Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by drowsyivy, UmbreonGurl, and Petrames.

"Longing, how soft a word for such a ravenous feeling. How we hunger in silence."

— Pavana

In the wake of grief, lives are left broken. His life feels broken. The air in his lungs feels like brittle glass. Not that breathing would kill him, no not that. He's lived like a cockroach, always stomped on, never dying, old bad penny, always coming back.

But how does he come back from this? How does anyone come back?

How do you pound a square peg into a circle without making it smaller and smaller until all heart disappears into the land of shadow?

It's only that he feels each breath pack more of a punch than it ought is all.

It makes him tire more easily and think dark thoughts. So many choices had led them to this, to turn him into this crumpled man on the floor, to put him back on his knees with a bottle in hand.

God, he hates this.

There's no point in trying to drown sorrows that have long since learned how to swim.

Might've worked a few years ago, back when he was a younger man.

Doesn't work now except to make his vision blur around the edges and his hands shake like he's low on sugar.

Cash it in, cash it in, cash in all that bad luck of yours.

No, he'd dared to hope even though he knew he couldn't get his hopes up, and look where it's landed him.

On his knees.

In his own damned shadow.

A bottle in hand, empty bottles rolling all across the floor.

An ocean of hard liquor can't numb out the pain.

And he hates himself when he's like this, he really does. He hates when he blames himself for things out of his control, and he hates when he seethes with this bitter resentment for how blessed —

A dead man cannot be blessed. Death is no blessing; thinking so is logic so twisted that he's not even sure where to begin unpacking the falsehoods.

Kaito is dead. He is dead, and even if it has been years — it has been years, but it still turns his grief into anger, into seething, heartbreaking rage.

Ah, but he's jealous. He's a jealous man, a bad man. A bad man made out of shadows and bitter grace.

He runs the back of his hand — cracked knuckles, skin paper dry, anything more and he might shatter into as many pieces as the stars — over his chapped lips. The more he drinks, the worse it gets.

What was the old saying? When you fall off the wagon, you spend a lifetime trying to get back on.

Sure doesn't feel like he's gonna try getting back on the wagon right now. He barely knows the value of his own life as it is. Why care about the impact whatever he's doing now has on others?

He'd sent the boys away to manage themselves before he completely broke down, which was all he had the mental bandwidth to do.

It's good enough.

It's good enough, even if he's never once in his life been good enough.

"Sensei?" Kai's little sprout.

He'd give his own right arm for a daughter. The more the gods deprive and deny him, the more it — carves out all those good pieces of him, the ones he'd hoped to use to make himself worthwhile, and turns him into this wreckage on his own living room floor.

He peels himself away from where he'd been leaning against his couch, the half empty bottle in his hand slipping from his slack grasp and smashing against the floor.

The sake cascades back onto the hem of his pants, but he's long past the point or the ability to care.

"Hana?"

"Is there anything I can do?" And for a moment, he loses himself, swimming in shame — shame that she has to see him like this, shame that he was jealous, shame that he fell off the wagon, shame that he can't get back up, shame that—

That he didn't die somewhere on this road in between breaths of vengeance and cursing god.

"Hana." And through his shame, he loves this little girl with her serious eyes and too kind heart that he hadn't the strength to break. "You're safe." He's shaking, shaking uncontrollably. The alcohol's catching up to him. "Safe." He murmurs. "Safe. Safe. Safesafesafe-"

"Yes," she says, "I am safe." Somewhere in the back of his mind, he's still chanting. Safesafesafesafe… She was gone but now she's back. She's safe right now, in this one moment, she's safe.

"Sensei?" She asks. "How is Kiho-baachan?"

He laughs, bitter, broken, and forty types of shattered all in one. "Kiho?" They hadn't spoken for a while now. He doesn't know exactly how long. "I've let her rest." He's bringing his shaking under control slowly. "She's in the bedroom."

"By getting drunk?" Her frank statement holds a red hot brand to his pride, whatever little bits of it he has left. From the mouths of babes comes the harshest of truths. And Hana has never been someone to hold back from saying what she's thinking. That sort of honesty is rare these days. "How will she rest if you are losing your mind here in the living room?"

She doesn't know this part of him, doesn't know how blindingly he'd gotten himself drunk when Kai died, and how hard it'd been for him to dig himself out of that grave.

She didn't know that he'd done that for her team, kept himself so busy that he hadn't the time for it.

She doesn't know, because he'd kept this shameful, horrific part of his past carefully locked away until now. He'd tried to make himself good. A good man. A kind one. Capable. Supportive. He'd tried to hide the shadow, but lies by omission are lies all the same.

"I never did tell you that I was an alcoholic, did I?" He laces his fingers together and sits there, hunched, staring at his clasped hands. "I haven't slipped this bad since—" He shakes his head. The memories threaten to drown him. "It doesn't matter now." His knuckles are cracked, skin peeling off of the pads of his fingers. He's sure the rest of him looks no better.

The cracks on his lips sting when he runs his tongue over them in an attempt to wet them.

It's a surprise then, that Hana-chan chooses to lean her head against his shoulder. "I'm not blaming you, Sensei." Chooses to slide off of the couch to kneel in front of him, in that pool of sake he'd so casually disregarded. "I just don't like seeing you like this." Her hands are tiny when compared to his, little child with a child's hands.

The corner of his mouth tilts up in a broken crooked smile. Ah, I've made you be the adult now, haven't I? "You sound like both of your parents, Hana." He pulls a hand free to tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear. "Your parents." What a reality it is, that she might be a child he loves, but he is not her father, can't ever hope to take that role.

Damn Uchiha Fugaku.

Damn him, but also thank him.

Sometimes, he can admit that Uchiha Fugaku's the better man really. Might not be the smarter man, or the more loving man, or the more politically adept man, or the better shinobi, but he is the better man.

The more dependable, kinder, principled, honorable man. And he's always envied those qualities when he couldn't find them in himself.

"You are also my parent." She doesn't squeeze his hand, probably careful of the cracked skin, though her grip on him and his heart is absolute."You're my sensei, and I love you."

His eyes slide closed. Ah, but that isn't the same. "I've been calling other people's children my own." He might love them, all four of them, but they have parents, lives — the lies he's told himself threatens to choke him.

All shinobi lie, in one way or another, to each other, to the enemy, and to themselves.

This is just how he lies.

I'm important. I'm a parental figure. I'm worthwhile.

I'm worth something, something good.

"You are our parent." Her eyes are so earnest, so forgiving. It burns in the wake of his grief. How could he have forgotten he already has a home? "You've taught us. You've loved us. You've sacrificed for us, given up your time, protected us. You've been everything that—"

He leans forward and presses his dry lips gently against her forehead. "Enough." He whispers, voice hoarse. "I won't make the mistake of calling you not my daughter again, yes?"

It takes him a long time to be able to talk to Kiho again. A long time before they can pass for normal with each other even though they both know that nothing is normal, that this isn't like the other times they'd fallen apart before.

"I know you always wanted—"

"Not at the cost of losing you." Never at the cost of losing you. There are dreams, and then there are necessities. There is love, and then there is air.

One may dream of what one wants. One may love what one wishes, but one always needs to breathe.

And when the oxygen burns out in the room, well, there's only so many options a person has. Because all of them, in some way, need to breathe.

Sometimes, you drop what you love the most when the oxygen's gone.

Sometimes, you smash the room.

Sometimes, you kill the fire, too little, too late.

He stares at his clasped hands which he's rested on the tabletop, looks at the cup of tea slowly growing cold between them and wonders if speaking about the matters of the heart ever got any easier.

It wasn't a great feeling to put his heart on the table and pare it down to the component pieces back when he was twenty, and it isn't a great feeling now, to be doing this all over again when he's damn near thirty.

It hits like a punch to the jaw and hurts just about ten times worse.

He never thought old age would have a chance to catch up to him, but it seems like it will; it seems like it has. Seems like he's going to dance to this tune yet again without rhyme or reason, just a long, long string of mistakes making its way to a crash, and they'll have to patch it over just enough to make it through this rough stretch of road.

Until next time then, but ain't that the sting of it? There'll always be a next time.

A next high, a next crash, a next month of bloody promises and broken hopes.

"It's not like we didn't know," he breathes out hard, and runs a hand through his hair. "I made that choice, Kiho. I make it every day." This wasn't, it's not about laying blame.

"I feel like I failed you," she says, a gap between her words wide enough to fall through given time and distance.

The words drag all their old wounds out to bleed.

"I feel like I failed myself."

It's a choice to make, and it's a choice they keep making, and one of these days they'll have to weigh everything on the thinning line between madness and understanding.

"You're no failure." You've never been.

There's gaps wide enough to fall through, but they're not doing any falling today. There's going to be no falling today.

He's fallen hard enough. It's time to stand back up.

"I made that choice, Kiho." He comes around the table, pulls her close. "I made that choice. I didn't come here blind."

He's never been able to afford walking anywhere blind in his whole damn life. Always making calculations, always testing the waters, making plans, couldn't feel before he thought it through.

But that's not entirely true, is it?

He might think it through, but the feeling? The feeling comes free, comes cheap, burns like an electric buzz, the smell of singed hair.

She breathes out, breathes in and keeps breathing. "It's not fair." A pause, a beat. She waits for him to laugh, to fill space, to say "Hey Hag, life isn't fair." He doesn't. "I'm sorry," she says instead when he says nothing.

"You don't gotta be." He breathes in, breathes out and wonders when it will stop hurting, when these wounds will no longer be live wires, bleeding whether or not they're touched. "You don't gotta."

They stand there a long time in the fading light.

And dusk goes down to night, shadows deepening in pools all around them.

It takes some time to go back to work. To go back to being normal. To pretend of course, that he did not fall off the wagon and struggle to climb back on.

It takes some time, but that is the way of things. Everytime after he hit rock bottom and looked around at the pieces and places all around him, what a mess he'd made of things, he'd sat there and stewed in the misery of it all just a little bit.

Long enough for him to remember where he came from and where he planned to go, because he'd only barely accepted the lot that life handed him anyway.

And then he'd struggle to get back up, climb back on the wagon, work through whatever darkness's taken hold of him this time.

It takes some time, but he manages it.

There isn't a true way to shake off the darkness at the edge of his vision, every step he's taken in life has been marred with a hint of shadow, but it's manageable, until it breaks its bounds and threatens to overwhelm everything.

It's manageable, so he manages it.

There's no replacement for him down in Crypt, so he picks himself up and manages it.

Harada's drafted a list of flunkies from this year's graduation to scope for potential recruits to add to Crypt, and he'd sent Harada and Myoboshi out to see what sort of workforce they could scrounge up.

His department is perpetually understaffed and overworked.

Cryptology requires a cunning mind, a good memory, quick recitation skills, and the willingness to slog through long, long hours of ciphering.

It's not a natural talent that most were born with, but perhaps the most damning of all is that it provides no points to brag about, no saving princesses or rescuing nobles, no exciting battles or dangerous S-class missions.

You're hardly likely to scar unless Nakaya threw another paperweight at you for being chatty. Which is hardly a talking point for picking up a hookup or two at a bar.

No, the shinobi of crypt are largely old timers, with a few fresh faces who would either realize that they could achieve more acclaim working in RnD or in the general forces or wash out. And then he has to force them to sign the nondisclosure agreement before they bail completely, and he has to order someone to kill them.

At least RnD has more popular acclaim. There's a name stamped to the top of every important invention that comes out of there, and you'd likely be able to make a little money off of it on top of your typical wages.

Getting key intel to the Hokage's desk in record time didn't earn much in the way of fame.

Crypt itself is secretive enough that out of the 14 people working there at any given moment day and night (himself often not included these days) one would often be hard pressed to know who exactly worked there, in truth.

Mostly, his department attracts the bad tempered ones, the loners who like to drink too much coffee and have a mind too brilliant to not love a good puzzle. Crypt attracts the ones who couldn't be bothered to keep up with more than basic shinobi training every now and again, on weekends where one of them actually saw the sun.

And no one knew that better than him.

His old man had worked in Crypt as its head once upon a time. Nara Mutsuo had a brilliant mind and landed in Crypt after a mission gone wrong had lost him a leg.

He'd replaced it with a wooden one and moved into the Intel Department's basement to solve the riddles Konoha's spider's web of informants had sent in from all corners of the world, and when he'd passed on one day out of the blue of a heart attack not discovered until it was too late, Ensui had stepped into his place at a fresh faced 23 year old.

He'd been pulled off of the frontlines of the war for it, and there he's stayed ever since.

The two year stint he'd taken as a Jounin-sensei was now mostly ended, but he'd brought back a surprising addition to the depths of Crypt.

"Sensei, what does this section mean?" Itachi-kun frowns down at a section in the encryption exercise he'd assigned to test just how well the sharingan actually processed information.

The Uchiha kept that part close to their chests after all, and he'd never get a chance to know something like this ever again.

How much of it was rote photocopying? How quickly could the information be recalled?

Clearly, with this particular exercise, it wasn't perfect recall, not by a long shot.

They still needed to know what they were looking for to find it in the mass of information.

"You've been able to unlock the first two layers of encryption. That's enough to read half the words." He leans over, points to a string of gibberish. "But the bottom layers are where this gets interesting."

Like flashcards, the different ciphers rotate through his mind. "You've done transposition, and you've done substitution, but you've forgotten there's another one, deeper than that."

Sometimes, when faced with a particularly difficult encoded message — most often foreign intel intercepted or copied by a spy who has no idea what the contents would be and sent off to Crypt to crack — it wasn't just a matter of intelligence.

Sometimes, you just needed to brute force it, and if that was running through a multiplicity of different ciphers and trying them in conjunction with one another, then that was that.

"I'm not sure I understand." Itachi-kun blinks down at the half lines of scrambled words. "If I've tried every possible transposition and every possible substitution…"

Realizing the infinite myriad of possibilities that still await him, Itachi-kun buries his face in his hands. "Oh no."

Nakaya grins from around his cream cheese filled bagel, which he had clutched possessively in one hand. "Oh yes, young one. Oh yes."

And if the department takes great amusement in Itachi's head thunking straight onto the stack of paper before him with a quiet muffled, whump, it's because they haven't had entertainment like this in a long time. Fresh meat always amused them, when they could get it.

"There's something on your mind." They're sitting together on the porch stoop looking out at the garden. It's just before the dawn, him coming back from work, her just about to set out.

Soon, Toku-kun will rattle his way up the garden path, wearing some even more outlandish outfit that he'd cobbled together himself.

And god, he loves the unconventional Hyūga child as well.

But despite the steam having long stopped rising from her teacup, Kiho had been looking out at the goldenrod in the garden.

There's something she's been thinking about talking to him about, and it's waited long enough that her tea's gone cold.

"Are you sure you want to hear it?" She blows a lock of hair out of her face, almost sighs, but doesn't.

"Would I have asked if I didn't want to?" Whatever it is, she doesn't expect him to react well to it then. Well, it wasn't as if he was modeling good behavior recently.

She's right to be wary. He's climbed back on the wagon but he's still not sure how long he's staying on before falling right back off.

"You can tell me." He says in the silence. "I'll try to take it the best I can."

She smiles at this, a little wry. "I didn't think you'd take it badly, just didn't know what you'd think of it."

"Well," he says. "We won't know until you say."

"Do you think we could adopt a kid?" The words break up a little piece of the morning, a tad rushed and uncertain.

Adopt a kid.

A way to put things together, even if it takes masking tape and glue.

"I'll," Is that something he'd be able to accept? Is it something he wants? "I'll think about it, Hag."

Is it something he wants?

The question follows him, trailing, like blood in the water.

"Do you ever miss what could've been?" He and Tsume hadn't always been the closest, but they were friends, despite the distance they've grown to inhabit. The distance of adulthood had separated them, responsibility and work weighing heavy.

Still, here they are now, sitting in a backroom in Mufu-an, watching the lanterns lighting up across the street. A few fireflies have started to come out of the gloom, darkness falling slowly the way it does in early summer when the days are long, and dusk lingers forever.

"All the time." She tilts her cup as if to read the tea leaves. But likely, she doesn't find anything there. "But I have too much to do now, ya know?"

He tosses back his cup of tea like he used to toss back cups of sake and cans of cheap beer.

"Too much to live for to wonder about the other paths, huh." And that's no secret really. Inuzuka Tsume's a busy woman.

A clan head, a mother, a special jounin.

But more important than filling her life with work, she has drive, an ambition, a hunger.

Even when she was younger, Tsume had a zest and hunger for life — all facets of life and living — it didn't seem like the years, despite tragedy and loss had changed any of it.

And in some ways, it's so enviable.

What must it be like to live like nothing could break you and mean it?

He'd never been able to stop calculating.

Every fall brought him closer to rock bottom. Every failed hope, every burned dream, every loss.

What must it be like to love life despite that?

"Other paths aren't the path I'm on." Tsume props her chin up on one hand, watching him from across the low table.

By her side, Kuromaru's tail thumps on the tatami mat.

"I know in your case, it ain't the same." Grief cannot be measured. Lives cannot be held next to each other and compared. This one small. That one large.

This more heartbreaking than that.

"But sink too deep and think too long, and you miss the joy of being, y'know?"

He smiles at this, a little rueful around the edges. "You know me so well, Tsu-chan."

Yes, being adults had splintered them somewhat, even if they shared the same attentive love for the same child. No longer would there be the days of hanging out in training grounds, the five of them watching dusk linger in the summertime.

No longer would they swagger down the street together, not a care in the world.

No longer would they fill one side of the counter in that old bar in the fifth district, drunk and rowdy, spend all night catching up, and ship out to war missions the next morning.

No longer.

The old world had broken, and they'd been broken along with it.

But in the wreckage, there's something new.

And maybe, in time, he'd learn to care for this too.

He steps back into the house later that night, pausing to admire the moonlight streaming in from the window.

It's been a long time since he's had the presence of mind to do that.

There's beauty he's missed, and there were opportunities for joy as well.

How many opportunities do you have to miss for a life to turn into a litany of regrets?

"Hag?" He asks the dark of his house.

Naras are never afraid in the darkness. In a sense, there's always a bit of darkness in all of them, to go with the light.

"Mmm?"

She's in the kitchen then, even though there's no light on saying so.

Slowly, he makes his way over, finds where she's sitting at the counter, leans down, presses a kiss to her cheek.

"I thought about what you said this morning, yeah." This morning, or maybe, given the hour, it's yesterday's morning.

She turns to him, blue eyes dark in the gathered gloom, but doesn't say much.

"The idea's not half bad." Uchiha Fugaku hadn't fussed about papers or legal status.

But that didn't mean the man didn't gain a daughter all the same.

"I think, if you're willing to try, then I am too."

And those words taste like salvation, what salvation two people like them could find.

It's Kiho who runs into the kid. Uchiha Mikoto had offered to take her out and around, find her something to do, find them both something to do, really, before one of them actually does lose their minds in earnest, and that led Kiho to the orphanage.

And to the kid.

Which is where they stand right now.

"Well," he says, looking at the bedraggled jinchūriki on his doorstep. "You can come in and clean up, yeah?"

The child looks at him as though trying to decide if he meant it.

Which is strange, because nothing about him had said that he didn't mean it.

Meanwhile, a glob of river mudslides down that bright blond hair and splats onto the wooden porch stoop.

Thank god it's summer.

Otherwise, whatever sort of flu that would be going around? The kid's gonna catch it, and it'll be all seven levels of hell stacked on top of each other like some sort of demented hell sandwich.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and slouches a little more. There's an open door behind him. "You're dripping river water on my porch, kid." He jerks his head vaguely in the direction of the indoors. "Might as well come in and drip river water on my floor, yeah?"

This wasn't quite the right thing to say either, because now Uzumaki Naruto looks like he's full of fear.

And whatever else has gone wrong with him, Nara Ensui didn't exactly get off on the fear of small children.

He pulls his hands out of his pockets and crouches so that he and the kid are eye level.

"I mean it." There's so much he wants to say to this child. How old is he? What's he afraid of people for? "You don't gotta be afraid of me."

Slowly, in his mind, he counts the years back to the October the Yondaime died.

...Slowly, because recently his brain is sludge, which means it takes him a moment to remember that it's been near five years since the Yondaime died.

Which means that Uzumaki Naruto is less than five years old, and still he looks like he's learned to be afraid of strangers.

Something about that makes him angry too, because he knows that look in those wide blue eyes well.

Just a little too well, cuts just a little too close to the bone.

Nara Mutsuo had lost one son and didn't want another. His old man had had problems, and most of them went by the name of Ensui.

But that isn't the case here. It isn't the case.

So why does Uzumaki Naruto distrust strangers?

Slowly, so as to not spook the kid off of his porch, he offers Naruto his hand. "You can come home, kid. It's gonna be alright."

You can come home.

It's gonna be alright.

He doesn't know who he's trying to reassure, but the small grubby hand carefully placed in his seems like a sort of peace all the same.

Maybe, in this world, there's still a little patch of sun.

Somewhere out there, there's a little sun, a little storm of sweet rain, a cottage by the forest, a yard full of flowers.

Somewhere out there, there's something able to make broken lives whole.

Patch up an old world and make it new.

"Why are you full of rage?

Because you are full of grief."

— Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

A.N. This takes place around the general time as the summer Hana was in the capital and a bit into the upheaval in Ensui and Kiho's life during that period, so it's a Ensui and Kiho look into the later part of the Kakunodate Arc. I'd had thoughts about this particular time period and POV for a while now, but unfortunately, not the right mindset to write it properly. I like how this particular chapter turned out though!

Whatever happens, Ensui's trying to do his best.

Thank you to everyone who reviewed, followed, and favorited. You're all very kind.

~Tavina