"The council is advised-" Tsunade paused a moment to shuffle her papers. The council members stared at her solemnly, a sea of frozen, wooden faces. She cleared her throat and continued, "The council is advised that, while Uchiha Sasuke committed acts of treason, conspiracy, murder, sedition, and torture, one of Konoha's own died to give him a second chance, and, as the Hokage, I feel that capital punishment is not an option to be considered here."

"You must be joking, Tsunade-sama!"

"Tsunade-sama, he betrayed the Konoha - killed countless of our own, so why should the life of one be sufficient enough to grant him pardon-"

"Tsunade-sama, you are allowing your own partiality to influence your judgments!"

"The council is advised," Tsunade repeated firmly, "that I am not willing to consider execution. My friends... twenty-one is too young to die."

----

Tsunade leaned against the black monument, allowing her old teammate a few minutes to stare at the new name inscribed on its endless surface. Then she stood, began walking; and Jiraiya fell into step beside her, the clacking of his geta echoing in this old grove. A cloud of smoke framed his face, older than it had been a few months ago. "Where do you think he learned it?" she asked, looking up at the sky - it would rain soon, the blue sky had turned to gray and black hours ago. "The seal, I mean."

"Where else?" Another cloud of smoke escaped with Jiraiya's chuckle. "From the Yondaime's monument. I took him when he was thirteen... and he kept going back, especially after Orochimaru took Sasuke's body. I always wondered what he was looking at. Well, now I know."

"Now we know," Tsunade said quietly. Next to her foot, a little circle of ground darkened, and as they walked the sky opened up and began spilling rain. It pattered the ground in a steadily sad sound, lonely, cold. "Nawaki, Dan, your student, our master... it's too much sometimes, Jiraiya. Too many."

Jiraiya touched her shoulder, then slipped his arm in between the crook of her elbow. His hair smelled like sandalwood incense. Tsunade lifted her face up to the rain, to the whitening sky, and shut her eyes.

"What sentence did the council decide for Sasuke?" Jiraiya asked.

"The harshest they could give him. After five years of house arrest - the length of which I'll be trying to reduce - he'll be stripped of his status as ninja and all the privileges thereof. After all that... he won't be allowed to leave Konoha again. A prisoner within his own village... how ironic." She had protested the sentencing - if not for Naruto and Kakashi, then for her own sense of justice - but they thought this sentence the only one able to take the place of execution.

"Hmmm." Jiraiya dragged on his pipe, eyes narrowing. "And if he leaves the village?"

"Well," Tsunade shrugged, "then hunting-nin will be sent out with orders to kill on sight. If he escapes them - God keep him. If he comes back here, he'll be executed. I wasn't able to get around that one."

"Then that's another one we've lost," said Jiraiya. "Naruto didn't seal the kyuubi into Sasuke so he could sit around on his ass here in Konoha. He gave him the kyuubi so Sasuke could finally kill his brother."

"A cruel gift," Tsunade murmured.

Jiraiya smiled as he tapped on his pipe to loosen the herbs. "The best one anyone ever gave him."

----

They held Naruto-sensei's funeral in the middle of fall - only a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Tsunade had told Kaiki - and red and green leaves fell onto his coffin, into his grave and on the black memorial in the grove when they chiseled his name into it. For the next month, Kaiki and Nagi and Hikaru trained by themselves, meeting each other in the afternoons and heading down to the lake. He and Nagi wandered around the village together in the evenings; Hikaru had been engaged to the new clan heir, and wasn't able to spend her time with them as she liked. At the shops, Kaiki started buying bits of chocolate for her so he could give it to her on her wedding day.

Kaiki taught Nagi to gather chakra in the balls of his feet, then coaxed him out onto the lake; he caught Nagi when he fell and pulled him back up, until one day Nagi let go of his arm and began walking. He danced on the lake, waved his arms, laughed and splashed Kaiki with a handful of cold fall water. Kaiki splashed him back, and they fell into the lake together and swam back to shore to where Hikaru was waiting, eyebrows arched over her sunglasses.

The first snow of the season fell, coating Konoha with a light sprinkling of white that reminded Kaiki of the powdered sugar his mother spread on her sweet foods. Kaiki woke Nagi up, waited for him to get dressed, shouting to him through the window; they picked their way through the falling snow into the markets. Hikaru waved to them from a group of Aburames, spoke to her fiancee and joined them, giving them a bit of a smile. They bought breakfast and went down to the lake, where Hyuuga Hinata smiled to them and said that - as Naruto-sensei had asked her to - she would be teaching them now, and hoped they would be able to make it into this month's chuunin exam.

She praised their learning, their strengths - Hikaru's book knowledge, Kaiki's strategies and leadership, and Nagi's enthusiasm and energy - and began to fill in the gaps in their instruction, teaching more patiently and more kindly, yet more firmly than Naruto-sensei had. They took missions with her, D rank and then slowly moved into C rank; trained in the forest, against the other genin teams, and by the middle of October Kaiki and Nagi were sitting on Kaiki's porch, rolling back their sleeves and comparing their new scars. It snowed again, heavily this time; Hinata took them out onto the lake, where they learned how to control the weight and pressure of their bodies on surfaces - so they wouldn't break through the ice, and wouldn't bend tree branches for their enemies to follow.

Sometimes Sakura came and taught them, too, cutting her own arm and letting them tend it, telling them how to care for everything from the slightest scratch to the deepest, most gaping wound. "Like when Naruto-sensei got stabbed," Nagi said as he tightened the bandage around her arm, and Sakura smiled and said Yes, like that time. Sometimes she would tell them a story about Naruto and her and Sasuke, and Hinata would nod and smile and say that she remembered that.

Kaiki burned to ask if Uchiha Sasuke was alive, but Sakura looked older and more worn now, the way his own mother did at times. He kept his questions to himself.

The chuunin exam came and went; Hinata said that they were probably ready to enter it, but she thought it best to wait until the next time - they had had a hard year, no need to add unnecessary stress. She tested them with the Kaiten; none of them could break through, not even the tiniest of Hikaru's insects, but she listened to the strategies they came up with later and said that Kaiki's, if he could pull it off, would work. She smiled, ruffled their hair, said they were coming along very well.

"Now get strong," she said when it snowed too hard to train on the lake, and gave them a few weeks' break.

Kaiki trained with weights and sparred with Nagi, but he found that it was too pretty outside to be training all the time. At night, he walked in it alone, going down the alleys where no one had walked and looking behind himself at the lone, solitary tracks he left behind. He climbed a tree and looked out across Konoha, at the trampled snow in the markets, the untouched snow on the roofs; he told himself it was foolish, it had snowed before and he had always admired it - but when he walked by himself, down a path where no one had stepped, he couldn't remember ever having felt this way. In his backyard, he even bent down and scooped up a handful of snow, tasting its wet, cold fullness cutting to his teeth, then lifted his face to the falling snow and stuck out his tongue to catch more snowflakes.

Hikaru turned fourteen and married the Aburame clan head on a dark, snowy day. Kaiki stood close to her afterward, handed her the little brown box he had filled with chocolates. A high collar covered most of her face, but he could still see her smile.

After the marriage, she had to drop out of their team. She would never become a chuunin or a jounin, not officially.

Kaiki trained with Nagi, and sometimes Nagi beat him; his old childhood friend, the kid he'd been next door to his entire life, was getting stronger, filling out with muscle, becoming taller and thicker. But he still smiled sweetly when he stood over Kaiki, and held out a hand to help him up. Most of the time, though, Kaiki won and Nagi would grumble and scowl like always, and say someday he was going to be stronger than everybody.

On Christmas Eve, Kaiki escaped the pack of his family, waving to Ino and Shikamaru who were leaning on his porch, and ran down with Nagi to the old memorial. It had snowed the night before, but the snow was still pocked here and there with footsteps, three pairs, the light, evenly-spaced prints of jounin. Kaiki drew Nagi into the bushes around the monument and they crept to the front, brushing aside leaves until they could see the three jounin. Kaiki put his hand to his mouth and narrowed his eyes as Tsunade and Jiraiya turned, clearly leaving behind their companion.

The ninja who stayed at the memorial was young, only a little taller than Naruto-sensei had been; thin, well-toned, and pale like the moon. His face was clear of its black mark. He stood still for a long time, stiller than the trees in the forest which still swayed in the wind; only after a long time did he move, and then only to stretch out his hand and touch the monument. His pale hand looked strange against the black stone. He curled in his fingers with their long, sharp nails and looked up at the sky; at the stars.

Kaiki brushed Nagi's elbow, nodded for him to follow. They crept out of the bushes and ran back to the village. In the markets, the people were milling about and laughing, faces bathed in bright lights that illuminated wide smiles, white teeth and clear, unworried eyes.

Kaiki wondered what Uchiha Sasuke would look like in bright light; wondered if he might just merely fade away, like the shadows.

----

Kaiki became a chuunin at the beginning of the next year, Nagi at the end. They still visited Hikaru, who had a child two years later.

----

A/N: Wow, thanks to everyone who read this far, to the last chapter. Thanks so much for the reviews and the constructive criticism, which I'll definitely incorporate into a revision. Alas, all relationships, even platonic ones, are not sweet or rosey or even healthy, and that's the angle I was tackling here. So thanks for sticking with it.