Roots Chapter 4, a naruto fanfic

Tenten noticed the silhouette of her teammate against the moonlight as she approached him and could read a lot from his posture. Although it was the middle of the night and absolutely nothing had happened since they left Konoha, Rock Lee was clearly wide-awake and almost painfully alert, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice. Tenten grinned to herself. Even after working beside him for years, it never ceased to amaze her how Lee could have so much enthusiasm for even the most mundane shinobi duties. He'd been like that ever since they were kids.

"Can't sleep?" he asked softly, although his back was toward her and she had approached silently through the boughs of the trees. Tenten sighed as he turned his head to her and she saw the grave expression on his face. And in other ways, she reflected, he was nothing like the Lee she'd graduated the Academy with. He'd seen his share of shinobi duty, some of it particularly gruesome (Team Gai was frequently used for combat missions), and after losing both Gai-sensei and his beloved Sakura-san (who, in spite of multiple opportunities, had never returned his affections), he almost seemed like a different person. In public he acted like his old self – it seemed to make things easier for him. But alone, or with his team, the change was obvious.

Tenten made a soft landing next to him and sat down, facing the moon in the west like he was. "Can't sleep," she affirmed.

"You should still try to rest," he said. "Your watch isn't for another hour."

She shook her head. "I've got a lot on my mind. I'm going to be awake anyway. Might as well put it to good use."

The night air was thick and hazy, and there was a low drone of insects and frogs, cut through every now and then by the call of a bird. "You're not psyched at the idea of becoming a Hyuuga?" Lee said after a few minutes.

Tenten smiled. "No, it's not that." If only it were something that simple. The smile fell from her face swiftly when she stated the truth. "Yoshio started asking about his father."

The silence that followed brought to mind the plague of awkward silences and embarrassment that had filled and defined the first whole year of her life after she'd found out she was pregnant. She smiled ruefully. Some women glowed when you asked them about when their children were born. Tenten would have been just as happy if all memories of that time were erased.

"What are you going to tell him?" Lee asked soberly.

Tenten shook her head. "The truth."

It wasn't what she had to tell him, it was the question of how to tell him that was keeping her wide awake.

Lee sat with her for a long time after that, and she wondered how he could stand it, but Lee always managed to surprise her when he actually showed tact. He did turn in when his watch was supposed to be up, and she was left to try to bear the worrying thoughts running through her mind and train her ears to ignore the natural sounds of night. The problem was, she was a good enough shinobi now that it didn't require nearly enough thought, and her mind was left to wander back to the time she was trying to forget.

She had started to notice something wrong during one long mission outside of Fire country. There were a few surface similarities to the mission they were on now – the time of year, for instance, and the goal of capture – but that mission wasn't with team Gai. It was another team that had been put together for a very specific purpose, and out of the six members that had been sent to the far northern country where their targets were hiding, the only other close to her own age was Inuzuka Kiba. The mission leader, Kotaro, was someone she had worked with before and who had once been in ANBU. She respected him greatly. How humiliating that he was the first to find out.

She knew something was wrong as soon as she started to get sick. She assured her teammates she was fine, told them it was only something she ate, but she couldn't fool herself to miss the fact that there was an unfamiliar twinge of exhaustion in her muscles that told her she was pushing them, although she knew that with her conditioning that shouldn't be the case. She resolved not to let herself hold the team back, and since they were already far from home, her only option was to keep going unless she wanted to wreck the mission. The next time she felt herself getting sick she carefully hid it from Kotaro. She forced chakra through her limbs and kept up with the others. If they noticed her sweating more than normal, no one mentioned it. There was no Neji on that team to monitor her chakra levels.

She knew immediately what it all meant, of course. It was harder to hide her emotions than it was to hide the signs in her body.

It was after the battle – the only real fighting the entire mission entailed – and after their mission objective was achieved and the captive safely delivered that she allowed herself to really rest for the first time in weeks. They were cleaning up at the camp site, preparing for the journey home, and she sat down on a tree root far from the fire and let herself release her careful control of her chakra and feel the alien weariness creep into her. Kiba came over and asked her if she was all right. It was the first time they had spoken alone together for the entire mission. He surprised her, though, and she stood up too quickly, suddenly and inexplicably terrified. She saw the look of concern on his face and registered that he was trying to say something to her. And then she blacked out.

When she came to, most of the team was standing over her. Kotaro was looking for head wounds. He seemed confused.

She blamed it on chakra depletion and told them in her most professional deadpan to kindly give it a rest.

Kotaro wouldn't, though, and Kiba noticed her getting sick again, and although neither one of them said a word to her about it while they travelled back home, at the next village where they stopped to rest she was ordered to see the local physician. The woman was nosy and rude, asked if one of the other ninja on the team was the father, and apparently, as Tenten later discovered, couldn't keep her mouth shut. Tenten only had her own instinctive knowledge confirmed but resolved not to say a word about it to anyone. Her plan was shot to hell the next day when they started travelling again. Kotaro changed the formation to put himself next to her at the rear of the group, and it was patently obvious that he had slowed their pace. She confronted him about it when they stopped to break an hour earlier than usual. He didn't even need to tell her that he knew. She could tell just by the way he looked at her. Sadly. Like a teacher disappointed with his student.

He had treated her as an equal, once – or at least an equal of lower rank, someone who would eventually be on par with him. Now he treated her like someone who had failed him. And even though he wasn't that close to her, it stung. Even at the time, she understood that it was a sign of things to come. She saw a lot of that attitude from many different people she respected in the days after their return.

Torn between the unpleasant memories of those days that kept dredging themselves up and her desire to forget about them for good, Tenten wasn't even close to sleepiness when Neji relieved her of her watch several hours later. It was only through the solid shinobi training drilled into her by Gai-sensei that mandated she recover some of her strength through sleep that she was able to shut her eyes at all.

"You're trash."

Silence and movement. A twist, a jab, and Rikyu dodged the swinging weighted chain of his opponent's kusari-gama at the last second.

It only took him a moment to leap out of the way, but it brought him within whispering distance of Yoshio. Rikyu laughed softly, showing the other boy that he wasn't even winded. Yoshio ignored it. They were done playing with kawarimi and clones now – both of them had used up too much chakra this afternoon, and the fight had become an all-out taijutsu battle. Rikyu excelled at taijutsu. Unfortunately for him, he hadn't counted on Yoshio actually using the kusari-gama he'd been carrying around since their last mission – he'd thought it was just for show. That's the kind of thing his cousins would do to look tougher or stronger than they were. But Yoshio could actually use the thing. Rikyu begrudgingly admitted to himself that his opponent was even pretty good with it.

This was annoying to Rikyu, and in response he'd fallen back on his old habit of name-calling.

Yoshio landed unsteadily from a dodge and Rikyu's powerful kick swept through the air toward his chin – he thought Yoshio would be too winded to dodge it. But he realized quickly that he'd miscalculated when he heard the whizzing of the weighted chain again and just managed to pull his leg away before it was caught. By the time he'd recovered, Yoshio had his footing again and was in a defensive stance, the chain circling like a propeller in a wide arc beside him.

Rikyu grinned to cover his misgivings. "This is a waste of time. Why don't you just give up, loser?"

Yoshio didn't respond.

Rikyu felt hot anger bubble up in his chest. This kid was nobody. Rikyu was a Matsumoto. Where did this guy get off thinking he was even half as good?

For Rikyu, anger didn't come without action. He launched another attack with a suddenness that caught even Yoshio off guard.

Akiko observed the scene. Naruto, watching his students spar, had a slightly sheepish expression on his face, like he was suddenly realizing the enormity of what he had started. The boys hadn't really gotten along from the beginning and this battle wasn't helping anything.

The fact that nothing Rikyu said seemed to rile Yoshio at all was clearly grating on the shorter boy's nerves, and Akiko could tell he was just grabbing at phrases he thought would get a reaction. She only caught the last one.

"Son of a whore."

Not even the rhythm of the battle changed. As far as Akiko could tell, Yoshio was single-minded; it seemed like either he wasn't hearing any of the taunts or they literally had no effect on him. You had to watch with a sharp eye and you had to have paid attention to him for some time – several weeks, say, like Akiko had – to see that Yoshio was furious.

Akiko watched and listened to the interplay between her two teammates with detached interest. From their perspective she looked like she was innocently sitting under her tree and reading, but if they bothered to pay any attention to her at all, they would have noticed that she had been on the same page for over ten minutes now.

She was watching their spar surreptitiously but carefully. Well, it was kind of interesting, and anyway she had read this particular book twice before and knew it by heart. It was mostly stories of the First and Second Hokages and their many defeated foes. Those were the kinds of stories that Akiko liked best: dramatic and true with plenty of real-life gossip. But she always preferred new gossip to old.

The cause of this spar, as with all the other fights between the two boys, was Rikyu. Naruto-sensei had been trying to teach his genin team how to walk up trees using chakra. Akiko had read about this exercise – it was a famous one that the Second Hokage had come up with – but had never tried it herself. It kept her attention for fifteen minutes or so, at which point she hit a wall with her chakra manipulation skills. She couldn't get any farther than ten feet up the tree. She carelessly gave up on the exercise altogether when she saw what was happening with the boys.

Yoshio had made it halfway up his tree and was steadily progressing. Rikyu hadn't been doing so badly, but once he saw that Yoshio was beating him, he started going nuts – furiously running up his tree and springing back every time he fell. He wasn't making any advances, but he seemed to be building up a lot of energy. He was clenching his teeth and breathing through his nose, and the sharp, angry glances he threw at Yoshio caused him to misstep more than once. Yoshio stayed characteristically silent and continued working hard, and Rikyu got increasingly annoyed, which was apparent from the ever-more-vivid vocabulary he was using.

Naruto-sensei, although he'd been steadfastly oblivious to most of their other silent battles, finally seemed to pick up on what was going on and set them to spar against one another to "get it out of their systems." He hadn't noticed that Akiko wasn't even trying to climb her tree anymore.

Maybe it should bother her that her sensei didn't seem to notice her at all, she reflected.

Well, that was only to be expected. Sparring wasn't exactly her strong suit. It was, however, Naruto-sensei's specialty. He was in his element during an all-out battle that required minimal thinking and maximum strength. He enjoyed coaching his students in this, and he seemed perfectly ignorant of the fact that quite apart from "getting it out of his system," this whole exercise was just getting Rikyu more frustrated. For someone who was supposed to be an incredible ninja, Akiko mused, it was amazing how much Naruto didn't notice.

Although Rikyu had been even more vicious with his taijutsu lately and had actually started to gain on Yoshio in skill, the kusari-gama that Yoshio was now using stopped the other genin from even getting close. Akiko had a suspicion that Rikyu resented the weapon, since without it he would certainly be beating Yoshio.

Rikyu launched a sudden attack that was direct and powerful, landing his heel on Yoshio's head in a finishing move, only to find Yoshio vanish in a puff of smoke, replaced by a log. The kawarimi caught Rikyu completely off guard, and the moment of distraction was enough of a window for Yoshio to stage a solid attack. The time it took to maneuver the swinging chain would have made him vulnerable if he hadn't caught Rikyu off guard. Instead, Rikyu found himself caught from behind, the chain wound itself quickly around his ankles, and in a few seconds he was half-immobile, his back flat on the ground, staring up at his brown-eyed teammate with an expression of utter loathing. Neither boy said anything.

"Okay, ha ha, that was really good guys, but that's enough for now, right?" Naruto said uneasily. "Let's cool off some, huh? Who wants to go out for ramen?"

Akiko noticed the look of disbelief on Yoshio's face that clearly said, ramen… again?

Rikyu, though, acted like he hadn't even heard his sensei. Free of the kusari-gama's chain, he was back on his feet but still staring hard at Yoshio. "You might be able to beat me now," he said with calmness that took Akiko completely by surprise, "but someday soon I'm going to surpass you. I'm going to be the first one in our class to make chunin, and you can't stop me."

Akiko's heart beat a little harder when she heard him say it. This was interesting. She quickly averted her gaze to her book when Rikyu got to his feet and stomped past her on his way back to the village with a stormy look on his face. Naruto-sensei watched him go with much confusion. "Hey, Rikyu? Hey, wait a second… wait up… hey, hang on, where are you going? Don't you want to get ramen with us?"

Rikyu was at an all-out sprint when Naruto started chasing after him. Akiko watched the orange jumpsuit disappear among the foliage and sighed quietly to herself. She couldn't believe how blind people could be. Everything was perfectly obvious to her, of course, but not everyone was so lucky as to have the kind of insight she did.

She settled happily into her book for a few minutes before she realized that she was alone on the training grounds with Yoshio. He was picking up the shuriken and kunai he had thrown during his spar with Rikyu.

Akiko watched him do this for a few seconds out of the corner of her eye before she took a deep breath, quietly closed her book, and got to her feet and started to help him. She started by yanking a kunai out of the tree that she had been leaning against. Neither boy had noticed, naturally, that it had just barely missed her head. Naruto-sensei hadn't seemed to notice, either.

She silently helped him gather his scattered weapons for a few minutes before she walked up to him and dumped them on the ground in front of him without ceremony. If he was surprised by this, then, Yoshio-like, he kept it to himself, and she got nothing but the usual cool brown eyes studying her carefully.

Without another word, they ended up walking back to the village together. Akiko had the feeling that Yoshio didn't entirely like this, but as with everything else, he put up with it without a whisper of complaint.

"You shouldn't let Rikyu get to you like that," Akiko said while they were walking.

She smiled to herself. He wouldn't be expecting that, because he was one of those guys who thought his emotions never showed through. But she knew better.

"He doesn't bother me," Yoshio said calmly. "He's just a bully."

"He does so bother you," Akiko stated. "I can see it, you know."

Yoshio did not respond to this.

"He is pretty stupid," Akiko went on, "but he's all talk. I'm sure he's not all that bad. That's just how he was brought up."

Yoshio gave her a look of utter skepticism.

"You can talk to me every once in a while, you know," she said pointedly. She waited patiently for him to take the hint – to no avail.

"…I didn't think you were the type to let him get to you," she tried again, after several minutes of stony silence from her teammate. "I thought you were better than that."

When he once again failed to respond verbally, she added, "Or maybe you think he's right? You think there's some truth to what he keeps saying about your family and your mother?"

That stopped Yoshio in his tracks, and the look he gave her was one that would have made someone who was actually shy hide behind a tree. But Akiko wasn't shy, not really. She just didn't especially like talking to people when she didn't feel like talking. She didn't lose her nerve when Yoshio looked at her. "So it's true?" she pressed on. "You really don't know who your father was?"

Yoshio moved forward again and looked away from her.

Akiko's eyes flew open. "It is true. Wow. This is kind of neat, like a mystery. I wonder how we could figure this out? They've got to keep birth records or something at the hospital… wouldn't it be cool if your Dad was someone like the Hoshikage or something? Just think of it! You could be related to a Kage! Or… or…"

"It's none of your business," Yoshio said, cutting off her train of thought.

"You don't have to be so mean to me all the time, you know," Akiko said.

"It has nothing to do with you," Yoshio said. "Stop sticking your nose in where it isn't wanted."

She felt cold in her stomach when he said this, and she slowed to a stop while he kept on walking. Her feet felt like lead suddenly, for some reason, and she felt the unexpected sting of tears in her eyes, although she knew better than to let it show. It didn't matter. He didn't seem to care if she were with him or not, or how she felt about what he said. Akiko watched his back as he walked away and breathed a deep breath to get herself under control.

Just because she was used to being ignored didn't mean she liked it.

Yoshio's mind was busy with thought while he walked home. What surprised him was that he was realizing how little he actually knew abouthis mother. He knew her personality well enough – the way she'd procrastinate with cleaning everything but her hundreds of kunai, for instance – but concerning her actual life, he knew very little. He had been told that her parents were immigrants, and he knew a couple things about their country, but he would never have been able to find it on a map. He knew his mother knew the language of her parents, but he'd never heard her speak it. He knew she did the majority of her missions with the same team she'd been on since she was a genin herself, and he knew her teammates well – a little too well, in Rock Lee's case – but beyond that he really didn't know anything about her past or how she had gotten to be who she was. Come to think of it, he'd never even thought about how she learned to use all the weapons she was teaching him to use – he knew her parents hadn't been ninja. Had it been Maito Gai who taught her or someone else?

There was a lot he'd taken for granted. Even more he'd never bothered to wonder about.

He was so lost in thought that he didn't even notice Isamu sitting on the stairs of his apartment building before he was halfway past him. Before he'd seriously started training to be a ninja, he'd spent a lot of his spare time with Isamu, but since he'd become a genin he'd hardly seen the younger boy at all.

"Hey Yoshio!"

He looked around.

"Yoshio, are you busy? Are you just getting back from a mission?" The blonde boy leapt up and started to follow him up the stairs. He seemed to pick up on Yoshio's mood and his enthusiasm died a quick death. "So… did you have to fight anyone today?" he asked somberly.

"Um… no," Yoshio said. He was assuming that Isamu meant ninja from other villages, not ultraviolent ninja from one's own team. They hadn't gotten to fight any foreign ninja yet on any mission. They'd had some bad run-ins with housepets, but that was as violent as it got. "Today was just training. We didn't have a mission."

"Training? Hey, what's it like training with Uzumaki Naruto? Is he teaching you how to make a thousand kage bunshin?"

"No… not yet," Yoshio said. He didn't want to kill Isamu's illusions, but he had a suspicion that no one could do that but his sensei. "Training is hard work," he said. Well, that was true. Trying to keep up with Naruto's demands while dealing with his teammates was, in fact, hard work.

"Oh, so I bet you're tired," Isamu said, a little sadly.

Yoshio felt a sudden stab of guilt. He hadn't spent any time with his friend since leaving the Academy. Isamu didn't have any family of his own, so he really looked up to Yoshio like he was an older brother, and usually Yoshio didn't mind. But tonight he had other plans.

"Yeah, I'm really tired," he said. "We have a mission tomorrow too, and I've got to get ready for it."

"Oh, okay," Isamu said. "Well – hey, are you going to be around this weekend? Can you show me the kusari-gama?"

"Sure," Yoshio said. "As long as I don't have any missions."

A few minutes later, when he was walking up the stairs by himself, he felt a little bad about lying. Well, he hadn't lied exactly. But in any case Isamu wouldn't understand that Yoshio needed this time for more important things – namely, research.

Rikyu squinted his watery eyes and lifted the cool, wet towel to his face. He sighed when he felt the cold cloth contact his hot, bruised skin. He remembered when his mother used to do this, years ago. She had been killed during a routine scouting mission, unlucky enough to actually find something worth scouting but unskilled enough (so his uncle sometimes said) to defend herself long enough for backup to arrive. She had miscalculated the risk. It was an all-too-common mistake for shinobi. His uncle spoke of her death with regret, if not scorn, trying to impart the lesson to the younger Matsumotos. His father never spoke of her at all to his two sons.

Two living sons.

Rikyu had originally had three brothers. One of them had died when he was a baby during a chunin exam. Another had died two years ago, during a mission. The same mission had killed one of his second cousins.

There was definitely a distinct tradition in the Matsumoto family.

After he had fled from his fight with Yoshio and after his sensei had caught up to him, he had sat and listened to Naruto-sensei preach about teamwork for almost half an hour before a distraction in the form of Hyuuga Hinata's genin team had proven a lucky escape for him. He respected Naruto-sensei, since he knew that Naruto was a jounin and one who had lived through events that had killed many of his equals, but he couldn't stomach the ideas that Naruto was trying to shove down his throat. Protecting others? That just wasn't what being a shinobi was about. None of them understood that. No one on his team came from a clan like the Matsumoto. The Matsumoto understood what made a ninja village work. It was pain, fear, sweat, and blood, all directed toward the objective of the mission. That's what they were all about.

His father was the best one of them, naturally. He wasn't the heir to the clan leadership, but he was easily the Matsumotos' best ninja, so Rikyu and his brother had a lot to live up to. Both of them took this very seriously. There was nothing better than being able to tell their father about the battles they had won – even better if the odds were against them from the start. Their father always had a smile for those stories, and even though he barely spoke to them otherwise he could always spare a few minutes to talk about strategy or technique, what jutsu worked best in what situation, and why their opponents had failed.

Of course, when they lost, the man just looked at them sadly and said something like, "You'll work harder and do better next time." And then he would finish his meal or his newspaper – whatever was in his hands at the moment – and go back to the world in his head, and the conversation would be over.

Years ago, when Rikyu's mother was alive, his father had been a different man and was as loud and animated as the other Matsumoto men when they spoke about their work. Over the years it seemed he'd quieted down slowly, and now he was almost silent and had a tendency not to notice the things around him, to the point of often ignoring his sons entirely. Rikyu and his brother were constantly fighting for his attention, and their stories of ninja battles were the only thing that ever got his attention.

His brother had pounded him as soon as he'd gotten home today. He hadn't tried to make an excuse this time, he'd just caught Rikyu at a vulnerable moment and set in on him, and Rikyu was in no place to defend himself, especially since the spar with Yoshio had sapped all his chakra. So now, as a result, Rikyu was bleeding from his crown, and the blood hadn't slowed for more than five minutes.

Rikyu clenched his eyes. I am going to be stronger than him. I am going to beat my brother. I am going to be stronger than all of them, and I'll beat Yoshio, too.

He winced, sponging the blood off of his forehead. He knew he was getting stronger. If he could just concentrate, he thought, he might stand a chance of beating his brother the next time they fought.

When the bleeding had stopped and the blood had clotted, he got up abruptly and left the Matsumoto compound, heading off to the practice grounds that were removed from his family's property. He had a few moves he wanted to work on.

Akiko put her hands in her lap, then back on the futon on either side of her lap, then in her lap again, clenched together. One of her baby cousins – her half-brother, in actuality, she suspected, but that was another story – was crying and her aunt was trying to shush it. Akiko was waiting for the moment when the kid finally shut up and she could have her aunt's full attention.

Akiko couldn't even understand why her aunt had chosen to have so many children. She certainly couldn't afford them, as she constantly reminded Akiko. Akiko couldn't imagine being the kind of woman her aunt was, living only to support her family and earning nothing for herself – not strength or respect, not even love. Even the women in Akiko's novels at least got some love out of the bargain. Her aunt got nothing but pain, work, and more babies. Akiko didn't plan on having any of those herself, ever. She saw the results every morning, and it was enough to make her swear celibacy for life.

It was sometimes hard to get her aunt's attention. In her defense, the woman had half a dozen children to look after, including her own four, Akiko, and another one of Akiko's cousins, and her aunt didn't really have enough money to take care of half of them. Akiko bit her lip thinking about this – what she was about to do would certainly help that problem, but for some reason that didn't make any of the enormous guilt go away. Maybe it was because Akiko knew she was one of the two sane, mature people left in this household. The other one was her aunt.

Finally – finally – the poor kid seemed to fall asleep. Akiko unclenched her hands slightly when she heard her aunt pour herself a cup of tea and sit down at the kitchen table.

Akiko got to her feet and walked out to the kitchen. She didn't have far to go – there were only two rooms in the house, after all. She saw her aunt look up as soon as she was in the doorway. There were dark circles under the woman's watery, unfocused eyes, and Akiko suddenly realized that the liquid in the cup in front of her was not tea. After staring at her a moment, her aunt said irritably, "Well, go on. You want to say something, don't you?"

It took all her concentration not to bite her lip. The truth was, although the woman hadn't been exactly nice to her since her mother had left her to be Akiko's guardian (Akiko's mother had disappeared several years ago, and she still didn't know exactly why, although there were several unsavory theories), this was the only family she'd ever really had. Even when her mother was still in Konoha, her aunt had been the one who cooked for them and cared for them. Akiko had been eating food made on this woman's stove for as long as she could remember. And now…

"I just wanted to say goodbye," Akiko said.

That got her aunt's attention fast enough. The woman swung her head unsteadily at her niece and her brow creased deeply. "Where are you going now? Another mission?"

"No. I saved up my mission money and got my own place."

Her aunt's eyes were sharp and piercing. She didn't say anything for about a minute, and Akiko took the time to mentally melt into the floor while reminding herself that it was the legal, fair, and responsible thing to do, and even though her aunt had been her guardian before, it meant nothing now that she was officially a genin.

Her aunt turned back to the cup in front of her. "I wondered what you were up to all this time," she said, slurring the words a little, as if she didn't even care to act sober anymore. "Good riddance. You'll turn out as bad as your mother, but I won't have to deal with you. Go on, get out of here."

Akiko breathed once through her nose and nodded. This was how she'd thought it would turn out. Honestly, this was how she'd hoped it would turn out: without argument. Her fingers clenched around the strap of the bag on her back, which contained all her worldly possessions that couldn't rightly be claimed by her aunt or uncle. "I'll stop by," she said feebly.

Her aunt sneered at her. "Don't bother. Who wants to see you? Go on, I said. Ninja. Ha. You'll probably get killed within a week like the rest of those fools."

Akiko pretended not to hear this. "Goodbye," she said.

She received no answer. Her aunt wouldn't look at her now. Akiko breathed slowly to regain her concentration, then firmly stepped out the kitchen door and into the street.

She wouldn't go back. Ever.

Even if she failed all her missions, lost genin status, and couldn't afford the little apartment anymore, she knew that from here on out she was on her own.

Strangely enough, she found she didn't like that idea at all. So instead of thinking about it, she pulled a book out of her pocket and started to read it while she walked. And when she realized that she already knew this book by heart she took the time to wonder about Yoshio's father instead.

The night was hot. The air conditioner finally kicked on and began its low drone, creating enough noise to drown out the crickets outside. Yoshio noticed it peripherally. For the last hour he had been focused on the pile of photos on his bed. He'd tried to look at them like an outsider, drawing conclusions from the evidence in front of him rather than subjective experience. It wasn't easy, but he felt like he was starting to understand, somewhat, who his mother was.

The weapons in her closet he knew as well as the chipped plates and glasses stacked drying in the sink, because he had grown up around weapons, from the blunt wooden shuriken he was told he chewed as a toddler to the kusari-gama that was hanging in his room even now. Weaponry was a way of life for his mother. For him, too. Other than that, as far as evidence concerning her past, there was only this: a handful of photos. These ones weren't like the ones on the walls, which were all neat little portraits: Team Gai at its inception, the three genin and stridently posing jounin all in a line; Team Gai when they all had made chunin; Tsunade on the day she was made Hokage; and other photos like that. There were also an inordinate number of pictures of Yoshio in various stages of life, from fat babyhood to his first day at the Academy.

The ones in the pile in front of him were not as neat. These were the personal photos she hadn't bothered to put on the wall but that she'd kept nonetheless. He saw a picture of Sakura, Lee, and Naruto-sensei, the latter with his face obscured by the photographer's thumb. There was a picture of the legendary Kakashi with Maito Gai, clearly unwillingly in the same frame together. There was one of a very young Neji washing dishes in a stream and looking thoroughly annoyed. A lot of these pictures seemed taken almost by accident, as if the subjects hadn't known there was a camera anywhere near. One was Yamanaka Ino and Haruno Sakura, Ino holding a toddler Yoshio and smiling toothily for the camera. Yoshio thought his young self just looked confused and slightly annoyed.

A lot of them seemed to show his mother in ways he hadn't seen her before, but one of them stood out. For the most part it was a portrait like many of the ones on the walls of the apartment. There were five people in it: his mother, Neji, and three ninja from another country. Two of these he recognized easily. The first was the Kazekage; the second was the Kazekage's sister. In the photo, his mother stood next to her and both of the kunoichi looked unnervingly alert. His mother had told him about the time she went up against this woman in her first chunin exam and met with grim defeat as well as the many fights that she herself had picked with the Suna kunoichi after that. His mother was not content to lose to anyone. He remembered another thing she'd tried to explain to him once: after so many battles, your greatest rivals become your friends. That's when you know you're a shinobi.

He had met this kunoichi before. Temari. There was something not completely unlike friendship that had formed between her and his mother, although he couldn't figure out how, since his mother seemed to hate her. He recognized the antagonism, but they were rivals and friends at the same time. Looking at this picture, he realized again that he really knew very little about his mother. This photo had clearly been taken in Suna. Why had she kept it? She and Temari were off to the side, Neji and the Kazekage were in the center, and at the other side there was another ninja, one he didn't know at all. His face was covered in strange lines of paint, and he wore bulky scrolls on his back. His mother looked like she was still a teenager in this picture. He knew – from having done the math – that she was a teenager when he was born.

Could this other ninja be his father?

It didn't seem likely, but after going through the pile of pictures, he didn't see any other candidates. He was certain beyond a doubt that the Kazekage was not his father. There were plenty of members of the Rookie 9 in these photos, and he knew his mother's team was closely connected to that group, but Neji's comment from earlier seemed to rule them all out as well. So who was this other Suna ninja? What kind of relationship had he had with Yoshio's mother? And why wasn't this picture on the wall?

Why was it that his mother had told him about the Kazekage and Sabaku no Temari, but never about this other ninja? Or rather – why did this Sand ninja seem to stand so prominently in this picture alongside the Kazekage and his mother's team, and why had she kept this picture? What was his importance? Yoshio just had a feeling that this person meant more than the picture was letting on. The paint made his face look grim, and his costume dark and ridiculous. There was something slightly terrifying about his smile.

Who else could be his father? There weren't any other faces among the few pictures that Yoshio didn't readily recognize. He'd only seen the Kazekage once, a few years ago when they'd had the chunin exams in Konoha again and the Kazkeage had come to watch.

Of course, he hadn't really met the Kazekage…

But knowing what he knew about the man, it seemed impossible that he'd had a relationship of any kind with Yoshio's mother. Even the stories about the Kazekage were unreasonably bloody – he'd heard his mother talk about him before without emotion. But this other ninja – who knew? To Yoshio, he was the only mystery face among the many in his mother's private collection of photos. That had to mean something, right? Yoshio didn't know whether his suspicions were unfounded or not, but he had the weirdest feeling in his gut when he stared at the strange ninja's picture. And he'd heard that there had been a special relationship between Sand and Leaf ever since the Godaime Kazekage had taken office. They were allies. Was that why no one ever mentioned his father? He was just from a different village? Or maybe this man was dead?

He picked that picture out of the pile and kept it separate from the rest. He was going to have to find out more about this Sand ninja, whoever it was.

Naruto had a sheepish smile on his face after his student disappeared. Hinata, who had caught him by surprise, focused all her energy on not blushing. It had taken her years to achieve this level of composure in his presence, but with concentration she could be as stoic as any other Hyuuga, even around Uzumaki Naruto.

Her students had been working on their scouting – specifically, interpersonal communication while scouting. It was just pure coincidence that Naruto and the Matsumoto boy had happened to be where they were when they were, providing an ideal target. Pure, pure coincidence. Hinata hadn't seen them from a distance and sought them specifically at all.

Well, some childhood habits were harder to kill than others.

Even though her team had broken rank for the day – it had been sunset already – she had lingered there on the pretense of apologizing for the interruption. Inevitably, she was caught on the receiving end of Naruto's long rumination about his team after the Matsumoto boy had run off. "Not what I thought they'd be," is not something Naruto would say. It was in his nature to be unfailingly optimistic. Hinata, though, could see through everything he was trying to say.

"They're good kids, it's just hard at the beginning for everyone, right? I remember when I was a genin, I was lucky just to know what I was doing half the time – I wouldn't have had a clue if Sakura and Sasuke hadn't been on a higher level than me. And they're good kids – Yoshio has a lot of skill, and Rikyu has tons of potential. He just, you know, with the sparring, he gets carried away… but they all eat ramen together, with me. Even after a mission. After every mission."

Naruto was clearly miserable in spite of what he was trying to say – and it didn't take a Hyuuga to see it. Hinata suspected it had much more to do with the team he had recently lost for good than the team he had recently gained. She started to say so without thinking it through. "It must be hard for you to start from scratch with a new team, after…"

After losing Sakura. That's what she had meant to say. But the words froze on her tongue. She suddenly felt that she had said too much.

Naruto, though, just shrugged. Hinata was surprised to see how well he covered up his grief. After only a moment of darkness the smile returned to his face "They're good kids," he said again, sticking to his guns. "Every team has to start somewhere, right?"

Yoshio slammed the button on his alarm clock and rolled out of bed two seconds later. He was practicing waking up in a hurry so that he could spring into action from a dead sleep in moments like his mother could. He didn't really need to hurry through his morning routine, but he did anyway, just for practice. He would be early to the meeting point, but he would use the time to practice environmental observation.

He descended the stairs of his apartment building as usual, but when he got to the bottom he was surprised to see Akiko sitting on a bench on the street just outside his apartment, clearly waiting for him. He didn't even stop to wonder how she knew where he lived. He ran up to her straightaway, assuming there was some emergency that brought her there. But then he saw that she was reading another one of her books. She wouldn't be reading if she were in a hurry to see him.

He noticed her hair was in a long braid down her back, her usual green dress was replaced by more standard shinobi attire. Before he could speak to her, she'd slammed her book shut and looked up at him. "I think I know who your father is," she said without preamble.

Yoshio was startled. "What? Who?" he said before he could stop himself.

"Inuzuka Kiba."