Sanji Himura Presents
A Naruto One Shot
The Broken Limb That Grew Into a Tree
The need for warmth is staggering to Naruto Uzumaki. Three days removed from where he left Konoha the genin ninja looked at the campfire in sheer silence. 'At least the food is good,' Naruto thought to himself, 'not as good as Ayame makes it over at the ramen stand.'
His sensei is five feet away from him, in a drunken stupor of what he called sleep. The high ranked ninja got himself drunk with sake like every day of the week while thinking about his slug-hime. The way things worked, in a perfect world, would be that the pair was married and had a few brats to continue the Senju line, but after the mysterious death of her betrothed and her younger brother during the Great Third Ninja war, she, like the toad sage before Naruto, went deep into the bottle.
'Would a similar fate befall me,' Naruto asked silently. As if to answer his prayer, a twig snapped a few meters away from him, barely noticeable to anyone but his sensitive hearing. Deciding to investigate, he drew a kunai. The few steps that he took to get to the broken twig was tedious at best. The results of his investigation turned out to be a broken twig, snapped in four places. 'Is it my fate to become broken,' he thought a grim thought.
Then something magical happened to the twig. As if it was channeling chakra on its own, the broken pieces of the twig merged together into one branch, and then entered the ground. Deciding to wait the few minutes for anything odd happening, naruto wasn't disappointed in that a new tree emerge from the ground. It then grew nine branches. 'No, I am not alone,' he thought, 'I have Kyuubi and the Rookie nine to help me. I am the trunk that holds them together.'
Emerged, mentally refreshed, Naruto walked back to the fire, with a new purpose in his journey. He will become Hokage when he was strong enough to handle the job, not when he wanted to. He needed to hold his classmates, the clan heirs, together as if they were a tree. That tree was Konoha.
Putting out the fire, he got into his bedroll, ready to face his new training with purpose.
Author Notes and Statistics
This was written during a 25 minute sprint. As you can see I finished with two minutes on the clock remaining. I hope that it satisfies your hunger.
This has no pairings, and it was done intentionally. I exercised the "write one scene as a completed story" approach to this, and I think it really turned out well. I might make this into a series of one shots later.
Statistics
Total Content Word Count: 379