Yamato

Yamato keeps his brown hair short above a pair of dark, almond-shaped eyes. That tidy look is a far cry from the long, tangled mane he wore as a boy trapped in Orochimaru's laboratory. After leaving the shadows of the Anbu he adopted the ordinary dress of a Leaf jonin, a flak jacket over a navy shirt whose high neck rises to his chin, notably missing the Uzushiogakure crest that usually marks the sleeves. A happuri-style forehead protector wraps the sides of his face much as the one Tobirama Senju wore, and he keeps two pouches at his lower back. By the era of the Seventh Hokage, faint lines had gathered under his eyes and around his mouth, his hair had grown shorter and spikier, and his happuri sat cracked and stripped of any emblem.

Careful, guarded, and rarely caught unready, Yamato holds a composed and level manner even when a situation turns dire. He treats his assignments with complete seriousness, going so far as to insist that people address him by whatever code name he currently uses. Beneath the diligence runs a streak of mischief: he enjoys unsettling Naruto with a hollow, ghoulish stare or a wood clone during ghost stories, admitting he has no objection to steering his squad through a little fear. He shows far less patience than Kakashi for Naruto's rule-breaking, yet he is just as easily rattled himself when handed misleading information. What he wants most, having grown up with no family or memory of one, is to labor for the village and earn its acknowledgment, a wish laid bare when the Infinite Tsukuyomi showed him leading a whole Team 7. A fondness for architecture runs through him as well, and he grumbles constantly about how his peers overwork his convenient Wood Release.

Yamato's defining gift traces back to Orochimaru, who abducted him as an infant and made him one of sixty children injected with the First Hokage's cells in a bid to recreate Wood Release. He alone survived, inheriting Hashirama Senju's kekkei genkai along with the power to control tailed beasts, then vanished into Danzo Shimura's Root under the name Kinoe before finally joining Kakashi's Team Ro as Tenzo. His Wood Release fuses earth-natured and water-natured chakra to grow trees, grass, and other vegetation from nearly any surface, his own body included, though he freely admits his output never matches the true scale of the First's.

He shapes the technique for attack and defense alike, raising durable wooden domes, walls, and cages, sending trees to bind or impale foes, and conjuring an entire house on the spot rather than pitching camp. He can also transform, spawn wood clones that share his cells and relay whatever they observe, and plant clone-grown seeds to trail a target. Using the First Hokage's Necklace to boost his power, he can hold a rampaging tailed beast in check, once quelling Naruto's four-tailed state within seconds, and a seal tied to that necklace would flash a number on his palm to warn how many tails had emerged; after the necklace shattered, his ability to suppress the beast was lost. Beyond his bloodline he is skilled at tracking, trapping, stealth, swordsmanship, and sealing, can merge into the ground to spy or evade, and carries Hashirama's regenerative healing. That value kept him close to Team 7 and, in later years, on watch over the pardoned Orochimaru, though the war saw Kabuto and the enemy exploit his altered DNA to bolster the White Zetsu Army before he was freed once the Infinite Tsukuyomi broke.