Disclaimer: Naruto is in no way, shape or form mine, thankfully. Kishimoto creates a much more varied world than I believe I could, both in tone and in characters.

Bloody Handed

It still amazed him, how quickly blood could dry, turning from a slippery liability to flakes of red before he'd even determined how it got on his hand.

It wasn't that he had never had blood on him before… he'd killed more than his fair share of men in his twenty-five years as a shinobi of Konoha. He had come home from missions dripping blood since he was seven, usually the target's, sometimes his own. He was even used to blood on his hands, dripping, spraying, splattering there when he killed with a kunai or katana.

But blood wasn't supposed to touch his hands when he used this technique. His chest, his arms, his face even, but not his hands, never his hands. This was the one technique that kept his hands clean, the force of his chakra ripping through tissue and bone, burning and spattering blood but not leaving it on his hands.

Not on his hands.

Not this blood.

He could hear them, Naruto and Sakura and the rest, hear the curses and screams that signaled the scattering of the enemy troops as their command structure collapsed. It had been a foolish thing, to attack the village so openly, a child's plan… a child's orders… but not a child's hate and disillusionment.

For a moment he struggled to stand, forcing chakra into exhausted muscles, relegating his injuries to his subconscious. Even without the pain, though, he was simply too damaged to be of use to them. He had already contributed all he had to give, the blood on his hand and the corpse resting before him proof of that.

At the rate the enemy was retreating, it would only be a few more minutes before those shinobi still standing turned to the task of collecting the injured and the dead. Rubbing his fingers together, watching small flakes of dried blood trickle to the leaf-strewn floor, he wondered which of his teammates would find him.

Sakura would be the best option for survival. Her training with the Fifth had taught her many things, but the most important was to deal with the living before even acknowledging the dead. The fact that the dead had been precious to her… was something she would deal with after seeing to the living. If she were to stumble upon him, her first action would be to retie his hitaite and settle it over the sharingan eye, conserving what little chakra he had left. He knew he should do it himself, stagger to where the strip of cloth with the thin metal headband that bound him to his home lay and replace it… but then he would half-blind again, unable to see to the left, unable to perceive depth as he should, unable to catch the flow of chakra and to read an enemy's move almost before he knew it himself.

Even with his sharingan, he was unable to see how the blood had come to coat his fingers and hand, trailing in small streams down his wrist and arm. To gaze at the same lines with only the muted clarity of his own vision, a vision that had failed so many times in the past…

No, better if Naruto were to find him. The boy… man, for he truly was a man now, in age and power and knowledge… the man still hadn't learned to deal with the living before the dead. Living or dead, the people in Naruto's world were prioritized in a strict order, and he… well, he fell below the corpse and the blood that he would not name.

Perhaps that was why the blood had clung to his hand like this. To the village of his birth, this was yet another traitor, another missing-nin to be disposed of in secrecy and never thought of again. There would be no new name scratched into the memorial for his eyes to catch on, no extra picture at the funeral service for him to pretend to study when really the only memory he would have of the boy's face would be the shock, the confusion, the utter loathing that consumed his face as he died.

The boy had expected to win. After all, he had succeeded in his life's goal a year before, and was it only he who saw the irony in kin killing a kin-killer?

Oh, yes, the boy had succeeded in his goal, but the price had been high. His village… his friends… his soul. Everything, everything for the power… and he had still died at the hands of the man he ran from originally, the one who would have given him power for no other charge than his faith in the bonds that tied the shinobi together.

A low chuckle rose from his throat. It was ironic, really, that the one he had the most hope for, the one who had willingly shared his food at the post if not his skills during the earlier trial… that he should be the only one to truly miss the point.

The world was starting to blur at the edges, threads of darkness running across his vision. He really should close his sharingan eye, perhaps even allow the rest of his body to collapse, focus on healing the damage dealt to him by a boy he would have died for in a heartbeat seven years ago, but some perverse need to understand kept him on his knees, searching for answers to questions he hadn't asked in ages.

How had the Third been able to stand watching Orochimaru fall away from the team, watching as the sannin, the best he had ever trained, scattered to the edges of the country? Did it console him, to know that one would protect the village even if he refused to live there? Had he smiled from whatever waited beyond death when Tsunade took the title of Hokage?

How had the Fourth been able to look him in the eye, in both eyes, rightful and stolen, after collecting the body of the Uchiha boy? There had been no blood staining his hands then, but there was still the guilt, still the failure of the mission.

Not that he had failed this time. No, he had succeeded this time, running the chidori through lungs and heart and guts, leaving his student nothing but a bloody mess to be cleaned up.

The haze had progressed to tunnel vision now, and he finally had no control over whether or not he stayed upright, falling forward to bleed on the ground next to the still-warm body of the one he couldn't save.

And he wondered, as he listened to the subtle movement of ninja through the leaves of their home, which one would find him, and what they would think of the blood on his hands.