Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 2: Questions

The fire was small and sensible, built in a cleared patch of earth where it would not spread, fed with dry wood pulled from the forest floor by hands that had thought through the task before beginning it. It gave enough light to see by and enough warmth to be useful and no more than that. The sacred scroll lay propped against a root nearby, its seals intact, waiting to be someone else's problem.

Naruto sat beside it with his back against the tree and watched the fire with the particular quality of stillness he was still becoming acquainted with in himself, the kind that was not boredom and not peace but something more like the idle running of a machine between tasks. His clone sat across from him on the other side of the fire, performing the same stillness with the same face, and the two of them regarded the flames together in a silence that required nothing from either of them.

The sound of Iruka stirring came before the movement, a low rough exhale, the kind a body produced when it was negotiating its way back from somewhere it had not intended to go. The clone was on its feet before Iruka had fully opened his eyes, moving to crouch beside him with a steadiness that was practical rather than tender, close enough to catch him if he went sideways, far enough not to crowd him.

Iruka pushed himself upright slowly, one arm braced against the ground, and looked at the fire and the scroll and the two identical boys on opposite sides of the clearing with the careful focus of a man whose head was informing him that rapid movements were not currently available as an option. His hand went to the back of his skull and found the swelling there and his brow creased.

"Naruto." His voice was rough. He looked between the two of them. "What happened. Where is Mizuki?"

He was on his feet before the question finished leaving his mouth, the instinct of a trained shinobi overriding the protest of a damaged body, hand going to a weapon pouch on reflex.

"I defeated him," Naruto said from beside the scroll. Flat. Factual. The way you stated the time or the weather. "Killed him. He was going to kill you, so." A small pause. "I did what I had to do."

The silence that followed had a texture to it. Iruka stood in the firelight with his hand still at his weapon pouch and his face doing something complicated and unresolved, the information arriving and being turned over and failing to settle into any configuration that felt stable.

"You what."

"Hey." Naruto sat up, feeling his ribs register the movement with a sharp specific complaint that he noted and set aside. "Listen. Mizuki tricked me, he was going to kill you, I did what I had to do. You're safe. The scroll is safe and can go back to wherever it lives. And." He held up a hand, the gesture of a man presenting evidence. "I learned a new jutsu. The multi shadow clone jutsu. So."

Iruka looked at the clone. The clone looked back at him with Naruto's face arranged in an expression of mild patience. Iruka looked at the original. He looked at the scroll. He looked at the fire and at the dark forest beyond it and at the particular unreality of the hour, the deep blue of the sky above the canopy that was still entirely of the night.

"Right," Iruka said slowly. The hand dropped from the weapon pouch. "The sacred scroll. And you said." He stopped. Started again. "You learned the shadow clone jutsu."

"Multi shadow clone," the clone offered helpfully.

"I see," he said.

Something moved through his expression then, something that traveled from one shore to another and arrived changed by the crossing. He looked at Naruto with the eyes of a man who had spent years looking at this particular boy from a careful distance and was now recalibrating that distance with information he had not had before.

"Then I suppose," Iruka said, and his voice had shifted into something quieter and more deliberate. He reached up to his own forehead. His fingers found the knot of his headband and worked it loose with the practiced ease of someone who had worn the same piece of metal against the same piece of skin for long enough that the removal of it was as automatic as breathing. He held it for a moment in both hands, the metal plate catching the orange light of the fire. "Congratulations are in order, Naruto."

He looked between them.

"Which one of you is the real one."

"That would be me," Naruto said from beside the scroll.

He grunted and pushed himself to his feet, moving with the careful economy of a man working around damage, and crossed the clearing to where Naruto sat. Naruto stood to meet him, feeling the inventory of the night's injuries conducting itself along his spine and across his ribs and most insistently at the back of his skull, where the dried blood had stiffened his hair into a solid mass and the skin beneath it pulsed with its own slow rhythm. He stood straight anyway.

Iruka placed the headband against his forehead and reached around to tie it at the back, fingers working the knot with the same careful deliberateness he had used to remove it, and there was a formality to the gesture that sat in the space between the two of them like something that had needed to happen for longer than either of them had known.

"Congratulations, Naruto," Iruka said again, quieter this time, the words carrying something additional that the first saying of them had not. "You are officially a genin of the Village Hidden in the Leaves."

Then he pulled him into a hug.

His arms went around Naruto's shoulders and he held on with the grip of someone who had been holding something back for a long time and had decided, in this particular moment, in this particular clearing, in the last dark hour before dawn, to put it down. The hug was warm and it was genuine and it asked for nothing in return.

Naruto stood inside it with his arms at his sides and waited for it to be over.

It was the contact of a stranger wearing a familiar face, unwelcome in the way that all uninvited things were unwelcome, an imposition dressed as kindness, and he endured it with the patience of someone who had calculated that the fastest way through an obstacle was sometimes simply to let it complete itself. He did not pull away. He did not stiffen. He simply was not there, behind his eyes, in the way that mattered, and when Iruka released him and stepped back and looked at his face with something searching and hopeful in his own, he found nothing there that told him what he was looking for.

Iruka cleared his throat.

"Naruto. About what Mizuki said tonight. The things he told you. I want you to know"

"You don't have to." Naruto's voice was not unkind. It was simply closed. "Apologize or explain or whatever it was you were going to do. I understand now. The way they look at me. The way they've always looked at me." He held Iruka's gaze with the steady unhurried attention of someone who has nothing to prove. "I always wondered why. Turns out not knowing was good for me. Now I do know. So."

He reached down and picked up the scroll and held it out.

"Thank you for the headband, sensei. I think you can return this. I have some thinking to do."

The clone dispersed without ceremony, the smoke of it rising briefly in the firelight and gone. Naruto turned and walked into the trees and did not look back, and Iruka stood in the clearing holding the sacred scroll and the ghost of a hug that had not been returned and watched the dark close over the retreating shape of his student.

There was something different about the boy. He had known it from the moment he'd opened his eyes and found him there, known it the way you knew a song had changed key even if you couldn't immediately name the note it had moved to. The evidence arranged itself around the feeling without quite explaining it. The things Mizuki had revealed. Whatever had happened in the trees. A kid his age, carrying all of that in a single night, would need space. Would need time. That was the reasonable explanation.

He picked up the scroll and went his own way through the thinning dark.

Naruto's apartment was on the third floor of a building that the rest of the building's occupants had made their feelings about very clear over the years through a combination of noise complaints, property damage to his door, and the particular pointed silence of neighbours who had decided that acknowledging his existence would cost them more than they were willing to pay. He had lived in it for as long as he could remember and had never thought about it as a space that could be different from what it was.

He thought about it now.

He opened the door and the smell hit him first, before his eyes had adjusted to the dark interior, the accumulated smell of instant ramen in its many variations, the cardboard of the boxes and the salt of the broth and the particular staleness of a space where the windows had not been opened in recent memory and the ventilation had been left entirely to chance. He stood in the doorway for a moment and breathed it and felt something move through him that was not nostalgia and not grief but something closer to the feeling you got when you looked at a photograph of yourself from several years ago and could not entirely reconcile the person in it with the person holding it.

He turned the light on.

The ramen boxes were stacked in a geography of their own devising along the counter and the windowsill and in a arrangement beside the bin that suggested they had been placed in the general direction of the bin over a period of weeks without ever quite making it inside. The bowls were in the sink in a formation that had achieved a kind of structural integrity through sheer accumulated mass. The floor had things on it. The table had things on it. Every surface had made its peace with having things on it.

"How," Naruto said to the apartment, to himself, to whatever version of himself had apparently been content to exist inside this particular environment for this many years without it occurring to him that it was a problem. "How do I live like this."

The apartment did not answer.

"Okay," he said. He looked at the window. The sky outside was beginning its first hesitant movement toward grey. "I know it's late. But this needs sorting out."

He brought his hands up and crossed his fingers.

Five clones came into existence in the available space of the apartment, which was not generous, and immediately set about the task with the efficient coordination of bodies that shared a single set of priorities. There was no discussion. There was no negotiation about who did what. They simply looked at the space and its problems and began solving them, the ramen boxes going into the bin in armloads, the bowls addressed with hot water and soap, the floor cleared and swept, the surfaces returned to the condition of surfaces rather than storage, the windows cracked open to let the outside air replace what had been sitting inside accumulating character for too long.

Thirty minutes.

Naruto sat on the edge of his bed and the clones dispersed and the apartment was quiet and clean and smelled of nothing in particular, which was considerably better than what it had smelled of before. He looked at it. The clean surfaces. The floor he could see.

He lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling and let his mind do what it had been wanting to do since the moment he'd sat in the roots of that tree in the forest and felt it shift into something new and capable of holding weight.

Twelve years ago the Nine Tailed Fox had attacked the village. A significant number of people had died. The Fourth Hokage had given his life to stop the creature and in stopping it had sealed it inside a newborn child, inside him, inside a baby, which raised a question that Mizuki had not answered and had not seemed interested in answering because Mizuki's interest had been in the weapon rather than its history. Why a baby. Of all the vessels available, of all the choices a dying man could have made in the final moments of his life, why a newborn. What did a newborn have that anything else lacked.

And who was the Fourth Hokage.

He was a name. A legend the village told itself about its own greatness, the kind of legend that accumulated details over years of retelling until the person inside it became impossible to see. He had a face on the monument. Naruto had painted that face more than once during various acts of what he had previously considered creative self-expression. He knew the face the way you knew a landmark, as a feature of the landscape rather than a human being who had once been alive and had parents and a history and reasons for the decisions he made.

He had a name too. The Third would know it. The elders would know it. The archives would know it, which was the relevant point, because the Third would lie by omission and the elders were not available to him at four in the morning and the archives did not have opinions about what he was allowed to find out.

The Third had ordered the secret kept. That was the fear he had seen in Iruka's eyes when Mizuki mentioned it, the fear of a man who knew that a rule existed and understood what breaking it cost. That meant the information was classified. That meant it was somewhere specific, somewhere restricted, somewhere that the Third had decided was safe enough to hold it.

He had already been inside the restricted archive once tonight. He knew the guard rotation. He knew the lock.

He sat up.

The ceiling of his clean apartment offered him nothing further and he had already gotten everything from it that he needed. He crossed to the window and turned the light off as he went, the room dropping back into the grey pre-dawn dark, and he stepped out onto the ledge and crouched there for a moment with the cool morning air moving against his face and the village spread below him in its last quiet hour, the streets empty, the lights mostly dark, the whole complicated machinery of the place at rest and therefore, from where he was standing, considerably more navigable than usual.

He looked at it.

Somewhere in there was the answer to who he was and where he had come from and why. Somewhere in there, behind a locked cabinet in a room that smelled of old paper and forgotten things, was the truth that the Third Hokage had spent twelve years deciding he was not allowed to have.

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