Menma only lowered his eyes when he felt the man arrive. He could hear Naruto's old teacher the moment the chunin stepped outside and laid his gaze on him. Emotions raged in the man's chest like a sea during a storm. Relief battled with guilt, joy with sorrow, love with self-loathing. Slowly, Menma tore his gaze from the Hokage Mountain and eyed his "date". He rose to his feet and, with a simple motion of his hand, invited Iruka Umino to sit beside him.

"Hello, Umino-san. Thank you for meeting me," greeted Menma with a small smile that did not quite reach his eyes, his voice carefully modulated to hold a calm warmth.

Iruka swallowed painfully and scrunched his eyes shut for a second. The man shook himself and breathed out deeply.

"My apologies," he answered with a somewhat brittle arching of his lips. "And the pleasure is mine… Menma, right?"

The boy nodded. "Yes."

Iruka Umino was a man approaching his thirties yet his tanned hide, the scar horizontally crossing his face and the few white hairs that streaked his head made him seem older. Surprisingly, the sight of Menma seemed to have brought a spark to the chunin's brown eyes and had seemingly straightened his spine a bit. Though it could have been Menma's imagining things.

"I think Tsunade-san informed you but I prefer to say it again," began Menma. "I have no memory of you. My time as Naruto has a very… abstract meaning to me, hence why I'm called Menma."

Iruka nodded. He had been told as such by the Hokage.

"I wished to meet you to know a bit more about my past self." It felt more and more like a chore but the teenage boy was careful to not let it seep into his voice and Iruka did not seem to notice anything amiss.

The chunin smiled softly. "Of course, I'll do my best to answer what I can."

Menma leaned heavily against the backrest of the bench and exhaled noisily. "Well," he prompted after a few seconds of silent consideration, his voice suddenly gloomy. "I guess… I guess I'll let you talk? I don't know. I'm not sure what question to ask."

He did not want to ask any question at all, in truth. Menma was tired, so incredibly tired like lead flowed in his veins instead of blood. He did not want to be Naruto. He was not sure he was even capable of being who he had been. He knew, of course, that what Naruto had endured had shaped him into the weird buddle of wrongs he had been, that his past ignorance, bratty behaviour and insecurities had been bred by the unfair treatment the villagers had had for him. That, however, was not what bothered Menma.

Menma took a deep breath and cleared, one by one, his spiralling thoughts before they could drown deeper into the recesses of his psyche. He massaged his eyelids and looked at Iruka, who was giving him a concerned gaze.

"Sorry. I'm just a little tired, is all," apologized the teen, stifling a fake yawn.

Iruka nodded. "No problem. It can't have been easy." He hummed. "So, Naruto, huh? Where to even begin?"

The man chuckled, relaxed against the backrest and looked up.

"Most people you'd ask would say Naruto was an annoyance." The teacher scoffed. "Well, no, actually, before Naruto was declared dead, most would say he was a demon. A few would consider him a knucklehead, an immature brat. Of course, they would carefully ignore the fact y-Naruto was an orphan who was expelled from the orphanage at six. No minder, no family - well, that's par for the course." Iruka chuckled mirthlessly at his own sad joke. "No nothing but the disdain of his home. And like most, I wasn't fair to him. Never really, truly fair."

Menma nodded in acknowledgement, his features appearing to be carved in marmor.

"The truth," continued Iruka, staring off in the distance, "is that Naruto was a fighter. Every single day of his life, he was fighting to prove his existence. A better ninja than most of us he was, since day one at that. He endured the hate of Konohagakure and made it his fuel in his combat for acknowledgement. That's why he wanted to be Hokage, at first."

Iruka had to stop for a second to recover his breath, his throat tight and his eyes misty.

"Bratty to the end, huh?" Menma commented off-handedly.

Iruka shook his head firmly. "No."

"No?" There was no surprise in the boy's tone, simply a genuine question.

"It is a motive as valid as any. Maybe more valid than many, in fact. Some want to become Hokage for power or fame. They never earn the hat, of course. Naruto's dream was for him to be accepted." The chunin sighed. "Something was broken between him and the villagers, Naruto knew it fully well. He was ignorant, not stupid. And even though it wasn't his role, he fought to make things right again."

"Not in the most efficient ways, I heard."

Iruka shrugged. "He pranked people." He spat derisively. "Big deal. He could have lashed out, hurt them or even killed them: some of his pranks proved he was capable of it. But he pranked them. And as soon as he officially became a genin, he stopped. He was their protector and he fully acted it. He always knew what it means to be a ninja of Konoha."

Silence fell over the pair as Menma contemplated Iruka's words, while the chunin once again looked at the sky. The teen noted the patriotic verse but ignored it; as if "protecting your village" was a creed specific to Konoha. He knew the chunin meant nothing by it; it was just the way he had been raised.

"That's high praise," remarked the teen after a moment.

Iruka shrugged again. "He wasn't the most knowledgeable or the most applied student. He was rude, as far removed from well-mannered and well-behaved as you can imagine. He was rash and confrontational and loud. He was an orphan who no one helped, on a perpetual crusade for any shred of attention he could get but we chose to ignore that. It was always much easier to make Naruto solely responsible for these shortcomings." The man rolled his eyes. "As if you could invent etiquette from scratch or something. But we would have needed to consider him as a boy in the first place, which we didn't."

Then, Iruka smiled and the anger on his face melted. "Naruto also tried and tried and kept on trying. He practically taught himself how to read and I think it disgusted him from academics for the rest of his life. He struggled against his own chakra until he could perform the transformation jutsu almost flawlessly. He always had a smile for you if you just gave him a kind word. Always had a joke ready to lighten up the atmosphere." The man blinked. "He might have been some kind of a clown but the more I think about it, the less of a problem I find it. We need people to make us laugh, too."

Menma glanced at the chunin's face; the turmoil that the teen felt echoing through his various emotional stands was almost unbearable but he showed none of it. "You loved him."

Iruka's features bunched up in a painful grimace and he gnashed his teeth. "Like a brother," he breathed shakily. "And I was too much of a coward to act upon it. To tell him."

Menma looked away as he furiously blinked away the tears. The man's pained outcry had toppled his mental barrages, flooding the teen's empathetic channels like a furious mountain brook tearing through her riverbed come Spring, spearing through it like a fiery stake. He swallowed the knot in the back of his throat.

"I'm… I'm sorry," whispered the teen, startling Iruka. Before he could stop himself, the words spilt from his mouth, the tears fell from his eyes, the sobs tore through his throat. "I'm not him. I'm not your brother. I can't… I just can't be him. I'm not that strong. I'm sorry, just sorry," choked Menma, his and Iruka's sorrow escaping from his restraints and shaking his voice violently.

He was tired, so incredibly tired like his bones were made of rock and his muscles of mud. He did not want to be Naruto. He did not want to be someone ready - expected - to endure scorn, disdain, pain and hatred again and again for people who could not be bothered to show they cared, the same people he felt chained to by his chakra. Menma could not be that person; he did not have the courage nor the strength to be Naruto.

Yet it felt so egotistical, so weak of character that Menma was left wondering if it was not wrong of him to seek reciprocity in relationships. The picture of magnanimity, Naruto had kept on giving, seemingly asking so very little in return. Much like the hero of some Epic, Naruto had met every challenge thrown at him with an inhumane will and such conviction that even the people closest to him did not know if he had suffered from it or not.

They acknowledged, intellectually, that Naruto had been dealt a terrible hand. None, however, had mentioned, even in passing, what Naruto felt about his endeavour. After ignoring or mocking him for years, now they admired him for his grand ambition, his strength of character. Menma, however, was more and more convinced that no one truly knew Naruto. Who was the boy behind the steel-like determination?

Was there even something to begin with or was the personality which Naruto had shown his true self? Did he have no weakness? No moment of doubt or discouragement, no resentment towards his tormentors? Did he ever find things to be unfair? Did he ever curse the villagers and their bigotry? Who could be that strong? wondered Menma. How could anyone be that strong? And how could he hope to compare?

Maybe the truth was darker. Maybe Naruto had been truly broken by his treatment. Maybe the boy had become the dog the people treated him as. Licking the hand that slaps him, licking the boot that kicks him and joyfully eating the crumbs of misery handed over to him. Menma felt horror and fear dig a pit in his stomach as the thoughts collided in a nauseating wreck. He didn't want that to happen to him!

He felt like a fragile glass statue but he couldn't determine whether the golem facing him was made of steel and granite or mud and hay.

Not a night passed without him awakening, drenched in sickly sweat, from nightmarish visions that he could not recall, the only thing remaining a vertiginous feeling of endless fall. Not a day passed without him questioning the very fibre of his existence, his worth, his legitimacy, the reason he was alive in the first place.

Luck. Fate. Destiny. It did not matter how one called it, Menma knew it was sheer chance that he was not a corpse rotting somewhere downstream of the Naka River. He should not have been alive and yet here he was, saved from the final destination that everything shared by the blind force of pure hazard. Only, there was some mistake made in the process for it was not Naruto who had been returned to life but an empty shell, a white parchment cleaned from every last drop of ink that stained it.

Was it written somewhere that it was not the day he ought to die? But hadn't Naruto Uzumaki died, in a way? Was death the sole fate of humanity or was there a grander scheme at play?

Why was he alive and not Naruto? Clearly, he was wasted if Naruto had been so unwaveringly steadfast, so immovably strong, so incredibly enduring. What were his personality flaws - all of them easily attributable to his childhood - compared to such heroic qualities? Alternatively, he might have been offered a chance at a real life, an opportunity to not be the slave of a village that, by all accounts, could not acknowledge him as worthy of their love.

Menma's strands of consciousness flailed out of his control before endlessly folding over considerations that had turned into obsessions over the months. The teenage boy gathered his limbs around him, his gaze lost and empty, blind and deaf to his companion's worried outcries. Distantly, he recognized that he was weeping.

As if it happened in slow motion, Iruka saw Menma scatter into bits and spiral into a panic. He saw, through the boy's tears, how his iris dilated, heard, through his sobs and repeated apologies, how his breathing quickened and shortened until it was completely choked.

The chunin clamped down on the rising wave of worry welling inside him and lost no time seizing Menma's left hand just as he was flaring his chakra. "Count with me, Menma!" said the man, his voice loud but firm and calm, before he breathed in. "One, two."

Holding his breath for a second, Iruka exhaled, slowly and forcefully. "One, two, three, four."

He smiled as the teenage boy imitated him, still dazed but receptive to his voice. Iruka inhaled and exhaled once more, counting with the regularity of a clock. Beside him, Menma's erratic breathing slowly returned to normal before the boy's consciousness abandoned him.

Menma came to in his room in the Hokage mansion. The futon was as comfortable as usual and his comforter was weighing on him just the right way. The teen decided to stay like this for a minute, relishing the peace as much as he could. Slowly, he gathered his bearings and the reasons for his panic attack came back to him. Four lines of awareness wrestled with the thoughts and kept them from swirling into a chaotic maelstrom; meanwhile, Menma surveyed the room with his last strand of consciousness. Tsunade was smiling at him, though her chakra sang of worry.

"Hello, Menma." She said gently.

"Hello," answered the teen, his voice low and his visage muted.

"What happened?"

Menma was tempted to answer "nothing". Not that Tsunade would be deterred with this simple word because obviously, "something" had happened, but he was not certain he knew what to explain. He was not sure he wanted to explain. There was now a layer of hurtful carelessness, of murky indifference to the people he had met up until now.

Menma wondered if it meant his ability could be trumped if maybe it was possible that he could hear the song of chakra wrong. He looked at Tsunade, listened intently to the notes of her metaphysical force. It rang so clearly; how could he be mistaken? And yet, he didn't trust himself, couldn't believe his senses. Why would their behaviour be in complete contradiction with their chakra?

"Menma?"

"Did you really care?" The words tumbled out of the teen's mouth before he could stop himself. He had to know, had to go to the bottom of all this. "Did you really know Naruto? You speak of his determination, you admire his will to change people's opinion of him, to protect his comrades. Do you know if it pained him to have to do this? Do you know if he felt any resentment towards the bigots who made it hell for him? Do you know if it was his true desire or did he just heed the words of an old man because that would earn him his approbation, like a good dog? Did he ever talk to any of you about any of this or was he too broken, too afraid that speaking of such things would rob him of your acknowledgement?"

Tsunade remained silent at the boy's outburst. Her chakra, though, Menma could hear it. It was howling in both stupefaction and guilt. He didn't trust it and soldiered on.

"Or maybe you think he was fine? That his life didn't really affect him? That he didn't hate, wasn't angry and knew no fear? That he could endure everything, shoulder everything, triumph over everything?" Menma's voice broke. "Maybe that's why you didn't really love him," he whispered. "You thought he didn't really need it, didn't you?"

"I did love him!" The woman protested immediately, her fists balled so tight that her nails were drawing blood out of her palms, her visage pallid and set in a snarl.

"Enough to ask him how he was truly doing?" asked the teen despondently. "Enough to take his side and punish those who reviled him? Enough to speak to him about his family? Or were you too busy? Or forced to consider the village first? More interested in a broken boy than an accomplished man, maybe? That's arguably how Lord Sandaime wanted him, after all and you're his student and successor."

Tsunade palled even further and shook her head. "No," she choked weakly, "that's not true". She felt robbed of her strength. Was that how her actions and inactions looked like from an outside perspective, she mused. She couldn't have been fooled by a facade, could she? She hadn't been so inadvertently callous, had she? Her mind conjured Naruto's smile a hundred times and the words of Menma echoed through her being. Had the blond's grin always looked this forced? This brittle? Did he always force those blue peepers of his to scrunch shut in the way people do when happiness doesn't reach their eyes?

How had Naruto endured his life in Konoha, caged by the people's fear and hate and led on by an old man who couldn't be bothered? It was so very obvious that he should not, could not have been fine but Tsunade realized that she had never questioned his smiles nor his claims. She had never questioned him, period. Neither had the boy's so-called friends, sensei or teammates. Friends who hadn't been such, given their shared history in the Academy and the fact Tsunade had never seen them hang out with Naruto; sensei who had to be won over first or had been too focused on someone else; teammates who had betrayed or pleaded he retrieve the wayward one, inadvertently playing on his feelings.

She looked at Menma; her eyes were bleary from the tears that she could not hold back. And as she looked at him, the teen spoke the words she dreaded.

"I need to leave," he whispered.

Menma felt out of it, out of his own self. Tsunade's distress had been so pregnant, her sorrow so intense that he felt burned out of his thoughts. The strands of his awareness had ruptured and retracted one after the other under the overwhelming surge of her emotions. He now was speaking with a voice that was barely his own, guided by a recess of his psyche, a preserved islet of his mind. He knew his heart was breaking, he knew his chakra was shrieking, he knew the worm was raging about his imposture but his decision was made. Because under the torrent of feelings that weren't quite his own, his own fear raged.

Menma was afraid of what these people could - would - do to him if he stayed with them.

"I can't stay here," he continued. "Naruto was either impossibly strong or completely broken. I can't be that strong and I won't be broken."

Tsunade sent him a pleading look but the teen was too overwhelmed for it to make a difference. Slowly, Menma rose from his bed, saw that he was dressed and bowed to the woman.

"Thank you for your kind hospitality, Lord Hokage. I'll be departing within the hour."

Tsunade was too stunned to react. Here he was, the boy who reminded her so much of her brother, leaving her again, from his own volition this time. Too afraid, too suspicious of Konoha, of the place that should have been his home, of the people who should have been his family and friends to be able to stay. How did it come to this? Naruto would never have left.

The very thought made her sick. No, Naruto would never have left, too dependent on the contemptuous goodwill of a few to even consider it. He would never have shared anything, too used to facing everything and everyone alone. She should have been glad, in a way, that Menma sought to protect himself but that it must be at the cost of him disappearing again is something she couldn't help but hate. She couldn't word any of her pleas out loud, however. She couldn't beg for him to stay, couldn't promise that she'd do better, that everyone would do better. She couldn't pray for a chance to make everything right, to give him everything she could not give Naruto.

To her own mind, it felt hollow and she knew it would feel hollow to the boy. Why would Menma agree to give Konoha a second chance? What had they done to deserve it? She could claim her love for him all day but he would simply ask why she apparently never showed it to Naruto. He would ask "why would you care now?" and she'd have no answer. Her head folded in on itself as she tried to understand her behaviour and the behaviour of all those who pretended to be close to Naruto, to rationalize the how and the why of it. She was horrified by the answer that her brain provided.

The lovable fuckup, the gutsy idiot, the headstrong clown; those had been the roles Naruto had been assigned to and not one of the people who pretended to care had seen fit to help him get out of these skins so that he could become his own person. Worst, she corrected; none of them had accepted his attempts to get out of them. Tsunade loathed herself as she never had, more than after Dan's death even, for buying the twisted play Naruto had been forced into.

As tears flowed freely from her eyes and her frame shook with exhausting sorrow, she was left wondering why she hadn't seen it.

Menma gathered his stuff quickly and efficiently, going through the motions like an automat, mind closed off and trains of thoughts shut down. He didn't want to think. He couldn't bear to feel. He refused to give his attention to the other person in the room as she broke down and cried, right next to him. He fought the urge to comfort her. If he did anything, he knew his resolve would wilt and he would end up staying.

He couldn't stay. He knew he had decided, barely a few hours before, to give all these people a chance and his decision to leave seemed abrupt, sudden even to him; it betrayed a flailing resolve, tasted like ash in his mouth. He needed more time, however, of that he was convinced. Were he to stay here, every interaction would be darkened by suspicion. He could not build anything true if he kept wondering when these people would hurt him next.

Recalling every personal harmony of these he had met, he found a strand of consciousness desperately trying to puzzle why their past acts were so disjointed from their feelings, while another simply looped on the word "monster". A third allowed fear to lead him astray, wondering about every word exchanged, every smile given, every caress lavished, questioning what these gestures meant, whether or not they had been truthful. He clamped down on the breaking wave of pain he felt rising as he thought about Sakura. He fought against the tears until his eyes hurt, swallowed the sorrow until it formed a knot in his throat.

He couldn't stay. He feared that the bonds he felt so strongly linking his chakra to some of the people here would shatter, either under the strain of his paranoia or at the first mistake his "friends" would make. It would be unfair and unhappy. Hence why he needed time to digest everything he had - and most importantly, hadn't - been told. He would come back at some point. There was no need to know when exactly, as it did not create any undue expectation. He would come back, he was sure of it.

Menma rose to his feet and left the bedroom behind him. In a dreamlike state, he climbed down the stairs, passed by the kitchen and, finally, exited the Hokage Mansion. His mind scattered and in turmoil, the teen let his feet guide him throughout the village. Without seeing them, Menma passed by the little corner stores, the arachnid arcades of braided steel, the colourful neons, the hairlike vines cascading down the facade of the buildings, the large, venerated trees keeping vigil, the whispering canals of the Naka River. He passed by the people who thought he was in turn Minato Namikaze, Naruto Uzumaki, a ghost, a revenant, a hero, a pariah.

He walked out of the gate, answering a muttered "bye" to the guard's enthusiastic call to visit again. In front of him, the road was stretching in-between the trees of Fire Country's largest forest. Words echoed in his mind, amidst the storm that obnubilated his conscious will. Menma looked west. He had more people to meet, hidden somewhere in the dunes of sand of Wind Country.


AN: This chapter marks the end of the first part of "Lost Maelstrom". I have no idea when the second part will come. Stay tuned and leave a review.