There was a seal on the entrance to Orochimaru's main base in Oto. It was new; Sasuke couldn't unlock it. He didn't recognise the pattern either, though he was not a fuuinjutsu expert.

"It's sealed, isn't it?" Tsunade said. Sasuke nodded. "Curious, I didn't authorise anything of the sort after we'd cleaned this place."

Despite himself, Sasuke was inclined to agree. He had taken her there not because he'd thought they would find Orochimaru within, but it seemed to have worked out anyway.

Tsunade stared at a point some twenty centimetres off the active centre of the seal. Sasuke thought of telling her, but she beat him to the punch. It started with an indent, then the crack flowered, and suddenly there was gravel in his ears and dust between his teeth, and a gaping hole on the mountainside. She waved uselessly at the dust, then lit a torch with a theatrical snap of fingers. "Lead the way."

Sasuke glared at her, wondering how exactly Orochimaru could have compared him to her, quickly followed by wondering why he'd thought of Orochimaru at all.

The base was all dark tunnels, all coiling and branching at unexpected turns, all winding at the center. Sasuke couldn't help thinking he had just entered the jaw of the snake, a meal voluntarily walking down its digestive tract. Though a snake's wouldn't have so many exits.

Tsunade's breathing raced ahead of them, bouncing off the stone walls and floors. (Sasuke's didn't; he hadn't let go of himself that much.) Despite all the noise, they arrived at Sasuke's old room unperturbed. No new tenants, then.

On the underside of the bed he had used while in Oto there was a crack. It was tiny, fit only for insects and his fingernail, and it had used to drive him crazy the first few nights trying to discover the source of the scuttling noise. At present he had to use his sewing needle to pin and pull out the preserved cockroach and then his notes from under its carapace.

After a quick inspection, he handed it to Tsunade. She held the notes between her index and middle fingers as though she was holding an exploding tag.

"And this has all of Orochimaru's base?" Sasuke nodded, setting the cockroach on the bed. Tsunade squinted; the note was only as long as her index finger and just as wide. "Maybe you ran out of paper. Can you even read your own chicken scratch?"

Sasuke rattled off the items on the list. There were only two, anyway. He didn't voice out his suspicion that Orochimaru had (in light of their current excursion, wisely) held off one or ten more secret bases. Orochimaru might have abandoned them all together and started anew, though Tsunade had dismissed that early on.

"So, Uchiha," Tsunade said to his left eye. Like most people, she reduced his face to the Rinnegan. Unlike most people, she was ever daring it to retaliate. "How does it feel to be back? You lived here for, what, three years?"

Sasuke grunted. "Where next?"

"Look, kid, I get it, probably more than anyone else. Had a longer tenure as a rogue than you, too. Don't know why they wanted me for Hokage, but it happened."

The last thing Sasuke needed was the former Hokage's sympathy – or worse, her empathy – wrapped in arrogance and presumptions as it was. "But only until Kakashi was ready."

"Ha," Tsunade said, vaguely amused. "Is that how he told the story? No… it's Naruto, isn't it? And I suppose Kakashi is only keeping the seat warm until he's ready?"

"Where next?"

"Why did you write this down?" Sasuke glared, though the effect was diminished by the poor lighting. She pocketed his notes. "Tsk, so impatient. There's one other thing I want to see."

Sasuke counted to ten before he followed, almost as if pulled by her genjutsu.

He found her on the top of a mountain, poised as a would be conqueror surveying a promising land. From here they could see all of Otogakure, even the parts that were never Orochimaru's. Otogakure was more of a village than Konoha ever aspired to, more hidden, even. Looking at it, one wouldn't have guessed it housed shinobi. Rice paddies at the center, and the village planned around irrigation channels, and in the end it wasn't even half the size of Konoha after Pain had gone through it.

But whatever else Orochimaru was, he had never ordered his likeness plastered on a cliffside.

Tsunade sounded almost indignant as she spoke. "This place used to be this big." She stretched her index finger and thumb as though measuring a ring for her nose. "'Twas more than a decade ago, under the old, doddering Otokage. What's the new one like?"

Sasuke wouldn't have noticed him if not for his hat; he groveled at Orochimaru's feet like any other. "Orochimaru let him run the village." The Oto during his apprenticeship with Orochimaru and the Oto of today did not seem much different. Orochimaru had provided protection, the occasional jutsu and technology in exchange for resources and warm bodies, but for the most part the village existed without him. Tiny, but as happy as any place could be.

"He would. To Orochimaru hell is bureaucracy, existing only to waste precious time better spent on research. Did he ever tell you the Sandaime had meant to appoint him as his successor? Before a literal golden boy came along, at least."

Tsunade reminded him – with no small amount of consternation – of one of his closer relatives, an old obasan who never stopped complaining about her feckless husband while he was alive and followed him almost immediately to death.

"What does Konoha want with him?" Sasuke asked. Orochimaru had slithered away along with the rest of his other team in the chaos of the abolishment of the Infinite Tsukuyomi. And the war – he had to pause and count – was three years ago. At least. Where had his time gone?

Tsunade said, "That depends on what he wants with Konoha, doesn't it? Ask instead what he wanted with you."

Even as he scoffed, she laughed and answered her own question. "Ungrateful brat that you are, he'd love to see you. Don't you want to make your old master happy? No? You're such an Uchiha, Sasuke."

Like an idiot carp he bit the bait. "And what do you know about the Uchiha?"

"Why, I had my personal Uchiha rival – ah, you wouldn't know what it's like; my clan was dead by your time."

"I do," Sasuke interrupted. "Senju and Uchiha, the strongest shinobi clans and founders of Konoha. Descendants of the Rikudou Sennin's brothers."

Tsunade smiled. "Therefore fated to clash for all eternity, or is that only for male heirs? And since one doesn't exist for you, you turned to Naruto?

"I used to think it injustice. I was young then, and you were many, teeming like ants in your aloof hill overlooking the village while our numbers dwindled by the day in purchase of peace – yes, peace for the Uchiha too. But I was wrong. What happened to your family… that was injustice."

Sasuke shrugged. He'd accepted her apology as then ruling Hokage and student of the Sandaime, under whose rule it had happened; her apology as a member of a rival clan he never knew seemed unnecessary. "I don't want to destroy Konoha anymore."

"And I believe you," she said with gentle conviction, "Else I wouldn't have pardoned you, though I don't doubt you would've had your freedom either way, knowing that colourful guardian spirit of yours. But here we are, the biological culminations of the two great founding clans of Konoha, so far away from home. And I am the last, the Senju name will end with me. But you, Uchiha, you are at a precipice few others could experience. Will you be its last scion, or will you be the second patriarch of the Uchiha, Sasuke?"

Sasuke shrugged again. Konoha had existed just fine in the years he'd been away. Evidently they could do without Tsunade either. But he knew better than to say it and invite further… whatever it was she'd been trying to do with him. Drunk or sober, the only difference was the calculation involved in her circumlocution. Either way she remained opaque and unwanted to him.

Tsunade said, "Let's see if Orochimaru's turned a patch of Ame into sunny paradise," and leapt, dove off the hill and landed without a sound. Sasuke watched her disappear into the forest below, not once looking back to ensure he'd followed.

Sasuke rolled his eyes and took the safer route of running down the ledge.