Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.

Author's Note: And Zen is back! Hello, readers, if you're still with me. Apologies for the late upload, I took that two week break I've been threatening for a while. First up, thank you to Rain Dove and Rosebunse, for your wonderful ongoing support. It's really encouraging since we're so close now to the end! Honestly, the last two chapters and epilogue after this are all planned and I wouldn't be able to continue this without knowing somebody's enjoying it, or at least still interested. Secondly, welcome to all newcomers to this story - you've come on board at the right time. I hope that in the final leg of the story, I won't disappoint you. So, in this chapter, we're back in Konoha, a few days after the Second Parade and lots of people have lots of things to talk about. I hope you enjoy this installment. Do let me know what you think! Best, Zen

Word that something had happened spread quickly through the Land of Fire.

News of bloodshed often did, although, what had specifically happened in Konoha, nobody knew for many days. There were hunters in the forest who had seen the red glow smouldering above the treetops. Travellers felt the road tremble beneath their feet and, as the story went, on that windless night, the pillar of pearly smoke, going nowhere but lingering over the town, could be seen from ten miles away.

Those who remembered the Third Great Shinobi War locked their doors and slid old weapons beneath their pillows for comfort. The lights in the sky had raked over memories as if they were coals and brought them red hot and glowing to the surface again.

Those who didn't remember the war stood eagerly in the streets to scavenge for news, wanting more, more and more. There had been fire, they chattered, but then what? What had caused it? Who had set it? Why had they done it? Would whatever have happened in Konoha happen to them too? Would the violence spread like a second Plague?

The questions were answered all too neatly for Tsunade in the form of a dossier prepared by Shizune and placed squarely on her desk, alongside a memo that the entry code for the strictly medical-use only alcohol cabinet had been changed and that Shizune was prepared to defy rank to deny the information to her superior.

If the sight of her town marred with black craters and twists of smoke hadn't made her heart jump when she returned, the sight of the dossier might have made her sink beyond despair. As it was, sink balanced jump - the dossier made her feel back on level ground again. Things were being investigated, things were being done, and things were still running well enough in Konoha that a dossier had be penned in time for her return - All hail the unstoppable power of the bureaucracy! Even after a quarter of the town goes up in smoke, a little clerk somewhere will still be adjusting his glasses and licking the tip of a pen.

Tsunade rubbed her eyes and turned another page. There was something numbing about the endless stream of black and white, report after report of damage upon damage, news of violence. Everything became reduced to monochrome. No more sprays of red or icy blue of glass in her imagination, no more pale yellow faces of the ones who had got caught in the crossfire. Only black anger and white dismay that anybody had dared pull such a stunt whilst she was away!

She flicked the pages of the dossier to the list of the dead. There were Keepers, Marksmen, a few Repenters, but scores more of people who had never taken part in the violence in the first place – people caught in shattering glass, crushed under falling debris or furniture at home, defending their shops from thieves who had taken advantage of the chaos to carry out their own crimes, locked in families who had suffocated on smoke or burned in the fire that had nearly enveloped the artisan's quarter. The next few pages were lists of the wounded, of men and women who had been violated in the midst of the riots, of the missing and unidentified bodies. There was even a list of those who had been put forward for needing mental health treatment.

Tsunade thought of a wound, of a throbbing, infected welt, lanced with a glowing needle until all the poison ran out of its centre. All sorts of long tolerated discontent in Konoha had burst out at last. Konoha's internal problems had been buried into invisibility in the past few decades, but part of Tsunade grumbled that nothing could have been done anyway. There had been world wars to deal with, the fallout from the Kyuubi release, the growing threat of smaller hidden villages, the Plague…

Tsunade groaned and settled her head onto the desk.

There was a light pop. The air in front of her filled with a puff of white smoke and a toad dropped onto the desk, blinking its wide yellow eyes.

"Wakey-wakey, sweetie, I've got a message from Jiraiya.

It was Shima, the little old toad grandmother, thin clammy skin hanging in folds around her neck and her bullet-head knobbled with purple warts. "He just wanted to let you know that he's going to set off for Konoha this evening."

Tsunade buried her face in the pages of the dossier. "Tell him to stay put in the mountains – I've got too many things happening around here to worry about him as well."

"Oh, so you'd worry about him if he came to town?" Shima's eyes sparkled. "I'm sure he'll be thrilled to know."

"He's my oldest friend, of course I'd worry," Tsunade said, her voice muffled by the paper. "I have a town to stabilise and a major ninja-civilian civic problem to untangle. I can't afford to worry about some oaf running around the town until he gets the Plague and I have to be the one to drag him to an isolation room!"

Shima held up a little webbed hand. Tsunade closed her mouth. The old toad looked suddenly world weary as she hunched her shoulders and closed her eyes.

"It will make no difference any more what we tell him. He has his mind made up, his heart's all set. Please understand, sweetie, we begged and pleaded with Jiraiya to stay in the mountains. We, the family of the great Toad Sage! We begged and pleaded him to stay where it was safe, where we could take care of him until the Plague passed by, but we can only convince him for so long. These riots were the last straw. We will not be able to keep him back any longer."

A fond smile tugged the corner of Tsunade's lips. "It must have been hard work keeping him and Naruto in the mountains when the Plague started."

"Oh, it broke my heart," admitted Shima. "Watching them worry and hurt and harass every messenger that passed through! And now my wee old heart breaks again to see Jiraiya-chan leave. There's no winning is there?"

"No, there isn't," Tsunade agreed with a strained smile. She didn't want to think how Jiraiya would react to seeing their town all broken in pieces and trying to put itself back together.

As though the old toad could read her mind, Shima clicked her tongue and said, "You shouldn't blame yourself for what's happened here."

Tsunade scowled. "I'm Hokage. Being responsible for everything and everyone, and everything and everyone's shit. That's my job description in a nutshell."

"No, it isn't," said Shima firmly. "And you jolly well know it without having some wrinkly old crone remind you."

Outside Tsunade's office, wheelbarrows shifting debris clanked and clattered and hammers continued to pound out their beat on the houses being repaired.

However much it felt as though the Hokage title did nothing more than legitimise having the whole world's mess thrown at her, Tsunade knew Shima was right. There was a reason why people so lovingly carved the faces of their previous Hokages on the side of the mountain after all.

Shima clapped her hands together. "One more thing - Jiraiya-chan was asking about Naruto. We haven't heard a peep from him since he left the mountains. How is he?"

The abrupt change of conversation didn't catch Tsunade off guard. She had been expecting that they would come to talk about Naruto later. She would've been more surprised if Shima hadn't asked after him at all.

"He's in the hospital, but, it's alright, he's doing fine," Tsunade said quickly as Shima turned a sickly pea-green. "He ended up with memory deluge after overstretching his shadow clones. It's simple enough to treat. We've knocked him out and put him on a mental health therapy programme for the past couple of days, so he ought to wake up later this evening."

Shima looked even more concerned than before. Tsunade resisted the urge to pet the little toad on the head and added, in her most professional tones, "It's a therapy programme we use on ninjas who had false memories put into their heads by enemies. He will be fine, Shima-san. Naruto's in experienced and highly capable hands."

"Well, if you say so, dear," Shima said, after a pause weighty with an unsaid, He'd better be! "These boys! Jiraiya-chan and Naruto! When will they learn to take it easy and just sit on the side-lines?"

When they're dead and buried, whispered that treacherous little voice from the depths of Tsunade's fears, but she schooled her face into a smile and opened her mouth to agree, when a knock sounded at the door.

"That's my cue to be on my way," said Shima briskly. She rested her little hand, delicate and light as a petal, on top of Tsunade's and looked her in the eye. "Stay strong, Tsunade, and take care. Look out for the boys when they're back with you."

Tsunade raised an eyebrow. "You think I don't try?"

Shima chuckled and with another light pop, soft as a bursting reed-head, the old toad disappeared, leaving only creases in the paper where she had been standing on top of the dossier and a faint smell of duckweed.

There was no second knock on the door. Whoever it was had decided to wait patiently outside. That action alone already whittled down the visitor to only one person Tsunade was expecting to see.

Standing in the corridor were Nara Yoshino and her son Shikamaru. At the sight of the Hokage, Yoshino immediately stood to attention. Shikamaru stifled a yawn and slouched behind her, but despite his supposed nonchalance in the Hokage's presence his eyes were sharp.

"Hokage-sama." Yoshino straightened from her crisp and deferential bow. "The messenger said I was to come and see you in person. I came here as soon as we could."

"Thank you for coming so quickly," said Tsunade. "Follow me this way. We have a lot to discuss."

Tsunade led them to a small room neighbouring the morgue in the hospital basement. It was clean, white-tiled, its lights bright and the air smelled subtly of formaldehyde and other chemical fluids. At the door to the room, Tsunade tied an apron over her hazard gear and exchanged the gauntlets for disposable gloves.

"You were right to ask me to do the dissection myself, Nara-san."

Yoshino looked concerned. "Was it a dangerous dissection, Hokage-sama? I apologise if it was."

"Let's just say it raises some highly sensitive issues. The less people know about this for now, the better."

Tsunade moved aside a pot of forceps and placed a metal tray, about four inches deep and a metre long on top of the stainless steel table.

She pulled off the linen cloth. In the tray was Danzo's right arm. Shikamaru's hand made a small motion towards his mouth as though he was about to gag. Tsunade didn't blame him. Embedded in the greying flesh was a line of sharingans, red and bloody, dull as dusty marbles. The skin was glistening from preservation fluids and was rippled like tree-bark,

"I certainly wasn't expecting that," Yoshino breathed. "What is the meaning of this, Hokage-sama?"

"This is the answer to Shimura Danzo's 'split personality'," Tsunade said. "I analysed the DNA from each eye and the surrounding tissue. Neither the cells of the arm nor the eyes matched with Danzo himself. The eyes corresponded to a number of Uchiha adults who died during the Massacre and the cells – the cells are from a culture line developed from my own grandfather. This level of body modification, I'd imagine Orochimaru was involved at some point."

Yoshino raised her eyebrows. "The Uchiha Massacre, tissue from Senju Hashirama and the possibility that Shimura Danzo was associating closely with everyone's favourite bioweapons engineer - I think I can see what you meant by highly sensitive."

Tsunade took a pair of forceps and, pinching two sections of flesh, pulled open the muscles of the arm. She tried not to think that this was, biologically-speaking, her grandfather's own skin she was cutting through. The tissue pulp oozed pink fluid sticky like amber. Thank gods it wasn't blood.

"You see here," she said, pointing at a line running through the rubbery muscle fibres, "this is a developing chakra system. It connects all of the eyes in the arm together. Judging by the path up the upper arm and the positioning of the node in the shoulder, it went up to Danzo's head."

"His eye," spoke up Shikamaru. "It connected up to his right eye. Neji said he saw something like the whole chakra system of a man squashed into an eye and an arm."

"It's possible that what happened was this," Tsunade began, lowering the forceps so that the arm flopped back into the tray again. "When the chakra entities of the eyes and the surrounding cells mixed together and connected, stimulated by the unique properties of my grandfather's cells, they formed a single, completely new chakra entity – a new consciousness within this arm and the right eye that was neither Uchiha nor Senju."

She turned over the arm then to show them the shoulder and Yoshino stifled a gasp.

There was a face pushing out from the muscle, its expression set in a pained grimace. It looked as though it was straining to break out from the limb.

"A new consciousness, unable to have a body of its own," Tsunade said, looking down at the face, "but it tried. It certainly tried. This face has a rudimentary nervous system, even the beginnings of a brain. The features are all cartilage. No bone. No eyes, but it's the beginning."

"Couldn't it ever have grown its own body from this arm?" asked Shikamaru.

"Danzo's body itself would probably have died of the strain of supporting it before it could have even formed a whole functioning head. Anyhow, I could imagine that all this complicates investigations for you, Nara-san."

"Tell me about it," Yoshino sighed, putting her hands on her hips. "We've had the Yamanakas looking through Danzo's head searching for memories in connection with the Repentance ever since he came into custody. Danzo insists he remembers nothing. From what you tell us, Hokage-sama, he's actually telling the truth. The other consciousness died and took its sweet dreams with it when my son broke up the chakra system. I'm not comfortable trying a man with no memory of the crime."

"Actually," Shikamaru cleared his throat discreetly, "Danzo's body was hosting the culprit, so in effect, isn't that like hiding a criminal in a house? We could try him as an accomplice and aiding and abetting an enemy of the state. He 'gave' the Eye of the World knowledge about the ANBU base and weapon supplies directly from his brain."

"We still don't know how willing Danzo was in sharing his body with the Eye," Yoshino pointed out. "If he gave up the information unwillingly, then trying him for aiding the enemy in this case would be like trying ninjas who have been coerced into their actions under torture or a genjutsu."

"How aware was Danzo of the Eye of the World controlling his body?"

"We don't know yet, Hokage-sama," Yoshino said. "We've timelined the blanks in his memories and confirmed that they match up to Repentance meetings, but as for anything like awareness, we'll only be able to tell when he talks."

Tsunade raised her eyebrows. "He hasn't spoken?"

"Not since we brought him in. Not to us at any rate," Yoshino muttered. "The guards say he talks to himself, or maybe even his shadow. Either way, he mentions a shadow a lot. I'm tempted to have him declared insane. He must have been pretty insane to some degree to have all these eyeballs stitched into his arm."

"Be Danzo insane or otherwise, I'm going to have to disappoint you, Nara-san." Tsunade closed her eyes and imagined that she was punching a brick wall instead of the morning Runner's face. "We cannot bring any charges against him."

Yoshino laughed loud and heartily. "Hokage-sama, don't worry, there are plenty of things we could charge him with – aiding and abetting an enemy, harbouring an enemy, inciting hatred and violence, printing ninja hatred propaganda, murder…with these sharingan eyes in his arm we could probably add illegal organ harvesting and aiding the funding of the activities of a rogue ninja, because I bet Orochimaru wouldn't have helped Danzo with his arm for free."

"It pains me to say this, but you misunderstand me. This morning, I received a letter from the Daimyo. It was an official pardon against all charges that may be pressed against Danzo in relation to the Sixth Repentance," Tsunade said drearily, feeling monochrome, flimsy and every bit as old as she carefully made sure she didn't look. "It also came with the order that we do whatever we can to cover up his involvement with the cult and keep him in protective custody until we have done so."

Shikamaru stared. He growled, "The Daimyo can't do that! You can't just make someone immune to the law!"

"What will happen if Danzo is tried for the Eye of the World's crimes?" Yoshino demanded, her face reddening under her visor.

"The Daimyo says he'll take it as a sign that Konoha is preparing a coup d'état against him and will 'take whatever action is deemed necessary'."

Tsunade left the inverted commas hanging in the air for Yoshino and Shikamaru to contemplate. It wasn't an empty threat. Konoha had been crippled by the Plague and was nearing bankruptcy. Even if the Daimyo didn't take military action, he could push them over the edge just by increasing their tithes and taxes.

"What's his reasoning?" said Yoshino eventually, breathing down through her nose. "The Daimyo must have something in mind. Hokage-sama, this is the worst outbreak of violence of Konoha since the Sound Invasion - some even say the Third Great Shinobi War! We can't let this pass without – without – "

"Somebody to blame, I know," Tsunade snapped, before scolding herself for getting irritated so quickly. "And I have something in mind that I want to discuss with you and your son."

"And me? Why?" said Shikamaru.

"Because you were there at the Eye of the World's cell in the ANBU base. Also, I would like to visit Shimura Danzo in his cell for a brief one-to-one chat. When would be a good day for me to come by the Keeper Headquarters?"

Yoshino exchanged a troubled look with her son. "About Shimura Danzo, Hokage-sama," she began hesitantly, "we were wondering if we could transfer him to the hospital as soon as possible. We think he needs to be put in isolation."

"Isolation?" Tsunade stared then exclaimed, "Does Shimura Danzo have the Plague?"

"He was coughing when we tried to interview him this morning," Shikamaru said. He scratched the back of his head and looked guiltily at his feet. "There's a high chance he got infected the night we found him in the ANBU cell. One of the team who was with me, Hyuuga Neji, became actively infected whilst we were down there."

Danzo hadn't been wearing a visor, because the Eye had taken it off so that Shikamaru could destroy his right eye.

"Bring him to the hospital as soon as you can," Tsunade said brusquely. "There will be a room ready. In which case, I will see him here when he's settled in the ward."

"Understood, Hokage-sama." Yoshino bowed her head, although it was a much stiffer bow than her earlier one. She smiled grimly. "To think that we were worried that Danzo would die of the Plague before he could answer for the Eye's crimes in court! What a joke."

"Oh, make no mistake, Nara-san, Danzo will be tried," Tsunade said and she smiled at the thought of the letter from the Daimyo, which she had nailed to her desk like a voodoo doll when Shizune had prevented her from tearing it up. "It was only a pardon for charges brought forward relating to the Sixth Repentance. Don't you want to know how, when and why he got hold of all those sharingan eyes from the Uchiha dead?

"Even if he wasn't the Eye himself, through various illegal means and for dubious purposes of his own, Shimura Danzo created a monster that wreaked havoc upon our town. If Orochimaru can be blamed for creating RAMK, then Danzo is equally guilty for the Eye." Tsunade's eyes slid to the tray on the table. The shape of the arm was just visible beneath the linen. "Don't think for a minute that we're going to let him get away with nothing at all!"

After Nemoto Ninjin, Hijiki Gobo and Tsukemono Daikon passed away, all those weeks ago, Ward 12 for Unknown Infectious Diseases became the first part of the hospital set aside for isolating infectious Plague victims, its name changed simply to Isolation One.

The ward was divided up bed by bed into cubicles by canvas curtains. They were weighted at the bottom, stuck to the ceiling by seals and marked out an area for each patient about six foot square. With the bed, chair, and side table, the cubicle already seemed cramped. On Sakura's better days, they put her in mind of tents – the entrance to each cubicle was via a zippered flap – but on the harder days, when she felt so miserable being a medic-nin she wondered why she made the effort to get out of bed in the morning, they made her think of cages.

The canvas curtains had transparent squares on the side. Through the warped plastic, Sakura could see the worn figures of the patients and often they gazed quietly back, finding entertainment in anything they could, be that a droplet of condensation running down the outside of their cubicle, or the young medic-nin standing in the doorway of the ward, taking a short break from duty.

She had seen patients in isolation with books and albums of old photographs. One time there had been a teenaged girl who hadn't been much older than Sakura, forcing her numbing fingers through the rhythm of a cat's cradle with her tongue between her teeth, as the once simple finger-flicks became arduous and draining.

The only time the patient could come out of his cubicle was to use the bathroom in the corner of the room, and even that was restricted to four outings per day. They would ring the alarm beside their bed and call for their attending medic-nin to let them out. They left dirty laundry in sealed sacks outside the door-flaps, to be burned like everything that came out of the cubicle.

Until they moved on into more intensive care, the patients in isolation were kept carefully monitored on different antibiotics treatment combinations, as the medic-nins tried, hoped and failed to cure them.

Right now, Sakura was simply visiting. She had already done her round of Isolation Two's patients and finished monitoring their disease progress. She came to a stop in front of the cubicle three down from the door and tried to ignore the gentle coughs and dry gasps for air all around her, whispering and rustling like leaves.

She waved through the window. Neji looked up and closed his book.

He opened his mouth to greet her, but doubled over in a fit of dry coughing that tore up from his lungs.

Sakura winced. "That doesn't sound good."

"I thought doctors were supposed to comfort patients, not lower their spirits even more," Neji said dryly, covering his mouth with his hand. "How are you?"

"Well enough. I'm still sane at least," she replied lightly. "And you?"

He lifted an eyebrow. "Haven't you seen my reports?"

Sakura hesitated then said carefully, "I can't say I haven't."

"Sputum," Neji said, with such cool matter-of-factness that Sakura was shocked into silence. "They found some in my scans yesterday. What does that give me? Another six days at the most?"

He covered his mouth and coughed again. Sakura watched his movements, noted their lack of fluidity. There was a slight lag in his speech. It was either taking Neji longer to register what she said to him or for him to think up a response.

"How's everybody else doing?" Neji asked, once he was sitting up straight in bed again. "Ino came by yesterday. She said she was helping out on a team in the mental health ward and saw Naruto had been admitted there. Is he alright?"

"Oh, Naruto's fine," Sakura said breezily. She flapped her hand as though to banish away his worries. "I just went to see him and he's sleeping like a baby. They've finished sorting his memories out, so he'll wake up in a couple of hours. He'll be back to being his usual nuisance self in no time."

"And Lee and Shikamaru?"

"Busy, but coping. Shikamaru's on the Keeper unit investigating Danzo. Lee's taken on the Tiger's Den until either Naruto or you go back. The kids like him, you know, when they're not trying to see if caterpillars will make friends with his eyebrows."

Neji nodded. "Tell him I said thank you."

"You can tell him yourself when you're out of here." He stared stonily back at her and Sakura pursed her lips. "Don't give me that. You've got the record for the longest time a patient stayed latent and we've got tonnes of new treatment to try. We're not going to give up on you any time soon."

"I'll take your word for it."

"I've got something for you." Sakura lifted the plastic bag she had been carrying all day and rummaged inside. After turning over a packet of cotton buds and a bottle of water, she held up the object to the window. "The children wanted to come and give this to you in person, but only medic-nins are allowed in the Isolation Wards, so they asked me to deliver it."

She held up a slingshot. Neji widened his eyes at the sight of it.

"They're waiting for you to come back, but until then they wanted you to have this to remember them by," Sakura said. "Actually, Lee sort of confiscated it off them when they started copying you by shooting weights from the window, but the kids said if they couldn't have it, they wanted you to have it."

"Waiting for me to go back? Surely they're not that naïve, Sakura," Neji retorted but there was a trace of a smile tugging up his mouth. He suddenly looked pensive. "What happens to the things people have given me when I get moved to intensive care?"

Sakura looked down at the slingshot in her hands then tapped it against her palm. "Everything…everything gets burned in the furnace."

"I thought it would be something like that," he said. "Then I can't accept it."

She sighed in exasperation. "I can't take it back to the Den. The kids will tear me apart."

"Yes, you can – give it to them and tell them to keep it safe until I go back and they can give it to me directly," Neji said forcefully. His breath hitched and he coughed into his fist. When he raised his head again, his eyes were fierce. "Like you said, Sakura, I've held out this long. All I have to do is hold out for a longer. Fate, inevitability – I'm fed up with being beaten down by either."

Sakura looked at him, at his shining, feverish face, at the numbing hands. She felt guilty. She wanted to tell him she was making him false promises, that it was her job to keep up morale, that happier patients got better faster, but on the other hand to be trusted to deliver made her hopeful, and hope was so temptingly bright.

She put away the slingshot in the plastic bag. "Okay. I'll tell them."

There was a commotion in the corridor outside. Neji peered out of the window and frowned. "Is there something going on?"

Sakura opened the door and looked out into the corridor, just in time to see a group of red-cloaked jounins march past and disappear into the isolation ward at the end of the corridor, with a grey-skinned and sickly-looking Shimura Danzo in their midst.

The old man tipped up the cart. "That's the last of them for today!"

The bodies dropped into the pit with dull, muffled thuds, to join the long linen-bound bundles, the tangle of white arms and legs that had spilled out of the cloth, already lying in its depths.

As the old man wiped his soot-blackened face on his arm, his companion, a teenaged genin in dirtied yellow hazard gear, set down the tank of oil and cupped his hands around his mouth. He shouted into the dark: "Hey! Hey you!"

The old man turned. The sky was red and the clouds were inky black, and on the road to Konoha was a shadow slipping towards the town.

At the sound of the genin's voice, the shadow stopped. It glanced towards the pit with eyes glowing red as hot coals. The old man stiffened. His hand reached for his hip-flask where the sake sloshed.

"You've got to get rid of your friend, the one you're carrying on your back," the genin continued to say. "Konoha isn't taking any sick from abroad anymore. There aren't enough beds. Leave him here, stranger. He looks dead already."

The shadow said nothing and continued on its way, stumbling down the road.

"You'd better send up a flare," said the old man, as the genin stared after the disappearing figure. "Let the quarantine guards know there's something on its way."

"Hey, old man, you need to get your eyes checked. You mean 'someone', not 'something'."

The old man swiped his flask at the genin and grumbled, "Just send up a flare."

The genin looked towards the trees where the shadow had gone, shivered and shot a white flare up towards the clouds.

A tape on Naruto's hand was holding down a small piece of gauze, probably to stop up the bleeding from where a cannula had been removed. He didn't need it, of course. A shallow cut like that would have healed in a fraction of a second.

There were paper sheets beneath him, a thin blanket under his fingers and to his side a chair. Naruto sat up slowly and looked around the room. Hospital, that was it, and he had been sleeping for two days. The last thing he remembered was crashing out under a hurricane of dreams, a torrent of colour and crackling fire splintering and whirling through his head so fast he could barely breathe, surrounded by a ring of black-robed medic-nins with glowing green hands.

Every memory from every clone was settled into place. He breathed in deep and exhaled slowly. His head felt clear, but will all the memories sorted, categorised, linked up and understood, suddenly, despite all that sleep, he felt worn thin. He was stretched and strained like a thin circle of paper stoppering a jam jar.

He drew in a deep breath again and stared up at the ceiling.

The door creaked and a visored nurse dipped her neck into the room. Seeing Naruto awake, she ducked out again and spoke to somebody behind her. "He's awake, Hokage-sama."

"At last!" Tsunade closed the door with a snap behind her.

"Bacchan! You're back from the Conference."

"Yes, yes, and I come back and find that in the meantime somebody's been blowing up my town." She dropped into the seat beside the bed. "Slept well did you?"

"Kind of yes," Naruto said uncertainly, "kind of no?"

"And now you know one more of the many reasons why the Taju Kagebunshin-no-Jutsu is a forbidden technique. Memory deluge is dangerous. If you don't want to see things, you shouldn't send eyes, not push clone memories to sort out later like something you push to the side of your plate."

"I know, I know, but, I'm fine now, right?"

"You tell me," replied Tsunade flatly. "Are you?"

He chewed the inside of his cheek. It was a tick of uncertainty that was so unlike Naruto there was obviously something was amiss.

"I can imagine that you saw a lot of bad things happen." Tsunade thought back to the brick of a dossier crouched on top of her desk. "Things even seasoned ninjas can take years to get over, if they ever do. I could have named you two dozen ninja before the Plague who came in for therapy after having just one bomb blow up in their face, and I heard that happened to several of your clones, didn't it? And plenty of the tactics the Repentance used left room for involuntary triggers."

"It's not really all the stuff that happened to me," Naruto said with the nervous reluctance of a man with his hand on a floodgate handle. "But I mean, it kind of is, because that whole thing with the Sixth Repentance was just…no, not insane, that's not the word, it was…"

He trailed off and looked at the back of his hands.

Naruto's forehead protector was on top of the side table. The metal was covered in scratches and nicks. They were small, not larger or deeper than a sparrow's footprint, but they were black with ingrained soot and old dried blood.

Tsunade leaned forward and smacked him on the back of the head. He yelped.

"Isn't that illegal in hospital?" Naruto spluttered indignantly, as she withdrew her hand.

"My hospital, my law, so spill, Naruto. What's eating you?"

"Bacchan, I just don't get it. I thought," Naruto chewed on his tongue, "I thought we were the good guys – the people in Konoha. Sure, some were hard on me when I was a kid, but I never doubted that we weren't all on the same side. We all lived on the same streets and ate the same rice. Everyone did their bit for the village. We all looked out for each other. Konoha ninjas protected Konoha citizens. That was how things were supposed to be."

Naruto fell silent. Tsunade waited. When he didn't say anything, she spoke. "Do you think differently now?"

He picked up his forehead protector and turned it over in his hands "When I talked to the Eye of the World, I told him to stop his mass mind control jutsu. I thought all the Repenters were crazy because he'd somehow got into their heads and they couldn't think for themselves and that we were saving them by defeating him."

Naruto clutched the forehead protector in his fingers. "He laughed at me. He talked about 'good people' like they didn't exist. I thought he was cracked so I tried not to listen, but, I was getting all my clones' memories. I knew about nearly everything happening in Konoha and…"

He bit his tongue. He didn't want to admit it. A flock of crows burst of a nearby pine and went cawing away into the distance.

Tsunade cracked her knuckles. "He got to you, didn't he?"

"Just a bit."

"There's no need to be so ashamed. Everyone doubts."

"Yeah but, Bacchan, I'm the guy who wants to be Hokage," Naruto continued earnestly and his eyes prickled with tears. "I can't be Hokage if I don't trust my own people, right? What the Eye was saying about 'good people', I've been thinking about all the rubbish I've seen since I came back."

Then the words were tumbling out of his mouth.

"Even without the Repentance, there was so much wrong. There was the time a guy in a convenience store tried to kick out Neji because he was latently infected, really casually, like there was nothing wrong with that at all. The orphans I've got at the Tigers' Den – people left them out on the street. Nobody was looking out for them. The other night, there was a Keeper who said we shouldn't take the Repenters to hospital, and now I've got all my memories sorted out straight, I can't help thinking that maybe the Eye was right, about people. That there aren't any good people you can trust not to stab in you back."

Naruto gripped his forehead protector tighter in his hands.

"I mean he manipulated them, but the Repenters - most of them wanted to be there, doing what they were doing and everybody was being so cruel to each other. I didn't think people could turn on each other so easily, but all the time I've been here, since coming back, that's what I've seen happening, and it kind of makes me feel disappointed." He hesitated before adding with a weakly, "Maybe even a little bit angry."

Tsunade closed her eyes. "You feel like Konoha people have betrayed your expectations."

"Yeah," he breathed, "maybe. Look at what people in Konoha have done to each other. We're in the middle of a Plague. Now, more than ever, we're supposed to stick together. If it's so easy to stab each other in the back, what's the point of all this? What's the point of believing in people who are so willing to – to - do the worst things to each other?" His hand curled into a fist and he punched the mattress. "Then I'm angry with myself that I'm stupid enough to think like this and I've let the Eye get to me this way."

"Naruto." Tsunade put a hand on his shoulder. "If you are angry at yourself then that means you are fighting and you don't think the Eye is right. You want to think people can be good and can be trusted. You want to believe that it's worth laying your life on the line for these people. You want to think he is wrong."

"But, Bacchan, wanting means I don't think those things anymore!"

"No! It means you have the will to try and keep trying, always wishing and hoping that things can get better." Tsunade plucked the forehead protector out of his hands and made sure she had his full attention before lowering her voice. "Konoha will one day need a Hokage like that, Naruto. The will to believe in people is active. Belief in people is passive. The will is what causes change, and as the Second Parade has reminded us, Konoha needs some change."

She blew the soot out of the scratches in the forehead protector, gave the boy some space to mull over what she had said, and polished the metal on her gauntlet sleeve. Time rolled by.

"Bacchan..." His voice was thick. Naruto swallowed. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. "Thank you."

He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and sniffed with a long, loud, snotty noise. Tsunade thrust the box of tissues at him. Naruto snatched three or four sheets and blew into each one, blinking quickly between each.

"Whilst you're sorting yourself out, some good news for you," she said, trying not to make her cheer sound too forced as Naruto plucked another chain of tissues and moulded them around his eyes and nose, "Jiraiya's coming back to Konoha."

Naruto suddenly howled, "Bacchan, you're so mean! Why didn't you tell me that first thing? It would have made me feel so much better and I wouldn't be crying now!"

Then he was smiling and she was rolling her eyes and they were talking again, but the more they talked the more difficult Tsunade found to get to the main point of her visit.

Don't forget, she said to herself. She mustn't forget that she was there to ask if Naruto would be prepared to give himself up to Uchiha Madara, in exchange for a Plague cure for the whole ninja world.

As sun set red beyond the window, she remembered the young Kazekage with his vivid red hair and her glowing red handprint on his cheek.

"The Jinchuurikis are, themselves, loyal citizens of their respective hidden villages. If they are to be part of negotiations, I think it best that the Hokage and the Raikage returned to their villages, spoke to their Jinchuurikis and found out what the Jinchuurikis themselves think of the situation."

Be he Naruto's friend and Konoha's staunchest ally in recent times, Tsunade cursed Gaara now for putting her in this position. She had hated him when the conference had finished, called him a cunning little raccoon dog in her head and had taken a moment of pleasure in remembering just what part of a raccoon went into raccoon soup.

Perhaps Tsunade was being unfair. There was all the chance in the world that the Kazakage had meant what he said in the purest possible sense – that the Hokage and Raikage asked their Jinchuurikis what they thought on the matter. Gaara had never specifically called for persuasion, manipulation or encouragement towards a particular desired result.

That the Jinchuurikis should make their own choices Tsunade could not have agreed more, but she didn't like the way Gaara's suggestion was making her feel uncomfortably as if exploiting Naruto's apparently unwavering loyalty to his people was almost justifiable.

But that loyalty had wavered. Naruto had doubted, just for moment, whether the people were worth anything to him and worth his efforts, or if loyalty at all held any currency.

She watched him cheerily continue to wipe his face, blow his nose and express himself with big gestures of his hands then couldn't bear to hold back any longer. She put her hands on her knees and opened her mouth. Think of the general good, she told herself.

"Hokage-sama!"

The door slammed open and Shizune stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. "This – this – just arrived from the Quarantine Guards."

Shizune had obviously been running as fast as she possibly could to get there. She saw Naruto sitting up in bed, gave him a breathless nod of acknowledgement and a smile, then thrust a small white scroll into Tsunade's hands.

The only time Shizune ever barged into rooms was because of something extraordinarily important, like a rampaging Tailed Beast, choirs of angels, a samba band of demons, or an army of people Tsunade owed gambling money to showing up at the Konoha gates.

Her heart leaping to her mouth, Tsunade opened the scroll:

URGENT MESSAGE: - Guardhouse One, Evening Watch Group E

Capture, identification, of rogue ninja Uchiha, S. confirmed.

Expresses wish to speak to Hokage.

Subject cooperative.

Immediate presence of Hokage at Quarantine Guardhouse One requested.

Thanks for reading!

Next time: Politics and pathology? (a nice alliteration)