Chapter 2 - Incomplete

Looking back, he can only remember pain and tears and determination.

When Tsunade forbade him from leaving to look for them, he almost left the village anyway. Kiba and Shino stopped him, saying that he wasn't the only one that cared about them and that the Hokage would not appreciate him leaving against her orders. So he stayed and waited.

The track team returned three weeks later with nothing but a bloodied headband and vials filled from the puddles of blood they had found but no missing friends. They had found puddles of their best friends' blood. Naruto raged and complained and argued but even he had to accept that if the best trackers in Konoha couldn't find a trace then neither could he.

That was his last sane memory before everything faded in a never ending blur of missions and death and dead ends and frustration. He vaguely remembered Kakashi yelling at him and Jiraiya knocking him down but it's like watching a mute movie. You can see everything happening, you see people talking to you but you can't hear them and their words don't touch you.

He remembered sitting in Ichiraku's staring at a cooling bowl of ramen and Neji next to him, a glass of sake in his white-knuckled grip. He remembered turning to laugh with someone that wasn't there and spending four hours looking around the village when he thought he heard a soft, shy voice before the ANBU knocked him down and tied him to a chair in Tsunade's office.

He didn't remember the things Kakashi won't forget, like finding his student sitting under the rain at three AM talking to empty air. Kakashi remembered every cut, every broken bone and every splatter of blood he saw in Naruto before he left again for another mission.

When Tsunade refused to give him more missions, he didn't even blink. He nodded and left and wasn't seen again for three days before someone had the good sense to call Neji, who found him at Team 8's old training grounds and quietly thought that no one really tried to find him, so easy it was.

He remembered a lot of things and knew that what he was doing wasn't healthy but he was completing missions and helping people and if some of the deaths could be avoided, well, no one really knew about that.

It felt like seeing everything through a curtain, thin enough like to get a glimpse of what laid beyond but so thick that it couldn't reach you. The curtain is lifted three years later when he comes back and sees a shock of pink, pale eyes and long brown hair.

And if their eyes are a little harder and their hands a little more scarred and their faces not completely honest…

He doesn't finish that thought and stretches his arms towards them.