I. A Wind From the North
Perhaps the wind
wails so in winter for summers dead,
and all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries
for what has been and is not.
The wind blows icy and sharp through the streets, rustling up scraps of torn newsprint and ad flyers, and sending ripples scurrying across laundry hanging from clotheslines. It's uncanny weather this late in spring, and it's taken the village by surprise. The villagers linger indoors, savoring the warmth of modern air conditioning. Less fortunate street vendors are forced to don thick raincoats for shelter, and to muster smiles for the hurrying, huddled passers-by.
Among them, three young boys cluster together against the wind. They forge their way ahead, too dispirited even to run.
"This is such a scam," Boruto growls, hitching his jacket closer around his chest. It doesn't help. The wind cuts right through his double-stitched waterproof jacket like it's made of cobwebs and daydreams. "What the heck kinda weather is this? It's nearly March."
"There's pr-probably a storm c-c-coming," chatters his companion through blue-tinged lips. "Sometimes low p-pressure systems are preceded by drafts of cold wind. Though I'm pretty sure they're not usually this cold."
"The heck, Denki? How'd you even know that stuff?"
The smaller boy gives a mute shrug, shoulders hunched miserably. "I r-read?"
"Isn't there a shortcut somewhere?" says the third member of their group. He's gone right past miserable into a sort of ancient weariness that doesn't suit his angular young face. "If there isn't, I'm ditching you guys and heading to Inojin's place; I don't even care."
"Traitor," accuses Boruto. "You'd ditch us and save yourself?"
Shikadai shrugs. "You can come too. It's not like Ms. Yamanaka would kick you out or anything. Anyway, isn't the point to get out of the wind? Just give your mom a call or something, and let her know you'll be home late."
The blond boy wrinkles his nose, tucking his chin down against the wind. "No thanks. Inojin's dad creeps me out a bit."
"I c-couldn't," Denki says, shaking his head. "I've got lessons."
"We just got out of class!"
"Extra lessons."
Boruto gives him an incredulous look, and then shakes his own head in a mess of windblown blond locks. "Maybe it's for the best my dad's never around, if that's what you have to deal with at home. I mean, shoot. Someone's gotta teach you how to play hooky."
"I'm not hearing anything about a shortcut," comes a drawl from Shikadai.
"All right, all right! Just gimme a second."
Boruto takes a hard right without warning them, one hand reaching out to snag Denki by the elbow and drag him along. Shikadai follows without missing a beat—he's had more practice keeping up with Boruto's impromptu turns—and they all three duck under the awning of a greengrocers'. He leans back against the wall, feeling some of the warmth seep back into his fingers.
"Okay," he declares, scrubbing his forearm across his numb nose. "Okay, I have an idea. We can cross through the alley just past the movie rental place, and jump from the roof of the apartment building down and around the Shodai's forest—"
"Nope," Shikadai interrupts.
"Aw, c'mon! You said you wanted a plan."
"You think I'm crossing rooftops in this weather?" The other boy fixes him with a green-eyed gimlet stare. "Besides, Denki wouldn't be able to keep up. He can't exactly scale apartment buildings, can he?" He sighs, and rubs the bridge of his nose. "Sorry, man. The Yamanaka place is way closer. Feel free to come with."
Boruto chews his lip. It's a seriously tempting idea. He's been around Inojin's house a few times, as a kid when he got shunted off on playdates, and once or twice more recently. It's just a few blocks to detour from here, a cozy place that smells like flowers from the rooftop garden. What's more, Inojin's mom makes some kickass hot chocolate on the days she's off work.
But Himawari's gotta be stuck at home, nose pressed to the windows. Boruto's not a perfect kid or a perfect brother, but he tries—he tries to be home for dinner. Bad enough if Dad never shows up. He doesn't want to be the next to flake out on them.
"Nah, I'll head home," he says, sliding his hands in his pockets. "Mom's making hamburgers for dinner. Can't miss it."
Shikadai concedes this with a nod. "Suit yourself. Denki?"
The boy looks up at his name, still rubbing his fingers for warmth. "Do you think Ms. Yamanaka might let me borrow her phone? I've got to be home by four, but—" He shrugs in a self-deprecating sort of way. "—you're right that I can't keep up with Boruto."
"Et tu, Denki?"
"Sorry, I—"
"Kidding, kidding." Boruto slaps him on the shoulder. "Go have some hot cocoa for me. I'll see you guys in class tomorrow. Here's hoping the train's back on by then, or at least the wind's stopped going nuts."
"Don't fall off an apartment building on your way home," says Shikadai, entirely serious. "Your mom would murder me."
"Roger that."
He waves the two of them goodbye, takes a breath, zips his jacket to his chin, and steps back into the wind.
Okay, so Shikadai and Denki might've had the right idea after all.
It's a tough battle between Boruto's pride and reality before he can bring himself to concede the point, but seriously. Every step he takes across the rooftop sends him skidding back two more until he finally gets the hang of keeping his center of gravity low. It's slow and tedious and pretty much completely defeats the point of going across the rooftops in the first place.
He grabs an aluminum gutter for a handhold and flinches back with a hiss at the unexpected cold. The wind's picked up. It's going right to his bones through his flesh, and his eyes have been watering since ages ago. If Mom knew he was up here—well, shit. She's got this thing about fifty-foot drops and iffy chakra control that defies logic. He'd be grounded in a heartbeat. Literally.
By the time he reaches the next street over, his face is probably wind-chapped raw. He clambers down the gutter with undignified urgency and takes shelter behind a dumpster.
A dumpster. This is what he's been reduced to.
His plan to circumnavigate the forest seems less appealing by the second. No shelter from the wind except the stone wall and the occasional telephone pole? No thanks. But he's walled himself into a corner by coming all this way, and unless he wants to backtrack he's gotta keep going.
"Wind or trespassing," he muses aloud. Given the words are snatched from his lips by a particularly aggressive gust, the choice is pretty clear. "Trespassing it is!"
He clears the stone wall into the forest in a single jump, and doesn't stop running until he stops feeling like the wind is about to claw his face off. And, oh yeah, this is ten times better than hoofing it out on the street. Big bro Konohamaru would so totally disapprove, but then Boruto hadn't really cared much about his disapproval since he was maybe six years old. Basically the instant he gets under the cover of the trees, the wind diminishes to almost nothing.
Boruto sighs in relief and unzips his jacket, running a hand through his tangled hair. "Thank god."
The words echo strangely in the glade.
He shuts his mouth with a snap. Okay. So maybe when trampling through a sacred forest bound to the memory of the village's ancestral founder—even in a time of very strict necessity—silence is the better part of discretion. Yeah, probably.
It's not even really trespassing, though, he tells himself uneasily. It's not like anyone uses it or anything.
The Shodai's preserve is just another ordinary patch of forest in a village surrounded by the stuff. Only the weight of the name attached to it keeps it from being repurposed for city expansion. Probably superstition more than anything else—doesn't the entire forest technically belong to the Shodai in some way? He thinks he remembers hearing that story from someone.
Anyway, Boruto is the Hokage's kid, like it or not. And the guy (nominally) in charge of the historical preserves for the village just so happens to be whoops, you guessed it. So he feels totally within his rights to take advantage of the trees. If Dad wanted him kept out, he shoulda done a better job keeping an eye on the place.
Without him talking, the air hangs silent. He can hear the sound of the wind rustling in the very uppermost boughs, but only distantly. It's like the sound of static on a radio far away. The sunlight is muted to a dim phosphorescent green, suited to the moss and ferns cropping up around the thickly rooted ground. And it is thick. Only quick reflexes and practice dodging phone lines keeps him from tripping flat on his face.
That's when he looks up from his reverie and groans. "Crap."
A sea of mammoth, uniform trees stretches around him. He can't even see the outline of apartment buildings and city lights he'd left behind. He meant to just cut across the very edge of the forest, but no. He'd gotten distracted about stupid details like getting caught, and just charged blindly straight in like a complete moron. Truly, another brilliant move by Boruto Uzumaki.
What kind of Leaf ninja gets lost in a forest? Even for an Academy student, this is just embarrassing.
The trees are too broad to climb, so he picks the largest one and rigs some ninja wire to hoist himself up. By the time he reaches the top, his palms are red and smarting. He rubs them against his chest with a wince— this is why only perfectionists like Sarada Uchiha actually use ninja wire. He harbors a secret suspicion that the Uchiha bloodline magically prevents wireburn.
And, yeah, he'd been daydreaming way longer than he'd thought. How else would he have managed to end up right smack in the middle of a sizable chunk of forest?
Okay. Regroup.
Boruto slides back down to the earth from a lower branch, marking his position mentally. As long as he doesn't get turned around, he can navigate using the plants on the ground to exit on the northeast side, closest to home. As long as he doesn't get himself distracted like an idiot—
Is that a spiral?
Aaaand again. Not even two seconds—practically a record.
He stares at it, still absentmindedly coiling up his wire for reuse, and his brain stubbornly refuses to provide a reasonable explanation for it. Not just your typical knot of wood or anything like that. There's no mistaking it for anything other than what it is. A handsbreadth in diameter, carved—no, burnt—into the trunk of the tree, some three feet off the ground. It's the kind of symmetrical shape that just doesn't occur naturally, and he recognizes it.
It's the Uzumaki emblem.
As a kid, Boruto had thought that emblem was cool. Out of all the clans in the village, only the Uzumaki had their emblem on the ninja uniform and as part of the village crest. The mark of friendship, Dad had explained once. Back when the Uzumaki came from a different village, they'd used that symbol to show their alliance to the Leaf. Even if no one really called it the Uzumaki spiral anymore, that was still pretty incredible.
But he'd soured to it real quick once he was old enough to realize that it was basically just Dad's signature mark. People didn't see it and think Uzumaki— they thought the Seventh Hokage. Mom used to sew it covertly onto the hems of Boruto's clothes, along with the Hyuga patch, but he'd complained about it until she stopped. Everyone and their mother already knows he's the Hokage's son. The last thing he needs is a big red spiral to remind them.
His hand reaches out to touch the burned spiral, then hesitates, and looks around guiltily. Maybe he'd be better off mentioning it to Dad, just in case.
In case of what, splinters? He shakes himself. He's an Uzumaki, dammit, as much as Dad is. It's practically his responsibility to investigate stuff like this.
Boruto takes a quick, bracing breath, and touches the emblem.
Nothing happens.
A forceful tap elicits exactly the same amount of nothing. Okay, so he's starting to feel kind of stupid for expecting—what had he been expecting?—from what was probably the work of some bored graffiti arsonist or something. Clearly he's seen too many movies about ancestral tombs locked deep in the heart of an unknown forest.
He chews his lip. There's something nagging at him— like looking at a math problem, and he knows there's a solution, he just can't quite make the pieces come together in his head. And when that happens, there's one way around it- you stop thinking, stop worrying, and open yourself up to intuition. So he closes his eyes and focuses his chakra into his hand.
It flickers, coalesces into a blue haze, and Boruto lifts his hand to the spiral.
It flares into light.
"Shit, shit, shit—" He lets out a squeak that he'll swear afterwards was exceedingly manly, and tries to pull his hand back. It's stuck. His stomach churns with panic, and he yanks again. The force stretches his skin from his bones painfully, and his eyes water with pain, but by the time he slumps back to the tree his hand is still stubbornly unmoved.
Underneath his hand, though, the tree is changing.
The light spools into a pattern around the emblem, winding and unwinding into a larger spiral, connecting and splitting off in a web of interconnected matrices conforming to the broad base of the trunk. It slows down towards the end, stabilizing, evening out until there's a circle four feet in diameter.
Shivering, it creaks in on itself. Then there's a sharp clicking sound, and it begins to open.
"I'm sorry!" Boruto yelps, pulling fruitlessly. "I promise I'll never come back again, I swear, just lemme go!"
With a lurch, it does.
Boruto hits the ground heavily. Something hard bangs the base of his spine, sending a jolt of pain up his back and sparks flashing in his eyes. He inhales sharply, waiting for the white-hot pangs to fade into something more manageable. Shortcuts be damned; he is never ever coming in this hellhole forest ever again.
When he can breathe, he hauls himself away from the tree on hands and knees. He's panting, eyes huge as he stares at symbol that is still glowing, dammit!
"Okay. God. Think."
Pros: the appendage-sucking Uzumaki tree decided to regurgitate his hand with all relevant bits attached. Cons: he may have inadvertently screwed up some seriously bad mojo in a forest he's not supposed to be in the first place, and considering the way the mark continues to glow without any sign of fading, his screw-up might just be permanent.
... it's definitely time to find Dad.
He snatches his bag and bolts. Doesn't matter which direction he goes now: with ninja all over town, all he has to do is find a chunin on duty and convince them to take him to the Hokage. They all know the transportation technique, so it's not like it'll be hard—the only obstacle is his personal pride, and recent events have proven that remarkably inconsequential.
Boruto finds the edge of the forest after fifteen minutes of sprinting full-tilt through the undergrowth. It's a far longer trip than he remembers going in—how the heck did he manage to wander for some two or more miles without noticing?— and his lungs are raw with panting. It takes him two tries to vault the stone wall, after his foot catches on the first jump.
He's always been quick, able to keep up with kids twice his age easily. Shikadai complains about it constantly. But he's pushed past his limits this time. He halts atop the wall, chest heaving and eyes swimming, not caring if someone sees him. Dimly, he notices that the sharp wind has vanished as well. Maybe it's just the sweat soaking his shirt, but the air seems more humid.
"Can the weather just make up its mind, please?"
Just his luck, too: he's somehow managed to end up in the one corner of the village that looks completely unfamiliar.
His first thought, since when does Leaf have a slum? is probably rude but totally warranted. The buildings look ancient: tiny rounded things stacked precariously atop one another. A latticework of pipes winds in and around the walls, and when he looks for a telephone pole to use as a vantage point, he can't find one. The sides of the buildings are patched where the wood has worn through, and the paint flakes away to show a layer beneath.
He wrinkles his nose. "Majorly slacking on the urban development, Dad."
More importantly: find a chunin, avert disaster.
Without the wind to deal with, it's a lot easier to make his way to the rooftops. A lady inside one of the buildings sees him; she raps the window loudly and shouts something at Boruto. You'd think she'd be used to having ninja on her roof—it is a Hidden Village—but he takes the hint and moves on.
He's starting to feel more and more disconcerted as he goes, though. Like a foreigner in his own city. Sometimes he thinks he recognizes a street crossing or a landmark, but just as soon it fades away into more twisted dirt roads and shabby buildings. Did that tree screw with his head? He thought he knew the whole village back to front, but he can't even tell where in the village he is right now.
There! A flash of green.
Relief surges through him, and he skids to a halt on the rooftop. There's an unfamiliar chunin kneeling at his post atop what looks like some kind of bank. He's looking the other way, but Boruto cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, "Hey! 'Scuse me! There's an emergency!"
The chunin glances around, frowning—then he sees Boruto and stands.
That's as much of an invitation as Boruto needs. He's bounding across the street before you can say evil magic tree and vaults onto the roof of the bank. It's a bit of a trick to manage without any telephone poles, and he hides a spark of pride at the neat landing. Judging from his glower, the chunin is Not Impressed.
"Look," Boruto says breathlessly. "It's really, really important that I go talk to the Hokage like right this instant, and I can't really explain why, but if you could like give me a lift or point me in the right direction that would be great because I've somehow managed to get myself lost, don't ask me how."
Do you know you babble? Sarada had once asked him coolly. Well, fine, touché, whatever. He's just the tiniest bit panicked right now and so what if it's showing through?
The chunin's frown deepens. "You want me to take you to the Hokage?"
"Well, yeah." He wouldn't normally answer an adult with sarcasm, but seriously. Talk about dumb questions! "The sooner the better." He hesitates for a moment, then, because his Mom raised him right, he tacks on a "Please?"
"I don't think so, kid." His mouth twists before saying 'kid', like he's inclined to tack on a stronger epithet. "Whatever you're up to, you can do it without bothering the Hokage."
Okay, what is this guy's issue? Boruto takes a step back, more bewildered than hurt. Never in his entire life has an adult looked at him with that much dislike. Even among his stupidest exploits, even when he shredded five hundred pages of his Dad's paperwork because his dumb five-year-old self thought that was what kept him away from home all the time, even when he crashed the Kaminarimon Express into the Hokage mountain— never. Not even when he's probably deserved it.
"Look, I'm telling you it's an emergency! Are you just gonna ignore that?"
The chunin snorts. "An emergency. Yeah, right. The Hokage's a busy man." Again, that ugly downturn of the mouth. "If you ask me, you've wasted far too much of his time already. Now scram, before I haul you down to the precinct myself."
Boruto stares. "I know he's busy! He's literally always busy!" His voice is reaching a truly astronomical pitch and he can't even bring himself to care. "I know I've done some dumb stuff but don't you think I know the difference between that and a real problem?"
"The only problem here is you. I'm not going to warn you again."
And wow, Boruto's actually struck speechless by that. His heart is thrumming in his throat and he doesn't trust himself to move in case he tries to punch the guy. In the end, all he can manage is a choked, bewildered, "Do you—do you not know who I am or something?"
'Cause that would be, like, a whole new spectrum of completely screwy. Boruto has been reliably informed all his life that he's basically the spitting image of his dad: blonde hair, blue eyes, whisker marks, the works. If the one solitary time he needs someone to recognize him as the Hokage's son is the miraculous first occasion that someone fails to do so, he might just choke on the irony.
The guy shifts. It's a slight movement, but suddenly he looks almost threatening. "Trust me; I know exactly what you are."
Seeing as the world is officially insane, Boruto does the only thing he can do.
He turns and runs as fast as he can away from the psycho paranoid chunin, barely paying attention to the streets that flash past him. Something is seriously wrong, and he would definitely like to know who promoted that irrationally hateful screwball to the village guard. He'd give anything to see a familiar face right now—Mom or Himawari, or Shikadai or Sarada or even Dad.
Except now he's facing south, towards the Hokage Mountain.
And he finally sees what he's missed.
Or rather, he sees what's missing.
Four faces are carved on the mountainside, more familiar than anything yet in this bizarre mirror of the Hidden Leaf. Only four. Then, after Grandpa Minato, it's just empty stone.
A sound like a choked, gurgling laugh forces its way up his throat. It's ten parts hysteria and zero parts amusement, and Boruto's next footstep twists under him until he's sliding down the side of the roof, gripping the shingles by his fingertips. He can't catch his breath because he's still laughing and he can't stop, not even when he starts feeling lightheaded.
"Oh, god," he says, "What did I do?"