Two years and one week after training was supposed to end-

Naru stood before the large wooden gates to the Leaf village, tilting her head one way then another as a soft buzzing sensation filled her mind. Jiriaya walked up and made sure to snap a twig or two to let her know that he was there since she wasn't looking towards him anymore and when she turned her head he gave her an awkward, slightly nervous smile.

"Are you ready to go in?" He asked. Naru shook her head no. She was worried about going into the village as she was now. Jiriaya looked at her, an uncomfortable silence stretching between them.

There had been a lot of shit going down these past two years that had kept them away from the village. None of it was Naru's fault- After all she hadn't been the one totally gung ho about some of the stuff that had led up to-

No! Stop thinking about, man. Stop thinking about losing the Kyubbi and coming a hairs breath from losing Naru too. She's alive. Sure she's different but after everything that she's been though I couldn't expect that she would totally be the same. To think she would still be totally the same after all the blood shed and changes she went through would be naive. Jiriaya thought as he took several steps closer to the girl- no wait, that wasn't right.

Naru wasn't a girl anymore. She had been fifteen when they had left the village five years ago. Today Naru was a stunningly beautiful twenty year old woman that held very few traces of the energetic, hyperactive child that he'd taken a liking too and decided to teach.

He stopped just in front of her and looked her over with a critical eye. Noting that she was keeping her head down like she usually did nowadays. He reached out and carefully grasped the hood on her jacket and pulled it up over her head so that she could relax a little bit then stepped back. "Let's go. I bet that there are a few people here who would love to see you again."

Naru was quiet yet he could sense her falling into step behind him as he headed towards the gate. He got about halfway through when he felt Naru just sort of disappear on him and turned his head to find her gone. He blinked and looked around for a second then sighed.

Dammit. What did she hope to achieve by vanishing into thin air like that? But more importantly, where had she gone?

He was about to go see if he could find her when he heard Gai, Lee, Genma and a few others calling his name as they ran up to greet him. Crap. Jiriaya thought darkly. Now he had to answer a buch of questions about Naru that he wasn't comfortable with answering, he needed desperately to meet with Kakashi and Tsunade, and he needed to warn Sakura and the rest of the rookies that Naru wasn't the person that they remembered from before.

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Naru didn't bother passing through the village gates when she could simply bypass them and slip into the village another way. After slipping into the village unseen by even her master, she made a beeline for the old building that she had once called home. Her mind still felt fuzzy, and she couldn't recall a lot of details about the village from before but somehow she managed to make it all the way to her former home without getting lost.

She stood outside of the run down apartment nervously shifting back and forth for several moments, not really caring if she was seen or if she looked more than a little bit suspicious to the people walking by. After a moment or so of mental debate she slipped inside through the front door after taking a moment to pick the lock because she couldn't remember where the key was.

The power was off, and the window blinds were closed but even so she could see everything perfectly. She could see her chairs, her dining room table, her small kitchen, the book shelf against the far side of the wall, hiding the place where her old self had once lost her temper and put her fist through the plaster. Wrecking it almost beyond repair even after trying to fix it with several tubes of toothpaste.

She walked by a small coffee table with a lamp on it and absently reached out and ran her finger tips along the top of the table, feeling the dust that had collected there, gather on her finger tips as she brushed by.

The fuzzy feeling in her head was getting worse. Her breath was starting to come out in little near pants, as if she had run a long distance or simply couldn't catch her breath. She closed her eyes and felt several painful twinges in the back of her mind as images flashed through her head.

It wasn't the first time that this had happened to her since...well she didn't really speak of it. And Jiriaya didn't speak of it either. All she could really remember of the incident was the time that she'd been laying in a hospital bed crying. Her body felt like it had been boiling from the inside, her organs and blood had felt like they were cooking and her master had reached out to grab her when she tried to get up so that she could crawl away and die without him standing there witnessing everything, and having her skin slide right off in her master's hands.

She vaguely recalled the look of absolute horror and grief on the old Sage's face before he'd jerked his hands back away from her and started screaming for help.

She didn't remember much after that though Jiriaya had told her that she had been in such a state for close to twenty nine days before finally coming out of it.

It was part of the reason her mind was so fuzzy and why she could only recall some things and not others. It was also why her voice was nothing more than a soft, barely whispered rasp now when she spoke. It was part of why every three months or so she ran a fever of a hundred and six, and why she was able to do things that she wasn't able to do before.

It was why she looked different. Acted different. And was why she had been gone two years longer that Jiriaya had meant for her to be. After those long twenty nine days, Jiriayay had been a mess and had cried like a baby when she had finally managed to wake up and get out of her hospital bed. It was why he had attached himself to her side like a shadow and often times placed himself between her and others- Saying that if there was harm to be done then it would be done to him.

He'd had enough of seeing her in pain.

He'd also had to retrain her a little bit at first. Starting with the basics and going from there. Once he was sure that she'd had everything down again, he'd helped her train herself to get used to her new abilities. He'd even helped her discover the depth of them.

She shook her head as her vision faded a little bit, the ache in her skull magnifying a little more. Becoming a migraine.

Her vision slowly came back and she found herself standing in the door to the bedroom that she used to sleep in as a kid and blinked her eyes for a second just to make sure that her vision wasn't going to go out on her again then looked around. She could smell the old scents of cleaning chemicals, sweat, blood, and the dust that seemed to smother the scents, muting them.

She'd have to do something about the dust and other things if she was going to live here again. If one could call what she did now living.