It felt like he was looking at his own when Naruto looked at the exposed heart of the person who he used to make promises to, the sputtering of the arteries finally beginning to wane along with the small tides of blood that lapped at his heels. It was for that reason that he raised his black boot high above Sakura's body with her eyes rolled to the back of her head as if she had just enjoyed a raunchy night with her beloved, and he brought the shoe directly over it. A shoe that unlike most peoples had enjoyed a life of luxury consisting of freshly minted tatami mats and angel wax.

It was funny, because her upper body would rise with every stomp as if she was waking up, and her feet would kick into the air like a newborn baby with every impact. He knew from his anatomy studies that a live ninja would move this way involuntarily in an effort to preserve life in the same way that regular people move their arms in a windmill motion when they fall backward. But he dealt not with the body of an ordinary live ninja but with the carcass of an extraordinary dead one. If she were alive she would hold her breath or buck her legs from her stomach instead in a battle to protect the ones she loved. But here she was doing the exact same thing that a live ninja would, and despite feeling the same pain in his chest as Sakura's in every other part of his body he continued to stomp because his shoe polish had just started to wear off.

Naruto noticed this and began to stomp harder and with more speed. The twitch muscles in his right hamstrings became the gun hammer of an automatic rifle, and as he turned with just a twinge of regret to make sure Sasuke was able to absorb the new reality of his world, he forced a smile, becoming the thunderbolt that burst open Sakuras chest and was bathed in ever type of her fluids in a shower of busted bodies and severed friendships.

But the lines on his face dropped as he realized that Sasuke had managed to close his eyes before the final act, an impressive feat in and of itself. He also noticed that in the last few minutes the death threats finally stopped only to be replaced by a few soft words.

"Kill me..."

XxX

"Hey, what the hell do you think you're doing!?" said Shikamaru, grabbing the shoulder of the Hokage.

"I'm going for a walk," answered Naruto, swiftly. Through a flick of his embroidered white cape he was even able to catch the look of disbelief on his adviser's face at his reaction speed.

"We're in the middle of a ceremony," said Shikamaru, talking in a lower voice now, "Everyone expects the Hokage to be there for the opening speech. It boosts the morale of the village."

Naruto waved off the cloud of dark smoke that was emanating from his adviser's cigar. He wanted nothing to do with the fumes of a vice that only served as a crutch, but at the same time the innocent request shed some light on one simple truth that he had been avoiding for a long time. He was a prisoner.

Sure he had more power than anyone in the village, and possibly more power than any of the kage that ruled the five great nations. At his orders, even the first lady of the Hyuuga household would drop to her knees and lay down her robes as her husband watched, but that was artificial freedom. Real freedom was what Sasuke had and he craved. The ability to run through trees that he or any of the villagers didn't plant, or enjoy a bowl of ramen at 12 pm without being stalked by 13 armed anbu black ops units.

It was not that he lacked the speed or skill to evade the watchful eyes of even his most elite guards. It was that his friends and family that he had divulged too much with, whom he never anticipated would become the strongest chains in his personal prison as he tempered them with every word that carelessly left his mouth knew him too well. Especially Shikamaru, his adviser that had developed a flowchart accurately predicting the exact foods he would want to eat in any given day of the week just by listening to his gastrointestinal vibrations on a whim.

So he began making his way to the glorious podium with his three guards including his adviser Shikamaru. He narrowed his eyes at his adviser who stayed a careful three paces ahead of him first but eventually made way to the second guard with only a thirty-degree turn of his head, with thoughts about what his speech would be culminating all the while. By the time he made eye contact with the third guard he had a pretty good idea about what he would speak about in front of the 10k plus villagers of all ages and backgrounds.

As he turned the corner his eardrums were welcomed with two cannons full of confetti and his sanity with five-year olds who abandoned their parents for a chance to touch the robe of the fabled hokage. The dividers lining the path to the gargantuan stadium split the crowd in half and followed the theme of red and gold, just like the carpet that cascaded all the way to the upper-half where a giant cardboard moon watched the crowd with envy.

But as soon as Naruto was positive that the majority of the crowd's attention was invested with him, his feet began to move more slowly, and the joints in his knees locked straight instead of raising high. The pupil's of his eyes were for all intents and purposes fixated on his feet, and would alternate from left to right with every metronomic sway of his shoulders. His hands were not raised triumphantly above his head in an effort to acknowledge the crowd but were folded and pressed up against one another in a desperate attempt to pay homage to his sins.

When he finally made it onstage the crowd emulated him in their dead silence. They mostly surveyed his eyes as if they might find some nonverbal indicator as to why he was behaving so strangely and clamped their hands in prayer that his motivational speech where he would give a shout-out to Ichiraku Ramen would not be replaced by an evacuation order that warned of the second-coming of Pain.

But the small-minded villagers did not realize that pain was not man or external-force alike but a subtle memory born of complacency that had made itself at home within a war-torn veteran.

Naruto suddenly raised his bandaged right arm born of the original hokage's cells and funneled kyuubi chakra into it allowing it to take the grotesque form of a monster's claw that he used to defile the left side of his cloak. What the villager's witnessed behind that cloak made many of them begin praying a different prayer - the kind that took the form of wails and screams of agony as the women dropped to the floor and struggled to form breathing devices with just their hands.