"So what happened to the old man?" Genma asked as he walked her to the Hokage's room, trying to help her keep up appearances so that no one else would know that she was a fake 'Hokage'. Naru was quiet for a second or so as several people walked by them. She pretended to trip so that Genma could catch her, and laughed it off when the other people turned to look at them. Ten minutes later she slipped into Sarutobi's room and yanked Genma inside after her and closed the door.

He gave her a funny look as she ditched the Kage robes and the large straw hat and set them aside like she always did before she even bothered to answer.

"Do you remember how a year ago, the old man fell down the steps just down the hall and had to be taken to the hospital?" Genma nodded his head as he recalled the incident. He couldn't recall a time he had felt so nervous or scared as he had that day.

"Yeah. I remember. Is it relevant?"

Naru nodded her head. "Yes. The reason that he fell, you all thought it was because of old age or something finally catching up to him, but the truth of the matter was that he had been poisoned by someone here in the tower."

Genma stiffed as he stared at her in shock as she continued to speak. His mind soaking up every little bit of information like a sponge. "Someone had slipped two very toxic, and very deadly poisons into his morning coffee. One took effect soon after that causing him to fall down the steps when he was going for his morning walk. The doctors were able to flush it from his system after a few hours, but they didn't find the other one until it was too late."

"What do you mean?" Genma asked as he sank into the closest chair, the nice cumfy reading chair against the wall several feet from the door.

"The other poison was like a Trojan horse, Genma. It had no detectable signs, or symptoms, and could lay dormant in a person's blood for months, even years. It attached itself to his healthy blood cells, tissues and nerves and lay dormant for almost two months before he started to feel the effects. Once he started to feel the effects, it was too late to do anything. And there was no cure at that time..."

"But there is a cure now?"

Naru nodded her head again. "He knew that he was dying after the third month and knew that it wouldn't take him long to go, so he pulled me aside after school one day and asked several favors. 1) When he died, I was to take his place since he had already decided that I was the only person suited at this time to be Hokage. I have no real use for power or wealth, and I like being useful to my people. So he knew that I wouldn't get drunk with power and run the village into the ground."

"Makes sense."

"2) He wanted me to find a cure for the poison since the person who had slipped it to him was still on the loose and was likely to try slipping it to me once 'Sarutobi' didn't show any signs of getting sick or dying. 3) I would have to stay close to him so that once he did die, we could change places without anyone noticing-" Genma nodded, again, the old man's logic had been right on the money on that one. Even though he had figured it out didn't mean that everyone else would.

Not for a good long time at least.

"4) I was to take his body and burn it to ashes and scatter them across the village. His reasoning behind this was, that even if someone figured out that I was a fake. They wouldn't be able to prove it without his body and everyone knew that he wouldn't leave the village. That and this village had been his home, he loved it more than anything. And he wanted to be able to watch over it and it's people even from heaven."

Genma's lips curved up in a smile. That definitely sounded like the old man. "He wrote out a will, and put his affairs in order. One part naming me the hokage and the rest was mostly about his estates and money and such. He had some things set aside for Asuma-san and his grandson Kona. So the night that he died, I did as he asked, but not before I took as much tissue, blood and bone samples as I dared to use to make a cure."

Genma leaned forward in his seat. Now the story was really getting interesting. "It took about a week. But I was finally able to break down the poison and neutralise it using the samples that i took from the old man's body before I burned it. And because I knew that the poison would and could be a major issue if it was introduced to the village foods and water supplies, I took it upon myself to introduce the cure to the village by unknown means. Everyone has taken the cure at some point in time without even realising it."

Genma's jaw dropped. "E-Everyone?"

Naru gave him a sunny smile. "You do eat right? Drink the water? Take showers?"

His eyes widened and he jumped to his feet and almost yelled. "You put it in the food and water!" When? When had she done it? And why the hell hadn't anyone figured out what she was doing? True that most people would have thought that she was trying to kill them all but it still shouldn't have been that easy for her to slip the cure into their food or water, they had most store owners and shop keepers trained to detect someone messing with the food, and there were Anbu watching the village water supply all the time.

Genma started pacing around, he ran his fingers through his brown hair and stared at her for a second before gritting his teeth and chewing on the senbon in his mouth like mad. He wasn't sure that he liked the fact that she could slip in and out of places so easily and without notice. It wasn't that he didn't trust her, no that wasn't it at all. It was the fact that if she could do it, what was stopping others form doing the same thing?

That right there is what everything boiled down too. And that was why he suddenly felt so shaken and light headed.

"Where were the shop keepers and the Anbu watching the water?"

Naru shrugged and thinned her lips before saying, "I put them to sleep for a few minutes."

Genma muttered something along the lines of "fucking priceless" before his legs gave out and he more or less fainted right there at her feet. Naru drummed her finger nails against her teeth for a second then made a humming sound.

She had known that as a shinobi Genma would react badly to having his food and water tampered with, but she wouldn't have done it if she wasn't paranoid that the poison would be given to the villagers in secret. And the last thing she wanted was for the people of the leaf village, was to have an epidemic on their hands that could cost them all their lives.

She had promised the old man that she would take care of everyone and everything and by god she would do whatever she deemed necessary to do it.

Weather they liked it or not.