Chapter 8: Growing Up
Another year folded itself into the ones before it, the way years did when you’d already lived through more of them than anyone in the room could imagine.
Naruto had gotten taller, marginally.
Better at kunai form, marginally, and only ever exactly as much better as the rest of the class managed to be, which by now was its own kind of skill — reading the curve of everyone else’s improvement and staying calibrated a careful half-step inside it.
You’ve started aging like a person who’s actually going to grow up, Kurama observed, watching him fail to reach a shelf that had been comfortably out of reach a year ago and was now only mostly out of reach.
It’s a strange thing to witness.
You were very small for a very long time.
Everyone’s small for a while.
Not like you were small.
You were small the way a war criminal in a diaper is small.
There’s a difference.
Naruto huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh and gave up on the shelf.
He noticed the shift in Ino and Sakura’s dynamic the way he noticed most things — sideways, without meaning to look for it, and then unable to stop seeing it once he had.
They’d been close once, genuinely close, the specific fierce loyalty of girls who’d found each other early and held on.
He’d caught the tail end of it in fragments over the past year — Ino teaching Sakura things about flowers, about her family’s shop, the two of them sharing lunch most days without needing to discuss it first.
Sasuke had started to come between that, slowly, the way he apparently always had.
“You’re doing the hair thing again,” Ino said one lunch period, not quite gently, watching Sakura fuss with a ribbon that had been fine five minutes ago.
“For him.”
“I’m not doing anything for anyone.”
“Sure.” Ino’s voice had an edge under the lightness, the specific tension of someone watching a friendship reroute itself into something else and not sure yet whether to fight it or let it go.
“You know he doesn’t even look at either of us.”
“He might.”
“He won’t.” Ino said it without cruelty, just flat certainty, and something in her tone suggested she’d already made peace with a version of this future that Sakura hadn’t gotten to yet.
“That’s not really the point, though, is it.”
Sakura didn’t answer that, and Naruto — close enough to catch the exchange without appearing to listen, an old and well-practiced skill by now — filed it away with something that wasn’t quite sympathy and wasn’t quite detachment either.
He knew where this went, more or less.
Knew that whatever came between them now would eventually resolve into something else entirely, later, in circumstances neither girl currently had any way of predicting.
You could tell them how it turns out, Kurama said, dry.
Save everyone the trouble. This story is hosted at g.com.
And ruin the only part of growing up that isn’t rigged in advance?
Naruto thought back.
No.
Some things people have to get to on their own.
Very noble.
Very practical.
Also noble.
Doesn’t have to be one or the other.
Choji Akimichi was easy to overlook, which Naruto understood better than most people in the room, though for entirely different reasons.
He wasn’t loud like Kiba, wasn’t sharp like Shikamaru, wasn’t performing anything in particular — just steady, warm, quick to share whatever he was eating with whoever happened to be sitting near him, entirely unbothered by the fact that half the class treated him as background furniture.
“Want some?” he asked, offering a bag of chips across the small gap between their seats, the same easy offer he made to nearly everyone, entirely without calculation.
“Sure,” Naruto said, and took a small handful, and meant the thanks that followed it.
“You’re the only one who ever takes just a little,” Choji observed, not unkindly.
“Everyone else either says no because they think it’s polite, or takes a huge handful because they think I won’t notice. You just take what you actually want.”
“Seemed simpler.”
“It is simpler. Nobody does simple, though.” Choji considered this with the same unhurried thoughtfulness he seemed to bring to most things.
“Shikamaru says you’re alright. He doesn’t say that about many people.”
“High praise, coming from him.”
“The highest, honestly.” Choji grinned, easy, and offered the bag again without being asked, and Naruto took another small handful and felt something settle, warm and uncomplicated, in exactly the place warmth like this kept finding lately.
The shogi games had gotten longer, and harder, and Naruto had started actually trying to win rather than just enjoying the company, which Shikamaru noticed immediately and without much surprise.
“You’ve gotten better,” he said, studying a position that was, for once, not immediately catastrophic for Naruto’s side.
“Genuinely better. Not just less-bad.”
“Working on it.”
“Why, though. You don’t strike me as someone who cares about games.”
Naruto considered how to answer that honestly without answering it too honestly.
“I like understanding things. Games are just things with rules you can actually learn all the way down. Most things aren’t.”
Shikamaru looked at him for a moment, something calculating behind the usual half-lidded boredom.
“That’s a strange way to think about it.”
“Not wrong, though.” He moved a piece, considered the result, seemed almost satisfied for once.
“My dad says the same kind of thing, actually. Says most people play the board in front of them. Good players play the board underneath it — the one that’s actually deciding things.”
“Sounds like a smart man.”
“He’s alright.” Shikamaru’s usual deflection, though something in it had softened over the months into something closer to genuine fondness than the tired resignation it used to carry.
“You’d probably get along. You’ve got the same look he gets sometimes. Like you’re already three moves past the actual conversation.”
“Is that bad?”
“Didn’t say it was bad. Said it was strange.” Shikamaru shrugged, unbothered, and moved another piece, and lost the thread of the conversation to the game the way he always eventually did, and Naruto let it go, comfortable in a silence that had stopped being effortful a long time ago without him quite noticing when.
Later, alone, Naruto ran through the accumulating list of it — not the Root ledger this time, a different list, one he hadn’t consciously started keeping until he noticed it was already long.
Teuchi’s easy warmth.
Hiruzen’s terrible jokes.
Iruka’s flinch, mostly gone now.
A door left open for a girl who hadn’t walked through it yet.
A dog boy who liked him without complication.
A quiet boy who shared his food without calculation.
A lazy genius who’d started, somewhere in the last year, saying things like “you’d get along with my dad” — the specific, understated way boys that age said “I think of you as someone who matters.”
You’re doing the ledger thing again, Kurama observed.
Different ledger, though.
Different ledger.
Heavier or lighter than the other one?
Naruto thought about that for a long moment, turning the question over with more care than it probably needed.
Lighter, he decided, finally.
Same weight, maybe.
Just easier to carry.
That’s not nothing.
No, Naruto agreed.
It’s really not.
He closed his eyes, let the ordinary hum of the village settle over him the way it did most nights now, and thought, not for the first time and not with the same coldness it would have carried a year ago, that whatever this life eventually cost him, it had already given him more than the first one ever had a chance to.