The house sat at the edge of a village that looked like it was quietly losing an argument with the sea.
Salt-gray boards, roofs patched more than shingled, a smell of brine and woodsmoke that clung to everything.
Tazuna’s daughter met them at the door before anyone knocked, like she’d been listening for footsteps for longer than was healthy.
“Dad,” she said, and the relief in it was so plain it was almost embarrassing to witness.
Then, taking in the four of them, the mud, the obvious fact that something had happened on the road: “You didn’t say you were bringing shinobi home with you.”
“Figured that part would come up eventually,” Tazuna said, already heading for a chair like his legs had been waiting all day for permission to give out.
“Tsunami, this is Team Seven. They kept me breathing.”
“Barely,” Sakura muttered, and Tsunami’s eyes went sharp with a question she didn’t ask yet.
She fed them before she interrogated them, which Naruto respected on principle — soup that tasted like it had been stretched twice as far as it should go, bread a day past its best, and not one word of apology for either.
Sasuke ate like he hadn’t in a while, which he probably hadn’t; road rations weren’t anyone’s idea of a good meal.
Kakashi ate one-handed, book angled just enough that nobody could confirm he was actually reading it during a meal, which Naruto suspected was the entire performance.
The boy came in halfway through, took one look at the four strangers at his table, and sat down without a word at the far end of the bench.
“Inari,” Tsunami said.
“Say hello.”
Inari said nothing, which was its own kind of hello.
He had the specific, deliberate blankness of a kid who’d decided a long time ago that flinching was the same as hoping, and hoping was the same as getting hurt.
He’s not going to warm up to a speech, Kurama said, quiet, for Naruto alone.
Kids like that don’t want to be told it gets better.
They want proof, and proof takes time you don’t currently have.
Wasn’t planning a speech, Naruto thought back, and meant it.
He’d had this conversation once already, a lifetime and a war ago, with a version of himself that hadn’t needed anyone to give it.
He knew exactly how little a stranger’s optimism was worth to a kid who’d already done the math on hope and come up short.
So he didn’t offer any.
He just passed Inari the last of the bread without comment, like it was nothing, and went back to his own bowl.
Inari looked at the bread like it might be a trick.
Then he ate it.
It wasn’t a breakthrough.
It wasn’t supposed to be.
It was a boy passing another kid food at a table, and Naruto let it be exactly that small.
After the meal, Kakashi laid it out plainly enough that even Tazuna went quiet.
“Zabuza Momochi,” he said.
“Former Kirigakure. One of the Seven Swordsmen before he tried to overthrow the Mizukage and lost. Kills fast, kills clean, doesn’t care who’s watching. That name shows up on a request, the request should’ve been ranked higher than a C.” He glanced at Tazuna without much heat in it, which was somehow more pointed than heat would have been.
Sakura’s hand had gone very still around her cup.
“How much stronger is he than the guys on the road?”
“Different category,” Kakashi said.
“The Demon Brothers were a test. Zabuza’s the actual exam.” He said it lightly, but his eye didn’t move off her while he said it, checking for how she held the weight of it.
Sasuke’s jaw tightened, but his eyes stayed steady, already working the problem instead of flinching from it.
“Can you beat him?”
“Probably,” Kakashi said, eye still on his book, tone about as urgent as a man discussing the weather.
“I’m told I’m very good at my job.”
He’s not wrong to worry them a little, Kurama observed.
Fear’s useful.
Keeps genin careful instead of stupid.
Yeah, Naruto thought.
I remember.
He didn’t say what he remembered.
Nobody needed the specifics of a fight he’d already lost once, in another life, against a man who wasn’t even the scariest thing waiting in this country’s fog.
Kakashi took them to the tree line the next morning, unannounced, the way he did most things.
“Chakra control,” he said, and set two fingers against the bark of the nearest trunk without any further ceremony.
“Focus chakra to your feet — not too much, not too little — and walk up. No hands.”
He demonstrated by walking straight up the trunk at an angle no human body should manage, hands in his pockets, and stood there sideways looking down at them like gravity was a suggestion he’d politely declined.
Sakura got it on her third attempt, which surprised exactly nobody who’d watched her chakra-theory scores climb quietly past everyone else’s for two years running.
She made it four steps up before her focus wavered and she had to jump clear, landing neat, looking almost annoyed at how easy it had been.
Sasuke took longer, burned two more attempts than she did, cracked bark on a third with too much chakra and nearly put himself flat on his back — and kept going anyway, jaw set, until he matched her on the fourth try.
He didn’t say anything when he did.
He didn’t need to.
The look he gave the tree was answer enough.
Naruto went up on the first attempt, casual, unbothered, and made it look exactly as hard as it should look for someone who’d apparently never done this before — which took considerably more effort than actually doing it correctly would have.
He stopped a few feet shy of where his real ceiling was and pretended to wobble once for effect.
Showoff, Kurama said, dry.
Occupational hazard, Naruto thought back.
Kakashi watched all three of them with the specific, unreadable attention that had started meaning something different to Naruto over the last few weeks — not just assessment anymore.
The attack came on the walk back, in the gray hour before the fog off the water had fully burned away.
Zabuza didn’t bother with a puddle this time.
He came out of the mist itself, a shape resolving out of white the way a held breath resolves into a shout, and the first thing any of them registered was the sword — a blade the size of a person, wrapped in bandages, already swinging.
Kakashi had a kunai up and Team Seven behind him before Naruto had finished clocking the angle of the strike.
“Get Tazuna back,” Kakashi said, no drama in it, just instruction, and the three of them moved.
Zabuza’s mist thickened around them, cutting visibility to nothing past an arm’s length, his voice arriving from everywhere and nowhere at once, low and almost bored.
“Sharingan Kakashi. I’d heard rumors. Didn’t expect to collect on them this early in the trip.”
“You get chatty before or after you try to kill people?” Kakashi said, and pulled his headband up off his covered eye in the same motion, the Sharingan opening red into the white fog like something waking up.
What followed didn’t look anything like the fight on the road.
Zabuza moved like water finding the fastest way downhill, testing angles Kakashi hadn’t offered yet, and Kakashi met every one of them a half-beat early, reading the mist itself for the change in air pressure that gave away where a body was about to be.
Steel rang against steel twice, three times, each impact throwing sparks bright enough to briefly outline both men against the white.
Zabuza broke off, reformed six feet to the left through a technique too fast for Sakura’s eyes to track cleanly, and Kakashi was already turning to meet him there before he’d finished arriving.
“He’s not even trying yet,” Sasuke said, low, more observation than complaint.
“Neither’s Kakashi,” Naruto said back, just as low, and watched Sasuke’s expression do something complicated with that information.
You could end this, Kurama said, no joke riding under it this time.
Not my fight to end, Naruto thought.
Not yet.
He meant it two ways and let Kurama parse which one mattered more.
Zabuza’s blade came around in a wide, water-heavy arc that should have taken Kakashi’s head off cleanly — and caught nothing but mist itself, a perfect copy dissolving into droplets where Kakashi had been standing a half-second before.
“Water clone,” Zabuza said, something almost like approval in it.
“You’re better than the file said.”
“Wish I could say the same,” Kakashi said, from behind him now, kunai already moving — and Zabuza spun into the strike a fraction too fast to be anything but prepared for it, catching Kakashi’s wrist and hauling him bodily into the lake at their backs before anyone could close the distance.
The water rose around Kakashi in a churning column and closed like a fist.
“Water Prison,” Zabuza said, conversational, one hand holding the sphere shut with visible effort while his other hand came up, fingers already shaping a new seal.
“Now. About the children.”
Naruto felt the whole shape of the next several seconds arrive at once — Kakashi’s muffled shout to run, Sasuke’s stance shifting to stand and fight anyway, Sakura’s grip tightening on a kunai she had no illusions about actually landing — and, underneath all of it, quiet and immediate, Kurama’s voice.
Now would be a very good time to stop pretending, Kurama said.
Naruto didn’t answer that one yet.
He was still watching the water clone already peeling off Zabuza’s real body to come finish what the sword hadn’t, and doing the math on exactly how much of himself this particular morning was actually going to cost him to keep hidden.