As always, thanks to everyone who left reviews, I loved reading 'em! And thanks to everyone who's still reading 3

Boruto staggered to a halt as he stood before the falling gates of the Hidden Time. He breathed in, faced eastward, and breathed out. The very beginnings of sunrise were poking out on the horizon, a slow and steady wash of orange just barely cresting the black silhouettes of the world. He felt strange. There was all of this power built up inside him with nowhere to go, a power so much greater than what he was used to and just itching to be used but, despite all of that energy, his physical body was begging for rest. He wondered if he could sleep, even now, even with everything that had happened in just one night.

Shoving all his uncertainties into the darkest corner of his mind, Boruto stepped through the gates and made straight for the World Temple.

The Hidden Time was located just beyond the dense forest encircling Konoha, through the furthest reaches of brush right where mountains and rivers cropped up on the edges of Fire Country. On his journey there, Boruto found more than one cave structure while hiking along a cliffside and made a mental note of them for later. If he couldn't figure out a way back to his own time—or a way to break the jutsu, if it was all a farce—then those would be half-decent areas to camp out at. If nothing else, caves provided shelter and dark clouds were looming to the south.

The ruins were still… well, ruined , but now that he knew what to look for, Boruto could see that the landscape was undoubtedly different than it was the day before when he arrived with his team. In the future, there were tents set up, rest points for the excavators and archivists, even a camping ground. Excavations like those could take weeks or even months , or at least that's what Konohamaru had gone on about during their travels. The excavators would stay there, away from their families for who knows how long, until every bit of history had been uncovered. Personally, Boruto didn't see the appeal.

After the excavators were done with the artifacts, the archivists would step in. A big part of their job was to analyze, record and report the teams findings, hence their job title, but just as important was the handling of the artifacts themselves. He heard through his shadow clone what that one lady had said about curses and seals—the one who was talking to Sarada and the others—and how they would have to be removed before they could really look into whatever it was they found. Thinking about that now was a bit of a kick to the knee, a clear warning against picking up unchecked artifacts. He wished that lecture hadn't been going on as he was picking up the scroll .

Lastly, an archivist's duty was to recover artifacts to their former quality. Maybe that wasn't always possible, but they did their best to assure everything was as well-kept as it could be, and no information was missing. If it was, they did what they could to get it back.

Boruto frowned, kicking a rock into the side of one of the smaller residential buildings around the temple.

"Now what?" he asked, waiting for an answer.

Nothing. Not a damn thing. The thing inside him had been perfectly silent ever since absorbing Kakashi's chakra. It seemed pretty pleased with itself, which annoyed Boruto to no end. It used him like a puppet. He didn't take kindly to being used.

He took a seat on the front steps of the World Temple and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, just thinking. Going back down to the level where he grabbed the scroll was a start. The scroll, at that point in time, should have been untouched. Of course, that meant that a past copy of that thing that latched onto him would be there, too… so he couldn't touch the scroll. Couldn't use the scroll.

He groaned with all of the remorse of a defeated man.

Boruto had very little experience dealing with crises on his own. Konoha, in his time, was a pretty cool place. It was safe and there hadn't been a war since, well—since his dad was young. Though, in this time, maybe that war hadn't happened yet. In this time, that war was imminent . There was a chilling thought, but one that he could safely ignore if only for the fact that it wasn't his problem . Hell, he wouldn't even be born for a long time to come. It wasn't his place. So he boxed up any looming concerns of fire and brimstone and focused on the problem at hand.

Boruto had a strong support system back home, even if his dad was rarely suited to hold the title of 'supportive'. He had his mom and sister, and aunt and grandpa that meant the world to him. At school, he was surrounded by friends, people who could help him if something too big to deal with himself was standing in his way, people who he could help in turn . Sometimes things were repetitive, a bit boring, but at the end of the day the Konoha he knew was a warm and vibrant place and if he went to anyone with as messed of an issue as what he had on his plate now, they would step up to bat and give him the help he needed. Boruto was sure of that.

For the first time, Boruto had nowhere to turn. He had to find his answers on his own, with no one there to back him up. No Sarada to tell him that his plan was a bad idea. No Mitsuki to bail him out when that plan turned south. No Konohamaru to show him where everything went wrong.

But what did that matter, when there wasn't even a plan to start?

With a groan, he hung his head and closed his eyes. Well, he was here. This was where everything started. There were no chakra signals in the area, no presence in the trees or mountains or even the big pile of dust that now made up the Hidden Time. He was all alone.

He let out a strangled noise of frustration and denial and scratched through his hair.

"Aw, damn it! When did I get so sentimental?!"

He was starting to feel like his old man. That was never good.

Boruto jumped to his feet and turned sharply to face the towering temple doors. Being all mopey wasn't his thing. That moment was over, and now he needed to get this show on the road. He marched in, mirroring the path he and his team took down into the catacombs below, his hand gliding along the stonework wall. It wasn't long before a spark of chakra buzzed at his hand, his fingers sliding through the skillfully crafted illusion of a wall, and he made to turn. He didn't. A thought nagged at the back of his head, pulling his face into a frown.

No. What good would it do, going to a scroll that he couldn't touch? He didn't know the first thing about breaking seals or curses, and he couldn't imagine trying with no mentor, no instructional scrolls and no second chances to be a wise plan.

A thought prickled at the back of his mind.

"Everything you see here has been extracted, but either hasn't been looked at yet or hasn't had any cursed seals removed."

"This one is safe, then?"

"In fact, it's the only item that's been checked so far that doesn't have any protective seals on it."

Oh. Oh, no, there is something that he can do.

Boruto never thought that the imprint jutsu his clone mocked right before he fell backwards in time would be the one thing that had the potential to get him backup.

His first roadblock, then, was figuring out where that damn scroll had been extracted from. Recalling the shared memories of his clone, Boruto followed the path his team had into the expansive room of tarps and collected artifacts several levels below. Except, of course, the room was empty in this time. The air was stagnant. It was before, too, but now even more so. He wondered how many hundreds of years it had been since the people of Time abandoned their village, how long ago a human last set foot down there.

The wondering ceased, because he realized that he didn't care all that much. Relics of the past mattered little to him, who was stuck in it.

"Shadow Clone Jutsu," he called out, his voice echoing in the dark expanse of the cavern, and he wished that he'd thought to bring a light.

A clone appeared through a puff of smoke and grinned at him. Then another, and another.

Four Borutos stood in a circle surrounding the original, and he nodded his approval. Something seemed different about them, though. Something more solid, more real, more tangible than usual.

As much as everyone around him liked to go on about how little effort he put into his training, lately there was a fire lit beneath him where the shadow clone jutsu came into play. He was tired of seeing his father's, seeing them walking around town, watching them poof away the moment they ended a conversation. And he was tired of being compared to him, to the Seventh Hokage who could create a thousand to his mere four. For the longest time, Boruto was content with those four. They did what they needed to do even if they could only stay within eyesight, and in spars at the academy they were a vital asset in his arsenal. But now he was a genin. Now he was starting to take short, easy missions out of town. Now the stakes were rising, slowly but surely, and the pressure from the world and for his team was starting to crush him. Even if it wasn't meant to. Even if they didn't realize.

After the stunt he pulled yesterday, he supposed they would be well acquainted with the fact that he could now hold a clone a good distance from himself, well out of eyesight. There was a limit to how far his clone could get still; he wasn't crazy skilled the way that his dad was. Yet. He also only had enough control over his chakra to get one clone to go such a distance; the last time he tried it with two, they both poofed away in a billow of smoke and shame.

But, well. If there was any circumstance that called for expedited growth, this was it.

His eyes shifted momentarily to the light coming from his arms. Glowing markings back in sight. It figured. He glared dully at them and remembered then that his own chakra had been devoured, replaced by that thing's chakra, and wondered how much of a difference that would make, if any at all. What did it mean?

At the very least, that thing had a hell of a lot more reserves than he did, all nice and filled up with stolen chakra that doused him in more guilt.

He sighed and straightened.

"Alright!" he exclaimed with some faint tone of authority, his hands on his hips. "We don't know where the scroll was excavated from, so we're going to have to split up."

"We're just gonna vanish the moment you take your eyes off us," the first sighed, throwing his hands behind his head, watching the original with some faint show of boredom.

"Even if we find it," the second countered, kicking at the rubble, "it won't make a difference. How the hell are we supposed to understand what's written? They wrote in a different language , smartass."

Boruto narrowed his eyes. Why was it always like this? He bet that Dad never had to deal with in-fighting amongst his own damn clones . Knowing that might have tugged at his own inferiority, but he brushed it aside. "Don't give me that!" They had a point, though, and he knew it. They were his thoughts. He knew them well . "Look—"

"What's the harm in trying?" the third interrupted, hands shoved into his pockets as he leaned back against the wall. "If we disappear, it'll just slow us down a bit. Not like we have anywhere to be. Bickering like this is wasting time, too. Let's just do it."

The first made to open his mouth but the fourth beat him to it. "Come on. We're Boruto Uzumaki. We can do anything , got it? And we're not about to give up before we try."

Boruto's eyes widened. That may have been the first time his own clones stood up for him, and he may have been feeling a touch sentimental, and that was stupid because they were clones but he'd spent the last twenty hours with no one to rely on but himself so—

It was nice to know that he had his own back, if no one else did.

"You guys…"

The second clone made a choking noise. "Gross. Aren't you too old for waterworks? Jeez."

"Shut up," he spat, scrubbing at his eyes with his sleeve. "The air's dusty. I got sand in my eye—shut up."

The first clone rolled his eyes and sighed, twisting around to look down one of the multiple caverns. "In any case," he started, the mildest of the clones, lacking the familiar bite of the rest of Boruto's insecurities, "if we're doing this, let's get it over with. We're going to need light. Three?"

Three grinned. "On it." He ran up the stairs.

The rest waited with bated breath, the original following his mental link as the clone went all the way back to the surface without disappearing. Oh thank the Sage that worked, because if it hadn't he was going to be so many levels of frustrated.

There was a stretch of time as they waited for Three's return where the rest just hung around. There was at least some light filtering in through the cracks in the ceiling in that room, but the halls beyond were pitch black. Without a light source, they wouldn't be getting very far. Boruto didn't know any jutsu that could provide light and even if he did, he wasn't confident in having his clones try to use anything. This whole experiment, allowing four clones out of sight, was risky enough as it was without them pulling even more chakra from him for that crap.

Three returned with a few makeshift torches. At the very least, he was glad they taught basic survival in the academy; firemaking wasn't so hard with a little practice.

The search took a while, but not as long as it could have if he were working on his own. Which he was , technically speaking, but the clones definitely expedited the process. There were five main halls leading from that room and each had their own branching paths to follow. He wasn't sure how long it was before Four stopped before what could only be described as a room of sealing where several texts were kept and, among them, a scroll tied closed with a red thread. He recognised it, the same thread with a golden clip that sealed the scroll shut, the same one that was handed to Sarada for safekeeping.

Four grinned. "Found you."

He disappeared into smoke along with the rest, and Boruto doubled back around to find the room for himself.

Boruto wasted no time in snatching the scroll out of the relief in the wall, knowing that it shouldn't have had a curse or seal protecting it. He realized his mistake when an inky-black mist lifted off the paper and dispersed into the air, his eyes wide and panicked as he tossed the scroll at the wall. It bounded off and rolled along the stone by his feet.

With a small yelp of surprise, Boruto patted himself down, threw off his jacket and lifted up his shirt in horrified search of any new markings across his skin, thankful to find nothing but the ones already on his arm.

On his arm.

They were back again. They were there, glowing the whole time that his clones were activated, and left the moment they did. Boruto wasn't stupid; even he could see the pattern of how those markings made themselves visible whenever he used his chakra, and whenever the thing inside him made its move in the outside world. He put that together fairly quickly. And they were there again, the short-lived glow flickering out into ordinary black ink. He wasn't using his chakra, though, which meant…

I ate it .

Boruto swallowed, looking between his hand and the scroll. There was a round, seal-like marking on his palm, its rings coiling around one another, and it seemed to stare back at him.

This was just the paranoia talking. He hoped.

"There," he tried, momentarily losing his voice, "there was a seal, wasn't there?"

I ate it.

"A curse?"

It is gone.

Well, he thought with impressive levels of false optimism, that's one mystery solved.

"Um," he said, stupidly. "Thank… you?"

The seal on his hand swirled and shrunk, and while all of the other markings faded away it remained, little more than a small black dot at the centre of his palm.

With a hesitance not usually seen in the son of the Seventh Hokage, Boruto gingerly picked the scroll up between his thumb and forefinger, dropped cross-legged on the stone and unclasped the thread holding the scroll closed. It opened to a yellowing but surprisingly well-kept paper with foreign black characters drawn across it. Those damn pictograms again. Boruto sighed, about to mark the mission as a 'failure' when he looked a little closer.

"Imprint… jutsu," he read, licking his lips. His eyes shifted across the page right to left, scrolling each line with frightening understanding as his jaw went slack. "You—"

He looked at his arm, but the markings hadn't returned. There was a moment where he warred between scared and excited, unsure of just how he was supposed to react.

"You're doing this, aren't you?" he asked, turning his hand over to stare at the dot of black ink. It didn't answer, so he tried again. "You ate the curse, and now you're helping me read this. I'm right. Don't tell me that I'm not."

I won't .

Boruto blinked, his shoulders slumped, and he could feel a faint tug at the corner of his mouth as he fought back an unneeded smile. Ultimately, he didn't know what or how to feel about this whole thing. The beast—he had taken to call it a chakra beast, because for all that it ate chakra, it also seemed to be made of chakra—had forced its way inside him and leeched off his energy like a parasite, used him to feed off of Dad and Kakashi like a damn vampire —

And now there it was, eating curses and translating a foreign language all in his head.

"Okay," he nodded, "alright, now we're getting somewhere!"

Diving headlong into the scroll's instructions, Boruto muttered the words beneath his breath, his hands moving in lazy, half-formed signs as he worked through the jutsu, and practiced.

This was the first time something had gone right since he first landed here.

"Curses use chakra, right?" Boruto asked absently as he made his way through the fake wall, down a path he felt that he was starting to know a little too intimately. "Even when they're sealed. Is that how you ate it?"

Yes.

He offered up an acknowledging hum as he waded through the water and hopped off one path and down onto another, effortlessly avoiding the traps left behind that were starting to feel a bit stale. The chakra beast had been strangely responsive, and it was thankfully keeping its interests to itself and allowing Boruto to do what he needed to do. Like that, having that thing within him wasn't… well, wasn't the worst thing in the world, even if he still hoped that they could extract it from him if he ever returned to his time.

There was a grim thought—never returning home. It was a good thing that Boruto had gotten so good at suppressing his insecurities.

He came up to an open door with a pedestal centered in the room beyond, but before he entered he looked around at the pictures on the wall. Now that he could read them, maybe he should offer them more than just a quick glance. There was indeed a riddle, as he expected—something about the answer he sought buried in the depth of true fear. He wasn't so sure about that; the switch was in another room, in the mouth of a fox statue. Foxes weren't all that bad. Pests, mainly. The people of Time were so melodramatic.

When he stepped in he saw more writing on the far wall, along the ceiling.

"Time is an ever-flowing current," it read, also very dramatically. "Learn from the mistakes of our great nation and move forward. Never look back."

Boruto pulled a face, rubbing the back of his neck. "What if I can't help it?" he muttered, feeling somewhat insulted that a bunch of foreign pictograms thought they could give him a lecture. "It's your fault I'm here, y'know."

That time the chakra beast kept its thoughts to itself.

That was enough of a distraction. Boruto walked into the centre of the room and hovered over the pedestal, brows furrowed as he stared hard at the damn scroll responsible for this whole mess. He felt the beast within him stir and his stomach turned, a wave of nausea overtaking him that was hard to ignore.

"Guess this is your home," he muttered, keeping the unpleasant weight of his stomach from distorting his features. "I take it you don't miss it."

After thinking about it, Boruto determined that if he was going to leave an imprint anywhere, it had to be here. This was where they would look for him. This was where he disappeared. As much as he wanted to leave it in Konoha where people would have easy access to it, he knew that line of logic was all kinds of stupid. It likely would have been found many years before he needed it to be found, before anyone who cared enough to try to get him back would ever get the chance. Then there was the knowledge that between this time and his own, Konoha was destroyed at least once. The imprint seal could very likely be destroyed too. And who was the current Hokage? It certainly wasn't Dad. Grandpa Third, right? So leaving it in the Hokage office—not that he'd even be able to get in there , with him being an unknown—would only screw up the past more when Grandpa Third inevitably found it. He couldn't leave it at home; his home wasn't his yet. The academy—

There were so, so many reasons not to leave it in the academy.

Above all, he attacked both Dad and Kakashi. He didn't mean to… but that didn't matter, did it? As far as they would be concerned, he would be labelled an enemy to Konoha and a danger to its people. There were no two ways around it.

At the end of the day, this was his first option. He had faith that Sarada, at least, would notice a strange seal left in the room her teammate vanished from. She was… good at that sort of thing.

With nothing to write with, Boruto crouched down and bit his thumb. A pinprick of blood oozed from the wound, and he used that to trace out the seal depicted in the scroll on the side of the pedestal. It was crude, but recognizable enough, and he stepped back to give himself some room, and took a breath.

He formed the first hand sign, his eyes facing forward. "Hey," he called. He knew full-well that he was using the beast's chakra now, that he didn't have much other choice without his own. "I'm going to be using more energy. Don't start throwing fits if you get hungry, got it?"

There was no answer, but he didn't need one. Boruto motioned through the hand signs before settling on the ram and immediately a seal of light formed circles at his feet. That was the start, then. It was recording. At least, he thought it was.

"Is this—" His confidence faltered as he eyed the corner of the fresh seal that he could make out from where he stood. "Is this even working?"

The seal called for his right hand to remain still, but not his left. He unfolded his left and rubbed the back of his neck, perhaps a little too telling of his insecurities, then brought it down to stare at the dot of ink on his palm. "You'd better not be pulling anything, y'hear?"

"Here goes." He clenched his fist and faced forward, imagining his squad standing right there in front of him. "My name is Boruto Uzumaki. I'm a genin from Konoha, from the time of the Seventh Hokage." He bit his lip. "I'm not… really sure who's going to find this, so I thought I should get that out of the way first."

Boruto said his piece, reciting his situation to the best of his abilities. He explained it all—all except the chakra beast because, in all honesty, he wasn't sure how much he knew about that thing, and right now his biggest concern was getting home.

Before he closed it off, he recalled the caves he'd come across on his journey there. He could wait out there for anyone to find that message, he supposed. At the very least, he'd be away from any major chakra sources, out of the rain and away from any major events where he could cause a big change to the future.

Well, it was probably too late for that.

"I think I found a good place to ride this out. There's a cave past the trees." He felt his hand twitched; he wasn't used to holding signs for so long. "The coordinates… are…"

Boruto's voice failed him, his hand falling to his side when he saw a lazy grey eye staring back at him from the entranceway.

Kakashi leaned against the wall of the door, his arms folded across his chest, and he looked so completely, utterly tired .

Boruto stilled, his mouth gaping open, trying to form words that just weren't there. He hadn't even felt the man's presence, with how depleted Kakashi's chakra was and how absorbed he was in the message that he was leaving. A swell of relief filled his chest knowing that the Sixth was still okay, but it was quashed by the overwhelming worry of what did he hear?

Kakashi's eye crinkled into a smile, perhaps none too genuine, as he lifted a hand to wave at the blond. "Hey," he greeted casually. "After the night I've had, I could use some fun, and you seem to be having a lot of it. Let's chat."

Boruto stepped back and the recording seal at his feet broke. He cursed under his breath, dreading the fact that his message was left incomplete. He could try a second time, were it not for the Copy-nin looming ominously across the room, but decided that what he said was good enough.

With Kakashi there now, who's to say whether those coordinates would be accurate?

"Old man," he whispered and hated himself for it, his throat dry and hoarse. "I—what did you hear?"

Kakashi pushed off the wall, still smiling behind that mask, a smile that Boruto knew better than to trust. After all, this was the man that was to be the Sixth Hokage. This was the man who headed the village back when Boruto was just a boy. Boruto knew the man well—he was not happy.

Well. Of course he wasn't happy. Boruto wouldn't have been happy in his position, either.

"Now, now," Kakashi eased and closed the gap between them. "No need to get upset. I just want to have a little talk with you, Boruto Uzumaki."

Oh. Oh no, oh no he heard it .

His eyes darted frantically around the room and he pressed his back to the wall, scrabbling his hands along the stone in search of another secret passage that could save him from this man's interrogation. There was nothing, at least nothing immediately obvious, and he balled his fist and slammed it back into the stone with a low growl of frustration.

He regretted it. Now his hand hurt.

Kakashi stopped at the pedestal, a hand in his pocket, and the smile fell. "That's quite the name you're carrying. I'm inclined to ask where you picked it up—"

" It's mine ," he shot back, because his name was the one thing he wouldn't part with. He didn't give a damn what it would change. "I didn't steal it, I—"

Kakashi held up a hand in pause and Boruto swallowed his words. " But ," the jōnin continued, "I'm starting to paint a pretty good picture on my own. What you said in that message, how much of it was true?"

Boruto swallowed back his worries and grinned. He shoved down any thoughts that he should confess and hoped that a little more deception could keep him from screwing up the whole timeline, if he hadn't already. "What, that?" he asked with an easy tone, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I was just practicing my jutsu. Just saying whatever, y'know? To see how well it records."

"Of course." There was no belief in his voice but his smile was back as he bent down, his hand hovering over the still-drying blood seal. "So you wouldn't mind if I broke the seal and watched it over, then?"

"Don't—" He lurched forward, wide-eyed with his hand outstretched, and he hated himself for how helpless it sounded. Kakashi's hand stopped just before the seal and he bit his lip and averted his eyes. He'd walked right into that.

"I thought as much."

Kakashi sighed, hefting himself back up. Boruto thought he saw Kakashi sway, but maybe he imagined it.

"You're going to be taking a trip back to Konoha with me," the jōnin stated, offering his hand. "We'll chat there."

Boruto stared wide-eyed at the offered hand, and in his mind there was forest and darkness and a prone body lifeless on the grass. He remembered what got him there. "I can't," he stated definitively, shaking his head. "You saw what I did, Old Man Kakashi. I can't." He pressed his lips together, his head hanging forward, and he stared at his feet. "There's… something inside me," he tried, unsure how else to phrase it. "It eats chakra. If I get too close to people, it takes control of my arm and drains them dry. You saw."

The echo of footsteps reverberated against the walls and Boruto looked up, his eyes wide, the jōnin standing just two feet ahead of him with a cool gaze.

"Well?" Kakashi prompted. "I'm waiting."

"I—" He ran a hand through his hair, searching his mind for remnants of the chakra beast. It was there, but content. "It's…" There was no urge, no rush to dive in and leech away the last of Kakashi's chakra reserves, and he let out a broken, disbelieving chuckle. "It's not hungry."

"There, see? It—"

Boruto broke out into a wry grin and launched himself forward, wrapping his arms around the jōnin in a fit of slightly manic laughter. "It's not hungry!"

Kakashi cringed, stumbling back from the boy's weight and his own failing stamina, and stood there with his arms awkwardly hovering over the child. "That's… good," he tried, but it lacked his former cool indifference.

Boruto pushed himself off the Kage-to-be with a grin, putting some distance between them. It was pretty clear that this Kakashi wasn't all too fond of invasions of his personal space. Boruto could respect that, if only because he was too elated to care. "I just have to keep it fed. Somehow. And—and then, if I do that, maybe it won't—you know. Thanks, Old Man!"

"...Right." Kakashi cleared his throat and recomposed. "That's all well and good, but as it stands I still have to return with you. Understand?"

His smile faded and he looked away, "But…" He still needed to figure out how to amass chakra in order to feed the thing. Before he did that, how could he return to the village, a place surrounded by morsels of human chakra? It seemed… a bit stupid, really.

"Relax," Kakashi said smoothly.

Boruto took a deep breath and looked back up, and—

He paled, seeing a familiar mess of blond hair poking through the doorway. Naruto was leaning into the room, eyes narrowed, and the moment he saw that Boruto was looking, he placed a finger over his lips.

Kakashi didn't seem to notice. With how drained he was, maybe he was too tired. Too distracted. That seemed to be just what Naruto wanted, because he slipped quietly into the room.

It came as a shock that this version of Naruto could be any sort of quiet .

"I'm well aware that there's more going on here than you stealing people's chakra," Kakashi continued. "I'm not blaming you. But that doesn't matter right now. My first priority is getting you to the Hokage."

"...Right," he answered absently, his eyes locked on the awkward sneaking that his father was doing in the background. It looked so… clumsy.

Naruto's grin did little to reassure him.

"Once there, we can—"

Naruto lunged at Kakashi, wrapping around him like a monkey, one hand covering his visible eye. Caught off-guard and already weakened, Kakashi stumbled back, leaning to try to keep balance.

Boruto was so confused. So confused , but there Dad was, grinning ear-to-ear like an idiot—

"Do it!"

Do what?!

Boruto flailed internally for a bit before raising his hand to his forehead, making a sign and—

This was his first time using the paralysis jutsu outside of training. Kakashi went down, his body stiff and immobile as through restrained with ropes, and Naruto leapt triumphantly into the air.

"Alright!" Dad cheered and instantly ran over to Boruto, grabbed hold of his hand, and pulled him from the room. Before he was given any time to think, he was being dragged through the passages, up the stairs and out of the temple, his dad giddy and laughing like they were having the time of their lives.

Boruto gawked openly at his father's back with owlish eyes, at a loss for words. He didn't know why they were running; he just listened to his dad, which probably wasn't the smartest thing to do because his dad was currently the same age as him, living in a cramped apartment, eating junk food all day.

"Naruto?" he called, looking back. The temple was shrinking behind them. "Where are we going?"

"Away from Kakashi-sensei! Duh!"

Boruto's mouth twitched. "I—I get that , but—"

"We gotta hurry!" Naruto exclaimed, his smile fading as he looked left then right, then ducked further into the brush. "Kakashi-sensei won't stay down for long. Crap, crap! Which way—"

Boruto watched his father's flailing. It was weird, seeing him like that, all panicked and flustered. He shot forward, dragging his father along as he recreated the path to the caves in his head. "I know just the place!"

Naruto never questioned it, grinning, allowing himself to be pulled.

"Kakashi's a tracking ninja, right?" Boruto asked, mulling that over in his head. He bit his lip. Those nin-dogs of his would be a problem… "We'll detour towards the river—lose our scent there, y'know?"

"Got it!" Naruto laughed, no questions asked.

Boruto may have not known why they were running, but he was starting to realize that he didn't care.

Adieu~