It was then that Mushimi finally appeared. Pocketing something that jangled in his pouch, he exchanged a meaningful glance with Suzuru. Then, turning to Fū with a scowl, he motioned towards the village gates with a jerking gesture.
And so, they left Sunagakure.
...
As they began the long trek across the sand dunes back to their village, Fū couldn't shake off the feeling that something was off. Mushimi and Suzuru seemed to be avoiding her gaze even more so than usual; tense and sweating profusely, they looked around every now and then, as if expecting something.
She glanced around at their surroundings, but all she could see was sand. "Something's up," said Fū, eyeing the boys in question.
"I agree," said Chōmei. However, despite their unease, nothing happened the first day.
But on the second day, just as they were nearing the border between Fire country, Fū sensed them.
As she realized that she was being watched, her senses grew hyper alert. Without stopping, she began to pick up her pace, and soon, she had left her teammates behind. Her heart pounding, she raced across the tree branches of the heavily dense woodland.
Suddenly, with a blur, a figure landed directly in front of her, blocking her way. Fū came to a stop.
"Hold up there, kid." The man had slicked back silver hair, and was dressed in a long black cloak with red clouds and a chin-high collar.
Fū's eyes darted to the blood-red scythe he held in his hand, and snarled, "What do you want with me?"
"Honestly?" The man seemed to genuinely think it over, though his purple eyes never strayed from her face. A gruesome smile lit up his face. "I want to offer you to my god...and by that I mean I want to tear your face up with my scythe, and feel your agony as I rip through your nerves, cell by cell, reveling in your every –"
"Shut up and do your job, newbie." A gruff voice joined in; Fū spun around in shock to see a tall man in a similar black cloak, with a black mask covering much of his face. He wore a Taki forehead-protector, but there was a slash running straight across the middle. Taking in his bizarre appearance, Fū knew for sure that she had never seen him before in her life.
As she watched, the tall man tossed something to the side, and it took a second for Fū to process what it was; when she realized, she jerked back in alarm.
Mushimi and Suzuru's decapitated heads, still dripping blood at the base of their necks, stared back at her with shocked, glassy eyes.
"Not that I care," said the purple-eyed man, "but I thought we made a deal with them?"
"They had only half the money they promised," growled the tall man. He turned his pupil-less green eyes towards Fū, who took a step back.
"Let's show them what we can do, Chōmei," she said, ignoring the trembling in her legs.
...
After a long, hard day of traveling, they had finally left behind the deserts of Wind country and were at the edges of Fire country. However, with still a half day's journey left from Konoha, they had set up camp for the night.
After a satisfying dinner with some prairie chickens they caught and then roasted over the campfire, Rai and Mayu finally collapsed in exhaustion. Sporadically mumbling words like 'I passed!' and 'I'm a chūnin!' in his sleep, Rai snored away on the grassy ground. Next to him, Mayu dozed in her sleeping bag with a peaceful look on her face. And occasionally stoking the campfire with a stick, Kakashi read a book by the fire's light.
Unable to fall asleep, Naruto reclined on top of a nearby boulder that was covered with light fuzz of moss, looking up at the night sky.
Tomorrow, they would be back in Konoha. Naruto was just as happy as the others to finally leave behind the bleak, endless sandy plains of Sunagakure – but he didn't know how he felt about returning to their home village. He didn't want to see any of their faces; he didn't know if he could ever forgive what they'd done to him.
His entire life, they'd lied to him but still subjected him to their hatred and ridicule. They'd never even given him a chance to figure things out for himself, controlling him by tying him down with the Taboo Seal , as if he were nothing but a senseless, rabid beast.
If Konoha could do that to an ignorant, innocent child, what did the village ideals he'd always believed in even signify? The 'Will of Fire' was taught to every child, whether civilian or shinobi-born, as a symbol of peace and compassion, but it had never seemed to extend towards him.
Naruto supposed most of them had never even thought of him as one of them. His hands curled into fists by his side. That was fine with him; he no longer cared about them either. Or at least, he'd try not to.
However...
He gazed down at the sleeping figures of his teammates. The look on Mayu's face as she looked down upon him in the arena had been completely different from anything he'd seen before. There had been no fear, no disgust. There had been only trust, and an unwavering belief in him. And then in a bolt of realization, Kakashi-sensei's words had flashed through his mind:
"So you're saying your efforts were all to get people to acknowledge you? That doesn't sound like the Naruto I know."
Naruto hadn't responded then, but at that moment, his answer had been suddenly clear in his mind. He hadn't been striving all those years to hear praise from faceless villagers who spat at him. He'd been doing his best to stand out for that one day when someone – anyone – noticed him. Not as Naruto the village pariah, or Naruto the jinchūriki, but as Naruto the Konoha ninja. He had wanted the strength to protect them.
But in chasing after that dream, he'd gotten so caught up in its mechanics that he hadn't even realized that he was already surrounded by people who saw him for himself.
Naruto turned to look at the sleeping forms of his teammates. They didn't know, of course, that he had the Nine-tails trapped inside of him. Kakashi-sensei had told him that they would be going directly to the Hokage as soon as they returned to Konoha, but that until then, nobody else was to find out.
How would they react?
Rai's words, from back when they were in the deep underground caves of Suna, swam hauntingly around in his head: "I guess you already know that you were born on the day of the Nine-tails attack... My parents were killed on that day."
Naruto's heart sank. Surely they would realize that Naruto wasn't the Nine-tails itself? That he was just an unwilling vessel for the beast that had killed their loved ones?
Struggling to contain the raging thoughts in his head, Naruto sighed. Letting his head fall back against the moss-covered rock, he looked up at the star-filled sky. Raising a hand, he stared at the outline of his hand.
Several hundreds of feet away, tucked in the shadows of the surrounding forest, a solitary figure in a long black cloak with red cloud motifs silently observed the campsite. His face was obscured by an orange mask that spiraled inwards, opening up into an eye hole on his right. Ignoring the two sleeping genin completely, his red gaze lingered on the jōnin for a second before resting on the redheaded genin who lay awake.
The figure stood completely still, watching. He watched as the genin eventually drifted into a fitful sleep. He watched the jōnin sleep, periodically waking up to stoke the campfire.
For hours, he watched and watched.
Then, there was a hiss and then a distorted flickering in his consciousness.
"We've got the jinchūriki," a voice spoke in his head telepathically. "We're beginning the extraction process now."
Finally, he roused himself. With one last look at the sleeping ninja, he turned to leave, stepping on a leaf as he did so. At the faint sound, the silver-haired jōnin's eyes immediately snapped open, and getting up with a start, the man peered with narrowed eyes at where the figure had been silently watching. But there was nobody there.
He was gone now, but he would keep watching. He was always watching.
...
After several days of nothingness, Fū suddenly realized that she had been given bodily form once more.
She was floating in a pitch black world. There was nothing around her, above her, or below her. But somehow, she was there. She felt weak and tired, and even though she had just awakened, she wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep.
With a jolt, she realized that it was eerily quiet where she was. She couldn't remember the last time it had been so quiet. Where was Chōmei?
"Chōmei?" Fū called out softly, taking a step forward. Despite there being nothing there, her foot held in the blackness, so she took another step forward. "Chōmei?"
She kept calling out his name, but he never answered. After some time, Fū finally realized that he wasn't there. She was the only person there.
For the first time in her life, she was truly alone.
"You know...I really wanted those fireflies..." she whispered into the darkness. But of course, nobody responded.
Fū closed her eyes, and everything faded away.
======================
If you want to support me, Or just want to read ahead of the public release, you can check my p atreon :
p atreon.com/sybife