A/N: This mask isn't as easy to figure out as the other two - or at least I hope so.

Salamander - Sanshoou

There were masks older than the salamander - sanshoou - masks that had seen more battlegrounds and masks that had been worn by stronger shinobi ...despite all of this, salamander was the most famous of all the ANBU masks.

It's first owner had been a young man when sanshoou was handed to him, though even at age nineteen he had been fatally ill and gone through the days knowing that he wouldn't live to reach the age of thirty. Coughs and seizures had plagued him even on his better days, but still he had carried out his duty for his village with pride, salamander covering his face and katana in hand to kill everyone that threatened his home.

Hayate Gekko did just that when he died, even though he wasn't wearing his mask the night he fought Baki of the sand and lost.

Sanshoou had been lying back at the ANBU headquarters then, waiting for its owner to pick it up and use it again to protect his identity as well as the country of fire. When he didn't come back salamander waited for its owner... waited for more than twenty-five years to be worn again.

But the day finally came when another young man with glinting black eyes raised the dusk covered mask from its place in the shelf it had been laying in for far too long.

He was haughty, but also gentle and caring and he wore sanshoou with the same pride he wore his name with. Free of the sins of his father the young man was, the first son of the one that they had called traitor for far longer than he deserved to be called.

Along with bird and toad salamander was worn for the better part of a decade this time. It were glorious days for the once forgotten mask and while the black haired man never made sanshoou overly famous, or feared or hated it still were some of the best days any mask had ever had, because they were not wasted but cherished.

Taro Uchiha loved his mask probably more than any ANBU had before him, because it not only gave him a purpose but it also brought him the chance to protect his siblings, his family and his friends, the people he cared most for in the entire world. He didn't regret taking sanshoou even once, knowing that being of Konoha's legendary ANBU gave him the opportunity to keep his loved ones save.

He never aspired for more and as a reward fate allowed him to live a long life, to watch his children and grandchildren grow and give away salamander at the day of his son's birth without regrets.

The first two owners of salamander wore it with pride ...the third did too, and he also made it infamous well beyond the borders of fire country.

Most ANBU were given their masks when they were young, some were barely out of their teens, the last owner of sanshoou though was given his mask when he was still a boy, fourteen years old and more than a head shorter than his shortest comrades.

All his life they called the boy a dreamer, a stubborn child that didn't know its limits. Many people told him that he would never archive his dream, that it was impossible and that he better give up before he got hurt.

Staring down at sanshoou the fourteen-year-old had known that they were wrong.

They had called him a genius from a very young age, a prodigy like Konoha had never seen one before - he had known that he wasn't however, that he only thing really extraordinary about him was his unmatched stubbornness. His grandfather had told him so once, when he had been on the verge of tears because the other kids had called him an idiot and laughed at his dream: "I knew a boy like you... when he was a child they laughed about him, they shunned him and treated him like dirt. When he was a man they carved his face into the Hokage monument."

Ryosuke Uchiha made sanshoou the most famous mask of them all, because when they carved his head into the Hokage mountain they carved salamander into it as well, pushed up above his face for the world to see.