The sealed kunai

Chapter 52: Storm on the Horizon

The day after his return to Konoha, Naruto went to the only place he figured he would find easy to contact Sai or Maki. He headed to his oldest stomping grounds, the Root hideout he was trained in that served as his mother base back during his fomulative years. He hadn't been in the Konoha base since he had found it abandoned after his first attempts to locate Danzo three years ago when he had first broken the seal on his person.

The gray and colorless walls brought back a wave of nostalgia that he let himself get swept up in. He was even subconsciously striding along silently on instinct. Walking in those halls and allowing Danzo to effortlessly hear your footsteps would get you disciplined. Sadistic old fart... it was going to be weird without him always hovering in the shadows somewhere. Even when he wasn't in contact with him he could always just feel Danzo around somewhere.

He could afford these thoughts now. Danzo was dead and even though the man would have wanted him and the others in Root to move along it was Naruto's choice to think of him and try to keep him in the back of his mind. Even if the man's death never became the major news around the village it should have been, probably the way he would have wanted it, it didn't mean that he should just be forgotten in time. He had done too much for his village to be a footnote at best.

Naruto's feet carried him to the old dimly lit training section of the base and as he walked through the door and stepped inside he let out a sigh as he started walking towards the room that he remembered as his own little personal space. It was actually his and Maki's but it was his first. He trained there mostly alone under Danzo's watch for over a year before he was ever partnered with her.

And since it actually did wind up being their training area it didn't surprise him to find her there sitting down, seemingly meditating. He walked into the room without alerting her or disturbing her serenity and leaned against the wall just basking in the tranquility of the more or less empty base.

One day it would be up and running, and full of life again. Once he became Hokage Naruto would have Root operate the way it was meant to be used all along; as the extension of the village's defenses. The real black ops unit. Only the very top of the food chain in the village would know they existed as originally intended and the operatives would live amongst the populace, some as registered shinobi, others as sleepers posing as mere civilians, all with the same overall goal, to do what needed to be done.

"Do you know how I wound up in Root in the first place Naruto-senpai?" Maki said quietly from her meditative position, eyes still closed, "I don't think you do. We never really talked about how we all wound up here."

Naruto shook his head. He didn't know, but it wasn't that hard to figure out how. Either they came to Danzo of their own will once they learned of him as active shinobi, the way most of his adult forces did when Root was a legitimate branch of ANBU, or they were orphaned and recruited that way. Most of the children that wound up in the Academy had some kind of legitimate family background as a shinobi. Civilian children could of course join the Academy, but it required them to be enrolled by someone related to them. Without a benefactor sponsoring them, parental or otherwise, children couldn't join the Ninja Academy as it wasn't a decision that a child should have been allowed to make on their own.

So the reason that Maki and Sai joined Root was obvious, especially now that Naruto knew that most of Danzo's forces had been wiped out by Pein back during the last great war in a mission along with many of Sanshouo no Hanzo's Ame shinobi. They were both orphans, much like him, with no one to sponsor them in the Academy. With their only route into the conventional forces blocked, Danzo reached out to them and recruited them for training to eventually rebolster Root.

The most talented of the youth were enrolled in the Academy eventually much like Maki and Sai were with Danzo as their backer. This was done to keep some members of Root in with the main forces so that Danzo was kept aware of everyday happenings that he might have missed while keeping his gaze in the shadows. The others that weren't sent to the Academy were kept as Root's go-to force; the ones that accomplished most of the general missions.