I remember holding someone's hand. We were running across this really wide ocean.

I held out my other hand, and tried to form a Rasengan in my palm.

I focused my mind as hard as I could, and blue chakra spun around at the base of a forming sphere.

And then it disappeared. Before I could figure out why it did.

My legs stopped. I tried again, but it was harder this time.

I felt the girl that I had been with this whole time slip from my fingers. She ran on ahead, while I was trying to figure out why I was stuck in place.

I felt someone else pass me, then someone after that.

By the time I looked up, I was staring at the backs of everyone else, watching them disappear in the horizon.

The chakra in my hands was no longer the blue like the sky and ocean. It had turned green, and I couldn't find out how to make it go back. My defect as a shinobi.

Man…I hate having this dream.

…

…

A late Spring's Sun blazes down on the dirt path leading into the village.

The cicada chirps played on an infinite loop in the background, and I drowned them out by turning the fan up to max in my station at the village gate. Like most days, I'm wearing the standard blue-and-green uniform today. Unfortunately, long sleeves were the incorrect choice.

When it gets hot like this, guard duty drags on at half-speed. The line of merchants and ninja looking to get their rubber stamp out of the village is twice as long, and the rubber stampers work twice as slow.

It's not enjoyable for anyone involved in the process. No one likes it. It's the most boring part of any mission in existence, and it's not even really necessary. The only reason I'm here is because I won the lottery where they throw in all the names of mid-level guys like me and pick who has to work the gates for the day. And by win, I mean I lost.

"Yo. Next." I bury my cheek into an upright fist and mutter what I'm supposed to say. A foreign ninja, a fifty-or-sixty-something Prewar from Suna, walks up to my window.

"Name?"

"Ah, Baki."

He hands me his pass, the rank on it one of those irregular titles that goes above Jounin. Looks like he's some bigshot back in his home village.

"Reason?"

"Diplomatic Mission, B-Rank. All the mutual documentation is right here…" He hands me a bunch of papers written by the higher-ups of each of our villages. I skim through to make sure nothing looks forged, and then stamp his pass to leave. Apparently, his mission was something along the lines of bureaucratic work involving the upcoming Shinobi Exchange between villages.

When I go to hand everything back to him, I notice he's got a bit of a curious look on his face.

"Say, you…is that…"

…Hm?

Could he have…recognized who I am? I started bleaching my hair blond recently, so maybe…

"Behind you, she…"

Oh.

He tilted his head and looked past my shoulder, into the little wooden shack we have set up for approving people coming in and out of the village. Sitting behind me in perfect seiza-style is a kunoichi wearing a dark kosode and a violet hakama; and an unpainted, featureless, porcelain mask.

…I don't know how she's able to sit like that for so long without saying anything. It'd drive quite a few people I know nuts.

"Is she…Anbu?"

I guess it's normal enough for me, since I always have at least one following me around and everything. But if I consider it from someone else's point of view, it might be a little weird.

It was strange enough to see Anbu out in the open in this day and age. Seeing one in out-of-place old-school clothes (instead of the standard steel flak jacket and black pants) and a creepy-plain mask had to be even weirder.

"Ah, she's just here for extra security." I smiled. "Don't mind her. Next."

I usher him out of the village with a couple waves of my hand before he starts asking too many questions. Technically, I wasn't lying. She's here to guard something, it's just not this entrance to Konohagakure. That's my job. What she's here for is to guard me.

Not that that's really necessary either. These days there are a dozen scouts posted in every nearby town, 24/7 patrols combing through everything within a twenty kilometer radius of the village, day/night shifts for sensors and sentries, and the strongest ninja in the world on call for backup. And all the other villages are allied with us, anyway. It's boring, but there aren't too many places safer than the four gates leading into Konohagakure.

It wasn't always like this. Apparently, a few years before the war, a couple of S-Ranked missing-nin (some shark guy and some guy with red eyes according to the pictures in the history books) managed to get inside Konoha by walking through the front door. They didn't get what they were looking for, so a few years later their boss came instead and blew up the whole village. It was a big deal.

I wonder what that's like, having S-ranked missing-nin running around. It's rare these days, but when it does happen; missing-nin tend to escape, get caught, get talked down to by some old guy with stories, and sent back home all in about the course of a day. Escaping long enough to join some mysterious organization is pretty hard these days. And it'd really hurt your chances to get promoted, so most people don't really think about it.

S-ranked shinobi are pretty rare by themselves these days. Most of them are old dudes from the War and Prewar generations. Young shinobi, Nii-san and his overpowered Team Shinachiku notwithstanding, tend to be considered rather weak by comparison. Which makes sense. Most of us, myself included, have never really been tested in life. Real-life fights with Shinobi from other villages are pretty unheard of nowadays. Killing someone in self-defense and assassinations are even rarer.

The intent to kill and the necessity to make yourself strong enough to resist being on the receiving end of it are both dead arts for us in the Postwar Generation. And as a result, we get talked down to every now and again about how "back in my day…" things were somethingsomethingsomething.

According to what I've been told about our village's history, Dad probably would have get pissed off and made it a personal mission of his to prove everyone else wrong if this were happening when he was my age. But, it's true that we're weaker, and it's true that it's because we haven't faced hardship like they did in their days. We'd all be a lot stronger if things were still a bit like the Sengoku Jidai and we were constantly fighting and competing with each other with our lives and self-worth at stake.

Would it be worth it if we did fight each other, all for the sake of getting stronger? I dunno, don't ask me, at least not if you're expecting a debate that'll change no one's mind. That's one of those political questions that everyone already has their own answer for. I avoid those—at least when it comes to talking about them out loud.

Personally, I don't think life's that bad, even without the chance to prove yourself and be a hero. What does it feel like to watch someone hold a kunai to a twelve-year-old shinobi's throat, threatening to kill them if you don't do what they want? What does it feel like to tell their parents if you can't save them? Well, that's probably the sort of thing that you can't understand until you have a family and children of your own. Us teenagers these days don't worry about much more than asking the girl they like out or putting up with their unfair parents. A world where you have to worry about being a good enough child soldier—or where your friends have to die just so it seems like there's more drama and meaning in your life—seems like a pretty stupid thing to wish for in my opinion.

So, I just stay quiet when the old guys talk about their stories. Think I'm the only person in my family who knows how to do that.

Of course, the whole Postwar Generation isn't just like me. Young people generally don't like being talked down to day-in and day-out, and tend to react with various levels of annoyance. Most of us just shrug it off, with a typical 'can't be helped' kind of attitude. Some of us get mouthy back and tend to hold up classes and mission debriefings by getting into arguments with our teachers and superiors. And every now and again you get the take-charge types that resent the modern society that let them become soft and start wishing for the return to militarism and war for the sake of bettering themselves, vowing to change the world.

The last type tends to also be the type that runs away from home, get caught, get a lengthy lecture, and then spend the night in the bath getting the dirt out of their hair before reading an action manga and falling asleep in the same bed they fell asleep in the last night. 'Missing-Nin' is the word for them if you want to conflate them with the criminal Shinobi of old that faced interrogation and subsequent execution if they were captured, before it became acceptable to break the rules and then get away with it with no real consequences. 'Chuunibyou' is what we Postwars like to call them.

If you're wondering why I'm bringing all of this up, ranting about kids wanting to run away from home and everything, well, it's because I'm looking at one right now—

—A heap of clothes thrown on top of each other is looking up at me. They're wearing a black cloak with red clouds over a hooded sea-green coat that's already covering them head to toe, sunglasses over a swirling plastic orange mask—a knockoff replica of something that some evil guy from the War Era wore—and a piece of paper taped over the leaf on their forehead protector with the word 'secret' scribbled on it.

…All right, I might as well play along.

"Name?" I ask. I'm not that tall for a guy, but I have to look down at where her eyes should be.

"My name is…anoooo…" she looks up at the sky and thinks. She must not have planned on getting this far.

Let's just skip this one for now.

"Reason?" I ask instead.

She perks up, and answers right away:

"Top-secret assassination mission! Rank, SS!"

"SS-Rank missions don't exist." I correct her.

"Oh." She looks off to the side. I can see her plain disappointment even with her face covered up. "Just regular S then."

"Alright then. S-rank. Top Secret. Assassination." I repeat every word loud enough for the people behind her in line to hear. "And your name is…?"

"I am…um…" she looks around, trying to think something up.

Suddenly, her eyes stopped and she pointed at a nearby building. "That!"

"That…?" I followed her hand to see her pointing at a vertical sign on a restaurant with two bold-printed Kanji next to the door.

…Normally when someone is looking around to find inspiration for a fake name, they don't point at what they're trying to use and ask whoever's being lied to for it to be read it to them.

"Kin'En?" I read the sign she's pointing at.

She nodded her head vigorously. "Yeah, yeah, Kin'En. The great and mysterious Kin'En!"

"That is a no-smoking sign. That is not a name."

"Really…?" She tilts her head in disappointment. The thick strokes on the fake-calligraphy must've made her feel confident.

She put her hand to her mask and thinks. Here it comes, her trusted Plan B…

"Wait!" She shouts. She spins in place, and presses her sunglasses up against her mask. "That was merely a secret identity to cover up my real identity!"

She thrusts her arm out forward in dramatic fashion, and says it:

"I am…Hatake Kakashi!"

Her arm hits my wicket's countertop, not reaching the window. Hatake Kakashi has certainly gotten shorter.

"…Of course, Kakashi-san. Please, leave right away on your top-secret mission." I play along and reply after a pause.

"Really?! Yayyy!" Our would-be Kakashi prances off like the happy fifteen-year-old girl she is, waving around the dangling sleeves of the fake Akatsuki cloak that's too long for her arms. She's only a year younger than me, but sometimes she acts like we're still little kids.

…I'm thinking this this as she comes right back five seconds later.

"Oh, um." She puts a finger to where the mouth would be, on her replica Uchiha Obito mask. "Do you have any strawberry milk?"

"Of course, Kakashi-san. Here you go." I hand her a filled glass bottle with an attached straw from under the counter. Obviously this isn't the norm, but I already figured she was going to do something like this when I started today, so I prepared ahead of time.

"Yayyyy!" She shouts again and runs off, some of her loose bugs following in her trail.

I wait until she turns around the corner, and then I pick up the cable phone.

"Hey, guys? Shino-chan escaped from the village again…no, not the dad, the daughter. Aburame Shinoko. She's wearing about three layers of clothes, so she might get Heat Exhaustion in this weather if she runs for too long…well yeah, she's stronger than me, but she's not that strong. She won't fight you."

The Jounin on the other line says thanks and I hang up. About ten seconds later, I hear a screech of defeat from a girl on the other side of the wall.

Sorry, ex-teammate. I think I just betrayed you.

"Next!" I shout. The day's not getting any shorter. I'll talk to her about her escaping habits later.

A fat merchant with a round nose and smile comes up to the window. I ask for his name, he gives it to me. I ask for his reason, he says trade.

He asks me to sign my name on some papers verifying that he paid the village taxes and lawfully abided by our rules. I sigh, and get out a pen.

Most of Konoha's shinobi have names written in kana. Legally, my first name's written in katakana and my last name's written in hiragana on my birth certificate, but I like to sign it in a kanji variant when I can. It's a little more inconspicuous in my case.

Let's see, I'll drop the 'ki' okurigana from 'whirlpool', use the character for 'port' to replace my given name, and…

渦
巻
港

He squints and looks at my signature. It's unusual for a name, since it doesn't have any nanori readings, but it looks like he can still read it. "U—zu…ma—ki…minato? Ah, Uzumaki Minato? Like the Sixth and Fourth Hokages, right?"

"Ahaha…" I laugh and nervously rub the back of my neck. "Not really."

A/N: Hey there. Chapter's over, so you can go ahead and skip this commentary part.

Basic AU's that Naruto and Sakura hooked up instead of the canon stuff. I don't remember the War Arc or anything else after the Pain Arc very well, so it's all in an 'only kind of happened' state for me and this story, along with all that anime-only stuff and movie stuff that I never watched. You can yell at me about this in that white box below if you want.

I know bits and pieces about Boruto from Youtube videos and other secondhand knowledge, but I've never watched the show or read the manga, so no spoilers from me on that front. Anything in this fic that's similar to stuff in the post-698 canon is either pure coincidence or something subconscious from the bits and pieces that I know about it.

There'll be a some background Narusaku in this fic, but it'll be more about their kids and their kids' friends. There're a lot of writers better than me that have written about how they could have gotten together, so I'll let you guys fill in that blank for yourself.

I am usually very, very slow to update, so be ready for that if you want to follow this fic.

Reviews appreciated, but don't feel obligated. It's more than enough for me if you're simply willing to read.

I don't own Naruto.

GL;HF