Stretched out on the ground, soaking up the sun with a cigarette between his lips, Asuma closed his eyes and sighed contently. Once again, he'd managed to shake off sensei and had withdrawn to his favorite "hiding spot", if you could call it that. Hiding in plain sight wasn't really a tried and tested Konoha shinobi strategy, but so far it had worked fine for him. Sensei had never come looking for him here, and, more importantly, neither had his old man.

Apparently the best place to hide from the Third Hokage was right on top of his head. The rock version, that was.

Asuma chuckled to himself until, suddenly, a shadow fell over him. A cloud?

No.

Right in front of him, someone cleared his throat. He would have known that harrumph anywhere. His eyes snapped open.

The reinstated Third Hokage loomed over him like a storm cloud.

There was no running now.

Asuma forced himself to relax and accept the inevitable. Not like he had a choice.

"Your sensei tells me you lack discipline," Father began conversationally, eyebrows raised. "That is a nasty habit you picked up there." A pointed look at the cigarette.

Asuma shot a similar but slightly less sharp one at the pipe in the father's hand.

"Yes, well." Mildly, "it will stunt your growth."

"I'm already taller than you."

"And wiser?"

Asuma looked away. No, he knew he wasn't. Would never be, probably. But wisdom hadn't stopped the kyuubi. Wisdom hadn't saved his mother's life. So what good was wisdom?

They'd already had that particular argument, though. No use going over it again.

This was shaping up to be more troublesome than training with the old pervert would have been.

"I'm going back," he said, getting to his feet and dusting himself off without meeting the Third's eyes.

Whenever he got into fights with his father, his mother used to break them up, usually by telling off both of them. "It's my own fault," she'd say afterwards, "for marrying a stubborn fool and giving birth to his foolish, stubborn children."

It hurt, a hot stab of pain right through his chest. It always caught him off guard, the reality of her absence.
The finality of it.

Your mother gave her life to protect something important. I couldn't be prouder of her.

What about her life? Wasn't that something worth protecting?

One day, Asuma, you will understand that there are things more important than the life of one individual.

Ever since her death, they'd had this argument over and over. They'd gotten to a point where speaking the words wasn't even necessary anymore, a single moment of their eyes meeting over the dinner table, past the empty spot where Mother used to sit, was enough.

Unlike his parents, Asuma would gladly waste his life, shirk his responsibilities, but he knew his father would never let him. He'd have to live the life of a Konoha shinobi, the life he was supposed to live.

He didn't see the point of it.

If he was going to be forced to get involved in matters, in fights, in wars, then he wanted to pick his own cause at least, not just become one more name on the cenotaph for… What exactly? The will of fire? His father's favorite expression, but what did that even mean? The willingness to throw your life away for Konoha?

He wasn't sure he had it anymore. He wanted to serve a bigger purpose than that. Looking down on it from the top of the Hokage mountain, Konoha seemed small and insignificant compared to the world that was out there, that he'd never get to see except on missions.

He'd turned his back on his father and the view of the village and was about to walk back down to the training fields – extra-slowly – when he felt his father's hand on his shoulder.

"Wait," his old man, the God of Shinobi, said, "look."

Asuma turned around and looked down into the village once more.

The kyuubi attack had taken its toll, and from up above you could see that what looked like a random deep furrow in the ground when you stood next to it was actually part of the huge claw marks the monster had left.

Scaffolds had been erected; people were trying to salvage the salvageable, to replace what was lost. It seemed like a wasted effort to Asuma, an act of repression.

And whatever his father was trying to show him, he didn't see it.