Un-edited. All beta offers needed and welcomed. Mine has ditched me, and apropriately so.

Terms:

Kero-Feminine version of "Wall Head"

Fata-Shepard

Soliel-Remote village in a canyon four hundred kilometers from Suna

*

Prolouge: Tell me a story…

"Kero-Fata! Kero-Fata"

Looking up from the thick sea of white fleece, the Shepard waves to the pack of almost-toddler-children charging up the hills towards him. Though he can't yet see faces, he is able to make out four blue heads and five dingy-brown ones; four girls, five boys.

"Bom dia!" he calls.

The girls have eyes as wide and blue as the Shepard, while the boys blink with dark green orbs that reflect cunning and mischief. They are probably neglecting their chores for this.

"Bom dia Kero-Fata! Will you tell us another story?"

The Shepard smiles and leans against his staff, setting hair full of bells into a jingling frenzy. His mane is long, white-yellow against his deep brown skin—a light color against the children's almost blackened faces. He laughs. "Depends—what do you have to trade for it?"

The children giggle, and two girls produce thick bread, a small white fruit, and a pouch of spices. These are little things, a snack really. But it is enough to buy the Shepard's words.

"Fine. I'll tell you a story. How about I tell you about my lady, my stary-one?"

This is a story he has told them many times, but they never tire of hearing about his lost love and he never tires of telling them.

He pockets only half of their offering, splitting open the fruit and giving each child a few of the chewy seeds. The children surround the Shepard with glee and he leads them out from the Wind Country sun into the icy shade of the cliff he stood on. He is still watching his flock through the corner of his eye.

They settle in the cool sand, legs crossed in front of them, and he begins to weave his tale.

"She is soft, with many curves like the walls of a canyon. But her hands are sharp, and can bruise your insides--one, two, hit! Think of her eyes as pearls--smooth and white, like stars amidst her midnight hair. She is pale too--like sunlight on quartz—and quiet as a cave." He uses his hands to make shapes in the air, as if drawing his woman.

"Do you miss her?" asks one young one.

"Where did you leave her? In an oasis somewhere?"

The oldest child is no more than seven or eight, and the youngest is still sucking her thumb. The Shepard's turquoise eyes dim, remembering himself at their ages, still learning the basics of how to kill someone. It's why the village children love to hear him talk—they admire his stories of young children summoning giant toads, turning into demons, and battling in honor of a green-eyed girl.

They think he makes these stories up, and he has almost convinced himself that they are right—that he was never called Naruto, and that there is nothing waiting for him in a land where water flows pleantifully.

"Of course I miss her!" he exclaims, throwing his arms wide. "But I cannot return to her—she has banished me from our home until I can prove myself worthy of her love! A true man of honor!"

The children shriek happily, thrilled with the dramatics and he smiles. He carries on like this through seven stories, until the sun is past the half mark in the sky. He talks about when they were young--how she cheered for him when he did not notice, and later, how he fought her own cousin to restore his lady's honor. He pokes fun at himself for chasing after his green-eyed friend for so long, before giving in to a better love.

Around their mouthfuls of chewy white seeds, his audience giggles and asks a thousand questions that he has answered a thousand times. The children love his stories--always have. They say he makes the time go by when the sun is too high! Their parents would scold them for reciting these tales later, but the Shepard knows they are also greatful that he keeps the young children busy for so long.

A horn sounds in the distance and he laughs.

"Go back to the village now, little ones. I'll tell you more after the feast—the one I know you're all supposed to be helping with," he teased.

They moan and groan, but he shoos them off with his staff, smiling all the way.

As soon as he is alone, the Shepard nods to the shadows under the cliff.

"Hello, Shikamaru."

The shadows sigh, shift, and release the form of a tired young man. His hair is longer than the last time they'd met three months ago, and his is face was thinner, yellower than the Shepard remembered. But at least he is unharmed.

"How can you stand all this sand? It get's into everything!" The man shakes his sandles and a trickle of dirt escapes from between his toes.

The Shepard shrugs. "You stop tasting it after a while, but you never get used to the feel of it in your underwear," he admits. "How long have you been hiding there?"

"A couple hours. I thought the village was further, so I'd planned to move by night."

"Nah, the village is just across the canyon. There's a bridge."

"I have things for you." He pulls out a thick package of letters wrapped in a perfumed blue scarf. Normally the shadow user would be irritaited by these sappy love tokens, but whenever he comes to this place and hands out another stack, Naruto's face becomes so soft, so gentle, as if he were holding Hinata herself. It's the look a man gives a lover, not a boy, and it reminds Shika of the men they have both grown into. It reminds him of a man's needs.

"She misses me that much, huh?"

"Guess so."

A second pack of papers emerges from within Naruto's dusty robe, this one with cacti flowers pressed between each letter.

"Glad to know it's mutual."

Shikamaru's eyes bulge. Somehow the blond idiot has written more than his girlfriend—there are twice as many letters and each one is thicker than three of Hinata's.

Shika swallows, his brain trying to sift through a hundred different ways to hide this package from the ROOT guards outside Kohona. He will have to go through these letters and cut out any words that might give this location away, and the process makes him nauseous, but it is nessicary. Danzo doesn't know where Naruto is being kept, but that can change in an instant--all it takes is one slip about some rare kind of cactus, and the most powerful tailed beast in the world is for Danzo's taking.

Still, he takes the letters from Naruto's hands, and pretends that he doesn't feel blue eyes watch him tuck them away like the precious life-line they are.

Shikamaru is the only person of Kohona that Naruto has seen in a year, and it doesn't surprise him when the blond asks him to stay and talk a little longer. Shika has another five or ten minutes to spare before the dust storm predicted by Gaara makes it impossible to return to Suna by dusk tomorrow.

He wonders if he can really spare that time, if Temari will kill him for being late, but he hear's the desperation in Naruto's "Wait! Rest a little, would you? Pull up a seat and tell me how everyone's doing."

So he sits, and tells his comrad about the reminents of Team Seven. He talks about Kakashi's growing shoulder pains and paranoia, from being bent over paperwork and being attacked by ROOT respectively. He talks about Sai's difficulty with fighting on their side, his conflicts between the ROOT conditioning and his urge to take Danzo down. He talks about the strain between Kohona and the other villages--how this "Civil Unrest" has caused them to loose face with their allies and loose missions to their rivals. He talks of Kiba's increased agression, Chouji's abrupt weight loss, Hinata's adaptation of the Hyuuga "stone face," and Tenten's growing drinking problem.

He does not talk about how often he tries to leave home to go to Suna, and escape the madness of war in Temari's arms. He does not talk about how Shino lost an arm last month in a battle with three ROOT agents. He does not talk about the rumors that Sasuke is in the desert.

He almost gets away with not talking about Sakura, but Naruto will not let him escape.

"How is Sakura-chan?" he asks, after Shika has lapsed into quiet.

The brunet sighs.

"She's working too hard," he begins. "Lee's been gone for a few months now on some mission to Rain. No word from him or the other operatives who went and no pre-set day of return for anyone, so we don't know when to worry. She's taking it kinda hard."

"How hard?" Naruto wants to know.

"Ino says she's training like Lee did after the Chunnin Exams. She sparrs like she's posessed, and using excuses to work extra shifts in the Reconstruction Teams. Sakura calls it endurance training, but Ino calls it suicidal. Seventeen hours without breaks just moving rubble the size of houses, and then she only has five or six hours of sleep until her next shift. And I heard from Shizune that she's schedualed to take back-to-back A Class missions in a few weeks. Requested it personally from Kakashi."

"And he didn't talk her out of it?!" Naruto looks utterly horrified, and yet the signs of defeat are in his eyes. There is no rage behind his words, because some part of him knows that Sakura's life is not part of his problems right now.

All Naruto is supposed to do out here is keep quiet and keep safe, and Shika knows it must be killing him. He imagines that Naruto would be sporting discoloration under his eyes from lack of sleep if Kyuubi wasn't fixing everything.

"I asked that myself. Kakashi says she's testing herself, trying to figure out where her limits and strengths are so she can improve on them. He says that without a teacher, she's moving blindly through her training; that she's trying to give herself direction. Shizune can only teach her to be a good doctor, which is why she stopped taking shifts at the hospital. There's nothing there for her to learn anymore."

The shadow user stopped and smirked dully to himself.

"I guess she's trying to learn like you did when we were young. You tried again and again and had to learn from your mistakes without anyone there to point them out, right?"

Naruto shrugs. "I guess. I never really thought about it, but yeah. I guess I was shooting blind myself back then. And now too."

Casting their faces to the clouds, the two men go quiet, and the looks on their faces say that they are both remembering the years behind them.

"I want to go home, Shikamaru. I want to be a ninja again."

Shikamaru sighs again and shakes his head. "I know Naruto, but this is--"

"--For our own good, mine and the village's," he finishes. "I know. But I still miss it."

"Try to relax. I know you want to go home and help, but almost everyone at home would give anything to be here right now."

"In a desert, with sand up their ass?"

"No. In a place where the biggest battle is a skirmish with the tribe next door over a water hole. These people don't know war. They don't know suspicion and how to distrust their neighbor. Try to enjoy this place. Trust me--it's a paradise by our standards."

*

When the sun goes down, a deep chill overtakes the desert. The sand becomes fragments of ice that pelt Naruto as he wanders home through the wind, alone. He bipasses the festivities at the center of the village, where firelight and noise and cooking smells have gathered. Instead, he comes to a small hut--no bigger or better than a shack, really--and slips inside where a small bowl of mud and water wait.

The mud is to scrub his skin and hair, mixed with salts and aloe, which makes a dirty paste that keeps the germs and stink away. It will matt his hair, keeping it clean, stiff, and out of his face when the wind kicks up. Eventually, this will create dreadlocks, which might be dyed or decorated, if he ever felt so inclined.

The water is to dip a tiny sponge into, to scrub away the mud, while he drinks the rest.

There are pots with dried foods, and a stack of clean clothes, a mat, a blanket, weapons, and nothing else.

There are no painted walls, decorative blankets and rugs, or fire pits for parties. This is not a home, by the Soliel standards, or his.

Naruto will clean himself, eat, drink, and lay down for the night, but he will not fall asleep until the moon is nearly set.

This is not his home.