The forest was quiet except for Naruto's own wheezing.
He slammed his palms together again, fingers numb and clumsy.
"Shadow… Clone… Jutsu!"
Smoke burst around him, harsh in the moonlight.
When it cleared, there was… something on the ground in front of him. It had his hair. Sort of. Its limbs were wrong, its eyes were rolled back, and then it popped like a soap bubble and vanished.
Naruto cursed and dropped to one knee.
His arms shook. His shirt clung, damp with sweat. The Scroll of Seals lay open in front of him, its inked warnings and diagrams staring back like they were mocking him.
He glared at it.
"I did it," he muttered. "Once. I know I did."
He had, too. The first time he'd tried, fueled by panic and stubbornness, there had been three clones for a second. They'd fallen over like drunks and hit each other in the face, but they'd been real. Sort of.
Since then? Nothing but half-formed mess.
Naruto clenched his fists.
"If I get this jutsu," he told the trees, "Iruka-sensei has to pass me. Mizuki-sensei said so."
The name tasted weird in his mouth. He shoved that feeling away.
He could see it so clearly in his head: Iruka putting the hitai-ate on him, saying he was finally a real ninja. Everyone else having to shut up about him being dead last.
He pushed himself back to his feet.
"One more time," he growled. "No—ten more times!"
He slammed his hands into the seal again.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
By the time I realized exactly how bad things were, the whole building was buzzing.
"Uzumaki Naruto stole the Scroll of Seals—"
"—Hokage-sama says keep civilians away from the north forest—"
"—if ANBU find him first, it's going to be—"
I stepped out of the orphanage hallway just in time for two chunin to barrel past, talking too loud and too fast. The words "Naruto" and "Scroll" hit my brain like a cold bucket of water.
"What," I said to nobody.
They didn't slow down. One of them added, "Iruka-sensei went after him already," and that was enough.
I grabbed my sandals from beside the door and jammed them on as I ran.
The smart move would've been to stay put. Let the professionals handle it. Trust the system.
I'd seen the system here. It left Naruto alone on swings and shrugged at Mizuki's oil-slick chakra and told me I wasn't "a real Konoha ninja anyway."
So: no.
The village blurred past—dark streets, shuttered stalls, the distant glow from the Hokage's office. I cut through alleys and hopped a low fence, lungs already burning. I did not have a runner's body. I had a "sits cross-legged and paints for three hours" body.
Too bad.
The closer I got to the treeline, the clearer the hum of chakra became, and more intense my heart raced. Dozens of signatures flared and shifted as ninja fanned out in search patterns.
Beneath all that, two points stood out.
One was Iruka: steady, warm, pulsing with worry.
The other was Naruto: bright and jagged and exhausted.
I followed the line between them.
Branches clawed at my sleeves as I shoved through undergrowth. My sandals slid in damp leaf litter more than once. I nearly ate dirt twice. I couldn't stop, no matter how much my legs ached to reverse direction.
"Great," I panted. "This is just like the last time I almost died in a forest. Love the symmetry for me."
Voices filtered through the trees ahead.
"…you found me… "
"…did you do all this…?"
I slowed automatically, forcing my breath quieter, and edged up behind a trunk at the edge of a small clearing.
Naruto knelt in the middle of it, scraped up and panting, the Scroll of Seals lying open beside him. Dozens of shallow craters pocked the ground around him like bite marks.
Iruka stood a few steps away, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead, vest torn where something sharp had grazed him. He looked furious and terrified in equal measure.
"Yeah," Naruto said, grinning weakly. "I learned a jutsu from the scroll in only a couple hours. Pretty impressive, right?"
I could barely see him from my angle, but his chakra felt like it was holding itself together with duct tape and spite.
Iruka opened his mouth to answer.
A kunai whistled through the air.
"Iruka, get down!"
Mizuki dropped from the trees like a knife.
Everything happened too fast and too slow at the same time.
Iruka shoved Naruto out of the way and took the hit himself, the kunai burying in his back with a wet sound I felt in my teeth. Naruto hit the ground and rolled, scrambling for cover. Mizuki landed on a branch above, chain weapon uncoiling from his hand.
I slapped a palm over my mouth to stop the noise that wanted out.
"Oh, come on," I whispered.
My brain skidded. The smell of blood, the ragged drag of Iruka's breathing, the way Naruto's chakra spiked with white-hot panic—
"Why, Mizuki-sensei?" Naruto shouted. His voice cracked. "What are you doing?!"
Mizuki smiled down at him, too wide, all teeth.
"Give me the scroll, Naruto," he said. "Iruka has been lying to you from the start."
My fingers dug into the tree bark.
Here it came.
Iruka staggered to his feet, blood soaking through his vest.
"Don't listen to him, Naruto!" he shouted. "Run!"
Mizuki laughed.
"You think he'll trust you once he knows?" he sneered. "Once he finds out what you really are?"
My stomach twisted. I wanted to scream.
"Thirteen years ago," Mizuki said, eyes locked on Naruto, voice dripping poison, "the Nine-Tailed Fox attacked this village. It killed hundreds of people—"
"Naruto, stop listening!" Iruka yelled.
"—and the Fourth Hokage couldn't kill it. So he sealed it away…" Mizuki's smile hit something ugly. "…inside a newborn baby. Inside you."
The forest went very quiet.
Even the bugs seemed to shut up.
Naruto's chakra didn't spike this time. It didn't flare or crackle or explode.
It dropped.
One second it was that familiar, restless blaze; the next it was gone, like the bottom had fallen out of him and everything inside had just… dumped into a void.
I'd felt him scared before, angry, lonely, humiliated. This was different. This was hollow.
He stared up at Mizuki, face ashen.
"That's why everyone hates you," Mizuki went on, relentless. "You're the fox that killed their families. You're a monster."
Iruka flinched like he'd been stabbed again.
"That's enough!" he shouted. "Naruto is not the fox!"
Words, even true ones, felt so small against the weight of that secret.
My nails bit into my palm hard enough to hurt. I needed to do something.
I'd been practicing a barrier seal. It was half-baked, a clumsy ring of ink lines meant to block simple projectiles for a few seconds. On paper, it worked. Once.
This was not paper. This was a chunin with a giant shuriken and a murderous grudge.
But his chakra was coiling to strike, and Naruto was frozen, and Iruka was bleeding out on his feet.
Any plan I made in the next five seconds was going to be bad.
"Fine," I whispered. "Stupid option it is."
I fumbled in my pouch for a folded tag, fingers slick with sweat, and pressed my back harder into the tree for cover.
The pattern on the paper was rough: a circle, a spiral, four anchoring marks. I fed a thin trickle of chakra into it, ignoring the way my hands shook.
"Please don't explode in my face," I muttered.
Out in the clearing, Mizuki hurled his shuriken.
It spun toward Naruto, whistling through the air.
"MOVE!" Iruka screamed.
"Naruto!" I yelled, because subtlety had clearly already left the building.
I slapped the tag to the ground at my feet and slammed my hand over it.
"Barrier Mark!" I hissed.
The seal flared to life—too bright, too fast. A flickering dome of chakra shivered into existence around me and… about two feet of leaf litter.
The shuriken sailed majestically past, unaffected.
A shockwave of misfired chakra slammed into my chest.
I choked and dropped to my knees as the barrier collapsed on itself, static crawling over my skin like ants. For a second, my vision went white around the edges.
"Okay," I wheezed. "That… was not it."
So much for playing backup hero.
The combo flare and yelling had jerked Naruto out of his stunned freeze for a heartbeat. He flinched sideways on instinct, buying Iruka enough time to take the hit instead- the shuriken struck Iruka, sending him crashing into a tree.
My attempt at interference fizzled into nothing but a headache and singed leaves.
Naruto stared at Iruka, shaking.
"Why?" he whispered. "Why would you—after what he said—why would you protect me?"
Iruka smiled, pained and fierce.
"Because you're not the fox," he said. "You're Naruto."
Mizuki scoffed, but there was an edge of frustration now.
"Touching," he said. "But you really think he'll believe you over me? You've treated him just like everyone else has. Like a nuisance."
Iruka's expression twisted.
Naruto's chakra flickered wildly, erratic and raw. Panic. Anger. A hurt so deep it scraped along my own nerves.
Iruka took a breath.
He started talking.
About himself. About being alone. About watching the village treat Naruto the same way they'd treated him after the attack—only worse. About bad grades and stupid stunts and how Naruto's pranks were his way of saying "look at me, I'm still here."
Every word hit something in the air.
I'd always loved this speech on-screen. It was better here, stripped of music and framing. Just one tired teacher bleeding in the dirt, telling a lonely kid the truth.
Naruto's chakra flushed with something new. It didn't erase the hurt—in what world would that be possible?—but it cut through the numbness like a blade.
Mizuki snarled.
"That's enough," he spat. "Give me the scroll, Naruto, and I might let Iruka die quickly."
He launched himself down, chain whipping.
Naruto moved.
One second he was shaking in the dirt, the next he'd yanked the Scroll away and bolted into the trees.
Mizuki cursed and took off after him, branch to branch.
Iruka slumped, panting.
I forced my legs to cooperate and staggered out of my pathetic scorch circle, around the tree, and into the clearing.
He turned his head at the sound and blinked at me, dazed.
"Sylvie?" he rasped. "What are you… doing here…?"
"Poor life choices," I said, dropping to my knees beside him. "Hold still."
The kunai in his back had gone deep but not—judging by the way he was still moving and yelling—immediately fatal. I put shaking fingers on the ground beside him and pushed a weak diagnostic pulse of chakra through, the way I'd practiced on tree stumps and very patient cats.
The feedback was fuzzy, my own earlier backlash making everything feel off, but I caught enough: torn muscle, lots of blood, no obvious lung puncture.
"Okay," I muttered. "Messy but fixable. Great."
I tore a strip from the bottom of my shirt and pressed it down hard around the wound to slow the bleeding. Iruka hissed through his teeth but didn't pull away.
"Uzumaki…" he started.
"Is currently running for his life," I said. "And, if we're very lucky, toward a character development moment."
Iruka managed the barest huff of a laugh. It sounded like it hurt.
"Can you… get help?" he asked.
"Already on it," I lied. "But you're not dying before Naruto gets back, so don't get any ideas."
He gave me a look that said "you are a child" and "thank you" at the same time.
The forest shook.
Chakra flared ahead—Naruto's, wild and huge, like a fire finally finding dry kindling. Mizuki's flickered, surprised.
I helped Iruka push himself up against the tree so he could see.
"Naruto!" he shouted, voice raw.
Through the trees, we caught flashes: Naruto, defiant, clutching the scroll; Mizuki, mocking him; the moment Naruto stepped in front of Iruka and squared his shoulders like he'd just decided something that would change everything.
Then Naruto's hands came together in a familiar seal.
Something in the air snapped.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!" he roared.
The chakra hit like a thunderclap.
For a heartbeat, the clearing ahead was nothing but light and smoke. Then the smoke ripped away and there were Narutos everywhere—on branches, on the ground, clinging to trunks, filling every inch of available space with orange and sheer murderous intent.
Iruka's jaw dropped.
Mizuki's face went from smug to horrified in record time.
"W-what is this?!" he stammered. "They're just illusion clones—!"
The nearest Naruto punched him in the face.
He went flying.
"All of these," Naruto yelled, voice echoing weirdly from a dozen throats, "are real!"
They dogpiled him.
It wasn't a fight so much as a karmic beatdown. Dozens of fists and feet and forehead protectors hammered into Mizuki until the ground itself gave up and made a Mizuki-shaped crater.
When the last clone popped out of existence, the original Naruto stood in the middle of the wreckage, chest heaving, eyes blazing.
For a second, no one moved.
Then I exhaled. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath.
"…Okay," I said softly. "Yeah. That counts as extra credit."
Naruto stumbled back toward us, the scroll dragging behind him. As he got closer, the adrenaline started to drain out of his chakra, leaving everything shaky and raw.
His hands were trembling.
I pushed myself upright and stepped forward to meet him.
Up close, he looked smaller again. The big, triumphant pose didn't quite hide the way his mouth kept twitching like he wasn't sure whether to smile or cry or throw up.
"Hey," I said, gently. "You did it."
He blinked at me like he'd only just noticed I was there.
"Sylvie?" he croaked. "What are you—?"
"First aid," I said. "And bad decisions. It's a theme tonight."
His laugh broke halfway through.
Iruka pulled himself up a little straighter as Naruto reached him.
"Come here," he said quietly.
Naruto hesitated, then knelt.
Iruka's hand shook as he reached up, fumbling with something. For a second I didn't understand—then I saw the hitai-ate.
Iruka untied his own forehead protector and pressed it into Naruto's hands.
"Close your eyes," he said.
Naruto obeyed, baffled.
Iruka tied the metal plate around his forehead with careful fingers, knotting it in the back.
"Congratulations," he said, voice thick. "You graduate. From now on… you're a ninja of Konoha."
Naruto's eyes snapped open.
He reached up and touched the plate like he didn't quite believe it was real.
"I…" His throat worked. "I… did it?"
Iruka smiled, tired and proud and hurting.
"Yes," he said. "You did."
Something in my chest twisted.
I was genuinely, fiercely happy for him. I'd watched him get kicked over and over by a system rigged against him, and now he'd forced it to acknowledge him on his own terms. He deserved this more than anyone I'd ever met.
Underneath that joy, though, a tiny, sharp sting pricked.
He'd gotten there first.
We'd started from roughly the same place—two strays in a village that didn't quite know what to do with us—and he was the one kneeling in the leaf litter with the hitai-ate gleaming on his forehead.
The thought flashed across my mind, quick and ugly.
What about me?
Guilt hit immediately after.
I shoved the feeling down hard. This moment wasn't about me. It was about the idiot who'd just nearly died twice and somehow turned it into a miracle.
"Nice," I said, because my mouth needed to do something. "Looks better on you than the Third's mustache."
Naruto snorted a wet laugh and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand.
"Of course it does," he said. "I've got a cool forehead."
"Debatable," I said.
His chakra was still vibrating, too fast and too high. The revelation about the fox hadn't disappeared just because he'd punched Mizuki into a crater. It hung under his skin like static, waiting.
"Hey," I said more softly. "Can I…?"
He looked at me, confused but trusting. "What?"
"Just… breathe for a second," I said. "Humor me."
I pressed my hands together—two simple seals, the ones I'd been practicing for weeks.
"Calm Stroke," I murmured.
I set my right hand lightly on his shoulder, just above the hitai-ate knot, and let a thin trickle of chakra flow down my arm. With my thumb, I traced a slow, looping spiral between his shoulder blades, drawing the pattern I'd sketched a hundred times on paper.
In, out. In, out.
Naruto's breathing, which had been stuttering and uneven, hiccuped—then started to match the rhythm of my hand. His shoulders lowered a fraction. The wild jitter in his chakra smoothed, just at the surface.
The pain didn't go away. The hurt was still there, raw and ragged. This wasn't a fix. It was just… a hand on the back of his neck, a reminder that the world existed outside his head and he was still in it.
"That's it," I said quietly. "In. Out. You're here. You're you. The fox is a tenant, not the landlord."
He huffed another tiny laugh at that, breath catching.
Iruka watched us, dark eyes sharp despite the blood loss. I saw something flicker there when he glanced at me—a quick flash of understanding, then concern when my own hand trembled from chakra fatigue.
He didn't say anything.
Naruto's breathing finally evened out. I let the technique fade and pulled my hand back, fingers tingling.
"Better?" I asked.
He nodded once, fiercely.
"Good," I said. "Because you're going to need that lung capacity to argue with literally everyone about this later."
He grinned, crooked and determined.
"You kidding?" he said. "I'm gonna make them all acknowledge me. Fox or no fox. I'll be Hokage, and then they'll have to look at me."
"Terrifying," I said. "Can't wait."
Somewhere above the trees, ANBU masks flickered between branches. The search net was closing in; the adults were finally about to arrive and wrap this whole disaster in red tape and paperwork.
For a last, suspended moment, it was just the three of us in the clearing: a wounded teacher, a boy with a demon in his gut and a hitai-ate on his head, and a stray girl with ink on her fingers and way too many feelings she didn't have time to process.
Naruto touched the metal plate again, smiling like the world had cracked open in the best possible way.
I smiled back, the sting in my chest settling into something softer.
He'd gotten there first.
Good.
Somebody had to lead.
Naruto was still grinning at his hitai-ate when the first ANBU dropped into the clearing proper, mask tilting toward Iruka's bloodied vest. More shadows followed, then the rustle and clink of practical adults: stretcher, bandages, the sharp snap of orders.
The spell of the moment shattered, but the echo of Calm Stroke was still running down my arm like static.
"Genin Uzumaki. Civilian girl. Report," one of the masks said.
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
Right. Chakra. That… uses energy. Who knew.
Iruka covered for us, voice hoarse but steady as he walked them through the cliff-notes version of events. Naruto jumped in halfway through to loudly correct every detail that undersold him by even half a dramatic flourish.
I let him. I focused on keeping my hand from shaking.
The tingling in my fingers had worsened into a full pins-and-needles burn, like I'd fallen asleep on my own arm for an hour and then tried to write an exam with it. My vision fuzzed at the edges, white snow creeping in. Every heartbeat felt slightly delayed, like my blood was buffering.
When the med-nin finally finished wrapping Iruka's arm and declared him "stable for transport," one of the ANBU jerked their chin at the tree line.
"Let's move. Hospital for him. The brats can walk."
"Hey!" Naruto complained automatically. "I'm not—"
"Fine," I said, before he could pick that fight. My voice sounded weirdly far away. "Walking sounds great."
I pushed myself up from the ground. My knees almost forgot their job.
The world did a slow, lazy tilt. For a breathless second, the forest and the sky traded places.
A warm hand clamped around my elbow.
"Whoa." Naruto's face swung into my field of vision, way too close and very, very real. His eyes were wide—not the manic shine from before, but something smaller and sharper. "Hey. Hey, Sylvie. You good?"
"Yep," I lied cheerfully, because habits die hard and denial is free. "Totally fine. Just… gravity check. Making sure it still works."
His grip tightened when I swayed again.
Iruka noticed, of course he did. He took a half-step toward us, then faltered when his freshly bandaged arm protested. For a second he looked like a teacher torn between two kids and only one functional limb.
"I've got her," Naruto said, fiercely, without looking away from me.
That… shut Iruka up. He gave a small nod instead and let an ANBU guide him toward the path.
I tried to straighten my spine and pretend I wasn't using Naruto as a very loud, very orange crutch.
Did not go great.
Every step made the chakra-deep ache spike higher up my arm, into my shoulder, into the base of my skull. Calm Stroke was supposed to be a light technique — a gentle ripple on the surface, not a whirlpool — but this had been the first time I'd pushed it that hard on someone who had a demon's worth of extra nonsense thrumming in their coils.
Apparently my circuits had notes about that.
"You're… doing a wobble," Naruto muttered, low enough that the adults ahead of us couldn't hear. "You never do a wobble. You're like—" he made a vague, frustrated gesture with his free hand, "—annoyingly stable."
"Rude," I said faintly. "I'll cry later."
"You better not," he said. "'Cause you yelled at Iruka-sensei for trying to apologize, and you did the hand thing, and you said the fox was just a tenant, and…" He trailed off, frowning, words bottlenecking. "You don't get to do all that and then just fall over."
The forest path blurred for a second. I blinked hard until the trees reassembled properly.
"Newsflash," I said. "I am, tragically, made of meat."
He snorted. "Yeah, well. Even meat's gotta take a break."
We walked a few more steps in companionable staggering.
He shifted my arm across his shoulders without asking, tucking himself under my weight with clumsy care. It was the same way I'd seen him shoulder Iruka earlier, only this time his jaw was set, eyes cutting sideways to check my face every few seconds like he could brute-force me into staying conscious through sheer stubbornness.
"You're allowed to be tired, y'know," he said, quieter still. "You don't always have to be the one… doing the talking thing. Or the… brain stuff." He grimaced, hunting for the word. "The… therapist-ing."
"That's not a verb," I muttered, though my throat went tight in a way that had nothing to do with chakra.
"Whatever." His ears went a little pink anyway. "I just— I don't want you to…" He groped for it, fists clenching. "You helped. A lot. So you're not allowed to pretend you're fine and then faceplant in the street. That's a rule now. Hokage decree."
"You're not Hokage yet."
"Future Hokage decree."
I huffed, almost a laugh. It came out more like a wheeze.
"Bossy," I said.
"Yeah," he said, and this time his smile was small and lopsided and entirely for me. "Guess somebody's gotta lead."
The words landed in my chest like an echo, overlapping perfectly with the thought I'd just had in the clearing. For a second, the ache and the static and the terror of what we'd just done all layered over each other into something almost bearable.
Maybe leading didn't always mean marching ahead with a banner. Maybe sometimes it was just… taking turns not falling over.
"Okay, future Hokage," I said softly. "New rule accepted."
"Good." He squeezed my hand once, quick and awkward. "Now focus on walking. I'll handle the not-falling part."
I let my weight lean into him a little more than strictly necessary.
Naruto, hitting a small hop with one foot every step, walked along beside me, one hand on his brand-new forehead protector like he was afraid it would vanish if he stopped touching it. "I'm gonna be Hokage," he continued muttering.
"Yeah," I murmured. "Somebody has to change things from the top."
For the first time since I'd woken up in the wrong forest, it wasn't just me holding someone else together.
This time, somebody held on to me.
I think it was there that I decided: if Naruto was going to be the sun this village revolved around, I could live with being the shadow that made sure nobody fell through the cracks and disappeared into the dark the way I did.