Twelve days had passed since Naruto Uzumaki had stood in the public archive with a cardboard box on his lap and the weight of a dead clan settling into his bones. Twelve days of cooking and training and the slow careful process of becoming someone he had not been before. His apartment still smelled of nothing in particular. His meals had improved from edible to almost pleasant. His body had healed completely, the split at the back of his skull now a closed seam of new skin that he touched sometimes in the morning without quite knowing why.
He tied his headband around his forehead and looked at his reflection in the small mirror above the sink. The face looking back at him was his face. Same blue eyes. Same blond hair. Same whisker marks on the cheeks. But something behind the eyes had changed and the change was permanent. He looked at himself the way you look at a tool you are learning to use, assessing its strengths and its limitations without sentiment.
Today was paperwork. Registration. The final administrative step before team assignments. He left his apartment and walked through the village streets without being seen, which was exactly how he preferred it.
The Hokage Tower was busier than he had expected. Clerks moved through the corridors with stacks of documents pressed against their chests. Shinobi came and went through doors that opened and closed and opened again. Naruto climbed the stairs to the third floor and found the door to the Hokage's office already ajar.
He knocked once and entered.
The Third Hokage sat behind his desk with a pipe in his hand and smoke curling around his weathered face. A clerk stood near the window with a stack of papers and a tired expression. The room smelled of tobacco and old wood and the particular authority of a place where decisions had been made for decades.
Naruto crossed to the desk and placed his registration documents on the surface. The clerk picked them up, checked each page against a list, and nodded.
"Everything is in order, Lord Third."
Hiruzen set down his pipe and looked at Naruto over the tops of his fingers. His gaze was careful. Measuring. The look of a man who had seen many things and was trying to decide where to place this particular thing in the catalogue of his experience.
"Congratulations, Naruto. You are officially a genin of the Village Hidden in the Leaves."
Naruto nodded once. "Thank you, Lord Third."
He turned toward the door. He had no interest in conversation. He had no questions. He had nothing to say to the man who had ordered his heritage sealed and his parents' names buried. The Third was a functionary. A piece of the system. Naruto did not hate him. He simply did not trust him.
The door opened before he reached it.
A boy younger to his own age charged through the doorway with the particular momentum of someone who had been running for some distance and had not yet figured out how to stop. He wore a scarf and a hoodie and an expression of furious determination that lasted approximately two steps before his feet found the polished floor and left him. He landed face down with a sound that was more surprise than pain.
Behind him, breathless and already exasperated, came a man in a green jonin vest. Sunglasses. Dark hair. The kind of face that looked like it had been born frowning.
"Honorable Grandson! You cannot keep running away from your training. It is unseemly. It is improper. It is not behavior befitting the grandson of the Hokage."
The man looked up. He saw Naruto. His expression curdled the way milk curdled when left too long in the sun. Disdain. Recognition. The particular look that Naruto had seen on the faces of adults his entire life, the look that said *I know what you are and I do not approve*.
Naruto felt nothing. He stepped around the boy on the floor and reached for the door handle.
The boy scrambled to his feet. He pointed at Naruto with the confidence of someone who had never been told no.
"You! You tripped me!"
Naruto did not respond. He opened the door.
The boy grabbed his wrist. The grip was tight. Accusing. Small fingers digging into the skin above his glove.
"I said you tripped me! Apologize!"
Naruto looked down at the hand on his wrist. Then he looked up at the boy's face. His eyes were completely calm. There was nothing behind them except a flat, patient assessment of exactly what would happen next if the hand did not move.
"Back off, kid. Or you will regret it."
The room changed. The temperature did not drop. The light did not dim. But something filled the space between the walls. A pressure. A certainty. The absolute knowledge that the person speaking was not making a threat but stating a fact. The killing intent rolled off Naruto in waves that had no sound and no shape but everyone in the room felt them.
The clerk dropped his papers. They scattered across the floor in a white fan.
Hiruzen's pipe paused halfway to his mouth. His eyes narrowed.
The man in the green vest swallowed loudly. His throat moved visibly. His hand drifted toward the kunai pouch at his thigh before he caught himself and stopped.
The boy's face went pale. His hand began to tremble. Slowly, very slowly, his fingers released Naruto's wrist. He stepped backward. His heel caught the edge of a floorboard and he stumbled but did not fall.
Naruto walked out. The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded very loud in the silence.
For a long moment no one in the Hokage's office moved.
The clerk knelt to gather his papers with shaking hands. Hiruzen set down his pipe and pressed his palms flat against the desk. The smoke from the pipe rose in a thin grey column and dispersed against the ceiling.
The man in the green vest recovered first. He straightened his vest and cleared his throat. His voice was loud in the silence, too loud, the voice of someone who had been frightened and was trying very hard not to show it.
"Well. That boy is clearly a problem. No manners. No respect for authority. As a jonin, the highest rank of elite ninja, I can say with certainty that he is a bad influence on the honorable grandson. If you are going to become the Hokage then you must listen to me and only me. I am the best instructor in the village. I am always correct and therefore I am never wrong."
He looked down. The boy was gone.
"Honorable Grandson!"
Hiruzen picked up his pipe and took a long draw. His eyes were on the closed door. He did not say anything. There was nothing to say.
Naruto walked through the village streets with his hands in his pockets and his thoughts arranged in neat rows. The sun was high. The crowds were thick. Merchants called out to shoppers from their stalls. Children ran between the legs of adults. He moved through all of it without being seen, a grey ghost in a bright world, and he preferred it that way.
He had been thinking about the Uzumaki clan for twelve days. He had been thinking about little else. The information from the archive had settled into his mind like stones dropped into still water, each one finding its place and staying there.
Rebuilding the clan required finding women. Women with Uzumaki blood. Women with red hair and strong chakra and the particular vitality that had made his mother's people so dangerous that other villages had banded together to destroy them. He needed to find them. He needed to approach them. He needed to convince them to help him rebuild something that had been burned to the ground before he was born.
He was twelve years old.
He did not know how to do any of this.
But he could prepare. He could research. He could learn everything there was to learn about the physical characteristics of women, about where they might hide, about how to recognize them from a distance. He could study the subject with the same focused attention he had brought to the Cloud report in the restricted archive.
His research plan had three parts.
First, the magazines. The stalls in the market district sold publications aimed at adult women. Fashion. Beauty. Photographs of women in various states of dress. He could study those photographs to train his eye. The shape of the face. The particular intensity in the eyes that the Uzumaki bloodline seemed to produce. He would buy several issues and examine them carefully in the privacy of his apartment. This was a strategic necessity.
Second, the bathhouses. The village had public baths. Women came and went at predictable hours. He did not need to enter. He simply needed to observe from a distance, to note the boob on the women who passed through the doors, to build a mental catalogue of potential targets. This was intelligence gathering. Nothing more.
Third, the village registry. The public archive had census records. He could search for women with red hair on the official rolls. Cross reference ages. Build a list of names and addresses. The elderly woman at the reference desk would not stop him. He had clearance now. He was a genin.
He told himself this had nothing to do with personal desire. He was doing this for the clan. The clan needed heirs. The clan needed to grow. He was the last male Uzumaki who knew his own heritage. It was his duty to ensure the bloodline continued.
The part of his mind that still sounded like the old Naruto was laughing at him. He ignored it.
He turned a corner toward the market district. There was a newsstand on the corner of Academy Lane and Third Street. He had seen the magazines through the window before. The women on the covers smiled at the camera with expressions that suggested they had secrets they were willing to share.
He was halfway down the street when he sensed it. A presence behind him. Small. Light on its feet. Not hostile, just persistent. The kind of persistence that came from someone who did not know when to quit.
He stopped walking.
"You are still following me."
The boy stepped out from behind a vegetable stall. Konohamaru. His scarf was askew. His expression was a complicated mix of fear and stubbornness and something that looked like wounded pride. He held himself like a fighter who had just been knocked down and was trying very hard to pretend he had meant to fall.
"I am not scared of you."
Naruto looked at him. No expression. No warmth. No hostility either. Just the flat neutral attention of someone observing an insect that had landed on his windowsill.
"Your hand was shaking."
"It was not."
"It was."
Konohamaru's jaw tightened. He stepped closer. His fists were clenched at his sides. He was trying very hard to be brave and doing a better job of it than most adults would have managed after feeling what he had felt in that office.
"I am going to be Hokage someday. Everyone says I cannot do it because I am just the grandson. But I will show them. I will become the greatest Hokage in history." He pointed at Naruto. "And I have decided that you will be my rival. That is an order."
Naruto stared at him for a long moment. The boy was serious. Completely, ridiculously serious. He had no idea what he was asking for. He had no idea what he was attaching himself to. He was a child playing at something he did not understand.
Naruto turned and continued walking toward the newsstand.
"Hey! I am talking to you! You cannot ignore the future Hokage!"
The footsteps followed. Small. Quick. Determined.
Naruto did not tell him to leave. He did not turn around. He simply walked, and the boy walked behind him, and the sounds of the market filled the space between them. The vendors called out their prices. The children ran between the stalls. The sun continued its slow arc across the sky.
The magazines were waiting.
The research would begin.
And somewhere behind him, chattering about rivalries and destiny and the proper respect due to the Hokage's grandson, Konohamaru followed him into the crowd like a small boat caught in the wake of something much larger than itself.
He did not know what he was following.
Naruto did not bother to tell him.
Next Time: Squad Seven – Enter Sakura Haruno and Sasuke Uchiha