5.

"Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto called out, and even Sasuke's eyes had widened. We hurried over to the form and rolled it carefully over onto its back.

"Was he injured in the battle?" Tazuna asked with morbid fascination. What must he think of all of this?

I felt up and down the form. "He's not bleeding, nothing's sticking out from any weird places." I checked breathing and pulse. "Breathing and pulse normal." I checked his forehead. "No fever."

"Chakra exhaustion," said Sasuke softly, his expression falling back into more of its normal reserve. "Sharingan can do that. It pulls too much chakra away from the body and drains it."

"Yes, that must be it," I said, frowning in concern. "His eyes are closed. That means he's not using the eye anymore, correct?" Sasuke nodded. "We have to get him resting at Tazuna's house."

Sasuke and Naruto each took one of Kakashi's arms and they helped heave the limp body up between them. I turned to Tazuna.

"Tazuna-san," I said, "please lead us to your home."

Tazuna's house was a simple but well crafted abode set far back into the trees, right up next to the water in a way that seemed almost dangerous. It was a notch better than the buildings we'd seen in town, as perhaps one might expect from a construction manager; it even had a balcony looking out over everything on the second floor. In the early evening, we made it to the door and Tazuna knocked heavily. We were let inside by a young dark haired woman, tightly put together and dignified, with lines in her face. Her eyes widened in surprise when she saw what her father had dragged in behind him.

"Tsunami," said Tazuna, "these are the ninja I told you about. They've already fended off two assassination attempts after learning how I tricked them. I think they deserve to stay with us for the time being."

So, no matter how much she didn't necessarily seem to like it, Tsunami was all business about getting Kakashi into a spare room, which she furnished with a pallet, blankets, and pillows. Kakashi-sensei was laid down and left in the dark, allowed to sleep. Soon, if he didn't wake up, he would have to be fed nutrition and fluids intravenously, but with Gatou after us that horrible possibility didn't bear thinking about.

In the other spare room, Tazuna helped Tsunami divide the room in half with a partition. Sasuke and Naruto and their clothes and supplies got one half; I was lucky enough, as the only girl, to get a full half of the room to myself. (And I only mean that slightly sarcastically.) Food would be provided by Tsunami and Tazuna.

We were all allowed to put down our things in our room and then gather around the table in the kitchen to have dinner, real home-cooked food for once, seafood featuring heavily in the menu. The table was one set low to the ground, in traditional style, and the room around it was almost as bare as the spare rooms had been. Save for a few pictures up on the walls, the feel of the whole place was very economical, the mark of people who lived in a culture that could not afford to spend a lot of money on decorative art. It was all scrubbed spotlessly clean, which had to be Tsunami's doing; she seemed rather proud.

The food was delicious. Tazuna's mysterious grandson did not appear; I saw a shy little dark-haired form half hiding in the doorway for a moment, then Tsunami brought him a plate full of food and the form disappeared.

"Thank you for keeping us here," I said to Tsunami later on in the meal. She was straight-backed and hard to read from her place at the table. "I know it costs extra money."

"Don't worry about it! You've saved my life, you're welcome here!" said Tazuna, more cheerful and in his element now that he was at home, eating, and relatively safe.

But I kept looking at Tsunami. "... Part of the reason guard escorts are so cheap is because half the cost comes from keeping the guards at your house for a week," said Tsunami at last, a humorless smile flickering across her features. "We understood this when we put in the request."

That was all she would say on the subject.

After dinner, we each took our turns in the family's one bath. I was last, because I knew how long I would take. (Warm baths were almost as good after getting beat around as chocolate was for period cramps.) I nearly moaned as I sunk down into the warm water and it reached my bruised skin and strained muscles. I lay back and just let myself relax, unwind completely for the first time since this mission had started. The steam filled the bathroom and floated up before my vision, and I just sat there for a long time, half asleep.

It was the closest I could probably get here to an onsen.

The next morning, Tsunami walked into Kakashi-sensei's room. A minute later, she poked her head out. "He's awake," she said. Then she scowled. "And he's trying to move around a lot when he knows he's not well."

All three of us got up and hurried into the room, Tazuna right behind us. Sure enough, there was Kakashi-sensei, lying still but with his eyes open. He looked over at us with effort when we came into the room, the blankets draped across his thin frame. It was strange, seeing him so human. The room smelled like him, not necessarily in the romantic way, but in the sense of how a normal human being would smell if he hadn't bathed for a couple of days. Kakashi-sensei had always seemed remote and implacable before; not so now.

This, I would learn, is how it always is with healing.

"Sensei, how hurt are you?" I asked as we kneeled down by his bedside.

Kakashi shook his head. "I'll probably... not be able to move around well for about a week," he said, slower than usual. "My standing will be shaky... I'll probably need crutches... I'll go through periods where I can't eat anything and periods where I want to eat everything..." He winced. "Chakra exhaustion is... not a fun disorder."

"But it happens to all people when they use the Sharingan too much?" I asked.

"Every single one," he confirmed.

So that was the price for having a high-powered hereditary technique.

I noticed, again, that Sasuke was listening closely.

"Sensei, I wanted to ask something else..." I added. Seeing Sasuke had made me remember. "How do you have the Sharingan? Sasuke said it runs in his family. And why do you only have one?"

Kakashi paused for a moment, his face unreadable. Sasuke had leaned forward slightly, as if to hear harder. "... I think I deserve to know," Sasuke said formally after a moment, stiffly, but his eyes were intent.

Kakashi sighed then. "Probably," he said. "Remember those friends I told you about, on the memorial stone?" His eyes were sad. "One of them died in the aftermath of a battle, there on the ground in front of me. He was an Uchiha. I had recently lost an eye during a fight, and he had a healer cut out his own Sharingan eye and implant it in my head as a parting gift." Our eyes had widened. "This ninja stuff," Kakashi sighed tiredly, "it's no joke. People get injured. People die. That's what happens. But... it was from him that I learned that people who break the rules may be trash, but people who don't help their friends are worse than trash. He died trying to save a friend, even though ninja logic told him he should have left her behind."

Kakashi smiled, bittersweetly. "That's amazing," said Naruto in awe. "He sounds incredible..."

We all looked at Sasuke for a moment. "It makes sense," he said at last, almost awkwardly, "to want a part of yourself to live on through your friend."

Kakashi seemed amused. "You're much more forgiving than the head and some council members of your clan were. They were scandalized a Sharingan had been given to someone on the outside."

"I... disagree with their anger," said Sasuke at last, frowning. "But it's important for me to know that the Sharingan can make someone this sick."

"So what are we going to do until you get better?" Naruto was the one to ask.

"What do you mean? He defeated such a strong ninja... we should be okay for a while," said Tazuna, frowning worriedly.

"Kakashi-sensei, I want to know something else," I said. "Why was the hunter nin alone, instead of in a group like they normally would be? Also, you told me that most hunter nin destroy a corpse on the spot. So why did that hunter nin take Zabuza's away?"

"Why indeed...?" Kakashi murmured, staring up at the ceiling.

"Sorry," I said, embarrassed, after a moment. "I know that's not a very important question. I was just -"

"No, you're right," said Kakashi. "That is an important question. That is, in fact, the important question."

"What do you mean?" Naruto asked in confusion.

"The standard hunter nin would have been surrounded by his fellows. He would have cut off Zabuza's head and burned the rest of the body in front of us. This singular hunter nin took the body away. We have no way of knowing what he did with it. He also did not kill Zabuza with a kunai, shuriken, or sword. He used senbon - long needles, typically undeadly, usually used in acupuncture to hit specific pressure points by the medically aware," Kakashi listed off.

My mind was spinning. Pressure points? "You're not really saying -" I began in horror.

But Sasuke had nodded. "Zabuza's alive," he said seriously, understanding. "The hunter nin uniform was a facade. One of his fellows helped him by putting him in a near death state."

"That would explain why the hunter nin seemed so angry!" I realized. "He kept talking about how we'd mutilated Zabuza's body. He was angry about the scar on his mid section."

"Wait, what?" Naruto was looking hurriedly from one to the other. "But Kakashi-sensei checked his pulse! Zabuza was dead!"

"But if a needle hit exactly the right pressure point, he would only look dead," I said. "And then he'd wake up again after a while, perfectly fine. In fact... if he weren't dead, Zabuza would have woken up by now." I frowned worriedly.

"Zabuza's at least as physically ruined as I am," said Kakashi. "We probably won't have to worry about him for at least another week."

"But, isn't this all a little presumptuous?" Tazuna was the one to ask. "Assuming someone is still alive based on little facts like that?"

"Ninja stay alive by being cautious," said Kakashi shortly, and I got the feeling he'd have come up with a more creative answer if he wasn't so exhausted.

I remembered the hunter nin - how protective he had been of Zabuza, how careful with his body. "You don't think we'll have to worry about the fake hunter nin, do you?" I asked.

"I doubt it," said Kakashi. "He hid and watched, rather than attacked. It might even have been his rabbit. If his job was not to attack then, I don't see why it would be now. He may be more of an assistant. The logical thing for him will be to wait for Zabuza to wake up. Besides, Zabuza isn't the type to like someone infringing on prey he sees as his."

"So - we'll get another chance to fight Zabuza and kill him," said Naruto, with a vicious kind of eagerness.

"Another chance to prove ourselves," Sasuke added, in something like satisfaction. "I take it we'll be training, in the time leading up to the next confrontation?" He said it like he expected it.

Was I the only one who wasn't enthused at the prospect of fighting Zabuza again? But if it would mean more training... "What will be doing?" I asked at last.

Kakashi, strangely, almost laughed. "Climbing trees," he said.

"... Great," I responded, staring at him. "So the next time Zabuza attacks us, we can climb a tree."

Kakashi really did laugh this time, and the others in the room hid smiles. "Well, it's a type of tree climbing that improves chakra endurance and control. At the end of the training, you all should be able to augment your muscles with chakra in various ways to make yourselves faster or stronger..."

"Or more stable on unstable surfaces," I said, my eyes lighting up in realization. "Kakashi-sensei, will you teach us how to walk on water?"

"Oh, I don't think you'll get that far in a week. You should stick with walls and tree trunks first, things that won't move. But I'll tell you what," he said when I seemed disappointed. "If you can get tree climbing down before the end of the week, I'll teach you water walking."

There was something else I wanted to practice as well. I had accidentally done a one-handed seal during the battle with the Onikyoudai, and I had seen Zabuza do one-handed seals while he had Kakashi in the Hydro Prison. I wanted to see if I could replicate the process and do a one-handed, silent spell.

"So we'll just be learning all kinds of awesome things!" said Naruto excitedly.

"That is the plan," said Kakashi, smiling slightly.

Then a little boy's voice echoed behind us. It said, "You're all going to die."

This sounds like the start from some kind of horror movie. In reality, we turned around and it was just Tazuna's grandson standing there behind us, looking sullen and annoyed. "Thanks for that," said Kakashi in surprise after a moment.

"It's true," said the boy. "No one can win against Gatou. You're all going to die." He was, apparently, a firm pessimist.

"Hey! What did you say?!" Naruto began to stand up in fury and I pulled him back down.

"Go easy on him, Naruto," I muttered. "He probably doesn't remember a time before Gatou."

Naruto stopped and stared at me. "But - but that's so sad," he said, stricken dumb.

I shrugged and nodded in the boy's direction.

"Inari," Tazuna scolded, "stop that and come give your Grandpa a hug." Inari ran over and hugged his grandfather.

"These people saved your grandfather's life," said Tsunami sternly. "Be nice to them."

"But it's not going to work," said Inari plaintively, turning to his mother. "This thing against Gatou can't work."

"You're wrong," said Naruto positively. "And we're going to prove it. We're going to be your heroes!" He beamed, standing, his chest swelling and his arms behind his back. He seemed quite decided.

"Heroes don't exist," said Inari morosely, and he turned and walked off into the depths of the house. "I'm gonna go watch the ocean..." he muttered, sighing.

"He has a serious case of the teenagers," I said, my eyebrows risen.

"He's lost someone to Gatou," Sasuke murmured. I looked over at him in surprise to find him staring after Inari, frowning.

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"I recognize it from myself," he said simply. And then suddenly I was left with no words. Naruto had always been an orphan. But perhaps Sasuke hadn't.

"... I'm sorry," said Tazuna, breaking the awkward silence. "You're right. Inari's father..." Tsunami turned away, crossing her arms over herself as if trying to keep herself together, her angry eyes filled with unshed tears. "Maybe I shouldn't talk about it today," said Tazuna quietly, looking over sideways at his daughter. "But it's why I decided to build the bridge."

We went out into the trees by Tazuna's house the next afternoon, where Kakashi-sensei explained to us our tree climbing training.

"First: what is chakra?" he asked. I raised my hand and he pointed at me, from where he was leaning against his crutches.

"Chakra is a combination of physical and spiritual energy. It's molded inside the body, crafted through hand seals, and then expelled outside the body in the form of a spell. Chakra is increased through training and experience," I said.

"Correct," said Kakashi, "but what some don't know is that chakra control is increased through training as well. So far, all of you have been using chakra very inefficiently. You can do some basic techniques learned from the Academy, but you waste chakra doing so. If we don't break that habit, you could end up -"

"Like you?" Naruto grinned.

"Don't insult me when I'm trying to explain something to you," said Kakashi. "And also I have the feeling you're going to be really bad at this, so I wouldn't be grinning."

"Ha! Says you!" said Naruto. "I'll prove you wrong!" Off to the side, Sasuke rolled his eyes.

"This is what you do," said Kakashi. "You channel chakra into the bottoms of your feet, supposedly the hardest place to channel chakra. Like so." He made a hand seal briefly, before grabbing his crutches again. "Then you use the chakra to stick to a surface." He put his feet up on the tree and began walking sideways up the tree trunk.

Our eyes were wide with wonder, back then when things still had the power to stun us. I had half expected it, but even still... "That's incredible," I said.

"It is," agreed Kakashi. "And you three are going to give it a try." He threw a kunai down to each of us. "Get a running start and make it as far up the tree as you can. Mark your spot on your tree each time and then try to go higher than your best."

I raised my hand again. "What happens if we fall off the tree and land on our head?" I asked worriedly.

"If you're a good ninja, you'll learn not to land on your head," said Kakashi. "If you're not a good ninja, you will die!" He smiled cheerfully.

He wasn't as scary after Zabuza, though.

And so we began. Sasuke and Naruto kept falling off, but I actually found going up and down the tree trunk to be surprisingly easy. Kakashi complimented me on having naturally good chakra control, perfect for things like genjutsu and healing - which I'd had some idea of before - and then he used my easy success to goad Sasuke and Naruto into doing better. Soon, they were competing against each other, trying their hardest to make it up the tree before the other. At least they seemed motivated.

I quickly learned something else, though: to make up for my good chakra control, I had very little chakra. Going up and down the tree ten times left me tired, breathing hard. Sasuke and Naruto could make it halfway up the tree twenty times and not even seem to feel it. I was reminded bitterly of why Naruto hadn't taught me the Kage Bunshin - he didn't think I had enough chakra for it.

"Kakashi-sensei," I said, looking over at our teacher, who was sitting and watching the process.

He smiled almost knowingly. "Yes, Sakura?"

"Can practicing this a lot improve your chakra reserves?" I asked.

"It can," he said.

And so I started practicing running up and down the tree near Tazuna's house every night after dinner. I would also practice doing the three ninjutsu spells taught to us at the Academy: the replacement, the transformation, and the illusion copy. All required more chakra than genjutsu illusions did, so they were also good practice.

But I wasn't going to let Kakashi-sensei get away without fulfilling one of his training promises. So on that first afternoon, after I had mastered tree climbing, he took me back to the pond on the way to Tazuna's house and we overcame our bad memories of the place by helping me practice water walking in the shallows. Mostly, I just got my bare feet wet a lot at first. I didn't finish the training in the first day, so I came back the next evening before doing tree climbing practice and tried water walking again; the unsteady surface made it hard, but that time I got it.

One thing I did use genjutsu for was practicing one-handed seals. It took me a while to replicate what I had done by accident that afternoon with the Onikyoudai, but I quickly learned that starting a spell two handed and then keeping it up one handed was easier than starting it one handed. After that, I just had to figure out why. After some concentrating on it, I realized it was because the chakra was already shaped in the air beside the hand. So, with some chakra control finagling, I managed to move the chakra from my one hand to the air beside it in the correct precise movement, and then I could do one-handed silent spells.

Naruto and Sasuke trained every night after dinner, too, beside me. Neither of them had even made it up the tree yet, so we were doing different things, but sometimes we would stop and Sasuke and I would help Naruto with some of the stuff he'd missed at the Academy, as I'd promised myself. Originally, it was just going to be me helping Naruto, but then in his own macho, contemptuous way, Sasuke said it would be better if we "were all of a more equal level." Naruto got really pissed off if Sasuke started beating him, though, so I would fight with Naruto, and Sasuke would stand back and give Naruto pointers. He seemed to have ninjutsu spells down pretty well already, especially the Kage Bunshin. So we helped him better his basic taijutsu - he had lots of energy, strong stances, and painful punches, so that went pretty quickly - and we also helped him learn how to recognize and break out of my genjutsu, which he apparently didn't know how to do at all. This last part. Took. Forever.

Sasuke and Naruto were surprisingly good at helping each other, but they'd just go back to competing against each other madly at the tree climbing training right afterward. They seemed motivated by my moving on to other things, almost angry about it, though I knew they were angry at themselves and not at me. I did give them some pointers - particularly about staying calm and emotionally in control while molding chakra, since they were such competitive, emotional boys.

But I was so far ahead in my training that during the day, since Kakashi was still recovering and Naruto and Sasuke needed to train more, I was charged with accompanying Tazuna to his bridge and guarding him while he continued his work on it with the other construction workers. And I always went, no matter how exhausted I was from training the night before.

And out there near the sea in the hot sun, I read. A lot. Of books.

So one afternoon, I was sitting there near the construction site, up on the bridge, holding my book, and I was mentally pitying myself because I wasn't able to listen to music - that, apparently, would count as "sensory distraction" that would "impede my ninja capabilities." (Stupid Kakashi-sensei.) I was pretty bored. I'd done nothing but sit there and watch Tazuna and his workers labor for hours. I couldn't even do any of it myself; it would have "gone outside the bounds of my prescribed duty." So I was looking for anything to take my mind off of things, even as I was reading.

Which was why I looked up and noticed it when one of the laborers approached Tazuna. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, except the laborer in question looked... nervous.

"Tazuna," he said reluctantly after a moment, "can I... talk to you?"

"Sure, Giichi, what's wrong?" said Tazuna, frowning, puzzled, straightening.

"I... I've been thinking about it, and... I don't want to build this bridge anymore. I'm turning in my notice."

"What - why the - why the hell not? Not you too!" Tazuna seemed taken aback, angry, almost betrayed. I got the feeling he and Giichi were friends. "Giichi, this bridge is important!"

Giichi looked away, almost shamefully. "... I know," he said. "And I want to help. But Gatou's men have been sending us threatening letters. I have my wife to think of. Tazuna... you know they're going to kill you, right? And all of this, everything, it will all just lose meaning if you die."

"Are you asking me to quit?" Tazuna asked in a dangerous tone.

"I... I'm asking you to think of your own life!" said Giichi, forceful at this last part, looking up at his friend pleadingly.

Tazuna's jaw set, his eyes flaring. "... I can't quit this project," he said. "You know that. The hopes of our people are riding on it. Commerce will suddenly be able to flow in and out of the Wave, even better than it used to. I can't just quit."

"But if we die..."

Tazuna paused. "It's lunch time," he said at last, quietly, solemnly. "Let's stop for now." He turned to leave.

"Tazuna -!" Giichi lifted a hand after his friend's back in panic.

"Relax, Giichi," Tazuna sighed, "you don't have to come anymore." He sounded disappointed. And he just kept walking.

But as Giichi closed his eyes shamefully, I wondered if that was really what he'd been shouting about at all. I got the sudden, sinking feeling I'd just watched the ruin of a decades-old friendship.

And I would have forgotten about the incident, but the point was brought home to me again later that afternoon. The bridge builders had quit for the day and I was, as usual, accompanying Tazuna back to his home. But this time, instead of going around the village, we went right through the heart of it.

"I have to buy the ingredients for tonight's dinner," sighed Tazuna. "I usually hate going through the center of town, but..."

And that had made me pause. Why would someone hate walking the streets of their own home?

I saw as soon as we entered the bustling heart of the city. Homeless people with signs saying, "Will Do Any Kind Of Work" lined the streets. Pickpockets were rampant, and I had to sling my bag across my shoulders to keep someone from being able to tug at it and run off with it. I held myself in close, not sure what it was about the place that made it feel so... dangerous. Maybe it was the way everyone looked starved, the way their eyes were like Giichi's - hollow, and unable to meet anyone else's for shame. Everyone went about their business with slumped shoulders.

"Is this all Gatou?" I asked after a while.

Tazuna looked sideways at me. "You're a sharp one, aren't you?"

I looked down, strangely embarrassed.

At the grocery store, there was barely any food, little on the shelves, little even in the produce sections. What there was, was picked over, thin, and bruised. The minute people saw us buying food, we started getting requests from poorer people - adults and children alike snatching at our bags, holding their hands out for money. We got people like that all the way home. I gave a little bit of money to each of them, until Tazuna told me that if I gave too much away I'd eventually come upon one of the homeless people who would harass us for money, following us home.

"It's despicable, what it's all come to," said Tazuna, angrily. "The adults have become cowards. We need that bridge to give them hope. Everything I see only makes me more determined to finish it."

And the bridge was important. But was it really enough? Somehow, I got the inexplicable feeling that I should be doing more. Maybe it was because Sasuke and Naruto were training all day, and I spent so many long hours sitting with Tazuna, hoping something would change. Watching other people work toward their goal.

What about my goal? What did I want to do?

I just felt so privileged, all of a sudden, to have grown up in the place that I had, and by the time we'd made it back to Tazuna's home that evening with the crickets singing all around us, my mind was full of it. Konoha was a paradise of wealth and peace in comparison to what I'd seen in the Wave. In comparison to what I'd heard of from the Mist, even. The Mist, an intimidating and violent military base, with its viciousness and poverty; the Wave, a poor fishing country, with its depression and shabbiness. Meanwhile, my own village was full of wide, paved, tree-lined avenues, covered in intricate and colorful buildings, with weather that was usually calm, and schools set conveniently next to homes, and ninja coming back and forth beside civilians and children in peace, and an old and wise leader. I was blessed, to have the Leaf, to have my family and my girlfriends.

The idea of the benefits of my own home pulled up something in the back of my mind. What could I do to help the Wave people? I remembered the produce section of the grocery store, the thin and picked over vegetables, the meager amounts of food available to feed so many.

"Tsunami-san," I said, standing up and coming over to where she was stirring a pot of food in the kitchen. She looked over at me suspiciously, stiff-backed. "Do people here know how to grow their own food?"

"We don't have many resources here," said Tsunami in response.

"But... you don't need much to start a vegetable garden... some seeds and good soil. Does no one here know how to grow something like that?" I asked.

"... We're fishing people," she said. "That's what we've always relied on."

My mind was spinning. I knew how to grow vegetables. A little old lady on one of our D ranks had showed us the basics of how to take care of a vegetable garden, and I had a retentive memory. I'd kept everything in my head.

"Do you think, if I gave a class showing the basics of how to plant a vegetable garden out here by your house... do you think people would come to it?" I asked then, nervous, hopeful.

Tsunami stared at me for a moment as if she'd never really seen me before. "I know several women who would be interested," she said at last. "We could do it in the early evenings, after you come back, before dinner."

And so by the time Naruto and Sasuke had come in from training and Kakashi had come down from his recovery room, we had already hammered out the details.

Naruto and Sasuke's competitiveness had begun to border on ridiculousness. They had moved it from training, where it was useful, and into the dining room, where it wasn't. They almost made themselves hurl trying to out-eat each other, and after that I moved our places at the table so that I was sitting between them and they couldn't make eye contact with each other. Kakashi, of course, was completely unhelpful and seemed almost amused by my efforts. Sometimes, taking care of boys really was like taking care of small children.

There was tea after dinner and as Tsunami did the dishes, the talk turned to the day behind us. "We saw a lot of... interesting things, while we were out walking in town today," I announced. "A lot of poverty." I was somber. My teammates looked over at me curiously.

"How was it?" Tsunami asked her father, who'd had a couple of drinks with dinner.

"The same as usual," he said in a slightly louder-than-normal tone. "Nobody'll look you in the eye. I tell you, things sure have changed since -"

He paused, and Tsunami had stiffened.

I was confused. "Since Gatou came along, you mean?"

Tazuna hesitated and then plowed ahead. "Since my son in law died," he said.

The reaction within the room was immediate. Inari, who had been very quiet except for the occasional teenager-ish comment, stood from the table and ran from the room. Tsunami threw down her dishes with a clank and hurried after him, uncharacteristically distraught. "Father, I told you not to talk about him in front of Inari!" she snapped backward defensively, tears in her eyes again, and then she shut the door behind herself.

There was a moment's pause. I looked at Tazuna. He seemed sad. "We never talk about him anymore," he said slowly. "It's like he died shamefully."

"Is that what the picture is about?" I asked. Everyone looked over at me in surprise. "In one of the photographs on the wall, there are four people posing: Tazuna, Inari, Tsunami, and a man. But the man's head has been torn out of the picture. Inari looks at that picture a lot. I always thought he was looking at his father. That's why I never said anything."

"Did one man's death really change everything that much?" Kakashi asked, sounding surprised, almost skeptical.

"Inari's father was the hero of this island," said Tazuna.

"Inari's father was called a hero?" Naruto asked. "Then why did he say he doesn't believe in them?" I was surprised Naruto had connected all the dots and remembered such a trivial detail, but then I remembered that Naruto, with his big ambitions and his love for stories, certainly wanted to be a hero, and at the very least believed in them himself.

"Probably because," said Tazuna bitterly, "Gatou took that away from him. But while he was alive, Kaiza was a hero. He and Inari weren't related. He married Tsunami and adopted Inari. But they all loved each other very much. Everyone loved Kaiza," added Tazuna, as if this were an irrefutable fact.

And with tears in his own eyes, he told us the story.

"Kaiza met Inari first, about three years ago now.

"Inari was bullied a lot as a little boy. He didn't have any friends and he really wanted one, so we got him a dog from the local animal shelter. He named the dog Pochi. One day, Pochi and Inari were out near the ocean and some bullies came along. They took Pochi from Inari and threw him into the water, then they told Inari to go after the dog and get him. Pochi was thrashing around in the water, frightened, but Inari couldn't swim, so he didn't go in after him. He was too scared.

"The bullies pushed Inari into the water after Pochi, and Inari began to drown. Pochi finally learned how to dog paddle, but because Inari had abandoned Pochi, Pochi abandoned Inari. He swam away and left Inari there to drown. The bullies chased after Pochi, and Inari was left alone, drowning in the sea.

"Kaiza came along and saw what had happened. He was a big, muscled, tanned man, a fisherman, a traveler from a foreign land, come here in a little boat just to start over. He jumped into the water and saved Inari from drowning; then he went after the bullies. He never did tell us what happened after that, but I get the feeling he scared the living shit out of them, because Inari was never bullied by anyone again.

"Inari came to next to Kaiza on a remote beach on the south side of the island. Kaiza had gone fishing and started grilling the fish he caught over a fire. He fed Inari, made sure he was okay. Then he took him home, and that's how Tsunami met Kaiza.

"Kaiza taught Inari, and he taught the other people of our village. He was a brave man, and he taught us bravery. Kaiza always said a true man lived in a way that he would never have to regret anything he had done, and he said a true man protected whatever was important to him - even if he was only one man, even if he could only do so much, a true man lived without regret and protected anything he cared about. 'I will protect everything I care about,' he always said, 'with these two arms.'

"Inari's birth father had died before he could really remember him, so Kaiza became Inari's father. He taught him how to fish, how to do lots of little things. Kaiza became a member of our family. He and Tsunami fell in love.

"Kaiza became an important member of the village, too. People called him our hero. Whenever danger came - a dam broke, or anything else of the sort - or whenever people weren't sure what to do - at town hall meetings and other things - Kaiza was the one people turned to. He was a natural leader, and he would always do whatever it took to sort things out. Once, he jumped out into the middle of a freezing storm and swam across to tie a dam back together so a sector wouldn't get flooded. Kaiza was a very vocal person, and when he spoke everyone listened. And when he spoke out against Gatou, everyone listened. Gatou saw Kaiza's effect on people, and he decided that had to be eliminated.

"One night after fishing, Kaiza never came home. The next day, everyone was gathering in the town square. They watched in horror from behind erected chain-link fencing, powerless, as Kaiza, who had both his arms broken, was publicly executed by some of Gatou's thugs. They had a samurai behead him with a sword, did it properly and everything. Inari was there, crying. His father was smiling at him, with effort, until the very moment he died.

"Inari has never believed in anything since. Especially not heroes.

"And that's - that's not fair... That man made everyone lose their faith - and that's why I have to -" And here Tazuna looked away, emotional. For all his flaws, I suddenly realized he was a very brave man. He was old, but he was one of the only people who was still trying to do something.

The story had caught at me. I used to be bullied as a little girl myself. All the other girls at my civilian school would make fun of me, calling me ugly, following me home and calling me names. Ino once saw what was going on, from where she lived down the street from me. She didn't know me then, but she ran over and defended me from the other girls. From then on, we were best friends, and that was how I had started down my eventual path to becoming a ninja.

I tried to imagine Ino being executed. She was just so strong, spunky, and sarcastic. It didn't fit. I couldn't imagine what Inari must be going through.

I wondered what Sasuke, who had lost his parents and who had seen murder, who aspired to it, would have to say. But he was dead silent, staring down at the table in front of him.

I almost missed, then, what Naruto had to say.

He alerted everyone to his presence, first-off, by attempting to stand and then falling over on his face. "... Naruto," I said at last, "are you okay?"

"You can't train anymore tonight," said Kakashi knowingly, and suddenly I realized all at once what was going on. "You're too exhausted."

"I have to -" Naruto grabbed the edge of the table and stood, trembling, weak, but determined. There was a terrible fire in his eyes. "I'm going to prove to him that heroes exist. I'm going to prove it to him." The fire bordered on painful. Then Naruto turned away and began to walk with trembling steps toward the door.

I met Sasuke's eye and he nodded, standing, seeming almost dryly amused. "Hey, Naruto," I called out quietly, playfully, "aren't you going to invite us?"

Naruto looked around in surprise, as if suddenly reminded that he didn't have to do it all on his own anymore. And we walked up, each taking one of his arms, and we helped him out toward the training space in the trees.