A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
'Parable of the Old Man and the Young' by Wilfred Owen
Naruto knocked on Tsunade's door, ignoring the two ANBU on either side of him, their eyes burning through their masks as if they knew.
"Come in," her voice, welcoming him. He cracked open the door and slid through, jerking as he found her standing right there, her mouth twisted into a sad smile. "Oh, Naruto…" her voice broke as she stretched out her arms and he went willingly into her embrace, resting his head on her shoulder, the shoulder that had steadied him these long seven years, breathing in her familiar scent of antiseptic and ink. His older sister.
"Obaa-chan," he breathed, feeling her arms tighten around his waist. "I sent Gamakichi for the scroll." He felt her nod. "Come sit down," she said, releasing him and going back to her desk. He followed, taking the mug of green tea she shoved into his hands.
"So the Kyuubi has received all of its chakra back?"
"Yes. It-" he paused, took a sip of tea, "summoned the demons." She let her head fall into her hands, a sigh escaping. "It did? Great."
"I'm sorry." He was, really. 'Sorry I couldn't do more, sorry I was so weak, I'm sorry, I'm sorry-'
"Don't ever say that!" He looked up, shrinking back into his chair. Tsunade towered over him, her green eyes almost aflame with fury. "Don't ever say you're sorry! You did the best you could, the best anyone could ever do. Nothing is your fault, nothing. And even if the world does end, even if it does, you gave us seven more years of life, and that is something you should never apologize for. Even though…" she looked out the window, and then back at him, her face pale with agony and voice hoarse,
"Even though I would have sacrificed those seven years to keep you from pain." Naruto felt his lips twitch into a helpless, sick smile. Tsunade fell back into her chair, and suddenly she didn't look like the Hokage anymore, not like a leader or a healer or a shinobi at all, but only a woman who would rather be struck deaf than hear what Naruto had to say next.
But because he loved her, and he loved Konaha, he had to say it anyway. Hating himself, with his fingers digging into the bright porcelain of the mug, he told her the plan.
Tsunade looked away and let her fingers curl around the photograph on her desk of Naruto, smiling, a beautiful smile, bright and sunny.
A false smile.
"Are you sure?" She didn't look up, couldn't, because to look at Naruto, this brave, noble, good man, who bore the pain and the burden of an entire world and asked for no surcease of sorrow, who loved desperately and simply and joyfully-
To look at this good, kind man, who had never been given a chance, not really. Not in the way that the rest of them were. ' I guess… you've always known, haven't you?' The picture frame cracked in her hands.
"Give me another way, please?" Her voice was disgustingly weak in the silence. Warm hands settled on her shoulders and pulled her to her feet, and she buried her face in Naruto's hair and wept like a child, while Naruto hummed a lullaby, this martyr for the world, and said in a voice that sounded so much like Dan's,
"There is none."
Tsunade gazed at her hands, tracing the wrinkles she knew were there under the thin cover of a jutsu. A sad affectation, as if by their invisibility, she was still young.
"Shizune?" Her lover laid a hand upon her shoulder, squeezing in a vain attempt to comfort. Tsunade's eyes flickered to the report on white paper in front of her, black words stark: 'The seal has broken.' She felt as though she should be crying. She wasn't, couldn't, and not for the first time she cursed Naruto, cursed his idealism and his love and his unfailing loyalty to the village that scorned him. Cursed him for making her believe that she could ever have been Hokage, making her forget that to be Hokage was to become the stone face on the mountain, emotionless.
"Are they here?" Her voice rang hollow.
"Yes. All of the former Rookie Nine, plus Gai's former team." A breath hissed out between her teeth as she closed her eyes. 'They are our hope. The greatest generation. The greatest we have ever produced, the beacons for our future. They are everything we could ever have hoped to produce, and they have slain the earth.' There was a terrible pain behind her eyes. She opened them, pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead, and then composed herself, straightening.
"Send them in, please." The hand left, and Shizune walked to the door and opened it, gesturing. The eleven filed in, pale and stoic, the gap in their midst as wide and deep as the seas.
She let her gaze wander over each of them, stopping to stare into Sakura's wide eyes. Her apprentice flushed, but she didn't look away. Perversely proud, Tsunade turned to Sasuke, traitor who now served their village, his steady black eyes- Uchiha to the last drop of blood in his veins- old and ancient. Ino Yamanaka broke the silence.
"Hokage-sama, why am I here? I didn't have anything to do with this."
"You didn't? Why not?" Ino looked away, biting her lip. She took a deep breath and blurted, "Because Naruto's a demon and he deserved every bit of what he got!" Tsunade felt the blood drain from her face as the world blurred before her.
"Excuse me?" Her voice was soft, the blood throbbing in her ears. Her hands curled into fists. Ino faltered, but persevered, "He killed my uncle and grandfather."
"Get out," she snarled.
"But-"
"Get out!"
Ino fled, the door slamming behind her. Tsunade sighed, looked up, and said,
"What do you have to say for yourselves? No-" her words were clipped and sharp as knives, "what the hell were you thinking? What in the world were you trying to do?!" They glanced at each other, shuffled, but said nothing. " Well?!"
"We just wanted to help," Shikamaru spoke up. She rose slowly, the Hokage robes billowing behind her, fury boiling up inside her.
"Help? Help? You haven't helped one bit, you measly lackwits, you've done the absolute worse thing you can do: you have made those long seven years he suffered in the dark worthless!" They flinched with each word she said, and distantly she recognized tears trailing down Hinata's bloodless face. "You have made his dream worthless, his pain and his sacrifice and his love worth no more than your own souls. You never paid any attention to him when he was young, did you, when he was crying out for someone, anyone, to love him, to speak to him just once, so he'd know he was alive.
He had nothing, don't you see? He had no one, and he still cared; he didn't abandon Konoha, even though all this village did was flay him to pieces with words and stones. And now you want to make up for it, to reassure yourselves that you're good people, that you're worthy of his love. My god, did you think that it was easy for me to stand by and watch him be hurt, knowing that it was for the better good of a people who had scorned him, who will never know of his sacrifice? No, it hurt me every day, that I was the one who consigned him to that hell, but I supported him! I cared for him, while you, all of you, in your arrogance, defiled his sacrifice and condemned him, trying to be as noble as him. If this was a contest for you, then who was the better friend?" Sasuke flinched. She took a deep breath, struggling for control, to not snap and batter them into the ground.
"You, Uchiha. You don't know the tiniest inkling of what he suffered; you didn't have to stand by his bedside every morning and watch him struggle for breath with lungs shredded into blue pieces of wool; you didn't have to pick him up when all of his bones were shattered and drain yourself dry to keep him steady and sane, even though everything you could do could only hurt and prolong his pain; you didn't have to hold his hand and watch his flayed face try and smile for you, no matter how much it hurt! You-" breath shuddered in her lungs, and finally she just picked up the thick folder full of lurid photographs and flung it at them, watching with grim satisfaction as their faces turned green.
"Do you understand what will happen now?" Her voice was soft. Mutely they shook their heads. She sneered. "The demons will break free, destroying their containers, and they will come. Akatsuki will come, but what they don't know is that it doesn't matter, because-" her fingers curled around the edge of the desk, "the demons are going to end the world." She laughed bitterly.
"Of course, Naruto found a way out." Their heads jerked up, hope gleaming in their eyes. "When the demons and Akatsuki are here, he's going to use a new jutsu, one stolen from Akatsuki's lair. He will take the form of Kyuubi, take all the demon's chakra, and destroy the demons and every member of Akatsuki, yes, even Itachi." She smirked. 'How does that feel, Uchiha, to have your vengeance taken by someone you called 'weakling?''
"But what you don't know," she said slowly, savoring the dimming light in their eyes, "is that this jutsu will almost certainly kill him."
"No!" Sakura gasped. "That's not true! He- he can't have gone through all this to… to go like that!" Tsunade felt her lips peel back in a predatory smile.
"There is a ninety-eight percent chance of his death. And if he dies," she was sure that she should have felt bad for crushing their hope, "it will be all your fault ."
Sasuke strode forward and slammed his fists onto the desk, sending papers and ink everywhere. The charcoal liquid splattered on his face in a poor imitation of the cursed seal.
"That's not going to happen!" he snarled in her face, a blast of wet breath and the cold cereal he had had for breakfast hitting her in the face. "I won't let it. We'll fight Akatsuki and the demons ourselves, he's already suffered enough. He doesn't need to fight them." The other shinobi, pale and almost trembling, nodded behind him.
Tsunade deliberately wiped the saliva off her cheek. "We have no choice. Maybe you could stop Akatsuki, maybe you could take your vengeance, but there is no one on this earth that can stop the demons. You've all seen what the Shukaku, the weakest demon, can do - what it does to its victims. What do you think eight demons, driven mad by the fox's call, will do to the Hidden Villages?" Sasuke's fingers dug into the desk, making the dark cherry-wood splinter, but he finally acquiesced and stepped back, fury etched into his face.
"The other Hidden Villages, what's going to happen to them?" She looked at Shikamaru with a grudging respect. 'Smart boy.' "Five of them are going to be destroyed when the demons break free of their containers. Kiri, Oto, Taki, Iwa, and Kaminari are all going to be destroyed, due to the demons' fury at how their hosts were treated." Kiba was becoming rapidly paler by the second as the full weight of the deaths they were going to cause descended upon him.
"I will not punish you," she said softly, sinking down into her chair, "as any punishment I could devise would be paltry and useless compared to the punishment of your own consciences. Now get out of my sight."
"C-can't we see Naruto?" Hinata said, trembling. "If Kakashi and Gaara would let you, I suppose you could. But I highly doubt they will." She made a show of inspecting her fingernails, listening to the soft shuffling of their feet as they left her office, beaten and broken.
They deserved no less, she thought viciously. "Shizune, can you tell Naruto to come and see me whenever he has the chance?" Unbidden, her hand strayed to the order on her desk, awaiting her signature. She dipped her pen in the ink and slashed her name across it, sitting back and regarding the paper smugly when she was finished.
The order for Naruto to become Rokudaime Hokage.
"Kakashi, Gaara, can I talk to you?" Kakashi looked up from his book, his free hand absentmindedly petting Gaara's hair, to see Naruto, his face gaunt, in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe.
"Sure." He jostled Gaara, who stirred, sand flowing to tug the loveseat in the couch over to where Naruto stood. Naruto sank into the seat with a smile of thanks, settling into it with a soft hiss as the newly grown skin on his back rubbed against the coarse fabric.
"I talked to Tsunade," he said without preamble. "I think she chewed out the others after I left-" a flickering smile, all too precious in these dark times, "I could hear her yelling from all the way down the street!"
"She is Tsunade," Kakashi said wryly. "Yeah," Naruto said, grinning, "that's the Old Hag for you." Gaara turned his head from where he lay on Kakashi's thigh to stare in puzzlement at Naruto.
"You call your Hokage an Old Hag? That is allowed here?"
"Oh, no," Kakashi assured him, "it's just Naruto that does that. He usually gets beat about the head for saying it, though." Gaara made a noncommittal noise, satisfied that the world had once fallen back into its proper alignment, with everything neatly organized.
"I do kind of have something important to say," Naruto said, fingers twisting nervously around each other.
"Once, when I was little, Sandaime told me I was a hero." Naruto looked down at his hands, his face pale and breath rattling in his lungs. "I didn't know what he meant, but I can say now that I know."
"You mean the Kyuubi?" Naruto looked up at him, and tears shone in his eyes. "No, Kakashi. I wish that was it." Motes of dust swirled in the sunlight pouring in through the windows, illuminating the room as if Kakashi had returned to the warm house of his childhood. As if all of life could be contained in the illusory speck of dust in a sunbeam.
Naruto leaned back in his chair and coughed, the sound rattling dryly from somewhere deep down inside, as if there was a thin, sharp-edged man inside struggling to escape. He wiped at his mouth and continued tonelessly, "I stopped reading fairytales with heroes in them when I was really young, because I hated the endings. You know what always happens at the end of every hero's story?"
"They live happily ever after?"
Naruto smiled, and it was bitter, so bitter, hard and grim and sad as the desert itself.
"They die." Kakashi's stomach felt like it was crumpling in on itself like a ball of paper in the hand of a frustrated artist.
"You will not die," Gaara said, his voice so certain that it seemed as if the words were etched in the very rock of the Hokage mountain. "I won't let you." One side of Naruto's mouth lifted in a tired, spare grin.
"Well, I've got a two-percent chance, you know, of living. I guess I've faced worse odds before."
"Yes," Gaara said, "When you fought me, I calculated the odds of your survival at zero."
"Yeah," Naruto trailed off, looking tired and sad and anticipatory all at once, "I've beaten the odds before. I can do it again." Kakashi rose from his seat and tucked his book away, crossing over to take a seat beside Naruto and sliding an arm around his frail shoulders. He was silent, suppressing all his urges to question, to pick apart the problem and search for other options, because he could see in Naruto's ancient, pained eyes that there were none, that to question would only cause further pain, pain that Naruto, as always, would forgive.
"I can do it again," Naruto repeated, trying, it seemed, to convince himself, before he folded into a fetal position, heedless of the pain of his freshly healed bones, a child too young to be a martyr.
Gaara joined him, sitting on Naruto's other side. Carefully, as if he would break, they enfolded him between them, their eyes meeting over his bowed head as he shuddered against them, cracking sobs trembling against their sides, his thin fingers clutching them to him as if he was afraid they would leave. The hiccupping sobs trailed off, only to replaced by a high, wavering keening that made the hair on his arms stand up and set his teeth on edge, the keening of a wounded animal who could see no way out of the trap it was caught in, the regretful cries of a man who had fought for seven years to save his world, but finally, at the end, there were thousands of people he could not protect, despite his suffering.
'Never,' Kakashi swore silently, seeing the same conviction mirrored in Gaara's eyes, 'will I leave you to suffer alone like I did for those twenty years. If your name shall be written on the monument, it shall be with mine beside it.'