Behind the Mask: Silver Blood Fox

Ice Princess

"So, are you sure he's okay?" Tazuna's daughter, Tsunami, asked, her eyes creased with worry.

"Yes, he's fine, he's just tired from the fight. After a while he'll be fine," Naruto told her with a smile. It was mostly true - Kakashi would be fine after a while. It wasn't that he was tired, it was that his chakra reserves were depleted due to overuse of the Sharingan.

Tsunami sighed in relief and went back to cooking dinner. "I don't want you all to get injured for our sake, you know?" she murmured. "I just-"

"We're ninja," Sasuke spoke up. "It's our job."

"I know, but be careful, okay?" Tsunami said. Everyone in the room nodded.

"I'm going to check on Sensei," Naruto excused himself and trudged up the stairs. Twisting the knob with old chipped paint, he swung the slightly creaky doors open. 

He saw the body of his ex-teammate lying on the small bed. "Someone is obviously out of shape," he chuckled quietly to himself. With a sigh, he locked the door and went over to Kakashi. His hands glowed with green light as he healed Kakashi slightly. He sped up Kakashi's recovery process by healing minor scrapes and transferring some chakra to him. "Get well soon Dog."

With that, he turned, unlocked the door and walked out. When he got to his shared room with Sasuke, he saw the said boy sitting on the floor, staring at a picture in his hands. Not noticing that Naruto was there, he let out an angry growl and ripped the picture in half.

Naruto shut the door.

Sasuke turned around with wide eyes and dropped the picture, trying to cover it up hastily, but Naruto caught a glimpse of one half of the photograph.

He knew that face.

He knew that face all too well.

It was Sasuke's older brother, Uchiha Itachi. The man responsible for the Uchiha Massacre.

"Don't look!" Sasuke snapped, grabbing the halves and ripping them up even more before throwing them away. "It's nothing."

"It's your brother. It's not nothing," Naruto stated calmly. 

"He means nothing to me! He ruined my life!" Sasuke hissed in rage.

Naruto regarded him with cool cerulean blue eyes. "Did he ruin your life, or did you ruin your own life by chasing after him just to kill him? What good will come out of murdering him? In that way you'd be no better than him."

"It is not the same!" Sasuke half-yelled, the most emotion the cold Uchiha had ever shown to Naruto before. He glared darkly at Naruto, spitting out, "It is not. That man was a cold-blooded murderer, who took the lives of hundreds of innocents. He deserves to die. As the lone member of the Uchiha Clan, I should kill him to avenge the deaths of all those he killed. He killed his own parents."

Despite what Sasuke said, Naruto still looked calmly at Sasuke.

"And what if I told you that the roles were reversed? What if Itachi was the innocent, and your Clan were the bad guys?"

It's not true.

It's not true.

It can't be true.

But why does it make sense?

It can't be true...

But it sounds like it is.

The young black-haired boy sat at the steps of Tazuna's house, his coal-coloured eyes staring blankly before him.