Wildflowers Burning

Konoha is just as he remembered it, sort of. It's old, it's something different. Cities change, they grow. It's a living being, and by the time he hit thirty, it was a very different place to when he was five. Still, Konoha would always be home.
The streets are dusty, the buildings are painted, the people are alive. He takes it all in with a reverence. Home.
It's so vivid, so colorful. People pass in vibrant yellow, pink, blue kimonos, signs painted in reds and golds plaster storefronts. Ochre buildings, sepia streets, ocean-blue sky. Unlit crimson lanterns strung across streets glow in the sunlight.
He takes it all in, and breathes easier than he had in a long time.
It’s beautiful.

The crowd is raucous, though. Pressing, claustrophobic. Someone drops something, it cracks open on the ground and Kaito finches away, nearly ducks for cover. It's not long before flashes of hair have him jerking to call after someone dead, before the idle conversation of civilians stops being familiar and starts being an overwhelming crush of noise. He starts to see blood, in the corner of his eyes. He makes a quick turn away from the main center, following the sound of quiet.
He creeps through the shadows, once more the outsider of his youth, darting around people and into corners. He doesn’t realize his destination until he's wandering the training grounds. They're quiet, peaceful. Loud but distant voices and the muffled sounds of a wild spar drive him to walk the other way. The leaves are just starting to turn, the collection of colors ranges from maple greens and pales yellows to the occasional warm red.

He treads the beaten dirt until he finds himself at the gates of the forest of death, the sun low on the horizon. He remembers the chunin exams, he remembers Orochimaru. He remembers watching it burn. He remembers Anko. He hops the fence, a small chakra-enhanced jump landing him inside the grounds.
He walks.

He catches a rabbit- what an out of place creature- with his hands. He breaks its neck, builds a fire, starts to roast the meat. He nearly pukes.

He's trembling, sweating, and soaked from the unnecessarily high powered suiton jutsu he conjured. Sakura's green eyes, her pink hair, her damn need to save one more kid, flash behind his eyelids. Flames crawl up his legs, licking his torso. Ayame screams,  caught in the rubble. He sees her corpse while it’s being consumed by the flame. He can't do this.

He can't save anyone.

He's been fooling himself for the past three years, the past lifetime.

He stands. He walks to the river. He takes a drink. He washes his face. He breathes.
He needs to talk to Kurama.

He finds a tree with high roots. He settles into the nook between them. He breathes. He closes his eyes and sinks, sinks deep into himself.
His mindscape had become uglier. The sewers of his younger years had been transformed into a green valley. It burned when Konoha did. The ashes were waist high in places, he sunk into them in his dreams, drowned in the screams of a dying village. It was a wasteland, covered in burnt scraps of childhood. A brutalized copy of Kakashi's Icha Icha lay, barely orange and half submerged in ash. His old frog wallet was somewhere, soaked in blood and surrounded by spilt coins.
He waded through ash and ash and ash until he surmounted a hill. The bars of the cage were near-set trees, he'd managed to rebuild those. The fox had hated the metal box he'd rotted in.

"Kurama," he called out, slipping between the trunks. "I did it." It reverberated, as if he'd yelled into a cave.
Grey dust flew everywhere as the fox, the great Kyuubi, unearthed itself from the ashes. He was smaller, every part of him thinner. His nine tails curled like snakes around his torso, winding and unwinding and kicking up ash. He was tired.
"You think I don't know, kit? Your little astrology trick didn't mean there wasn't a toll. It just meant it didn't kill the both of us." It growled at him, even as he calmly paced forward.

He wrapped his arms around the mighty beast's foreleg. "Thank you." He felt the heat, the fire of Kurama's soul scream agony into his skin. He held on. Fire couldn't hurt him in his mindscape. Fire couldn't hurt him in his mindscape. Fire couldn't-

Kurama kicked him back, and he landed on his ass, kicking up a cloud of dust.  "Cut it, kit. I didn't have a say in the matter."

"You did. You helped. You kept me alive, you'd reform if you didn't. Free."

"Thank me by eating, you brat. Thank me by not fucking wasting this. Thank me by quitting your little angst party and getting out there and doing what you came here to do. Thank me by letting me rip out that Madara traitor's throat. Don't hug me, human. And don't play the martyr. Your angst is noxious." The fox settles back down, beginning to sink once more into a pile of smoldering ashes. Kaito was very clearly dismissed.
"May what lives never die," he says. The fox once taught him the blessing of spirits, had shown him flashes of what life had bee before this game of bijuu keep-away, passing him around from jail to jail.   

"Fuck off, kit."
He does.


When he wakes, he wanders to find food. The Forest of Death was not a hospitable place, but it could be a haven, provided you knew what you were doing The morning flower vine held fine berries, he remembers Anko teaching him, but it looked all too much like the water blossom which would kill you in three hours flat. The kitsune had handled all poisons he ingested in his childhood, but right now he was fairly sure with any extra strain the Kyuubi might roast him in his sleep in revenge.
He finds the five petaled flower near the bank, midnight purple blossoms speckled with white, just a little upstream. He traces the vein pattern on the bottom of one of the leaves, sprouting from a centra axis, one of the minor tells that it was not, in fact, it's lookalike. He methodically plucks and eats its fruit. His hands start to stain red. He washes them in the river, keep eating, keeps his eyes staring into the idle disctance. Food left him uneasy, even after the past few months. He ate as he had to, as was necessary. He was fairly sure it wasn't enough, though.

He'd have to go to the market soon. He needed weapons. He needed money, too, but he had a plan to handle that. He needed at least something, first. A blade would be good, though he couldn't afford the quality he'd usually call necessary.
Then he could do what he came to.

He'd train, first. He was far from the pinnacle of strength he'd once been, he was weak and ill and tired.

He could do this, though. He had to.

Failure was not an option.

It was in the pre-dawn twilight that Uzumaki Kaito made his way to a small weapons shop in town, chewing mint leaves. A few early birds potter to and fro, and he brushes past them with little of note. It’s not technically open yet, he doesn’t think, but there is a man behind the counter fiddling with the register, and the door opens when he pushes at it. Bells tinkle and a small child comes hurrying up to him. Tenten.

“Hello mister Shinobi-san!” she bubbles, gazing up at him. How old was she- eight? She had been his senior, once. Then his subordinate. Then dead. Red starts to spread across her small blue tunic, to trickle down from the corner of her mouth and from her hairline. Kaito keeps himself very carefully neutral.

“Ah, hello,” he replies, gently guiding her away from his knees. His hand on her weeping crimson shoulder comes off clean. It’s not real, it’s not real. He is fine. He closes his eyes, takes a breath. When he opens them, the inquisitive little panda child is peering up at him and notable not covered in gore.

She tugs on his pant leg. “Can I help you mister? What are you looking for? I like the senbon and the kunai and the trench knives and the shuriken and the daggers, and and and” she hurtles in one breath. Kaito smiles indulgently.

“Dangerous,” is all he manages to say. He thinks, remembers her spark, her flare, her passions. Her determination to prove that she, was more than her gender. “From that… I think, you must be too.”

She positively beams at him. “Yes! I’m going to grow up to be like Tsunade! She’s stronger than everyone!” He thinks about Granny, about his object of many fantasies, resting upon her head. He remembers good times, he remembers days, good days, where she snuck children candy and pretended very hard to be a cold, heartless ice queen.

“If you work hard, you could become even stronger than her ,” he whispers, conspiratorially. The small child looks aghast at the concept, as if she had not even conceived the possibility, then rushes off to her father. Kaito, amused, half-listening to the high-pitched, breathless yammering of an overexcited child as he continues to browse the racks of weapons. He spies a tanto with a hilt wrapped in crimson cloth, a dark steel blade. It reminds him of a sword he’d bought from this very store in a whole other world. He picks it up, pulls it across his palm to see beads of blood well almost immediately in the sliver of split skin. He runs his tongue over the small wound, copper-sweet, and watches as it coagulates. He smiles, swinging the blade gently in his hand, feeling out the balance. It’s good, gorgeous, better than most blades and definitely better than the kunai he’s been using. He checks the price and winces. He sets it down, and tries not to look for good.

Tenten’s father, a man he never really got to know, ambles over. “Can I help you find something? I know my daughter can be a little… excitable, I hope she didn’t bother you at all.”

“Ahhh, yes. I do… need a little help.” He admits. Then thinks. “She is a... lovely girl. She will be a strong kunoichi one day.”

“Ahh, one day,” the man agrees. “For now, she’s just a little girl with a bit too much interest in sharp objects. I’m enrolling her in the academy this year, I hope they can tame her a little.” Kaito looks at the untamed little one mentioned, currently battling the air with a small foil. He smiles.

“Forgive me, let me introduce myself. I’m Ryouta, and that little beast is Tenten. You’ve really charmed her, you know. So anyhow, what are you looking for, ah-” he trails off.

It takes a moment for the expected response to process. “Kaito. Uzumaki. Ah, Uzumaki Kaito, sorry.” He shoves a hand in the back of his hair, tugs. It’s painful to be so utterly incompetent at speech. Small children don’t judge stilted sentences, don’t think too hard about who he is and why he’s there. “I’m looking for a blade. I’m not… picky. I don’t have much money for it right now, so nothing too nice. I’ll be able to...” he flounders, fishing for the right word, “replace. Replace it soon.”

Ryouta nods, seeming to ignore Kaito’s complete ineptitude. “I see, I see. Well, there are a few options, depending on what you need it for. I noticed you liked that tanto- do you have a preference of sword style?”

Naruto had known all about swords, learnt to wield them in lieu of fighting just with fists. Kaito shrugged.

“We can stick with tantos, then,” Ryouta decides. He gesture to a rack to their left. “These ones aren’t the highest quality, but there are a lot of ninja who prefer them. They’re easy enough to keep sharp and very light- it helps those who rely mostly on speed. They break fairly easily though, using them to block heavy blows isn’t always the best idea.” Another rack over, he continues.

“These are sturdier, but heavy and once they’re dull, they’re dull. There are more swords around that you can take a look at, but these are the lowest priced tantos for proper combat. Take a look.” He then leaves Kaito alone without waiting for a dismissal on the customer’s part- thankfully- to wrestle a large, heavy blade out of his young hellion’s hands. Kaito silently wishes him good luck.

He goes for the first rack and whittles his choices down to two fairly quickly, between one with a slightly longer blade and another with a more comfortable handle. He chooses the cheaper one- the latter, and brings it up to the counter to pay. He hands over the necessary ryo and remembers one more thing.

“Where can I buy paper?” He blurts.

Ryouta looks up. “Hm?”

“I prefer to make my own tags. Where could I get some blank ones?” He elaborates. The man begins to answer but Tenten, who had moved on to embedding shuriken into the floor behind the counter pipes up.

“Oh! Oh!” She starts dashing around at high speed, and before Ryouta could properly respond, she’s next to Kaito with a stack of papers in her hands.

“I was trying to make my own tags so I got my friend Kita to give me some! But then Daddy got mad because he said I would kill everyone and my dog! I don’t wanna kill my dog!” Ryouta shrugged helplessly. Kaito related.

“Thank you, Ten-chan. It’s very nice of you to give me these.” He attempts to  to placate. “One day, I can teach a little about them.” The Tenten of his time had already known sealing, he wondered where she’d gotten it from. He wondered how many times she’d singed off her own eyebrows.

The girl’s eyes widened, and she tried to tackle him into a hug. What she’d embraced was a cylindrical clear display case, and she looks up in confusion to see a swinging door with tinkling bells.