50 Chapter 50

Neji Hyuuga walked through the village as he grappled with new information he couldn't quite understand. Individually, he could make sense of most of it but together it was an unsolvable puzzle. The fight between Naruto and the Kyuubi had been just within his range and he watched as someone a year younger than him had a spar with the strongest of the legendary chakra beasts. It looked closer to a boy playing with a pet than a battle to the death.

If that were not enough, if Naruto being the victorious one wasn't inexplicable by itself, the prodigy Hyuuga saw the Uzumaki use two bloodline limits, Hyoton and the legendary Mokuton. How? How was it possible to wield several bloodline limits? Was Naruto preternaturally gifted? A result of Orochimaru's experiments? Both?

Even if he were the beneficiary of legendary genetics and or astounding scientific breakthroughs the red haired ninja still had to train those gifts, along with using a unique version of the Raikage's lightning armor. Powerful. He could not speak of the younger shinobi's talents but he knew power when he saw it. He'd chased it all his life. He'd considered himself the best of his generation, the Uchiha a close second. He'd chalked the Chunin exams loss up to a fluke. After the fight with the Kyuubi Neji couldn't delude himself any longer.

While the battle with the giant fox was revealing, Naruto's words shook Neji just as much. The former branch member was able to conclude with no known heritage but his status as a container a widely known secret, the residents of Konoha were likely unwelcoming of the boy. He recalled what the Aburame said at that get together and he was forced to admit the bug user had been correct. He only saw all Naruto had and never questioned what he'd lacked, what he'd lost.

This left Neji perplexed. Fate was unchangeable and punished those that tried. When Neji first meet the Uzumaki he assumed him a failure, or at best mediocre. Years later, after being trained by two of the Sannin that same boy had demonstrated he was anything but average. What Neji couldn't decide was, which was Naruto's fate? The ostracized pariah or the powerhouse? He should not have been able to go from one to the other.

Winners and losers were chosen at birth, this was an unassailable fact. By lineage, Naruto was a winner. By circumstance he was meant to be a loser. Which was fate's design? Why couldn't Neji understand it? Why couldn't he see it? How had he managed to seemingly fight fate? Or did he simply correct it's altered course? The Hyuuga didn't know. Hated not knowing. His all-seeing eyes meant he rarely had to languish in ignorance but he had no conclusions, only questions. Only the mystery that was Naruto Uzumaki.

While Neji was trying to resolve his crisis of faith, Tsunade was busy staring daggers at Jiraiya and Hiruzen. Back in her office, after having plopped in her chair she couldn't bother to hide her anger and disappointment at the pair. She decided to start with Jiraiya.

"What the fuck you stupid toady asshole!" she shouted, vein bulging on her forehead.

"Just because it has toad in the word doesn't mean it fits now, Hime," Jiraiya remarked. He knew calming Tsunade down wasn't possible so it was better to just let her boil over so they could actually talk.

"You dare get funny with me now? I should kick you so hard you see the curvature of the planet."

"That sounds painful, don't do that," Jiraiya responded neutrally and as soon as the words left his mouth Tsunade's fist went through her desk followed by her grabbing him by the collar.

"You better watch it Jiraiya. It's one thing for Sensei to be acting behind my back, I expect it as he doesn't care about anyone's opinion but his own," she started and ignored how Hiruzen frowned at her assessment, "but I trusted you to be straight with me and respect that I am Hokage."

"Tsunade, I do trust you. This wasn't an attempt to move around you. At best, I could tell you the sky would possibly fall some day at some point. And realistically, what could you have done to prepare for this that didn't end in hundreds or thousands of people dead? If any one of us would have attacked the Kyuubi he would have retaliated in full force.

If you had the idea to use Itachi or Sasuke, assuming they were comparable to Madara or that he actually managed to suppress the Kyuubi with just his Sharingan, it would have been worse. Naruto told me himself, the fox hates the Uchiha. All of them, no exceptions. Tenzo, frankly, isn't strong enough to suppress a bijuu and the only seal users who could possibly come up with something are all redheads and two of them fear Orochimaru more than you, the other one is sleeping with her. That last one took care of the issue, no one got hurt and a lot of things that needed to be said were."

Tsunade quickly considered his argument and while she didn't have ready counters to most of it, it simply wasn't up to him to decide when he'd share a village wide threat. Tsunade impressed upon Jiraiya that very fact and he agreed and sincerely apologized. The Godaime then moved on to Hiruzen.

"How much of your legacy, of your remaining time… how many of your relationships are you going to ruin trying to get back at Orochi? I told you I wouldn't tolerate you working behind my back and you turned one of my ninja into a secret asset, spying on a high ranking member of the village. You had no right."

"I had every right. You didn't have to sort through the dead babies like I did. You didn't have to chase her out of the village like I did. You just support her and this twisted relationship she has with Naruto-kun. You should be protecting him instead of encouraging this farce. So, knowing she hadn't changed, I enacted a plan. It didn't work but I'm not wrong about her."

"You keep pushing and it isn't her you're going to have to deal with," Jiraiya observed recalling the earlier conversation he had with his godson. "Sensei, you're going to back Naruto into a corner and I don't know why you can't see that. I'll make this as plain as I can, he just played with the Kyuubi. It took most of the senior ninja, you, Enma, Gamabunta, Minato and Kushina to restrain and seal it. What do you possibly think you can do to someone like that? You may think you're protecting Naruto but he will protect Orochimaru. It's time to move on." Hiruzen was about to respond to his student but was cut off by Tsunade.

"Several of us have tried to talk you out of this vendetta, this quest to get her out of the village. You won't listen no matter how much it has cost you. You tried to kill her, Sensei! The Daimyo could have had you executed. You had to resign in disgrace and you'll never repair your relationship with Naruto. If I cut you out of village affairs completely all your knowledge and experience would be wasted but what else can I do? You're making it impossible for me to do anything but isolate you, place you under house arrest for the remainder of your days. Is that what you want?"

"Of course not. But people don't simply change, Tsunade-chan. She's had designs on Naruto for years. Years! She's manipulated things, possibly him for who knows how long? Do you believe they are anything approaching equals? He's an affection starved young man and she's used her wiles to exploit his weakness."

"Like she did with you being the implication?" Tsunade asked. "Is that the story you've been telling yourself? She seduced you?"

"How do you know she didn't?"

"Because I'm not fucking stupid, Sensei," Tsunade yelled. She took some calming breaths, forcing her anger away. It wouldn't do to be beat her Sensei to death. "This is getting us nowhere but just know this is truly your final warning. Act against her again and I'll lock what's ever left of you in your compound. We still have one more issue. There is no way word won't get back to Ay and Onoki." Both men looked grim at Tsunade's words.

"Strength invites challenge," Jiraiya whispered, wondering if his final student was clairvoyant.

"What's that Jiraiya?"

"Something Naruto said earlier, strength invites challenge."

"The problem is, Naruto's known abilities simply give Onoki justification to do whatever it is he was already going to do. You likely won't know where he falls until the Chunin Exams," Hiruzen remarked. Tsunade nodded in response but wished she had a better read on the Fence Sitter.

After his laughing fit ended Naruto took a seat across from the murderer of his parents, the person that altered his very lifecourse. Only the width of the stainless steel table separated the pair. Naruto studied the Uchiha's face, a mismatched pair of brown and green eyes would suggest someone had taken his Sharingan eyes from him. He had scarring on his face, clearly having suffered some major trauma. The man looked tired or was it resigned, as if he had just accepted all that would come to him.

The Uzumaki clan head didn't know what to say to the man. He never planned on talking to him, not even a witty remark as the man faded away. He was just going to kill him. But now? It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume he'd been subjected to some of Orochi's more questionable impulses. He looked broken and while Naruto didn't care about his emotional state it didn't leave him with a lot of motivation to strike the Uchiha down.

Some might find it foolish that Naruto wasn't blindly driven by revenge, by all the pain this man caused him and all he took away. But to Naruto, that's exactly why he couldn't prioritize revenge. What could he do to the person that took his parents and caused the village to hate him, only to create an organization of monsters to one day hunt him down and kill him as well? To even get into the realm of retribution, Naruto reasoned, he'd have to bend the laws of space and time.

True, he could just kill him now for his past actions. No one could possibly fault him but it still felt hollow. He was prepared to neutralize a threat and by all appearances it had been. Naruto had also felt for the Hiraishin marker his father had placed on the man and it was still there. Once he'd reached for a marker he simply didn't forget it and this Obito person wouldn't get a normal Rasengan to the back this time.

"Why?" Naruto finally asked. He didn't know if learning of this man's justifications would do anything but so much pain and misery, he simply had to know.

"The simple answer is a girl," Obito answered.

"If you rained destruction down on this village because you couldn't get a date I am going to kill you." It appeared he could find the motivation after all.

Obito raised his arms in mock surrender," Whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't despite what many may think. It was one of my genin teammates, along with Kakashi."

"You were one of my father's students?" Naruto asked in surprise. He hadn't known that.

"Yes. Rin, my teammate, wasn't just some girl I had a crush on. For context, the Uchiha were not a well liked clan during my childhood and even amongst the Uchiha I was considered an oddball and a failure. I learned early that life could be mindlessly cruel."

"You know what, just hold out your fist, this will go faster," Naruto suggested as he became engulfed in Kurama's chakra cloak. The two men bumped fists and Naruto saw it all. Obito's childhood, his affection for and friendship with Rin and rivalry with Kakashi. He saw how much the Uchiha respected his father and how he helped him deal with the frustrations of being in Kakashi's shadow. He saw the disastrous mission and the aftermath. He saw the real Madara play head games and he watched Rin sacrifice herself.

The emotion of the world coming apart at the seams was not one he could easily relate to. It was all encompassing and infinite. Naruto watched the real Madara take a broken boy and warp him, shattering or perverting everything Obito believed in. He saw a boy become a young man, having given up on this world as meaningless. He watched the fateful night as Master unknowingly squared off against student and all the years after. The change of the Akatsuki, the havoc done to Kiri. It was a tale of misery and violence that left near everyone worse off in their wake. As the link was severed Naruto deactivated the chakra mode and gathered himself.

"She made it all make sense."

"Yes. I believed the world could be good because she existed in it. Madara twisted me to his cause so thoroughly that any thought that what I was doing was dishonoring her never entered my mind. This world wasn't real so none of it mattered," Obito explained. "It was Orochimaru that helped me come to the realization that Madara likely set me up to see Rin die knowing it'd cause me to give up on everything."

Naruto sat in silence, mulling over this new information. Obito had been a lonely kid that just wanted acknowledgment, and that was an incredibly familiar feeling. The Uzumaki couldn't ignore how the young man, a child still, was broken and manipulated by one of the greatest ninja to ever live. How he thought he was helping people to never truly experience what he had. Naruto couldn't relate to that level of despair but he knew how hard he took it when he learned of Hinata's death and they hadn't been friends for years.

Pain begets pain. He'd seen it with Obito and even if she'd never admit it, Orochi-chan was caught in this cycle. Jiraiya wasn't wrong about the cycle of hatred. Revenge, the futile desire to even some nonexistent cosmic balance when someone hurts you. Naruto never considered himself vengeful but that was before he had to face himself, his long buried hatred. A few different situations and he'd be what Obito was, someone with the justification to harm others and the permission to never feel guilty about it.

"So, what now?" the Special Jounin asked.

Obito seemed surprised by the question if the widening of his eyes were a reliable tell. "I honestly don't know. I assumed you'd kill me without a second thought for what I'd done to you."

"Killing you wouldn't bring my parents back nor give me a happy childhood. Doesn't mean I forgive you or anything like that but you dead does nothing for me. And I don't know if there is redemption for you but there really isn't if you're dead."

"There isn't. Everything I've done… there's just no coming back from that. I accept it. The irony is that I was so dedicated to seeing Rin again in this world I assured I won't in the next. No torture devised hurts more than that."

Naruto wanted to tell Obito he was wrong, if not for the sake of the Uchiha than his own. He wanted to believe there was a chance to redeem, to make amends as long as you were alive to do so. But that inclination warred with the slights of his past. He hadn't forgive the villagers, he hadn't forgiven the Old Man and even with this new information he wasn't sure how he could truly forgive Obito. He didn't hate any of these parties but true forgiveness and acceptance was a long way off. Questions with no easy answers swirled in his mind as he responded.

"I am credited with ending a rebellion in Iron Country. The chief architect, Ito Watanabe, trained me for a little while I was there. He spoke a lot about his late daughter, Retsu, often. How when she was little she would proclaim she'd be the first female samurai of Iron Country. He said she was brave and headstrong. She wanted to choose her own destiny and not accept the rigid role assigned to her. They argued a lot about that and he remained steadfast in his refusal to train her. He told me a lot about her but only revealed how she died the night before he rebelled. Some students he kicked out of the service paid him back by raping and killing her.

Now, even with training, there was no guarantee that she would have survived but with no training it was a certainty she wouldn't. It left him broken and he all but retired from his post, only training a select few students in a private school, Mifune allowing them to test into official service. He also became a champion for a more equal Iron country, so much so it put him on the outs with Mifune. As he told me about his daughter's life, demise, and his change of heart he also confessed the tremendous guilt he carried. He asked why did he have to lose his daughter to finally see her point?

The next day I'm escorting Mifune's granddaughter, Tomoe, and we get surrounded by dozens of Ito's former and current students. They, calmly, say they deposing Mifune and as an outsider I can walk away. The subtext being that they were going to kill Tomoe. Backward ass country. If they couldn't defeat Mifune outright, they were going to try to shame him into ritual suicide for failing to protect his family. So, here I was with a decision, allow this one innocent to be sacrificed for the potential of granting liberty and self-determination to countless others."

"I'm assuming you didn't leave her."

"I killed them all."

"But ninja arts are outlawed in Iron Country, even in defense of his granddaughter you'd have been arrested."

"Didn't use any ninja arts, just my sword. Anyway, after getting her protected, I tracked down Ito and we had a duel. What struck me was his smile, even as he lay dying. It makes me wonder if he knew this was the likely outcome, if I hadn't been willing to sacrifice one person then he'd put me in the position to sacrifice many. Officially, I am a hero but how many people see me as just another tool of their oppression? More concretely, how many more Retsu's will there be because I intervened and protected Tomoe?"

"You can't think like that," Obito cautioned. "You can't carry that weight. I never learned to harden my heart and it shattered when Rin died. I became a monster."

"But it's all linked. An endless web of action and consequence. That's mostly beside my point anyway. For some I am a hero. For others, possibly a villain. But the truth? Tomoe's Governess turned Attendant poisoned me earlier, the effects only kicking in once the fighting started. For most of it, I wasn't even seeing Tomoe anymore, not that I realized it at the time. Thanks to Kurama, the poison wasn't going to kill me but it was a bitch of a handicap.

So, not a hero. Not a villain. I was just a drugged fifteen year-old doing the best I could. And that's probably the truth for all of us. We are neither the best nor the worst things we've ever done. You may believe redemption is impossible and maybe it is. But wouldn't it be worth it to try to get as close to it as you can? Do as much good as possible to rebalance the scales?" Naruto asked with a shrug. "Whatever you land on, at least talk to Kakashi first. He deserves that much." Obito nodded and Naruto got up to depart, Orochimaru still standing in the doorway.

As Naruto reached the exit, Obito asked a question, "How did you find out you were hallucinating? You said you weren't even aware of it so how did you come to realize it?"

"The next day Tomoe came to bid Jiraiya and I farewell, neither wanting to stick around. As we were saying our goodbyes she asked me if I were really ok to travel. I assured her I was but she didn't seem to believe me so I asked why. She said that during the fight my attempts to be reassuring were a mixed bag because I was calling her some other girl's name."

Naruto and Orochimaru departed, the mood quite somber. In an attempt to lighten the vibe, Orochi slides next to Naruto and kiss his cheek. Startled, Naruto asks, "What was that for?"

"Because clearly I was the woman you were hallucinating about. Kukuku, my Naruto-kun is so gallant. Keep it up and I might swoon one day."

Naruto chuckled before saying, "The one time I attempted to protect you I failed miserably and got my ass handed to me."

"It's the thought that counts," Orochi responded.

"You don't actually believe that," Naruto observed, finally eliciting a laugh from her.

"No, but it sounded good." The couple returned to silence as they returned to her study. Once everything was sealed Orochi lead Naruto to her living room, both taking a seat on her couch. "I know you may have more questions," she started.

"Like the pair of Sharingan you've been hiding? Certainly makes me feel better you tore through my genjutsu," Naruto said as he tickled her side. He didn't really care she had them.

"I only implanted one into myself just in case you ever wanted an upgrade as well. But not just that," Orochi paused. She wasn't used to feeling uneasy about things but she had to admit it to herself, she cared what Naruto thought of her and while she was confident she knew what lines not to cross, even a hint of disappointment would affect her more than she liked. "If I wasn't the person you were seeing in your poisoned state then giving the timing I can guess who it was so let's start there. Naruto-kun, Hinata's alive."