*Chapter 35*: Interlude: Twenty Drops of Blood

Blood is within all of us.

It carries nutrients and oxygen to all parts of the body.

But blood isn't best known for this. No, blood is almost universally known for one of its peripheral traits- that it is red.

Come with us today. Explore what it means to see beneath the surface, and dive into the veins of Rogue Fox.

Learn of things important and things trivial, things that are earth shattering and things that touch on the small details of who Team Akachi and their influences are.

Twenty blood red jewels. Twenty snippets of knowledge about Team Akachi and the world that surrounds them.

Twenty Drops Of Blood.

1). Naruto hates ramen.

And he loves it, too. Make no mistake, that seasoned broth, diced fresh vegetables, marinated meats, and garnishes, to his palate, they are a culinary delight. But to Naruto, Ramen is something else as well.

Ramen is, to him, a symbol of everything that others take for granted, but he is continually denied in his life.

Ramen was the reason he did not become a ravening animal. Ichiraku Ramen, specifically, where an old cook and his daughter showed to him a glimpse of what it was to be human. And that glimpse became a window into a world where his belly was full. Ramen was something he could afford to buy at three or four times its normal price, the only prices he usually received, if he was allowed to buy at all.

Naruto is infinitely grateful to Ramen. It gave him Ayame and Ichiraku-san. And they are a large portion of why Konoha still stands. But ramen also symbolizes to him that he is truly unwanted, and that this junk food, this unhealthy, fatty, un-nutritive substance that he lived almost exclusively on for the first ten or so years of his life, is the best he could ever hope for so long as he lived in Konoha. On his departure he swore he would never eat ramen again...

With the possible exception of every once in a while, if he could get away with it, under henge at the Ichiraku stand. 2). Naruto can barely read.

Reading is a skill often given to one by their parents or caretakers. Foundation work, such as the recognition of the nomenclature and icons used to signify meaning, is all laid out by those who raise us.

This is a thing Naruto has never had.

The difference between learning symbols when you are three, looking over the pages as a loved one points them out while we sit on their lap staring in wonder, and an aggravated, often impatient teacher sparing a few moments to enlighten an "idiot" at the age of nine or ten, is a profound difference indeed. Enormous amounts of mental flexibility are lost between three and ten years old, and by the time Iruka came along Naruto despite his innate brilliance had begun to believe that he truly was an idiot.

In spite of the fact that Iruka in the space of a few weeks took him from literally no reading ability what-so-ever to a full recognition of hirigana, and a moderate mastery of katakana. And Iruka, despite wanting to teach Naruto, was too wrapped up in the rest of his duties as a teacher to recognize that Naruto was essentially starting from zero when he spent those first few weeks trying to teach him.

Were it not for Naruto's innnate brilliance, he'd have never progressed so far under Iruka in just a few short weeks, and Naruto's rapidity in picking up the alphabet was not, as Iruka assumed, the dusting off of earlier knowledge that the boy in his laziness stopped using, but rather, the first stirrings of an ability to sort and store knowledge that dwarfed all of his classmates, with the exception of Nara Shikamaru.

And all of this with brain damage brought about by chronic malnutrition despite the regeneration granted to him by the Kyuubii.

Naruto spent the following summer looking over the incomprehensible scrolls he'd been given with his new found knowledge, and was again stymied, until he realized that he had an option: A wonderful invention called a dictionary. He tore into his scrolls with a fervor with the help of a dictionary, painstakingly going Kanji by Kanji on the scrolls, writing in the margins above them the hirigana translations. This exercise even ended up teaching Naruto about forty or so of the most common Kanji.

Full literacy requires about two thousand or so.

Even now, Naruto has to go by context and guesswork when he reads, and his difficulties with it makes him avoid it whenever possible. He has no idea that were he to apply himself a few months, devoted specifically to learning the kanji he needs, he could be fully literate, but he has no idea that the ability resides within him. He truly is convinced, even now, that he is stupid. And the Kyuubii reinforces it every so often with an unthinking, disparaging comment, which doesn't help matters.

What you don't know can hurt you quite a lot.

3). Naruto was the first person in his graduating class to kill.

The strange thing about this is, Naruto's first kill was many years before those of any of his classmates.

Many, many years. More years than anyone would believe possibile, because Naruto has a deep secret... but it is a secret that goes deeper even than that of his harboring the Kyuubii, which, since his first six week departure from Konoha, became no secret at all.

Naruto is not who he believes himself to be. And he has no memory of that kill at all.

4). Naruto carries around three pairs of socks with him at all times.

When he was younger, Naruto wore shoes rather than the common sandals he wears now, or the split toed tabi that many mature and practiced shinobi wear. But being he couldn't afford them much of the time, most of his pairs of shoes were salvaged from dumpsters and donation piles outside used goods stores.

It rains a lot in Konoha, and as a result, the holes in those shoes would result in soaked and soggy feet. But Naruto, clever child that he was, discovered that much of his discomofrt would be alleviated were he to change into clean, dry socks at the first available opportunity. And even when they weren't strictly speaking clean, dry would do. So the wet socks would be tucked into the collar of his jacket, while any dry ones would be in an inside pocket, and his feet would be warm and more or less dry again as soon as the rain stopped.

As Naruto got older he discovered that he had to change ouit foot gear less often if he wore sandals like everyone elsehis toes at least had some place to go even if the sandals were a little small. So he stopped wearing shoes, and with them, socks as well. But he never stopped carrying the socks.

Were anyone to ask him about those socks, he would go on about all the uses that a piece of thick, soft, absorbant cotton could be used for, especially in the shape of a sock. Bandages, patches on clothing, a quick and ready sack for anything your pockets no longer have room to carry, even, when stretched or torn into long strips and twisted, for tying small things together or down to a stable object.

To this day, though, nobody has any idea he carries socks around with him, because he hasn't used them for anything. 5). Until he was altered by the Ancients, Naruto had no sense of self worth.

Hardly a surprise. Humans develop their sense of self worth based on the opinions of those around them. Humans are social creatures, and the tribe's attitude towards an individual reflects how much that individual is worth to the tribe.

All humans want to be valued. It's in their nature. They desire to have a purpose in the tribe, and a low ranking member of the tribe can be broken by the pain of knowing that they aren't worth much.

Naruto was neglected by virtually everyone. It is an incredible marvel that he had the will to go on at all, save perhaps for the fact that he had never known anything else. The meager scraps of affection he received from the Hokage and the Ichiraku family were what salvaged him, let him know that there was possibly a hope for him, so he struggled and strove with all his being to be noticed, to be seen, to prove himself as SOMETHING in people's eyes.

It underscored every action he took. When he killed for the "first" time (which, despite his lack of knowledge or memory of it, was in fact NOT his first kill) he unwittingly saved Iruka's life. His "second" kill was Iruka.

But both of these times, despite the horror of it he bore until training ground forty four, gained him a level or respect from those who knew it. It elevated him ever so slightly that he was capable of killing, despite his loathing of it. Which is why he killed, and killed easily, every time the situation called for it.

The action turned his stomach, the blood haunted his dreams until he could no longer sleep, but they gave him esteem with his comrades, team mates, superiors. He tried to deceive himself about it, pretend as he had for so long that everything was alright, but it twisted him, damaged him, demoralized him, until by the time of the chuunin exam he truly believed that his only purpose was to serve as a tool for the village until he broke. And he felt that break coming.

Those few who had acknowledged him, even a little bit, were like gold to Naruto. He would bleed for them, work himself to the bone for them, kill or die for them. It was far better to him, the knowledge that he was good for SOMETHING, than going back to the indifferent treatment that he had received before he became a ninja.

6). Kakashi has no sense of self worth.

Kakashi, the Copy nin. Most successful non-Uchiha bearer of the Sharingan eye, his skills with it were legend among shinobi. His mastery of it far exceeded that attained by most rightful bearers of the bloodline. Master of a thousand ninjutsu, and of all shinobi in Konoha, he had the seventh highest number of completed missions of ALL shinobi that had EVER graced the Konoha active duty roster. Given a few more years of effort, he'll ascend to fourth highest.

But Kakashi, for all the powers of ight that his Sharingan eye grants him, doesn't see any of this.

Kakashi has to look in the mirror every morning- and it's why he wears a mask. He doesn't see the myriad shinobi below him on that list. He sees the ones above him.

Of the six shinobi on that list of more completed missions than his own, three of them are missing nin. Were he to ascend to fourth place, those remaining three... would all be missing nin.

Kakashi is haunted by ghosts. Ghosts of those whom he loved and cherished. Ghosts of worthy foes given unworthy ends at his hands because they were in the wrong place and he was in the right place. Ghosts of his past that make a mockery of anything he could call a future.

Kakashi is disgusted by the reverence he receives from his opeers because he doesn't feel he is worth any of it. He doesn't realize that without the Sharingan he would have still risen high in the ranks of the shinobi world, likely as high as he is now, because the Sharingan is not what made him a ninja. But Obito had the last laugh after all. Because of the gift of his eye, Kakashi will never step out from under Obito's shadow in Kakashi's own mind.

7). Kakashi has a dead plant on his bedstand.

Seventeen years ago, Kakashi bought that plant from a Yamanaka florist who assured him that its blooms would be gorgeous and full, absolutely breathtaking. He bought it when he was first placed on the same team as Obito and Rin. After six months, when it failed to bloom, he took to calling it Obito- it had the pedigree, but never attained the glory that its family was famed for.

He would talk to the plant, giving it the same verbal abuse that he would have showered on his team mate were it not for how inappropriate that would seem in the middle of a mission- and talking unnecessarily during a mission could cause the mission to fail if they were discovered.

Then, the fateful mission where Obito died.

He returned, fresh Sharingan still in his scarred orbit, to discover that he'd forgotten to have someone water the plant while he was away. It lay there, all but dead in its vase, with a single, breathtakingly beautiful flower in bloom, the last sign of life that the plant would ever show.

Kakashi pressed and preserved the flower, but left the dried twigs of the plant in its vase on his bedstand, where it has remained for more than fifteen years.

He still talks to it sometimes. But now, the abuse he repeats is instead aimed at himself.

8). Kakashi misses Maito Gai.

Sure, there were an endless stream of things that aggravated Kakashi about the Green Beast. Not the least of which was that title. Or his endless declarations of youth. His obsession with perfectly white teeth. His insistance on wearing green spandex.

And yet...

Maito Gai was an elite jounin, and one of the few shinobi whom Kakashi would truly fear to face on the battlefield. His genjutsu were nearly the equal of the amazing Kurenai, his ninjutsu- nearly two hundred of them, and many among the most devastating ever created- were the stuff of legend, and his taijutsu was unequaled in the shinobi world. Gai may have counted himself as 50-49 in the "rivalry" the two of them had together, but Kakashi counted only the actual spars of ninja combat, wherein the score was actually 22-7 in favor of Gai. Kakashi was pretty severely outmatched by the green beast and he well knew it.

Yet he also knew that Gai looked up to him- why, Kakashi would never know. And Gai treasured that rivalry so greatly, the struggles to over take his rival were a joy the the Green Beast that was unmatched by anything Kakashi could compare to. He'd noted that as Gai had drawn ahead by a greater margin in their spars that he started to lose that spark, that joy in what victories he attained. Then Kakashi won a foot race by accident- Gai tripped over a gopher hole- and noted that the contests did not have to be pure contests of combat to keep Gai happy.

So thereafter Kakashi ensured that ridiculous, meaningless contests were thrown in often enough to keep the count more or less even, so that Gai could strive, and struggle, and "keep pace" with his desire to "prove" to Kakashi that hard work could trump a genius, a fact that Kakashi had felt was proven years before.

Kakashi knew it well, and also knew that to acknowledge it openly to Gai would put an end to their contests. And he couldn't bear to see the one thing that kept Gai happy and at the top of his game be taken away from him, because deep down, Kakashi admired Gai. And deep down, he even wanted to be a little more like him.

Minus the green spandex, of course.

9). Kakashi is a virgin.

It's not that he had no opportunity. It's simply that, he at first had no time. Genin by six, jounin by twelve, he spent the first portion of his shinobi career trying to get out of his father's shadow, the next trying to live past his father's shame, and now, ever since, trying to live down his own fame in the face of his own loss.

Everyone he has ever loved is dead.

This is not an expression or a mere turn of phrase. He has had ten people in his life that he would classify as loving, whether Agape or Eros, and now, as of the death of Maito Gai, all ten of them, every one of them, is dead.

And it has hit him hard, because of those ten people, seven of them have been killed by Konoha missing nin.

Kakashi is an intensely emotional person, a fact that isn't apparent to those who aren't more than casually familiar with him. And he isn't one for casual sex.

He'll read about it eagerly, of course, and enjoy it immensely, but those little orange covered books serve as much a barrier to hide behind as for reading material. A way for him to hide behind a wall and pretend that the world is bright and happy, where sex is fun, frequent, and without consequence, and where one can revisit and relive the good times without worrying about the knowledge that all carry deep within, that all things must come to an end.

Like the people to whom he gives his heart.

He has plenty of opportunity. Even when he was twelve, there were a lot of young girls- and a lot of women now- who would have cheerfully given an arm to see what was under his mask, or under anything else he was wearing for that matter. But he keeps himself at arms length because he knows and fears that anyone he gets close to will eventually die.

He has many enemies who would do anything, to anyone, that they could to harm him. With all of the people he has lost, his soul is cracked and chipped, and one more blow will likely shatter him completely.

As far as Kakashi is concerned, there is nothing about sex that could possibly justify the risk it would entail, and unless someone can break through the barriers in his own mind, he will likely be a virgin til the day he dies.

10). Shikamaru is not a virgin.

The Nara clan is legendary for its intellect. Almost as much so as for its laziness, at least among the menfolk.

What isn't legendary- or even known, outside the clan, is that they are the result of careful breeding for intelligence.

The men of the clan aren't even aware of it, for a specific reason: The women of the clan don't tell them.

It is well known among the clan's geneticists that the first born child is usually the smartest, and they have capitalized on this fact by ensuring the best and brightest available children have a child together as an "illegitimate" child, one who is unsuited to being married outside the clan for favors or clan politics. Uncertain parentage is one of the things that is a deal killer for intermarriage between the clans, and so only children of stable marriages are acceptable, a fact that has been capitalized heavily on. When accepting women of other clans to marry into the Nara's, the women folk ensure that the smartest girl of the lot is the one they choose, and this over all strategy has paid off in spades.

In Shikamaru's case, the women of the clan knew they had something special. Brilliant even by Nara standards, a full convening of the breeding council was held, searching out the smartest young woman in the family that could be safely bred to him, and learned it was his seventeen year old third-cousin Yohko. They spent several months assessing what traits Shikamaru found most attractive, and he was the object of heavy surveillence for a while before they finally pinned down that he had a weakness for strong willed blondes.

The following week, he managed to catch the eye of just such a young woman, one who was the daughter of a merchant in town for just a few days. She lured him back to her hotel room, seduced him, and enjoyed a second stay with the Nara boy a day later.

When Shikamaru went to find out more about the beautiful Katsunishi Kimoko the hotel mysteriously had no records of her, a fact that distressed him greatly. But over the last eight months he has slowly come to terms that he will likely never see her again.

Meanwhile, in a few weeks Shikamaru's first born child is due, and he hasn't got a clue.

11). Shikamaru is deaf in one ear.

Shikamaru discovered the art of Fuuinjutsu during his second year in the academy. He was floored by the possibilities inherent in the art.

Seals could do amazing things, stuff that wasn't possible to do with ninjutsu, and for so much less chakra it was staggering. All for the cost of a little ink and paper and some doodling. He threw himself into his studies of Fuuinjutsu with an energy he normally reserved for... well, in his case, energy he normally just reserved.

He'd been studying the art for a month and a half before he started crafting his own explosive tags.

Explosive tags are terribly risky, and the more so for a novice, however talented, to be playing around with. A single slight error, one that would have been noticeable to a professional, slipped past his attention on a specific tag. He was practicing with his explosive notes when he charged the tag, and instead of the delay that he'd been expecting, the note exploded immediately.

He was inordinately lucky. Had he more chakra control, he'd have been able to channel more chakra into the note, and it would have maimed or killed him. As it was, it destroyed his shirt, burned his arm badly, and deafened him on his left side. Before the accident he'd actually rather enjoyed music, but afterwards he lost interest in music as it never really sounded right.

And he stopped his studies of Fuuinjutsu. It was just too troublesome.

12). Shikamaru is ambidextrous.

It was a thing he found out rather by accident. During his training with team Akachi, he learned that he was able to seamlessly translate any motion he learned with his right hand into a mirrored action with his left hand, and vice versa. He looked into it more after training that day, and while he found he could just as easily write with his left hand as with his right, but his handwriting was different.

The weirdest part, though, was when he tried writing backwards, and discovered that, when held up to a mirror, writing backwards with his left hand was identical to writing normally with his right hand, while writing backwards with his right hand looked indistinguishable from writing normally with his left.

It was a perfect mirroring of motion, in so far as he could tell.

He brought it up to his father that night, who was singularly unsurprised, and only warned his son to never tell anyone outside the clan about any of it.

Shikamaru suspects that it is this ambidexterity that is a prime secret to smooth execution of the Nara clan shadow techniques.

He's actually pretty close to the truth. The clan techniques aren't precisely a blood line, but the Nara keirakukei is.

The Nara keirakukei are capable of spontaneously reversing their position in the body on a lateral axis.

Without this, a Nara could only execute their techniques on an opponent whose dominant hand was the same as their own.

13). Shikamaru was the first boy in his class to receive medical training.

Shikamaru spent some time working in the Konoha hospital because he came to the realization that the Nara clan shadow jutsus could be used to help people with a tendency to seizures- the ability to control the body so it didn't flail around and damage itself could be highly valuable in trauma medicine, especially if that seizure was brought about by a traumatic head injury. The ability to hold a body still while surgery was going on in the field could save lives, and lots of them.

After a few weeks in the hospital, though, Shikamaru was faced with the down side of this- he tended to feel what the body he was controlling experienced. And a seizure is VERY unpleasant. He was forced to conclude that his services were doing him more harm than he was doing good, as to be worth the effort you had to be right there on the scene when the seizure started or else the initial part did most of the damage before you could start mitigating it. And it didn't do anything to control the mouth, but it DID teach him what it felt like to bite through your own tongue.

He doesn't have any healing techniques, but of all his class Shikamaru was the first one to study trauma medicine.

14). Sasuke has a crush on an older girl.

Her name is Inuzuka Hana. Yes, Kiba's older sister.

Sasuke ran into her when he was visiting the Konoha animal clinic with a wounded animal. A dog, specifically.

She thought he was rather cute... in a kid sort of way. Sasuke was smitten.

She was a strictly no nonsense woman, obviously a powerful shinobi by the play of steely muscle beneath silken, somewhat tanned skin. She was balanced and dextrous and tough.

Of course, part of the attraction was that she showed no interest in him what so ever. And after she figured out his crush for what it was, which took all of fifteen seconds because you can't fool an Inuzuka's nose, she told him he was sniffing up the wrong tree, so find another bitch to sniff around before he got bit.

He's held a torch for her ever since, and has sworn to himself that one day he'll get her to notice him. In a hot and sweaty kind of way.

Sasuke is an independant sort, partially by nature and partially by circumstance, and he wants a woman who isn't clingy. One who doesn't define herself by the man she's with. That pretty much ruled out every girl he ever went to school withthey'd run themselves right out of the contest by trying so damned hard.

And if he'd actually been teamed up with one of his fangirls? Ugh. He might have sworn off women all together.

But the question remains, why was Sasuke at the animal clinic in the first place?

Because...

15). Sasuke has a pet.

It's a small dog, one of the toy breeds. He found it wandering around with a bad limp outside the Uchiha estate and caught it, taking it in to the veterinary clinic. This, of course was how he ended up meeting Hana.

He could tell that the animal was a pet; but he had no real way of finding out who the dog belonged to. Sasuke decided to name him Menchi.

Eventually, with Hana's help, he found out who the owner was, and Kirochiro was returned to his rightful family, but Sasuke visits the dog every week. Even though he knows the dog's real name is Kirochiro, he can't help but think of him as Menchi.

16). Sasuke has a morbid fear of flypaper.

After he awoke from the mental trauma inflicted on him by his older brother, Sasuke was having a recurring nightmare. He was being pursued by Itachi, chased, and the harder he ran, the slower he would move, as his feet would stick to the ground. As his terror grew, he stuck fast, trying to lift a foot, and pinned to the ground, unable to see his brother but knowing that Itachi was walking closer and closer with each passing second.

The nightmares would eventually pass, after a fashion, as he found a way to subsume his fear of his older brother with his unending hatred. But shortly after the first time he had the nightmare, he was walking down the street, when a strip of flypaper blew off a nearby porch and landed on his shirt.

From a distance of inches, Sasuke saw a fly stuck to the strip of paper, struggling to escape, unable to move, a sight which, combined with the flypaper sticking to his shirt and then his hands, and the fresh memory of the nightmare, had Sasuke screaming in the street. ANBU arrived and took him to the hospital, but it took the nurses almost a half hour to calm him down again.

Sasuke hasn't willingly approached a strip of flypaper since.

17). Haku has a recurring nightmare about a basement.

The basement is dark, or at least, the shadows are. There is a single light bulb on the wall, and it is so bright it hurts his eyes to look at, but the only light it casts is so bright that it washes out what it shines on, while everything else is all but black shadows.

He has a sense of where the floor is, though- the floor is sloped, hidden in shadow, and it leads upwards closer and closer to the ceiling. In this dream, he is forced into that wedge, walking that slope upwards with stumbling feet because his eyes can't see the floor, the shadows are so deep, the space tighter and tighter until he is cramped into a crouch, looking on a chioroscuro room of empty storage space that nothing will stack flat on.

Haku isn't certain what it is about this nightmare that rattles him every time he dreams it. But every time he has it, he wakes up with a stifled scream, heart pounding and bathed in a cold sweat.

18). ATMA- or biju, as humans know them- are universally mindless.

Humans are not aware of this fact, of course. Even the biju themselves are not aware of this- in so far as one can apply awareness to something mindless, although the term mindless isn't precisely what people think it is. Mindlessness is a complete awareness of what is outside, with no internal consciousness. No self awareness. There is no emotion attributed to anything the biju experiences, only action and reaction. It can still decide, of course- that's what it is programmed to do. It even has memory, a purposeful inclusion by the Ancients to ensure that an ATMA could not be stopped casually by using the same tactic, allowing it to learn from prior experiences so as to continue its mission more efficiently, and this of course is what confuses and obfuscates the issue- how can something mindless have memory?

The most surprising thing is not that the biiju are unaware of this fact, but rather in the follow up question: If a biju is completely mindless, what is it that Jinchuuriki are actually talking to?

The answer is: Themselves.

Or rather, more specifically, they are speaking directly to their own Id.

The process of sealing an ATMA into a human host is to literally graft the thing directly into the host's chakra generation system, the lead up into the Keirakukei. The keirakukei work by mixing mental energies with physical energies, or at least, this is the closest metaphore that has yet been devised in their world, although a closer truth would be to state that the focus necessary to draw on the chakra stores of a human requires the full attention of the subconscious mind to both the state of mind and body in order to achieve correctly.

This distinction is virtually unknown to the shinobi world at large, but is the core reason for why jinchuuriki go insane so frequently. The chakra matrix of a biju has drive and will, a desire to be used in accordance to the programming it was given when it was first created. But when a biju is inserted into a human, attached to the subconscious mind, the Id of the host subverts the programming of the biju to its own uses, and suddenly has an enormous secondary power source at its disposal. The Id of the host subverts and meshes with the control codes of the ATMA's programming, and the abrupt influx of memory and knowledge fools the Id into believing it is the biju itself.

The distinction becomes virtually meaningless when the biju is sealed into a baby as the Id never knows anything other than the experience of being bound to the biju. For all intents and purposes, it IS the biju.

Given how jinchuuriki are universally treated, their Ids' reaction is understandable, and perpetuates the illusion that the hosts are in fact influenced, even controlled by the biju within them, when in truth it is their own darkest urges given play that wreaks such havoc.

This truth may never be known because during some point in their lives the conscious mind and the ATMA fuelled Id will come into direct contact with one another, and it is almost always an event of mutual repugnance. The Id is disgusted at the fact that the consscious mind is "Weak" and incomprehensibly unwilling to make use of the massive power at their mutual disposal to avenge the wrongs they have received, while the conscious mind is horrified by the utterly monstrous nature of the demon within. Their greatest distaste for one another stems not from their differences, but from the knowledge that in the other, each can see itself, and knows just how much alike they really are.

How can you avoid a mirror that stares back at you every time you close your eyes?

How can you hide from yourself?

Ironically enough, the closest individual to discovering this truth is in fact the Jinchuuriki known as Killer Bee, from

Kumogakure. In making peace with his Id, in truly forgiving those who mistreated him for so long, he has in fact calmed the seething rage and hatred in himself and so that which once drove his biju. But he is no psychologist. He isn't even much of a singer. And singing is the most introspective thing he has at his disposal. Even he believes that he has tamed the beastwhen in truth, what he really tamed is himself.

19). The Shinigami is an Ancient.

Long ago before anyone thought to count the time spent between one summer and the next, much less the number of summers that had passed, one of the Ancients had a marvelous idea- these creatures that they had created had a gift the ancients did not- ease of mobility. True, an ancient could reshape itself slowly, effecting a sort of crawl across the landscape that on the scale of several thousand years could effectively move it, oh, maybe a couple of miles, but their mobility was severely hampered. The idea: Remove its mind from the physical form that it was bound to. That mind could drift about freely with no loss of intellect inherent to being bound within the body of a lesser creature.

It failed to take into account the fact that, without a body, the Ancient had no means by which to generate the energy it needed, the chakra, to keep its mind whole and intact.

For a short while it fed off the life essences of animals as a desperation measure, but in short order the remaining Ancients found a way to trap it. In a fit of desperation it proposed a deal: It would serve as a neutral agent, unable to harm the other ancients, and serve as a sort of lliason between them, in exchange for the right to take the life force for its own of any creatures that agreed to it, so long as the freeform Ancient held to the terms of the contract.

The other Ancients agreed to this, and the Shinigami, as later it would be known, came to be.

A loophole existed in this contract that the Shinigami fully exploited: It could absorb free floating energy freely, and it could kill, freeing up a measure of energy in the process, so long as that killing existed within the boundaries of a contract that it formed with a lesser creature. This worked fine for the Shinigami; it essentially got a two-for-one deal on the extraction of souls and life from living things.

Fast forward to the contract with the being known as yondaime-hokage-namikaze-minato.

This was... an unexpected situation. Long before it could even partially drain the life energy of the ninth ATMA, it could not contain a smidgeon more energy. Not without its own destruction. And it had no intention of destroying itself for the sake of a mortal. But without completing its contract, it could not keep the energy it had taken from the ATMA, and it had already been running low on energy as of the last several thousand years contractees were few and far between.

So it improvised, sealing up the self generating power of the Ninth ATMA inside a living container, and for good measure, to protect its own reputation, ensured that nobody would be the wiser, save for a few mortals that wandered onto the scene as it was finishing up. But none of them had the Mokuton bloodline, and so would not be a risk to communicate back to the local Ancients as to the... slippery interpretation of its deal.

But it did not consume either the Kyuubii nor the yondaime-hokage-namikaze-minato.

In fact, it more or less fulfilled its part of the deal- after all, what is a life but memory and knowledge and a body to contain them in? The nith ATMA was dealt with. And also...

If you take away the years of experience and growth, the life is gone, is it not?

Because this is the final drop of blood.

20). The Fourth Hokage is not dead.

Uzumaki Naruto was a child that never existed.

The secret that Uchiha Sasuke stumbled upon and subsequently used to save Naruto's life is this:

His born name is Namikaze Minato.

End Interlude.

EDIT: Thanks to TheWatcherandReader for pointing out an error on my part regarding the number of Kanji needed for literacy- it's been a LONG time since my one, abortive attempt at learning Japanese.

-AN: This is where the pre-time skip stuff ends. Naruto himself, at the beginning of the next portion still has no clue of the truth. He is looking for answers, following the bread crumb trail of deceit, and will find out the hard way that he has been lied to his whole life.

Don't have a time frame for the next actual chapter ready, so I'll just say it will be up when it is done.

Ja mata.

-AXENOME