Naruto POV:
"Okay," I said to the empty apartment. "Body audit. Let's go."
Nobody answered, which was fine. I was used to talking to myself. It was one of those habits you pick up when you spend a lot of time alone and eventually stop being embarrassed about.
I dropped into a crouch on the floor — heels up, knees to chest — and closed my eyes. This was the position I used to think in, back when I had a different body and a different floor and a different set of problems. Apparently that transferred. Good to know something did.
The silence was heavy in the specific way that empty spaces get heavy when they've been empty for a long time. I could hear the village outside — muffled, distant, going about its business without me — and underneath that, my own heartbeat.
Which was, now that I was paying attention to it—
Slow. Really slow.
I counted. Held the count. Counted again.
Low fifties, maybe. Resting. In a five-year-old's body.
Huh.
I pressed my thumb into my forearm, hard, the way you'd check a bruise. The skin resisted. Not like muscle — like something denser, something that had decided it wasn't interested in being damaged. I held the pressure until my thumbnail went white, let go, watched the mark vanish in about three seconds.
Three seconds.
I did it again just to make sure I hadn't imagined it.
Three seconds.
Okay, I thought, and I was grinning a little despite myself, which I was aware was probably not a cool or detached response but also I had just discovered I had supernatural healing and I was seventeen, so. Okay. That's actually insane.
The Uzumaki bloodline wasn't just chakra reserves. It was structural — the whole body running hotter and tighter and faster than it had any right to. I'd known this academically, the way I knew most things about this world: secondhand, through a screen, mediated by fan theory and wiki pages and that one guy on the forums who claimed to have calculated Naruto's exact power scaling and got into a forty-page argument about it.
Knowing it and feeling it were different things.
I felt like I was supposed to do something with this information. Something productive and strategic and forward-thinking. Instead I just sat there for a moment, pressing my thumb into my arm and watching the mark disappear, because it was genuinely cool and nobody was here to tell me to stop.
Then I noticed the water issue again, because the apartment smelled, and reality is persistent.
---
The sink was worse up close.
Brown sludge in the U-bend. Tap producing nothing but a hiss. The whole setup had the energy of infrastructure that had been neglected specifically and personally, not just overlooked — like someone had made a quiet decision somewhere and the pipes were the result.
I thought about that for a second and then decided I'd feel angry about it later when it was useful.
Okay. Water. How?
I tried the obvious thing first, which was pushing chakra at the blockage to vibrate it loose. I'd had some success with the chakra earlier — well, "success" in the sense that I'd proven it existed, which felt like a low bar in retrospect — and this seemed like a reasonable application.
The sink cracked.
Not a little. A full spider-web fracture blooming from the drain outward, the porcelain groaning like I'd hit it with something.
I took my hand back slowly.
"...Right," I said. "Right, okay. That's — yeah. That tracks."
The problem wasn't technique. The problem was scale. I had way too much chakra and absolutely no precision with it, which meant every attempt at fine control was like trying to write your name with a firehose. I'd need to fix that eventually. For now I needed a workaround that didn't involve chakra, because apparently I couldn't be trusted with it near fragile objects.
I lay down on the couch — or what was left of the couch, which groaned in a way that suggested it was also done with me — and stared at the ceiling and thought.
Okay. Physics.
The main line was still pressurized; I could hear it humming faintly behind the wall. The valve was closed but that was just a mechanical thing, that was just a position, and positions could be worked around if you were creative about it. What I needed was a path from the pressurized side to my tap that didn't require me to turn anything or break anything or use chakra near anything load-bearing.
Capillary action. Porous material, pressure differential, gravity doing the actual work. I'd need charcoal for filtration, ceramic for the bridge, something to seal the edges.
Scavenging run, then.
---
The thing about moving through Konoha when you were me, specifically, was that you got very good at reading the temperature of a space before you entered it. You learned to check the air the way you'd check ice — not always consciously, just as a baseline, just as information.
The alleys were easier. Obviously. Less foot traffic, less direct eyeline, and the layout of this village was so inefficient that the alleys were genuinely faster than the main roads, which was either an accident or a confession depending on how charitable you were feeling.
I was not feeling particularly charitable.
Why are all the markets in the same place? I thought, squeezing past a stack of crates someone had left blocking two-thirds of the passage.Why would you — who designed this? Who looked at this and said yes, one economic centre, everyone goes there, great plan, very convenient.
It wasn't convenient. It was a single point of failure wearing a convenience costume. One fire, one panic, one badly-placed explosive tag, and the whole commercial district would become a very efficient way to hurt a lot of people at once.
Not my problem. And kept moving.
The blacksmith's scrap bin was technically over the property line, which I pointed out when he came out yelling, and he spent long enough processing the zoning argument that I got what I needed and left. I felt a little bad about it — he was probably just a guy who'd been told his whole life that I was dangerous and had no particular reason to update that — and then I felt annoyed at myself for feeling bad about it, because I was five and had no running water, and then I felt annoyed at the whole situation generally.
The charcoal stall owner threw the bag at me, which saved me ten ryo and also answered a question I hadn't asked about the kind of morning I was having.
"Thanks," I said, to nobody, to the alley, to the general concept of a world that had decided to make everything slightly harder than it needed to be.
A group of academy students crossed the intersection ahead, loud and oblivious, doing that thing where you move like nothing bad has ever happened to you because nothing bad ever has. I stopped and watched them for a second — not with any particular feeling, just watching.
One of them said something that made the others laugh. I couldn't hear what.
I turned down a different alley and kept walking.
---
The filter took three hours and most of my patience.
The hands were the problem. My hands were five years old, which meant the span was wrong and the grip kept slipping and there was one point where I was trying to hold three things simultaneously and dropped all of them and just — sat on the floor for a minute. Just sat there. Not doing anything. Not thinking anything particularly useful.
Then I picked everything back up and kept going, because what else was I going to do.
Physics is patient. Leverage and torque don't care how old you are, they just require that you commit your body weight correctly and accept that it's going to take longer than it should. I drilled the hole by hand, packed the layers — charcoal, sand, ceramic — sealed the edges with tree resin, and sat back.
Now I waited.
The apartment was very quiet.
I'd been in quiet apartments before. I'd spent a lot of time in quiet apartments, actually — it was sort of a theme in my previous life, quiet apartments and talking to myself and games of chess where I played both sides because the point was the problem, not the company.
This quiet was different though. It had a texture to it.
I was trying to figure out what the texture was when—
Drip.
I looked up.
A single drop of water, clear, falling into the glass I'd set under the tap.
Drip.
"Okay," I said, and my voice came out slightly unsteady, which was embarrassing, but also it was working. The capillary action was pulling water through the filter, bypassing the valve entirely, and it was *working,* and I'd figured that out by myself in a body I'd had for less than a day, and—
"Suck it," I told the sink. "Suck it so much."
---
The leaf exercise was supposed to be simple.
Stick the leaf to your forehead with chakra. That's it. That's the whole thing. Even academy students could do this — it was basically the first thing you learned, the foundational proof that you had control.
I went through seventeen leaves.
Seventeen.
The first few I could understand. Too much output, leaf disintegrates, fine, calibration issue. But I kept adjusting, kept narrowing the mental image of what I was trying to do, kept trying to find the floor of my control — and it kept not being enough. Whatever "small" felt like to me was apparently still enormous by any reasonable standard.
"Okay," I said, lying flat on the floor after leaf twelve. The ceiling stared back at me. "Okay. This is fine. This is just — this is a scaling problem, this is not a competence problem, this is just—"
Leaf thirteen. Gone.
Leaf fourteen. Gone.
I grabbed leaf fifteen and held it and breathed and tried to imagine a valve, a limiter, something between the ocean of energy I apparently had and the amount I was actually trying to use.
It stuck.
"Yes—"
It disintegrated.
I lay back down.
The floor was dusty and hard and not particularly comfortable and I stared at the ceiling for a while and thought about the fact that I used to be good at things. I used to be someone who was good at things. I'd had a whole list of things I was good at and "basic chakra control" was apparently not going to be on it anytime soon, and that was—
Fine. It was fine. It just meant more work.
I grabbed leaf sixteen.
---
Leaf seventeen was the one that knocked me out.
I'd gotten it to stick — actually stick, actually hold, actually maintain a connection that lasted more than two seconds — and I was so focused on keeping the flow steady that when I sent the disintegration pulse I didn't modulate it at all. Just sent the whole thing.
The feedback hit me like a physical impact. My vision whited out. I felt myself falling and then I didn't feel anything and then—
Library.
I was standing in a library.
Tall shelves, dark wood floors, floating candles. Books everywhere, most of them with blank spines. It was quiet in the way that libraries are quiet — not empty, just held.
"...Okay," I said. My voice echoed slightly. "So this is a thing that's happening."
I turned around slowly, taking stock. The architecture of my own subconscious, apparently. My brain had reorganized whatever the mindscape was supposed to look like into something it found legible. Which was — actually kind of funny, in a way that I couldn't quite laugh at because it was also slightly alarming.
I walked forward. Some of the book spines had titles, glowing faintly:
●Language Acquisition: Polyglot
●High Degree Physics: Intuitive Models
●Human Behavior: Pattern Recognition
I pulled that last one out. It fell open to a diagram — arrows, expressions, probability margins scribbled in the margins in handwriting I recognized as mine.
Most people are predictable. The problem is assuming they're rational.
"Yeah," I said. "Still true."
I put it back and kept walking, and that was when I noticed the chains.
Black. Thick. Embedded in the floor like they'd grown there. They pulsed with a pressure that made my teeth ache, snaking forward through the stacks toward a section of shelves that was — wrong, somehow. Warped. Books shoved in sideways, some of them half-burnt, the organization completely gone.
The restricted section.
I stopped in front of it.
The pressure was bad here. Not pain exactly — more like standing next to something very large that was paying attention to you. I became very aware of how much of me there was, and how small that amount was.
A pair of eyes opened in the dark behind the shelves. Horizontal slits. Ancient.
"So." The voice came from everywhere at once, low and enormous, the kind of sound that you feel before you hear. "The new one. I wondered when you'd fall in here."
I put my hands in my pockets.
I was scared. I want to be clear about that — I was genuinely, actually scared, in a way that the infrastructure analysis and the water filter and the leaf exercises had not made me. This was something old and enormous and furious and it was in my head and I was five years old.
But I was also — and this was the part I hadn't expected — angry.
Not at Kurama. At the situation. At the whole shape of it. Because I'd read about this, I'd processed this as a narrative element, and standing inside it was different. This was a child's mind. This was a space that had been built by a child who'd had no say in any of it, and this thing had been sitting in here for five years, radiating hatred, and the kid hadn't even known.
That made me angry in a way that was probably not useful but was very much present.
"You're quieter than I expected," I said.
A pause. The eyes narrowed. "...What?"
"Forums had you more dramatic." I looked up at the orange fur, the impossible scale of it, and kept my voice level through what was honestly a significant effort. "Nine-tailed Fox. Calamity of the age. You've been sitting in here for five years and your opening line is 'I wondered when you'd fall in here.' I expected more monologue."
The pressure spiked. Hard. The kind of spike that made the bookshelves crack and the candles gutter and something in my lizard brain start screaming about how I was going to die.
I exhaled slowly. "Okay. Yeah. That's the killing intent thing. I've read about that."
Reading about something is not the same as experiencing it — I'd made that observation already today, several times, and here it was again. My legs wanted to fold. My hands, in my pockets, were not entirely steady.
But I stayed standing, because sitting down would mean something and I wasn't ready for it to mean that.
"You are not scared," Kurama said, and it wasn't a statement, it was an accusation, like he'd caught me in something.
"I'm scared," I said. "I'm absolutely scared. You're enormous and ancient and you've destroyed nations and you're currently inside my head. That's a lot." I paused. "I'm just not going to fall over about it."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"You know what I am," he said.
"I know what you are."
"And you're not going to grovel." Still that tone — not quite confusion, but something adjacent to it. Like he was recalculating.
"I'm not going to grovel," I agreed. "I'm also not here to pick a fight, because I'm pretty sure I'd lose spectacularly and we'd both have a bad time." I looked at the chains — the way they bit into the floor, the way they responded to his agitation. "I'm here because I ended up here, and because we apparently share a situation, and because I'd rather know what that means than not know."
Kurama's lip curled. "And what does the brat think it means?"
"I think," I said carefully, "that you've been in here for five years with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. And I think you're angrier than you need to be about me specifically, which suggests the last version of this was bad enough that you're carrying it forward." I tilted my head. "Am I wrong?"
The silence stretched.
"You're not the same as the last one," Kurama said finally. Slowly. Like he was deciding whether to admit it.
"No," I said. "I'm not."
"You think that makes you special."
"I think it makes me different. Whether that's better remains to be seen." I looked at him steadily. "I'm not going to pretend I have leverage here. I'm five, I can't control chakra well enough to stick a leaf to my face, and you could make my life significantly worse if you wanted to. That's just true."
The killing intent had dialed back slightly. Not gone — still there, still heavy — but no longer actively trying to fold me in half. He was listening. That was something.
"What I have," I continued, "is the fact that I'm not interested in fighting you. And the fact that I actually want to know—" I stopped.
Kurama waited.
"I want to know what happened," I said, and it came out more genuine than I'd planned, because I actually did want to know. Not strategically. Just — I wanted to know. "To the original. To the other hosts. What it's actually been like, from your side."
The eyes blinked. Slowly.
"You want to know," Kurama repeated, flat.
"Yeah."
"Why."
I thought about it honestly, because he'd know if I was performing. "Because you've been inside a child's head for five years and nobody's asked. And because I'm going to be in here for a while and I'd rather we actually—" I gestured vaguely. "Talk. Eventually. When you're less convinced I'm going to be exactly like whatever came before."
The chains settled. Not loosened — just still.
"You're strange," Kurama said finally.
"I've been told." I glanced around the library, at the warped shelves, the half-burnt books. "Can I ask one thing?"
He said nothing, which I took as permission.
"The dopamine spike. Earlier, when the leaf stuck. Was that you testing me or was that just — ambient?"
A long pause. "Testing."
"Okay." I nodded slowly. "And you didn't flood the whole system. Which you could have." I wasn't making it a compliment — just an observation.
No response.
"Trial period," I said. "That's all I'm asking for. You don't have to decide anything. Just — see if I'm actually different before you assume I'm not."
The eyes stayed on me for a long time. The pressure in the air was still immense — would probably always be immense, that seemed load-bearing — but it wasn't actively hostile. It was the pressure of something vast that was, for the first time in a while, waiting to see what happened next.
"You'll disappoint me," Kurama said. "They always do."
"Maybe," I said. "But I haven't yet."
I turned and walked back through the stacks. The library felt different behind me — not warmer, exactly. Less like a place that was deciding whether to collapse.
I didn't look back.
---
I came to on the apartment floor, cheek against the dusty boards, a pile of leaf ash in a rough circle around my head.
I lay there for a moment.
"That," I said to the ceiling, "was a lot."
The water filter was still dripping steadily into the glass.
I reached out, picked it up, drank it.
It tasted like nothing. Just water. Clear and real and there.
I put the glass down and looked at the remaining leaves — three of them, sitting in a small pile by the wall — and thought about Kurama sitting in the dark of my head for five years with nobody asking him anything, and the way he'd said they always disappoint me like it was just a fact about the world that he'd made peace with.
I grabbed a leaf.
Okay, I thought. Let's go again.
The leaf stuck. Held for three full seconds. Dissolved.
Better.
(A/N:I think I've found a manageable schedule, 1 chapter a week, but said chapted will be 3k to 5k words depending on how busy I am. Enjoy ♡)