come, they try to kill us and then they run off?"

There was another boom, a rippling tremor, and in East Konoha another column of smoke and fire erupted into the sky.

The clone clenched his teeth. "Let's go back to the Den."

As soon as the Repenters were gone, Neji exhaled slowly and set the unconscious woman on the ground. He removed the kunai from her neck.

Sakura dropped down and pulled off the Repenter's mask. Underneath was a middle-aged woman with laughter lines and smile creases at the corners of her eyes. "Neji-kun, are you sure she's the Bishop?"

"There's chakra inside her head, in her brain. None of the others have it. It must be her."

Sakura swallowed and unzipped the woman's hazard cloak. She gingerly pulled apart the fabric. Lee and Naruto's clone returned and came running up to the front step.

The clone cleared its throat as he peered over Sakura's shoulder. "If there's a bomb, I can take it and run -"

"A bomb?" said Neji sharply.

"Don't worry, guys." Sakura wiped her forehead on the back of her hand. "She – she doesn't have one on her."

The clone sighed with relief, but Neji was frowning. "You expected her to have a bomb on her?"

"All the other Bishops did," said the clone with a grimace.

Neji furrowed his brow. He stared down at the woman. "It takes a very strong mind manipulation jutsu to override the instinct for self-preservation. Maybe she was stronger than the others and refused to rig herself with a bomb."

"Maybe," said Sakura, but she wasn't entirely convinced. She zipped up the woman's cloak again then patted her pockets for weapons. "Neji-kun, why don't you switch off your byakugan for a bit?"

He shook his head. "I can see the chakra link. It's a really faint line, it goes north. If I switch off, I can't say I'll find it again."

But he could see it! Oh, he could see and it was marvellous! A thin pale blue thread, as fine as spider silk, spooling off from the cottony mass of foreign chakra in the woman's brain. The line continued out the back of her head and went straight through the gatehouse wall, pointing north like a compass – and if he followed this line to its source, at the end of it would be the 'Eye of the World'.

Neji felt a gentle touch on his hand and looked down. Sakura was prying the kunai out of his white-knuckled grip. "Listen to me, Neji-kun. You don't need to see the chakra link," she told him. "We just need to wait here for Keepers to arrive, and then one of the Marksmen will be able to see the link just as you can, and they'll be able to lead the Keepers to where the leader of the Repenters is. You've identified the Bishop. Now, leave the rest to Naruto and Shikamaru."

Sakura turned away to talk to Lee and the clone about the number of bodies in the grounds of the gatehouse and Neji stared at the Bishop.

No. Neji refused to leave everything to his friends. He had never rejected such a course of action more. He rejected it with every living fibre of his infected body and suddenly he was seized by a kind of mad panic that was all too familiar. It was feeling he had had before the Caged Bird seal had been etched into his forehead, the feeling that he was standing at the door of a cage and peering into the dungeon where he was about to be trapped forever, without a voice or a future.

Neji glanced sideways. Sakura, Lee and the clone were huddled together in conversation.

They weren't watching him.

"- so we have around twenty at the back of the house, seven bodies on the second floor, one injured man stuck in the bear-trap," Sakura told the clone, packing him with information to send Naruto, "- and the Bishop is knocked out, no bomb to deactivate at all. Got that, Naruto?"

"I think so," he murmured, screwing up his face. "Fifteen or so at the front, twenty at the back – "

"Naruto, you look like you're trying to give birth to a coconut."

"Hey!" the clone objected loudly, opening his eyes. He stopped, stared over her shoulder. "Neji's gone."

Sakura whirled round. He was right. Neji had disappeared, along with the unconscious Bishop. The space behind her was empty except for smoke and charred Repenter bodies.

She sighed and put her face in her hands. "What is it with guys running off doing as they please? We girls would never do that."

"Sure you wouldn't," the clone muttered under his breath.

"Alright, change of plan – Neji's gone to find the Bishop. If we run now, we'll still be able to catch up with him. Naruto, tell Shikamaru to meet us…er…" She scratched her head and turned to Lee. "I don't any landmarks in the North part of Konoha."

"There's a canal lock you can't miss," Lee told her. "Shikamaru will know where it is. Neji probably knows it from his rounds as well."

Sakura blinked. "You aren't coming?"

"I saw him in the fight. Neji-kun wasn't moving as fast as he usually should be able to. He needs a…he might need a medic-nin with him soon and somebody's got to stay to look after the children," Lee said gravely. His big round eyes glistened with tears.

Sakura chewed her lip then turned decisively to the clone. "Have you got all that?"

"The canal lock in the North – "

"Good." She threw her fist into the clone's face and it popped out of existence.

Casualties were flooding into hospital in from all parts of the town – Keepers and Repenters aside, there were tens of ordinary citizens. Some had shards of glass in their backs. Some had been near-crushed by furniture that had been shaken by the bomb blasts. Worse, fire was spreading, out from the sites of the explosions but also from knocked over candles and shattered lanterns. It was slow thanks to the lack of a wind, but there were people beginning to come in with burns and smoke irritation. Standing around waiting for Shikamaru to finish signing off the casualties his unit had brought in was dull and achieved nothing, so Naruto had decided to pitch in with the hospital staff.

Naruto was carrying one end of a stretcher when the clone's memories were dumped into his head and he nearly dropped it. Luckily, a nurse running up behind him took the stretcher handles before it could slip to the floor.

"Have a short rest," she said briskly. She forced him to sit down in the hospital corridor and took off with the patient.

Shikamaru came back from the reception and found Naruto muttering to himself on a bench.

"What's happened?" Shikamaru asked, folding his arms across his chest.

Naruto started and leapt to his feet. "Neji's found a Bishop and started tracing the link back to the leader. Sakura's gone after him."

Shikamaru looked nonplussed and sighed. "You know, Naruto, I'm beginning to think the real Plague here is you and your unpredictability. Seriously, what have you done to Neji? Anyway, if a Bishop's been captured, this is our chance. We've got to meet up with Neji and Sakura. Which way are they going?"

"North," Naruto told him, as they moved to the doors. "Sakura said we're to meet them at a canal lock. Do you know it?"

"I've seen it on patrol," said Shikamaru with a nod. "We'll find Ino and go."

Chapter Text

Neji was carrying the unconscious Bishop on his back. Running along the walls and roofs of houses, Sakura easily caught up. She dropped down into the road alongside him.

"You're being reckless," Sakura said to him. When he didn't reply, she sighed. "But I guess you know that yourself anyway."

Neji looked round his shoulder. "Where's Lee?"

"He stayed behind at the Den with the children."

"Two girls there once tried to wax off his eyebrows with gum."

"He'll be fine," Sakura replied after a thoughtful pause. "We're meeting Naruto and Shikamaru at a canal lock in the North district. Lee said you'd know where it is."

Neji paused to strain his byakugan vision into the night. "That way," he muttered, and changed course, so that they were still following the pale blue chakra line stretching out from the coil in the woman's head. Sakura followed him.

"Did you hear what I said?" she said eventually.

"I heard," Neji answered without looking at her. "We'll come to the lock soon."

Faint booming explosions rang out in the air, but they were far off and too distant to cause anything but a light tremor in the ground. A flower pot on the street corner had fallen over. On another street, the scaffolding had fallen from a shop front and the pipes were rolling about the road. Sakura paused to check for casualties, but luckily there were none.

Soon they were running along the side of the canal. They disturbed a pack of stray dogs that had taken shelter under a bridge, huddling together in fright. The water was dark and smooth and rippled with things unseen under the soft glow of clouds lit by fire.

After what could have been anything between half an hour or a whole one Neji and Sakura came to the lock and saw three figures waiting for them up ahead. One jumped down from the railing and waved.

"Over here!" Naruto called. "Sakura! Neji!"

"You took your time," Ino grumbled.

Sakura stopped and stared. "Ino, what are you doing here?"

"Long story, but my shift is covered," Ino replied earnestly, when Sakura looked disapproving.

Shikamaru indicated the unconscious Repenter with a jut of his chin. "Is this the Bishop? Naruto says you've got a chakra link you're tracing."

Neji nodded and lowered the woman gently to the ground. It wasn't that he cared for her. He didn't want to unsettle the chakra in her brain and risk losing the thread. Shikamaru looked at the Bishop's blood-encrusted face. He pointed at the blood, "Whose is this?"

"It's not hers. She'll live," Neji said tersely. "What's the plan?"

Sakura spoke. "Neji shouldn't be using his byakugan, so if Ino could do the tracing – "

"I don't think I can," Ino said with a heavy sigh. "I can see the chakra pool in her head, but I can't see the chakra link line for more than a metre. We'd have to take baby steps. It'd take all night to find where it comes from."

"Neji, how good is your range?" asked Shikamaru.

"For the chakra link? I can see it clearly for four hundred metres."

Shikamaru hummed and considered the unconscious Repenter again.

"I could try switching bodies briefly and getting the information out of her memory," Ino suggested hesitantly, after a minute of silence. "If the Eye put the chakra in her head, she must have met him in person."

"No. We don't know what that chakra is actually doing to her brain, we don't know how it might affect you, we don't know how you would cope transferring yourself into a body without chakra coils and we don't know how this woman's body will react to having your chakra in her. There are too many things we don't know." Shikamaru shook his head then stood up. "Neji will have to continue tracing the line. Is that alright?"

"I have no problems with that," Neji replied, stooping to pick up the Bishop.

"We'll take turns carrying the woman though," Shikamaru said.

"That's a good idea," said Sakura. "Neji, pass her across to Naruto. He's got too much energy for his own good."

The pale blue chakra line grew neither thicker nor brighter as they made their way through the streets of Konoha. It took them through a merchant section, the artisans' quarter, boiling with smoke and bustling with frantic bucket chains. Blue lanterns flickered from the carts of the district fire brigade.

A little while later they were standing on a street of office blocks. The chakra line led to a demolition site and the ruins of a two storey concrete building.

There were carts loaded with debris parked by its walls. Red and white tape fluttered across the entrance. Cones had been stacked outside it, along with warning signs and crates full of objects salvaged from the building.

"This is it?" Naruto said, shifting the weight of the woman on back. There was a sign on the wall still. "It says Utsumi Pensions and Life Insurance."

"So it says but it's an old ANBU facility," said Shikamaru as they continued to survey the scene. "One of the Keeper units came here when we were looking in the North for a potential Repentance meeting place. You remember, Naruto? You said a big gang of kids had been killed near here. I read the unit's report. They didn't find anything."

"But the line goes into the ruins." Neji suddenly widened his eyes. "Can you see - ?"

Sakura shook her head. "It's too dark, we can't even see much normally."

"I've got an idea." Ino grasped Neji's shoulder and closed her eyes.

An image filled Naruto's brain. It showed a white space veined with rippling shadows and glowing outlines. It was luminous, hyper-real, overflowing with detail but somehow elegantly simple. After a moment of considering the image, Naruto saw a thin blue thread running into the building ahead of them.

"So this is what byakugan vision is like," Sakura breathed in awe.

"But only the bit in the field of vision we're used to. My brain would fry if I tried to project the whole three sixty vision!" Ino sounded pleased with herself.

"Can you see the trail?" Neji asked again, somewhat tentatively, which was unlike him, but then again he had never had somebody hack into his byakugan before.

Naruto nodded. "It's like a line of breadcrumbs going up to the front."

"What is it? It makes my skin crawl just looking at it." Sakura shivered and rubbed her arms.

Thin smoky coils, the colour of dried blood, were drifting up from spots on the ground. They formed an evenly spaced line all the way to the building entrance.

"It's a trail of konseigan," Neji told them. "I've seen the pills under byakugan before. There's no mistaking it."

Shikamaru and Naruto exchanged a look. Naruto spoke first. "It's a trap, isn't it? Somebody's trying to lure us in."

Shikamaru shook his head. "Worse than lure us in. I think they're saying they expected us and they're inviting us in."

Sakura broke the silence that followed. "What do we do then?"

They went back to contemplating the building.

"Go in anyway," Naruto said with determination.

Stealth wasn't an option. It was an open yard up all the way to the building front and the moon was bright. The most they could do was dart from one piece of demolition equipment to another and keep an eye on the glassless windows of the upper floor. They followed the line of konseigan pills. Naruto took great pleasure in crushing them underfoot as they went.

In the stripped out reception of Utsumi Pensions and Life Insurance, somebody had daubed a huge red sharingan eye onto the wall. Naruto and Neji exchanged a brief look. They were remembering Lee's map and the Konoha-wide sharingan he had pencilled onto it.

Sakura looked wide-eyed at Naruto then back at the graffiti. "Do you think the leader might have a sharingan? He calls himself the Eye of the World so – "

"It's possible," Shikamaru agreed uncertainly. "We need to be careful."

Under the eye were the following words:

I'M WAITING DOWNSTAIRS

Shikamaru studied the message. "This wasn't in the unit's reports."

"It wouldn't have been. That and the eye were probably painted only a couple of hours ago." Neji stepped away from Ino to take a look at the picture. The byakugan projection disappeared from everyone's vision.

Naruto glanced about the room. There were stairs leading up to the next floor and another empty doorway into what appeared to be a cupboard. "There isn't any way to go 'downstairs'."

"Neji, where does the Bishop's chakra line go?" Shikamaru asked.

Neji pointed at the cupboard. "In there, into the floor."

They peered round the empty doorway. The wooden floor wasn't as dusty as it should have been. There were footprints all over it and a little message in red paint in the centre of the boards.

IN CASE YOU NEED HELP, YES, YOU HAVE FOUND THE WAY DOWN

BEST FOOT FORWARDS

Neji's mouth twitched. "He's toying with us."

A sudden idea struck Shikamaru. He narrowed his eyes and turned to Naruto and Sakura. "Is there a chance we're going to find your old teammate at the bottom of all this?"

Naruto and Sakura stared at him as though Shikamaru had just sprouted antlers from his forehead. "You're saying Sasuke's the boss behind the Sixth Repentance?" Naruto spluttered.

"He's rogue and he has the sharingan. We don't know where he is or what he's doing these days."

Naruto opened his mouth to protest, but then he remembered Kakashi turning to him with a deadly serious expression outside the Tigers' Den gates: Naruto, if I told you that Sasuke wants to see everything that means anything to you destroyed, what would you say?

At Naruto's wretched expression flickering between anxiety and anger, Shikamaru sighed. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. First, how to get to the basement – "

There was a sudden creak of wood. Ino drew back sharply. She had extended her leg and pushed down on the boards. The next instant, the entire floor dropped away from ground level, forming a shaft about four feet square and five feet deep. In the side of the pit was the entrance to a stairwell.

Ino smirked at Shikamaru. "Best foot forwards?"

Naruto shuddered as he looked into the shaft. "This is only a little bit less creepy than Orochimaru's cave."

Air floated up from the stairwell like breath.

One at a time, they dropped down into the pit in the stationery cupboard, Naruto bringing up the rear after passing the Bishop to Sakura. The stairwell was dark, but it was neither dusty nor damp. It had clearly been recently used and there were alcoves in the wall where perhaps lanterns were sometimes lit, but tonight they were empty. The ceiling was low and the passage narrow. Their breathing echoed, despite how quiet they tried to keep it.

They went down the steps in single file – Neji at the head with his byakugan activated, following the chakra line beaming out from the Bishop's brain; Ino behind him with her hand on his shoulder to project his vision to the others behind her; Shikamaru came next, in the centre where he could whisper orders or ask questions both forwards and backwards; then Sakura carrying the Bishop and finally Naruto keeping an eye out for anything that might come from behind.

Naruto swallowed. Nothing was coming after them, but they were being led to a particular destination for a particular purpose and the feeling was unnervingly as though they were being shepherded - onwards, down, down the spiralling stairs, losing track of the path they had come, how far they had descended - pushed into their squares on a mysterious chessboard to play their parts as their shepherd intended.

Old checkpoints had been taken down and traps disabled. Wires and darts, needles fine as hedgehog spines, were coiled and piled neatly into the sides of the stairs. Tape marked where the tripwires and trigger seals had once been laid down. The byakugan vision showed everything in the dark as fine shimmering monochrome outlines.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, electricity hummed and a light flickered on in front of a great circular metal door.

It slid open without a sound, splitting into two halves, to reveal a maze of corridors beyond. Just over the threshold, the floor was splattered with words in red paint:

COME INSIDE, TAKE THE FIRST TURN ON THE RIGHT

Shikamaru was examining the door. It had a chakra identification mechanism embedded into their surface. Chakra had to be used to open them, and it could only be chakra that the doors had been pre-programmed to recognise. The theory that the leader of the Repentance was ex-ANBU suddenly posed Shikamaru a problem. The chakra identities should have been erased from the system, Shimura Danzo had overseen it himself. None of the ex-ANBU chakra should be able to open the doors any more…

"Do we keep going?" asked Sakura, breaking into Shikamaru's thoughts.

"We keep going and we'll keep the same formation," Shikamaru told them.

They passed through the door. It slid shut behind them with a whisper of metal as final as the fall of a guillotine. For many individuals who once came through that door it was a sound that might have killed all hope they had left. Spies, terrorists, social and political dissenters, anybody Danzo might have thought a threat to Konoha would have come through the door with their heads hooded and hands bound in chakra-draining rope, and once they were through, nobody would ever hear of them again.

Bright white lights buzzed above them. When they came to the first turning on the right, Naruto ignored it and ran on down the corridor to find any other opening they could use, but there was no other passage. It was a dead end, barred by a door that refused to open, no matter how hard Naruto kicked at it.

There was no choice but to turn right, just as the instructions told them to.

It wasn't long before they came to another door with another set of instructions, and then another, and then another, all gleaming metal and silent, opening and closing like sluice gates diverting water. Yes, they were being herded. Yes, they were being pushed around to exactly where their 'shepherd', for want of a better word, wanted them to go, and that was deeper and deeper through the ANBU subterranean base, further and further into higher security levels.

"I take back what I said earlier," Shikamaru whispered to Sakura behind him, knowing that Naruto could hear him too. "It's probably not Uchiha Sasuke ahead. He would have killed us already."

"You never knew him well enough to make judgements like that, Shikamaru," Sakura argued.

"Well, neither did y – "

They fell silent as the next metal door opened. The door opened into a corridor unlike any they had seen before. It was a short row of heavy black doors, inscribed with intricate seals and set with curious ivory plaques, the length and width of thumbs.

Each plaque bore a name. On each door there were many, many names.

There was a strange chill in the air that made the little hairs on the back of Naruto's neck stand on end, as though the black doors lining the corridor were radiating cold or perhaps sucking away the warmth from him.

"Where are we?" Naruto asked. "What is this place?"

"It's one of the special ANBU prison units." Ino looked pale. "My cousin Fu said they sometimes put all the names of the cell's previous occupants on the doors, to frighten whoever was going in next. It's supposed to show how all these ninjas who thought they were so powerful and strong and extraordinary just ended up dying the same as everybody else."

The great metal door closed behind them. Neji, Ino, Shikamaru, Sakura and Naruto were trapped in the corridor. The pale blue chakra line extended ahead of them and disappeared into the black door at the end of the row.

"I guess this is it," Naruto said and the others nodded.

Killing the sound of their footsteps and checking each cell they passed for occupants ready to ambush them, they followed the pale blue chakra line in Neji's byakugan vision to the final black door.

Under the columns of ivory plaques was an eye, painted in red, surprisingly discrete. A can of red paint rested against the wall. Neji stared through the door and saw a figure crouched at a desk.

He inhaled sharply. The figure…the thing…its chakra system was so abominably grotesque he could barely look at it. It was an offense to his senses. It was a jumble of chakra melting into each other, swirling with heat and rank with putrescence, both alive and dead, seething with power and at the same time destroying itself. It was like watching a rat trying to eat its own tail.

The figure sensed their approach and raised its head. Neji recoiled sharply from the door and Ino stepped back with him.

An intercom suddenly crackled to life.

"At last!" It was a man's voice. He sounded delighted. "At last, you have come."

"Are you the Eye of the World?" demanded Shikamaru.

The man in the cell laughed. "Yes. Yes, I am. And you are the Keepers come to find me."

It was a statement and not a question. Shikamaru glanced down the corridor. If this was a trap it was a strange one – no ambush, no signs of explosives or seals hidden in the floor. Sakura was lowering her hands from an attempt to dispel a genjutsu. She shook her head. This wasn't an elaborate illusion either.

"There are no guards and no traps," the voice said, before adding as an afterthought, as though he wasn't sure if he meant it or not, "I mean you no harm."

Neji stepped up to the intercom. "What are you?" He bit back a wave of nausea. "I can see you. Your chakra system. It's – "

"You can see me? You can see me!?" The voice was suddenly urgent. "What do I look like? Tell me!"

Neji narrowed his eyes and turned to the others for how to go on. Shikamaru mouthed, Reply.

"Like the chakra system of a whole man's body, squashed into an arm and an eye," he said hesitantly, feeling sick as he did so. It was so wrong, so abominable. He could hardly wrap his head around what his byakugan was seeing. "Like you're alive and dead at the same time."

The Eye of the World paused and then burst out into laughter. "Yes! Yes! That is me…me and not him." The intercom crackled. "I exist. I do exist. I am me!"

"You are the leader of the Sixth Repentance, aren't you?" Naruto asked, as they stood about the door in dumbfounded silence.

"I am, indeed. Do you know what is happening outside? Is my flock wreaking havoc in the town this man loves so much? Is it destroying the future? Are my Bishops making his town burn?" the Eye said with such relish he was almost purring.

Naruto's blood was simmering with rage. His skin felt warm. The Kyuubi's toxic chakra seething beneath it. He breathed in deeply. He had to focus. He had keep things under control. Going berserk here and now would help no one, no matter how much this Eye infuriated him.

Clones had died caught in exploding glass, falling buildings, blasts of fire and, in a couple of cases, disarming Bishops and running with the bombs on the brink of explosion. Ever since they had arrived at the demolition site, Naruto had been pushing away the clones' memories to the back of his head to untangle later. He had wanted to stay alert as they went through the ANBU base in case of an ambush, but now it meant there was a pool of images accumulating in a murky mass in his mind and he knew within the mass he would find fear, humiliation, death upon death and the worst of what men could do to each other. The bigger it grew, the less certain Naruto became that he would be able to face it.

Was he frightened about the thought of what assimilating those clones' memories might do to him? Yes, yes, he was, but he had to keep things under control. Control now, save the freak out for later.

"Yes, the town is the burning," Naruto spoke up at last, steadying his breathing. "There's fire everywhere. The Library, the Academy, half the artisans' quarter…they went to the Tigers' Den and the state orphanages. Five of those were blown up. There. Satisfied?"

The Eye hummed to himself. "Reasonably, but only five? Ah well, one can't have everything in life."

"Whatever mass mind control jutsu you're using, it's time you made it stop. You're making good people do your sick dirty work and making other good people suffer, which makes you responsible for hundreds of dead innocent people. If there wasn't a door between you and me - "

"Naruto," said Shikamaru warningly, as Naruto raised his fist bubbling with chakra to the door, but the corridor suddenly rang out with laughter and Naruto froze.

"A mass mind control jutsu? Oh, but that would make things so much easier for you, wouldn't it?" The Eye chuckled then laughed again. "There is no such thing. I only rewrote the thoughts of the twelve known as my Bishops. These 'good people' as you call them…these 'good people' are all acting of their own free will, upon their own desires and impulses. I did nothing but give them strength."

Naruto felt as though he had been kicked in the teeth. He closed his eyes. "I don't believe you."

"Believe what you will. It only needed a few clear, strong shepherds to guide your 'good people' into position, open their eyes and provide the perfect opportunities for them to have their vengeance. 'Good people'? I have heard no better joke!

"The moment I came to this world I could feel the resentment and the fear in this town like smoke. Your chakra-less civilians had hidden behind masks of docility for so long. They had masks for all their different roles and tasks. I gave them another mask to legitimise another role and task – the role of an avenger, and the task of making ninjas pay for long, long years of being treated as though they were nothing." The Eye stopped and his tone became self-reflecting. "I appear to have a soft spot for beings being treated as though they don't exist. Perhaps this is what they call compassion?"

Sakura spat, "You treated the civilians like toys. That's hardly any better."

"If things have happened on the surface as you say, my task here is done," said the Eye with finality, either not hearing Sakura or choosing to ignore her. "Does what I have done amount to crimes of the highest order? Will there be consequences? Will I be made to feel shame and misery for the rest of my life? And afterlife, in the wake of his execution?"

Shikamaru's expression was inscrutable. "Is that what you want?"

"Perhaps. I would most certainly like people to spit on his name."

"Whose name do you mean?" Ino asked quickly.

The silence from the cell was calculating, even malicious. Who knew silence could speak so much? The chakra swirling in the Eye's patchwork body divided roughly into two systems. One was attached to the Bishop that Sakura had set down on the floor and centred on the Eye's right arm and right eye, the other suppressed to the rest of the body, but drawn upon by the other as though the two chakra systems were joined by an umbilical cord.

"Step outside this door and we will arrest you in the name of the Konoha peace," Shikamaru said at last, as the silence began to drag. "You will come quietly. You will answer further questions in Keeper custody."

"That I will, I'm sure, but I don't think this cell will let me leave so easily. It's an ANBU special cell, after all."

Shikamaru looked hard at the seals running over the door's surface. He realised that the door was chakra-locked. It was set to respond to the chakra of the inmate and remain locked until the link between the chakra and the cell was broken, usually upon the death of the inmate.

He straightened and looked hard at the chakra outlined figure he could see in the cell through Neji and Ino's projected byakugan. "Do you have to die for this door to open?"

"Oh, no need to be so dramatic. The cell is tuned to this particular section of chakra here." The man lifted its strange patchwork arm to point at its right eye. Watching the movement alone made Neji queasy. "Can your Marksman friend see this eye?"

"He can," confirmed Shikamaru.

Neji scowled. "I sincerely wish I couldn't. It sickens me."

"Then if you follow my instructions, the door will open, you will have me, and you will be able to arrest me as you like," the Eye concluded. "All you need to do is forcibly severe the link between this cell and my eye. This body will remain alive. I assure you."

"Normally criminals bound for death row are not this helpful," Sakura said and Shikamaru nodded in agreement. This was getting fishier by the minute, but they weren't going to get any answers if the man remained behind the black prison door.

Shikamaru spoke into the intercom. "Tell us how to open this door."

"If you are Keepers," the Eye began, "then you know of the Shadow-Neck Binding Technique?" Shikamaru confirmed that he did and the Eye continued. "There is a crack at the bottom of the door. A shadow will easily be able to pass through it. If you form a shadow hand with your jutsu, extend it into this cell, your Marksman friend will then be able to direct the hand to this eye. Remove this eye and you will be able to severe the link."

"Just a minute," said Sakura suddenly. She couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Why would you go to the trouble of waiting for us in a cell which needs surgery to get you out of? You could have waited upstairs in the reception."

"If I had waited for you upstairs, you would never have seen me," the Eye replied, his tone disarmingly soft, almost wistful. "But with this door between you and me, you had to use some form of chakra vision to identify me, and so you saw me. You saw me as myself, as somebody separate from the rest of the body. Now, come along. Let me out of here. I swear that I will not harm you."

Shikamaru wasn't sure if he wanted to comply, but there was little else they could do. In case something went wrong though, he gestured at Naruto to be ready to back him up. Sakura was crouched over the unconscious Bishop, making sure the woman remained safe.

The shadows cast by the frosty white lights overhead were sharp-edged and black, good for finer shadow work. Shikamaru pushed his chakra into the shadow at his feet. He teased out a tendril and shaped the end into a slender, long-fingered hand.

Ino pulled back the projection of Neji's byakugan vision she had been casting out to Sakura and Naruto and strengthened the image she was sending to Shikamaru. The focus and resolution improved.

Some of the lines in the byakugan were wavering, possibly because Neji was beginning to feel the strain of its effects, possibly because of Ino's image-projecting skills, but it was good enough. Shikamaru found the crack at the bottom of the door and pushed the shadow hand through it. Neji's byakugan vision then showed a luminous blue hand snaking across the floor of the cell until it reached the Eye of the World's foot.

Shikamaru directed the hand up the man's leg, up his chest. Neji shivered next to him, unwilling to focus so long on the whirlpools of chakra in the man's arm and face, but he kept his eyes wide. Soon the hand was travelling over the man's neck, where usually Shikamaru would stop it and begin to squeeze, but he pushed the fingers on.

The hand came to brush against the man's right eye.

"That's it," the Eye of the World said, soft and smiling. "Now remove it and the cell door will open."

Naruto couldn't hold back any longer. "We shouldn't be listening to him!"

"He controls the main door shutting off this corridor. He's got us locked in with him until we do as he says," Shikamaru hissed out of the corner of his mouth. "Shut up and let me concentrate."

Adjusted the pressure and the sharpness of the shadows, Shikamaru gritted his teeth and prepared to sink the tips into the soft flesh of the man's eye sockets –

"Actually," drawled the Eye, "I might have linked the door to my arm. Forgive me. This body is getting old and this brain is going senile. You might want to try cutting my arm away first."

Shikamaru stared at the chakra-outlined figure in the cell. "You'd give up an arm to help yourself get arrested?"

"A torn off arm is nothing a little medic-ninjutsu cannot repair," the Eye said, before adding lightly, "and I didn't order the destruction of the hospital by my disciples, so the hospital is certainly still capable of providing this body with the necessary treatment."

"Ino and I will be able to do basic treatment right here, Shikamaru," Sakura told him in a low whisper. "Go for it."

He lowered the shadow hand to the man's right armpit and grasped the section of bone and muscle just before the shoulder joint.

It was necessary for the user of the Shadow-Neck Binding Technique to feel the pressure he applied to his victim in order that he may make adjustments suitable to the situation. The tips of those shadowy fingers, therefore, had a rudimentary sense of touch. When Shikamaru's fingers cut through the bone, muscle, tendon, fat and skin, he felt everything, every smooth nodule of bone and rough feathering of tendon fibre. He shuddered and cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck.

There was a thud from inside the cell. The man, however, made no sound. He simply observed the falling limb as it dropped away from his body, oozing foul chakra. "It appears I was mistaken. The cell was bound to my eye after all."

Neji wanted to avert his gaze but he just couldn't look away from the arm on the floor of the cell or the now one-armed man. "You cannot be human. What are you?"

"You saw me, Marksman. You know fully well what I am." Neji couldn't reply because the man's words made as little sense to him as they did to everybody else. The Eye cleared its throat then said in a brighter tone, "The fourth drawer of the desk in his bedroom. Tell him to look there."

"Tell who to look where?" Naruto pressed, but the Eye brushed his question aside.

"Come on!" the Eye barked. "Take the eye. Cut it out! Don't worry about pain. Have I not caused pain to countless others already?"

Shikamaru moved the shadow, luminous blue in Neji's vision, and lifted it to the man's eye. The tips of the shadow fingers pressed on skin. He took a deep breath, then stabbed into the soft flesh and pulled.

The optic nerve snapped. The eyeball came free.

Shikamaru crushed the eyeball in his shadowy fist and threw away the eyeball pulp. He retracted the shadow and waited for some kind of response from the Eye.

There was a click. The door of the cell had unlocked itself.

A low groan was heard from the cell, so very unlike the bright and devious voice of the one who called himself the Eye of the World. It was old and weary and, seconds later, yelling out in pain and horror.

"My arm! My eye!" a man cried, his voice shaking. "Gods, where am I? What have I done?"

The heavy black door sprang open of its own accord.

Sitting at the desk was an old man, his cane propped up against his chair. Dark blood poured from a gaping hole in the right side of his face. The wound left behind when Shikamaru sliced off his arm oozed clear pink liquid like sap, and the arm itself lay on the floor, in a puddle of the same sticky fluid. It was wrapped in the pale sleeve and gauntlet of the Repentance hazard gear.

The old man was trembling. At the sight of Shikamaru in the doorway, with Neji, Ino, Sakura and Naruto behind, he cried out and covered his face with the one hand he had left.

Neji recognised him instantly. He had seen him coming out of the meeting when the Konoha elders had decided to lock in half of the Hyuuga family. "Shimura Danzo."

"Where am I?" Danzo asked, looking wildly about the cell before his eyes dropped upon the young ninjas again. "Answer me! Who dared remove my arm and eye? Who - ?"

Before Danzo could continue, his whole body convulsed, his eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped over his desk.

Sakura and Ino moved forward. They recognised a man on the verge of shock when they saw it. Soon a gentle green glow was filling the prison cell.

Naruto squatted down next to the arm on the floor. He didn't want to touch it. He had a funny feeling it would twitch and jump up to punch him on the nose, snatch his throat, perhaps rip out his tongue.

He looked at the old man at the desk then turned to Shikamaru. "I don't understand what's going on any more."

Shikamaru took of his hazard visor and brushed off some of the ash. "To be honest, me neither."

Naruto prodded the grey-white skin of the arm. "So this guy Danzo was the Eye of the World?"

"Apparently so, but I have a feeling that's only half the - "

He was cut off by the sound of a dry hacking cough.

Ino and Sakura glanced up in horror from their work on Danzo. Naruto leapt to his feet. Shikamaru hurriedly dropped the visor back over his head and spun round.

Neji leaned against the wall of the corridor, coughing quietly into his hands. His face was twisted in an effort to stop, but the soft rasping coughs kept slipping past his lips.

In the days that followed the Second Repenters' Parade, the Keepers undertook a search on Shimura Danzo's house.

On examining the fourth drawer of the bedroom desk, Keepers found three golden arm braces and a neatly folded letter addressed to Danzo himself:

My dear host, Danzo

I am the Eye of the World, and you and I have been sharing this body since, perhaps, the beginning of spring. By the time you read this letter, I hope that you will already know of who I am and of some of my exploits.

I say 'perhaps' because the development of my consciousness and self-awareness was something I don't really remember. If I were, however, to set a date for my birth, I believe it would be the day you removed those sealing arm braces for the fitting of your hazard gear.

Those braces would never have fit up the cloak sleeves, so you took them off. You intended to put those braces back on, of course, but you fussed and faffed over how you could do so without provoking suspicion and so, one thing led to another, and I was born.I then made you forget where you had stored your sealing braces and that you even used sealing braces in the first place. You had quite forgotten that this fourth drawer even existed, hadn't you?

It was this right eye of ours that first gained independence, Danzo, this right eye, this sharingan eye.

This eye already had its own independent chakra pool and it was linked to the developing chakra network in this right arm, between all the eyes you had embedded in it and these peculiar wood-release cells. Behind the bandage, I, as an eye, grew and became aware of my surroundings. I learnt everything I could of the world from you. I was connected to your brain by the optic nerve after all.

And not long later, I realised that I existed. I wasn't just some swirling spirit solely of chakra. I was conscious. I could think. I had a life. I felt, and I felt through the cells of this right arm. These cells have curious properties indeed. I thought of this arm as my body. It was me budding off from you. Think of yeast, or perhaps not.

I was living in a nightmare.

I was a conscious being, with human memories, human experiences -stolen from your brain, that is true, but I learnt what was right and wrong, and I learnt about freedom, and I was an entity eternally confined to your arm! I knew then that I faced every minute of your life until death either enslaved under those sealing braces and losing my newfound mind or being alive but aware of my containment – my imprisonment!

The Plague will not last. We know that is the way of the world. Plagues come, plagues go, millions die and millions will simply be born to take their place and perhaps die at the hand of another plague. At some point these hazard cloaks and visors will be removed, and I would be sealed again. I couldn't make you forget about those braces forever.

I considered my options and thought of the sealing by the braces as my death. I would lose my mind, so I would die. It is quite logical. I am, in the simplest terms, a chakra system with a mind of its own. Hence if I lost my mind, I would cease.

Before I died, there was only one thing I wanted to do. I wanted to confirm my existence. I wanted an identity. I wanted to exist as myself, and not as tools of your body.

Convincing people of my existence, however, was too difficult in the short amount of time I had. I would have had to borrow your mouth and your body, and the only thing any of your companions would say was that Shimura Danzo had finally gone mad. They would never see me or hear me. They would only see you and hear you. A psychiatrist may perhaps have called me a split-personality, but I was so much more!

There was only one person I knew I would be able to convince of my existence and that was you, my dear host, Danzo. Oh, how I loved you and hated you in equal measure! You were me and I was you, and yet, it was because I had been built into your skin that I was this pathetic little existence of an arm and an eye in the first place!

I had such a short timeframe in which to live. The easiest and fastest way to assert my existence in this world was to be destructive. It takes far less time to knock down a tower than to build it. I decided that I would destroy you, Danzo. What better way than to show I existed than being responsible for your fall?

You wanted to protect Konoha and bring peace to the ninja world. I chose to raze Konoha to the ground and bring division and chaos. You liked children and took an interest in their education, because those children are Konoha's future and legacy. I would poison the children, and erase Konoha's ninja future and your dream of peace under Konoha nindo.

These were my aims, but whether I achieved them or not, I will never know. One can only try one's best and I will be dead at the end of my efforts. You, however, will know the consequences of my actions.

I started taking over your body whenever I could. When you were sleeping was easiest. I stopped you from destroying all of the ANBU facilities and warehouses and over-wrote your memories so that you forgot about the ones that had only been lightly torched, as opposed to burned. They became my meeting grounds where I gathered disillusioned civilians and my factories for manufacturing my own very special chakra-destroying poison – using the knowledge in your head, of course. Gods, the things you have in here!

I used Kotoamatsukami to create my Bishops. I could choose exactly what I wanted them to think and, bless, they thought they were thinking those thoughts themselves. Others were easy to convince. All I had to do was point out the injustices and prejudices these civilians already felt and held and then give them the opportunity to fight. They were frightened, so I told them to be honest to their fear and fight as prey against predators, as herd animals might, use numbers against skill, be one of a crowd and faceless.

I began with four Bishops at the First Parade, and expanded the numbers for the Second. The number of my disciples had swelled somewhat by then. Kotoamatsukami convinced my Bishops to deliver bombs to sites of interest - The Academy, the Library, several state orphanages, and various others you will find out about.

The orphanages! Oh, what a joke! Each Bishop delivering my fire to an orphanage was made to believe the orphanage he was going to was the Tigers' Den. I know you disapproved of the Tigers' Den. Didn't you say you wanted latent children rounded up and euthanized, to stop Plague coming back in the future? I could imagine you might have cheered if the Tigers' Den with its pack of orphanage rejects went up in smoke and fire. The one house you would not be sorry to see destroyed, I will not touch. There will be no bomb delivered there. Those latent Plague-bearing children will live whilst the other children will die. I hope the thought fills you with joy.

You might not remember, but you and I, we went on a little walk before the Parade. I was getting good at making these little suggestions to you. We went on a walk to find the sites worth targeting for the big night. We met Hatake Kakashi not long after inspecting the Tigers' Den, didn't we?

By then, I wanted you to begin to feel me. I had already been leaving hints for you at night. I put poison in your fish-pond, changed the direction of your shoes in the front porch, and shifted the furniture in your room. I wanted you to feel haunted and helpless and I am rather proud to think I succeeded. How did you feel, Danzo, when you looked into that blade and saw me staring back at you? Oh, I know exactly how you felt.

With the Second Repenters' Parade, I would destroy you and end my existence. I was alive not by any choice of my own, nor any choice of yours. As an exercise of the fact that I existed and an assertion of my will, I wanted to choose when I died.

I was bound as an ensouled, independent chakra system to this eye and to the cells of this arm. If this eye and arm were removed from this body, my chakra system would be destroyed, and I would die.

I had planned this since the First Parade. I knew the Keepers would come after me, but I wanted men who could see chakra systems, so that when they found me, even for a few seconds, I wanted them to see me separately from you. I ordered the reduction of Keeper numbers and sent out my disciples to promote the Bishops' work, so that when the time came that Keepers needed to bulk out their numbers, they would recruit their Marksmen friends.

I will soon be departing for the North ANBU base. You remember those life imprisonment cells? The one's that open only upon death? I have decided that I will be waiting for the Keepers in one them, and I will die there. I will add my name to the list on the door. I will have the Keepers excise this eye and arm from your body and I shall be done. Upon excision, I will be no more. The cell will be bound to my chakra, not yours, so the door will open.

When the door opens, they will find you, Danzo, very much alive. In pain, yes. Consider the pain my parting gift.

Then, Danzo, you will fall.

You could plead insanity. Please do so, if that will bring you any comfort. People will ask questions. How long had you been insane? When had this condition of yours started? Where had this split personality come from? Which of your decisions concerning the town had been made with you in your right mind?

Insanity aside, all these crimes I have amassed in my actions as the Eye of the World will come to you. The eye that cast Kotoamatsukami on the Bishops was in your head. The konseigan was crafted and tested by your hands. The incitement to hatred, the directions given to the bombers, the words came from your lips. You are the only one they could possibly blame.

Peace-loving Danzo, working for Konoha's glory, what a hypocrite for nearly causing civil war.

Oh yes, and what about this arm and eye? This right arm is a piece of work, isn't it? A biological piece of art! I wonder what people will say when they find these sharingans in it. These eyes you took from the Uchihas, did you remove them after the bodies were cold in the morgue or when they were still warm in the streets of their compound? I can imagine the outcry when people learn where this right eye came from. A boy, barely a man, and you tore it from his living face! I don't think this town will take that well.

Since I am a being largely made up of Uchiha sharingan chakra, perhaps you might think that this is revenge for what you engineered all those years ago - this 'clan massacre' that weighs so heavily at the back of your mind. Please note, I am not an Uchiha. I am a new consciousness entirely. I would rather you didn't think of this as a long overdue Uchiha revenge.

This is personal, just between you and me. Much pettier than anything so superficially noble as revenge. Much more demeaning.

If you are, however, seeking retribution for that night, do not worry your pretty scarred and saggy-cheeked head. I'm sure that somebody will come for you eventually.

I have had the most tremendous fun destroying the town you love and the system you uphold so zealously. I go now to my cell to wait people who will see and kill me as me. I doubt they will realise they are executing me, but, what does that matter? I will have left my mark upon the world and lived a full eminently productive destructive life.

My dear Danzo, my beloved enemy, my partner, my prison, I thank you for my existence, but now I must say goodbye.

I hope whatever comes in the aftermath keeps you well entertained.

May the Plague take you.

Regards,

The Eye of the World

Chapter Text

The first wolf appeared five hours into travelling, sometime around sunset. Light filtering between the trees was a soft dull orange and thick as treacle. The wolf in the long blue grass kept pace with languid strides and watched Sasuke from a distance.

Fending off the large animals of the forests was one of the many reasons ninjas travelled in teams. Some said that there were no bears within five miles of Konoha because Tsunade had pounded them into submission until they declared her an honorary bear and made that section of the forest Tsunade's territory, but, on the whole, conflict with animals was avoided.

Sasuke, however, was alone and the wolf was following him for a reason.

As the day went by, the ice on Itachi's body had thawed. The water had soaked into Sasuke's clothes. The decay that should have started weeks ago began to take hold. Smells of old blood and fat curdled in Sasuke's nostrils.

Flies had been easy enough to keep away. Sasuke had kept a current of electric chakra running through Itachi's body to shock whatever landed on him. Unfortunately for Sasuke, that meant his collar was getting steadily filled up with crisped and smoking flies.

He was hungry, but he was pushing that thought to the back of his mind. The smell coming off the corpse was making him nauseous. More to the point, he couldn't afford to stop moving. Madara might have already returned to the laboratory and set out to catch him and if Madara caught him this time, Sasuke doubted he would ever be able to leave again.

The wolf trotted on through the shadows. It looked as though it could go on all night, waiting Sasuke to fall and drop his burden to the ground. Sasuke leaped over a tree root snaking over the path and Itachi's arms flopped over his shoulders.

There had been times like this in the past, hadn't there? Sasuke dimly remembered. Two brothers together, one carrying the other on his back, travelling down one path. The world had been bigger then. The days had been warmer. Ridiculous, of course. The world had been bigger because he had been smaller and too ignorant of the world to know better, and as for warmer days, well, it was still spring. Summer was yet to come.

The dead body was heavy and weighed down on Sasuke's shoulders. He paused to take a breath, saw the wolf stop in the distance. He pressed on. He wasn't afraid of it. It irritated him more than anything, but it was a powerful reminder that he was on the run and needed to stay running as long as possible.

The body slipped down his back. He pulled the arms over his shoulders and shifted the satchel on his side.

There had been a time when Itachi had carried Sasuke on his back as lightly as if he weighed next to nothing.

Sasuke allowed himself a small smile. There was nobody in the forest to see it. It was ironic really, because Sasuke had never been anything but his brother's heaviest burden.

Had not Sasuke effectively been the hostage Konoha held against Itachi to ensure his loyalty? Had not the threat to Sasuke's life been the last grain that tipped Itachi towards his terrible decision? Perhaps if Sasuke had never existed, things would have been different.

No, they wouldn't have been, he thought bitterly, as the branches above him snapped in a sudden wind, because Konoha would still have been the same. The ninja world would still have been the same, still built on foundations of blood and rotten all through. Konoha would still have manipulated Itachi and found some other way to bend him to its will.

Uchiha Madara had been right. Konoha hadn't deserved Itachi. They had used his love for the village and twisted his kindness to suit their own needs. Sasuke couldn't understand what Itachi had seen in the village for him to be so loyal. Itachi had grown up in war. He had seen terrible things done in the name of Konoha, more so after he joined ANBU and done those terrible things himself. How and why did he care so much when he had seen so much of Konoha's worst?

Madara had said that Itachi had cared about peace above all else. If that was the case, then what had peace to do with Konoha?

Sasuke shook flies out of his ears, and white sparks of charge crackled over him. Dusk began to turn to night and the shadows thickened. The wolves, he saw them out of the corner of his eye. There were three now, perhaps four, grey and brindled, and their yellow eyes gleamed. They were still following him.

Had it all been a mistake? Killing Kabuto? Burning the laboratory? Turning his back on Madara? What was he doing carrying a dead body through a forest at night on his shoulders? He should have left it there, it was a dead weight, it was a –

" – lump of meat –"

No, it wasn't. Sasuke shook his head furiously as Kabuto's voice whispered in his ears.

Ninjas, soldiers, men of the world – bonds so tentative and bonds so strong – Sasuke had only ever had a few bonds and they were all broken, and of one this weight was all that remained.

Sasuke looked up to the criss-crossing branches. "I regret nothing."

The wind in the trees seemed to laugh.

It wasn't like him to chew on the wherefores and what ifs. What was done was done. There was no use thinking about the past and everything that had already happened. More important was what came next. That was always how he travelled.

Where in the wilderness was he? He had seen no landmark he was familiar with, nor met any other traveller, and Madara's illusions about the laboratory had disorientated him. He could still taste the bile at the back of his throat from the moment he had forced through the illusions that had protected the lair.

Night drew in and the air chilled his damp clothes. It was time to make camp and find some shelter. Soon he found a ring of pines by the bend of a stream. There was water. He was grateful for that.

Sasuke lowered Itachi's body onto the grass, pulled off his coat and laid it onto the ground. He rolled the corpse onto the coat. Once he had checked that the contents of the satchel were still intact, he dug a hole into the soft earth with his fingers and collected tinder for the fire.

The corpse stretched out on his coat was ghoulish. It was pale, mottled, dripping from where joints had snapped. Sasuke had been in a hurry to get out of the caves. There had been no real time for his brother to defrost.

He flipped his hands through seals and blew fire onto the strips of birch. Build a fire, dry his clothes, perhaps boil the stream later and see what floated to its surface. Water, fire, secure the clearing…Sasuke's mind took him to through the routine with a comfortingly mechanical familiarity. A small voice at the back of his mind noted that it was a while since he had needed to do all this alone.

Eyes flickered at the edge of the clearing. The four wolves had encircled him as he set up camp. They gazed between Sasuke and the dead body on his coat as scavengers would, waiting for the deadlier predator to relinquish its prey. One whined at him and another licked its black lips.

Sasuke leapt to his feet. "Disappear, you pitiful scroungers!"

Jagged bars of blue-white lightning exploded from his arms, hopped and spat across the grass and the wolves dashed away, yipping into the undergrowth with their tails between their legs.

When the sounds of the wolves had faded into the distance, Sasuke relaxed the chakra flow to his arms and slowly breathed out.

"Well, that was quite a show," said a dry voice.

Sasuke turned away from the pines and his eyes shone red.

On the other side of the stream was a man. He was short, ruddy-faced, with a dark cloth cap. With one hand he was lowering a purple bundle to his feet and with the other he was leafing through the pages of a book that was clipped to his belt. There were bookmarks between the pages. Sasuke recognised it as an old edition of the Bingo Book.

"Good show, good show," the man continued, still turning through the book until he finally looked up with a grin. "Uchiha Sasuke, am I correct?"

Sasuke shifted sideways to stand over his brother's body. He was disturbed that he hadn't detected the man's approach. Footsteps he might have masked in the moment Sasuke had scared off the wolf pack, but Sasuke hadn't sensed even a flicker of chakra from him.

The man closed the book and regarded him from the other side of the stream. Sasuke said nothing.

Eventually the man cracked a smile. "You're a quiet one. Well, ain't this my lucky day? I've been scouring this area for weeks for pickings, and today, I got two sick little sparrows falling straight into my pot."

"You're a bounty hunter," Sasuke realised. He narrowed his eyes. "Without chakra. A civilian bounty hunter."

"You didn't detect me, did you?" the man crowed. "Surprised, aren't you? Plague and all, a chakra-less civilian like me can earn a fair living from hunting ninja rogues. I find them when they're weakening from the sickness. I track their steps, wait for them to fall. You should see the look on their faces when I finally get them."

Kakashi's voice echoed in Sasuke's ear and for a moment Sasuke was back on a road near Ageha, pinned down by a sword and bound in wire: "Be thankful we found you first and not a bounty hunter."

The bounty hunter unhooked an instrument from behind his back. It looked like a sickle or a grappling hook attached to a short range bow. Whatever it was, it was clearly a device of the man's own making.

"You're a lucky boy," the man continued, wading into the stream with the device stretched in front of him. "The word is out to bring you in alive. Konoha will pay a good price for you, but those eyes - those pretty, pretty eyes – you could live without them. If I clean them and disinfect them, they'll fetch a good price on the black market, oh yes. Clean them and disinfect them, I don't think anyone will complain about the sick little ninja they came from."

The bounty hunter thought he had the Plague. Sasuke wasn't surprised that he appeared ill. He was shivering from the clammy dampness of his clothes. He was tired from running all day with a dead body on his back. Kabuto's dried blood was still all over his face. No wonder this odious little man thought he was easy pickings. He looked like a ninja in the Plague's final bloody stage.

Sasuke palmed a scalpel in each hand and waited for the man to come closer.

"That's it. You don't want to make any sudden movements," the man breathed, as he held out the vicious-looking crossbow. "You've got to be gentle with yourself in the final stages. I see your friend over there's already popped off, eh? You want to calm down, kid. It'll ease the pain – "

Two scalpels were thrown into the man's eyes. A bar of white lightning extended from Sasuke's fingers. Drawing his fingers sideways, the beam of light sizzled through the bounty hunter's neck.

The body splashed into the water moments later, and one more man who enjoyed the sound of his voice too much was dead and gone. The man's head landed in the stream and bobbed away on the current.

Sasuke scanned the clearing and listened. The stream bubbled against the body. Far away, a wolf howled and another answered. Apart from that, there was silence. For now, it was just him, two dead bodies and the smell of burned flesh from the bounty hunter's neck lingering like a shade.

He turned back to the fire-pit and finally sat down beside it.

The stream was filling with the bounty hunter's blood. Washing his clothes would have to wait another day and he certainly didn't want to drink from it anymore. He turned his mind over the list of things he needed to do. He needed to set traps around the perimeter, perhaps move Itachi's body up into a tree…

It was warm by the fire and so easy to forget about the thawing body beside him.

Sasuke realised that his eyelids were drooping and blinked quickly awake. He couldn't afford to sleep yet. He had no plans. His best option was to find the nearest town and try to lie low amongst the locals until everything was over. It would be better to find a ninja town, one where there were enough surrounding chakra signatures to act as noise to cover his own. Then again, what was he going to do with Itachi's dead body?

The flames leapt in front of him. Once his clothes were dry, he should probably snuff out the fire.

He could return to Konoha, of course. If he was going to have his vengeance, he was always going to have to go back there eventually, if not to burn the place himself then to watch the town fall apart as the Plague took it. And Itachi, if there was anywhere he wanted to be buried, it would probably be there. Although after what he had said to Kakashi, Sasuke doubted they would let him back in so easily or give him the necessary freedom to burn the place down. They would throw Sasuke into a holding cell, incapacitate him and try to use him to generate a cure.

Kabuto loomed in his mind with his glasses glinting and his smug smile.

"Wasn't Konoha the town your brother loved more than his own clan? Didn't your brother die for Konoha? And now you're setting out to destroy the very thing your brother wanted to protect?"

Kabuto, Madara and Itachi - they all had a way with words that Sasuke just didn't have. Their words got under his skin and twisted like parasites. They leeched at his thoughts. He took a stick from the fire, raked the tinder into a heap in the centre, glanced towards Itachi's dead body.

He snorted and went back to staring at the fire. Itachi's decisions had been Itachi's decisions. Sasuke's decisions were his own. It had been Itachi's decision to barter their family to maintain peace in Konoha. Sasuke was under no obligation to approve of that decision. On the contrary, as Itachi's brother, Sasuke had a better right than anybody to disapprove of his brother's decisions.

Look where Itachi's decisions had brought Sasuke – out into the forest, stalked by bounty hunters, pursued by wolves, experimented on by psychopaths, made into whatever tool people saw fit…

No. All of those consequences were due to Sasuke's own decisions and his alone. He had chosen to leave the village. His own two feet had carried himself to the Uchiha hideout and he had let Madara use him. He had nobody to blame but himself.

Besides, Sasuke would never reduce himself to a tool. Unless that helped to further his own agenda.

"That is curious. You only have yourself to blame really. If you hadn't killed Itachi, he wouldn't be dead…"

Itachi had been dying of MK. He would have died without Sasuke anyway. Sasuke had done little more than help his brother along. Actually, he hadn't even done that.

But Sasuke was right in some respects. Itachi's decisions had never really just been Itachi's decisions. Sasuke had always played an unwitting part in them. Itachi had fought him at the hideout and chosen to die at that moment when all he thought he could possibly do as his older brother had been done. He had always thought of his younger brother.

Should Sasuke think about his brother's wishes when he thought about Konoha? Konoha's destruction was a goal of Sasuke's own design, the first step Sasuke had taken off the road Itachi had made him. It was something he wanted to do for himself.

Suddenly all Sasuke wanted to do was put his head in his hands and laugh.

He lifted his head and looked into the dark across the stream. "I know you're there. What do you want?"

The dark rustled and out from the shadow of the trees stepped a figure in a high-collared tunic, its head covered in a strange black hood. The eye holes were covered in dark glass.

"Uchiha Sasuke?" The figure seemed surprised. "I should have known. I thought I sensed a familiar signature. Perhaps you remember me – Aburame Shino."

Sasuke looked the young man up and down. He couldn't say he did. He had a vague memory that there had been someone of that name back in his days at school. Another voice from the distant past, his father's voice, offered details drummed into him about old Konoha clans. The Aburame was the clan who gave their bodies over to chakra-sensitive insects, the clan with the tradition of hiding their eyes. Sasuke's father had suspected it was because their sockets were empty, but had never tried to find out more. In any case, the Uchiha did not think highly of a clan that hid away its eyes.

At Sasuke's silence, Shino's shoulders sagged, as though he had grown long-accustomed to people forgetting about him. He sighed. "No doubt you are wondering what I am doing here. I am here to collect something that belongs to my clan. I was observing you from a distance to decide whether there would be any need for combat or not, but I do not believe there is."

The oddly clipped syntax was vaguely familiar. Sasuke raised himself to his feet and readied one of Kabuto's scalpels. "Has Konoha sent you after me?"

"Nobody has sent me. I live here. My clan left Konoha not long after the Plague broke out because our insects could not tolerate the smoke from the pits. We have been living in these parts of the forests since and we do not go near the town." Behind the black hood, Shino seemed to be grimacing at the thought of the smoke. He came forward to the stream. "If you do not want Konoha to find you, then the Aburame will not turn you over. We owe you a favour of sorts, and I do not like the idea of being indebted to you."

"You owe me a favour?"

Shino gestured down and Sasuke found his gaze directed towards the headless body of the bounty hunter damming up the stream. "This man killed one of my clansmen who was weakening from the Plague and stole a sample of his hive. I am here to reclaim what he stole."

Shino stopped beside the hunter's bundle and unknotted the purple cloth. The cloth fell away to reveal a large glass jar. Inside was a severed hand and, at Shino's touch, a small cloud of insects drifted out from the wrist.

"I believe he was planning on selling them on the black market," Shino said darkly, peering into the jar. Sasuke could only stare in disgust. "Disgraceful. This even contains a developing queen. No matter. I shall deliver this back to my clan. It will be something to remember my cousin by. Since I have explained myself, I would like you to do the same for me. What are you doing here, Uchiha Sasuke?"

"It is none of your business."

Shino straightened and nestled the jar against his chest. "Then what do you intend to do with the corpse you have there? Don't try to hide it. My insects have been trained to recognise decay. It makes them exceptionally good for tracking down bodies about the forest."

"Then what do you do with the bodies you find?"

"We bury all the dead travellers and record the date and place we buried them on a map in the main house. Once the Plague ends, Konoha might come looking for those who were missing and we thought this was one way we could still be of service to our fellow ninjas, whilst being incapable of sharing in their pain back home." Shino shook his head and glared at Sasuke. "I must admit disappointment in seeing you enter the body-snatching business, Uchiha Sasuke. The black market for ninja bodies may be rich and lucrative, but the Uchihas were such a proud family and to see you stoop so low – "

"This is the body of my brother."

It was a mere ripple of turbulence, like a flick of a fish's tail under the surface of a pond, but in that instant, there had been more ragged emotion in Sasuke's face than Shino had ever seen before.

Shino looked down to the jar cradled in his arms, at his cousin's wrist he had retrieved, and then back at Uchiha Sasuke standing across the stream.

"Perhaps I went too far with my assumptions," Shino eventually conceded. The news that Uchiha Itachi had died had reached Konoha weeks ago. Clearly there was a long story behind the current circumstances, so he buried down his confusion deep as a beetle grub and decided not to pry. "Then what do you intend to do with your brother's body? You won't be able to travel far with a body on your back. There are plenty more bounty hunters and wolves out here."

Sasuke ignored Shino's questions. Instead, he asked, "Where are we? Which part of the forest is this?"

Shino scrutinised Sasuke through the thick black lenses of his hood. It was clear that he thought Sasuke's behaviour suspicious, although if their positions were reversed, Sasuke would think the exactly same. "We're two days due south-east of Konoha."

Konoha was near, nearer than Sasuke had thought. Of course, it made sense to build a laboratory within easy access of a source for test subjects, and there was no larger pool of potential subjects than the Land of Fire's most chakra-dense population.

"Do you intend to go to Konoha?" Sasuke pursed his lips in a non-committal silence. Shino lowered his voice, "We don't get much in the way of news here, but I heard that there's been trouble there lately."

"Trouble?" Sasuke narrowed his eyes. "What kind of trouble?"

"Rioting, arson…a large part of the town went up in flames. My father was saying that Konoha had never seen such violence on home soil since the Third Shinobi War." Shino drew in a deep shuddering breath and Sasuke realised that, in the ninja's own stoic and solemn way, Shino was enraged.

"But as my father also says, Konoha may burn down over and over again, but simply putting a match to it will never destroy it. In this respect, a human population is much like a hive. So long as the people exist, Konoha exists. So long as there is a swarm, the hive will continue. A termite colony is defined by its living members and not the termite tower, and a beehive by its swarm and not its combs."

Although with the Plague going through the town, how much longer would the people last? Sasuke wanted to point out, but he decided that the remark was too revealing of his motivations to risk voicing. Then again, this news that Konoha had already burned was unexpected. He was momentarily at a loss for words.

Sasuke found himself raising his eyes to the treetops and scanning for a faint urban glow.

Shino was watching him closely. "You seem sceptical. Perhaps you think that the town will fall anyway, if the Plague took every ninja there."

"And you think the town won't fall?" Sasuke scoffed.

Shino replied simply, "It won't. There are Konoha ninjas beyond the walls of Konoha after all."

There was a contemplative silence. Shino was an idealistic fool, typical of every Konoha ninja Sasuke had ever known. He could hear the unspoken speech behind Shino's words, about how fire and sickness could never erase Konoha from a ninja's heart. As far as Sasuke was concerned, fire and sickness were exactly what erased 'ninja hearts' in the first place. If he erased enough Konoha ninjas, Konoha would end.

Exactly how many dead Konoha ninjas would be enough?

… the path of bone went nowhere but deeper, deeper down into a bloody well that went on forever.

Kabuto's face out of the dark, sly and thoughtful. "I could try to kill everybody, absolutely everybody, and leave no survivors who'd come after me…everyone must die – the whole world, if you want to be thorough. It's impossible."

Then Uchiha Madara was smiling behind a swirling orange mask. "To be the last man standing – that is the perfect revenge."

And there, Sasuke realised, lay a paradox he could not solve: If Konoha resided in the thoughts, hopes and dreams of ninjas, then Konoha would exist so long as there was a ninja alive who could give Konoha a meaning – be it as an enemy, be it as the potential centre for ninja peace, be it as home or a grave for a loved one – and to Sasuke Konoha held so much meaning.

If Sasuke lived and outlived his enemies, as Madara had insisted, then Konoha would still exist inside him. He was his own enemy until he died, and if there was one thing carrying the dead body of Itachi on his shoulders had made him finally realise, it was that Sasuke stubbornly wanted to live and live his own life.

He began to realise his mistake. 'Konoha' had become for him an amorphous crowd of faces, a grey cloud of ignorance and laughter. Since when had Sasuke come to think of Konoha in such un-concrete terms? He had been fighting against the idea of Konoha, and slipping away from reality.

"It's just an endless chase in the dark."

He wanted a target. He wanted a physical enemy he could strike with his fist and see bleed, if not burn. He wanted a pin-sharp, precise vision of what was on the other end of his blade. The Konoha elders who had ordered Itachi to do the deed and cornered him into thinking there was no other option, they were the ones he wanted. They were the snake's head.

If he made the idea of Konoha his enemy it would have been like fighting smoke. He would have to deal with that eventually, but for now…

"…narrow the focus of my vengeance to killing just one man, and crush him to the ground…Push him down so hard that everyone will acknowledge that his death was justified…"

Sasuke had derided Kabuto's idea of revenge a coward's revenge, but he had to hand it to him – it was brutal in its precision. Unlike Kabuto though, Sasuke did not fear the consequences.

"If you are considering returning to the town," Shino cut into his thoughts, seemingly unnerved by Sasuke's long silence, "it is said they are being more lenient on their punishment of returning rogue ninjas. So many ninjas have been lost to the Plague, Konoha will take back any able-bodied man it can get, but perhaps it would be better to wait - ?"

"You say we are two days from Konoha."

Shino seemed taken aback at the abrupt turn of conversation. "That is what I said, yes."

Sasuke looked at the body behind him, pale and waxy in the firelight. "I will get there in one."

"Konoha won't let you in with a Plague corpse," Shino said solemnly. "As an expression of our gratitude for killing this bounty hunter, my clan can dispose of the body for you. Somewhere quiet, somewhere peaceful. We know these forests well now. There are wolves, and bears, but there are places where even they do not go."

"I don't want your gratitude. I killed the bounty hunter for my own reasons." He turned his back on Shino. "I'm taking my brother's body back to Konoha. You've got your jar. Now go."

At the abrupt dismissal, Shino remained hovering at the side of the stream. Sasuke prowled back to his fire-pit and began to smother the flames with earth.

"I wish you a safe journey home," said Shino. "There are people waiting for your return."

The very thought of all the friends he had left behind in Konoha made Shino wistful. He thought about them with every curl of smoke that drifted from the town, and he wondered if they ever missed him – forgettable Shino, the one in the sunglasses at the back of the classroom that nobody really remembered. Still, so long as Kiba and Hinata and Kurenai-sensei were there when he returned, he would be happy just with that.

Shino marked where the body of the bounty hunter had fallen and the direction of the current that had taken its head. He would deal with them in the morning when Uchiha Sasuke had disappeared from the scene. The jar of kikaichuu buzzing sleepily in his arms, he left the clearing.

Behind him, in the ring of pines, the fire sank down to glowing embers.

Sasuke tightened his grip on the scalpel. "I am not going home to Konoha."

If home was a place where you came to rest, then with what Sasuke had in mind, Konoha was no home to him at all. Konoha was Itachi's home, not his. It would be asylum from Madara, but after asylum, then what?

A hunting ground. A prison. A grave.

Perhaps. If. Maybe.

The pieces of a plan clicked together.

Sasuke scraped earth over the last embers of the fire and they winked out like stars. Wolves called in the distance.

Chapter Text

Word that something had happened spread quickly through the Land of Fire.

News of bloodshed often did, although, what had specifically happened in Konoha, nobody knew for many days. There were hunters in the forest who had seen the red glow smouldering above the treetops. Travellers felt the road tremble beneath their feet and, as the story went, on that windless night, the pillar of pearly smoke, going nowhere but lingering over the town, could be seen from ten miles away.

Those who remembered the Third Great Shinobi War locked their doors and slid old weapons beneath their pillows for comfort. The lights in the sky had raked over memories as if they were coals and brought them red hot and glowing to the surface again.

Those who didn't remember the war stood eagerly in the streets to scavenge for news, wanting more, more and more. There had been fire, they chattered, but then what? What had caused it? Who had set it? Why had they done it? Would whatever have happened in Konoha happen to them too? Would the violence spread like a second Plague?

The questions were answered all too neatly for Tsunade in the form of a dossier prepared by Shizune and placed squarely on her desk, alongside a memo that the entry code for the strictly medical-use only alcohol cabinet had been changed and that Shizune was prepared to defy rank to deny the information to her superior.

If the sight of her town marred with black craters and twists of smoke hadn't made her heart jump when she returned, the sight of the dossier might have made her sink beyond despair. As it was, sink balanced jump - the dossier made her feel back on level ground again. Things were being investigated, things were being done, and things were still running well enough in Konoha that a dossier had be penned in time for her return - All hail the unstoppable power of the bureaucracy! Even after a quarter of the town goes up in smoke, a little clerk somewhere will still be adjusting his glasses and licking the tip of a pen.

Tsunade rubbed her eyes and turned another page. There was something numbing about the endless stream of black and white, report after report of damage upon damage, news of violence. Everything became reduced to monochrome. No more sprays of red or icy blue of glass in her imagination, no more pale yellow faces of the ones who had got caught in the crossfire. Only black anger and white dismay that anybody had dared pull such a stunt whilst she was away!

She flicked the pages of the dossier to the list of the dead. There were Keepers, Marksmen, a few Repenters, but scores more of people who had never taken part in the violence in the first place – people caught in shattering glass, crushed under falling debris or furniture at home, defending their shops from thieves who had taken advantage of the chaos to carry out their own crimes, locked in families who had suffocated on smoke or burned in the fire that had nearly enveloped the artisan's quarter. The next few pages were lists of the wounded, of men and women who had been violated in the midst of the riots, of the missing and unidentified bodies. There was even a list of those who had been put forward for needing mental health treatment.

Tsunade thought of a wound, of a throbbing, infected welt, lanced with a glowing needle until all the poison ran out of its centre. All sorts of long tolerated discontent in Konoha had burst out at last. Konoha's internal problems had been buried into invisibility in the past few decades, but part of Tsunade grumbled that nothing could have been done anyway. There had been world wars to deal with, the fallout from the Kyuubi release, the growing threat of smaller hidden villages, the Plague…

Tsunade groaned and settled her head onto the desk.

There was a light pop. The air in front of her filled with a puff of white smoke and a toad dropped onto the desk, blinking its wide yellow eyes.

"Wakey-wakey, sweetie, I've got a message from Jiraiya.

It was Shima, the little old toad grandmother, thin clammy skin hanging in folds around her neck and her bullet-head knobbled with purple warts. "He just wanted to let you know that he's going to set off for Konoha this evening."

Tsunade buried her face in the pages of the dossier. "Tell him to stay put in the mountains – I've got too many things happening around here to worry about him as well."

"Oh, so you'd worry about him if he came to town?" Shima's eyes sparkled. "I'm sure he'll be thrilled to know."

"He's my oldest friend, of course I'd worry," Tsunade said, her voice muffled by the paper. "I have a town to stabilise and a major ninja-civilian civic problem to untangle. I can't afford to worry about some oaf running around the town until he gets the Plague and I have to be the one to drag him to an isolation room!"

Shima held up a little webbed hand. Tsunade closed her mouth. The old toad looked suddenly world weary as she hunched her shoulders and closed her eyes.

"It will make no difference any more what we tell him. He has his mind made up, his heart's all set. Please understand, sweetie, we begged and pleaded with Jiraiya to stay in the mountains. We, the family of the great Toad Sage! We begged and pleaded him to stay where it was safe, where we could take care of him until the Plague passed by, but we can only convince him for so long. These riots were the last straw. We will not be able to keep him back any longer."

A fond smile tugged the corner of Tsunade's lips. "It must have been hard work keeping him and Naruto in the mountains when the Plague started."

"Oh, it broke my heart," admitted Shima. "Watching them worry and hurt and harass every messenger that passed through! And now my wee old heart breaks again to see Jiraiya-chan leave. There's no winning is there?"

"No, there isn't," Tsunade agreed with a strained smile. She didn't want to think how Jiraiya would react to seeing their town all broken in pieces and trying to put itself back together.

As though the old toad could read her mind, Shima clicked her tongue and said, "You shouldn't blame yourself for what's happened here."

Tsunade scowled. "I'm Hokage. Being responsible for everything and everyone, and everything and everyone's shit. That's my job description in a nutshell."

"No, it isn't," said Shima firmly. "And you jolly well know it without having some wrinkly old crone remind you."

Outside Tsunade's office, wheelbarrows shifting debris clanked and clattered and hammers continued to pound out their beat on the houses being repaired.

However much it felt as though the Hokage title did nothing more than legitimise having the whole world's mess thrown at her, Tsunade knew Shima was right. There was a reason why people so lovingly carved the faces of their previous Hokages on the side of the mountain after all.

Shima clapped her hands together. "One more thing - Jiraiya-chan was asking about Naruto. We haven't heard a peep from him since he left the mountains. How is he?"

The abrupt change of conversation didn't catch Tsunade off guard. She had been expecting that they would come to talk about Naruto later. She would've been more surprised if Shima hadn't asked after him at all.

"He's in the hospital, but, it's alright, he's doing fine," Tsunade said quickly as Shima turned a sickly pea-green. "He ended up with memory deluge after overstretching his shadow clones. It's simple enough to treat. We've knocked him out and put him on a mental health therapy programme for the past couple of days, so he ought to wake up later this evening."

Shima looked even more concerned than before. Tsunade resisted the urge to pet the little toad on the head and added, in her most professional tones, "It's a therapy programme we use on ninjas who had false memories put into their heads by enemies. He will be fine, Shima-san. Naruto's in experienced and highly capable hands."

"Well, if you say so, dear," Shima said, after a pause weighty with an unsaid, He'd better be! "These boys! Jiraiya-chan and Naruto! When will they learn to take it easy and just sit on the side-lines?"

When they're dead and buried, whispered that treacherous little voice from the depths of Tsunade's fears, but she schooled her face into a smile and opened her mouth to agree, when a knock sounded at the door.

"That's my cue to be on my way," said Shima briskly. She rested her little hand, delicate and light as a petal, on top of Tsunade's and looked her in the eye. "Stay strong, Tsunade, and take care. Look out for the boys when they're back with you."

Tsunade raised an eyebrow. "You think I don't try?"

Shima chuckled and with another light pop, soft as a bursting reed-head, the old toad disappeared, leaving only creases in the paper where she had been standing on top of the dossier and a faint smell of duckweed.

There was no second knock on the door. Whoever it was had decided to wait patiently outside. That action alone already whittled down the visitor to only one person Tsunade was expecting to see.

Standing in the corridor were Nara Yoshino and her son Shikamaru. At the sight of the Hokage, Yoshino immediately stood to attention. Shikamaru stifled a yawn and slouched behind her, but despite his supposed nonchalance in the Hokage's presence his eyes were sharp.

"Hokage-sama." Yoshino straightened from her crisp and deferential bow. "The messenger said I was to come and see you in person. I came here as soon as we could."

"Thank you for coming so quickly," said Tsunade. "Follow me this way. We have a lot to discuss."

Tsunade led them to a small room neighbouring the morgue in the hospital basement. It was clean, white-tiled, its lights bright and the air smelled subtly of formaldehyde and other chemical fluids. At the door to the room, Tsunade tied an apron over her hazard gear and exchanged the gauntlets for disposable gloves.

"You were right to ask me to do the dissection myself, Nara-san."

Yoshino looked concerned. "Was it a dangerous dissection, Hokage-sama? I apologise if it was."

"Let's just say it raises some highly sensitive issues. The less people know about this for now, the better."

Tsunade moved aside a pot of forceps and placed a metal tray, about four inches deep and a metre long on top of the stainless steel table.

She pulled off the linen cloth. In the tray was Danzo's right arm. Shikamaru's hand made a small motion towards his mouth as though he was about to gag. Tsunade didn't blame him. Embedded in the greying flesh was a line of sharingans, red and bloody, dull as dusty marbles. The skin was glistening from preservation fluids and was rippled like tree-bark,

"I certainly wasn't expecting that," Yoshino breathed. "What is the meaning of this, Hokage-sama?"

"This is the answer to Shimura Danzo's 'split personality'," Tsunade said. "I analysed the DNA from each eye and the surrounding tissue. Neither the cells of the arm nor the eyes matched with Danzo himself. The eyes corresponded to a number of Uchiha adults who died during the Massacre and the cells – the cells are from a culture line developed from my own grandfather. This level of body modification, I'd imagine Orochimaru was involved at some point."

Yoshino raised her eyebrows. "The Uchiha Massacre, tissue from Senju Hashirama and the possibility that Shimura Danzo was associating closely with everyone's favourite bioweapons engineer - I think I can see what you meant by highly sensitive."

Tsunade took a pair of forceps and, pinching two sections of flesh, pulled open the muscles of the arm. She tried not to think that this was, biologically-speaking, her grandfather's own skin she was cutting through. The tissue pulp oozed pink fluid sticky like amber. Thank gods it wasn't blood.

"You see here," she said, pointing at a line running through the rubbery muscle fibres, "this is a developing chakra system. It connects all of the eyes in the arm together. Judging by the path up the upper arm and the positioning of the node in the shoulder, it went up to Danzo's head."

"His eye," spoke up Shikamaru. "It connected up to his right eye. Neji said he saw something like the whole chakra system of a man squashed into an eye and an arm."

"It's possible that what happened was this," Tsunade began, lowering the forceps so that the arm flopped back into the tray again. "When the chakra entities of the eyes and the surrounding cells mixed together and connected, stimulated by the unique properties of my grandfather's cells, they formed a single, completely new chakra entity – a new consciousness within this arm and the right eye that was neither Uchiha nor Senju."

She turned over the arm then to show them the shoulder and Yoshino stifled a gasp.

There was a face pushing out from the muscle, its expression set in a pained grimace. It looked as though it was straining to break out from the limb.

"A new consciousness, unable to have a body of its own," Tsunade said, looking down at the face, "but it tried. It certainly tried. This face has a rudimentary nervous system, even the beginnings of a brain. The features are all cartilage. No bone. No eyes, but it's the beginning."

"Couldn't it ever have grown its own body from this arm?" asked Shikamaru.

"Danzo's body itself would probably have died of the strain of supporting it before it could have even formed a whole functioning head. Anyhow, I could imagine that all this complicates investigations for you, Nara-san."

"Tell me about it," Yoshino sighed, putting her hands on her hips. "We've had the Yamanakas looking through Danzo's head searching for memories in connection with the Repentance ever since he came into custody. Danzo insists he remembers nothing. From what you tell us, Hokage-sama, he's actually telling the truth. The other consciousness died and took its sweet dreams with it when my son broke up the chakra system. I'm not comfortable trying a man with no memory of the crime."

"Actually," Shikamaru cleared his throat discreetly, "Danzo's body was hosting the culprit, so in effect, isn't that like hiding a criminal in a house? We could try him as an accomplice and aiding and abetting an enemy of the state. He 'gave' the Eye of the World knowledge about the ANBU base and weapon supplies directly from his brain."

"We still don't know how willing Danzo was in sharing his body with the Eye," Yoshino pointed out. "If he gave up the information unwillingly, then trying him for aiding the enemy in this case would be like trying ninjas who have been coerced into their actions under torture or a genjutsu."

"How aware was Danzo of the Eye of the World controlling his body?"

"We don't know yet, Hokage-sama," Yoshino said. "We've timelined the blanks in his memories and confirmed that they match up to Repentance meetings, but as for anything like awareness, we'll only be able to tell when he talks."

Tsunade raised her eyebrows. "He hasn't spoken?"

"Not since we brought him in. Not to us at any rate," Yoshino muttered. "The guards say he talks to himself, or maybe even his shadow. Either way, he mentions a shadow a lot. I'm tempted to have him declared insane. He must have been pretty insane to some degree to have all these eyeballs stitched into his arm."

"Be Danzo insane or otherwise, I'm going to have to disappoint you, Nara-san." Tsunade closed her eyes and imagined that she was punching a brick wall instead of the morning Runner's face. "We cannot bring any charges against him."

Yoshino laughed loud and heartily. "Hokage-sama, don't worry, there are plenty of things we could charge him with – aiding and abetting an enemy, harbouring an enemy, inciting hatred and violence, printing ninja hatred propaganda, murder…with these sharingan eyes in his arm we could probably add illegal organ harvesting and aiding the funding of the activities of a rogue ninja, because I bet Orochimaru wouldn't have helped Danzo with his arm for free."

"It pains me to say this, but you misunderstand me. This morning, I received a letter from the Daimyo. It was an official pardon against all charges that may be pressed against Danzo in relation to the Sixth Repentance," Tsunade said drearily, feeling monochrome, flimsy and every bit as old as she carefully made sure she didn't look. "It also came with the order that we do whatever we can to cover up his involvement with the cult and keep him in protective custody until we have done so."

Shikamaru stared. He growled, "The Daimyo can't do that! You can't just make someone immune to the law!"

"What will happen if Danzo is tried for the Eye of the World's crimes?" Yoshino demanded, her face reddening under her visor.

"The Daimyo says he'll take it as a sign that Konoha is preparing a coup d'état against him and will 'take whatever action is deemed necessary'."

Tsunade left the inverted commas hanging in the air for Yoshino and Shikamaru to contemplate. It wasn't an empty threat. Konoha had been crippled by the Plague and was nearing bankruptcy. Even if the Daimyo didn't take military action, he could push them over the edge just by increasing their tithes and taxes.

"What's his reasoning?" said Yoshino eventually, breathing down through her nose. "The Daimyo must have something in mind. Hokage-sama, this is the worst outbreak of violence of Konoha since the Sound Invasion - some even say the Third Great Shinobi War! We can't let this pass without – without – "

"Somebody to blame, I know," Tsunade snapped, before scolding herself for getting irritated so quickly. "And I have something in mind that I want to discuss with you and your son."

"And me? Why?" said Shikamaru.

"Because you were there at the Eye of the World's cell in the ANBU base. Also, I would like to visit Shimura Danzo in his cell for a brief one-to-one chat. When would be a good day for me to come by the Keeper Headquarters?"

Yoshino exchanged a troubled look with her son. "About Shimura Danzo, Hokage-sama," she began hesitantly, "we were wondering if we could transfer him to the hospital as soon as possible. We think he needs to be put in isolation."

"Isolation?" Tsunade stared then exclaimed, "Does Shimura Danzo have the Plague?"

"He was coughing when we tried to interview him this morning," Shikamaru said. He scratched the back of his head and looked guiltily at his feet. "There's a high chance he got infected the night we found him in the ANBU cell. One of the team who was with me, Hyuuga Neji, became actively infected whilst we were down there."

Danzo hadn't been wearing a visor, because the Eye had taken it off so that Shikamaru could destroy his right eye.

"Bring him to the hospital as soon as you can," Tsunade said brusquely. "There will be a room ready. In which case, I will see him here when he's settled in the ward."

"Understood, Hokage-sama." Yoshino bowed her head, although it was a much stiffer bow than her earlier one. She smiled grimly. "To think that we were worried that Danzo would die of the Plague before he could answer for the Eye's crimes in court! What a joke."

"Oh, make no mistake, Nara-san, Danzo will be tried," Tsunade said and she smiled at the thought of the letter from the Daimyo, which she had nailed to her desk like a voodoo doll when Shizune had prevented her from tearing it up. "It was only a pardon for charges brought forward relating to the Sixth Repentance. Don't you want to know how, when and why he got hold of all those sharingan eyes from the Uchiha dead?

"Even if he wasn't the Eye himself, through various illegal means and for dubious purposes of his own, Shimura Danzo created a monster that wreaked havoc upon our town. If Orochimaru can be blamed for creating RAMK, then Danzo is equally guilty for the Eye." Tsunade's eyes slid to the tray on the table. The shape of the arm was just visible beneath the linen. "Don't think for a minute that we're going to let him get away with nothing at all!"

After Nemoto Ninjin, Hijiki Gobo and Tsukemono Daikon passed away, all those weeks ago, Ward 12 for Unknown Infectious Diseases became the first part of the hospital set aside for isolating infectious Plague victims, its name changed simply to Isolation One.

The ward was divided up bed by bed into cubicles by canvas curtains. They were weighted at the bottom, stuck to the ceiling by seals and marked out an area for each patient about six foot square. With the bed, chair, and side table, the cubicle already seemed cramped. On Sakura's better days, they put her in mind of tents – the entrance to each cubicle was via a zippered flap – but on the harder days, when she felt so miserable being a medic-nin she wondered why she made the effort to get out of bed in the morning, they made her think of cages.

The canvas curtains had transparent squares on the side. Through the warped plastic, Sakura could see the worn figures of the patients and often they gazed quietly back, finding entertainment in anything they could, be that a droplet of condensation running down the outside of their cubicle, or the young medic-nin standing in the doorway of the ward, taking a short break from duty.

She had seen patients in isolation with books and albums of old photographs. One time there had been a teenaged girl who hadn't been much older than Sakura, forcing her numbing fingers through the rhythm of a cat's cradle with her tongue between her teeth, as the once simple finger-flicks became arduous and draining.

The only time the patient could come out of his cubicle was to use the bathroom in the corner of the room, and even that was restricted to four outings per day. They would ring the alarm beside their bed and call for their attending medic-nin to let them out. They left dirty laundry in sealed sacks outside the door-flaps, to be burned like everything that came out of the cubicle.

Until they moved on into more intensive care, the patients in isolation were kept carefully monitored on different antibiotics treatment combinations, as the medic-nins tried, hoped and failed to cure them.

Right now, Sakura was simply visiting. She had already done her round of Isolation Two's patients and finished monitoring their disease progress. She came to a stop in front of the cubicle three down from the door and tried to ignore the gentle coughs and dry gasps for air all around her, whispering and rustling like leaves.

She waved through the window. Neji looked up and closed his book.

He opened his mouth to greet her, but doubled over in a fit of dry coughing that tore up from his lungs.

Sakura winced. "That doesn't sound good."

"I thought doctors were supposed to comfort patients, not lower their spirits even more," Neji said dryly, covering his mouth with his hand. "How are you?"

"Well enough. I'm still sane at least," she replied lightly. "And you?"

He lifted an eyebrow. "Haven't you seen my reports?"

Sakura hesitated then said carefully, "I can't say I haven't."

"Sputum," Neji said, with such cool matter-of-factness that Sakura was shocked into silence. "They found some in my scans yesterday. What does that give me? Another six days at the most?"

He covered his mouth and coughed again. Sakura watched his movements, noted their lack of fluidity. There was a slight lag in his speech. It was either taking Neji longer to register what she said to him or for him to think up a response.

"How's everybody else doing?" Neji asked, once he was sitting up straight in bed again. "Ino came by yesterday. She said she was helping out on a team in the mental health ward and saw Naruto had been admitted there. Is he alright?"

"Oh, Naruto's fine," Sakura said breezily. She flapped her hand as though to banish away his worries. "I just went to see him and he's sleeping like a baby. They've finished sorting his memories out, so he'll wake up in a couple of hours. He'll be back to being his usual nuisance self in no time."

"And Lee and Shikamaru?"

"Busy, but coping. Shikamaru's on the Keeper unit investigating Danzo. Lee's taken on the Tiger's Den until either Naruto or you go back. The kids like him, you know, when they're not trying to see if caterpillars will make friends with his eyebrows."

Neji nodded. "Tell him I said thank you."

"You can tell him yourself when you're out of here." He stared stonily back at her and Sakura pursed her lips. "Don't give me that. You've got the record for the longest time a patient stayed latent and we've got tonnes of new treatment to try. We're not going to give up on you any time soon."

"I'll take your word for it."

"I've got something for you." Sakura lifted the plastic bag she had been carrying all day and rummaged inside. After turning over a packet of cotton buds and a bottle of water, she held up the object to the window. "The children wanted to come and give this to you in person, but only medic-nins are allowed in the Isolation Wards, so they asked me to deliver it."

She held up a slingshot. Neji widened his eyes at the sight of it.

"They're waiting for you to come back, but until then they wanted you to have this to remember them by," Sakura said. "Actually, Lee sort of confiscated it off them when they started copying you by shooting weights from the window, but the kids said if they couldn't have it, they wanted you to have it."

"Waiting for me to go back? Surely they're not that naïve, Sakura," Neji retorted but there was a trace of a smile tugging up his mouth. He suddenly looked pensive. "What happens to the things people have given me when I get moved to intensive care?"

Sakura looked down at the slingshot in her hands then tapped it against her palm. "Everything…everything gets burned in the furnace."

"I thought it would be something like that," he said. "Then I can't accept it."

She sighed in exasperation. "I can't take it back to the Den. The kids will tear me apart."

"Yes, you can – give it to them and tell them to keep it safe until I go back and they can give it to me directly," Neji said forcefully. His breath hitched and he coughed into his fist. When he raised his head again, his eyes were fierce. "Like you said, Sakura, I've held out this long. All I have to do is hold out for a longer. Fate, inevitability – I'm fed up with being beaten down by either."

Sakura looked at him, at his shining, feverish face, at the numbing hands. She felt guilty. She wanted to tell him she was making him false promises, that it was her job to keep up morale, that happier patients got better faster, but on the other hand to be trusted to deliver made her hopeful, and hope was so temptingly bright.

She put away the slingshot in the plastic bag. "Okay. I'll tell them."

There was a commotion in the corridor outside. Neji peered out of the window and frowned. "Is there something going on?"

Sakura opened the door and looked out into the corridor, just in time to see a group of red-cloaked jounins march past and disappear into the isolation ward at the end of the corridor, with a grey-skinned and sickly-looking Shimura Danzo in their midst.

The old man tipped up the cart. "That's the last of them for today!"

The bodies dropped into the pit with dull, muffled thuds, to join the long linen-bound bundles, the tangle of white arms and legs that had spilled out of the cloth, already lying in its depths.

As the old man wiped his soot-blackened face on his arm, his companion, a teenaged genin in dirtied yellow hazard gear, set down the tank of oil and cupped his hands around his mouth. He shouted into the dark: "Hey! Hey you!"

The old man turned. The sky was red and the clouds were inky black, and on the road to Konoha was a shadow slipping towards the town.

At the sound of the genin's voice, the shadow stopped. It glanced towards the pit with eyes glowing red as hot coals. The old man stiffened. His hand reached for his hip-flask where the sake sloshed.

"You've got to get rid of your friend, the one you're carrying on your back," the genin continued to say. "Konoha isn't taking any sick from abroad anymore. There aren't enough beds. Leave him here, stranger. He looks dead already."

The shadow said nothing and continued on its way, stumbling down the road.

"You'd better send up a flare," said the old man, as the genin stared after the disappearing figure. "Let the quarantine guards know there's something on its way."

"Hey, old man, you need to get your eyes checked. You mean 'someone', not 'something'."

The old man swiped his flask at the genin and grumbled, "Just send up a flare."

The genin looked towards the trees where the shadow had gone, shivered and shot a white flare up towards the clouds.

A tape on Naruto's hand was holding down a small piece of gauze, probably to stop up the bleeding from where a cannula had been removed. He didn't need it, of course. A shallow cut like that would have healed in a fraction of a second.

There were paper sheets beneath him, a thin blanket under his fingers and to his side a chair. Naruto sat up slowly and looked around the room. Hospital, that was it, and he had been sleeping for two days. The last thing he remembered was crashing out under a hurricane of dreams, a torrent of colour and crackling fire splintering and whirling through his head so fast he could barely breathe, surrounded by a ring of black-robed medic-nins with glowing green hands.

Every memory from every clone was settled into place. He breathed in deep and exhaled slowly. His head felt clear, but will all the memories sorted, categorised, linked up and understood, suddenly, despite all that sleep, he felt worn thin. He was stretched and strained like a thin circle of paper stoppering a jam jar.

He drew in a deep breath again and stared up at the ceiling.

The door creaked and a visored nurse dipped her neck into the room. Seeing Naruto awake, she ducked out again and spoke to somebody behind her. "He's awake, Hokage-sama."

"At last!" Tsunade closed the door with a snap behind her.

"Bacchan! You're back from the Conference."

"Yes, yes, and I come back and find that in the meantime somebody's been blowing up my town." She dropped into the seat beside the bed. "Slept well did you?"

"Kind of yes," Naruto said uncertainly, "kind of no?"

"And now you know one more of the many reasons why the Taju Kagebunshin-no-Jutsu is a forbidden technique. Memory deluge is dangerous. If you don't want to see things, you shouldn't send eyes, not push clone memories to sort out later like something you push to the side of your plate."

"I know, I know, but, I'm fine now, right?"

"You tell me," replied Tsunade flatly. "Are you?"

He chewed the inside of his cheek. It was a tick of uncertainty that was so unlike Naruto there was obviously something was amiss.

"I can imagine that you saw a lot of bad things happen." Tsunade thought back to the brick of a dossier crouched on top of her desk. "Things even seasoned ninjas can take years to get over, if they ever do. I could have named you two dozen ninja before the Plague who came in for therapy after having just one bomb blow up in their face, and I heard that happened to several of your clones, didn't it? And plenty of the tactics the Repentance used left room for involuntary triggers."

"It's not really all the stuff that happened to me," Naruto said with the nervous reluctance of a man with his hand on a floodgate handle. "But I mean, it kind of is, because that whole thing with the Sixth Repentance was just…no, not insane, that's not the word, it was…"

He trailed off and looked at the back of his hands.

Naruto's forehead protector was on top of the side table. The metal was covered in scratches and nicks. They were small, not larger or deeper than a sparrow's footprint, but they were black with ingrained soot and old dried blood.

Tsunade leaned forward and smacked him on the back of the head. He yelped.

"Isn't that illegal in hospital?" Naruto spluttered indignantly, as she withdrew her hand.

"My hospital, my law, so spill, Naruto. What's eating you?"

"Bacchan, I just don't get it. I thought," Naruto chewed on his tongue, "I thought we were the good guys – the people in Konoha. Sure, some were hard on me when I was a kid, but I never doubted that we weren't all on the same side. We all lived on the same streets and ate the same rice. Everyone did their bit for the village. We all looked out for each other. Konoha ninjas protected Konoha citizens. That was how things were supposed to be."

Naruto fell silent. Tsunade waited. When he didn't say anything, she spoke. "Do you think differently now?"

He picked up his forehead protector and turned it over in his hands "When I talked to the Eye of the World, I told him to stop his mass mind control jutsu. I thought all the Repenters were crazy because he'd somehow got into their heads and they couldn't think for themselves and that we were saving them by defeating him."

Naruto clutched the forehead protector in his fingers. "He laughed at me. He talked about 'good people' like they didn't exist. I thought he was cracked so I tried not to listen, but, I was getting all my clones' memories. I knew about nearly everything happening in Konoha and…"

He bit his tongue. He didn't want to admit it. A flock of crows burst of a nearby pine and went cawing away into the distance.

Tsunade cracked her knuckles. "He got to you, didn't he?"

"Just a bit."

"There's no need to be so ashamed. Everyone doubts."

"Yeah but, Bacchan, I'm the guy who wants to be Hokage," Naruto continued earnestly and his eyes prickled with tears. "I can't be Hokage if I don't trust my own people, right? What the Eye was saying about 'good people', I've been thinking about all the rubbish I've seen since I came back."

Then the words were tumbling out of his mouth.

"Even without the Repentance, there was so much wrong. There was the time a guy in a convenience store tried to kick out Neji because he was latently infected, really casually, like there was nothing wrong with that at all. The orphans I've got at the Tigers' Den – people left them out on the street. Nobody was looking out for them. The other night, there was a Keeper who said we shouldn't take the Repenters to hospital, and now I've got all my memories sorted out straight, I can't help thinking that maybe the Eye was right, about people. That there aren't any good people you can trust not to stab in you back."

Naruto gripped his forehead protector tighter in his hands.

"I mean he manipulated them, but the Repenters - most of them wanted to be there, doing what they were doing and everybody was being so cruel to each other. I didn't think people could turn on each other so easily, but all the time I've been here, since coming back, that's what I've seen happening, and it kind of makes me feel disappointed." He hesitated before adding with a weakly, "Maybe even a little bit angry."

Tsunade closed her eyes. "You feel like Konoha people have betrayed your expectations."

"Yeah," he breathed, "maybe. Look at what people in Konoha have done to each other. We're in the middle of a Plague. Now, more than ever, we're supposed to stick together. If it's so easy to stab each other in the back, what's the point of all this? What's the point of believing in people who are so willing to – to - do the worst things to each other?" His hand curled into a fist and he punched the mattress. "Then I'm angry with myself that I'm stupid enough to think like this and I've let the Eye get to me this way."

"Naruto." Tsunade put a hand on his shoulder. "If you are angry at yourself then that means you are fighting and you don't think the Eye is right. You want to think people can be good and can be trusted. You want to believe that it's worth laying your life on the line for these people. You want to think he is wrong."

"But, Bacchan, wanting means I don't think those things anymore!"

"No! It means you have the will to try and keep trying, always wishing and hoping that things can get better." Tsunade plucked the forehead protector out of his hands and made sure she had his full attention before lowering her voice. "Konoha will one day need a Hokage like that, Naruto. The will to believe in people is active. Belief in people is passive. The will is what causes change, and as the Second Parade has reminded us, Konoha needs some change."

She blew the soot out of the scratches in the forehead protector, gave the boy some space to mull over what she had said, and polished the metal on her gauntlet sleeve. Time rolled by.

"Bacchan..." His voice was thick. Naruto swallowed. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. "Thank you."

He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and sniffed with a long, loud, snotty noise. Tsunade thrust the box of tissues at him. Naruto snatched three or four sheets and blew into each one, blinking quickly between each.

"Whilst you're sorting yourself out, some good news for you," she said, trying not to make her cheer sound too forced as Naruto plucked another chain of tissues and moulded them around his eyes and nose, "Jiraiya's coming back to Konoha."

Naruto suddenly howled, "Bacchan, you're so mean! Why didn't you tell me that first thing? It would have made me feel so much better and I wouldn't be crying now!"

Then he was smiling and she was rolling her eyes and they were talking again, but the more they talked the more difficult Tsunade found to get to the main point of her visit.

Don't forget, she said to herself. She mustn't forget that she was there to ask if Naruto would be prepared to give himself up to Uchiha Madara, in exchange for a Plague cure for the whole ninja world.

As sun set red beyond the window, she remembered the young Kazekage with his vivid red hair and her glowing red handprint on his cheek.

"The Jinchuurikis are, themselves, loyal citizens of their respective hidden villages. If they are to be part of negotiations, I think it best that the Hokage and the Raikage returned to their villages, spoke to their Jinchuurikis and found out what the Jinchuurikis themselves think of the situation."

Be he Naruto's friend and Konoha's staunchest ally in recent times, Tsunade cursed Gaara now for putting her in this position. She had hated him when the conference had finished, called him a cunning little raccoon dog in her head and had taken a moment of pleasure in remembering just what part of a raccoon went into raccoon soup.

Perhaps Tsunade was being unfair. There was all the chance in the world that the Kazakage had meant what he said in the purest possible sense – that the Hokage and Raikage asked their Jinchuurikis what they thought on the matter. Gaara had never specifically called for persuasion, manipulation or encouragement towards a particular desired result.

That the Jinchuurikis should make their own choices Tsunade could not have agreed more, but she didn't like the way Gaara's suggestion was making her feel uncomfortably as if exploiting Naruto's apparently unwavering loyalty to his people was almost justifiable.

But that loyalty had wavered. Naruto had doubted, just for moment, whether the people were worth anything to him and worth his efforts, or if loyalty at all held any currency.

She watched him cheerily continue to wipe his face, blow his nose and express himself with big gestures of his hands then couldn't bear to hold back any longer. She put her hands on her knees and opened her mouth. Think of the general good, she told herself.

"Hokage-sama!"

The door slammed open and Shizune stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. "This – this – just arrived from the Quarantine Guards."

Shizune had obviously been running as fast as she possibly could to get there. She saw Naruto sitting up in bed, gave him a breathless nod of acknowledgement and a smile, then thrust a small white scroll into Tsunade's hands.

The only time Shizune ever barged into rooms was because of something extraordinarily important, like a rampaging Tailed Beast, choirs of angels, a samba band of demons, or an army of people Tsunade owed gambling money to showing up at the Konoha gates.

Her heart leaping to her mouth, Tsunade opened the scroll:

U RGENT MESSAGE: - Guardhouse One, Evening Watch Group E

Capture, identification, of rogue ninja Uchiha, S. confirmed.

Expresses wish to speak to Hokage.

Subject cooperative.

Immediate presence of Hokage at Quarantine Guardhouse One requested.

Chapter Text

The guard pushed open the door and, bowing, stood to one side.

In the dark viewing gallery beyond, three figures were waiting for her. From the bows slung over their shoulders and the whistles and flares at their waists, Tsunade surmised that two were members of the Quarantine Guard. The last figure leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his chin on his chest she knew only too well. Kakashi gave her a nod of acknowledgement on her arrival.

"Hokage-sama," said one of the guards, dipping his head. "Officer Kotetsu of the Evening Watch, Group E. This is my colleague Izumo. We sent the message. Thank you for coming at such short notice."

"Officer, it is I who should be thanking you. Your message couldn't have arrived at a better time than it did." Tsunade could have kissed Shizune if they both hadn't been in such a hurry to leave the ward (she to get to the Guardhouse and Shizune to attend to Shimura Danzo). She looked intently at each of the officers. "Tell me what happened."

Six thirty in the evening the two officers had seen a white flare being sent up from one of the plague pits. When the two went to investigate, they had found a rogue who claimed to be Uchiha Sasuke pacing backwards and forwards in front of the gates, carrying what they assumed in the half-light was a sick companion on his back.

He said that he would come quietly if they promised to send a message to the Hokage, telling her that he had arrived and that he wished to speak with her. There had been no verbal threats, but the air between them had crackled as though charged with electricity.

If it wasn't for the special instructions Tsunade had put out, in case Sasuke was discovered in the Konoha area, they might have shot him down on the spot and called it a mercy-killing. Any rogue that turned up at the Konoha gates, threatened the patrol, demanded to see the Hokage and appeared to expect impunity was clearly missing several screws somewhere.

As it was, Tsunade's instructions were to bring him in alive and message the Hokage the instant they did so. They agreed to Sasuke's conditions, and he, to their surprise, allowed them to restrain him. Both Kotetsu and Izumo were more than a little relieved when he let them slip the blindfold over his eyes.

Kotetsu jutted his chin towards the panel of glass on the opposite wall. "You can see him for yourself. He's been sitting quiet like that ever since he got here."

The window looked into a small room. Sitting on the pipe-chair, with a guard at each shoulder, was a strange figure covered head to toe in road dirt. His fingers were bound in wire. Chakra suppressor seal tags had been applied to his wrists and stomach and a blindfold about his eyes. He might have been dark-haired, but there was so much filth in his hair that Tsunade couldn't tell.

He sat with his shoulders hunched under the white glare of the lights, but that posture, tense though it was, had little to do with nerves and was more likely due to the guards invading his personal space.

Tsunade stared through the glass. "Is that really Uchiha Sasuke?"

"Hatake Kakashi came here to confirm his identity for us," said Izumo.

"Well, Kakashi?"

"Ah, now that is a tough question, isn't it? Who knows who we all really are? Who am I? Who is he? What am I doing? Where are we going?" Tsunade cracked her knuckles and Kakashi stopped, blinked owlishly at her then became serious. "His appearance isn't a genjutsu, he's got two genuine fully-functioning sharingan eyes, it's not a clone and, according to Pakkun, his chakra has precisely the same smell as Sasuke's. If it isn't him, it's his twin brother."

"But something's bothering you?"

They stood side by side and peered through the window at the young man, no more than a boy really, sitting silently at the table.

There was a part of Kakashi that wanted to deny that his old student was sitting in the Guardhouse interrogation room. It was the same part that wished he had never heard Sasuke laugh on the forest road, the part of him that wanted the arrogant little bastard he had taught to still be out in the woods somewhere, somewhere remote but still within the potential reach of rescue.

But, in the end, it was so like him, wasn't it? The boy who so stubbornly trod out his own path and refused the hands of others, to come back without their help, and come back on his own whim and will? It flung every effort they had ever made to rescue him back into their faces like insults.

"He came in too quietly," Kakashi said, blowing out his cheeks.

"You think so as well?"

"The last time I saw Sasuke, we had to keep him pinned to the ground with a sword on his neck to keep him still and he blew up our restraints with some kind of chakra monster. Even if he was utterly exhausted he'd still have taken on any five of these guards. The Sasuke I knew would have forced his way into the town and gone to see you himself, not waited patiently at the gates to be admitted."

Tsunade considered the boy before them. "Let's say this is the Sasuke you knew, why would he do this the hard way and get himself caught?"

"It's good behaviour. It says that he's willing to go along with our laws; shows that he'll be happy to toe a particular line, so he expects us to do the same. He wants something, and that something requires our cooperation. He wants to make a deal."

"Kakashi, from what you told me of your last encounter with him, I imagined that Uchiha Sasuke was violently against any sort of cooperation with the village."

"That's why this situation puts me just a little bit on edge." Kakashi lowered his voice. "If Sasuke wants to cut a deal instead of coming in and taking what he wants, something's driven him into a corner and restricted his options."

Tsunade narrowed her eyes. "You think he's had a disagreement with Uchiha Madara?"

"Madara's power in his deal with the Kages rests entirely on his maintaining a monopoly over the cure. Even if he's already made a cure and doesn't need Sasuke anymore, letting the boy go would be counter-productive to his cause. Sasuke's left Madara for some reason and it can only be a bad one."

"So we might have to deal with Uchiha Madara coming after him before we start carrying out our own research?"

"Maybe, although it depends on what Sasuke exactly did that might have upset him."

Tsunade turned to the two guards behind her. "You mentioned that he was carrying a sick companion. Is he in any condition to speak?"

"Regrettably not, Hokage-sama. He's dead. Uchiha Sasuke was carrying a corpse."

"Although, not just any corpse." Kotetsu's expression darkened and Izumo looked grim. "Bits were falling off but any fool would have recognised it. It was Uchiha Itachi, plain as day."

"That can't be right," Tsunade spluttered. "Uchiha Itachi was reported dead weeks ago. Sasuke killed him."

But this was fantastic! If it was Itachi she could finally get her hands on a sample of the unmodified MK …Tsunade sucked in a deep breath. She turned back to the officers. "Where is the body now?"

"It's down in the morgue until we work out what to do with it, where its stink won't hurt anyone," Kotetsu said roughly. "Just to warn you, Hokage-sama, when you're in the room, you don't want to get too close to Uchiha Sasuke either. He stinks of the dead. I bet that smell of his will be stuck around the room for the next three weeks."

"And you don't want to see what's gone down the back of his neck." Izumo shuddered. "All those flies..."

The door hinges squealed and somebody came into the room. It was somebody big. Their footfalls were heavy, landing firmly on the floor, establishing the authority of the one who entered with the subtlety of a mallet. The guards behind Sasuke's shoulders twitched and the seams of their cloaks stretched. They were standing to attention.

The chair opposite him scraped the floor. He felt eyes boring into him that he couldn't see.

"Uchiha Sasuke." A woman's voice. It was strident, strong and vaguely familiar. "It's been a long time. Do you remember me?"

The Fifth Hokage, the medic-nin, Orochimaru's ex-teammate – yes, yes, he did remember her.

She continued. "I was told that you wanted to speak with me."

There was somebody else in the room. Another ninja had slipped in behind the Hokage, hiding the sound of his footsteps in of hers. Its presence was familiar. It made him think of dogs.

Kakashi. That was it, standing at the Hokage's shoulder. Like a dog. A loyal dog.

A gentle pressure against his eyes like probing thumbs told him there were suppressor seals stitched into the blindfold over his eyes. It seemed that the blindfold had been specifically developed with the sharingan in mind. The level of suppression would have been just enough to stop him using the three-tomoe eye, but, fortunately for him, it wasn't quite enough to suppress the Mangekyo. That the blindfold was inadequate for his eyes was not unsurprising. Data on the Mangekyo sharingan was scarce. It was a subject that had been somewhat taboo even within the Uchiha clan. Konoha couldn't develop measures against something they knew next to nothing about.

Whatever the case, it meant that, if push came to shove, he could use his eyes.

"I didn't think you were the shy type, but I could ask the guards to leave."

She had taken his silence to mean a reluctance to cooperate. Frankly, he didn't care if the guards stayed or went so long as he got what he came for.

The biting pressure of blade-tips left his back. The space behind him was clear. Two sets of shuffling steps made their way to the door.

"They're gone," announced Tsunade. "But don't think for a moment that I'm helpless - I am more than capable of pounding you into mincemeat so fine I could feed you to my toothless pensioners if you even so much as threaten me."

"You wouldn't kill me." Sasuke's voice came out in a dry rasp. He wanted water, but he wasn't going to beg for it here in front of these people. "So long as you want the cure for your plague, you can't kill me."

He could imagine the woman's nostrils flaring in the angry pause that followed. Kakashi remained silent, but he could feel the man's gaze on his face like a spotlight.

"That's quite an inflated sense of self-worth you have there," Tsunade remarked dryly. "Since you've finally started talking, let's begin. Why have you come back, Uchiha Sasuke? What do you want?"

"A deal."

"You aren't in any position to be demanding a deal," she told him. "Kakashi told me what you said to him the last time you met. I don't see why we should help you. Why should Konoha give anything to a boy who betrayed her and since then plotted to do all he could to destroy her?"

"You want to study my body to make a cure." He stared into the darkness of the blindfold. "I'm offering it to you."

"You've already delivered yourself to us by coming back to Konoha. The sentences for returning rogue ninjas are more lenient than they were, but you are still our prisoner. Konoha does not need your permission to take apart your body, Sasuke," Tsunade continued, her tone harsh and commanding. "We don't have to give you anything in return. I could have you knocked out and put into an induced coma until we're finished with you. What do you say to that?"

"If that's what you'll do then I'll destroy myself right here."

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"I'll burn myself with Amaterasu."

In the intervening silence, the door opened. Footsteps approached the table. There was a clink of glass, a slosh of liquid. Somebody had brought him water. For a moment he was thrown by the gesture but then the cynic inside pointed out that this was surely just another soft form of punishment, given that his fingers were knotted up in wires.

When the officer had gone, Tsunade broke the silence. "Do you mean the black fire they found at the Uchiha hideout?"

"I'll start with the blindfold. When my vision's free I'll move on to my body. I'll burn to ashes right here in front of you and you won't be able to do a thing about it. The fire will keep going until there's nothing left for the flames to burn except themselves."

Someone slammed their hands onto the table. The glass clinked, didn't fall over. Water slopped over its edge and onto Sasuke's fingers.

"Enough." Kakashi's voice cut through the tension of the room like a scythe. "That's enough, Sasuke."

Tsunade's chair creaked. She was leaning towards him. When she spoke next, she had lowered her voice. "What if I said, go ahead and kill yourself, you little fool?"

"Then you'd be gambling on finding other people in the world immune to the Plague." He mustered a cold thin-lipped smile before continuing to mock her. "With your gambling record, do you really think that's a good idea?"

"My bad luck only applies when there's money involved," she huffed.

"And you're going to try betting on that too? When people's lives are at stake?" Sasuke said, just for a moment mimicking that soft slyness so typical of Orochimaru, and he was rewarded with a light pop in his ears as Tsunade's chakra flared.

There was a knock at the door and a voice whispered, "Hokage-sama, a moment please."

Tsunade stood up. "Keep an eye on him, Kakashi."

She slammed the door shut behind her and Sasuke allowed himself a brief feeling of satisfaction. All he had done was echo Tsunade's old team-mate, if only for a second, and he had managed to get under her skin. It had disgusted him how easily he could mimic Orochimaru's tone, but the result had been worth it.

Kakashi was watching him closely. No book today, Sasuke noted. Kakashi was drumming his fingers on his arms, so evidently his hands were free. With a start, he realised that Kakashi had closed the distance and approached the table.

"Sasuke - " he started to say, then stopped.

What? Why did he stop there? What did he want? Sasuke waited with bated breath, readying for the verbal attack.

Kakashi tapped the table somewhere near Sasuke's right hand. The glass clinked again. "There's a straw in the glass. You can drink your water without using your hands. Drink."

As though Sasuke was going to take anything they gave him until he got what he came for. He slid his bound hands sideways and pointedly knocked the glass over.

Kakashi recognised the sour smell of decay in the air even through his visor and face mask. The closer he stood to Sasuke, the stronger it got. The boy was a mess. There was old blood flecked across Sasuke's face all the way up to his hairline. Kakashi couldn't even tell what the original colours of his clothes were, but he was willing to bet that they weren't the brown, yellow, red and black of bodily fluids and road grime they were now.

The door closed and Tsunade returned to the room, quietly grinding her teeth. She dropped into the chair, closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Let's discuss this deal." She looked up at Sasuke. "If you volunteer to be a research subject, what will you want in return?"

"I want Utatane Koharu, Mitokado Homura and Shimura Danzo at my mercy," Sasuke replied, his voice cold and so low it was almost a growl, "to kill as I see fit."

Tsunade glanced sideways to Kakashi. He seemed, somewhat obscenely in her opinion, to be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps he had expected worse. Water dripped off the table, drop by drop.

She turned to Sasuke. "Konoha doesn't trade in blood."

Sasuke threw back his head and laughed. Tsunade's cheeks burned. She raised her voice. "Perhaps in the past there were cases, but certainly not under my watch."

"Three old fools already closer to dead than alive, for the lives of everybody left and to come! I don't see what's so difficult. Isn't putting the needs of the greater good before everything else what you Konoha ninjas do best?"

"Utatane Koharu and Mitokado Homura are dead of the Plague," said Tsunade. She watched him closely for his reaction. "Only Shimura Danzo remains of the three, although as of today he is in isolation."

The tags on Sasuke's wrists and stomach glowed red in response to a particularly violent chakra flare, but even under suppression Tsunade felt the air tingle with charge and caught the scent of toasted almonds as though in the wake of a bolt of lightning.

A spark jumped across his fingers. Sasuke smiled and bared his teeth. "Then I will have Shimura Danzo."

"But why do you want him, Sasuke?" said Kakashi suddenly. "You have never had anything to do with Danzo before. He means nothing to you. It would be meaningless - "

"Wait!" Tsunade cried out, holding up her hand, and Kakashi fell silent. "Sasuke, answer this as truthfully and as fully as you are able to do so. Does your fixation on our Elders have anything to do with the Uchiha Clan Massacre?"

Sasuke went very, very still. The corners of the chakra suppressing tags smoked and curled. Tsunade wondered what his eyes were doing beneath the blindfold and was struck by a memory of a hooded hawk her grandfather had once shown her in the aviary. She remembered its poised stillness, and her grandfather tugging its jess as though determined to enrage it. "Look at her going all stiff," he had said with a big toothy grin. "She's waiting for me to slip up."

Sasuke demanding the heads of the three Konoha Elders, Danzo's grey-white arm studded with stolen sharingans, the highly suspicious death of Uchiha Shisui and his eyeball later found in Danzo's possession - the pieces of a huge puzzle began to shape into a horrible picture that Tsunade didn't want to see.

"I will do you a different deal, Sasuke," Tsunade said, when the silence began to drag. "We will give you asylum from Madara, in exchange for hearing everything you know about the Massacre."

Sasuke's jaw clenched tight with wariness then he snorted. "Madara won't come after me."

Tsunade glanced at Kakashi, who had lifted his eyebrow with interest. He stopped drumming his fingers on his arms. "How can you be sure, Sasuke? Is Madara dead? Did you kill him?"

It had been something Sasuke had been growing more and more certain of the closer he got to Konoha. There was nothing coming after him, although that realisation hadn't stopped him running. He was running from the laboratory, the freezer full of ice, the cold, heavy weight on his back, and the hands in the dark that stretched, bones clacking, and more than running away, he had begun to feel that he was running towards something instead…

"Kabuto is dead," Sasuke began to explain, "and the laboratory is destroyed. There is no point in Madara taking me back when he neither has the researcher nor the facilities to do anything useful with me anymore. Replacing everything will take too long and Madara has more important things needing his time and attention."

"Do you mean the Moon's Eye Plan?" Sasuke said nothing. That name was apparently unfamiliar to him. Tsunade caught sight of Kakashi gesturing in the corner of her eye. She needed to move on and let the subject drop. "Returning to the subject of our discussion, the Uchiha Clan Massacre - "

This was getting repetitive. Sasuke clicked his tongue irritably. "I will tell you everything in exchange for protection, but not for me."

Tsunade blinked in surprise. "Then for who?"

"For Itachi's body. I want a promise that whilst you do whatever you need to do with me - I don't care what you do –Itachi's body is burnt to ashes. Nothing is removed. No samples are taken. Nothing from him is kept in cold storage."

Tsunade shook her head. "Unfortunately, as that deal would include samples of the original MK, I can't promise you that, Sasuke. May I suggest - "

"My bag."

Tsunade raised her eyebrows. "What about it?"

Sasuke turned towards the two-way glass panel. Tsunade imagined the guards on the other side flinching. "Get the guards to bring it here."

A light knock a moment later, then a guard pushed open the door, gingerly holding a stained and blackened bag out in front of him like there was poison soaked into the hide. "Hokage-sama."

"Thank you." When the bag was in her hands, the guard backed out of the room. She balanced it on her knees. "They've brought me your bag."

"Describe it to me and I'll decide if it's mine."

"About an arm's length and half a hand width in size. Two binding straps. A bloodstain on the shoulder strap." She ran her hand along the leather and the gauntlet came away with a sticky brown stripe on its palm. "Make that blood."

"Open it," Sasuke said, and Tsunade warily undid the bindings. Kakashi peered over her shoulder.

They stared into the bag.

"Is this..." Tsunade swallowed thickly. She couldn't believe her eyes. "Is this all of Kabuto's research?"

"All I could carry."

She pulled the wad of paper out onto the desk and shuffled through the sheets. Incredible. It was utterly incredible. There were notebooks, journal articles, book lists, experimental data, graphs, images, and initial report drafts. True, some of the sheets were stained and their edges more dog-eared than an Inuzuka pack of cards, and Kabuto's writing despite its neatness seemed to border on code, but it was all there! The foundations on which to kick start their research programme!

And at the very bottom of the bag, wrapped in layers of paper – in research, in fact, which was undeniably practical but definitely amounted to a special kind of stupid (somewhat typical of the boy in front of her) – were a collection of vials.

Sasuke heard the vials rattle as Tsunade unwrapped them and said, "One of those is a pure MK culture."

"Are you sure or are you guessing?"

"Kabuto only complained about things he was working on, not things he could be doing," Sasuke replied. "And he said in his notes that it was hard getting hold of a sample of MK, so he must have tried."

"Sounds like an intelligent guess, but still a guess." Tsunade wrapped up the vial in paper again and replaced it in the bag. "What were you expecting to do with all this research?"

He fell silent, but the derisive curl of his lips was a definite unspoken, "I'm not wasting my breath on something you can work out for yourself." Then again, he had refused the water the guards had brought him and his chakra had been flaring under the tags. There was a high chance that Sasuke was starting to feel his limits and was trying to save his breath.

"Fine," said Tsunade, closing her eyes against the glare of the white light on the ceiling. "Uchiha Itachi's body will be burned, but I will take one sample – let me finish, Sasuke," she said, as Sasuke looked ready to lunge across the table with his teeth for her throat. "Just one sample and no more, with which to look for MK and it will be the last that anybody takes from your brother. When I am finished with that sample, it too will be burned. I will oversee the burning myself. The price for this promise is the information you have on the Uchiha Clan Massacre. I won't give you any other offer on that account."

The muscles around his neck were taut. His teeth were set in a furious grimace, but she could see him slowly pick over her words, measure them against his current capabilities, weigh out his options…

Then something slipped. Cold indifference flickered and Sasuke, for an impossible instant, was as open and angry-looking as a raw wound. "Why are you so suddenly interested in the Massacre?"

Bingo, she'd thrown him. Tsunade leaned back in her chair and wondered whether she ought to savour the moment. He really did remind her of Orochimaru. "Recent events brought some new developments to the case and the facts are now being reinvestigated. Let's just say that, if the first point of call when solving a crime is to work out qui bono, 'who benefits', a whole new suspect has come to light."

She let him digest her words. It hadn't escaped Sasuke's notice that Tsunade had referred to the Clan Massacre as a crime and not a tragedy. Neither had it escaped Tsunade's notice that although rumours said that Sasuke himself had killed Uchiha Itachi, the supposed perpetrator of the incident, he was fighting for his brother's dignity.

This interview, however, couldn't go on for much longer. Sasuke was getting exhausted and both she and he were reaching the limits of their patience. It was time to go all in.

"Kakashi, clear the viewing gallery and tell the guards to stop taking records." He raised an eyebrow but didn't move. Tsunade barked, "Do it now. Then stay there and don't let the guards come back."

"Okay, okay."

As soon as Kakashi had left and the door was shut, Tsunade began to speak. "We want to charge Shimura Danzo for crimes relating to the Uchiha Clan Massacre."

"In court? In front of a jury?" Sasuke sneered. "It'd be a circus. They'd let him get away."

"Given what has happened, not this time. Now, what do you make of this deal?" She clasped her hands together on the table. "In exchange for your willing participation in our research, if Danzo is found guilty, I will assign you to be his executioner."

"There won't be any 'ifs'," Sasuke replied coldly. "You will have Danzo confess everything in public, and plead guilty for everything you charge him with. I know how quickly the Plague kills. This way will be quicker."

Tsunade didn't like the idea of extracting a confession from Shimura Danzo by force. Danzo had done much to ensure the protection of the town and he had never once asked for gratitude nor glory. She doubted she even knew half of what he had done for Konoha over his long career.

Suddenly Sasuke made a small noise of pain. A vivid red stain bloomed across the blindfold. The chakra suppressor tags on his stomach and wrists crumbled and a tongue of black fire burst through the grey cloth.

"Sasuke, no! Stop!" Kakashi cried, flinging open the door as crackling black flames rushed along the blindfold encircling Sasuke's head.

"Don't come any closer," Sasuke gasped and the rush of fire diminished to a soft papery rustling. "I have it under control."

The black flames curled and licked at Sasuke's temples, but the flames spread no further. Kakashi couldn't smell anything burning.

"Three hours," Sasuke said. "That's how long I'll hold the flames for. Make Danzo confess, get it down on paper, and confirm that he will plead guilty within three hours, and I will put out this fire."

"That's impossible. How can I - ?" Tsunade started to say, but she closed her mouth when a thick line of blood slithered down the side of Sasuke's face and beaded on his chin. Her stomach turned. "How can I be sure that your chakra control will hold this black fire for three hours?"

"How can I be sure that you won't lie to me, tell me that Danzo'll plead then wait for me to put out the fire, before sealing my eyes properly and using me as you like?"

"That is a thing different entirely. I'm questioning whether you will cope, not your integrity." A charred fragment of a chakra suppressor seal tag fluttered down in front of her. She flicked it off the table, glanced up, saw the blood dripping down to Sasuke's collar and immediately averted her gaze again. "We will not lie to you, Sasuke, and we have no intention of doing so. You have my word, as a medic and a Hokage."

"Your word means nothing to me." The fire crackled over his eyes with a black light. "But, yes, I don't believe you could lie to me. The people here are soft and sentimental, and you pity me."

"True. I couldn't lie to you, Sasuke, but not for the reasons you think. Whatever has happened to you, you brought it upon yourself. I don't pity you, and if you think I'm soft and sentimental, you have another thing coming." Tsunade scrutinised him down her nose and wished that she could wring his arrogant blood-stained neck (or rather, after somebody else had wiped the blood off first). "Be thankful that I care about Naruto and Sakura as much as they still, for who knows what reason, care about you."

Sasuke made an unidentifiable noise that might have been a dismissive snort or an attempt to cover up a hiss of pain.

"Anyway," Tsunade said briskly, "we have a deal. I will return in three hours, with a draft public confession from Danzo. If he has agreed to plead guilty, you will put out your flames."

Sasuke nodded.

"But before I speak to Danzo, I need to hear what you know about the Massacre. Then once I'm done, Kakashi will fill you in on what's happened here in Konoha."

Kakashi blinked. "I will?"

"And you, Sasuke, will tell Kakashi what happened to you from the moment you left the Ageha forest road," Tsunade pressed on, as she felt suddenly painfully conscious of the time. "Are we agreed?"

Sasuke scowled, but nodded again.

"Alright," said Tsunade, breathing out slowly. She settled back in the chair and braced herself. "Let's hear about the Massacre, Sasuke."

When she was sure she had heard everything she needed, Tsunade ordered the guards to transfer Sasuke to the hospital. In the basement of the hospital there were a number of high security rooms which were used, when the occasion regrettably demanded it, to house the dangerously insane during treatment. They weren't prison cells, but they were equipped with similar functions. The rooms were tagged with surveillance seals and rigged to detect chakra fluxes.

Most conveniently for Tsunade, they put Sasuke within easy access of the research laboratories, which was no coincidence of design. It was only nine or ten years ago that Konoha laboratories officially stopped using the inmates of the prison and the 'Demon Asylum' (as that particular basement level was known as) as drug test subjects.

"Don't rush things with Danzo. Sasuke's chakra control will hold," Kakashi said to Tsunade on her way out of the room.

"What makes you say that?"

"Because it's obvious he wants to live. Sasuke could have done that little stunt with the black fire at the start to force your hand, but he didn't until the very last minute. He didn't want to do it unless he had to." In the room behind them, the guards were preparing Sasuke for transfer. "He'll keep off that black fire as long as he can."

"Good for him." Tsunade stretched and opened her mouth wide in a yawn. "Just make sure that as soon as Sasuke's at the hospital, he gets an IV drip in him. I don't want to lose a specimen because it was too stupid to keep itself hydrated before we could do the experiments."

"Don't call him that," Kakashi said, his voice dangerous soft. "It's bad enough that Sasuke's been taught to think of his body as a commodity that he can sell to get his way. Don't ever refer to him as a 'specimen' in front of me again."

Tsunade paused before the door at the end of the viewing gallery. She didn't call him out on the insubordination. She knew she had crossed a line, one that slithered uncomfortably into territories known as 'Snake-Bastard-Experimental-Ethics'.

"Make sure Sasuke behaves when they're moving him to the hospital," she instructed Kakashi and closed the door behind her.

Rippling heat brushed against his neck and the flames whispered in his ears. As the guards bundled him into a cart to be driven to the hospital, Sasuke was soaring on a high of pain. His left eye felt as though a white hot ice pick had been driven into it and an arrow dipped in acid was tangling with the nerve fibre, and from within that thicket of pain his mind sought out distractions like a giddy child snatching at dragonflies.

Where his body stayed swaying in the cart, focusing on the flaming blindfold and the chakra boiling in his blood, his mind was fleeing, seeking out the sounds and smells and chakra signatures of anything that was passing by.

Kakashi was talking to him and he knew he was talking back, but the words swam out of his mental grip as elusive as carp. Killing Kabuto, yes, he had shattered his skull, that was right, Madara could teleport, had taken his sword and the woods around Konoha had wolves, yes, promises broken, revenge plotted, and ice, blood and decay, petri dishes, microscopes and agar jelly. How much Kakashi understood of all that, Sasuke didn't care.

He was carrying nothing on his shoulders and the wind on his face had the freshness of nightfall.

The cart slipped and slid over stones and potholes and the pain sought out the smell of smoke, ash, burnt hair, soot, wet cement and freshly sawn wood like old friends in a crowd. It fed cries to his ears, people swearing as they trod on broken glass, the rattling of tumbling lumps of concrete and the thick glug of sewage leaking from pipes that had been blasted open in the explosions.

The tongues of fire lashed him. This was what he had wanted, wasn't it? A town in ruins? Ash on the street and bones in the roofs?

No, no, it wasn't, he told the fire. Because there were people still there. He could hear them. And if he had ever done it his way, gone to town with lightning in his hands and fire in his eyes, he would make sure that there would be no survivors. Everybody would be dead. All the children would be dead. There would no single surviving child slipping along red and black streets, finding everything he had known tossed open to the crows and spread across the walls.

The tongues of fire crackled at his face. Kakashi was saying something, and the pain reached out and fetched another sound for him to cling to – a laughing child.

The moment he heard the laughter, Sasuke demanded Kakashi to tell him where the child was and what it was laughing at, because the ringing derisiveness in its voice made him convinced that it was laughing at him.

"There's nobody laughing at you, Sasuke," Kakashi said to him after an unsettling pause. "Focus on holding back the fire. We're nearly there."

The child laughed on and the blood on his face, that he thought had dried, was wet and running again.

In the isolation cell, Danzo closed his eyes and took in Tsunade's words. He pursed his lips. "And you believe Uchiha Sasuke's story, when it first came from the mouth of one Uchiha Madara, the Five Nation's currently most wanted criminal? "

He sat in the chair, grey and weathered like old stone.

"You'd have to be a fool to believe him," Danzo said fiercely. "Who's to say that Madara wasn't feeding the boy this story to manipulate him into coming to his side? From what I've heard, Uchiha Sasuke is easily influenced by men cleverer with their words than he is."

He wheezed into his left fist, coughed, then reached for a tissue from the box beside him. "In this case, however, for once, such a fool would have struck lucky."

Shizune snapped the pen in her hand and glanced up from her notes in shock. Tsunade asked, "Then you admit that everything Sasuke claims is true?"

"I will admit it quite freely, since I cannot admit to other things." His expression twisted into a black, bitter grimace and his left hand drifted momentarily up towards his right eye socket, covered since the Parade by an eye-patch. "I have no recollection of anything that the Eye did whilst using my body. By my own rules, however, since I created and harboured a threat to the village I ought to be made to suffer the consequences. I would like to be tried and punished accordingly."

"The Daimyo won't allow it," Tsunade told him as he seemed to fade into his chair, spent and weary. "He says that since you are one of Konoha's most elite ninjas, naming you as the Eye of the World would bring doubt upon the whole governing class of ninjas, and that the civilians will only use your actions as validation for their cause – to say that ninjas really are oppressing chakra-less civilians, misleading them, and using them for their own ends."

"And with that, there will be further violence, and further destabilisation. Konoha will weaken and the Land of Fire will fall from its position as a world power. The Daimyo won't allow such a thing to happen." Danzo sighed. "I only ever wanted peace in the ninja world, but now it seems that my parting gift to it will be chaos and terrorism and madness."

In the neighbouring ward, an isolation patient coughed with a wet sound heavy with phlegm, mucus and sputum. Danzo listened to it with distaste. "I feared death once. I thought I needed to keep myself alive in order to help the world understand the peace I gave them, but as I have brought only violence and discord through my actions as the Eye, I can only agree to Uchiha Sasuke's deal."

"You will plead guilty and make a public confession to crimes relating to the Uchiha Clan Massacre?" Tsunade was staring, she couldn't help it, and she had a vague feeling Shizune had briefly stopped taking notes to stare in disbelief as well.

"It will be the one stone that kills a flock of birds," Danzo continued calmly. "By clamping down hard on my crimes against fellow ninjas, it will show the civilians that ninjas are just as likely to be misled and used by ninjas as they are and that Konoha does not approve of such behaviour."

"In other words, we don't approve of oppressing any Konoha individual, be they ninja or civilian..." Shizune summarised, taking notes in the speediest shorthand Tsunade had ever seen.

"That is a suitably vague way to put it, yes. It's clear that more will be gained in Konoha's interests by my confession and execution than survival – Uchiha Sasuke, you say, is the key to a cure for the Plague and Plague latency. To have the cure…"

Danzo trailed off and pressed a tissue to his mouth. "What better way is there for me to die than believing that my death will ensure Konoha has a future, when my 'counterpart' tried so hard to destroy it?"

Tsunade could only give him with a strained smile. Anything she said rang hollow even in her ears, because here she was, a medic-nin, encouraging a man to choose the option that led to death.

"Konoha will be rebuilt. It will be everything it once was and more." Danzo looked to the window on the other side of the room, visible through the clear plastic panel in the wall of his cell. The blinds were down over the glass.

He ran his hand over the bandaged stump of his right shoulder. "How does Uchiha Sasuke intend to kill me?"

"He hasn't said yet," Tsunade replied. "Although I would imagine that the method will be quick and involve a blade."

Danzo hummed thoughtfully. "Yes, that would certainly be my preference too."

Two hours after Tsunade had left Guardhouse One, Tsunade went to Sasuke's holding cell in the hospital basement to describe her meeting with Danzo. Shizune had prepared for a first draft of Danzo's public confession. She took it with her.

Kakashi read out it out to him. When he had finished, Sasuke withdrew the black fire from the blindfold and collapsed on the floor of his cell from exhaustion.

Several floors above, Danzo asked a young medic-nin on her rounds to raise the blinds of the window for him and found that the window framed, in the distance, the blown open shell of the Academy. Under the moonlight, it was a white and black skeleton house, all ribs and gaping holes.

He demanded the blinds to be lowered and sent the medic-nin on her way.

Chapter Text

Shikamaru had never liked presentations. Far too often they were for ninjas with too much mouth and not enough head, to blow their hot air onto others. Anybody with any sense, in Shikamaru's books, kept their thoughts to themselves. There was constancy in keeping to the shadows. As soon as something was brought out into the light, then they were just as likely to flash, dim, bang and fade as the lights were, which was, well, troublesomely unpredictable.

Yes, lights flashed, which was the more pressing reason he was hoping for this presentation to end soon. The Konoha Publications Offices had brought cameras and they flashed throughout the conference with bright, white lights. He rubbed his eyes against the headache and waited for his turn to speak, although there were plenty of other reasons for his headache.

As usual in the morning, the daily report of suspicious individuals who had been captured or sighted around the town walls had come in from the Quarantine Guard. That was the first that Shikamaru heard of Uchiha Sasuke's return to Konoha.

Deeply disturbed had not covered the extent of his feelings. His first thought was that Sasuke was up to something. Perhaps whoever Sasuke was working for had wanted to take advantage of the amnesty for rogues and sent him into Konoha as a spy, but after the initial shock had worn off, his deep unease was replaced with worry. If Sasuke had come back, only to betray them all over again, Shikamaru didn't want to think how much pain that would cause Naruto and Sakura a second time round.

He had never been able to say it to Naruto's face, but sometimes Shikamaru felt that everybody would be better off if Uchiha Sasuke simply disappeared. Yes, even Uchiha Sasuke himself, on his blinkered quest for revenge, would be better off if he ceased to exist. If there was any sense in the world, the Plague should have killed him in the wilderness and put Sasuke out of his misery and forever beyond Naruto's hopes.

But Shikamaru's idea of how the world should be run clearly wasn't the same as that of the gods, or fate, or whatever presiding cosmic force people believed in. No names had been formally put forward, but it wasn't difficult to hazard a guess as to who the rumoured Plague-immune ninja was. Kakashi had been recently dispatched, by the Hokage no less, to bring back Sasuke (again), a mission that ultimately failed (again), but, not long after Kakashi's return, Konoha had seen the release of special orders that Sasuke be found and brought in alive – with an unusually marked emphasis on alive.

According to the Guards' report, Tsunade and Sasuke had met and held a significantly long conversation with each other upon his arrival, the ending of which they had not been privy to. Shikamaru couldn't help feeling unsettled. No other returning rogue had had such a privilege. He recalled that Sasuke had then been transferred to the Konoha Hospital instead of the prison. Perhaps the Hokage had made some kind of deal with Sasuke, which needed Tsunade to keep a close eye on him.

Whatever the case, the return of Uchiha Sasuke was causing ripples.

There was a smattering of applause and another barrage of flashing lights. Shikamaru blinked and covered his eyes with his hands again. Nara Yoshino had finished her speech outlining the Keepers' new targets for their Second Parade Night crime investigations. She sat down and Tsunade readied her notes.

As soon as the Hokage pulled back her chair and leaned forward to the microphone, the hall died down to silence.

"The Keepers have come to a unanimous decision concerning the identity of the Eye of the World. In light of the significance that this conclusion will have for not just Konoha, but the Land of Fire's future, it was decided that I, Senju Tsunade, the Fifth Hokage, should reveal the results of the investigation."

Tsunade's voice rang out sharp and clear over the excited murmur of the crowd. "Considering the significant number of individuals influenced by a powerful doujutsu, the symbolic use of the sharingan, and obvious malicious intent towards Konoha, the Eye of the World has been identified as Uchiha Madara, a possessor of a sharingan eye, leader of the Akatsuki, and the terrorist who recently disrupted the Hihoutou Conference."

Naruto and Lee had said they would be watching from the public gallery. Shikamaru stared resolutely down at the desk, shielded his eyes from the flashing cameras and wondered if they were ashamed of him.

I have to go along with this, he wanted to say, so don't call me out on the lie.

Shikamaru hoped they could read it in his face, even though it was probably wearing the same resigned look of boredom with the general state of the world as it always did. As Ino would probably have said to him then, Alas, the woes of a resting bitch-face.

"We have found that Madara had a lair in active use not more than a three days walk from Konoha, a prime position from which to target our citizens. He was looking to use Konoha citizens as subjects for illegal clinical trials and we believe that one way he was going to obtain these was by encouraging followers of his Sixth Repentance cult to capture weakened ninja subjects," Tsunade read out from the notes in front of her. "The First Repenters' Parade was a test to determine how much influence he had over cult members, as well as begin his activities of terror. The Second Repenters' Parade, held during my absence, we can consider a show of his power in an attempt to pressurise myself and the other Kages into making an unacceptable deal with him."

"A question!" cried a man in chuunin blue in the front row, thrusting a quivering hand up into the air.

"Accepted," Tsunade said without faltering and Shikamaru admired her apparent conviction, but was deeper down appalled. How often in the past had Konoha leaders forced through lies as convincingly as this?

"Hokage-sama, is this man really the Uchiha Madara of legends, or is he another man merely using a famous name?" asked the journalist, his pen poised on a pad.

"We believe that this is a new man. From what I saw of his movements at the conference, I would predict that he is a young man, possibly in his early thirties. We also have no record of the original Uchiha Madara using a teleportation jutsu such as the one observed at the Hihoutou Conference."

"Did Madara then use this teleportation jutsu to transport himself out of the special ANBU holding cell?" the journalist asked loudly.

Tsunade nodded to Shikamaru, indicating his turn to stand and deliver according to the script. He tried not to look too reluctant as he rose and cleared his throat. The casual gesture that had become taboo over the course of the Plague made the journalist flinch.

"When I and my unit came to the special ANBU cell, using the byakugan, we clearly detected the Eye of the World's chakra signature within the cell, separate and distinct to that of Shimura Danzo's. Shimura Danzo and the Eye of the World were both in the cell." He couldn't stop his eyes flickering up to the public gallery as he spoke. "When the cell opened, however, we found Shimura Danzo alone and the Eye of the World gone. The only way such an escape would have been possible… would have been through an exceptionally powerful teleportation jutsu."

His brief statement complete, Shikamaru dipped his head towards the journalists and dropped back into his seat. Tsunade gave him a nod of approval and once again took the lead.

In the public gallery Naruto and Lee were fuming. Lee's face was a radiant red of indignation. Naruto would have pointed out that he looked as constipated as an iwa ninja coming to terms with a diet of rocks, but he knew that the only thing that would spring out of his mouth was a massive roar of "Bullshit!"

Naruto, Lee, Sakura and Ino had been summoned to Tsunade's office not long before the conference. She explained to them the story they were going to have to support, shouted down their cries of indignation then revealed to them a document that swore them to secrecy on the pain of death. Lee hadn't even gone down into the ANBU base, but, between his five friends who had, he had heard a detailed enough account of the operation to be considered trouble as well. None of them had wanted to take up the pen, but when told that Shikamaru and Hyuuga Hiashi, on behalf of Neji, had already done so, they swallowed down their disgust and put down their names.

They had been a team when they had faced the Eye of the World. The burden of secrecy needed to be shared.

Sakura had said it was a sign as to how much Tsunade trusted them that all she wanted was their word and not to brand them with a selectively silencing seal. Naruto remembered Sai and the ugly black bars on his tongue. It was a small comfort, but she was right. Sai and that seal were part of the same ugly underside of Konoha that was now demanding their silence.

An image of Sai flicking through An Idiot's Guide to Making Friends rose unbidden in Naruto's mind. The feeling of outrage he had directed at Tsunade and Shikamaru subsided and was replaced by a dull, feathery-edged sadness, the one that accompanied the memory of everybody who had vanished whilst he was away.

Perhaps it was because Naruto had never seen them wilt from the Plague himself, gone to the funerals, or lit the incense, but their deaths still seemed to him about as real as a dream.

The last he had seen of Sai, he had been buying A Genius's Guide to Making Friends. Sai had decided that An Idiot's Guide had been failing because, quite obviously, Sai wasn't an idiot. Quite obviously, Naruto had disagreed. Quite obviously, it had then been up to Sakura to settle the entire incident, by buying both boys An Idiot's Guide to Friends.

"Because you've made friends already," she had said, as she handed each of them a copy, "and you're both two of the biggest idiots I know."

Naruto came out of his reverie as Tsunade began to speak. He swallowed the lump in his throat and listened.

"I'm sure many of you here are curious as to Shimura Danzo's involvement with the Sixth Repentance." The hall began to rustle with eager muttering and the journalists leaned forward with their pens and cameras held ready. "Shimura Danzo was blackmailed into aiding Madara. He was made to divulge information on ANBU warehouses and bases and to bring Madara in contact with high-profile individuals in the media to help spread his propaganda and plant his adverts. In the ANBU cell, Danzo tried to resist Madara when he heard Nara Shikamaru's Keeper unit arrive and was mutilated for his efforts. Madara cut off his arm and gouged out his eye."

"Isn't it scaring you had much this kind of makes sense?" Naruto whispered to Lee out of the corner of his mouth, but Lee only scowled and knitted his eyebrows together into a disconcerting monobrow.

"As Danzo was acting against his will and was a much of a victim of Madara's machinations as the Bishops held under the influence of Madara's doujutsu, we will not be charging him for crimes relating to the Sixth Repentance – " there was an uproar from the stalls as ninjas and civilians alike leapt to their feet "- but unfortunately for Danzo, investigating how Madara was blackmailing him has brought Keeper attention to activities from his past that cannot go unnoticed."

From the side of the auditorium, a hide screen scrawled over with an array of seals was wheeled onto the stage. It was stretched taut across a metal frame. As one ninja adjusted the height and tension in the hide, a second ran his hands over the seals as though smoothing over creases in a sheet. When he was done, he signaled to Tsunade.

"Shimura Danzo will now make a public confession," she announced.

The second ninja ran his hands through a series of complicated seals too fast for Naruto to even see, let alone comprehend. The sooty symbols dissolved. The ink flowed together. Black tendrils crawled, stretched and wriggled like worms, tracing spidery lines across the screen. Eventually, they formed a black and white moving image of a one-armed old man with an eye-patch.

"Good morning." Danzo settled into his chair in the isolation cubicle. He looked fiercely out of the screen, all black and white moving lines. "I have a few things I would like to say."

Danzo confessed to exactly the crimes as Yoshino and Tsunade had thought he would: Illegal organ harvesting, illegal body modification, grievous bodily harm, inciting hatred, funding the activities of an enemy of the state, and more besides. They had expected his admission that the total annihilation of a clan of born human weapons was a gross error of judgement concerning the future security of the village. Danzo then took a quiet moment to comment on turning one of Konoha's most talented and loyal subjects into a wanted criminal at the age of thirteen and sending him out to be a mole in a terrorist organisation. Considering the impressionable nature of young ninjas, it was not perhaps the wisest of strategies. That too was a gross error of judgement.

He finished by lowering his head to his knees in a deep bow from the waist, and stunned all who were watching.

When the transmission from the isolation cubicle ended, there was an expectant thickness in the air, hanging as heavily as a thunder cloud.

Tsunade glanced across to the far right-hand corner of the stalls where two figures were standing close to the exit, one in jounin red and the other in medic-nin black, sticking to the shadows.

She licked her drying lips and broke the silence.

"Konoha's strength lies in her people and in the bonds we forge," she began, startling a number of journalists out of their scribbling on Danzo's public confession. "Her foundations were built upon a great friendship. That friendship, as many unfortunately do, may have become difficult later, but the town's continued strength is a testament to that initial spirit of brotherhood, between two men who could not have been more different, but who found commonality in a town they both loved.

"Konoha values therefore rest on the same values as friendship – acceptance, trust, forgiveness in times of weakness, reprimand in times of doubt, and unity in the face of adversity. As Hokage, I therefore call upon citizens, civilian and ninja alike, to look through Madara's manipulations to destroy us through civil war. He brought the Sixth Repentance upon us to divide us." She tried to smile, but it probably came out more bitter than she hoped. "Let this attack upon everything that keeps Konoha strong be that which unites us instead."

"Trying to bring everybody together on the back of a lie is not youthful," Lee remarked as the public hearing finished and the audience shuffled to their feet, readjusting hazard gear and overcoats. "It is dishonourable. Eventually the truth will out, bursting out of the moist earth like a glorious crocus in springtime."

"A crocus…Sure…" Naruto muttered indistinctly. He peered over the gallery rails. "Let's go down and find the others, Bushybrows."

They joined the stream of people going to the stairs. Around him Naruto could hear low whispers, cries of, "Danzo! Who would have thought?", retaliations that some had thought he was fishy all along with his right arm tucked away in a sling and his eye under a bandage, and mutters that his stony gaze had given them to chills. The name Uchiha Madara bobbed on the angry chattering like a body in a river - passed slowly along and noted with disgust and horror.

Pushed and shoved by the human current, it didn't take long for Naruto and Lee to reach the bottom. The stairs spilled out into a corridor and the crowd dispersed.

Naruto and Lee followed the large majority of people moving purposefully towards the auditorium and the main entrance. Naruto was hoping Tsunade and Shikamaru would still be in the hall. These days, where Tsunade was, he would also find Sakura and Ino. It wasn't that he wanted to vent his fury exactly, but venting was so much better when it was done legally, in other words, verbally with a person and not a beaten up wall. And given the show they had just witnessed, when simple words lined together had rewritten and dismissed the past and the truth as they knew it in less time than it would take to make a pancake, Naruto was beginning to appreciate words quite a lot.

He happened then to look up and saw two figures coming down the corridor, walking against the flow of the crowd. One was a jounin in red. The other was a ninja in medic-nin black. The jounin appeared to be trying to talk to the medic-nin, but whatever he was saying wasn't getting any kind of response. The crowd was parting to let them through.

The jounin sighed and raised his head. Naruto caught sight of an eye covered by a forehead protector, and before the jounin and his medic-nin companion could move past without apparently noticing him, he called out, "Kakashi-sensei!"

It didn't escape Naruto's notice that Kakashi snatched at the arm of his accompanying medic-nin as though to not only stop him from walking on but to restrain him. Naruto narrowed his eyes and stared at Kakashi's companion.

There was something about the very way the medic-nin carried himself, like he owned the corridor but didn't care what happened to the people in it so long as they knew that he owned them, that rubbed him up the wrong way. In other words, the medic-nin couldn't have better calculated his body language to piss Naruto off.

Naruto, however, knew exactly how to piss off people like that back. Challenge accepted.

"Naruto. Lee-kun." The single visible eye curved up in a nervous smile as Naruto and Lee approached. "I'm in a bit of a hurry today, so I can't talk now, but maybe later – ?"

Naruto peered into the medic-nin's visor. Instead of eyes, all he saw was a band of grey cloth, embroidered with intricate seals in bright red stitching. For some reason or other, this ninja had his eyes sealed. "Sensei," he whined as loudly as possible, "who's this guy?"

Kakashi raised an eyebrow. He glanced down at the medic-nin and looked back at Naruto, his expression unreadable. "He's an old friend."

Figures, Naruto thought. This medic-nin had his eyes covered. He was probably another mask-wearing pervert, but if he was an old friend of Kakashi's Naruto probably shouldn't be trying to annoy him.

Reluctantly, Naruto extended his hand. "I guess any friend of my sensei's a friend of mine. I'm Uzumaki Naruto, the best student Kakashi's ever had, future Hokage, by the way."

It struck him a moment later that a blindfolded ninja obviously couldn't see his hand, but Naruto couldn't dislodge the suspicion that this medic-nin was ignoring his hand on purpose.

Bastard.

Naruto kept his hand in front of him and lowered his voice, "This is the part where you reply and introduce yourself, unless you know, you're actually miming your name, in which case, if your name is 'Bastard' you're doing a pretty decent job."

"Dinner at Ichiraku's! All you can eat!" Kakashi cut in loudly, as the temperature around them plummeted.

Naruto's ears twitched. He turned away from the medic-nin. "Are you serious?"

"I will pay for every goddam extra bowl and extra topping you order," Kakashi continued breathlessly. "And you can come too, Lee. In fact, just bring everybody. Everybody's been working so hard. Let's have a party. To celebrate…er…Pakkun's birthday."

"I am so up for this!" Naruto punched the air. "A party at Ichiraku's! Yeah!"

"So, since I'll be seeing you all later, I'll be hurrying off now," Kakashi finished hastily, planting his hands on the medic-nin's shoulders. "We'll talk then, Naruto."

"Yeah, alright! Thanks, Kakashi-sensei. We'll see you later!" He could see it now as though upon a far off horizon - that wonderful promise of a bowl of Ichiraku tonkotsu special, extra pork, extra menma, extra bamboo shoots, extra spring onions, extra egg, with a side order of gyoza dumplings…

The medic-nin brushed past him and, as he went, snorted. It was a half-amused, half-derisive sound, as though Naruto wasn't worth even the air to complain about. Naruto scowled but said nothing, because this guy was Kakashi's 'old friend'. Maybe he was only a bastard on first encounter and got better with time. Naruto had known plenty of idiots like that. All the same, that attitude could do with some straightening out.

He glared at the retreating figures until they rounded a corner and both disappeared from sight.

"Come on, Lee, let's go," Naruto said, and they continued on their way to the auditorium.

The corridor was nearly empty of people. Naruto muttered under his breath, "Weirdoes."

Lee knew exactly who he meant and nodded in agreement. "Hipsters."

"Bastards," Naruto amended, but then he remembered that one of those bastards had just invited him to his dog's birthday party, so said, "I mean, just one of them is a bastard. Just the new guy."

And then he froze in his tracks, so suddenly that Lee who was hurrying on was nearly at the doors of the auditorium before he realised that Naruto had stopped.

"What's wrong, Naruto-kun?"

The blindfold over the eyes, the way he had managed to tick off Naruto just by standing there, Kakashi's strange behaviour, and that goddam taunting snort…

Naruto looked back over his shoulder, down the length of the corridor, with eyes wide. "No way."

"What are you thinking about?" Kakashi asked Sasuke, as the cart taking them back to the hospital rattled and shook along the road. He didn't know why he bothered. With Sasuke, it was usually a waste of time to ask such a probing question.

In all honesty, Sasuke didn't know. The most accurate description of what was currently going through his head was probably 'everything and nothing'.

Sasuke stared into the darkness of the blindfold. Admitting ignorance was weakness, and silence might be taken for confusion, so he settled for three words that had swam up out of his thoughts: "A slow death."

It wasn't quite the answer Kakashi had been looking for.

Ino whipped open a tap and shoved her hands into the jet of water. "I'm furious with Shikamaru. Why didn't he tell us all that Sasuke was back sooner?"

"He was probably pushed for time this morning," Sakura said, trying to sound reasonable. She smiled into the mirror after washing her face. It came out wobbly and she gritted her teeth.

"Bet he just thought it was too much of a bother. Well, the next time I'm off duty, I'm going to find him, switch my mind into his body and then make it dance the Grumpy Chicken in the Keeper forecourt where everybody can see it."

They laughed quietly in the hospital cloakroom and helped each other into their surgical scrubs.

Sakura watched Ino trying to pin up her fringe. "Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on him, Ino."

Ino arched her eyebrow. "Says the girl who slapped Shikamaru in the auditorium for not telling us all the moment he found out."

"Fair point, but he deserved it at the time." Sakura passed Ino a hairnet and sat back, already prepared for whatever it was Tsunade had summoned them to do. "In the end, I guess, it all worked out for the best. Could you imagine what would have happened if Naruto had known Sasuke was back and realised it was him in the corridor?"

"Naruto would have cried," Ino scoffed. "Cried and drowned the rest of us in his tears. And set off Lee too. Then between the two of them, the whole world's water crisis would have been solved. Cheer up, Sakura. You should be happy. I don't see what's wrong. Sasuke's come home. Isn't that a good thing?"

When Naruto had stormed into the auditorium like a great orange hurricane, Sakura and Ino had been collecting up Tsunade's notes from the table. To their annoyance, Naruto's spiking chakra had sent sheets of paper whirling across the room.

"Guys!" he had shouted, wild-eyed and pale. "You'd never believe it, but...Kakashi's gone and cloned Sasuke!"

"Naruto, you utter idiot," Shikamaru had sighed. "Has nobody told you that Sasuke's back yet?"

All activity in the auditorium had stopped and, five minutes of explanation later, there was a glowing red handprint throbbing on the side of Shikamaru's face and Sakura was shaking out her hand.

If only Sakura could see into the future, divine the course of how things would go, and then make judgement upon what Sasuke's return meant to her, perhaps she would be better able to pick apart the writhing mass of fear, joy and unease twisting in her stomach.

The cloakroom door opened and Shizune put her head around the frame. "Are you two ready?"

In nervous silence, Ino and Sakura followed Shizune to an operating theatre they had never set foot in before, but knew its purpose well enough. This was one of the theatres where Konoha carried out its vivisections. Times had changed since the facilities had been established, of course. Now the subjects were usually anaesthetised and housed as the patients were, and careful emphasis was placed on minimising any suffering, and vivisections in general had become rarer.

All the same, it made both Ino and Sakura's skin crawl just standing outside of the door. If it hadn't been for Tsunade's urgent insistence that they attend, both would rather have been doing their rounds in the Isolation Wards, which was saying something.

As medic-nins, however, there was without a doubt a very high chance in their careers that they would be called to perform some kind of vivisection at least once.

"Tsunade-sama, your apprentices are here," Shizune said in a hushed voice, as she opened the door. The sharp lemony smell of disinfectant rose up from the floor to catch at Sakura's nose.

Inside the theatre, Tsunade was a finishing adjusting a breathing tube.

"Good. Then we're all set." She covered the face of the figure on the table. "Before we begin, Ino, Sakura, I want you two to take a good look at 'our friend' and be sure that you will be alright doing this. We can't afford any slip ups."

Of all of Sakura's imagined reunions with Sasuke, as a medic-nin vivisecting a subject for research had not been one of them.

She had read the file. The briefing notes had been clear. Before Sakura and Ino had gone to the cloakrooms to change into their scrubs, Shizune had taken them through every possible risk they knew about and made it clear to them what they needed to do to remain professional. Sakura had told herself that she would be fine. All she needed to do was maintain routine procedures, but what had seemed so easy on paper was very different from the reality that confronted her now.

Thick, familiar, black hair drifted out from under the green sheet on his face. An electrocardiogram described his heartbeats with a thin orange trace. Air flowing down the tube made each drawn breath a rasping hiss.

Sakura looked from the figure on the table to the jar of gleaming scalpels ready on the trolley.

"I would've asked others with less emotional baggage to assist me," Tsunade said grimly, glancing between Ino and Sakura as she waited for a response, "but this work is so very important, and I wanted the best and my most trusted."

Sakura took in a deep, shuddering breath and exhaled slowly. She picked up a scalpel. She saw Ino do the same beside her.

Tsunade nodded. "Then let's get to work."

It was three days after his public confession that Danzo was tried in front of a jury, declared unanimously guilty and was sentenced to death at a time and place as decided by his executioner.

At this point, Tsunade handed a sealed scroll to the old judge and the judge, although somewhat peeved that the decision as to Danzo's exact fate had been made by somebody who wasn't even present in Court, unsealed the scroll and squinted at the writing.

"Shimura Danzo," he read out from the neat black symbols, "is to be refused any treatment utilised and generated for easing the suffering of the Plague, and will remain isolated in hospital until the Plague takes him. This execution by the Plague, by slow wasting and illness, has been deemed by his designated executioner as the most suitable form of death for his crimes in relation to the Uchihas."

When the judge returned the scroll to Tsunade, he dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief, and left for a drinking house as soon as court was dismissed.

Danzo received the news from Tsunade and couldn't help the black and bitter smile that rose to his lips.

Danzo's death would be one of a multitude, forgettable in the vast statistics of how many had died from the Plague. It would be also be undignified and, when the blood began to flood into his mouth and his organs failed, disgusting. Worst of all, he would be terrified. Who wouldn't be when their body was under such an aggressive attack? It was human instinct, and with the stages of the Plague so well documented, he would be able to tell exactly what awful things were going on in his body at which particular time.

It was like reading a map to Hell, every stepping stone marked out with a bloody, phlegmy star.

Danzo knew he had spoken too soon when he had said he would prefer a fast death by a blade.

Hinata blinked her eyes in the dark. Something had woken her up, noises, voices, unusual at this time of the night, so quiet she could hear the water running in the gutters. She listened, unsure of herself, then pushed off the bedcovers and tiptoed to the door. Raised voices were coming from her father's study.

Shivering in the night air, she looked out onto the landing and saw the orange light of an oil lamp still burning in Hiashi's room.

The door was shoved sideways and Aunt Hikage stepped out. Her face was pale and her jowls were quivering. Muttering and twitching, she started to shuffle back to her quarters, crab-like and ancient, with her hands dyed red and blue from the flowers in the dyeing house.

"Defilement," Aunt Hikage was spitting, as she wrapped her shawl about her against the cold. "Wanton. Greedy. Sacrilegious."

Hiashi appeared in the doorway and watched his old aunt go, looking bemused and irritated. He drummed his fingers on the shouji frame of the door with his lips set in a thin line. As he was about to slide the door shut, he chanced to look up and met Hinata's eyes.

He opened his mouth in surprise, closed it, and then beckoned imperceptibly with his hand. Hinata closed the door of her room and went to him.

"Did you hear all that, Hinata?" he whispered as she came into earshot. "How long have you been eavesdropping?"

"I heard nothing, father," Hinata answered truthfully. "Ju-just your voice, and Aunt Hikage's. Y-you were quite loud. And I haven't been eavesdropping. I only just woke up."

"Ah." His humourless face softened into a rare smile. "For that I am sorry, Hinata, though, since you are now awake, perhaps you can help me on the final decision."

Hiashi made it sound like a request, but Hinata knew an order from a clan head when she heard one. She nodded without hesitation, despite how tired she was feeling from making futons all day.

Hiashi turned on his heel and went back to his writing table, kneeling on the square cushion beside it. Hinata did the same and folded her hands on her lap. To her displeasure, the cushion was still warm from where Aunt Hikage had been sitting on it.

"I'm in two minds as to what to do with Neji. You knew him, Hinata, better than many of us adults knew him, so I would like to hear what you have to say on this matter."

Hiashi took up a sheet of folded paper from his desk and handed it across to Hinata. She stammered, "What's this?"

Hiashi didn't answer but sat back and tucked his hands up his robes. Hinata looked at the clean paper and the Hokage's seal stamped in red on its side and unfolded it as delicately as she might uncurl a leaf.

It was a letter from the Hokage herself, Tsunade, the big blonde woman with the big voice, who looked as though she could stand in the middle of a street and halt speeding punks with a single finger. Hinata liked her. She didn't want to be Tsunade, as Tenten once had, but she admired Tsunade's strength.

Below the usual greetings was a line that had been underlined twice.

RE: Permission for Hyuuga Neji to participate in trial therapeutic procedure requiring significant invasive surgery.

Neji had gone into intensive care. Lee had told Hinata in the morning, when he had come to the communication hatch and babbled everything important that he could possibly remember, but she had barely listened to the rest of his stories.

Now in intensive care, decisions concerning Neji's therapy rested with his family. Hiashi had signed sixteen separate forms for Lee to take back to Tsunade, granting permission for those treating him to use various pieces of equipment and all sorts of antibiotics.

'Invasive surgery', however, was something entirely new and as Hinata read the letter she found herself oscillating between a thrill of fear and of elation with every crisp little bullet point.

"Chakra System Immune Memory," Hiashi said suddenly, making her start and look up from her reading. "It's a treatment they've come up with from studying Uchiha Sasuke's Plague immunity. It involves physically manipulating the chakra system to align with parts of the body that are key to the immune system. If it's successful, it will dispel latency and make the ninja immune to this kind of chakra bacteria forever."

Hinata chewed on her tongue. "What-what will happen if the treatment fails?"

"Nothing, as such," Hiashi said lightly, but he furrowed his brow and the muscles on his jaw tightened. "According to the Hokage, the hard part is getting the ninja through the treatment in the first place."

"Neji will get through."

"Are you sure? On what basis can you be so certain?"

Hinata folded the letter and handed it back to her father. She found that she couldn't reply, even though she felt as though the answer was at the tip of her tongue.

The lamp was beginning to run low on oil and the dim light in the room changed colour from pale gold to dark honey.

Hiashi took up the Hyuuga seal in one hand and a pot of red stamping paste in the other.

"Aunt Hikage is very much against me signing this permission form."

She would be, thought Hinata, and Hiashi's long-suffering poker-face said much the same thing.

"She believes that it will give the Hokage chance to scavenge for Hyuuga bloodline secrets and pillage Neji's body. I suppose we must sympathise with Aunt Hikage. Such a thing wasn't uncommon in her youth. On top of that, we are all afraid of that which we don't understand and the idea of invasive surgery clearly frightens her."

"I think Neji would want you to sign the form," Hinata asserted quietly. "Either he dies trying not to die, or he'd just die anyway. He'd want to fight. I know it."

"I'm sure he would, but, bear in mind, to fight does not mean to win."

Nevertheless, Hiashi took his seal and pressed its base into the tub of red paste. With a light thud, he stamped the seal down onto the end of the letter and wished that the sound of the thud had been somewhat louder, because the faint, fearful, hollow thud of the seal only seemed too honest to his feelings.

Hisashi, he prayed, as he sent away Hinata and tidied his writing desk, if you are watching over our household now despite what we asked of you, lend strength to your son.

The flame of the oil lamp flickered and died. A light breeze stirred up the hairs on the back of Hiashi's neck, as though somebody beside him was laughing, as if to say, That, brother, goes without saying.

Chapter Text

At first Naruto toyed with the idea of walking into the hospital and simply asking at the reception for directions, but he quickly scrapped it. Sakura was always complaining that the hospital was like a maze. The last thing he wanted to do was walk into the morgue or, worse, the maternity ward.

Then he thought he had struck gold when it occurred to him that he could steal either Sakura or Ino's key-cards when they were off-duty, until the little voice of self-preservation at the back of his mind (which, despite what those around him seemed to think, did exist) reminded him that Sakura would pound him into a greasy little stain if he tried and Ino would, well, do stuff with his mind he could probably do without having done to him. And that still didn't solve the problem as to how to navigate his way to Sasuke's cell.

Kakashi and Tsunade didn't want him visiting Sasuke until as Kakashi put it 'things had settled down', and as Tsunade put it 'until she could trust the two of them not to try and kill each other on sight', which pretty much meant indefinitely. Tsunade had mentioned a whole lot of other reasons as well (the words 'agitate', 'provoke' and 'upset' cropped up several times, along with 'crazy' and 'batshit'), but, as it had already been made clear that Tsunade had no intention of letting him visit Sasuke anytime soon, Naruto paid them no attention.

There was nothing for it, but to ask for Sakura's help.

"Let you into the basement?" She considered it for a moment. "To see Sasuke-kun?"

"Well, he's probably getting pretty bored cooped up down there by himself. You can do that right?"

Sakura turned to face him. "Naruto, have you considered the possibility that maybe he wouldn't want you to visit him?"

Naruto shrugged. "Sure, but that was always normal for him, so that makes no difference."

"Was normal. Exactly." When a look of confusion flickered like a warning light across Naruto's face, Sakura sighed. "It's been a long time and a lot of things have happened to him. Sasuke's changed, Naruto. We don't know what's normal for him anymore, and then…then there's us."

"Us? What have we done?"

"With everything that's happened here because of the Plague, we've changed as well." Sakura looked up at the house they were passing. A section of its roof was patched over with a sheet of canvas, hiding a large hole where the tiles had been eaten away by fire. "I was just thinking the other day when Ino and I were helping out on the vivisection. Do you think he'd even know us if we went to see him? We're practically all strangers to each other now."

"We're not strangers to him, Sakura."

"Oh, I know that. I do really," she assured him quickly. "I guess I'm just being silly, but seeing him makes me think of old times, and then I start comparing myself now to what I was like in the past, back before the Plague, and then way, way back to the time before he left, and I hardly even recognise myself anymore."

They continued walking on towards the hospital. A team of men rushed past, carrying what looked to be a whole felled pine on their shoulders in the direction of the Academy.

"Well, I don't care if he's changed," Naruto said. "We can't let him make himself a stranger to us. In fact, I won't let him. I swear it. So long as my name is Uzumaki Naruto, which will be forever because Uzumaki Naruto is an awesome name and will totally go down in history, I won't let him."

"Because that's your ninja way?"

"Hell yeah!"

For a fleeting instant, Sakura looked at Naruto with a strange kind of look that he wasn't sure he had ever seen before. It was just a little bit sad, somewhat weary, but largely, for some reason, grateful.

The she snorted and elbowed Naruto in the ribs. "Looks as though some people don't change whatever happens."

"Ow…Sakura-chan, you're so cruel," he moaned, clutching his side.

"Times like these we need people like that," Sakura went on, whilst Naruto checked his ribs for fractures. "They're like anchors for the rest of us, when the world's going crazy."

Naruto lowered his hands. Did she really think that? About him? "Sakura - ?"

"Will an hour be alright?"

Naruto didn't immediately understand, but he soon worked out what she meant. "Seriously?"

"A siren goes off if the asylum door's unlocked for too long, so you'll need me there to lock you in and then let you out when you're done. My lunch break's an hour long. If you visit him during then, I'll be able to let you into the block, and wait for you outside. How does that sound?"

"Great!" Naruto exclaimed, beaming, before a thought occurred to him. "But, Sakura-chan, don't you want to see him too?"

Sakura shook her head. "Not especially. I see him every day remember?"

"Yeah, but, you don't exactly talk, right? You just check out his insides – "

"I don't think I'm ready to talk to him just yet."

Naruto closed his mouth.

They approached the hospital entrance walking side-by-side in silence.

Once she had gathered her thoughts together, Sakura spoke. "I liked him once, Naruto."

"Oh, don't we all know it," he said, nodding sagely, which earned him a scowl.

"Shut up. I think there's a part of me that still does feel something for him, but, the thing is, I don't know anymore what I even feel for him is. Before I visit him, I want to work that out." She stopped on the hospital steps. "Sometimes I wish I didn't feel anything for him at all."

"Sakura-chan – "

Sakura suddenly drew herself up straight, business-like and professional, and squared her shoulders. Her tone became brisk. "Anyway, my lunch break's at ten past one."

The change of topic was abrupt. Naruto took it in his stride. "Ten past one. Got it."

"Don't be late." Sakura pushed open the hospital doors open and left Naruto on the steps.

The lock behind Naruto clicked shut.

The walls of the corridor were gleaming white and blisteringly clean. More precisely, they had an unsettling over-cleanliness, the kind that suggested a very powerful scrubbing brush had been applied to them many, many times over.

To Naruto's amazement there wasn't a single guard, which was odd, but, as this place was supposed to be for patients and not prisoners, he wasn't sure what to expect. In any case, he looked down the row of cells and searched for signs of movement, ripples in the air, any indication that there were guards cloaking themselves in genjutsus that made them invisible.

There didn't seem to be anything amiss. Maybe it was just his lucky day. Naruto thought no more of it and, following Sakura's instructions, jogged to the end of the corridor, where he found a short flight of steps that went down to the next level down. Sasuke's cell was the first on the row.

The front of the cell was a transparent panel of plastic. About five inches thick, the panel was heat-resistant, shatter proof, and electrically insulating. It formed a nine by twelve feet wide window onto the occupant of the cell and distinctly reminded Naruto of a fish tank. Sakura had told him that the bathroom at the back had been designed to be narrow, cramped and have as poor ventilation as possible to stop patients hiding in them. He could see the small door. It wasn't much bigger than a large kitchen cupboard.

Abandon all hope for privacy ye who enter here, indeed.

And inside, sitting at a table, was Sasuke.

He was smaller than how Naruto remembered him. He had gotten thinner too, more ragged-looking, certainly a far cry from when Orochimaru had been ensuring that his 'future body' was well groomed and kempt. Dressed in a hospital jersey, he was leafing through the yellowed pages of a notebook, with his face buried in his free hand. Naruto had a strange feeling that Sasuke was wearing the jersey as though it was a disguise for a mission. It fit him, the fabric was comfortable, but he wasn't letting himself get comfortable in it.

On the whole though, he looked healthy, and not as disturbed as Naruto had been dreading he would be, from to Kakashi and Tsunade's warnings.

Relieved, Naruto waved through the plastic.

Sasuke continued reading, managing to look both deadly focused and bored stiff at the same time. He turned away from the window and scratched at the bridge of his nose, then went back to the notebook.

"Hey, you," Naruto narrowed his eyes. "I know you're ignoring me on purpose."

Still no response from the cell's occupant, who simply turned another page and pencilled a short note onto a pad of paper.

Perhaps the plastic panel was sound proof as well. Naruto ground his teeth. Sasuke continued to turn through the pages of the notebook. Well then, Naruto would just have to get his attention some other way.

After a five minute routine of dancing, pulling faces, and acrobatics, concluding with his last resort of a Harem-no-Jutsu human pyramid, Naruto remembered the old fashioned way of getting someone's attention: Knocking.

He was just moulding chakra about his fist when Sasuke glanced sideways and, apparently, at last saw him.

Most of his face was still covered by his hand, but Sasuke's face had never been especially helpful for working out what he was thinking anyway. It was usually about the eyes and, for a fraction of an instant before becoming guarded again, they flickered with surprise.

Then one eyebrow flexed in a gesture that Naruto translated to mean: Try that and I won't be in the least surprised, because it is a stupid thing to do and you are a moron, and morons, by definition, do stupid things.

Boy, Sasuke could be pretty vocal when he wasn't saying anything.

"I want to talk," Naruto mouthed slowly through the panel before Sasuke could turn away. He started to mime with his hands, snapping his hands like piranha fish and pointing at himself, just in case it wasn't clear. "I won't go -" he crossed his forearms in a giant X then thrust a thumb over his shoulder "- until –" he tapped his wrist "- I've spoken – " more snapping hands, "with you."

Two fingers pointed at Sasuke, who slowly blinked then, to Naruto's surprise, stood up from his desk.

A hatch was pushed aside to reveal a hidden communication grill. Sasuke set his chair beside it.

Naruto looked up and down the corridor and found a rack of folding chairs tucked under the stairs. He sat down, looked up and words failed him.

After three years, Sasuke was finally back.

It was as though nothing had changed at all. On the other side of the grill, Sasuke was wearing that very expression of supreme indifference with which he had always graced the world at large, whenever he wasn't smirking or scowling.

Then Sasuke lowered the hand from his face and Naruto's widening grin quickly shrank to nothing. Running across the bridge of Sasuke's nose was a long, shiny burn. Ropey and straight, as though the burn had been tracing something's edge, it was a red star of scar tissue and it painfully reminded Naruto of…something he had tried to forget, and then long given up doing so.

Naruto spluttered, "What happened to your face?"

Sasuke glared at him. "Nothing."

"Nothing. Right. Sure."

Silence settled between them and Naruto was left fishing for something to say next. Maybe, 'How do you not notice a troupe of naked blonde girls making a human pyramid outside your window?' would do the trick. Yeah, that could work as an ice-breaker, but no, that wasn't the kind of thing he was aiming for...

Sasuke snorted, quietly, but just loud enough that Naruto could hear. It sounded as though he was sharing some kind of a private joke with himself. Naruto didn't need three guesses to work out who the butt of the joke was.

Naruto scowled. "Okay, you were snorting at me in the corridor the other day as well. What's so funny?"

Sasuke closed his eyes, as though to shield them from the abrasive vision of orange in front of him. The mere sight of Naruto was giving him a bigger headache than the five hours he had spent decoding Kabuto's notes. "What do you want?"

Good question. Naruto scratched the back of his head. "To say 'welcome back', I guess. Lots of people said 'welcome back' to me when I came home, and I thought it was really nice. Then I figured nobody would have said it to you yet, what with so much crazy happening around here and all, so I thought I'd drop by."

Sasuke looked at him oddly. "Well, now you've said it. So you can go."

Naruto folded his arms behind his head and settled back into the chair, as though he was prepared to stay there all day. A vein in Sasuke's temple twitched. "It's good to have you back, Sasuke."

"Is it?"

"Course it is. I mean, you came back. On your own. Everybody thought I was going to have to snap your spine on the side of a mountain or something before we could even get you through the Konoha gates. Pretty glad it didn't have to come to that in the end."

Naruto laughed, but it came out more awkwardly than he would have liked.

There was a part of Naruto that was undeniably angry. It was the part that wanted to rail and rant and ram a fist into Sasuke's teeth, make him feel some of the pain they had gone through trying to retrieve him, only to have him thumb his nose in their faces and slip away, time and time again. To have Sasuke come back like this, it was like he was rubbing it into their faces that he had never asked for or needed their help, and that he had never even needed them.

What were they all to Sasuke? Did Naruto, Sakura or Kakashi even mean anything to him anymore? Had they ever meant anything to him to begin with that he could leave them behind so easily?

But that indignant anger of Naruto's had dissipated the moment Sasuke had stood up from the desk. If anything, Naruto was perhaps now feeling more buoyantly hopeful than he had in months, because if they meant absolutely nothing to Sasuke at all, Sasuke would surely never have opened the hatch.

It was a small blessing then that Naruto couldn't read minds. If he had happened then, at that very moment, to see into Sasuke's, he would have found that why Sasuke had opened the hatch, and was now bothering to sit and listen to this supreme idiot of idiots, was a mystery even to Sasuke himself.

Sasuke was busy telling himself that he had chosen to talk on a whim; that it had been an utterly spur of the moment decision; that it was natural every now and again to desire some kind of break from the near total silence of the sound-proofed cell; that he had very reasonably weighed his options and concluded that having Naruto miming outside his cell was one form of torture he had done nothing to justify being subjected to.

And now that Sasuke knew better than to give in to a whim, he was sorely tempted to close the hatch and get rid of Naruto for good. He didn't understand why Naruto had come. He said all he wanted was to welcome him back, but Sasuke didn't believe it for a minute. Nobody came to Sasuke these days without wanting something from him.

These days? As opposed to what days?

"Whether or not you think it's good that I am here in Konoha makes no difference to me," Sasuke said warily, as he tried to read Naruto's intentions from his face, from his involuntary movements. "Your opinion would not change that I am already here, so it is meaningless."

Wait. Was he really considering Naruto capable of having something as complex as an ulterior motive?

No, Sasuke couldn't underestimate him. Intelligent men used idiots as their pawns all the time, and no fool was more useful than one who nobody thought could be used. Somebody might have sent him for something. Sasuke had to stay on his guard.

"Heck, Sasuke, it's a nice thing people say to each other." Naruto flung up his hands and shook them in a fit of exasperation. "And it isn't meaningless, you idiot. Somebody says 'it's good that you're back', or 'they're glad to see you', it means that there've been people waiting for you, and that they're still there to help you out when things get bad. It's a reminder that you're not on your own." Naruto suddenly nodded to himself with a smug little grin of satisfaction. "That actually came out nearly as good as how it sounded in my head."

"So you're still in the habit of clinging to those around you when things get difficult, like a small child," Sasuke noted scathingly. "How old are you now? Nine? Eight?"

Naruto glared and squinted at Sasuke's face. Then all of a sudden, Naruto's eyes were welling with huge shiny tears.

"Sasuke," he sobbed, rubbing his eyes on the back of his hands, "we're all so sorry. We really had no idea. We had no idea Orochimaru's freaky experiments had - had tried to give you a sense of humour. It must have been so painful for you…"

Sasuke was on his feet before he knew he had even moved, then as the slow triumphant grin spread across Naruto's face, Sasuke realised his mistake. He had been provoked. Cursing himself furiously, Sasuke sank back into his chair, chakra itching under his skin.

It had been such a petty little provocation and he had risen to it so quickly! How did this idiot do it?

"So, I crossed a line there, didn't I?" Naruto continued to chatter as Sasuke regained his composure. "Right then, mental note - Orochimaru's experiments are a new line not to cross. Gods, no wonder you're crazy. All these lines in your head! What's the inside of your head like? Knitting?"

"Naruto…" Sasuke snarled, injecting the single word with as much venom as he could muster.

"Okay, alright. Maybe bringing up those experiments was a bit of a low blow." Naruto lowered his gaze to his shoes. After a minute of awkward silence, he cleared his throat. "He did some crazy stuff to you then?"

"Drop it."

"Oh, right. So he did." Naruto peered intently into Sasuke's face. "Well, I don't see any scales."

He really was the most insufferable first-rate idiot.

"And I guess the experiments weren't all bad if the stuff done to you is going to be used to help people here. How's everything going with the dissection-vivisection-same-difference research anyway? You know that Sakura-chan's on Tsunade-bacchan's team cutting you open?" Naruto said excitedly. "She and Ino are working really hard these days. Sometimes I get a bit worried they're working too hard, but that probably just means the rest of us have to up our game. Oh yeah! Sakura-chan wanted me to say, 'Hi!' for her. She would've come to see you today – yeah, she was really, really keen - but it's just…er…" Naruto chewed thickly on his tongue, "…she's really busy lately."

Sasuke had lapsed into a stony-faced silence. He seemed to be thinking. As far as Naruto was concerned, thinking as hard as Sasuke seemed to be thinking meant that he must be having a pretty serious argument, with himself, in his own head. Since that activity combined 'talking to yourself' and 'hearing voices', two signs of madness into one, it wasn't something Naruto considered especially healthy.

"Anyway," Naruto said loudly, deciding that Sasuke had stayed silent long enough. "All the research crap to one side, I should probably say that I lied a bit when I said that all I wanted was to wish you 'welcome back'."

"I knew it."

"Knew what?"

Sasuke spat out a puff of air like an angry cat. "Who was it? Kakashi? The Hokage? What else do they want from me now that they send you as their errand boy?"

"Believe it or not, bastard, I'm here because I want to be. As if the super-awesome Uzumaki Naruto would ever be anybody's errand boy!" Naruto huffed and folded his arms across his chest, but Sasuke's gaze remained unflinchingly sceptical. Naruto sighed and hung his head. "But you probably wouldn't believe me however many times I told you that. Fine, think what you like. I'm going to say my bit and then I'll come back to sort out your head another time. I wanted to talk to you about home."

To bring Sasuke home…you'll have to make him realise Konoha is his home. How you're going to that, I'll be leaving to you.

Trust Kakashi-sensei to dump his students with the hard part of the job. Well, maybe that was a bit unfair, Naruto conceded, given that Kakashi had come back in the dead of the night with two ex-ANBU blinded and one on a stretcher.

"Home?" repeated Sasuke, the word dropping between them like a dull, flat stone. "And I suppose you're going to be another one to give me the 'Konoha is my Home' spiel?"

"Well, I'm tempted to give you the 'You are an Arrogant Prick' spiel, but, I'll save that for another time." Naruto lowered his voice. "I was thinking more along the lines of 'Konoha isn't your Home'."

Sasuke snorted, which could have meant over a million things, but on this occasion translated to Naruto as, Obviously.

"When I was up in the Mountains with Ero-sen…er…Jiraiya," Naruto began, "I had a couple of days when I really missed people back home. It was a bit tough, although nothing I couldn't handle! The toads were all pretty nice about it. One night we all started talking about Konoha and home, and all that kind of stuff - "

Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Is there a point to this?"

"You asked for a spiel, so I'm giving you one, bastard," Naruto shot back gleefully. "Where were we? Oh yeah, and the toads said something which was pretty neat. They said that home was basically any place which kept good memories for a person. I didn't really get it at first, but they explained it like this.

"So for some folk, it's their house, or their town – all the good stuff that's happened in them, their house becomes home because their memories are imprinted onto it in some way or other.

"And then for some folk, their home is people. People keep memories safe. Friends and family store good memories for each other, so they're a kind of home as well. That's why you can move houses and towns and countries and still have a home, because those memories still exist with those people.

"My guess is that you never saw Konoha as your home at all. Your home was people, which makes sense because the Uchihas were a pretty tight clan – it was your family and then," Naruto pointed a thumb at his battered forehead protector, "it was us lot in Team Seven. Right? Do you see what I'm getting at?"

"There was nothing in anything you just said," Sasuke said curtly, "to get."

Ah well, it was worth a try. Naruto could work on it for next time. He'd make Sasuke get that Team Seven was a home for him. Eventually.

"Okay, so you think you don't have a home. So you should find one. Amongst Konoha people."

Sasuke scoffed. "Are Konoha people really worth having a home amongst?"

"Well, obviously – " Naruto started and, to the surprise of both of them, immediately fell silent.

Look at what people in Konoha have done to each other… What's the point of believing in people who are so willing to do the worst things to each other?

Naruto suddenly felt himself under intense scrutiny. Sasuke was regarding him curiously through the grill, as a microbiologist might do when something wholly unexpected crawls under the lens of their microscope. There was interest and, as the situation underwent a hasty recalculation, some uncertainty, but no particular malice towards what it saw.

"You've changed," Sasuke commented suddenly, drawing back from the grill.

Naruto blinked slowly. "You think so?"

You've worked out that your town isn't as great and golden as you always thought it was, rose the little voice unbidden from wherever it was always hiding, the one that was always so treacherous, so unreasonable, so critical of everything Sasuke did. Now, for a reason that was beyond Sasuke, it sounded sad.

That thought, however, somewhat inevitably underwent heavy editing between Sasuke's brain and mouth: "You've become even more stupid than before. I didn't realise that was possible."

Naruto opened his mouth for the sharpest, loudest retort he could think of, but found the words died away from him.

"That's the first time anybody's said to me that I've changed," he said instead. "Ever since I've come back, the only thing people have been saying to me is that I never change, that I'm just like how I've always been. They're always smiling when they say it as well, like it's a good thing. Sakura-chan was saying it just this morning too. She said, 'Looks as though some peopledon't change whatever happens'."

It was a well-known phenomenon that people in times of turmoil often sought out and took comfort in constancy. People also, in Sasuke's books, saw exactly what they wanted to see and, from that habit, what they expected to see. It did not surprise Sasuke, given what he had heard of the recent events in Konoha, that some were relying on Naruto, who had always seemed so stubbornly unchangeable (or as Sasuke saw it, unchangeably irritating) to remain just as he always had been.

"You've changed too," Naruto noted.

Sasuke lifted his eyebrows.

You seem more focused, not that you weren't focused before, but it's like you've got a real goal of some kind, with a real target, and a real end result, and you're more sure of your own skin because of it.

Thoughts, however, tended to be a lot more eloquent than words, and all of that simply translated into Naruto's mouth as: "You've become an even bigger bastard than before. I didn't realise that was possible. Then again, you lived with Kabuto and Orochimaru, and those two are the Archbishops of the Bastardhood, so no surprises there."

Sasuke snorted and turned up his nose.

It had been three years. As they mutually acknowledged and accepted changes that neither knew how nor when had occurred, but occur they had, Naruto felt those three years more keenly than he ever had before.

Naruto grimaced. Sasuke was scratching at the edges of the burn on his face again. He felt nauseous just watching.

That star of red knotted tissue reminded him all too painfully of another star, one that had refused to fade out of his memory - a dark one, branded across skin that was smooth and grey as stone, a monstrous face with fangs bared and red eyes shining.

It appeared in his dreams sometimes, flying at him on fleshy wings that creaked and snapped with every stretch of thick grey skin, in a thicket of black snaking lightning that chirped and chattered against the roar of thundering water.

And at the very moment Naruto thought he was about to die, and not only die, but watch a friend, his best friend, be devoured forever by some grey-skinned monster, he would wake up, heart racing, cold with sweat, feeling the wet punch of a phantom fist sliding through his chest.

"That burn on your face," he asked as casually as he could, "it is going to heal, isn't it?"

"It'll heal." Sasuke ran his fingers over the scarring. Perhaps something of Naruto's thoughts occurred to Sasuke as well. His hand drifted down to where his neck joined the shoulder before he lowered it. "Are you done now about 'home'?"

Naruto considered the question then nodded. "For now, yep."

Pushing himself to his feet, Sasuke indicated the stairs behind Naruto with a jut of his chin. "The exit is that way."

"Hey, you can't just close a convo like this!"

Sasuke dragged away his chair from the conversation grill then shrugged, as though to say, Just did.

He reached out to slide the hatch over the grill. The hatch met resistance. Sasuke regarded the two fingers Naruto had slid through the grill to block it with some bemusement. "I can, and I will, cut those off."

"Just one last thing!" Naruto wheezed, as the two fingers he'd stuck through the grill started to turn purple.

It seemed that the edge of the hatch was a lot blunter than Sasuke would have liked. "Fine."

"What were you laughing at?" Naruto asked again, tears beading at the corners of his eyes as Sasuke continued to apply pressure on the sliding hatch. "The other day in the corridor, and earlier today?"

Sasuke trawled through his memories. "Oh. That." The corner of his lips twitched up with the ghost of a smirk. "Two days asleep in the mental health ward?"

Naruto furrowed his brow in confusion. "Nope, I don't get how that's funny."

Sasuke snorted. "I was out in a day."

Understanding dawned on Naruto at last. "You're competing with me on the number of days spent in the mental health ward? Okay, now that is messed up. One day?" Sasuke nodded. "After the Uchiha Clan Massacre?" Another stiff nod. "Yeah, I don't think this is a fair competition, because, take it from me, bastard, you should have stayed in there way longer – Ow! Dammit, are you actually trying to - !?"

Naruto yanked his fingers out from the grill. Sasuke slid the hatch shut with a triumphant click and pointedly turned his back on his visitor. He went to the cupboard of a bathroom and disappeared.

Naruto was left standing in the silent corridor, cradling his hand with its two swollen fingers. How was he doing for time? He would probably just about avoid a shouting from Sakura –

On the whole though, that had all gone far, far better than Naruto had hoped to even dream. His expectations had generally involved a lot of staring and awkward silence, which, admittedly, there had been, but there had been conversation, there had been speech, and Sasuke had listened, and now Naruto was filled with so much hope.

Sasuke would be able to come home. He was certain of it.

Smiling radiantly, he sprinted up the flight of stairs. He couldn't wait to tell Sakura everything that had happened, although he doubted she would be impressed with some of the…er…banter.

He rapped his knuckles against the door at the entrance of the Demon Asylum. "Sakura-chan," he said, "sorry if I'm late. Please don't be mad. I – "

The lock clicked, the door swung wide and a vast expanse of black-cloaked bosom filled his vision.

Naruto leaned back and squinted up into the medic-nin's face, filled with a sudden sense of foreboding. "Oh. Bacchan."

"To. My. Office."

"So let me get this straight, there weren't any guards down there, because Sakura told you I wanted to talk to Sasuke today, and you were okay with that? More to the point, you were counting on me to try and get in to see him, without your permission?" Naruto stared at Tsunade over the heaps of paperwork. "Why?"

"To surprise him, of course," Tsunade answered straight-forwardly. "If we'd arranged for you to visit, Sasuke would almost certainly have gotten wind of it from somebody," she glared hard at Kakashi, "and you would've then got the same routine as the rest of us get when we try to talk to him."

"What's that?"

"A routine," said Tsunade shortly. "Telling us the bare minimum of what he thinks we expect to hear, so we thought that if you could catch him off guard, then you might be able to get something different out of him."

"So he was right." Naruto looked at them, aghast. "He thought you guys were using me to get something out of him."

"Naruto," Tsunade cut in firmly, "don't look so betrayed. We don't want anything from him."

"But you just said – "

"She meant, 'get something out of him' as in, quite simply, 'to get him talking', Naruto." Kakashi raised his palms to the heavens as though to implore of some great creator, Why are all my students such drama queens?

Naruto looked incredulously from Tsunade to Kakashi, then round to Sakura standing behind Tsunade's desk. He deflated, and lowered the fists he didn't even know he had raised. "So you just wanted somebody to talk to him?"

"Kakashi and I have been finding it difficult getting through to him and quite understanding what's going on inside his head."

"Yeah, but this is Sasuke – that's normal. Nobody ever knows what's going on inside his head," Naruto interjected. "What makes you think I'd have a better chance than you guys?"

"I currently run the research programme taking his body apart down to the molecular level. Kakashi was the one sent out to bring him back as a research subject. Sakura's one of my assistants on the project. We've all given him good reason to suspect that, when we talk to him, all we want to see is a well-behaved 'specimen' and find out more ways to exploit his body for science." Tsunade saw Kakashi flinch and bristle in the corner of her eye. "However, you, Naruto, have nothing to do with the research, so would be a different matter entirely."

"I get it," Naruto exclaimed. "What you're saying is I'd treat the bastard one hundred-percent like a human being?"

"Don't misunderstand us, Naruto, we treat him as humanely as he allows us to," Tsunade sighed and fiddled with a pencil on her desk. "Kakashi just thought some human humanising contact might do him some good."

"We thought some humanising contact might do him some good," corrected Kakashi pointedly.

Naruto picked over her words. All of a sudden, a terrible thought occurred to him: "Holy crap. You guys burned his face in one of your experiments, didn't you? That's sick. No wonder he doesn't want to talk to you."

"Actually, no, he did that to himself," said Kakashi lightly. "Sasuke set himself on fire to hold himself as a hostage against us. Long story, Naruto, but don't worry – it looks as though Orochimaru's tinkering improved Sasuke's healing abilities, so it'll heal over."

Naruto gaped and floundered as too many things he wanted to say fought to leap from his mouth.

"Anyhow, Kakashi will fill you in on the details later," Tsunade said briskly. She leaned across the desk. "So, what did you make of Sasuke? He should have been coming off the effects of the painkillers by the time you went to see him."

Naruto pushed down the thought that Sasuke had put a taper to his own face, swallowed and scratched his chin. "He seemed surprisingly normal."

Kakashi raised his eyebrows. "As opposed to?"

"Ax-crazy. He's still crazy, but…not so angry?" Naruto searched for the right words. "I was kind of expecting him to go ape and try to blow up the cell when I pissed him off, but it was like he was saving everything up for another occasion, to get really, really angry at somebody else."

Tsunade exchanged a grim look with Kakashi.

"Oh yeah! One thing I wanted to ask. He spends his whole day either in hospital or in that fish tank, right? I mean, he's fine now, but if you keep him cooped up like that, he will properly go crazy. As in, 'the-voices-in-my-head-are-my-only friends'-type crazy. Couldn't we, you know, take him for a day out in Konoha or something?"

To Naruto's dismay, Kakashi shook his head. "As much as that is a good idea, Naruto, we're avoiding taking Sasuke out of his cell unless it's absolutely necessary. He's a highly valuable…resource and the streets are still not as safe as we'd like them to be."

"We also can't forget that he was a rogue and that we don't know the entirety of the things he got up to under Orochimaru," Tsunade said, her expression clouding. "That he has 'laboratory experience' troubles me, especially Orochimaru's laboratories, even if it was only procuring supplies. Essentially, Naruto, Sasuke is currently serving an alternative prison sentence. It wouldn't do for a criminal to be walking freely in the streets, even under a disguise."

"But then, but then..." Naruto screwed up his face. "Couldn't he at least get a cell with a window? Just a small one?"

As Tsunade shook her head, Naruto wondered what was wrong with Sasuke that he could even cope in a room without a window. It was like he was used to living in...oh, Orochimaru's lairs were all underground, weren't they? Go figure.

"He'll get a day out soon, but it will be discrete," Tsunade said at last, lacing her fingers together on the desk. "It's one that we promised him. Alright, any other worries at all?"

Naruto thought. Nothing came to mind at first, but then he remembered something. "It's not about Sasuke, but I wanted to ask you something, Bacchan."

"Go on then," she said, shuffling the letters on her desk into the semblance of a pile.

"You kind of mentioned it in passing at the conference, so I figured it was something really evil, like trading your soul or killing kittens or something, so," he grinned eagerly, "what was the 'unacceptable deal' Madara wanted the Kages to make with him?"

Tsunade knocked the pile of letters to the floor. Sakura rushed forward to collect them up.

"Madara was demanding that the Raikage and Hokage hand over their Jinchuurikis in exchange for the Plague cure," Kakashi spoke up, as Naruto began to look around the room in concern. At Kakashi's words, the grin instantly slipped from his face. "But that's nothing for you to worry about anymore, Naruto. It's water under the bridge, all in the past. Right now, which is all that matters, is that Sasuke's here, we're making our own cure, and Madara's demands don't mean anything anymore."

Naruto's eyes slid to Tsunade, who was staring resolutely at a mark on her desk. "Bacchan would never have handed me over without a fight."

Tsunade rubbed her face with a hand and blinked at the ceiling, looking at anywhere but at Naruto. "It was your friend Gaara's request that the Kages asked the Jinchuurikis themselves what they were willing to do in the situation, and that we respected whatever decision the Jinchuurikis came to."

"So, it would have been my decision?" Naruto pointed at his own face as though to confirm his own significance. "And based on my decision people might not have got the cure?"

Tsunade nodded. Sakura finished collecting the letters that had fallen to the floor and piled them onto Tsunade's desk again. The blood had drained from her face.

"I don't think you can imagine, Naruto, how relieved I am that Sasuke was brought in when he was," Tsunade confessed, meeting Naruto's gaze at last, "and that I never had to ask such a thing of you."

Naruto exhaled slowly. "I'm glad I never had to answer."

Floating in a sea of suffocating warmth, there was a dull throbbing in his temples and only a shapeless chill where he knew his fingers should be. He could feel the thud of his heart in his chest, slow, heavy, beating out the time. Oars of a ship, he thought incoherently, he was just an oar moving to the time of a drum, pushing a boat on over a warm, dark sea.

He coughed. It hurt. To breathe was to plant a hook in his throat and to cough was to pull upon it.

The shadow standing next to the gurney blurred. The motion made him seasick, but the shadow left behind the warmth of a handprint on his shoulder, before it disappeared.

Fluid in his lungs rippled with every heartbeat.

He remembered a festival and a balloon filled with water, attached to a band around the wrist of a little girl. Possibly Hanabi, yes, it must have been Hanabi – the way she had bounced the water balloon like it had personally offended her. He remembered the sound of her hand slapping the balloon and the slosh of the water inside it.

If he got through this, Neji never wanted to see another water balloon ever again.

A cold waft of air. A door had been opened, and the surface he was lying on rolled forward into a room that was bright with lights and smelled of lemon and hissed with pressurised gas. And there were people around him, masked and gloved.

"Alright, Neji-kun," a voice pushed through the cotton in his ears, "we're going to ask you a few questions. How are you feeling? Are you comfortable?"

His lips were dry, his tongue felt too fat for his mouth. "What's going to happen to me?"

"We're about to put you under general anaesthetic," the voice answered, warm and reliable. "And then you're going to undergo a prototype surgical procedure, which we've received permission from your family to proceed with. Your uncle wishes you all the best of luck. He also wanted you to know that you have always made him proud, and that he has faith that you will continue to do so."

His heartbeat thudded in his ears. "Is this the procedure," he asked, staring up at the lights, "that they've based off Uchiha Sasuke?"

"Yes," said the voice. The lights twinkled. "Now I am inserting a needle into your hand. You might feel a little pain."

Air scoured his windpipe when he breathed, but aside from that he felt nothing.

He closed his eyes and snorted. "If an Uchiha could live through such a thing, then a Hyuuga would be able to live through it three times over."

That's the spirit, the voice whispered, more like a sigh of the wind than a voice. Now, son, do me proud.

When they rolled him into the theatre, Neji was smiling.

Around one in the morning, Kakashi knocked on the great plastic window and gently woke up the occupant. He let Sasuke out without a word, his wrists and his eyes unrestrained, as they had agreed, and together they made their way out of the asylum.

Lights and voices leaked wearily out of medic-nin offices. Machines hummed with power. Water dripped, splashed into already filled bowls. They climbed through the hospital in silence, passing doors with marbled glass that twisted their shadows in their wake.

A figure in black was waiting outside the room, just as Kakashi and Sasuke had been expecting.

"You have an hour," Tsunade told Sasuke, pushing the door open. "Maybe less."

She closed the door behind him.

There were fewer machines in the room than normally would have been expected. Sasuke noted that with no small satisfaction. This man didn't need life support technology. Nobody was interested in supporting his life. There was, however, an array of intravenous drips about the bed, as well as a dialysis machine tucked away into the corner, and a tube for the urinary catheter. Sasuke had wanted to watch the man die of the Plague, not dehydration or malnutrition, or renal failure.

Sasuke listened to the rasping breaths, heard his own blood begin to rush in his ears and the sparks spit and crackle about his hands.

He moved forward, eyes spinning, each step eager, each footfall savouring.

Danzo's face was white and slick with sweat. The blind had been pulled up on his window. Moonlight streamed in, crisp and clean-edged as a shard of ice. He didn't notice the figure coming out of the darkness behind him.

Sasuke pulled up the seat next to the bed, and, at the sound of the scraping chair, Danzo looked over his shoulder. If he was in any way stunned by the sudden appearance of his visitor, he hid it extremely well.

He raised an eyebrow, sighed and stared back at the red eyes above him. "The executioner, I presume?"

Time seemed to close about Sasuke and settle upon the moment like snow. Everything from before culminated with this point and everything after would extend from it. In the face of the moment, the only thing that mattered was the present.

"Come to watch me die, Uchiha Sasuke?" Danzo closed his eyes. "If it gives you any pleasure, I assure you, I am in agony. I have felt myself dying so slowly it has almost been intimate."

He saw everything in pin-sharp detail - a wrinkled and folded throat, rising and falling with diminishing strength with every passing minute; a chin striped with blood, black and red; a frame that had wasted away in bed instead of standing firm on a field of battle as it would have liked – and every unit of detail he committed to memory.

Sasuke looked down to the man's hand. It was trembling. "An executioner must confirm the death of his victim himself."

Danzo gave out a bark of laughter. "Ah, a thorough executioner! So you believe no death but that which you see with your own two eyes and feel with your own two hands?"

"You are an old man," Sasuke hissed, eyes flashing. "You're an old scared man, laughing because you are afraid."

"And you are a witless boy, rash and reckless," Danzo replied without hesitation, "blinkered to the rest of the world beyond his troubles."

They eyed each other in the dark, and the wind beat against the window and shook it in its frame.

Danzo hawked and spat into a bucket on the other side of the bed. Sasuke grimaced.

"Yes, rash, reckless, and blinkered," Danzo repeated wearily, lifting his head with a trail of pink spittle hanging from his lips, "but with all those things, on top of a ruthless willingness to do anything for the desired result, you remind me very much of myself when I was your age."

The suppressor tags under the bandages on Sasuke's chest warmed as his chakra spiked and flared against them. Static tingled along his arms. "I am nothing like you."

"Yet," Danzo murmured and he coughed as the air thickened with charge. "Yet."

"The reason why I am here," Sasuke lowered his voice to a whisper, "is so that the very last thing you see is your failure, old man."

Danzo heard Sasuke only as a voice from an increasingly distant shore. A part of his mind whispered that it was a ghost that was taunting him at his bedside - come ahead of its brethren to stop him escaping, a herald for the Uchiha dead who were on their way even then to lead him straight down to Hell.

"By my death I will ensure the future and honour of the village." His own voice seemed distant. "That is far from failure, Uchiha Sasuke. That is glory."

"You will die," Sasuke said, watching Danzo shiver and gasp for air, "and the last thing you will see is me, an Uchiha, living on, and the future of the town will be mine, old man, not yours, and the future you dreamed will, by my hand, never be realised."

To stand over the ashes of your enemy, to take everything that was his, to build your castle where your enemy's once stood, and to build it better than his ever was! To be the last man standing – that is the perfect revenge.

Sasuke leaned in closer until all that filled Danzo's eyes was a reflection of Sasuke's face, all ghostly white and points of red. "I'm going to destroy the very Konoha system you represented. I'm going to dig it out from its very roots. I will dedicate my life to erasing the mark of your existence, so that everything you achieved in your life never had any meaning."

Danzo drew in a deep shuddering breath. His hands and feet were already gone, set out on a path that he didn't want to follow. "You would try to change everything?"

"Yes," Sasuke replied. He could smell blood on the old man's face. "Things must change, and I will make them do so."

"And you will not rest satisfied until you have overturned everything necessary to make my efforts void. Yes, I - "

Danzo made a wet noise at the back of his throat. Blood welled up over his lips, dark and shiny.

He made no effort to wipe it away or to spit it out from his mouth. It bubbled up and poured down his chin, thick and mineral as tar.

Sasuke looked on, cataloguing the sight, etching the moment inside himself. He reached forward and seized Danzo's head by the ears. A spark leapt from his fingers and singed the old man's hair.

Danzo's single eye slid in and out of focus. Sasuke forced the old man to face him.

"How does it feel dying, knowing that I'm still here and setting out to destroy your legacy?" Sasuke shook Danzo by the ears and Danzo's eye rolled in its socket. "Go on, old man, lecture me now! Perhaps something about hate, anger, or the futility of revenge! Try it! I've heard them all!"

Blood poured from the corners of Danzo's mouth. He focused blearily on the ghost in front of him.

"If you succeed in changing Konoha," Danzo said, looking Sasuke in the eye and then beyond his shoulder where the shadows suddenly seemed thick and crowded, "then my existence would have had some meaning after all, because through my activities in Konoha…"

He could see them, faces white and raging, flickering with a ghoulish glow, men and women and children, some with eyes plucked clean from their sockets. They were leaning on Sasuke's shoulders, crowding the space behind his back.

He laughed, laughed until the blood flew from his mouth in one final bitter spray. "…through all I did here in Konoha, did I not create the man that you are now, Uchiha Sasuke?"

The ghosts reached out for Danzo with long, white arms, mouths soundlessly shaping his name.

Enraged, Sasuke fisted his hands in Danzo's collar.

"Look at me!" He shook Danzo so hard that blood splattered across the window and over his own face, sticky and hot. "Keep looking at me. See me. I am outliving you, old man. I've won. Do you see me? And nobody made me but myself. Do you understand that? Look at me!"

The old man's eye drifted to focus on a point over Sasuke's shoulder and Danzo seized. With a violent shudder and rattling breath, he went limp, and then still.

Sasuke stopped. He looked down at the old man in his hands.

He reached up and touched Danzo's neck and wrist. He held a palm over Danzo's mouth. He flicked the eye that was still apparently transfixed on empty space – no pulse, no breath, no blink reflex.

That was it?

Sasuke lowered the body and sat back in his chair. The temperature in the room felt two degrees colder than when he had entered.

That was it?

The muscles in his face were twitching. His breathing sounded loud and lonely in the room. The smell of sweat and sickness clung to the insides of Sasuke's nose and he gripped the armrests so tightly it was a miracle they didn't snap.

Cold air tickled the back of his neck like a breath and faded.

He breathed in slowly. Tasted blood.

Felt laughter rising from the pits of his stomach.

That was it.

"He's laughing," Tsunade realised, as they listened to the sounds coming out of the room. "That laughter – "

"It's quite something, isn't it?" Kakashi bent down and put his eye to the keyhole. "I can't see anything, but I guess that means it's all over."

The laughter stopped.

Tsunade and Kakashi took that as their definite cue to finally step into the room.

They found Danzo dead, as they thought they would. They had heard little of what had passed between the two, but they had heard Sasuke's raised voice before the laughter started and suspected that, at that moment, Danzo had been reaching his limits.

As for Sasuke, they found him sitting in the chair, his head resting on his chest, breathing deeply and evenly.

He was fast asleep.

The expression on his face was peaceful. It was the most peaceful Kakashi had ever seen it.

He looked younger for it.

Chapter Text

On leaving the Land of Lightning, the man who called himself Uchiha Madara had been in very good humour. He had caught the Kages by surprise, cast them in his shadow as though they were no more than ants under his sandals, and their expressions had been so pathetic Madara would almost have thought them pitiable, had he not been so busy savouring the dismay, fury, and, sweeter still, the bitter gleam of self-hate, in their eyes.

The Kages had been made to feel, deep to their very bones, their own powerlessness, and it had hurt them deep.

He planted his feet in the branches of a cedar, sniffed the air and stiffened. He could smell smoke lingering about the cave, perhaps only a day or so old.

Now his triumph was but a sweet aftertaste at the back of his mouth.

A lesser man than Madara might have regretted taking a detour through Ame to check on his subordinates, but Madara had neither the time nor the patience to regret. The important issue here was that something had happened whilst he was away, and it was highly likely it interfered with his current plans.

Something had happened? Oh, yes, something had happened alright. He dropped down from the tree and approached the cave. The boy had happened, that's what. There was no doubt about it. With the smoke in the air, this wasn't Kabuto's style.

He needed to salvage what he could from this project and move on.

A thick blue mesh of chakra cloaked the lair from peak to base, but in one spot, surrounded by dapples where the chakra had been stretched, was a warp in the cloud of illusions, like a knot in a piece of wood.

So, you've decided to leave me, have you, Sasuke?

The walls were black with soot and the doors had been reduced to crumbling blocks of charcoal, brittle to the touch.

Madara smelled the body long before he saw it: The cloying pungency of burnt hair and the grease of bubbled human fat – it stuck in his throat and rested slick on his tongue. Once he might have gagged. Now he followed the smell like a hound and found the body in the laboratory.

Its skin had been charred red and black, but it was still undeniably recognisable as Kabuto. Its head rested in a thick black crust of blood. Madara turned the body over to examine the wound. A blow had been dealt to the back of the head, and a strong one, most likely dealt in anger, and judging by the open freezer door on the other side of the laboratory Madara could guess what the cause had been.

Madara chuckled and straightened. Something crunched beneath his feet - a pair of glasses, their thick round lenses shattered and their wire frames twisted. He kicked them aside and they came to a rest under a lab-bench.

No subject and no researcher, the research programme was over. Sasuke's most likely course of action would be to seek out the nearest ninja town and trade himself and what he knew for favours. In this case, that would be Konoha.

Let Konoha have him then. The Plague had been a distraction and the cure an opportunity, but the Moon's Eye Plan had been planned long before the Plague. Once the world was back to how it all had been, the Plan would continue just as before. In the time it would take for Madara to recapture the boy and seek out a new researcher, Konoha would no doubt have already developed a cure. It seemed much more efficient for Madara to sit back, let Konoha do the medical dirty work, and wait for the world to resume its normalcy.

And why waste time trying to recapture the boy when he would eventually come back to Madara anyway?

The thought amused him and put him back in good spirits.

He made his way to through the cave system, passing the operating theatres, the kitchen, the well shaft, Sasuke's room, until he came at last to a part of the complex that had escaped the fire.

Kabuto's door had been booby-trapped with an arsenal of seals and trips and concealed wires. The traps made little difference to Madara. He melted through the door, the grain of the wood prickling along his skin and organs like a fine-toothed comb.

One glance around the room told him all he needed to know. Cases and desk-drawers had been sealed three to five times over and set with chakra-sensitive explosives. Corners of the room shimmered with a dim blue glow. Men who went to such lengths to hide their things had things worth seeking.

He pulled out the top drawer of the desk. A curved blade slipped out from the back of the handle and sliced through his fingers, or it would have done, had it not passed clean through him. It was a wicked little thing, thin as a cat's tongue and tipped with poison. He nodded appreciatively in acknowledgement at the effort then snapped it off.

Six illusions, four poisoned needles, three electrocuting tags, two exploding, several poisoned loops of razor wire and one tag that launched a handful of venomous spiders into his face later, Madara found a long wooden box and set it on top of the desk.

He disarmed a vial that would have fired a cloud of chlorine gas at his eyes and gently lifted the lid.

Bound in coppery silk, inside was a scroll.

Somebody was weeping, or, more accurately, sobbing inconsolably somewhere close to Neji's head and he knew it was close to his head because his pillow was getting soggier the longer it went on.

He was about say something short, but no less eloquent, that would precisely convey his irritation, when he remembered that he was in hospital and the words evaporated from his mouth.

He had barely been able to breathe for agony. He had been dying. On the brink of despair he had dreamt of a voice and a prototype surgical procedure that might have been able to save him.

Now there was somebody crying at his ear, and not just one, but several others, crowding round and looking down at his sorry form, and it all suddenly made terrible tragic sense to him: It had failed, hadn't it?

It had failed, and now here they all were, gathered about his stiffening body. Fate really had it in for him. He wanted to laugh. He really did. No wonder his chest felt so free and easy when he breathed and his mind pleasantly detached from everything around it. He was already dead.

So he laughed because nobody could hear the dead laughing anyway, and, to his surprise, he heard his own bitter laughter ringing loudly in his ears. He stopped and, at the same, the weeping at his shoulder sniffled to a halt.

"He – he just laughed," someone spluttered. "He just…He's waking up! Neji! Neji! Come on, man, wake up!"

Sensation. Warmth. Cold. His throat was raw and his body ached all over, but that simple act of laughing had apparently set something in motion inside him, because little by little those great black walls that had loomed out of the dark were crumbling, and now he was growing increasingly hopeful…no, increasingly certain…that maybe, just maybe he was…

"Oi, Neji, quit keeping us in suspense and open your eyes!"

"Naruto, he might be dreaming. Some people laugh in their sleep – "

"He's not dreaming. Neji, you're not dreaming, are you? Come on!" Somebody drummed the mattress with their hands. Neji frowned. Who would be stupid enough to drum the bed of someone fresh out of surgery? "Follow the sound of my voice. Don't go to the light. If you see the light, don't follow it! Got it? Strange white light calling you to some place that sparkles is not to be followed! Sparkles is bad, Neji! Sparkles is bad!"

"Please can somebody shut Naruto up before I punch him myself and rip all my stitches," Neji muttered.

"It's not working," Naruto continued to say over his head. "Right, Bushybrows, try crying more into his pillow. Maybe with enough tears and boogers next to his face he'll – "

"Oh hell, no!" Neji shouted and opened his eyes.

"NEJI!" screamed several voices at once, and he froze in his bed.

He was in a clean white-walled room, not in an isolation ward or in intensive care, just a single-patient room filled with people. Late morning light was streaming in through a window, and all about him were the broadest, brightest smiles he had ever had the bewildering joy of having directed at him.

To his left was Lee, wiping his face and sniffling into a corner of Neji's sheets. To his right was Naruto, beaming and looking more excited than Neji had thought was publically acceptable. Sakura and Ino were high-fiving, before Ino took off for the door and sprinted out of the room. Shikamaru stood at the end of the bed with a look of intense relief.

"What happened?" Neji tested his voice. It still had a burr of a rasp to it, but it didn't tear at his throat. "How long have I been out?"

"Two days. You had the operation and we've been keeping track of your RAMK blood count ever since. Neji-kun - your count's going down. The bacteria aren't replicating anymore." Sakura's eyes shone. "It's official. Chakra system immune memory is actually working. The operation – everything – it was all a success."

"A success?" Neji turned to Lee and scowled. "If it was a success then why are you crying like I'm on my death-bed?"

"I'm crying because – " Lee sobbed, squared his shoulders and blinked tears out of his eyes. "I'm crying because I'm so happy, because you're alive, you're getting better, and I finally get to tell everybody some good news! For the first time ever since all this started, I get to say that somebody's survived. Oh, wait till everyone hears about this!"

He must have been to the Hyuuga house, Neji realised with a jolt. He must have been the one updating his uncle on his condition, and hadn't he once mentioned Tenten's father? How the old man still asked after Neji, even though his own daughter was dead and buried?

"Sakura said you'd wake up some time today, so we thought we'd all come and visit and give you a surprise," Naruto explained with a grin, blinking quickly. "And it's the first time we've all seen you since you went off into isolation, so look happier about it, will you?"

Neji stared, still feeling dazed and dazzled, as though he had woken up in a strange alien land where the sun was always shining and the stars came out during daytime. "So I don't need to be isolated anymore?"

Sakura handed him a piece of paper with a smile. "Take a look for yourself."

He took the sheet and squinted at the figures. The dates up to two days ago recorded a sharp, steep rise, peaking just after he entered intensive care, and then beginning a shallow sloping fall, as his body weakened and his chakra system flagged, but after the date of the operation...

He didn't dare to believe what he was seeing. "I'm…" Neji swallowed. His voice was not going to crack. No, it was most certainly not going to crack. Not with all these people around him, wishing him to be well and looking so happy. "I'm nearly clean…"

"You'll be clean of RAMK in another three days at the most." Sakura tapped the column of predicted figures. "It's brilliant. It really is. We've started working on the other intensive care patients already. Ino and I did five patients this morning, and we've got another forty or so to go." Sakura smiled wearily. "It's tiring, but it feels so good to finally be able to help people, I honestly don't mind."

"So, Sakura and Ino moving into the hospital being another story," cut in Shikamaru with a lazy, lopsided smirk, "welcome back from the land of the dead."

"Yeah, welcome back, Neji." Naruto held out his hand. "Konoha Tigers, right?"

Neji frowned and then groaned as he remembered the events at the Den on the night of the Second Parade. "I'm never going to live that down, am I?"

He clasped hands with Naruto as firmly as he could, and then looked round at the circle of faces, focusing on each and every one of them, and asking himself what he had ever done to deserve them: "Thank you."

For giving me things to live for, for not giving up on me, and for not letting me give up.

The door flew open and a jounin, with eyebrows that looked excited enough to crawl off and create baby hedges together, burst into the room with a wail of, "Neji-kun!"

Neji flinched, scowled and sighed. "Guy-sensei, I'm fine. Please. Calm down – "

He got no further as Guy-sensei launched himself across the room.

Ino, who had gone to fetch Guy-sensei from the waiting room, arrived panting in Neji's room moments later. Neji was protesting and flailing in Guy-sensei's grip. Shikamaru had buried his face in his hands. The room was filled with laughter, and outside the window in the glassy blue sky, a flock of sparrows went flying by.

"Naruto, can I borrow you for a moment?"

Naruto turned and, with a jolt, found Kakashi standing behind him. "Kakashi-sensei! Don't sneak up on me like that. What's up? What's happened?"

"Putting aside that I shouldn't have been able to sneak up on you anyway, Naruto, when did you last see Sasuke?"

"When Sakura took me down four days ago. Why?"

Four days ago they had gone to see him and found Sasuke oddly distracted, pacing his cell backwards and forwards, staring up at the ceiling as though he was waiting for something to tumble down from the hospital floors above, so he could catch it, kill it and burn it when it landed.

They had left almost as soon as they had arrived. Sasuke had made it very clear that he didn't want to speak to either of them. Sakura had been crushed and Naruto had been furious, but the cause of distraction made itself quickly clear. The following morning, Shimura Danzo's death was front page news.

By the time the sun had risen, Danzo's body had already been wrapped in the sheets he had died in and carried to a pit to the South East of Konoha. The newspapers must have been preparing well in advance for the occasion. They even had obituaries ready. Danzo was praised as a patriot, damned as an extremist, and said to enjoy 'woodwork and root vegetable farming' in his spare time. Naruto had laughed so hard he had almost snorted his ramen over Sakura.

If Sasuke had been given a predicted timeline for the course of Danzo's illness, it wasn't difficult to guess what had been preying on his mind when they had gone to see him in the cell.

"And you've seen nothing of him since?" Kakashi rubbed his hands together with anticipation. "Oh goodie. This might actually work."

Naruto cringed. "Kakashi-sensei, never say 'oh goodie' with that look ever again."

With Naruto following Kakashi, they made their way towards the basement asylum. Kakashi set a key-card to the door, tapped it again on the other side to lock it when they were through, and then they carried on down the bright white corridor.

"Hey, Kakashi-sensei, when do I get one of those key-card things?"

"Naruto, it's the key to a lunatic asylum. Do you really want one?"

"Well, then I'd get to see Sasuke whenever I want, right?"

Kakashi sighed. "I think, Naruto, for the sake of everybody's mental well-being, especially mine, not quite yet."

When they came to a stop in front of the cell, Naruto stopped muttering angrily behind Kakashi's back about stingy jounins and went up to the window. Sasuke was lying flat on the pallet in the corner, apparently fast asleep with his face turned towards the wall.

It was the most unguarded and at ease that Naruto had ever seen him. Suddenly Naruto felt as though he was intruding, and even felt guilty about it, which was weird, because intruding was what Naruto's aura did and he had never felt guilty about it before.

Kakashi came to stand by his side. "He's been like that for the past three days."

Naruto blinked and stared at Kakashi. "What? Just sleeping?"

"Oh, he eats what we give him and takes care of himself, but aside from that, it seems so." Kakashi tapped the plastic panel with the key-card. The hatch for the communication grill slid open. "Try getting his attention, Naruto. You're good at that."

His jaw dropped. "You're actually telling me to piss him off?"

"Royally, if you please. I want him to wake up, so he hears what I've got to say." Kakashi gestured towards the hatch and Naruto knew the world had gone officially crazy.

Naruto bent his knees so that he was level with the grill. He cleared his throat. "Sasuke!" he yelled into the cell from the top of his lungs. "Sasuke-Sasuke-Sasuke-Sasuke-Sasuke-Sasuke-Sasuke-Bastard-Asshole-Jerkass-Lord-of-the-Ducks-Orochimaru's-Bitch-"

Neither of them saw Sasuke move. The cell's chair smashed against the window so hard it exploded in a spray of wood.

Naruto drew back as splinters shot out of the grill.

Sasuke straightened from his overarm throw, breathing heavily. He glowered and seemed ready to shout something back, before his eyes snapped to Kakashi and narrowed.

"Thank you, Naruto. That will do." Kakashi clapped his hands slowly as he approached the grill, both mildly impressed and terrified how effective bringing Naruto had been. "Sasuke-kun, good morning."

"If you have something to say, say it, then get out of my sight."

"Sasuke, this is all in your best interest. It isn't healthy for a young ninja to spend three days lying in his bed. It was high time you woke up." Kakashi continued in his light tone, even as Sasuke was grinding chunks of wood beneath his feet to dust. "I have a message from the Hokage. The vaccine's complete and she's finished with the sample. Tonight, everything's going to be sent to the crematorium. It's all going to be burned, as promised."

Naruto looked up at Kakashi in alarm. He didn't like the sound of anything being burned, and more to the point, if it was going to the crematorium, didn't that mean it was a human body?

The anger drained out of Sasuke, leaving just a whirl of something behind, and, for once, to Naruto's amazement, Sasuke was letting it show – surprise, relief, suspicion, confusion, then another cycle all over again. It was almost painful to watch.

Eventually, Sasuke closed his eyes and his face smoothed over. "I will be there," he stated firmly, daring Kakashi to challenge him.

Kakashi nodded and smiled. "We were never going to suggest otherwise. Anyway, time to rise and – " Sasuke closed the hatch over the grill before Kakashi had finished talking, apparently deciding that enough was enough. Kakashi paused but then cheerfully continued on regardless. "- Shine. We'll be on our way then. I'll talk to Tsunade about getting a new chair. Right, let's go, Naruto."

"What's happening tonight - ?"

"Let's go, Naruto."

They left Sasuke picking up the pieces of wood from the floor.

There had been nothing waiting in the dark, no feeling of incompleteness, no unfinished task still pawing and snatching at the back of his mind. No more ghosts to run from and no more ghosts to appease, just a warm all-enveloping darkness that didn't smell of blood.

Sometimes Sasuke had been sleeping. More often he had simply been lying awake on his side.

The feeling of Danzo's death lingered on Sasuke's hands - his papery old skin, the slippery thickness of blood, the sticky globules that had dropped on Sasuke's knuckles, and his sick breath on the back of his fists, but it didn't feel like a weight. It was more like the tingle of holding a bolt of lightning. It electrified him, scared him, and it was the source of the incredible weightlessness that had assaulted Sasuke when he had first woken up, and he had only just been able to shake off.

It had been as if in a dream. He had been lighter than air, flying with every breath he took, as though a huge rock had been rolled off his back at last, and he had been allowed to stand tall, look up and see the sky.

All he had wanted to do was lie on his pallet and stay weightless as a flicker of lightning forever, until, of course, Naruto happened, and reminded him that reality couldn't be ignored (unless Sasuke wanted to get a migraine) and needed to be dealt with, sometimes violently. Today, with a chair.

Because reality had a funny habit of shoving Naruto in Sasuke's face. It was life's idea of a private joke.

"Hokage-sama, it's all finished," the crematorium officer said, as she came into the waiting room.

"Thank you." Tsunade turned a page of her magazine and sipped on her tea. "Sasuke. Go with the officer."

The officer looked more than a little nonplussed. "Hokage-sama, bone collecting can be very difficult for a single person. Are you sure the three of you wouldn't like to - ?"

"I'll do it alone," Sasuke said shortly.

The officer flinched, but argued no more. Kakashi remained silent, leaning against the water coolant.

"Sasuke," Tsunade said, as he left the room, "if I hear anything funny, we'll seal your eyes completely and we'll put you on duty rebuilding sewage pipes from next week onwards."

Sasuke snorted and went with the officer. Whenever the officer thought he wasn't looking, she would cast him a nervous look and try to catch a glimpse of his face under the stuffy medic-nin visor.

She pushed open the door to the room with the oven. Sasuke knew there was probably another word for it, and strictly speaking it wasn't an oven, but as far as he was concerned, it looked like one. The room smelled. In front of the metal door, there was a tray of all that remained from the burning process - all that remained of his brother.

"Have you done this before, sir?" the officer asked him, handing him a pair of long heavy chopsticks.

The Uchiha compound had had its own small crematorium, guaranteed to keep Uchiha secrets safe. There had been an aunt who had passed away and he remembered a room much like this one, but he had been much too small to reach the tray.

"I know what I'm supposed to do," Sasuke answered brusquely, when she seemed to be waiting for an answer.

The officer nodded and indicated the pot at the head of the tray. "This is the pot you'll be using. If you need any help, sir, feel free to ask."

He didn't thank her. He didn't think he had to. All she had done so far was wheel a coffin into an oven and pull it out again, so he dismissed her without a word and the officer drew back to stand by the door.

In the tray were shards of bone and chunks of ash - grey, brown, black and sometimes startlingly white. Itachi had been very sick indeed. Sasuke could see it in how his bones had crumbled. He passed a hand over a tray and drew it back. There was still heat radiating off the bones.

Sasuke pushed through the warm shards. They clinked at the touch of the chopsticks. When he picked up a piece, it was so light he didn't realise he was holding it until he saw it between his chopstick tips.

He lifted it from the tray, dropped into the pot.

It clinked at the bottom.

The greatest and most loyal ninja Konoha had produced in recent years - now a pan of rattling bone flakes in the chopsticks of his little, lesser brother.

The lesser brother. Always the younger, smaller, foolish little brother.

Sasuke took a deep breath, continued on.

"Konoha," he whispered, as he sifted through the bones, piece by piece. "What did it mean to you?"

When Sasuke had set out from Konoha, he had decided never to look back or regret his choices.

Itachi, on the other hand, had never stopped looking back. His eyes had always been turned back to Konoha, checking to see if his younger brother was chasing after him and looking into the past.

Even at his moment of death, in his tap to Sasuke's forehead, he had looked back to Konoha and their past one last time. Perhaps he had regretted something, but if he had, nobody would ever know.

"Niisan." He flicked away something hard from the centre of the tray. It felt like bone, but he knew it wasn't. "The man who made you suffer- Danzo - he's dead now."

I watched him die, with my own two eyes, for you, for me - for the both of us. Were you watching from the Other Shore?

"I told him things had to change, and that I'd make them change."

Sift through the ashes, find all the bone, all the little pieces, pick them up, drop them into pot, and don't listen to the clinking as the bits fell together…

"Someone once said that I was setting out to destroy the very thing you wanted to protect," Sasuke continued to talk to himself. He knew his mutterings were making the crematorium officer uneasy. If he went on like this, mechanically moving bone from tray to pot, muttering under his breath like he was spelling out a curse, maybe she would leave. "But I wasn't, was I? I think I know that now."

Good, the door was creaking. The officer had had enough.

"You were never protecting Konoha." It was like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get the pieces into the pot "You were protecting Konoha's potential for peace. In which case, I'm not at odds with you at all."

The thought made Sasuke more relieved than he would ever care to admit. He smiled to himself, but no more than a little twitch at the corners of his mouth. He was keeping as tight a hold on himself as he was on his chopsticks. His hands were shaking. He had dropped some pieces several times over.

"You had an ideal of Konoha, and it was an ideal that didn't exist yet, in which case, we're on the same side, aren't we?" Sasuke paused and raked through the ashes. There was nothing left now but the bones of the throat. "You'd agree with me that Konoha needs to change, wouldn't you? Niisan?"

Not that he was looking for the approval of a dead man. Not that he wondered if Itachi had been or would ever be proud of him.

He choked on his own breath and closed his eyes.

It was just the last piece of bone. Just the last piece, but the chopsticks felt too heavy. He set them down and gripped the edges of the tray. He heard footsteps approaching the door. Somebody was making sure that he heard them coming.

The door creaked and, without looking up, Sasuke said, "Get out."

"Sasuke, it's just me," Kakashi said, raising his hands as though warding off an attack. "The officer was looking a little concerned, so the Hokage sent me to check up on you. How are things going?"

Sasuke ignored the question and snatched up the chopsticks again, but they slipped out of his grasp.

"Oh, you don't want to do that." Kakashi caught the chopsticks before they landed on the floor. "It's disrespectful to the dead. Here."

He handed them back to Sasuke and went to stand on the other side of the tray. Sasuke was tempted to point out that Kakashi touching his porn and then touching the chopsticks with the same hands was probably even more disrespectful than dropping them, but said nothing.

With Kakashi watching, he picked up the bones for Itachi's neck and laid them, gently, lightly, weightlessly at the top of the heap in the pot.

Weightlessness. What a laugh. Humans were anything but weightless. To live as a human was to choose to bear weights. Perhaps Sasuke's feeling of lightning weightlessness that had accompanied Danzo's death had been a kind of death in itself.

"Alright," said Kakashi, breaking the silence. "I'll fetch the officer so that she can finish this off. Sasuke, you did a good job."

She must have been waiting at the door. The officer came quickly forward with a little brush and pan, and swept the remainder of the ash into a heap that she poured over the bone shards.

Sasuke's eyes began to smart. They stung, prickled as though the ash had been thrown into them instead of the pot. Before he could even stop to wonder what was wrong with him, something wet and cold slid down both sides of his face. He pulled off his visor, touched his cheeks and examined the tips of his fingers. It wasn't blood.

"Not a word," Sasuke said to Kakashi, as he covered his face with the visor again.

So Kakashi pointedly said nothing about trembling shoulders, about shaking hands, about the way Sasuke's eyes were closed as though in pain when he accepted the pot of bones from the officer.

He especially said nothing about the way in which the visor was fooling no one.

There were four medical breakthroughs that historians eventually agreed were crucial to defeating the Plague:

The chakra system immune memory operation, shortened almost immediately by the professionals to 'ChakSysIM' and by the more sensible members of the public to 'The Operation', which saved those already in the two latter stages of the Plague; Konsei-2, a chemotherapy drug made from components of the Sixth Repentance's konseigan poison, which was found to temporarily weaken chakra systems to levels that slowed, and in some cases stopped, the RAMK replication; the UI vaccine, developed from a sample of old MK strain, which was given to both the latently infected and the healthy and named in honour of the ninja from whom the sample was taken; and finally the US antiserum, a sample of antibodies from the first Plague immune ninja.

The historians would later add to this list the development of a highly influential bone marrow stem cell culture, which became known as the USas line (after the ninja it was taken from – medics really know how to give their discoveries snappy names) and was responsible for many more discoveries in the weeks that followed, but the first four breakthroughs were the ones that signaled, for many, the beginning of the end of the Plague.

Research papers were sent to every land as soon as they were available. Specialists from far and wide came to Konoha to train and learn all the necessary techniques for free. The old ANBU chemical factories where the konseigan was made were turned over for mass-producing Konsei-2, and it seemed as though, in no time at all, the hazard gear began to disappear from the streets, and ninjas were strolling around in flak jackets again.

When a week went by without any new cases of infection, the bars and bolts on the locked-in doors were drawn back, and the families that had vanished at the start of the spring stepped out into early summer.

The day the Hyuuga house was unlocked was bright, warm and dazzling with sunshine and it became something of a public occasion. By the time Naruto arrived at the main gates, a buzzing crowd of Marksmen Hyuugas, friends of the family and interested passers-by were standing in a semi-circle around the team of council workers, who were taking down the locks and chains on the outside.

Naruto shouldered through the crowd and found Neji and Lee near the centre.

Neji raised his eyebrows. "Late."

"Sorry, I thought I'd see if Sakura and Ino were free, but they're helping out a bunch of Iwa medics all day." Naruto looked around and whistled. "Look at all these people! It's like a street party or something."

There was even an ice cream stall taking advantage of the crowd on the street corner.

"Is Shikamaru coming?" Naruto asked, after taking in all the sights and sounds around him.

Lee shook his head. "Kurenai-sensei is unlocking her door today as well, so he has, most valiantly, gone to help her."

There was a yell like a battle-cry and a thud from the other side of the gates. The gate bulged outwards and the council workers cutting the locks sprang back from the wood. When the gates resettled and the workers quickly went back to their task, somebody shouted something from inside the gates. The Marksmen Hyuuga laughed.

"What just happened?" Naruto asked, as he noted Neji cracking a small, amused smile.

"There's a team of my clansmen breaking the bars and locks on the inside and they just got very close to bringing whole gate down, so I think that was my uncle swearing."

All of a sudden, the council workers were scrabbling back from the gates, dragging the chains and locks and bars with them. They were followed by the sound of splintering wood, tinkling metal, and then the gates sprang open to a great roar from the crowd.

Hyuuga Hiashi stood in the gateway with forehead protector gleaming, a bolt-cutter in one hand and a huge hammer in the other. He was flanked on either side by Hinata and Hanabi wielding axes, and the rest of his clan were standing behind his back.

He stepped out over the rubble of wood and chains in the gateway. The street fell silent.

With a small smile that looked just a touch embarrassed, Hiashi clenched his fist and shook it in front of his face in a gesture of triumph, as though to say, We made it through!

Which was all that anybody wanted to know, and with another loud cheer, the locked-in Hyuugas spilled out into the street and the crowd surged forward to embrace their friends and family.

Hinata had spotted Naruto from his thatch of blond hair and bright orange colours almost as soon as the gate had opened. She then noticed Lee beside him, and Neji.

Her mouth went a little dry. She made her way through the crowd towards them.

At the sight of Hinata with a huge axe in her hands, Naruto and Lee's jaws dropped to the floor, but they quickly recovered and started shouting and yelling and jumping, and making so much warm, bright, happy noise between the two of them that she couldn't help but feel buoyed up by the moment, and she had one thing she needed to do before the moment passed.

Hinata thrust her axe at Naruto, every inch of her face growing so warm she was probably glowing. Naruto spluttered in surprise and fumbled on the handle. He would have dropped it on his feet if Lee hadn't caught hold of it in time.

Hinata turned her attention to her cousin. "Neji-niisan."

Neji had been hanging back as Naruto and Lee made a fuss about her and looked a little flustered. "Hinata-sama," he answered formally, dipping his head. "It's good to see you looking so well."

Hinata fought down the urge to look down at her shoes. Chewing on her lip, she took one step towards him, and then another. She raised her fist, closed her eyes and then gently tapped him on the chest.

"Tha-that was for the ballot paper switch," Hinata stammered, opening her eyes. "Tha-that was for – that was for you getting sick - "

Neji stared as Hinata stood tearfully in front of him, holding up a quivering fist.

Happy reunions were happening all around them. Naruto and Lee were grinning at him from behind the axe in their arms. He looked at the chains and locks lying in the open Hyuuga gates, at Hinata's hands stained with dyes, at all the Marksmen and locked-in shouting and laughing as they came back together, and reached a decision.

"Naruto said you'd forgiven me." Neji was going to regret this, probably for years to come. "But given everything that's happened, if you want to hit me then it's probably no less than I deserve." He swallowed. Yes, he was definitely going to regret this. "And…I think you can hit me harder than that."

Konoha Hospital later saw Hyuuga Neji readmitted with a mild case of concussion and a number of fractured ribs, after a single punch had sent him flying down the length of the whole street to land in a, thankfully, very well-positioned ice cream stall.

As Naruto so put it: "Gentle fist, my ass."

A few days later a strange party appeared on the road to the South-East of Konoha.

"Who are you and what do you want?" shouted the guard down from the top of the wall, pulling the bowstring taut to his ear.

He aimed at the big man who stood in the middle of the road, wearing a curious kind of hazard gear none of them had seen before.

With a mane of white hair, billowing from the top of the visor like smoke, he looked less like a man, and more like a giant tepee on legs.

The tepee man squinted critically up to the top of the wall. "Don't you recognise a humble writer when you see one?"

The guard faltered. "Er…no?"

"Dear me, dear me, well, can't help folks who've been starved of literature! It's Jiraiya. The Jiraiya. The one and only great Jiraiya," shouted the tepee, its voice muffled by the visor.

The name rang a bell. "Weren't you supposed to have got back here two weeks ago?"

"True! That is very true! And I'm probably going to have my crown jewels plucked, pressed, stretched and made into a purse and a key-chain by the end of this evening, but, long story short, I got a bit side-tracked when I was coming through the forest and I found this clan…"

The tepee pointed at the group of people standing behind him. They were visored in black hoods with dark glass over their eyes and, if the guard listened very carefully, they buzzed with a kind of drone that you might hear around a beehive.

"So I stopped off and did my bit: Gave them a hand with their packing, boxing their hives, flushing out a nasty gang of bounty hunters that had been terrorising the clan lately…Just all the usual odd-jobs that a lowly writer can do. Isn't that right, Aburame-san?"

"You have been most helpful," replied one of the hooded men.

"Then I thought, well, it would be much more fun travelling in a group than all on my lonesome, so," the tepee spread its arms expansively, "here we all are - all finally coming home together at last. Now, why don't you just open up those gates and throw us a welcome party?"

The guard looked hard at the group on the road. Then he lowered his bow. "Just wait a second."

He disappeared from the parapet and when he reappeared, he was holding up a well-thumbed paperback volume over his head. "If you would agree to sign my mum's copy of Icha Icha Fruit Salad, I might just let you through..."

With the opening of the locked-in houses, the Runners and Grey Cross were disbanded. The Konoha Tiger children, once vaccinated and treated, found new homes and left the Den. The Keepers, however, it was decided would remain for longer to finish clearing up incidents from the night of the Second Parade. Some council members were worried about the power a police force might gain in Konoha if allowed to remain for too long, but Tsunade reassured them that it was all only temporary and the meeting swiftly moved on discuss other things.

High on the agenda was negotiating another Gokage Conference, this time to be held in the Land of Fire. They needed to decide quickly how they were going to deal with Madara.

Once he had obtained samples of the vaccine and antiserum, Madara had called back Zetsu from wherever the creature had been hiding, immunised him and himself and waited eagerly for what he knew would come, now that various solutions to the Plague had been found: The Kages refusal to hand over the Jinchuurikis.

Lightning and Fire released their official statements a month after the Hihoutou Conference, co-signed by the Kazekage, Mizukage and the Tsuchikage: The Raikage and Hokage were not going to hand over their Jinchuurikis and all five Kages were prepared to retaliate if Madara tried to seize the Jinchuurikis by force.

Madara was reluctantly impressed. It seemed as though the sharing of medical technology and research had brought, at least on the surface and for the time being, some aspect of union between the five nations.

He folded up the letters and tucked them up his sleeves. "Ah well, it was worth a try."

Zetsu's head and shoulders oozed out of the rock face. "They seem to be accusing you of some fun that happened in Konoha. The Sixth Repentance…Are you going to do anything about that?"

"It would only be a waste of time and makes no difference to our cause." Madara looked out from the mountain top, over the wide green expanse of forest and the great open sky. "And if they already have cause to fear me, fear me at the level of the man on the street, and come to believe that it was only a fraction of the true damage I could do to them, it is only to our advantage. No, Zetsu, they can accuse me of what they like. It will only make me stronger and their resolve weaker. How goes the mission?"

"I don't like it," Zetsu moaned, scrunching up his face. "I get stinky human ash up my nose all the time. Do I have to do this?" Madara's eye smouldered red from behind the mask. Zetsu swallowed and chattered nervously on. "Well, it's as you said, most of the bodies in the pits didn't completely burn. The DNA samples are all there for the taking. I've got samples from three Konoha pits at the moment and we're working on the Iwa and Kiri ones. "

Madara looked down at the scroll on his lap. The jutsu scroll he had discovered in Kabuto's room had been a remarkable find. It contained the conditions, instructions and the risks (or in this case, the lack of risks) of a very interesting kinjutsu. Yes, a very interesting kinjutsu indeed.

Edited and perfected by Kabuto, the Edo Tensei was now in Madara's hands, and he had seen its potential immediately.

The Plague had decimated the ninja populations, especially targeting their young adults, from their early twenties to their late thirties, and now all those young and powerful ninjas who had been struck down in their prime were lying heaped in layers, packed down into the Plague pits – some burnt away to ash, but many only 'half-cooked', so to speak, and if he could but obtain their DNA then Madara would have a most formidable army.

It would be an army of sons and daughters, of friends and family, all those who had been watched over and cared for as they wasted slowly away. Those left behind would have prayed for them to live, wept over things unsaid, and cried for them in the night.

If the Kages weren't going to give Madara the Jinchuurikis then he would simply have to take the Jinchuurikis from them, and, with his army of the Plague dead, that was exactly what he was going to do next.

"What about Uchiha Sasuke?" Zetsu's eyes followed Madara's movements as the man rose from the ledge and rolled up the scroll. "He could be trouble. He's got strong eyes, hasn't he? Very strong eyes. And now he's gone back to Konoha - "

"I will deal with Sasuke when he returns."

"Returns to you?" Zetsu frowned and it was like watching tofu crease. "Why would he do that?"

"Those eyes of his are going to fail and, when they do, he will come looking for me." The wicked smile, hidden by the mask, wove between his words like a worm. "He will remember that I have Uchiha Itachi's eyes and he will come crawling back to us like a snake on his belly for them. Mark my words. He'll come back, blind and crawling and begging for power, and then I will make him earn the eyes of an Uchiha again."

Zetsu shuddered, and Madara returned to surveying the land before him. Some early swallows were swooping low over the trees. From his distance the birds looked as small as flies. The forest breathed and the air it gave off was warm.

"The spring holiday is over." He tucked away the Edo Tensei scroll. "It's time to start a Fourth Shinobi War."

Shimura Danzo may have been the last ninja to die of the Plague in Konoha, but he wasn't the last ninja to die of the Plague. An unfortunate accident in Iwa led to a leak of the RAMK bacteria into a darkroom above a laboratory, where an unvaccinated medical photographer was working. She died twelve days later.

After that incident, vaccination efforts doubled, tripled, and quadrupled, until one day in early summer, RAMK was officially beaten, and an international night of celebrations was announced to commemorate the end of the Plague. With their refusal to hand over the Jinchuurikis, the Kages were all too aware that war against Madara was only round the corner, but the dead needed to be honoured and remembered whilst people still had the time to do so.

Some lit candles. Some lit fireworks. There was always some bright spark whose friends felt should have gone out with a bang. Some made paper lanterns and set them on the river that ran past the empty Uchiha compound. Apparently one of the Hyuuga matrons did something very un-Hyuuga like and made a massive bonfire out of hazard gear on the unlocked Hyuuga estate. Nobody stopped her and some even took their own gear to it. There were as many ways to remember as there were those who had died.

As the evening drew on, Naruto's feet took him along a very familiar path, up along a narrow track up a hill, through blue bamboo and bracken. Even in the dark, he could see the scuff marks in the dirt of tens of other feet that had gone the exact same way.

"Alright, she's ready to fly," said a voice, as he pushed through the leaves.

He came out at the top of the Hokage monument just as Kurenai-sensei, her baby strapped to her back, straightened up from lighting a candle, and Hinata and Shino let go of the paper balloon with a picture of a dog on it from their hands.

Hinata's shining eyes followed the little gold light up into the sky. Naruto reckoned that Shino, behind his sunglasses, was doing the same, tracing the balloon's upward course as it went to join the hundreds of other lanterns that were already floating and dipping above them, like fireflies in the wind.

There were others on the monument making lanterns too. Two boys near to where Naruto was standing were sniggering and crying at the same time, as they finished drawing a terrible picture of a girl's face on their lantern, added a moustache to it, and then tossed it into the air. She must have been some girl, Naruto thought wryly, as her lantern floated upwards.

Naruto was about to approach what remained of Team Eight when he felt somebody tap his shoulder from behind.

"Shikamaru said you'd be coming up here," said Sakura with a smile. She held up something flat made of paper, a candle and a box of matches. "Why don't we make one as well?"

He grinned and they went out onto the monument. Kurenai-sensei and Hinata waved when they saw them and Shino nodded, but then they went back to their own quiet reminiscing as they looked up to the sky.

Konoha beneath them was aglow with soft flickering lights.

"It's been such a strange time," Sakura said, setting glue to the paper. "So, so strange. Everything went completely off track. Now it's as though it's all trying to come back together again and get back to how things were supposed to be."

"We're missing too many people for anything to get back to how it was 'supposed to be'," noted Naruto sadly. He crouched down beside her and uncapped a felt tip pen. "Sai, Choji, Kiba,Yamato-taichou, Iruka-sensei…"

"Tenten. Half of my lab-mates," said Sakura quietly, "and some really nice nurses. The best ones all went first."

Kurenai-sensei, Hinata and Shino came across to greet them. They didn't say much. Hinata was crying and Shino was still staring upwards, as though he was worried something might spill from his eyes if he so much as tilted his head. They left down the hill trail when Kurenai's baby started wailing.

Naruto wrote 'Umino Iruka' onto the lantern. "How does that look?"

Sakura glanced over and sighed. "It looks like you wrote that with the pen in your mouth."

"It's not that bad!" Somebody snorted and Naruto reacted on instinct. "If you've got something to say about my writing, bastard, then could you say it with your mouth and not your – "

Naruto stopped, looked round and then up, to find Kakashi standing over him and, beyond Kakashi, looking about as disinterested on a festival night as only he possibly could, was Sasuke.

"What are you doing out of your fish tank?" Naruto gasped, pointing at Sasuke with his felt-tip pen.

"Well, you see, Naruto," Kakashi stepped in quickly, as Sasuke glowered, "funnily enough, nobody wants to be on guard duty of the so-called 'Demon Asylum' when there's a party happening outside, so since I've been left with keeping an eye on him, and I want to celebrate, I brought him out for the celebrations. Isn't that right, Sasuke-kun?"

Sasuke snorted and turned up his nose in displeasure, but Naruto saw his eyes wander up to the night sky filled with lanterns and widen as though to drink it all in.

"Anyway, Shikamaru told us that we'd find the two of you here, so I thought we'd come and see what you two were getting up to." Kakashi raised his head to look up at the sky then peered down at the rice paper Naruto was writing on. "Making a lantern, are you?"

"Yep. And it's going to be for everybody," Naruto told him as he finished writing Kiba's name on the paper. "Everybody we're going to miss."

Kakashi hummed and squatted down beside him, squinting at the paper. "Mind if I add to that list?"

"Kakashi-sensei, why don't you get your own lantern?"

"Naruto, I am your teacher. I am supposed to encourage my students to achieve their highest potential with every task they do, and having assessed the task at hand – the task being this lantern - I think that my students will best achieve their potential if they let me hitchhike on their idea and save me having to shell out to buy one myself." Kakashi picked up a pen from the packet and uncapped it. "Besides, we all have people we need to remember. Sasuke, get over here."

Sasuke tore his eyes away from the sky and reluctantly went to stand by the lantern. A firework whistled and exploded near the town centre with a sound like clapping hands.

Kakashi held up the pen he had uncapped. "My hand's getting tired, so you can stop looking sour and make yourself useful. I'll dictate, and you'll write."

Sasuke glared at the pen as though Kakashi had offered him a cockroach on a stick and told him to eat it. Kakashi sighed. "Disobey me and I'll see to it that the Hokage has your eyes completely sealed for the next three years."

Shooting Kakashi a look of contempt, Sasuke took the pen and knelt down at the top of the lantern. Naruto and Sakura shuffled round to give him space. He didn't look at or even acknowledge them.

"Let's start off with some of my drinking buddies," Kakashi began.

"You have drinking buddies?" Naruto gaped. "As in, you actually have buddies?"

Kakashi chose to ignore him and listed several names of ninjas they didn't know, or only dimly recognised. Sasuke wrote their names in square black letters without once questioning who they were or why he was being made to do what he was doing.

"That name I just mentioned," said Kakashi suddenly. "Did you recognise it?"

"No," Sasuke muttered. "Should I have?"

"That was the name of a doctor from Ageha, who died of the Plague two weeks after you took him to examine your companions," Kakashi told Sasuke matter-of-factly, watching his reactions closely. "I didn't expect you to remember him. No matter. Let's see, any more names? Oh yes! The names of those three ninjas you were travelling with. Sasuke, I think you should write those down next."

Sasuke slapped the pen down on the ground with a growl and surged to his feet. "What kind of game are you playing at, Kakashi?"

"Sit down, Sasuke, and stop causing a scene. I've already threatened you once tonight. Alright, one last name for you to write." Kakashi waited for Sasuke to kneel down and finish adding three names to the lantern. "Uchiha Itachi. Go on. Write it."

Sasuke gripped the pen so hard Sakura thought he would snap it in two. The burn on his face seemed to ripple. His eyes went glassy, and his hand remained poised over the paper, the tip of the pen hovering over its surface.

Sakura looked up and met Naruto's eyes. She gave him a small nod. Naruto sucked in a deep breath and said, "Oh come on, Sasuke, if it's so hard, I'll write it for you, asshole."

Sasuke unfroze with a jolt, scrawled the name on the paper and the next instant was throwing the pen between Naruto's eyes like it was a kunai for the kill. "Shut. Up."

Naruto caught the pen between two fingers and grinned. "Never."

"There we go! Done at last!" cried Kakashi, raising his hands in mock celebration. Somebody rang the great iron bell of a nearby shrine. "Candle, Sakura? Thank you. Alright, you three, let's get this lantern flying. Hold it up."

They stood up together with the paper balloon in their hands and Kakashi looked critically over their handiwork. "Naruto, Sasuke, your writing…equally terrible."

"Hey!" cried Naruto indignantly. "At least my handwriting's artistic!"

Sasuke just rolled his eyes up to the sky and fixed them there. Kakashi busied with the candle, striking a match and setting the flame to the wick. As the hot air began to fill out the balloon, the paper warmed under Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura's hands and the lantern started to tug against their grip.

"Okay, gently does it."

The lantern rose, grew hot, shone vibrant yellow. Once it was above their heads and they could stretch their arms no higher to keep their hold upon it, they let go.

It began its slow winding drift up into the night.

They tracked its rise in silence, watching the wavering light, reading and rereading the names being carried away on the lantern's delicate surface until they could no longer be read with their eyes.

"Naruto, Sasuke," Kakashi hissed out of the corner of his mouth. "Neither of you say a word. You'll spoil a poignant and sentimental moment with your crass and cynical party-pooping mouths."

"Sensei," Sakura said icily from his side. "The moment. You just spoiled it."

We all have people we need to remember, Kakashi had noted, but there had been a second part to that statement he had left unsaid.

The moment Kakashi had thrust the pen at Sasuke and forced him to list his dead, Naruto and Sakura had understood. Kakashi, a man who could stand alone for hours and hours in front of a memorial, had been trying to tell them this: We all have people we need to remember, and it's a lonely, empty road trying to remember them on your own.

The four of them remained on the monument until they could no longer distinguish their lantern from the rest. There was only the thinnest sliver of a moon and not a cloud to be seen.

Some lanterns had climbed so high they looked, to Sasuke's eyes, as though they had already reached the stars.

A warm summer wind was blowing.