Naruto 20 themes: don't try to look so wise

10. The climb kills before the fall

Hatake Kakashi is a chuunin at six, a jounin at thirteen, and by then also heir to legacies left to him by death. The villagers are unsurprised at his wish to be faceless, his comrades by his trading of his mask for the ANBU one. By the time he takes the latter off, no one knows what he looks like beneath the cloth that hides his smile, or what he thinks behind the closed-eyed smile that hides too much else.

Time kills as well as anything else. Kakashi is not the first to have proven what Konoha has always known.




19. Cavities

Today it is too bright to be watching clouds. Shikamaru stares up at the wooden roof of the shelter, traces the patterns in the grain with his eyes until even that is too much effort. Next to him, Chouji works his way through a bag of too-sweet candy. He never gets cavities. This always strikes Shikamaru as being rather improbable, but in an absent automatic way Shikamaru supposes he’s glad for his friend.

It’s a small thing, anyway, against their present lives. Shikamaru squints at the light that seeps through the cracks between wooden slats, and doesn’t wonder about time.




9. Parallel tracks

One thing about parallel lines is that they can take different directions.

Gaara doesn't think much of Sasuke, when they first meet. Sasuke's silence is just an alternative to anger, his restraint necessity rather than nature. Gaara reads the stories of power and sacrifice in the defensive set of Sasuke's shoulders, in the sharpness of his glare, and he is unimpressed. Sasuke, Gaara knows, has seen everything and understood none of it.

It is something of a waste, he thinks. Were things otherwise, there might have been an understanding.

The other thing about parallel lines is that they never meet.




1. Temporary Eden

In Konoha the sky is casually blue and the ground stays in its place under your feet. Temari still has the habit of running her tongue lightly over her lips, even if she doesn't need to do so anymore.

Here the air is warm and damp, complacent, tasting of yesterday's rain and ramen-steam. Beside her, Shikamaru picks up his chopsticks with lazy inelegance, and begins to eat with equal unconcern. She cannot imagine him in the dry, restless heat of Sand; it is fortunate for him, she thinks, that he will always have Konoha’s cool greenness to come home to.




Bonus theme 4. Pass it on

When Tsunade and Jiraiya meet, it has been over two years. Maybe Jiraiya has decided that if anyone can save Sasuke it'd be Naruto, though that doesn't mean that Naruto will; and maybe Tsunade thinks Sakura will be better at healing her teammates than Tsunade herself ever was, though she’ll have to bring Sasuke back first, in more ways than one.

Or maybe they still think that history repeats itself, that their fates have been passed on. In any case, Tsunade and Jiraiya meet, and go out for a drink. Of course. Neither of them says 'long time no see'.