Archive of Our Own

The first thing you should know is that I’m only writing this because Tsuna bet me I wouldn’t and I couldn’t let that stand. It’s complicated between us, too much to get into now, but even though I’m not quite sure what I owe her, and I fear it’s a lot, I can’t let her win a single bet yet. That’s the secret to her unluckiness: I’ve actively been sabotaging her every wager since we were green gennin. Shizune knows, but she’s been sworn to secrecy on pain of death; Kato Dan’s niece has a healthy respect for mischief and Tsunade’s a tough mentor. It must be fun to see her squirm, to see her blow all her clan money to debtors and loan sharks over fucking tiles, of all the ignoble things. Gambling is my least favorite of the shinobi prohibitions, but I won’t begrudge her her coping. Kami know I’ve done worse.

What she doesn’t know is that a solid half of the gamblers she goes up against are on my payroll. It’s a bonus of having an expansive spy network spanning the continent. She can’t get away from my machinations if she wanted to. I know that sounds petty, but it’s a thing between us, I swear. She’s got to at least suspect me; she wouldn’t be a Sannin if she didn’t at least suspect I was behind her financial misfortunes. I woke up one night in a onsen in Yu out of a cold sweat to begin the whisper campaign that landed her with both the nicknames the Slug Queen and the Legendary Sucker, but paid the agents more to spread the latter over the former. I figure, she’s already going to break at least three bones the next time we meet anyway. I may as well earn them.

Once, to keep her from winning a bet, I spent a month infiltrating the Daimyo’s Palace in Ishi to blackmail the feudal lord’s niece, since we’d had an affair a few years back, and I called in a few favors to get the debt collectors after Tsuna to run her out of Stone, because I was in Stone for nefarious reasons, and I was there first, dammit. Anyway, it cost me a lot to set up; the royal niece was not happy to see me again, no idea why, we had a fine time, the ladies love me, but I used up an important favor and now I’m not allowed back into Ishi for political reasons. And also because I’m being sued for alimony by three separate nobles, one of which is ugly enough I know she’s lying. I might have been drunk, but not that drunk.

No problem, I’ve got my ways of going where I want without being seen. Wouldn’t be much of a shinobi if that weren’t true. But the scheme worked; I got Tsunade out so when word got out about what I’d done, under one of my aliases so as not to reflect back on the Leaf, the last Senju wasn’t in country for suspicion to fall upon. That was good work. The best work. I got a few drinks in Key to celebrate, and to monitor the news coming out of Stone, just in case there were a few loose ends I needed to tie up. I’m usually good enough not to leave things like witnesses, but sometimes, especially now that I’m getting older, it happens. No big deal, I don’t mind the extra work. Keeps me spry, it does, keeping the enemy informers on their toes about me, and a witness is only a witness until I can promote them to casualty.

Anyway, this is just to show that I’ve put more work into keeping Tsunade loosing than this. I’m good at writing, the best at writing: my Icha Icha series is beloved by rabid fans across the continent. It may just be a convenient cover for my spying, but it wouldn’t work half as well if the books weren’t actually good. Writing calms me, helps me work around problems in creative ways, keeps my hand steady for fuuinjutsu.

So when Tsunade slammed her glass down on the table hard enough to dent the wood of her desk and sloshed sake out over a copy of my newest continuation to the series, Icha Icha Paradise, an author’s copy I’d autographed for her in my best calligraphy, after flipping through it and declaring, in that loud, sure, heiresses voice of her, that it was total garbage, irredeemable, full of the lecherous fantasies of a perverted old man writing self-insert porn, and I’d laughed, because I wasn’t hurt in the slightest, of course, and asked why she hated it so much. I’d expected her to say something like its porn, or something to do with how there’s only the vaguest suggestion of anything resembling a plot, or even, if I was really unlucky and about to need my arm healed, that the busty broad in chapter three looked like her.

But she threw back another slug of sake, expensive, imported from Bird Country, on my tab, wiped her mouth on her sleeve like she wasn’t the Godaime Hokage of Konoha, and said, “none of its true.”

And I’d had a single second of glorious hope that it meant something it didn’t, but she followed her statement up with, “Why is everything you write fiction?”

It’d caught me off guard; I felt that the conversation had unexpectedly gone off script. I’d laughed easily, the one she’d know to read as half humor, half dare and said, “You want me to write nonfiction? Publish it, even? I’d be rich! The Raikage would kill to hear all my true accounts of everything I’ve seen and done.”

And she’d smirked, raised her hand for another round, and said, “Bet you can’t write an autobiography without it being all fantasy porn.”

“If it was an autobiography, the porn would be real, and take up at least half the book, and it would cause several international scandals and at least two merchant wars.”

“Coward,” she said, pouring herself a new glass. “I’d have it censored, naturally, if you ever managed to tell the truth. But you’ve been telling lies long enough I think you’ve rather lost the knack of it.”

“Ha,” I laughed, loud and long. I’m a big guy, wide shoulders, and the laughter boomed around the stall. “There’s a trick to telling the truth, Hime. And you don’t have it.”

She just smiled, downed all the sake in her glass and said, “Bet you don’t either.”

So that’s all of that, then. Now I’m in a room in Shimo, promising myself in writing that I’m going to sicc Gamariki on her the next time we meet face to face, because maybe this is a bit more work than writing tales about swashbuckling heroes seducing grateful broads. Not that I can’t do it, I’m just not sure where to start. My books are about heroes, and happy endings. I’m not sure my life is.

I mean, that sounds bad, but the only reason I’m even in Frost Country is to make sure the stopper on Kumo is holding adequately. And the only reason why Konoha has to fear Lightning moving out of its peninsula is because of what I did to it during the Third Shinobi War. Sure, it’d been classified, and helped keep Cloud nin off our backs in Taki and Kusa so we could focus on crushing Iwa again, but it wasn’t exactly heroic. Like I said, I’m creative, and my problem solving tends to be on the overwhelmingly effective side.

This should be about Naruto; he’s the real hero in this tale, but he’s still only a kid, too young and untried for biographies and book deals. Besides, I’ve done enough to the boy without exploiting his life story; hell, he doesn’t even know his life story yet, and I’m not allowed to tell him. I agree with that law, if only because it lets me off the hook for several uncomfortable subjects, such as: why I abandoned him as an infant; why he has the Kyuubi sealed inside him; why even, Akatsuki are after him and how he’s safer out of the village with me. Its harder to hit a moving target, and there’s no telling where I’ll end up next, which spy outpost I’ll check up on, make sure all my handlers and double agents are actually double agents and not triple agents, which happens sometimes and is annoying and leads to the kind of cleanup and paperwork I don’t tell Tsunade about.

The second thing you should know is that I’m not in Shimo, and none of those countries I mentioned earlier are accurate either. Like I’m going to reveal classified, S ranked information like that? If she wants to go through all this later and play the guessing game, that’s Tsuna’s prerogative, but I’m not going to make it easy for her. It’s not exactly lying, but you should assume that I wouldn’t under any circumstances reveal anything in the course of this manuscript that could potentially damage the Leaf Village or its citizens. I’m changing names, I’m changing places, I’m taking credit for things I certainly haven’t done and not listing many accomplishments I definitely did. I’ve been a spymaster too long, and a shinobi since I was 10.

That’s as good place to start as any, with my gennin years. I’ve a certain flair for a nonlinear narrative, but maybe it’d be best to organize my thoughts chronologically, if only in this first draft, to see where this actually goes.

I graduated from the Academy at 10. This was before the Second War, when we were pushing out new ninja as young as 8 to fill the ranks. 10 was early, but I’d earned that headband, along with everyone else. I wasn’t the best in my graduating class, but I felt like the best when I was assigned to Team 7, the Hokage’s own team. It was Hiruzen sensei, the Sandaime Hokage of the Leaf, Senju Tsunade, the best kunoichi in our cohort, last of the most powerful Clan in Konoha, granddaughter of the Shodaime, and grand niece of the Nidaime. Hiruzen was Tobirama’s student, and even in class, everyone expected Tsunade to grow up and be great, do her Clan name proud, even if she didn’t have the famous kekkei genkai of her grandfather. She was destined to be Godaime, even before I knew anything at all about destiny, about how complicated it is, how disappointing.

Then there was Orochimaru. He’s one of the reasons I struggled to know where to start this: I don’t know how to think about my wayward teammate, even now, when I might be chasing him all over the continent thinking I’m just checking up on my spy network, like I’m not trying to hear anything about where he is, and what I’m going to do when I find him.

Anyway, Orochimaru was a genius, even as a kid. He was younger than me and Tsunade, a real early graduate, the kind of natural prodigy who treated his Academy years as a speed run. I’m not unintelligent, but Orochimaru is the kind of smart that made me feel stupid, as a ten-year-old. He’s the last of a great clan, and he came into the Academy already a summoner; a rare ability even clan ninja wait until they were chuunin to learn, because of how wrong it can go. A ninjutsu powerhouse, with the Killing Intent of a grown man, a cold, crawly apprehension that rose with a grim urgency whenever Hiruzen pitted us against each other in training, when he’d never hold back, even once I was on the ground.

He wasn’t evil then. He was all of 8, and even as a ten-year-old civilian born nobody, I knew better than to think summoning snakes made him evil. I did think he was creepy, but that was because of the mad scientist stuff he was interested in, his obsession with experiments, with pushing technology to its breaking point. Later, and more damningly, it was immortality he was fixated on.

Hiruzen sensei was never scared of it like I was. He thought it was quaint, even precocious, when the 8-year-old snake summoner turned animals inside out to see how they worked, and Tsunade told me I wouldn’t be so squeamish if I was a real ninja.

I didn’t know it as a green gennin, but being civilian born, not from any significant shinobi clan, inheritor of no fancy technique or dojutsu, would end up being one of the most important things about me, to other people. I knew enough to decide to adopt shinobi markings before I tested into the Academy, knew enough to try to pass myself of as shinobi born, maybe an orphan from the First War, with red lines under my eyes down my cheeks I’d have tattooed when I was full grown. It’s a shinobi affectation, but what I didn’t know, even as I instinctively tried to pass myself off as shinobi born, was that I was fooling no one and that my attempts to prove otherwise were viewed as humorous at best and pathetic at worst.

Another thing I didn’t know as a gennin is why I didn’t fit in on my team. Hiruzen sensei was a Hokage. Both Tsunade and Orochimaru were treated as serious contenders for the hat one day, and I wasn’t. I was noticeably weaker than them as a gennin. I’d managed to hold my own as a student, but up against the two of them, clan born, training since they could walk, I couldn’t keep up. I thought it meant they saw the same potential in me, that I could rise to be their equal, a true rival to Orochimaru, a match for Tsunade, a student who could do Hiruzen sensei proud.

It wasn’t true, of course. Team 7 was Hokage and Hokage contenders, and then me, the embarrassing hanger on, an unwelcome addition to the dream team of the top scorer in class and the top kunoichi. I wasn’t at the bottom of the roster, but it didn’t matter, because test scores only mattered to Clan ninja, even if I didn’t know it then. I was the diversity kid, the political pawn so the Hokage could say he wasn’t favoring clan kids, to keep the Uchiha and Hyuuga from being mad he didn’t pick one of their heirs instead.
It didn’t matter how hard I worked. I was up against a literal princess and a mad scientist, taught by a man who could use all five chakra natures. The only thing special about me then was work ethic, and that hardly counted as a power up.

This is important, because its true: I didn’t resent them. I didn’t know enough to resent them for it. I was oblivious, confused, but happy enough to be included, and it wasn’t like they treated me poorly. We got along great, even, for a time, and missions went smoothly. But the thing is, if I were beating Orochimaru and Tsunade, then it meant they had to rise to my challenge. But when I was getting beaten by Orochimaru and Tsunade, it just meant I was like everyone else, a nobody. They didn’t expect great things from me like it was expected from them. It wasn’t neglect, it wasn’t evil, but it was something. And that nameless something gnawed on me, added tensions between us that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

But we grew, and we learned, and Hiruzen taught us everything he could. He had to know that the tensions from the First Shinobi War simmered outside the borders, had to know that the Second War was brewing, and he had to prepare us for it, because he lost his sensei in the First War, he knew how war fractured teams. I can’t say he’d allotted that fate to me; he was practical, realistic in the ways of a war hardened Hokage, but not cruel. I will say that out of the four of us, it was obvious who the village would prefer to die.

But I wasn’t satisfied with what I’d been handed. I’d been given the coveted third spot on Hiruzen’s team, and it was an opportunity I wouldn’t dare waste. I had big dreams; I was ambitious, even if my ambitions then were vague in the way of kids who didn’t know how the world really worked.

So I listened to Hiruzen; I trained; I got stronger. I got jealous when Hiruzen started teaching summoning to Tsunade and didn’t offer me the same chance, but that was okay, I was used to making things happen for myself. So I got ahold of a summoning matrix, performed the required hand seals, molded as much chakra as I could, and before Hiruzen’s panicked face could stop me, I slammed my hand on the ground and winked out of existence.

The third thing you need to know is, and I know I’ve said it before but I’m not sure how to stress it enough, since even now I don’t think the others knew how much it affected me: I was civilian born, and this came with disadvantages both obvious and subtle. One of the most obvious is that Hiruzen didn’t waste time catching me up on things the others knew since they were four and I was left to figure things out on my own. If I was clan born, I’d have known how risky that attempt was, how wrong it could go. Summoning is fuuinjutsu, the trickiest branch of chakra manipulation, with the most pitfalls, and the least amount of practitioners because mistakes usually explode and kill everyone around them.

But I was drawn to the art; I was a big reader, a fan of fantasy and fiction, I grew up reading adventure tales about worlds where shinobi always saved the day. I liked the writing aspect of it, had tried my hand at a few smaller seals and by the time I was a chuunin, I was already making my own exploding tags and suppression seals and was working on the more difficult privacy seals when I interrupted my work to learn summoning.

I should’ve died immediately. Exploded. Turned inside out. Been vaporized or unmade or whatever it is that the Tsuchikage can do. But apparently, I’d done something right enough to reverse summon myself into a time/space. I got spit out, disoriented and nauseous, at Mount Myoboku, home of the Toads, and I impressed them so much just by surviving the journey that they offered me the Toad Contract. They didn’t care I was a nobody. Fugasaku said a nobody would have died on the journey over to the summoning dimension, and it was the first time I thought that maybe destiny might be moving in my name. Not Tsunade’s, not Orochimaru’s, but mine.

It was a novel experience. I ate bugs. I learned to work with Shima and Fugasaku first, perfecting my summoning, my collaboration techniques, just learning to work with toads, before I was introduced to Gamabunta, a massive battle toad the size of a mountain, and Gamariki, a genjutsu and infiltration specialist who could get information from anywhere, from anyone. I met Gamaken, a kenjutsu specialist who fought with sasumata and let me ride around on his head. I met Geratora, who holds this manuscript for me when it’s not actively in my hands, so don’t freak out about it, Tsunade, if it really is you who’s reading this and not the cypher squad trying to crack the encryption I’ve got on it. If it’s the cypher squad, good luck and also, Tsunade’s just being lazy; she knows this particular code. If its someone else, just try to keep in mind that I’m a shinobi and therefore a liar by trade.

Anyway, I met scroll toads, and messenger toads, and I learned to spit Toad Oil.

I worked so well with the toads, it was almost like I couldn’t believe. It wasn’t like Team 7 at all. I was appreciated, even liked. Gamariki appreciated my proclivities for sneakiness and shared my perverted humor. Gamabunta complimented my Fire Style, and after I learned toad oil attacks, we were a devastating duo. Fugasaku and Shima almost adopted me even. They insisted I call them Ma and Pa toad, and orphan that I was, I did.

I stayed on Mount Myboku three months, studying, getting stronger, and then I was taken before Gamamaru, the Great Toad Sage, who told me I was free to return to the shinobi world and to summon toads at my leisure. He also told me he was a prophet, and that I had a place in destiny, which was a lot to hear as a 15-year-old kid, but also no less than I felt I deserved. It was the kind of thing that happened in the books I read, the kind of thing that would made me fit in with Tsunade and Orochimaru. I’d been working hard for years and hearing that felt like the thing I’d been working towards.

When I went back a full Toad Summoner, I thought they’d be overjoyed I could finally hold my own with them. It’d only been three months, but I’d grown so much, both in strength and physicality. I’d always been a big kid, but now I was shooting up, filling out, gaining muscle definition and height. I was taller than Orochimaru already, and Tsunade, and all three of us were taller than Hiruzen. I was growing into my adult chakra reserves, and learning to summon pushed me to my limits and helped me define and overcome them.

Instead, I’d almost been court marshalled for desertion. I hadn’t had permission to leave Konoha; Hiruzen thought I was dead, dead like everyone expected me to be, no matter how many times I proved they were wrong about me. I wasn’t stripped of my headband or the Toad Contract, but it was a near thing. The politics of it were tricky; I could never be sure if Hiruzen was being fair, or making a point that he wouldn’t be unfair to his students, even as Hokage. This, I might have resented. At 16, I was old enough to recognize and name what I hadn’t at 10. I didn’t blame Tsunade, or Orochimaru, or even Hiruzen; I couldn’t imagine the position he was in, as Hokage. I knew it had to come first, before being Sarutobi Clan Head, before being our sensei.

And when my punishment ended, (I bore it well enough; I had technically left the village, even if it was out of my control, and I knew how delicate the political landscape had become. I’d sensed the tension at the chuunin exams, how the peace was wearing thin between the five Elemental Nations. But I came back a summoner, and a Toad Summoner at that, one of the strongest summoning contracts there was, and a huge asset to Konoha. Toads, unlike other summoning clans, could perform hand seals to do ninjutsu, could teach sage art, which I’d take a year to learn later) I demonstrated what I learned, thinking I was finally equal to Tsunade and Orochimaru. Orochimaru was a Snake Summoner, and Tsunade had mastered the Slug Contract while I was gone, which would be useful to the iroyo ninjutsu specialty she was pursuing now that we were chuunin and could pick specializations.

Tsunade was going to be a medic, a healer, but a frontline battle iroyonin, able to hold her own on any field. Orochimaru wanted to master every jutsu, and he already knew hundreds; he’d specialize in ninjutsu for sure. I was his rival, so part of me wanted to chose ninjutsu too, even with Hiruzen’s disapproval. But I remembered my true talent for sealing, how unique it was, how the creativity that got me in trouble with the others helped me navigate the matrixes of fuuinjutsu. It felt special enough to be something that might be in a prophecy, which had become a consideration that began to take over my decision-making process, in no small way.

I was young; I was frustrated; I bragged about it to the others, but it was easy to see they didn’t believe me. Hiruzen was contracted with the Monkeys, another noble summoning clan, and he knew Gamamaru could see the future, so it wasn’t the Great Toad Sage he doubted: it was me. They thought I was lying, or exaggerating, to make myself fit in more.
That hurt, but again, I didn’t resent them. I pulled my fair share of pranks, told quite a few lies, exaggerated before, sometimes to the point I hurt myself. There was a lot on Hiruzen’s plate as relations between the nations worsened, or even on Tsunade as the last Senju, or Orochimaru as a genius prodigy, last of his clan.

We trained, we went on missions, we started making a name for ourselves, even. Orochimaru was my best friend, and he’d gotten better over the years at not being so creepy. The yellow snake eyes were a summoning mark, like the warts I’d get eventually after years of summoning, but they weren’t creepy. I thought they were kind of cool, especially paired with his purple clan markings, which I was endlessly enraged about as a kid because of how similar they were to my own red shinobi markings, focused on the eyes as they were. He did research, apprenticed with the R&D department while Tsunade was at the hospital, and Hiruzen was running the village. I was on my own to practice my fuuinjutsu, which I was learning intuitively, through trial and error, because there was no one left alive in the Leaf Village who could teach me.

But Orochimaru wasn’t evil. This is important. This is the fourth thing you need to know. He wasn’t evil. He wasn’t evil, because I wouldn’t let him.

Hiruzen wasn’t good at it, not cynical, but his realism was grim, defeatist, and Tsunade had reached the age where we both pissed her off just by being boys in her line of sight. But I was his best friend. I took it upon myself to steer him right. He was a genius, and sometimes his brain outran his morals. He was low empathy, had trouble connecting to others, didn’t see the point of things like mercy or kindness, especially from a scientific perspective, which is how he viewed everything. He was my best friend, and whenever he went too far, did something wrong but not inexcusable, I helped him do better. I’m sure Hiruzen thought it was most of my job on the team; for sure, it was the most useful. Orochimaru had a lot of potential, but he tended to be cold, and impersonal, and it put a bunch of people off, especially civilians. It wasn’t a good look, for the Hokage’s student to be feared around the village because there were rumors about what he did to that Tea Village on mission when my back was turned.

I think now that’s where I got good at spying, at doing Hiruzen’s PR when it came to the Snake Summoner, at learning whisper campaigns and rumor mills, learning not only how to control the narrative, but how to spin it to say what I wanted. Hell, by the time we were 18, and jounin, I had half the village thinking he was a saint, albeit a creepy one.

And while Orochimaru was my best friend, I’d been in love with Tsunade since I was 10. It was doomed, naturally, and she resented me for it throughout our teen years, but it wasn’t like I could help it. She was beautiful, the last of a powerful Clan, a literal princess like I’d read about in books. I pursued it mostly jokingly, but she took great offense; the first bones I ever broke outside training were from her retaliation over whatever comment I’d made in her presence, and half the time she used me as a dummy to practice her healing on.

I was a dumb kid, and an even dumber teen, but it was a reputation I knew what to do with. I was already worthless in most of the village’s eyes, and so I got around, into and out of many a delicate situation I could explain away because I was a simple horndog and not learning the important tenants of spying. I mastered privacy seals, then barrier seals. I studied politics, clan intrigue, blackmail, gentle persuasion, those subtle shinobi arts that called for more than just throwing sharp things around or spitting fire.

Unlike in our earlier training, I excelled here. Orochimaru lacked the patience for dealing with the public, but I was charismatic, likable, and learning to use that to be manipulative.

I was never ANBU, none of us were, though it was clear we had the skills for it. Hiruzen needed his students’ accomplishments to be in the limelight, to reflect back upon him, especially as it became increasingly clear that the world was about to erupt once again into war.

I was busy, in the year leading up to the war. Spies usually are, and as a fuuinjutsu specialist, my privacy seals were paramount to the informant web I was building. I had informants in two major villages that answered to me and no one else, and a handful in the smaller nations. I was one handler of many, and untried in war, but I was showing promise, and even though he never said it, I knew Hiruzen was impressed.

But the tension built up in us as well. Team 7 suffered. I didn’t have the time to micromanage Orochimaru’s morality, and his reports from R&D grew increasingly concerning as his resentment grew over them vetoing all the experiments he suggested on an ethical basis. He was ready to move many of his theories from the page to human subjects, and since there was no safe way for it, they way sided it. Orochimaru was a prodigy from the time he could walk; I don’t think he knew how to be told no.

It was concerning, certainly, but no worse than the red flags we’d been putting up with for years. I didn’t know how the resentment was seething in him. He wasn’t simply put out; he actively hated it, and I was too busy taking over the known world to tell.

And Tsunade fell in love. I won’t waste the page with how much that hurt me, even if I never showed it and she’d hate me for writing it now. His name was Kato Dan, and he was a fearsome shinobi, a fellow jounin with the terrifying technique of removing peoples ghosts from their bodies, a jutsu I found almost as creepy as some of Orochimaru’s favorites.

I was grieving and in denial, but Orochimaru was interested in Dan in the way he was obsessed about death. We were bickering between ourselves, that easy teamwork grating up against each other in unexpected, new ways we couldn’t account for. Our missions suffered, publicly, but I did damage control, so the rest of the village didn’t know the extent that the Hokage’s team was falling apart.

Then Suna pissed off our Daimyo, and Iwa retaliated, and Kumo snuck out their borders, and suddenly, we were at war against three of the five Elemental Nations. It was everyone for their own, but in reality, Iwa and Kumo had a bad habit of teaming up just to flatten platoons of Leaf nin before turning on each other. I won’t bore you with the history lesson, or the statistics about why this particular war was so costly, both in fiscal and human terms, but before the Second War, nothing had killed as many people before, and nothing has after. The Third War was bad, but it never came close to the human loss, the meat grinder that was the Second War. The Iwa lines cut through Kusa, through Ishi, and Ame, and Suna pressed us from the west, from Ame, from Tani, while Kumo waited in Shimo and Yu and ran small operations mostly targeting civilians, aiming to lower our morale at the sheer numbers of the dead.

Every nation suffered. The smaller nations that were buffers between the Elemental Nations turned into warzones. Kusa was Iwa’s kill box. Taki had a Bijuu they’d set on any shinobi caught in their grasslands and so Taki was spared the worst of it, but when Kumo tried to assist Iwa, who was fighting on multiple fronts, it was through Taki that they marched.

We were deployed on the Suna side of the war, because they had an old puppeteer on their side who’s poisons could only be countered by Tsunade. But the desert was an inhospitable landscape, equally terrible to both sides, and so the Suna front with Konoha tore Ame in half.

I was new to this kind of sustained fighting, but I ended up excelling. Nobody could match me in stamina, since I’d adapted my fighting style to account for battle toads, and most of my sealing was premade. We weren’t even at war with Ame, but that’s where we went, because Rain nin were killing anyone not wearing their uniform they caught in their borders, and they weren’t wrong for that. Our war was destroying them.

But Hiruzen used us sparingly, at first. We were valuable to his image as a war kage. Aside from Tsunade’s long distance dance with Lady Chiyo, we stayed out of the worst of the fighting, in Iwa, in Kumo, where ninja were dying in the thousands by the day. Outside Shimo, the Raikage dies in a three day battle that kills 10,000 shinobi. Iwa was a kill box, where they’d trap entire squadrons in deep ravines and stone mazes and then send in the Blast Corps to bomb them to death. We were fighting a war on three fronts, and as the years drug on, so did the desperate atrocities we committed on each other.

There came a time when I could no longer agree with Hiruzen’s orders. He’d been taught war from Tobirama, and his hardliner stance was too stern for my tastes, especially on the cost of human life and civilian casualties caught in the crossfire. I understood a few mistakes here and there, but we as a nation were making no great attempts to avoid fighting in civilian populated areas. Hiruzen saw death in the First War, learned exactly how much he could sacrifice to win; he’d learned from Tobirama, who’d taught him the exact measure he could lose to win, which was, in no uncertain terms, everything.

I won’t say I didn’t see it coming. We were backed into a corner, with winter on the way. Hiruzen was Sandaime; his hands were tired. Kumo began using their two Bijuu to great effect, i.e, mass destruction, and Iwa had quickly followed suit. I didn’t know about our own jinchuuriki, about why we didn’t retaliate with equal force, but if pressed, I would have guessed our jinchuuriki was either too old or too young to be a fighter.

The only place untouched by the chaos was probably Kiri, who was isolationist and therefore neutral in the wars of the continent. Every now and then, they’d send their Swordsmen out to completely fuck a nation off the face of the earth, like Uzu, like Orange and Beach, and we’d chase them off the peninsula whenever we caught them taking advantage of our turned backs to drive in their knives. They only stopped their attempts to annex lands from Fire when one of our ninja managed to take out four of the seven Ninja Swordsman of the Mist with some unknown move, but it had killed him, so it wasn’t like we could do it again. But after that Kiri left our shoreline alone, even if they continued to gleefully butcher every informant I got close.

And after that, Hiruzen couldn’t spare us anymore. War made him hard. I think it brought back a bunch of unpleasant memories from the First War, of losing Hashirama, of losing Tobirama. The fact that Tobirama had sacrificed himself to save his team, of which Hiruzen was a part of, had to smart. For all of our experience, we’d never really experienced loss like that. People died all around us; we killed people, but it wasn’t like it was people we knew well. There was a certain necessary compartmentalization about it, just so we didn’t go crazy.

As the war went on, maybe Hiruzen started to resent that, about us. We were still innocent, in a way, because we were still together, despite our intrapersonal difficulties. So when we got sent to Ame, we really got sent to Hanzo of the Salamander, who invented Flee on Sight orders, the first S ranked foe we ever faced, and even though he was a monster, he was right. Hanzo was a butcher, but in his own terrible way, he was trying to spare Ame by killing as many people as he could.

No, it wasn’t wrong, after everything Hiruzen had ordered us to do to Ame in order to keep the battle line from moving to favor Suna, or north to knock on Iwa’s lines through Kusa.

This isn’t a confessional, but Tsunade charged me with telling the truth. This isn’t a kind truth, and its not the sort I think she’d appreciate me telling now, since she had no small part in what we did in Ame. But know it was bad. That’s the fifth thing, that we did it, and it wasn’t right, and we knew it and we did it anyway. You already know the details, why I’m still hated in Rain country, why even as Godaime, Tsunade isn’t allowed to negotiate with Ame.

Just know it led us to a cave in the north of Ame, and I was dying. I was dying, Orochimaru volunteered to kill me to keep Iwa from nabbing me, and to defend me, Tsunade threatened to kill him. We were pointing kunai at each other, and there was Killing Intent filling the air, and kami help us, we meant it. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t help Orochimaru’s grief that he’d already written me off, could do nothing for Tsunade who’d already lost so much: her parents, her grandfather and grand uncle, which left her so unwilling to lose another of her precious people, which was all I was, but it was enough to hurt us both.

It’s fucked up, I know, that I trusted him still, even pointing a kunai at my throat. Maybe he even thought it was kindness, that it was his hand and not some random enemy. It’s hard to think about now, knowing how our team falls apart in a few years, about why Tsunade leaves and Orochimaru attacks the Leaf Village. I wonder now, for a brief moment, if, in that cave in Ame, if I had died, if he would have cried for me, if Tsunade even remembered that he was capable of it amid her own grief and rage.

We were rescued from that pickle by Konoha forces, I healed, and we didn’t all kill each other, but it had been a close thing. Close enough I couldn’t quite forget the look in Orochimaru’s eyes when he hissed that he was going to kill me, the steel in Tsunade’s when she leveled a kunai and told him, “try it, bastard.”

Even then, it didn’t mean what I wanted it to mean. That almost hurt worse than the injury itself.

Our wonky teamwork deteriorated further. The war wore on each of us in different ways, the guilt, the shame, the desperate loss we were surrounded by. Orochimaru’s always been obsessed with death, being the cataclysm of so much of it wasn’t good for his mental state. Tsunade was a medic, she was supposed to be healing, not killing. I was obeying orders I didn’t agree with, and every day everything got a little bit worse.

It led us, eventually, to the end. To Hanzo. It was a battle they write songs about. It was, I was pretty sure, my destiny. Everyone thought I’d never survive it; no team was coming out the war whole; ours wouldn’t be spared. It had always been me that’d been expected to die; I’d only been injured so severely in the north because I’d taken a blow meant for Tsunade. As it turns out, I’d inherited Tobirama’s altruism from Hiruzen. I wonder to this day if he meant me too.

In actuality, none of us should have survived. Hanzo is a shinobi that comes around once in a generation. He was unstoppable. It took all three of us in our prime and all our Boss Summons to even slow him down. Even then, he could have killed us, easily. Tsunade was holding me upright by the end of it; I’d broken half the bones in my body, everything on my right side. Orochimaru was ragged; Manda, King of Serpents, demanded high prices for summoning him. When, halfway through the war, he’d started feeding corpses to the massive snake, neither I nor Tsunade said anything about it. It was war. Morality and ethics were on hold. Tsunade was only standing because she’d unveiled a Byakugo Seal, (which I was instantly jealous of, because I should have been the one to use it, it was fuuinjutsu for fucks sake), but she’d always had the best chakra control out of all of us, and Mito was her grandmother while I was still in so many ways just a nobody.

We didn’t win. I know people say we did, but that was rumors I started decades ago to make us look better. We only survived long enough to impress him. Hanzo respected strength, and when we fought him to a standstill, in a deadlock over a sea of mud in the west of Ame, it wasn’t winning. But it was enough.

He let us go.

He named us Sannin.

He named us Sannin and he let us go.

It was a mercy we didn’t deserve, especially from the warlord of the country we’d spent the past three years turning into fallow ground. Hanzo wasn’t sane, was a true monster of a man, as feared by his own people as his enemies; what did he care of what we’ve done, when we’d made the way for him to power so smooth? He let us limp away, and we went.

When Suna heard Konoha had a team, Hiruzen’s team, all grown up and challenging Hanzo, they pulled their forces into a retreat, and when we could focus on only two fronts, divided by Taki, it led to the eventual surrender of Iwa and Kumo, and the end of the Second Shinobi War.

I went back to Konoha, to recover from having most of my bones broken and suffering severe internal damage to organs and my chakra system. Tsunade and Orochimaru go back out to oversee the end of the border skirmishes. But I was benched, on Hokage enforced medical leave, and looking at a lengthy recovery time, even with PT, any of which I fudged and Tsunade would beat me back into a coma herself.

When I got the summons to the Tower, I thought it was for paperwork purposes, as that seemed to be all I was good for now. I had multiple messenger toads mobilized at all times but Hiruzen wouldn’t usually bother me about them unless it was an emergency, which little felt like in the wake of the worst war the world’s ever seen.

He slid the file across the Hokage desk and I flipped through it curiously, not understanding why I’m looking at a picture of a child until I understand exactly why I’m looking at a picture of a child and get cold all over, then hot.

“What is this?” I asked but instead of answering, he just keeps puffing on that long pipe of his. I just kept flipping through the file, waiting for it to make a better kind of sense.

He graduated at 10, same as myself, but he’s 12 now. Highest test scores ever recorded, which I highly doubt, those bastard Nara are both lazy and smart enough to chronically underperform, a basic sort of self-preservation intelligence that this file suggests a lack of. I kept flipping and the relevant information hits in descending order of building resentment: clanless, orphan, civilian born.

That changes things. I reorient the frankly absurd test scores in my mind. He’s either dumb and impulsive enough to be spiteful or intelligent enough to know nobody gives a damn either way. With an immigrant name like Namikaze, he could be the second coming of Senju Tobirama and the Academy would stick him in remedial classes.

I still wasn’t sure, at first. At 12, I was a handful brat, source of almost daily migraines and inspiration for chain smoking sessions in the hallowed halls of the Hokage Tower. I didn’t know, at 12, how much more the world demands of you when nobody paves the way.

Either way, I wasn’t interested. Hiruzen wasn’t making the others train a brat, would never even consider siccing Orochimaru on a child. I’m not being fair, I know, and I’m not proud of it, but that’s another thing you need to know. I’m not proud of how I treated my students, of how I treated any of them, most days I think I even hate how I handled things like I did. But as ashamed as I am at my own failings, they never failed me. I am proud of them, all of them, in ways I wish I knew how to properly express.

But then, it was there in the file, my decision, on the blank face of the blond-haired, blue-eyed brat. Clanless. Orphan. Civilian born. Who did Hiruzen think he was kidding? I know the Sarutobi are endlessly fond of their precious nepotism, but still, it smarted.

I didn’t make it easy on him, because I was angry enough I didn’t feel destiny moving. I stalled for time, making a big show of flipping through his file while the smoke irritated my weakened lungs, and maybe I was hurt in ways chakra couldn’t touch but I wasn’t about to roll over so quickly. Not when I suspected what he really wanted from me.

Still, he’s the only one who knew about Gamamaru and the words echo most nights in my dreams. I knew I was supposed to raise up a hero one day. I just didn’t think it was then, when I was so beat up, inches from a war I only ended through attrition. I didn’t think it would be as media res as an order from higher up the chain of command, instead of something ordained by the gods.

I asked him why, early on. Several times, thinking about how if he said the words clanless or orphan or civilian to me then I’d cram that pipe down his throat still lit so he could continue to blow all the smoke he wanted out of his ass. I’d done his dirty work in Ame and maybe I respected him as my CO and mentor but maybe I had a chip on my shoulder the size of a civilian town on a mud plain. Maybe my pain meds were making me stupid and snappy or maybe that was just the pain, doing what pain does best.

He just shrugged like a wise old sage. (He’s not actually a sage, even though the Monkeys are capable of teaching senjutsu. I’ve got a few suspicions about that, none of which I’m quite mad enough about now, drunk off River Country spirits and distressingly sentimental, as I feel in this shithole inn in Tani, to commit to a page. I only ever miss him when I’m really fucking drunk, when the blur takes the hard edges off the CO, off the War Kage, and leaves me with the fact that I wasn’t there when he died and I should have been.)

Hiruzen said, “He’s got an interest in fuuinjutsu.”

I snorted. Respectfully. “An interest or an aptitude?”

I remember all the ways it felt scripted, but like it was from someone else’s novel. A draft about the reluctant teacher and the stalwart Lord Commander, with a dash of zeitgeist or prodigal son. Tsunade will laugh when she reads this, especially because she knows how I’d get later, but at the time, it didn’t feel real. I spent all this time looking for prophesy and it gets handed down to me in medias res via a military government head. Gamamaru forgot to mention how uneventful it would feel.

This is not how good fiction works. Maybe I get now why she challenged me to tell the truth, because I rely on escapism and lies too often. I don’t know why I thought I could write this without confessing anything, except that back then, I still thought I was invincible, that fate wouldn’t touch me until I did what it demanded of me.

I said, “Aren’t I a little young to be a jounin sensei?” Hiruzen was old and going gray when he got us. I never could imagine him young. In my fantasies, Tobirama goes to face the Gold and Silver Brothers to protect a student with hair as geriatric as his own, and the Hokage hat’s only aged him more.

“The boy’s just made chuunin. It’d be a proper apprenticeship.”

At least there wasn’t a full trio of brats attached to him. I said, “Exam?”

He said, “battlefield promotion.”

I leaned back in the chair, arms folded severely across my chest in the way I know makes my frown more severe, especially with my new tattoos. Hiruzen might wield all five elemental masteries, but I’ve been taller than him since I was 10. I’m good at looming. I even learned disapproving from him.

He said, “it wasn’t intentional. C rank.”

It never was, sending gennin to war. On the file, his bright hair and eyes stare out at me. Was I ever that small?

I muttered, “fucking C ranks,” and Hiruzen only nodded. Sagely. With a condescension I’m maybe only now realizing I may have been projecting onto him. I added, bitter and sardonic, “Sensei.”

I only ever called him Sandaime when we were in public or I was in trouble or apologizing. But this felt like an apology. Tsunade and Orochimaru didn’t get injured enough to get benched and getting saddled with a brat will throw the team dynamic into the shredder, and at such a delicate time. The Second War’s only barely in the ground and there’s no real resolution from that.

Hiruzen puffed on his pipe, said, “It would be wise, for a Sannin to take an apprentice.”

I’ve never once claimed to be wise. Handsome, literary, preordained, but wise? I trained alongside Orochimaru. I had a better idea than most about my intellect. Besides that, no one even really knows what being a Sannin means, least of all myself, who can’t even remember parts of the battle due to a head injury that breathing in the smoke from the pipe is bringing to mind more and more vividly as this conversation went on. The problem with invented ranks is that no one knew, really, and it becomes the Hokage’s place to decide what the fuck a Sannin does, and apparently, it included apprentices.

Tsunade, I know you’re laughing right about now, all woe is me and my misfortunes, but let me remind you that I couldn’t afford to waste my time like this. 12 is young, but a chuunin’s not really a child, and Gamamaru was clear in the way he only ever is when he’s uncoupled from the linear timestream: I will train a Child of Prophesy who will change the shinobi world forever.

Regardless, I had to go see what this was about. The fact that it was not a request from dear old teach was clear. I swaggered over to Training Ground 7 (and isn’t that just a little more twist to the kunai he’s shoved in my chest) and then I creep. I wanted to know more about this before I made the decision to commit.

How can I describe him? What can I say that history cannot? I’m afraid the only thing I can add to his legacy is my shame. I am simultaneously disgusted by my handling of my first student and proud of how he turned out, despite my best efforts to sabotage him. I won’t lie and say these efforts were unintentional. Namikaze Minato was a lot of things, including a potential threat. He had all the makings of a great villain. Perhaps I was projecting my latent fears about Orochimaru onto him, which wasn’t right or fair, but I never claimed to be either of those things. I’m a spy. And my every instinct, if I ever came across someone like him on a mission outside the village, was to eliminate the budding threat.

Funny to admit that, to tell you how scared I was of what he would become, when his face looks down at everyone from the Hokage Mountain. I wish I could take credit for that. But the truth is, there are things I neglected to teach him, and things he got from me that I never tended to pass on.

The first time I set eyes on him, in Training Ground 7 of all places, he’s running drills in the sand pit like he’s in Wind’s desert terrain. His file said he’d been Kumo front. I ticked another point into the spiteful overachiever category of my initial estimation of him.

I observed him a long time. Hours. He didn’t seem feral. Prodigies can get like that: textbook genius, isolating and off putting in their power, not easily understood or sympathized with. That was the kind of genius I had experience dealing with, the kind his profile told me I’d recognize.

But then I find him trying to blow his arm off with some half mangled half-finished fuuton jutsu, the blowback of which grinds him right into the dirt.

I let it happen. I wanted to see how he took it.

He got up. Brushed himself off. Studied his hand like he’s trying to work out what went wrong, like he hadn’t just forced a shit ton of chakra from his hand with no direction or seal to focus it. I though it was impulsive, all power, no finesse. A blunt force instrument. I could have handled that, I think. I myself have previously been accused of the same thing, mostly by Orochimaru, too in the habit of trying to do my thinking for me, back when both of us pretended I was susceptible to that sort of manipulation.

Bu there was nothing in his face at all. No expression. No pain.

He tried again.

My heart sank. I understood then, why Hiruzen sensei was so adamant about me taking his case.

Still, I considered. I considered a long time. There’s potential there, no doubt the boy was skilled, but was he Child of Prophecy material? Was he going to change the world? Was I going to be the one to push him into it?

I couldn’t push Orochimaru into anything. I didn’t know why Hiruzen thought I could wrangle this prodigy into some semblance of social acceptance. Orochimaru is powerful, but he’s not popular. Even before his famous defection, people didn’t fully acknowledge him. Tsunade was the beloved heiress, I was tolerated, but Orochimaru was the darkness of Team 7, the one to do those distasteful things nobody admits happen in wartime, the lies Hiruzen said were necessary.

But I didn’t know about Orochimaru at the time I met Minato, except for all the ways I harbored that old, hidden suspicion. Its just another thing I’m guilty of, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m trying to do this chronologically, but sometimes these things have resonances that move forward, but that’s not this story. Not yet.

If this was a novel, then the choice at the time would be clear. Fiction’s helpful like that. In the times of rare doubt in our heroes, a sign comes from the heavens, a bird or a flower or a perfectly timed firework or series of helpful coincidences. There’s supposed to be music, a rightness in the air.

But there wasn’t any ceremony. Just a dusty beat up chuunin in shinobi blues trying and failing to harness the power of the wind in the palm of his hand.

I made my decision anyway. I swirled down in a gust of leaves, one of the sloppiest shunshins I could pull off, spilling leaves absolutely everywhere, (its always good to undersell yourself sometimes), and he didn’t even jump. I mentally docked him another few points for not trying to stab me reflexively.

He blinked at me after one of my more boisterous introductions. I remember how big I was playing it up, hiding how hurt I was, how I was regrowing most of my spleen and my bones ached like the end of the world, especially in the early chill of the season. To this day, my stomach still can’t handle too much red meat. I was like the protagonist of a novel, so sure abut everything, projecting a cheer so thick it functioned like a shield.

Namikaze Minato didn’t flinch. I don’t think he ever has.

“You’re one of the Sannin.”

I finger gunned, or maybe I did jazz hands, I don’t remember exactly my most infuriating obfuscating tactic at the time, but I do recall how I wanted to be just a little bit of an asshole about it. I was a spymaster Sannin; he wasn’t going to know me so easily. “Bingo!”

I started right away. While I wasn’t at fighting speed, I make a decent drill sergeant, and Minato’s always had enough speed for the both of us. It stops making sense actually, how quick he is. Like something out of a legend and not out of a skinny 12-year-old. He picks up kata and jutsu like its nothing. Kami, if I was that good at learning techniques at his age, I would have taken Hanzo to dinner and had Kiri for dessert by the time I was 20.

He wasn’t only quick on his feet either. He’s a true prodigy, the kind you see once in a generation, blindingly intelligent, with the kind of mind I only had to tell once. I was shit at teaching back then, but Minato made it easy. I don’t think there’s anything he couldn’t be taught to do and do competently, then eventually master.

He’s fast, he’s precise, he’s aware. I couldn’t teach him shit, actually. Minato was skill, was nothing but skill, honed and refined and aimed by an intelligence far greater than my own.

But that was all. That was it. There was nothing else in him.

There was so much I could teach him.

Tsunade threatened to rebreak my ribs for it when she found out, but I had to get him sociable or at least masking the lack better. He’s low empathy, and while that’s a bonus for shinobi, it makes civilians uncomfortable, and I needed him to have the power of a Sannin but the popularity of a Hokage. I figured 12 was old enough to start him on certain literary pursuits, just for training purposes. I was younger when I started and it’s only ever done me good, and regardless of what the others say, lechery is a fantastic cover. Besides, I don’t know a better way to teach human consideration and remind him of things like ethics and right and wrong than with porn. Tsunade will never understand; she’s got the Senju’s old blood pride and a kunoichi’s rage. But Minato needed that human element.

I’m not a total pervert, I didn’t scar him or anything. I was careful with it. I didn’t show him lewd images or take him peeping. The porn I started with was soft core and literary, more bawdy romances than anything, but boy did it make me feel things.

And feeling things, preferably for other people, was exactly what Minato needed.

I also started him on basic sealing. Fuuinjutsu is a rare affinity but he took to it like air supply. The puzzle of it was perfect for his hyper rational mentality, the way its all neat matrixes and careful script in recognizable lines that form patterns and meaning. Unlike with other specializations, learning sealing is less like learning a jutsu and more like learning another language and it’s a language he starts to learn like its his mother tongue.

It surprised me, actually, how quickly he took to it. Within a few months, he was writing his own explosive tags, then storage seals. I thought everything was going well until he started using half baked seals to blow up solid rock.

He’s everything the psyche evals warn about. He’s charming, focused, and ruthless. Most people don’t see it, because of how well he can mask it, and every shinobi learns compartmentalization tactics and even dissociation has its usefulness if applied in controlled environments, but Minato has nothing. Like Senju Tobirama, too interested in the could than the should. He’s got exactly Orochimaru’s moral compass, except I was able to influence him like I never was with Orochimaru. Our dynamic is different; we’re not teammates and I do have responsibility over Minato as his mentor that I never officially had over Orochimaru. Without a team to play him off of, Minato is straight-line gale-force winds, chilly and wind burnt.

He kept trying to blow his arm off with what he’s determined to make his signature move. Said he got the idea in Kumo and I had half a guess as to the who and what of that, that I never asked him again. Still, I wasn’t sure if I should stop him. Tsunade was out of the village enough that if he blew off his arm, it was game over for him as a shinobi. But I saw enough in him I guess I was wary of, because I never did.

I taught him like I was taught. I got Hiruzen’s permission to take tomes from the Hokage library and I threw him knee deep in Tobirama’s research notebooks. I was self-taught since Hiruzen rarely bothered, but I figured I could speed the process along once he ran out of easy peel and stick tags.

I should’ve have known I was in trouble when he cracked the encryption on them in a week. That coding was Tobirama’s own invention. It took me months to wring even a word out of that mess.

My concern only grows as the years go by. He had an eidetic memory and when he read about the less ethical of Tobirama’s inventions, he naturally considered the science reasonable and more interesting than all the reasons Orochimaru’s research was routinely axed by the R&D ethics board. I took great pains to never let the two of them meet. Minato was malleable and even back then, Oro was a manipulator. I didn’t think it wise, that they should meet.

I’m still not sure how Minato managed to fly under the radar for so long, even with his apprenticeship keeping him in village. I was doing my very best to hide the boy; I had at least 7 active covers circulating about him at all times. The only one I really reported to was Hiruzen. During those meetings, I stressed his growth not just in terms of technique and application, but in things like charisma, and likability, and ethical considerations. I was getting him to ask things like, I can use this jutsu to kill oodles of people, but should I? Are they civilians? Are they Fire citizens? Am I being paid for this? Is it really a bribe if its properly taxed? What would happen if someone saw me use this fuuton technique to wipe a village off the face of the earth? Can I afford to leave witnesses?

Honestly, I was just trying to keep him out of the Bingo Book as long as I could. A losing battle, that was: he’d eventually go on to max out his bounty by the end of the Third War. He actually made the cap for bounties in the Book, something I still haven’t managed to do. Both Oro and Tsuna have, but I was a spy. I don’t need that kind of notoriety. I don’t need the Hokage hat to feel acknowledged.

When I noticed he’s calculating for the degradation of seals in the wild due to fluctuations of natural chakra, intuitively, with no prompting from me, I tossed him to the Toads for summoning and senjutsu training before the clan kids ban together and kill him in his sleep.

Not that they could, of course, they’d have to go through me, and even recovering I was still a Sannin and they were at most little chuunin punks, branch member Hyuuga and bastard Kaguya looking for a little renown of their own and thinking my apprentice was an easy, no consequence target. Even some of the Nara were lazily considering his stats and Umino Ikakku’s Barrier Corps were circling like buzzards, but I knew how to deal with them. Konoha’s various sealing teams had been hounding me for years.

To this day, I think that if the others had taken apprentices at the same time as myself, that Minato would have been harder to spot. That being said, I do feel for the Mitarashi girl. I did everything I could to help her, but Juuinjutsu is tricky, Orochimaru’s bastard technique even more so. I only hope that one day she’ll be free of him, which is hypocrisy to write: I’m well aware that her freedom depends on Orochimaru’s captivity, and that I am a huge factor, if not the only factor, that keeps that from happening.

Minato mastered the Sage Arts within a year. I think the toads like him better than me. Ma makes him eat bugs but that’s just how Shima shows affection. I don’t think it bothered him, the bugs. Nothing really bothered him.

I can’t say this as a fact, because I don’t know how old Hashirama was when he learned from the Monkeys, but I think Minato might have been the youngest Sage in history. I made sure to introduce him as such, anyway, when he came back. He was personable enough by then that people liked him, even with the rumors, especially with all the gladhanding and politicking I’d been drilling into him for years. He shook hands like he’s asking for your vote. I’m pretty sure if someone handed him a baby, he’d kiss it. Even I was starting to think he’d look good in that dumb hat, and I knew there was a part of it that was all just an act, all the pageantry and production I’d put into it finally paying off in spades.

The first time I saw him use his Sage Mode in battle, I was beginning to think I’d potentially created a monster. Part of the reason I’d been so insistent about the sage training was because senjutsu was all about balance and collectivity and not taking over the world. I’d taken him to the toads for mercy. I thought I was making him incorrigible. I don’t think there’s ever been an evil sage. Orochimaru wasn’t a Snake Sage for good reasons.

I know, ridiculous to even consider now, but back then I wasn’t as sure. Hanzo wasn’t a Sage. Neither, for that matter, was Uchiha Madara. It was hard to look at him, to look at anyone, with that much power, that much potential for destruction, and not have the shinobi part of me worry. I was far from a pacifist, but there were lines I knew better than to cross, orders during the war that I’d interpreted creatively, to avoid certain outcomes. I wasn’t sure Minato wouldn’t take those orders and run with them. We’d just lost Uzu to the Swordsmen. I didn’t want any more Whirlpools on my hands, or Birds. It wasn’t how I was taught to make war, and maybe it’s the civilian in me, the weakness even Tsunade poked fun at, but there are human costs to war, civilian casualties that ninja as strong as Minato might neglect to consider in their drive to complete their missions.

I remember asking Gamamaru, almost in desperation, “For the better, right? He’ll change the world for the better?”

Gamamaru squinted at me with rheumy eyes. “Who?”

I held my tongue. It wasn’t right for me to pretend this wasn’t my problem to solve.

I resumed his fuuinjutsu training. When I caught him wrapping jutsu formula around kunai handles, squinting all the while at a pile of Tobirama’s notes, I thought there was indeed a future where Minato makes Hanzo look like a fun and happy guy.

I couldn’t imagine a warlord with access to a time/space technique, and a Sage Mode to boot. If I was a threat as an S ranked Sannin, then Minato was an extinction level event. If he’s not the Child of Prophecy, I couldn’t think of anyone who had more potential, more sheer fucking threat than him, clan ninja included. Hiraishin was invented to beat the mangekyo. The Uchiha would riot if he figured it out.

Because he’s Minato, he figured it out. And I’m not nearly drunk or stupid enough to talk about the Uchiha here.

It was turning into a headache and a half for me. I was so stressed at the time, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that now. I blamed Hiruzen most of all. I thought if Minato hadn’t been raised in a civilian orphanage, then he’d have more concrete bonds to the village. I thought if he’d been placed on a traditional gennin team then he’d have had friends, more reasons to stay loyal. I know the reality: Konoha was drowning in war orphans, Minato was one of hundreds, but I couldn’t help but thinking that we let him slip through the cracks. Unlike clan children, civilians that show shinobi potential have no legal protections, even once enrolled in the Academy. A lot of my work at the time felt like I was simply undoing the damage that those 10 years in an overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed public ward did to him. I am an orphan myself, but at least I was hugged as a child. I don’t think Minato was.

I remember taking shots with Tsunade on one of the occasions she was in the village instead of acting as an extra judiciary executioner in the border countries. We’re drinking and shooting the shit and I was whining about PT because Tsunade’s a ruthless enforcer, inclined to break as many bones as she heals.

“I’m telling you, he’s gotten so good at hiding it no one would even guess it’s a front.”

I was matching drinks with her, which means that I was rapidly approaching blackout while she had a healthy rosy glow. My tongue’s always been looser around her as well, and I can’t rightly blame that on the drink.

Tsunade made a face at my theatrics. She never did have patience for me and my drama. “You’re doing that wrong.”

She demonstrated the correct form for the exercise, and I groan and puppy eye her. “He’s not like Orochimaru at all. People like him.”

“Is that so bad? You like Oro.”

I groaned again, louder, demonstratively. She’s tiptoeing into dangerous ground. All of Team 7’s fucked up, our polite ignorance of each other’s cracks was a given at that point in our relationship. I think it was the only way we knew how to function.

I said, “He’s smarter than Oro. He knows how to hide it.”

“And who taught him that?”

I took another shot. She always shells out for the best sake, not the rotgut I keep on hand. I slammed down the glass miserably and continue to squeeze that little exercise ball, the one filled with foam that’s supposed to increase my grip strength. My hand seals might always be a little crooked, but I figured I’ve got the toads to compensate. The only thing this exercise was doing was giving me new ideas for Minato’s arm blowing off technique that I would try to recreate later, fully sober and wondering if I was right for it.

She said, dismissively, “Put him in ANBU. There’s plenty of psychopaths in there.”

I said, “He’s got to be popular, so he’s got to be visible. There’s no glory behind a mask.”

“There’s no blame either.”

I was maybe too drunk for this conversation and thinking about how pretty she was, how after this she was meeting Kato Dan. I was thinking about this too much to really register what she meant, at the time. Its only now that I think I see what she was trying to say. I carry a lot of guilt in me, about a lot of things. I didn’t realize it was so visible to her.

She slammed back her own pour. “Why’s he got to be popular? He’s aiming for the hat?”

I shrugged. She never believed that I was foretold. When we were kids, she laughed about the Prophecy. She might not even remember it, now.

At my shrug, she shuddered. “They’d have to nail me to it.”

Its funny now, to think back on how unwilling she was to be Hokage. At the time, I just said, “Hear, hear,” and we both drank long and hard and neither of us mentioned that then, between the three of us, the only interested party was Orochimaru, if only because then people would stop telling him no and he could fast track all his experiments.

She asked, eventually, swirling the sake around in her glass thoughtfully, and I knew she hadn’t been entirely truthful earlier, because she asked, “What exactly would he change? If he was Hokage?”

I thought about it more than I was willing to admit to her, even drunk as I was. I knew what I wanted him to change, could identify each and every facet of what I fervently hoped could be different, not just in Konoha and Fire, but in the entire shinobi world.

I said, because she lied first, “I don’t even know.”

He practiced his Hiraishin, he practiced his Rasengan, and when Kumo nin kidnap a Leaf chuunin, he took out the entire squad to retrieve her.

I almost started pulling my hair out. I was trying to teach him subtlety, and about overkill. He’d just been on a currier run!

Fucking C ranks.

The Whirlpool girl started sticking him like glue, after that. I was worried about that for reasons I’d be court marshalled for even thinking about too loudly, especially in a village full of Yamanaka, but as the weeks rolled by, I was starting to think that the Uzumaki might be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

I was still concerned, naturally. I was 80% sure she was the jinchuuriki, and even then, he knew enough about sealing to keep me up nights about it.

Minato didn’t have friends. He had a concerning lack of bonds to the village: no clan, no familial ties, no team. But the girl grounds him. Its everything I hoped would happen for him. He treated her with all the dogged devotion of a first love.

I laughed, when I heard later, via toad, that he’d knocked her up. The Yondaime Hokage, my very first student, and he went and got his girlfriend pregnant out of wedlock before the hat even touches his head. Minato was first at a lot of things as a Hokage; I think this is one the council’s least proud of, and even back then I hated those old farts enough to think it was hilarious.

Knowing what I do now, I—I’m not drunk enough for this shit. Fucking bullshit, is what it is.

I can’t write about it. Danzo is maybe the one thing I can’t blame myself for, even in a roundabout way, except for the residual of Hiruzen. The only reason I even know about the massacre is because afterward, Uchiha Itachi was technically a spy and nominally under my charge, not that he ever did anything useful as a spy, cracked as he was. I don’t blame him. I’m not trying to make myself look good here. If you get to the end of this and think I’m the hero, I’ve failed in my mission of being truthful.

I still don’t know who I’m writing this to. At first, it was Tsunade, I suppose, then my ego got ahead of me and convinced me that I was writing for a wide audience, impossible as it was. But its easier to pretend its you, Tsunade, and sometimes its easier to pretend its not. There are things I don’t want to you to know about me, things I think we’re both too close to. You can tell, reading this, how the “you” is variable. It a narrative slipperiness I’ve always despised as a reader, but that was before I knew how comforting the distance could be. Maybe it’s a side effect of only working on this manuscript late at night, while Naruto is asleep, after I’ve drank myself almost blind. I can’t face myself dead on. If fine literature is meant to hold a mirror up to ourselves, I’m not interested in this particular revealed iteration. That being said, I’ll try to be clearer in the future about who I’m writing to, maybe edit all this so there’s just one intended audience, but for now, I’ll continue to switch comfortably between the nameless, faceless mob, who don’t know enough to condemn, and the woman I’m closest too in this world, who’d know all too well what exactly it is I am most guilty of.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the scene: Minato with his first crush. His only crush. His future partner in all things.

Its such a relief to me I drank to Uzumaki Kushina’s name. I’d not entirely lost my ability to tell when he’s faking affability, at least I thought, but he did genuinely care for her. I’m sure of it. He wasn’t incapable, when he’d been inclined. I know now that the only reason I feared he was, was because of Orochimaru’s disinterest, not just in me, but in anyone. I told myself Orochimaru’s never been in romantic love, at least one he’d been able to express.

I told myself a lot of things about Orochimaru. Tsunade, I know I told you I loved you, and I do. I still do. I swear, if you’ll have me, I’ll drag Naruto back to the Leaf tomorrow. But there’s reasons I can’t bring myself to go after him, even knowing what he’s done and how much he deserves it.

He was my responsibility. He always was: Hiruzen made sure of it. He still is. I know that since he killed Hiruzen, as his predecessor you have a right to his life. Maybe its just because I’m writing this in some shitty inn in Yu wasted off bad sake, but Orochimaru’s life is mine. I’m the one with claim to it, whatever the laws say. Hiruzen was my sensei too. Please, I genuinely believe I can fix this between us. Between all of us.

Kami, this is pathetic, huh? After I win this bet, burn this manuscript, whoever you are. I’m the big, bad Toad Sage. I don’t have things like feelings. I traded them for flair and showmanship, and a really large penis. If people ask, tell them that!

Anyway, I was feeling so good about Minato’s progress that when I was finally officially cleared again for active duty, I accepted the first long term mission I’d been on in years. I was finally as recovered as I was ever going to be and maybe my protégé wasn’t going to turn into Hanzo and I was just having a grand time of it.

While I was having a great time, the world was not. Because nothing ever got solved by us not dying in Ame, all the unresolved tensions from the Second War were threatening to boil over into a Third. Konoha needed its mobile kage level threat as an active deterrent to what was beginning to feel like an inevitability.

Our Sannin reunion tour went through the middle of the continent. It was land we were all familiar with, all the things we destroyed back in the war so Suna and Iwa couldn’t profit off it in some infinitesimally miniscule way.

I knew I helped wreck Ame, but I felt different seeing it, standing on the vast mud flats, realizing how this land may never recover. Ame wasn’t even in the Second War, and they wouldn’t be in the Third either. It was during a time when I was considering what I would have done differently, if I was ever given the chance, how I’d like to see the world changed, if I could, and Ame was a blank slate, the board wiped clean, except for Hanzo holed up in the Capital.

I’m not sure how admit this next part. I’m tempted to bypass it entirely, since I was so wrong, and acknowledging it changes nothing about what happened. If anything, it will only make you maybe understand why I’d abandoned Minato so abruptly, so completely. But Minato is dead. I can’t explain it to him. I can’t exonerate myself from my actions.

Tsunade, you’re Godaime now, so you’ve got some right to it, little as it changes. You can break all of my bones the next time you see me, I will deserve it tenfold. I freely admit this is maybe my greatest regret, and that’s the next thing you need to understand about all this. I hate what happens next. But I can’t change it.

In Ame, there’s orphans everywhere. I knew why, I helped orphan some of them personally, even the civilians. But they’re everywhere, running around dirty and hungry and scared, bigger pity bait than any in Konoha could dream of. Previously, I’d been resentful of how myself and Minato were raised, but at least Konoha feeds its children. These kids were living in the mud.

Remember those three that ran right up to us? Made themselves hard to ignore. Most people in Ame hate us, and rightly so, but these three kids were the only ones who tried to leverage it against us, clumsy and desperate as it was. Regardless, it made it hard to ignore their pleas, harder still to ignore that I was the cause.

Orochimaru offered to kill them. We were both well versed in pretending he’s got any sort of moral code. Tsunade ignored them; she couldn’t have a bleeding heart for every scruffy urchin we found. Medics are generally the most disillusioned, disheartening as that is.

But I felt guilty. Worse, I felt responsible. Maybe I hadn’t been out of the village in a while, experiencing the wider world purely through my spy ring, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.

So I took them to shelter. I gave them food. I ignored how they devoured my field rations with big eyes and thin hands and bare ankles grimy and scabby from the mud and the scrounging. I left them food and shelter and enough provisions to make it a long while, if they were smart about it. Its treason only by technicality, the kind treason I’d slipped into more than once during the war, with my more creative interpretations of orders.

They insisted I owed them more. Maybe they were right, but they insisted I teach them ninjutsu, so I politely declined. I liked not committing capital treason, actually, and teaching ninjutsu was more of an ask than a few meals.

I left them. But that mission stayed with me, long after the Sannin’s strongarm reunion tour. I know what its like to be a nameless nobody who wanted to be a ninja. I wanted to be a shinobi for fame, for girls, for glory, for all those things I read about in books. These kids just wanted to survive the world I’d inadvertently made for them. It’s a truth that curdled in me.

Global politics worsened. On a simple B rank, Iwa shinobi ambush an unsuspecting Leaf team. Kato Dan dies.

Tsunade’s there. I don’t know the details, never had the gall to ask, but she comes back shellshocked and Dan doesn’t.

She can’t stand the sight of blood.

Its times like this I really hope the ‘you’ isn’t you, Tsunade. I feel irreverent just writing about it, like it’s a weakness I’m admitting to your enemies. I swear, I never thought it was weakness. I mean with ever courtesy that it didn’t decrease my estimate of you a cent. If Oro’s any guesstimate, I don’t think you can do anything I wouldn’t forgive.

But I knew she was hanging on by a thread. She’d already lost so much, her team was really all she still had. No grandfather, no great uncle, no parents, no lover. I don’t believe in evil, not in the way other people do, but if I’d made this all about me, in that moment, when she was reeling from the loss, I think I would have qualified as evil, all my love for her or not.

On the coattails of that unimaginable loss lurked another. Her younger brother, all of 12, goes on his first mission outside the village.

He doesn’t come back either.

Fucking fucking C ranks. Fucking fucking fuck. Sometimes expletives are all I have. In fiction, there’s always reasons why. The violence is always righteous, never senseless. Maybe it’s because I always think I meant the best, stupid and naïve as I was, and because I meant the best, it meant I was right, that everything I did was right, that orders were given for the right reasons, and if I followed them, the plot would seize the narrative and I’d be the hero I thought I was meant to be.

My only excuse now is that I was young. I thought the world was a story and that huge tragedies had to happen because of equally significant reasons, when the truth was usually small politics and petty hurts steered by daimyos to whom war was a thing that happened elsewhere, to other people, and had as little significance as the blurbs I forged for my first porn book.

Senseless. Cyclical violence. No grand design in it at all. No prophecy, no sacrifice required. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t sacrifice, and like I would come to realize, it never fell on who it should have. The powerful people in charge never get hit with the consequences. Its always people like Nawaki.

Even Orochimaru went through the process of mourning. He’s stiff and unsure, the ritual of it foreign to him, but I know more than most how he felt about death. It’s about the only thing I don’t think he understands, as well as the only thing I think he understands too much. He’s always had that orphan’s fascination of it, we’d seen it enough on the battlefield, on all his rejected R&D projects. Maybe you’re not shocked by what he turned into, but reader, I sweat to you, when Nawaki died, Orochimaru cried.

I get it now. I’d be the continent’s biggest hypocrite if I talked about my desertion, and Tsunade’s desertion, discussed the specifics of our treason and explained them away and excused them, without talking about Orochimaru’s. I know why he’s as obsessed with immortality as he is. You won’t believe me, but Orochimaru was a soldier who saw more than his fair share of death, who dealt it out almost daily, and he came from a background that saw his parents die first. It’s no large stretch of the imagination to connect the dots. Tobirama invented the jutsu he did because he was frustrated by the inefficiency of existing techniques, because he saw too many people die who didn’t have to. I’ve compared the two enough that its easy to see the same consideration lurking behind Orochimaru’s quest for immortality. He went about it wrong, but I can glimpse the desire of wanting a world in which no one had to die.

He cried. I think Tsunade forgot that. I’d be easier if I did too.

It’d be too much for anyone, but Tsunade was a Senju, the Last Senju, and so when she storms the Academy and yanks Kato Dan’s niece out of class, then marches out the front gate like a natural disaster leaving only the lucky in her wake, nobody tried to stop her. Not Hiruzen, who had to have seen this coming, unfair as it was that she would bear the brunt of the death when I was so uniquely qualified. Not ANBU. Not Orochimaru. And not me.

She’s not exactly a traitor to the village her clan had helped found, had raised out of dust and dreams, even if she can’t live there any longer. I think she knew, before I did, the darkness that was in Konoha.

Hiruzen never listed her as a missing nin. But he didn’t come up with a believable cover story to explain her absence either. I still don’t know if I’m grateful for that or resentful, but it did set a handy precedent for my own upcoming desertion.

I couldn’t explain it to Minato. He thought she was a nukenin for abandoning her post. We’re still working on nuance. I was feeling way too much about the particular topic: his incomprehension, Orochimaru’s uncharacteristic tears, Hiruzen’s unkind thoughtlessness, had started to piss me off. I think I snapped.

“What would you do if something happened to Kushina? Or me? Or anyone you found precious?”

He tilted his head, considering, all that formidable brain power condensing down to his conclusion. “I’d kill everyone involved.”

He even made it sound reasonable. Shinobi aren’t known for their mercy, after all. Most people would agree he’s in the right. If Tsunade got her hands on the bandits who’d killed her brother, I’m sure she’d put them through a mountain, heal them, and do it again while other jounin cheered her on.

But it just exhausts me. It still does, the way I don’t have any answers.

When a mission through Ame comes up, I take it. Its good cover. I know the land and I needed to check up on a few of my more distant handlers and maybe I needed to get away from the village and everyone in it too, for a little while.

I wasn’t planning to check up on the Ame orphans, but maybe I was thinking of another kid who couldn’t protect himself from this shinobi world. I couldn’t stand the thought of it being my fault this time.

I found them easily enough. They hadn’t left that run down shack I left them in all those months ago.

I wasn’t going to teach them. That’s important. You should know that. I was just going to check on them, maybe revamp the security seals around the shack. In and out, unseen, then back to the village.

But while I was sneaking around, bandits were sneaking up. I could feel the blowback of Nagato’s response from over a mile away. Hanzo was probably shaking in his boots thinking something worse than himself had crawled its way out of the mud in Ame.

I got there as soon as I could, which was seconds. I saw Nagato standing in the mud in the center of the destruction like a calm spot in the eye of a storm, with purple eyes that were ringed like ripples in a pond.

Its legend in itself. I have no idea what it was doing in a nobody from backwater Ame, but it’s the Sage’s dojutsu he looked at me with, over the remains of the team that cornered him.

The Rinnegan.

Everything made a grim kind of sense, then. There was no ceremony to Minato and that had always bothered me, but the Rinnegan’s reveal was suitably portentous. I swear, when he looked at me with the eyes of the Sage of Six Paths, even the rain stopped.

Once, I’d asked myself, if not Minato, who?

There’s no bargaining with a Rinnegan.

I’m not proud of what happens next. Hiruzen would never understand, and he knew about the prophecy; he’d just never accept it wasn’t a Leaf ninja who was foretold. But the second I saw those impossible purple eyes, I knew Nagato was the Child of Prophecy. No legality or politics held up in the face of that.

Besides, Tsunade had already left the village. I told myself there was precedent. I sent a toad. Said my spy ring needed urgent and immediate reinforcement. Scaled the timeline back to ridiculous, unbelievable lengths. Hiruzen would see through it in a heartbeat, but I didn’t expect him to understand, or even condone my treacherous behavior. I just needed him to not send hunter nin after me for it.

I don’t mean to gloss over the depths of my treason, but I need you to understand that I had no choice. I was foretold. It was fate, like in a novel. I was still believing that, then.
You’ll notice I’ve avoided talking about Minato. The truth is, I abandoned him, callously, immediately, thoughtlessly. I told myself that he’d be fine, he was advanced enough he could finish his specialization without my supervision, and besides that, hadn’t I recently convinced myself he wouldn’t go supervillain? I’d never needed to believe that as fervently as I did in that moment.

This was the Rinnegan we were talking about. Mythic as all I'd been led to believe. A power that scaled beyond human comprehension. Nagato had to be the one I was fated to train. It had to be him.

Prophecies, I thought, were about people like that, people like Nagato, not nobodies like us. Had I really thought a good work ethic would trump a bloodline? When had I ever gotten anyone to listen to me, respect me, acknowledge me? I was the bonus Sannin, named only because I happened to be on the team, alive though technicality and Tsunade’s indomitable will.

I told myself he had Kushina, and we shared a summoning contract, so its not like we were cut off. I told myself he was inches away from a promotion in the same way that the world was inches away from another war.

I won’t say it’s not because while Minato had accomplished great things under my tutelage, none of them seemed particularly prophecy worthy. He might want to be the Yondaime, and would eventually be, but that was a Konoha seat, with influence over Fire, and I needed someone who could change the whole shinobi world.

I hate how it happened, and I hate how I handled it, but I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again. I dropped my student like a sack of rocks, traded him in for a more promising model, abandoned him on the cusp of war. I abandoned a low empathy shinobi without a team, without a real support system, in favor of one with an entire team and all the bonds that came with it already in place, ready for me to use as example or exploitation as need be.

Minato has every right to hate me for it, not name his kid in my honor. I know better now, but if Minato was truly a bad person, then maybe this would have been his origin story, the thing that made him snap, snap like Madara must have, back in the day. That’s what I was risking, and I did it anyway, because of how sure I was.

Minato was not the Child of Prophecy. Nagato was.

I’m the second Sannin to leave Konoha, following Tsunade’s example but still making up excuses as to why I simply can’t return just yet. My spies. Research for my porn books that cover up my spies. My cover as a renowned author. I made the toads cover for me, and I made them keep the truth from Minato. ‘Riki never forgave me for that. ‘Ken and ‘Hiro don’t talk to me about it, even today. The deception’s all tangled up in the grief, still. I don’t think telling him would have helped. But maybe then I wouldn’t still feel this way.

But that’s selfish. An insult to his memory. I refuse to do that. I know I’ve maybe painted him in a less flattering light then expected, but you know already how Namikaze Minato turns out. The Hero of the Third War. The Yellow Flash of the Leaf. The Yondaime Hokage. Legendary in a way his sensei never was. Minato’s everything he was ever going to be. Its my fault that it wasn’t enough for me to stay.

This left Orochimaru as the only Sannin in Konoha, and that was precarious, I didn’t want to admit how precarious, but Orochimaru was, I was telling myself, in a denial I was neatly boxing away, a grown man and fully capable of making his own decisions. He wouldn’t go off the deep end just because I abandoned him too, me and Tsuna both.

I know this is a lot of convincing that I’m doing, and I think its only partly aimed at you. I said he won’t blame me, and neither would Minato, because I needed that to be so. Oro might have been a flight risk, but Minato was only dangerous to his enemies, and Kushina could help him to define who those were. I told myself I had succeeded in instilling in him a vast love of state. (I got my official authorial start writing propaganda during the Second War, for occupied lands to accept the military host tearing their homes apart. I never told Minato that part. I’m only admitting it now because it seems a small shame to hide when I’m admitting so much else.)

I stayed in Ame and I trained all three of the orphans to be ninja while the Third War raged around us. The toads kept me updated; I’ll admit another huge shame is that I rarely bothered to reach out to Minato myself; our correspondence was maintained almost entirely through his efforts to guilt me into responding via toad. I’d never wanted him to learn the guilt I carried, but he knew enough to trip me into writing him back, all of that time, even in the midst of war. That, and Gamabunta threatened me. But I’d like to think it was unnecessary intervention. I’d like to believe I was a decent enough person to write him back, regardless of how shitty of a sensei I was to him, always suspicious, always wary. I never gave him my heart, you know? I was proud of him, but maybe he wasn’t to me what I’d been to Hiruzen, and maybe that was more Hiruzen’s fault than Minato’s, but I’m sure it must have hurt him. I didn’t realize how deeply I must have hurt until after he was gone.

I stayed updated about the war, but I didn’t fight in it. I kept my new students as far from the front as possible, even as it began to drag on and on and on. If the Second War had bodies, then the Third War had time. If as many people died in the Third as in the Second, at the same rate as the Second, for as long as the Third lasted, then I believe nobody would be left on the continent. Maybe it drug on so long because of how cautious we were from the Second, how little time some of us had to recover.

This go round, Suna is too poor to fight, so Ame isn’t the battleground it once was. The battle lines cut Kusa in half as Konoha fights on two fronts against the same shinobi they bested last time and left with empty coffers and chips on their shoulders.

A couple of years in, I hear Minato gets that promotion, finally. He’s finished his specialization without me. Eventually, he gets a team of his own. At the time, I wasn’t too concerned besides feeling a vague relief that he wasn’t alone.

The Ame team grows and matures. The power of the Rinnegan is beyond belief. If anything’s going to break the world out of its bearings, it’s the Sage’s Dojutsu. It’s the power of life and death, of power over life and death. The Sage used it to found Ninshu. I couldn’t wait to see what Nagato was going to do with it. I was convinced he was going to break the mold. I needed him too. The world needed him to, so that there would never again be anything as horrible as a Fourth Shinobi World War.

Under my tutelage, even Yahiko and Konan grew into formidable shinobi. I learned the best ways of teaching from Minato, and without the inept guinea pigging I unwittingly inflicted on him, they flourished under my hand.

Over the next five years, I keep in sparse contact with my team, with Konoha, with the student I traded in for my promised destiny. I dedicate almost all of my time to training the Ame orphans and they each excel in different ways.

Nagato is nothing like Minato. The difference threw me off at first. He’s got all that power, but no finesse. Nagato’s like a bomb when he goes off; I struggled to teach him how to dial it down. Not every situation required a bomb. But he was trying, and he was improving, and he wasn’t fettered by Minato’s unflinching, hyper rational ruthlessness. I didn’t doubt him, not even once. If anything, I wished he had thicker skin, that he didn’t let Yahiko take the lead as often as he did. Yahiko wasn’t the Child of Prophecy. Neither was Konan.

Maybe I favored Nagato, it was only natural, probably, but Yahiko had charisma in spades, a natural born leader, and Konan was creative and loyal, exactly the support they would need.

While the Third War eats up the continent, I set the stage for the Rinnegan’s debut. It’s the type of pageantry I excelled in. I spent years planning how it would happen, how I imagined it had to happen.

But none of my machinations could change the fact that my new students, while Sannin trained, were Ame shinobi. They’d want to help Rain first, above all else.

I could work with that. Remember, I felt bad about Rain being as bad as it was, since it was mostly my fault. If this was my only atonement, I’d bore it gladly and consider myself lucky.

I taught them how to start with Ame, with Hanzo, with the fundamental steps for world domination, all those tips and tricks I never showed Minato either because I suspected he already knew or because I still feared making a worse Hanzo.

But the gist is the same, every time: accruing power and political influence, securing funding. How to stay underground long enough to stabilize, then take Ame, then wait before looking outside their own borders, let the rumors about the Rinnegan spread.

Yahiko names their dream Akatsuki, Red Dawn, for the new day they dreamed for.

I know how bad this sounds, but I swear the name’s coincidence. The Akatsuki after Naruto isn’t the same one as Yahiko’s, all about blood and power and whatever the fuck they’re after the bijuu for. But Ame’s Akatsuki was a hopeful dream. A peaceful one. It was only the beginning of the legacy I had planned for them.

I only heard belatedly when Minato lost one of his students to the war. Then he loses another. He must have cared for them, because he keeps his word. He goes out and slaughters his way through a platoon of Iwa shinobi.

1000 ninja. It’s unbelievable. I wish with everything I have that I hadn’t taught him that.

But it succeeds in ending the Third War in a way I didn’t when I stood up to Hanzo in the Second. Iwa stalls with the loss of so many fighters and Kumo can’t hold off Konoha’s newly undivided attention. The Leaf wins.

Like sensei like student. Another war come and gone. It sets the stage nicely. I knew they’ll probably make him Yondaime for it. At least I knew I could count on Konoha being amenable to my future plans.

I’m only gone a few weeks, just to check on the state of things. I’d lost a few informants, misplaced a few others, but the world was ripe for a Rinnegan. I was only gone a few weeks. I didn’t even go very far, just to Tani.

I was only gone a few weeks.

It doesn’t stop what happens from happening. I can’t even be sure if I could have changed things, had I been there. I’d never been able to beat Hanzo before. I fully admit he’s a more talented ninja than I, but he was also older, and infinitely more paranoid, more vulnerable to gimmicks and tricks as a result. With prep time, I maybe could have bested him, if I had my team behind me, with all of our boss summons.

Even with the Rinnegan, they don’t stand a chance against him.

The seals go off. The tiles flip.

The Ame team was dead.

I’m unsure how to properly convey how gutted I was. I shouldn’t have left them alone. They weren’t ready to face Hanzo, that wasn’t the plan, their organization was too new and undisciplined for the thugs the warlord surrounded himself with. I’m not sure why it happened, how Hanzo somehow forced a confrontation: all I know is that it shouldn’t have happened. I should have been there to see it coming and stopped it, even if Hanzo killed me like he should have the last time I saw him across a battlefield in busted chain and a gasmask.

Suffice it to say, my failure was incomprehensible. I’d lost the world its Rinnegan. I fucked up our only chance.

I should have never been prophesied.

I was in a dark place, like I imagine Tsunade was in, when she left. In my grief and confusion, I storm Mount Myoboku, demand Gamamaru explain, but the old sage cannot. There’s no hope in that toad oil cave, with a blind old toad gone half senile with age, with the unimaginable responsibility on his shoulders to steer destiny. I couldn’t handle a single prophecy. Gamamaru had hundreds, over a thousand years. I don’t blame him. Not when the truth is reflected back at me from the surface of a toad oil pool.

I grieved the lost team, and I grieved the lost chance like its all the world and maybe it is. Even now, with everything going on, I firmly believe that if Nagato was still alive, he would have righted this world. There’d be nobody after the jinchuuriki. No rising Fourth War. In Nagato’s world, Naruto is safe.

There was even a time when I was so far into denial that I tried to reconvince myself that I was wrong, that it really had been Minato all along. Technically, his callous display of brutality ended the Third War.

But it didn’t feel like the change it should have been. I swear I am not downplaying Minato’s contribution, the Third War was 7 years of atrocity and it needed to be ended, he’s rightly a hero for it, but it just wasn’t the change I needed it to be. Killing people never changed the world, not when the world revolved around people killing people. Minato was simply, in his own inept grief, perpetuating the very cycle of violence that I’m trying to break.

How do I convince you of how truly good he was, with everything you’ve heard about him, both from me and from history? I’ll say that once, via toad, after his swearing in, I was asking him about what kind of Yondaime he was going to be, thinking all the time ago to Tsunade asking me during a PT session, and I’d pushed, asking about Iwa’s war reparations, about how much they feared him, about how Kumo ninja named him and then maxed his bounty, because I was hearing the rumors about him, and he said to me, “I’d rather not be defined by my enemies.”

What the fuck could I say to that? I think I’m very much defined by my enemies. I surely didn’t teach him that, and just like me, he was named by a foe mid battle. I struggled to understand how different we were, how fundamentally good he was, and how, deep down, I’m a bad person masking successfully as a decent person. This is coming from a self-proclaimed asshole known for his sexual perversion. There’s not enough protagonist privilege in the world to color me now.

I didn’t attend his swearing in. I don’t go within a days run of Fire if I could help it. I have a spy ring to keep myself busy, and writing porn, and running from all the shame and regret twisting me up inside. Konoha, in all its winnings, would only remind me what I’d lost.

I spent years like this, exchanging the occasional polite toad with Minato, ostensibly acting as mobile Sannin and spymaster, functionally and effectually, but privately, I’m just wallowing. Tsunade saw me a few times like this, and we got so drunk the first time we met up after Nagato’s death that we drank a bar and she had to keep me from dying of alcohol poisoning.

It’s through the toads that I heard of Minato’s death, his contract going inactive, and it’s just another hit when I’m down. Hiruzen never says, but I can piece together enough about that night to guess what my student did with the unsealed Kyuubi. I don’t want you to tell me either, Tsunade. I’m burdened by too many details of tragedies. Before you say this can’t possibly be my fault, I taught him fuuinjutsu and Minato never knew a seal he was afraid of, one he wouldn’t try, and do it right. The Reaper Death Seal killed my student and my teacher. What a legacy, when I thought I’d save the world. I only even made more death.

I knew it meant Kushina was dead as well, though her death was never publicized in conjunction to his. She was just another of the Kyuubi’s victims during the rampage, and not the jinchuuriki responsible for keeping that from happening.

Like I said, I don’t know what happened, but I find I can’t blame Kushina. I don’t need you to tell me something else happened that night to know she wouldn’t just let the Demon Fox slip out.

I didn’t go to the funeral. All of Konoha was in mourning but I hadn’t seen him in years. Its an ugly realization, one that haunts me to this day, with all the time I wasted. I used to wrack my brain for times I could have snuck away for a visit, but because of what happened the one time I did leave, I realize it wasn’t possible. I’ll be sorry forever for how I treated him. He died abandoned, and its just another one of my failures.

I’d gone from being a teacher fated to one who outlived all my students.

They make Hiruzen Hokage again, instead of Orochimaru. Maybe sensei finally balled up and found it in himself to deny him. We both know how that ends. There’s no accusation in the missive Hiruzen sent me but there should have been. Hiruzen let him go, but I let him go first. We all did.

Maybe Tsunade lost people, and then maybe I lost people, but Orochimaru lost us. Even if we were still alive, he lost us first, because we gave up on him. We must have, for it to have happened like it did.

I truly believe that if we’d both been in the village, it wouldn’t have happened. We’d always tempered him, you and me. I never would have believed how far we let him fall until I met that test tube shinobi of his, the one with the Wood Release. There’s plenty I need to wring out of his slimy snake hide, but it’s not my grandfather’s bloodline he stole and corrupted.

Even so, even with the long line of people waiting to rip their revenge out of him, I’m first. And I don’t know if I’m going to kill him or cry when I finally decide to face him. It took me years to face Hanzo. Even with the experimentation, with the Konoha Crush, with the Ichibi and Kazekage and fucking Sound, with how he killed sensei, I’m still not sure. I’ve been wrong about so many things. I can’t afford to let this be another one of my mistakes.

He cried once. I still wonder what greatness the Sannin could have accomplished if we were allowed to be anything other than tools of war, if Orochimaru found something to fight for bigger than his own pride, if Tsunade was allowed to heal people instead of kill, if I ever learned how to grieve without blaming myself.

Still, bastard that sensei could be, he sent me a picture of the child. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, at first. Not only did they name him after me, named him Naruto and named me godfather, I wouldn’t have gone back to the village. Not even for my godson.

But the photo Hiruzen sends is a miniature photocopy of Minato. Same hair and eyes. Kushina’s bone structure. Dark whisker marks on his cheek that I stare at a long, long time.

I was thinking about a lot of things. I was thinking about how I was raised, how Minato was raised, about what it meant to be an orphan in Konoha. But I was sure Hiruzen was looking out for him; there was no need for me to go back. Hell, maybe I’d take a swing at him myself if I’d’ve known what exactly Hiruzen’s idea of taking care of Naruto was like, but at the time, I had no reason to suspect he was being mistreated. Hiruzen wasn’t neglectful, not with us, and not with his own children. I’m not sure why he saw the need to let events unfold like they did. I’m sure he leaked his status, since no one else even could. I can read some misguided intention in that, but its difficult. I’ve got the sense that I’m trying too hard, trying to remember my teacher in a better light. But I know too much about what the man was actually capable of to doubt that it happened.

But I’m also thinking about Minato’s intelligence and techniques paired with Kushina’s chakra capacity and kekkei genkai, with the Kyuubi thrown on top. Carrying the name of my most optimistic, and sentimental, enterprise. I won’t lie to you: you know by now I’m a bad enough person that I felt a little spark of hope at the thought.

But Naruto was a toddler. It would be years before I’d even consider training him. But I considered it. I know what you’re thinking: I was as obsessed with this prophecy as Orochimaru was about immortality, that our addictive personalities mirrored each other, that Gamamaru was wrong, that Hiruzen was wrong, that I was wrong. The Child of Prophecy wasn’t guaranteed to save the shinobi world, only change it. I was never promised a savior. I was only ever promised a change, for great good, or great evil, and I though Minato fit the bill, then Nagato, and now I was projecting onto an infant.

Hiruzen wanted me to keep Minato from turning evil, he thought I was potentially the best at keeping prodigy shinobi from turning evil, but look at how wrong he was about me. I thought maybe Gamamaru was wrong about me too.

Its an old tune to hear, but maybe you’ll be pleased, if not surprised, to hear me claim that Naruto is the Child of Prophecy. Maybe its just another chapter in this cluster, another failure in the wings. But there’s something about Naruto, something that neither myself, or Minato, or Nagato had.

Naruto’s got hope.

He’s helping me find mine again. I can’t believe I used to be an optimist. Maybe I’m just old now, old and crotchety, but I can’t remember exactly when I stopped seeing the light in the world, when the darkness and hatred of this shinobi world subsumed the good I used to see in people.

Hell, I’m not sure if the kid is manic or determined. But he’s got his heart set on so much. I never used to consider the heart as on par with the brain, not for shinobi, but evidently, that a mistake as well. Naruto’s so earnest, so genuine, it makes me consider all the ways I could influence Orochimaru that don’t include acts of extreme violence.

I know you’re laughing, Tsunade, or grimacing. I know you want him dead. A part of me does to. But Naruto changes people just by talking to them. I know you’ve experienced it, since we were both in the village, drinking off your new promotion to a position you once swore you’d never take even on pain of death, and you challenged me to write this. I never meant it to be as didactic as I fear it turned out. Who could possibly be interested in the doddering of a 50-year-old man, handing out wisdom like he’s earned it?

But when I think about Naruto’s story, about how I expect him to turn out, its such a beautiful story. Its not worth all the floundering I’ve done trying to make it happen, but I don’t think the world works like that. Naruto’s future success is not contingent on my past failings, but I am grateful to have this second chance. I’m glad Minato gave him to me, that Tsunade entrusted him into my training. She doesn’t know about Ame, about Nagato, but if its you reading this, Tsunade, all I can say is that I tried. I tried, and I failed, but maybe I still did some good in this world. I taught a chuunin a dying shinobi art and he used it to stop wars. I taught a bunch of orphans in Ame to be better than they were and they hatched a beautiful dream, one I hope I can teach Naruto to carry out.

He teaches me too, every day. He’s a good kid. More like Kushina, I think, than Minato. Utterly devoted to that runaway Uchiha in ways I try not to see parallels in. Yammers nonstop about that pink haired girl. Or the newest Ino-Shika-Cho. Or the Hyuuga heir, or an Aburame, or a boy with a dog. I’ve had it up to here, actually, about the Hyuuga and the jinchuuriki that tried to destroy Konoha. The kid even told me about the Demon of the Mist. I think he spills bonds wherever he goes. You’d never suspect he had the Kyuubi inside him.

One day, after he changes the world, for the better this time, I’m sure, I think he’ll go after all that hate inside the Demon Fox. Successful with the Kyuubi or not, eventually convincing to Orochimaru as I want him to be or not, he’s already succeeded in solving all the hate in me.

If there’s any moral in this, its that. The last thing I need you to understand is that no matter how he changes the shinobi world, he’s already changed me.

I think I’ll make Tsunade give me enough money to buy the kid a new outfit, since she lost this bet. If she demands to read it as proof, I think I’d be okay with that. Even with the dark parts, I’m hopeful enough at how the ending will be that I’m willing to share it with her. Or you. I’m willing to spread this light around.

That’s all, I think. I never thought, while writing this, that it’d have such a hopeful ending. But that’s Naruto for you. I should go, the kid eats like three grown men and I’ve got to go to market to secure us a few meals before he eats us out of house and home. We’re in Tea Country now, circling up through Tani towards Taki. There's a festival town I want him to see.

I can see through the window that the sun’s coming up. It’s a red morning, a new dawn, but at least it means the rain’s stopped, for now. The light’s creeping in through the window, slow but steady. Naruto’s snoring like three grown men, too.

I’m taking care of him first. The world will have to wait.