Whatever Shizune told Naruto last night must have been convincing, Sasuke decided as he observed the breakfast table. Things were not overly friendly, but Naruto had decided to forgo his frosty silent treatment from yesterday in order to become more like his chattier self. Tsunade looked a little more tolerant as well, which made Sasuke wonder if his own words last night had done anything to help change her mind.

Sasuke just quietly ate his breakfast and made a mental note to ask Naruto what Shizune had told him later. Tsunade was intriguing. He couldn't quite equate the woman who had patiently guided him through a particularly stressful panic attack with the bitch who had stomped all over a nine-year-old's hopes and dreams yesterday. His gut told him that she wasn't a bad person, but her actions were kind of all over the place.

He really hoped that the kind and patient woman he met last night wasn't the imposter. If it turned out that Tsunade really was a bitch in sheep's clothing he was going to get rather depressed.

At least that morning they weren't hampered by Tsunade having a hangover, so they actually managed to leave early that day. Sasuke's heart lightened as they started moving again. Resting was important, he knew that, but every minute they spent moving was a minute they were getting closer to Konoha.

His impatience to get home must have showed.

"Stop twitching, brat." Tsunade rolled her eyes at him. "We'll get to the village when we get there."

Sasuke just scowled at her. So what if he was eager to get home? At least he wasn't whining 'are we there yet?' like some sort of petulant child.

(Speaking of, he gave Naruto no more than another day before he started asking that very question.)

"Shizune and I could get there much faster, you know." Tsunade said smugly. "It's you academy brats that are slowing us down, seeing as you can't run at shinobi speeds yet."

Sasuke's scowl deepened. The woman was baiting him now, clearly. He shouldn't have to deal with this. He pointedly ignored her and looked off to the side.

"If you don't like walking slow Baa-chan, then you could always carry us!" Naruto suggested gleefully. "That's what Hound-san used to do when I was little."

Sasuke shot Naruto a look of incredulity. Hound-san?! That was an ANBU code name if he ever heard one. What was Naruto doing hanging out with masked ANBU? They were supposed to be invisible while they were on duty!

"Not likely." Tsunade snorted. "You two are too heavy for me and Shizune to cart that far. You can walk."

Well... if Tsunade wasn't all that keen on playing nice yet, there was no reason for him to keep up with his polite façade.

"I think she just called us fat." He stage whispered to Naruto.

"Hah?!" Naruto cried. "We're not fat!" He looked at Sasuke in alarm. "Are we?" He asked fearfully.

Sasuke gave him a long, careful look. "And now she's giving us body image issues." He shook his head. "What a bad adult she is!"

Tsunade's mouth dropped open and Sasuke turned a flat stare upon her. She'd annoyed him, and now she was going to get a double helping of his sarcastic tongue today.

She asked for it.

"Hey...How much further is it?" Naruto whined. "Are we there yet?"

Sasuke rolled his eyes. As usual he was right on the money. Naruto piped up with that question right after their lunch break on their third day of walking.

"We'll get there when we get there brat." Tsunade grumbled. "What does it matter?"

Naruto screwed up his face, tucking his hands behind his head as they walked. "It doesn't... I guess..." He mumbled. "I'm jus'... bored."

Yeah, Sasuke figured it would be something like that. There was only so long that they could play shiritori until Naruto ran out of words. He didn't exactly have a stellar vocabulary. That and he got tired of losing all the time. I spy quickly got old too, considering that the scenery around them barely changed as they walked. After the fifth time that someone had picked tree, cloud or rock it became obvious the game wasn't fun anymore.

"Take the time to contemplate quietly about your place in the universe." Tsunade told Naruto.

Naruto and Sasuke stared back at her blankly. Naruto because he had no idea what Tsunade was talking about and Sasuke because he was in disbelief that Tsunade thought that Naruto would actually do something like that.

"Hah?" Naruto said.

"She's telling you to shut up." Sasuke translated 'helpfully'.

"I didn't say that at all!" Tsunade protested. "I didn't mean..." She shot the stink eye at Sasuke, who just smirked back. He, for one, wasn't bored at all. He'd spent most of the trip so far twisting around Tsunade's words and poking fun at the grouchy old lady. It was the best fun he'd had since the hair dye prank.

"So what did you mean?" Naruto asked suspiciously. He trusted Sasuke a whole lot more than he did Tsunade, so the old lady was going to have a hard time convincing him that Sasuke was twisting things.

Tsunade pinched the bridge of her nose. "Never mind." She said with a sigh. "Just… can't you play another game or something?"

Naruto and Sasuke exchanged a look, pulling faces at each other. "We're out of games." Naruto complained. "The ones we played yesterday are boring now."

"Maybe we can come up with a new game for you to play." Shizune said brightly. "I'll try and remember the rules of the word game I used to play with my old teammates when we were on patrols."

Naruto pulled a face again. There was no way he was going to be satisfied with word games. He just wasn't all that good at them, and games you never won were always boring.

Tsunade rolled her eyes. "Okay brats, how about this? Do something useful while you walk: train. Do the leaf sticking exercise or something."

The two boys turned to stare at her blankly. "Leaf sticking exercise?" Sasuke repeated with a frown.

The grumpiness on Tsunade's face melted away to be replaced by confusion, followed closely by horror. "Neither of you have any idea what the leaf sticking exercise is, do you?"

They shook their heads. Sasuke had never heard of it, but by Tsunade's reaction he figured he should have.

Tsunade scowled down at them, but for once it didn't seem like she was cross at them. "What are they teaching midgets these days?" She muttered. "Not even knowing leaf sticking!"

"What is it? Is it hard?" Naruto asked, frowning up at Tsunade.

Tsunade shrugged. "I never found it difficult." She told them. "It's the most basic chakra control exercise there is."

Naruto almost face planted as Sasuke snorted in laughter. There was nothing Naruto hated more than chakra control exercises. He was useless at them to the point of absurdity. He had yet to master the paper exercise they learned at the academy, which used special slips of paper that turned from black to white when chakra was channelled through it correctly. Naruto's slip of paper stubbornly stayed black most times he attempted the exercise, but one day he managed to turn it white for a split second before the thing burst into flames. Mizuki-sensei had been livid: the paper slips weren't exactly cheap, and Naruto had been set running laps for over an hour as punishment. Sasuke still had no idea how he managed to set the paper on fire, those things were nigh on indestructible. They had to be, considering that they were teaching tools designed for use by under-tens.

Tsunade raised an eyebrow at their reactions, a silent question in her eyes.

"Naruto sucks at chakra control." Sasuke explained through his smirk of amusement. Naruto didn't say anything, but made a very loud groaning noise to go along with the face of disgust he had adopted in the last few minutes.

Tsunade eyed Naruto for a moment as she snorted out some laughter of her own. "Yeah, that sounds about right." She said.

Naruto's pout fell off his face immediately as he turned a wide-eyed look of hurt towards their travelling companion. Sasuke joined him in staring at the woman incredulously. Was Tsunade assuming that Naruto's natural idiotic personality would naturally translate into duncehood at school? Sasuke knew that he'd told Tsunade that Naruto was a bit of a moron the night of his panic attack, but still…

"I'm good at plenty of other stuff!" Naruto hurriedly told Tsunade, obviously jumping to the same conclusion as Sasuke. "Chakra control is just hard, Baa-chan!"

"I know." Tsunade scowled, turning a look of annoyance towards Sasuke, even though he hadn't twisted any of her words this time around. "I'm just pointing out that it was fairly obvious you'd be terrible at chakra control. Most Uzumaki are, what with their stupidly large chakra reserves. That's not even taking into account the boost that the fox is giving you."

Naruto and Sasuke just stared at her.

"What." Naruto said flatly.

"You mean it's expected for Naruto to be bad at chakra control?" Sasuke asked, appalled. "Why did no one say anything?!" A burning sensation started to build in Sasuke's chest. He knew that Naruto would never hold a grudge against another person, but that didn't stop Sasuke from getting angry in Naruto's place.

Tsunade shrugged. "Well, yeah." She said. "An Uzumaki girl I knew a long time ago used to set leaves on fire when she tried the leaf sticking exercise. It took her months to get the stupid thing right."

Well, didn't that sound familiar?

Naruto, being Naruto, didn't latch on to the hidden implication of what Tsunade had just said; that the girl she had been talking about was probably a relative of his, meaning that Tsunade might have known Naruto's family before they died. He just realised that Tsunade probably had the answer to all his chakra control troubles. Sasuke kept quiet. He figured Tsunade wouldn't appreciate the questions that would come after he pointed out that connection to Naruto.

"Do you know how that girl got better at it?" Naruto asked eagerly. "Is there a trick?"

Tsunade shrugged. "Practice." She said wryly.

Naruto almost face planted again.

"Tsunade-sama!" Shizune turned back to scowl at the older woman. "That's hardly fair!"

Tsunade waved a hand at her. "Fine, fine. Sheesh... I can't have any fun around here without someone jumping down my throat!" For some reason she turned a scowl towards Sasuke instead of the person who actually just scolded her. "Look – Brats... there are as many chakra control exercises out there as there are ninja. It's part of the reason why clan kids are often so much quicker at learning to control their chakra than civilian kids."

Sasuke and Naruto stared at Tsunade as she morphed into something akin to a teacher right in front of their eyes. She slipped into lecture mode as easily as Iruka-sensei, which seemed bizarrely out of character for her. Then again, it seemed like Tsunade was doing something out of character every five minutes, switching back and forth from bitter old drunk to responsible adult seemingly at random, so maybe they shouldn't have been that surprised.

"Different clans all have different training methods for their kids, catered to the body types and chakra levels that are common within their extended family." Tsunade went on. "For example, you, Uchiha-brat, what's the first thing you were taught to do with your chakra?" She pointed at Sasuke, eyebrows raised in question.

Sasuke frowned. He wanted to say the first thing he learned about chakra was the boring control exercise that everyone learned at the academy, but...

"The pebble trick..." He realised. "I can't believe it, but it's probably the pebble trick that my brother showed me." It was jarring to realise that. At the time, he'd thought the exercise was just a fun little game that his brother had showed him. Now he realised it was part of his early training. Considering that he'd learned the trick as a toddler, it was even more startling to realise just how soon his training had started compared to what he'd originally thought.

"Pebble trick?" Naruto repeated. "What's that?"

Sasuke blinked himself out of the half-forgotten memory of him and his brother playing out in the garden on winter afternoons, collecting small stones. "It's a small heat trick." He explained. "You channel your chakra into a rock to heat it up. It's really easy."

"A heat exercise. I figured." Tsunade nodded. "The Uchiha are predominantly fire natured. It makes sense to start their kiddies on a basic fire technique before anything else."

"Fire technique?" Sasuke repeated in shock. "But... it was just heating up a rock!"

"Yeah, and how do you suppose you make something hot?" Tsunade pointed out. "By using fire chakra. Seriously, it's not that hard. You'd be surprised at how many little chakra tricks count as elemental jutsu."

"So Sasuke's family teach him a fire trick first because he's supposed to be really good at it?" Naruto whistled. "That's so cool!"

Sasuke shrugged. It made a lot of sense, now that he thought about it. Piecing together all of the clan training he got in chakra control, he actually did a lot of work training up his fire techniques before he even got to attempt his first 'official' fire release technique: The Great Fireball. It was mind-boggling to realise that he'd actually been subtly pushed into favouring fire all along, simply by the way that his clan trained him. He'd always assumed that he was fire-natured because his first elemental jutsu was the great fireball technique. What if he wasn't?

Interesting.

"Other clans have different exercises they use to train up kids." Tsunade told them. "Like how the Hyuuga teach their kids how to cast ripples in water without touching it, because most of them turn out to be water types."

"What about the Uzumaki?" Naruto asked eagerly. "What do they teach their kids?" He was practically bouncing up and down as he waited for Tsunade to reply, and it wasn't hard to figure out why. Not only would it answer the question of how to fix his abysmal chakra control, but it would also be information about the family that Naruto never knew.

Tsunade shifted, suddenly looking a bit uncomfortable. "Well... the Uzumaki..." She bit her lip. "... I suppose they did the ink thing." She shrugged.

"Ink thing?" Naruto frowned. "What's that?"

"The Uzumaki clan was famous for it's skill with fuinjutsu. So pretty much everything they did came back to ink and calligraphy at some stage." Tsunade sighed. "Ink and enthusiasm, that's pretty much what made up the Uzumaki clan."

Sasuke couldn't keep a straight face at that. "Calligraphy?!" He said in glee. "His clan was famous for calligraphy?!" Naruto shot him a glare, but the information was just too funny for Sasuke to stop sniggering. "Have you seen Naruto's handwriting?"

"Shut up." The other boy said sullenly. "I'm not that bad."

"It's okay." Tsunade said. "My handwriting has never been that good either." She sighed, almost in guilt. "It was even before I became a medic..."

Sasuke stopped sniggering and looked at her sharply, but the comment went seemingly over Naruto's head. The boy took Tsunade's reassurance at face value and cheered up immediately.

Tsunade is a Senju. Sasuke thought. So why would it matter that she has bad handwriting? Sasuke's eyes narrowed as he watched Tsunade try to explain one of the Uzumaki clan's basic chakra control exercises. Unless it does matter, and she's hiding it...

Was Tsunade connected to Naruto's family?

"Can you teach me?" Naruto's loud begging jolted Sasuke out of his thoughts in time to hear Tsunade grudgingly agree to teach Naruto some of the basic Uzumaki chakra exercises.

"Not now." She told Naruto. "It's not something I can prepare while walking: we need paper and ink and brushes and shit... so wait until we stop for lunch at least."

"Yay!" Naruto shot straight up in their air, fist pumping for joy. "Uzumaki fun times, here we come!"

It really didn't take much to make Naruto happy, Sasuke thought in amusement.

True to her word, Tsunade fished out her writing supplies as soon as they sat down for lunch. As Shizune retrieved the lunchboxes that they had sealed away in a scroll that morning, Tsunade settled herself down under a nearby tree. Naruto hovered near her, practically bursting with excitement. Sensing that this could be a relationship repairing moment between the two blondes, Sasuke hung back, opting to help Shizune with getting out their food instead of intruding on Naruto's lesson. If Tsunade was teaching him a traditional Uzumaki clan chakra technique then the last thing that he should do was intrude.

That didn't stop him from glancing over at the two of them every so often. They were huddled together over a scroll, Naruto watching intently as Tsunade traced out some sort of design using a calligraphy brush.

"I can handle setting out the food if you want to go join in, you know." Shizune said quietly.

Sasuke jumped, almost dropping a water canteen as he did so. He met Shizune's eyes guiltily. He hadn't meant to stare; he just wanted to make sure that Tsunade wasn't doing anything mean to his friend.

He wasn't curious about how 'the ink thing' could possibly help with Naruto's abysmal chakra control. Not at all.

"Just go." Shizune took the water canteen out of his hands with a knowing smile and a roll of her eyes.

Damn it. Was he really so transparent?

Scuffing his sandal over the dirt as he turned around, Sasuke slunk off to the tree that Tsunade and Naruto were sitting under, feeling like he was barging into something private just to satisfy his own curiosity. Naruto had never demanded Sasuke teach him any of the Uchiha clan techniques, not even the taijutsu that Sasuke used in most of their practice spars outside the Academy. The least that Sasuke could do was hold his curiosity back the one time that Naruto was actually able to learn some of the traditions of his almost extinct clan.

"Took you long enough, Uchiha-chan." Tsunade said tartly, not looking up from the scroll she was drawing on. "I was beginning to think I was going to have to send the monkey off to fetch you."

"I'm not a monkey!" Naruto squawked, waving his hands around a lot like one.

Sasuke just stared at Tsunade. "I thought this was an Uzumaki thing?" He said suspiciously.

"Yeah." Tsunade said. "But it's not like it's a big secret or anything. Chances are this exercise is going to be useless to you anyway. You don't have the chakra reserves to make it work."

"So why bother showing it to me?" Sasuke huffed.

Tsunade finally looked up from the scroll, examining him with golden eyes. "Because it's knowledge." She said simply. "And knowledge for knowledge's sake is sometimes enough of a reason." Her hand gripped the calligraphy brush just a fraction tighter. "And well... there's the chance..." She cut herself off mid-sentence to glance over at Naruto, then back to Sasuke. "Brats... do either of you know what actually happened to the Uzumaki clan?"

Sasuke and Naruto immediately exchanged a glance. The look in Naruto's eye was odd, and Sasuke immediately knew that Naruto was just as clueless as him about the fate of the Uzumaki clan. Sure, they were peripherally aware that there was an Uzumaki clan. The name cropped up in their history textbooks every so often, just enough to let everyone know that they were a clan of ninja, and that they had a friendly relationship with Konoha, but that was about all that Sasuke knew.

"No." Naruto answered quietly for the both of them.

Tsunade's eyes narrowed fractionally, an obvious tell that she didn't really expect them to know so little, but she straightened fractionally anyway. Teacher mode Tsunade was making another appearance.

"They weren't a part of Konoha." She told them both steadily as she continued to work with her brush. "They were the most prominent clan of our closest ally: Uzushiogakure."

"Uzushiogakure?" Naruto's face screwed up in confusion.

Sasuke was not better off. "Never heard of it." He said stiffly. "If they're our closest ally, how come we don't hear about them in the village?"

"Because they used to be our closest ally." Tsunade explained grimly. "The whole village was destroyed in the second shinobi war."

Sasuke's eyes widened as his blood ran cold. A whole shinobi village, wiped out? He couldn't picture it. The scale of battle that would have been needed to raze a shinobi village to the ground had to be enormous. Hidden villages were built like fortresses. And not like the fancy fortresses that kept nobility safe; fortresses that contained thousands of super-soldiers, ready to fight and die to the bitter end to protect their homes.

"Konoha got the message that they were under siege too late." Tsunade continued. "By the time we sent ninja to help, there wasn't much left of the place, and all of the survivors had fled."

"Survivors?" Naruto said hopefully, his eyes lighting up.

Right, Sasuke realised. Any survivors might have been related to Naruto. Family.

"Don't get your hopes up kid." Tsunade said bitterly. "When a ninja doesn't want to be found, they can hide themselves pretty thoroughly. We only ever managed to bring a few survivors of the battle to Konoha, and to this day we still have no idea how many actually made it out of the city before it fell." She shrugged. "But we know that they're out there, because redheads with a penchant for getting into trouble keep cropping up every now and then."

"Is that why you want me to know the chakra control exercise?" Sasuke blinked with the growing realisation. "In case I ever run into a descendant of an Uzumaki survivor one day?"

Tsunade just shrugged again. "Something like that." She said. "Now, do you brats actually want to learn the technique or not?"

"Show me! Show me! Show me!" Naruto babbled excitedly, bouncing up and down as the sombre mood dissipated.

Half an hour later, Sasuke had to grudgingly admit that Tsunade was right: He couldn't do the exercise. He just didn't have enough chakra to make the damn thing work.

Naruto, on the other hand...

"Look! Look!" Naruto waved his hand excitedly at Sasuke, a massive grin on his face. "Look, Sasuke! I'm totally killing it!"

...Naruto was a natural.

The control exercise was simple enough. So simple that Sasuke had to hold back a snort and a snide comment about how Naruto's extended family were probably just as straightforwardly stupid as he was. Drawn on the scroll was some sort of circle, written in rather complicated swirls of plain black ink. The aim of the control exercise was to channel chakra into the circle and force the ink move, expanding and contracting the circle design. The moving ink was interesting in the way that Sasuke had never seen anything like it before. He'd seen seals before, none of them had moved on the paper past the initial drawing of the design.

"Once you get good at it, you can start making other pictures move." Tsunade told them both. "The circle is the easiest thing to start with as it's got functionality seals built into the picture, but as your control gets better you can move to simple animal doodles and the like."

"Ooh!" Naruto said appreciatively. "Like a dragon? A dragon breathing fire! That would be awesome!"

Sasuke scowled down at the circle, pointedly ignoring Naruto. It wasn't fair! Why was Naruto able to move on to fire-breathing dragons while Sasuke still couldn't even get the damn circle to move?

"Slow down brat!" Tsunade whacked Naruto around the head. "What did I just say? Simple animals, stupid. Try a fish."

Naruto pulled a face. "But fish are boring, Baa-chan!"

"Konoha wasn't built in a day." The woman said. "Here." She threw the calligraphy brush at Naruto, almost nailing him in the head. "Doodle me a fish on that spare scroll over there. If you can get it to swim, then I'll help you draw your dragon."

Meanwhile Sasuke was still scowling at his ink circle, wishing that he could set the paper on fire through the power of his glare alone. There hadn't been a training exercise yet that he'd fumbled, let along failed entirely. Tsunade had told him that he wouldn't be able to do it, but part of him hadn't really believed her. After all, he was an Uchiha; he could do anything.

Except make stupid ink circles move, apparently.

"Put the circle down kid." Slim hands tugged the paper out of his grip. "You won't be able to do it until you have a few more years on you."

"Why?" Sasuke asked with a pout. He looked sullenly over to Naruto. "He can do it."

"Yeah, because he has jonin level chakra reserves already." Tsunade told him. "You have high levels of chakra for a brat, but you're still below genin level."

Sasuke finally let go of the ink circle to stare at Tsunade with wide eyes. "Jonin level reserves?" He repeated incredulously.

"Yeah, pretty much." Tsunade's eyes settled on the boy they were talking about, an unreadable look in her eyes. Naruto wasn't paying attention to the fact they were talking about him, he was too busy trying to get the absurdly bad doodle of a fish he'd drawn to move. "Most Uzumaki have at least chunin level reserves at his age, and having a biju sealed inside him just pushed it that much further." She paused. "It's said that the most dangerous part of fighting a jinchuriki isn't necessarily the powerful techniques they can throw about; it's the fact that they almost never run out of chakra in a fight."

Sasuke paled. Like every ninja child one of the first things that he'd learned about chakra was that it was a finite resource. Everyone had a limit, and often life and death fights were decided not by flashy techniques but by who hit that limit first. What Tsunade was saying was that Naruto had the potential to outlast pretty much every other fighter on the planet, which was a practically priceless talent.

The sharingan eyes might even pale in comparison, Sasuke realised dumbly. What use are fancy eyes when one is too tired to activate them?

"But never forget that there is still a disadvantage Sasuke." Tsundae said quietly. "Big reserves mean that Naruto will never grasp the same level of control as you might be able to. Here." She pressed a new sheet of paper into his hands. "Try this one."

Sasuke looked down. The new piece of paper was painted with a spiral of dots, growing smaller and smaller as they reached the centre. The one placed right in the middle of the page was so tiny that Sasuke could barely see it was there.

"Start with the biggest dot and work your way in." Tsunade said simply. "Make them all glow, Sasuke."

The first five dots were as easy as breathing. They lit up the moment his chakra touched the paper. Spurned on by the triumph, Sasuke's focus sharpened, and he sent his chakra burning down the line, making the next ten dots light up one by one. The sixteenth dot made him pause, it flickered before holding steady. The next seven dots made him sweat, and his progress slowed. Finally, he reached the twenty fourth dot and frowned. He couldn't get it to light.

"Let it go now." Tsunade ordered gently.

Sasuke let the paper flutter out of his fingers, feeling fatigued, and looked up to scowl at Tsunade. "What did that prove?" He asked crossly, sore that he had failed yet another exercise.

Tsunade picked up the sheet of paper for him. "Twenty three dots." She said thoughtfully, looking down at the paper in her hands. The dots had gone dark once again. "Not bad."

Sasuke continued to scowl.

"I only got nineteen when I tried this exercise for the first time." She said.

Sasuke looked at her sharply. She was smirking down at him.

"Granted, I was six at the time..." She laughed at the look on his face. "Sasuke, there are thirty dots in total in this spiral. It takes absolutely perfect chakra control to make them all light up." She demonstrated, and the dots lit up steadily, one by one, until they were all glowing at him. "In general terms, fifteen dots signifies good chakra control."

Sasuke stiffened, staring blankly at her. She didn't mean that he...?

"Twenty is considered good enough for a chunin." Tsunade continued. "Twenty five is what is expected out of most jonin." She raised an eyebrow at him. "So I don't really think that twenty three dots is anything to sniff at, not when it's an Academy student on their first try." She handed him back the paper. "Care to try again?"

Sasuke took the sheet of paper with hands that shook just a little. What was Tsunade's aim in telling him that his chakra control was almost at jonin level? Surely she had to be joking?

He looked up at the woman through his bangs, afraid to see a mocking grin on her face, ready to tease him about being so gullible. Instead of poking fun at him, Tsunade was looking down at him with sharp, serious eyes, examining his face as if looking for something. For a long moment the two just stared at each other.

"Have you figured out yet how you're going to protect Naruto's back?" Tsunade asked quietly.

"No." Sasuke admitted.

Tsunade's eyes flickered down to the spiral of dots in his hands, then up at his face. "Hmm." she said. Then she turned around slowly to go and see what Naruto was doing.

Sasuke just stared after her blankly.

What was that supposed to mean? He wondered.

Naruto couldn't get his ugly little fish to move around to their tutor's satisfaction until their sixth day of travel. In the end he never got the chance to ask Tsunade how to make a dragon move though.

"Hah! Look at that Baa-chan! Now you have to-"

A swoosh! of wind cut Naruto off, stirring up dust from the road and making them all cough. Sasuke's eyes watered, and he lost sight of everything for a moment while he blinked the water away.

When he looked up, they were no longer the only travellers on the road.

"I suppose you're part of a crew looking for the midgets, then?" Tsunade stared the newcomer down, arms crossed and her most disgruntled expression on her face. "Took you damn long enough."

Standing a little in front of them, blocking the road to Konoha, stood a man dressed in the black and grey of ANBU. His stance was loose, like he didn't have a care in the world, but the tension in the air was tangible. His mask tilted in response to Tsunade's rude address and Sasuke tried to decipher what kind of animal it was supposed to depict. Like all ANBU masks it was bone white, with only a few splashes of paint to give it colour. In this case it had two curved red markings on the cheeks and eyes rimmed in red. The mask had pointed ears too, so maybe it was supposed to be a–

"Hound-san!" Naruto cried, forgetting the slip of paper in hands and the swimming fish it contained to beam at the ANBU agent in front of him. "You found us!"

At last the ANBU spoke. "Naruto." His voice was quiet and monotone, as if there wasn't really a person underneath the mask at all, but a machine.

Sasuke shivered, unnerved at the person standing in front of them, but a glance at Naruto revealed that the boy hadn't been turned off at all by the display of non-emotion. Naruto was grinning away, bouncing on the balls of his feet like he was going to dash forward and give the intimidating man a great big hug.

"Loosen up kid." Tsunade barked out, "I come in peace."

Sasuke jumped a little as he realised that Tsunade wasn't talking to him, telling him to relax despite the scary person in front of them, but to the ANBU agent himself.

How old must she be that she can refer to ANBU agents as 'kid'? He wondered in amusement.

"Tsunade-hime." The ANBU agent replied flatly. "How is it that you came to be in the company of Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha?"

"They owe me money." The excuse was absurd, but Tsunade raised her eyebrows at Hound, as if daring him to question her further on the matter. After seeing Tsunade fight nearly a week ago, Sasuke himself wouldn't have dared. He would have taken her stupid explanation at face value and left well enough alone.

Hound, though, evidently had balls of steel. "And how did they end up in your debt, not the other way around?" A hint of personality finally shone through as the man's playful disbelief made itself known.

Tsunade's eyes narrowed at the allusion to her status as the Legendary Sucker. "They collided with me outside a gambling den in Toutori." She said. "At the time of said collision I was carrying a great deal of cash, which they made me drop." She looked at the ANBU agent as if he was stupid and she had to explain everything like he was a child. "Hence they owe me replacement money."

"I see." There was a wry undertone to Hound's flat speech now.

There was a long moment of silence as the adults seemingly stared each other down. Neither Tsunade nor Hound moved a muscle. It was a stand-off.

"Kid, if you wanted to keep your identity secret, you really should have covered that stupid hair of yours." Tsunade finally said. "It's too late now. I know perfectly well who you are. I attended your parents' wedding and I changed your diapers. The only reason that I wasn't the attending medic-nin at your birth was that I got called away on an emergency mission to the wind border."

"I don't see how that matters." Hound said stiffly, but his body language shifted every so slightly towards discomfort, like Tsunade's words really did matter a lot.

"Just stop being a standoffish twit and let us continue on our way." Tsunade rolled her eyes. "There's no need to be difficult about it. If I was planning on kidnapping your precious rescue targets then I would have been smart enough to walk away from Konoha instead of towards it."

Hound made a noise that seemed to be something like a sigh. His posture slumped, and he waved a hand at them all lazily. "Fine." He told them. "I will escort you in."

"Whatever tickles your fancy kid." Tsunade said in exasperation. "Now...?"

The ANBU agent was gone before they could even blink.

"Eh? Baa-chan, where'd he go?" Naruto said blankly, looking around frantically. "I thought he said he was coming with us?"

Tsunade gestured to the forest lining the road. "He said he would 'escort' us." She said. "In ANBU stuffy speak, that means he's going to stick to the trees around us and scout ahead, making sure we don't run into any surprise attacks."

Naruto frowned. "Why would we get attacked?" He wanted to know.

Tsunade shrugged. "We won't. Hound-chan just likes feeling useful."

Twang! A kunai was embedded in the road at Tsunade's feet. Tsunade just made a rude gesture towards the woods and stepped over it.

"Let's go kiddies!" She said mock-cheerfully. "Not long until Konoha now!"

Hound must have split off at some point and run ahead to warn them that they were coming, because the Hokage was waiting at the gate when they arrived almost a full day after meeting the ANBU agent.

Sasuke choked down his shock. The Hokage was standing at the gate, patiently waiting for them to arrive.

The HOKAGE.

Really?

"JIJI!" Naruto bellowed in Sasuke's ear, making a break from their little group to launch himself at the most powerful man in the Land of Fire. The Hokage laughed as he caught Naruto, hugging the boy back like he expected this kind of greeting all along.

"I take it you had quite the adventure, Naruto." The man said mildly as he set Naruto on his feet once again. "Making new friends as well, I see."

Naruto grinned up at him. "Uh huh!" He said enthusiastically. "That's Shizune-nee and Baa-chan!" He pointed at the two women behind him excitedly. "Baa-chan is awesome! She punched one of the bad guys through a wall."

Naruto was exaggerating again. According to Sasuke's memories she had only nearly punched that guy through the wall. The details didn't matter all that much though, Sasuke decided, because seeing her do that was awesome enough.

The Hokage turned eyes that sparkled with amusement to Tsunade now. "Baa-chan?" He asked her, smothering a grin.

Tsunade looked like she wanted to punch someone else through a wall, but Naruto interrupted with his own explanation before she could even open her mouth.

"She's Baa-chan even though she looks like a Nee-chan because she's actually super old, Jiji." Naruto said confidently. "She fought in the second war, she told us, so that makes her old enough to be a Baa-chan."

Sasuke had the sneaking suspicion that his best friend was rapidly becoming the most likely candidate for Tsunade to punch through a wall next. He glared at Naruto, hoping that his unspoken warning would get through to the dumb blonde through the power of friendship alone.

ABORT! ABORT! ABORT!

"Why you little...!"

Too late. Sasuke winced as Tsunade darted forward and grabbed Naruto by the collar, hoisting him up in the air and shaking him like a naughty puppy.

"I'm not old!" Tsunade protested, shaking Naruto again. "I'm dignified!"

"A 'dignified' drunk."

Everyone was looking at him.

Oh no.

No!

Sasuke didn't mean to say that at all! At least not out loud!

"I should have left you brats in Toutori." Tsunade said flatly. She dropped Naruto, rubbing her forehead like she had a headache. "Nothing good ever happens when I win big." She muttered.

"On the contrary, Tsunade." The Hokage said quietly. "Some would say that we were very fortunate that you won big this time. I am one of them." The old man smiled, but it was a brittle and sad expression. "Thank you for bringing our young ones back. I know it would have been easier for you to look the other way."

The look on Tsunade's face was strange, almost hurt. "I never would have looked the other way, Sensei." She said quietly.

Something passed between the two then, Sasuke wasn't really sure what. It probably had a lot to do with the history that the crabby old lady and her teacher shared, but Sasuke had none of the details about that other than the sob story about her dead brother and lover that Naruto had relayed to him the night after his panic attack. The impression that Sasuke had gotten was that Tsunade avoided Konoha because it contained too many painful memories, and not enough living people she loved to combat them. Sasuke could understand that, maybe even better than most people could.

If the look on the Hokage's face was anything to go by though, maybe Tsunade had more living people to love her than she thought.

Maybe she might come back and visit now. Sasuke thought, eyeing Tsunade as she continued her awkward interaction with the Hokage.

Was it weird that he hoped that she would?

A/N:

Hey :) I'm really sorry for the delay between chapters this time. It turned out a lot longer than I intended, mostly due to events beyond my control and family emergencies. I'm hoping that the next chapter will come quicker, but this time I'm not making any promises. Writing has always been something that I need to be in the right mood for, and different stories require different moods. This one has been put on the back burner for a little while as I vent out the events of the last few months with angtsy pieces.

On another note, I can happily announce that this fic is nearing it's end, probably not in the next chapter, but maybe in the chapter after that. Whether I continue on to write part three is up in the air right now, but it's a definite possibility.

Some smart cookies may have already noticed that the ink trick that Tsunade teaches to Naruto and Sasuke is a lot like Sai's drawing techniques. That is deliberate. The little back story in my head is that Sai's fighting skills is based off the Uzumaki chakra control technique that I invented here. Whether it was adapted by Danzo and Sai in ROOT from studying old Uzumaki scrolls or by the Uzumaki themsleves back in the day is up for debate. Sai's justu is very different from the original chakra control technique however due to the way it's been refined to allow for someone without the Uzumaki reserves to use it (mostly by using special chakra-infused inks). Just think of what a true Uzumaki could do with Sai's ink drawings though, if they got the opportunity XD I just thought I'd share that little backstory here, seeing as there's pretty much no way I could ever work this into the story properly, considering there is no reason for Sai to make any sort of appearance.

A big thank-you to Yara9292, davycrockett100, PAVeY14, Old Girl Lost, canis lupus familiaris, Lamelinam, Sakuzi-chan, Canisse and the guest that reviewed chapter 11.