Chapter Six: Losing Battles

War leaves scars like love.

Terumi Mei was certifiably insane.

Zabuza left the cramped excuse for an office with one less eyebrow, Haku with lipstick on his cheek, and Naruto with a new friend. As Naruto chattered about how cool she was and could she teach him how to spit lava and Haku edged away cautiously as if his admiration of the woman could be contagious, Zabuza resolutely ignored the two stealths shadowing their movement.

He did allow himself one slightly bitter remark: "Ah, how nice it is to be trusted."

Haku only gives him a questioning but trusting look, while Naruto's glance is more veiled in shadows. There's a spot of understanding in the blonde's eyes as he smiles.

In the end, understanding or not, they were all just steel sharpening steel.

Mei smiled, waving off Ao's concerns.

"Zabuza's an old friend, and he brought us a hefty sum as a gift. As for the two brats - one is obviously on our side, for his own hide if nothing else. And the tree-hugger is just a naive kid. It doesn't matter if he's sincere or not. He's a chakra powerhouse that can spam shadow clones - we can use that."

She laughed. It was a rusted and insincere laugh, brittle and flaking in the humid airs of war.

"A communications system," Naruto echoed, a bit unsurely. "How can the Kage Bunshin do that?"

Mei resisted putting her head in her hands. The kid was really clueless. "Do you know anything about the forbidden technique that you're spamming all over the place? Or have you been using it like some mindless drone?" As she spoke, she reached out to tousle his hair, softening her rebuke. He pouted up at her like a kid, leaning into her hand, and despite herself Mei liked the Konoha nukenin. He was a risk and Mei liked gambling

"It's not like anybody taught me," Naruto complained. "I learned it from reading a scroll."

"It's a matter of application," Mei explained impatiently, trying to fathom all the impossibilities gathered in the blonde before her; the chakra, the casual seal usage, the lightning reaction speed. "The clones can go anywhere, and when one pops it transmits information to you immediately. It's communication at unrivaled speed across distances."

"Oh," he said. Then, "So, if it's so great, aren't you already doing it?"

"Idiot!" Mei smacks him lightly on top of his head. "Do you think everybody can put out a hundred shadow clones and still move? Maybe you've been using it too much, if such a thing is possible, and it's addled your brains!" But she was smiling down at him, like the obedient puppy he'd painted himself as.

"Ow, sorry, sorry," Naruto mumbles, mind turning over possibilities. He smiles a goofy grin up at the Mist rebellion leader and doesn't voice what he is thinking–that it shouldn't take vast amounts of chakra or something so tedious as sorting through hours of clone memories. A couple of Furu bound in the right seal should do quite nicely. Now, how to go about it…?

"So, how many clones do you need?"

It took them a couple weeks, but the team got used to the blonde shadow. Kimi took the longest to come around, struggling to reconcile the concept that the talkative young boy that accompanied them to guard the river pass was just an imprint of real personality, a chakra construct with no meaning beyond what the technique wrought. He seemed so real–he spoke often of food he liked to eat, things he had seen, dreams he'd dreamt. For a nukenin, he was startlingly naive and childlike. For a mass of condensed energy and will, he was startlingly real. For the technique that would serve as their panic cord and updater, he was all too much just another team member.

His only peculiarity was that every report, he made another one of himself and then brutally executed himself. And every month or two, depending on the frequency of reports to be made, there would be two of them for a little while before the old disappeared.

In the end, Yura, who had accepted him most readily into their midst, was most wary of Naruto. And Kimi ended up spending most of her time talking to the boy that listened all too attentively. Yura thought she was insane to indulge in wasting so much time with what amounted to another tool in warfare, no matter how sophisticated.

But Kimi was a storyteller. She was shaman of the Kiri Tsunamorigi, and she held in her mind all the stories of her people, passed down from mother to daughter since the Sage of Six Paths. Her life was one of words and all the things beyond words that were carried on language, but warriors had no need for stories and Mist had no need for storytellers.

The days were long and tedious. They scavenged in the surrounding forest, foraging in rotations to avoid depleting any one area of wildlife. Shipments occasionally came through, each heralded with the frog song signal, and occasionally some had luxuries to spare for them. To live in this small outpost of the Rebellion was a safe but unglamorous job; their combat abilities were too poor to afford them real place in the fighting, but their dedication and detection skills sufficient for guard duty.

The guard on one ship, full to the brim with provisions, pressed into their hands a small packet of tea. That day, they drank Tea Country Genmaicha, and then Yura and Shouta went to scout for ambushes again. Once they left, she poured him a little and added water to both their cups. It was too precious to waste on a chakra construct, according to her team, but a story was better over warm tea. As they sipped, she thought about war and spoke to her ever willing audience.

"The daimyo was born for war," she told Naruto. "But his brother was born for peace. Perhaps the warrior did not know what to do with happiness, with quiet blessed tranquility. For those who grow feeding on victory cannot know rest. So when you eat of the fruits of conquest, and feast in the halls of triumph, drink also of the waters of giving with no price, the most quiet of loves, lest you become king of only war. Such a crown is plastic, not golden."

"There's another shipment coming," Naruto told Mei after a couple of silent minutes spent sifting through the memories of campfire stories. He was perched on the ceiling, cross-legged, channeling wind chakra to the logs hanging from his hands. "ETA is two weeks, and they have tea this time."

"Good," Mei said, sipping her favorite Genmaicha while marking over maps vigorously while shifting contract papers around. "I'm running out."

Suzaku was the son of a master swordsman, descended from a line of ronin. His father had been killed by Yagura, and his mother had been a weed-whisperer, a witch of the green thumb before they came for his parents. All she could do was affect the plants she grew so they had interesting properties when they retained her chakra, but hers was a bloodline and so it was condemned.

He mourned them still, and so he took up the sword and went to the Rebellion. It was not honorable work, raiding administration storage and scattering blinded murderers. Murderers, not soldiers, blinded by lies to the suffering of the people they should have been protecting.

Suzaku always believed that might necessitated right–that power called for honor as well.

There was no honor in Mist anymore.

Their 'orange shadow,' as Mei liked to call the clones of her little pet Konoha nukenin, grated on him at first. What did the boy deserter know of honor? What did he know of suffering? Under what power could he waltz into Mist and think to pity the strong but struggling people?

But again and again, Suzaku was surprised. A couple of offhand comments, a couple of late night conversations, and the orange shadow became much more than a shadow. A friend, a light, more like. Somebody who somehow snuck in jars of spices undetected–perhaps from the Mizukage himself, for who had such luxuries in these times?–just because Suzaku mentioned once that once he'd wanted to be a cook, before the world forced his hand to the sword.

Oh, Suzaku was furious. But he was also happy, and happiness was such a rare thing that even a little was a treasure.

"The North Kura storage expedition is successful."

"These are their next plans," Mei says, passing him a memo.

Norugumi wanted to be a shinobi, once upon a time. Suzume was just a branch member, content with raising bees all her life, before the Family was gone and then there was only her and the bees and the anger. Mina and Nina were twins, and then there was just Mina and a grave. Tsuna still went back every other weekend to check on his sister's child, because she couldn't do so anymore.

Kimi died in a surprise ambush. There were no ships coming, and none came for the Rebellion for another month until a different land passage had been found and secured.

Suzaku lost his right hand in a fight during which he was outclassed, and began to train his left. He cried over it sometimes, at the wok, awkwardly wielding a spatula in a clumsy left limb. He thought the fumes hid the liquid on his cheeks, but the sound of frying meat did not quite disguise the muffled sobs.

Norugumi, in a point ambush. Suzume, left beeless and teamless, committed to a dirty white room for recovery. Mina, left eye dug out, no longer able to look in the mirror and find Nina.

And more, and more.

Naruto didn't remember many things–he always forgot the books that Iruka made them read–but he remembered each name, each story, each unnecessary meal. Every kindness that he hadn't known before, every smile and laugh shared, precious upon precious made bittersweet by the hindsight quality of memory.

Everything, even all the snide remarks, even the little things that rose from him still being set apart and marked as different, lesser somehow, all of it was beautiful in reminiscence. The good outweighed the bad in tragedy, and there were only lost things to mourn.

A hundred new friends and all of them lost, one way or another, lost and never to be found. And a shadow, gone as the light hit, just a tap or a jutsu, incapable of anything but making a little report in a little office for a lethal cause.

War.

Her house was a wreck, unsalvageable rubble in the midst of a city of ruin. Her parents were dead, buried six feet under together, not out of any romance or love or consideration, but just because Sakura didn't have the strength to dig two graves in the family plot. Whatever arm muscles she had built up in the past were all gone now. And the stadium was gone, the stadium she'd found their bodies in, and Tsunami-san was gone, not to be found in the dress shop Sakura had been watching during the exams, and all her future was gone, crumbling before her into ashes.

She couldn't bear to go to watch the exams, and now she rued her decision. In the bitter darkness of grief, she wished she'd died with her parents. They hadn't been close until after they'd found her crying and broken after her failure in chasing her dream. They hadn't been close for many years, as their headstrong daughter pursued a killing dream, but then they'd found her sobbing in her room and they were the ones that picked her up and made her strong again.

Sakura picked up a needle and put it to silk, but it didn't feel right. She started a seam and looked over the shop, front window blown apart, and the stack of backed up orders on the counter, at the people jumping from roof to roof with urgent purpose. Then she took up the needle, finished the seam, and left the shop.

She tied up her long hair in a bun and walked into the hospital and grabbed a woman by the shoulders. Tears were streaming down her face, and she felt them and for once didn't care.

"I'll do anything you need," she said. "Just don't let me be useless anymore. I don't want to be alone anymore."

"What can you do," the frazzled nurse snapped at her, "Just what do you think you can do!"

Another one pulled her aside and spoke gently. Then she turned back and gently said to Sakura, "We don't have time to waste. But if you have any skills, we'll take them and use them."

"I can sew a dozen kinds of stiches and do noble-commissioned embroidery," she said. And then, remembering a childhood dream, added, "I have 99 percent chakra efficiency and eidetic memory."

The nurse laughs an incredulous kind of laughter. But she takes Sakura's hands, glancing at the scarring on them. It speaks of the hours of work in her mother's best friend's shop, trying somehow to make up for wasted years and Tsunami's kindness to her family. Trying to make a way for herself in the blackness, trying to be of use again.

"I don't know about the second or third, child, but if you can sew even half as well as you claim we can use you. And if you have 99 percent chakra efficiency," another little laugh, "Then forget about useful. You'll end up wishing you had fewer uses, but there's few rewards greater than what you'll find here. Here lie the high and the low of human life and death."

"Yes," Sakura murmurs, thinking of the shovel in the wet ground and the markerless plot.

The nurse considers her and her face softens. "You don't know what you're getting into, kid," she said, "And one day you'll hate me for this."

Then she pulls Sakura into the doors.

It was noon by the time he made it to the office. Mei cast him a glance over her tea.

"You're late," she remarked.

"I can't do this anymore," he said.

Mei was a hard woman, demanding excellence from herself and from her followers. She had taken to him, but Naruto knew that her world was colored by the battle she was waging. It was a war against injustice, against the people who wanted slaughter, of the blood of families.

It was Haku and Zabuza's cause, but these days Naruto doesn't see them at all. He wanted to believe, wanted to change something in this darkness-ridden country, but all he did was sleep and dream of things he had never done, people he'd never dined with, friends he'd never met. When he closed his eyes, Naruto saw death and a thousand hours he hadn't lived, and he felt old and tired and tried and incapable of making a change.

There was a short pause, filled with the shuffling of papers and the scratch of Mei's grandmother's fountain pen, passed down to her, against the contracts to be signed and deals to be made. Money and food and people and lives, for freedom. Balances. Perhaps she weighed Naruto, too, against some inconceivable measure.

"Take a break," the leader of the Rebellion decreed. "I'll see you back in three days."

"Naruto," a voice called him on the morning of the last day.

Naruto turned and found nothing. Just the beating heart of the seaside, to which he'd escaped following routes he knew so well but had never walked himself. He looked for Haku, and found the boy in the hospital bandaging wounds, hand alight with green. But Naruto couldn't look in the eyes of the men he'd met but never met. It somehow felt like lying, and besides, he didn't know how to bandage anyway. So he didn't bother Haku and left.

He couldn't even find Zabuza, who was probably off sabotaging important things.

He held the papers in his hands, little chunks of unintelligible scribbles that only he knew held the ideas to a seal that would, in theory, do the same thing that he was doing for the Rebellion. Be his replacement.

Like the seal used for picture development, commercialized by a Rock nin in the form of the camera, it recorded patterns of light and color as perceived by the user's eye. Naruto had skimmed through the theory behind it—complicated material on brain structure and recording the electrical signals that sight provoked. Since time-space seals were notoriously difficult and required such personalization that use was nearly always incredibly limited, Naruto used a workaround that merged wind chakra theory to pass the information as a wave in the air, so that rather than actual teleportation, the picture would (theoretically) transport at nearly instantaneous speeds from one seal to the other. The receiving seal, then, was a reverse of the first, and would use the recorded signals to stimulate the same neurons in the receiving brain, making the image sent overtake the user's sight as long as chakra was applied.

It would be enough to send images of written messages or entire visual fields, far as the eye could see, as a still photograph that superimposed over the receiver's vision.

But as a Konoha ninja, no matter how much he liked the Mist cause, Naruto couldn't justify giving his invention to them. Especially after the debacle in Wave, he felt like he needed the backup of at least one of his contacts. Only there was no way to contact one, out here on the other side of a spread of ocean.

So here he was, at the river opening to the sea, wondering how streams always found their way to the ocean and where he was supposed to find his way to. He was unfathomably tired, tired from constantly learning and from all the stories and all the people pouring, desperately, hope into a boy who pretended to have the endless optimism he'd started with.

"Naruto," the voice said again, and this time Naruto channeled his chakra to his ears. A pinpoint of clarity in his mind–the clouds so sharp, the birds and the little dead man o'wars on the beach and a man in the trees.

"Kakashi-sensei," he said, turning to see the man he'd once hated, who'd become a teacher to him.

"The Hokage is dead. It's time to go home."

Author's Notes:

The Hokage is dead, but this isn't.

My belated birthday gift to you (warning: not proofread). Press a button and leave me some love?

-L