It took so long to get this done because I had the toughest time pegging the personalities of the new generation. Wasn't until the other day that I actually made any headway. With any luck, this will be the longest wait between updates to this story.

Naruto was distracted from his questioning by how the streets were different. They passed entire stores and crossed streets that Naruto didn't remember being there. Several times he spotted people talking into those strange radios (which, he was so stealing Hokage's just to find out what made the thing so much better than the current radios) but the strangest part of it all?

Nobody gave him dark looks. Nobody even gave him so much as a dismissive glance. One person even waved and greeted him with a "Nice afternoon, Boruto!"

It was the weirdest thing. It was like everyone was happy to see him. Even the people that shook their heads had weird smiles on their faces, smiles he'd only ever seen directed at well-liked kids.

"Are you sure this isn't a genjutsu?" Naruto asked, squinting at the concerned looks he was getting.

"Huh?" Sakura glanced over, then rolled her eyes. "Only you, Naruto." She paused. "That's going to be weird, since you're both Naruto..."

"I'm calling older me Hokage," Naruto said, not missing how she didn't answer his question. "Now. Are you sure this isn't a genjutsu?"

"It isn't." Sakura patted him on the head. It was really weird. "This is your future."

Naruto glanced up at the stone carving of Kakashi-Sensei's face. "What kind of Hokage was Sensei even like?"

"Lazy," Sakura replied with a roll of the eyes. "He kept calling his appointment as keeping the hat warm while you – older you – took time off to date Hinata, marry her, have kids... you know. Normal person stuff."

Since when was he ever interested in normal person stuff? Since when was he even put in the same room as normal person stuff? What even was normal person stuff?

His endless questioning died out as they turned another corner, onto yet another street Naruto didn't recognize. "Is this really Konoha?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?" he asked. "Because I don't even know half the streets we've walked past, you know?" He blinked, eyes widening in excitement. "Does it have to do with that Fourth War that Hokage won't tell me about? Was Sasuke there for the war? Did we kick ass together?"

"I forgot how chatty you were at that age." Sakura laughed, and Naruto felt his excitement die a horrible, horrible death. That was not the kind of laugh that came before answers. "Oh, we're almost there."

Naruto felt cheated out of answers. Maybe he'd have better luck getting something out of Hinata. She was quiet and kinda weird, but the kind of person he liked.

That thought died out as soon as the academy came into view. He spotted a kid his own age that looked almost entirely like him, smiling as he talked to what looked like a tiny version of Hinata. Both of them stood by the actual Hinata.

She looked strange, a lot stranger than he remembered her being. It took a moment before he realized what it was that she looked like: a mother. She looked exactly like the mothers Naruto had always felt envious of.

Also she was staring at him with a confused frown. "Naruto?"

The mini-Naruto – his son, that was Naruto's son – glanced up, then made eye contact with Naruto. He glared. "Shitty old man, what the hell?"

It was strange, but Naruto was glad to find something that was familiar. He grinned big, because if he was this kid's dad, then he was going to make the most of it. "Is that any way to talk to your dad?"

Sakura thwacked him upside the head. Naruto was glad to see that the kid's hair puffed up in anger just like his did. The kid – actually, both kids, now that Naruto looked at them – had his cheek markings. That was... odd. He felt some sort of weird feeling in his chest, like that time he had the stomach flu, except this didn't feel quite like he was about to hurl his guts out. It felt more like... bigness. He liked it, but he didn't know why he liked it.

"Naruto activated a Seal and summoned his younger self," Sakura said, because she was mean and awful and lived to ruin Naruto's fun. Now he couldn't ground his kids or shower them with the parental affection that he'd never had. He wanted to dad them into the ground, dammit. "He should be calling up Shikamaru and the two of them can figure out how to undo this."

She gestured at the entirety of Naruto. He would have felt betrayed, but he wanted to gesture at everything around him.

"Huh?" the kid said, and Naruto knew the look in his eyes all too well. It was those eyes, those damn eyes. Why would Naruto's son have those eyes? The look disappeared, replaced by a sly grin that Naruto recognized as his own. "So you're my old man, huh?"

Naruto squinted, then grinned right back. "Yep! I'm Uzumaki Naruto!"

The kid stuck out his hand. "I'm Uzumaki Boruto! Let's be friends!"

Naruto didn't know what to think about either of his kids. He didn't know what to think about that, either. Never had he ever imagined a future where he had a family.

Boruto's reaction to him was familiar, something easy and simple for him to cling to in this strange new world. It was almost enough to forget that this was the future, that he was trying to get his own son to recognize him.

"So I painted the monument!" Naruto exclaimed, laughing. "They were so mad, even Iruka-Sensei came to yell at me!"

"You too, huh?" Boruto grumbled, crossing his arms and looking away. "I did that the other day, you know."

Naruto tilted his head. He didn't want to know the reason why Boruto did it, but he knew perfectly well why he himself had done it. "You give any of them nosebleeds? Write that they're pervs?"

Boruto snorted. He opened his mouth to say something, when his mom (it was easier to think of her as just being Boruto's mom, and not Hinata) bopped him on the head. She gave him a gentle smile as he rubbed the spot and glared. "Don't get ideas."

"Mo~m," Boruto whined, looking like a sad puppy. Naruto felt something he hadn't felt since graduation day from the academy: envy. He felt envious of his own son. Maybe it was just because Boruto looked so much like himself, but he wanted that. He wanted a mom who doted on him, wanted the fond way Boruto looked at his mom. He wanted.

But what he got was an empty apartment. What he got was cold glares from all the adults around him. What he got was distance and hardness and painful loneliness.

"Naruto?" He was snapped out of his thoughts by Boruto's mom turning her attention to him. "Is everything okay?"

Naruto laughed, sticking his hands behind his head. "Everything's fine! I'm just getting used to all this, you know."

"Hey!" Boruto cried, stopping and pointing at Naruto. "You do it too!"

Naruto tilted his head and squinted, his grin slipping away into a confused frown. "Huh?"

"You say 'you know' too!" Boruto declared, then bopped a fist into an open hand. "This is why he keeps laughing every time I say it, you know!"

Naruto stared at Boruto, before laughing. Boruto went red, but before he could go off his mom was bustling them all along, talking about how it was getting late and dinner still needed to be made.

Behind them, Himawari hid a smile behind her hand.

Naruto avoided dinner as best he could, sneaking a plate away into one of the side rooms and munching away. Boruto had glared at him, muttered something about how some things never changed, while his mom sighed and let him go.

The room he was currently in looked a lot like the Hokage's personal office, only the desk had some sort of weird thing on it. He thought it was a computer, only it couldn't be. Computers were these huge things that took up a whole room– whatever that tiny little thing sitting atop the desk was, it couldn't have been that.

Naruto finished his plate, and set it atop the desk for now. He wandered over to the bookshelf, looking for a scroll or something that had the history of the last twenty years in it. Sakura, and her daughter Sarada (a strange bespectacled girl who, after learning who Naruto was, tried to bombard him with all sorts of questions), had been less than eager to explain what that Fourth War was, or even where Sasuke was.

Unfortunately, Hokage's bookshelf was low on scrolls, instead having actual books in them, from long and complicated titles whose only words he understood were 'jutsu theory', to books on politics. He even saw several dictionaries, for crying out loud. Who even needed six dictionaries!

The door clicked open, and Naruto stepped away from the bookshelf with a yelp. The girl walked in, quietly shutting the door behind her "So you're papa?"

"Um." Naruto didn't know what to say to the girl.

"I know you aren't really him," she said. "You look like him from his old photos."

She opened the door again, and pointed at Naruto's old team photo, hanging on the wall. There were a lot of photos there, of Hinata's team, and of Hokage and Hinata together, and of the two with their kids at different points in Boruto and the girl's lives. Naruto squinted at the picture of the Yondaime, and spent half a second wondering why that was there before dismissing it. Maybe he just kept it as a reminder to be a more awesome Hokage than even the Yondaime.

"Uh," Naruto said. "What's your name?"

"Himawari," the girl replied, shutting the door again. She grinned. "Did you really call the other Hokage pervs when you painted the monument?"

Naruto grinned. "Painted it right across their faces."

"Even Grandpa Kakashi's?" Himawari asked, and Naruto felt his grin tighten.

"Kakashi-Sensei wasn't Hokage," Naruto said, because it was the truth. "There were only four faces when I painted them."

Himawari's eyes got wide, and Naruto saw that she had the Hyuga eyes. He wondered if she had the Byakugan like Hinata and Neji. He wondered if Boruto had the Byakugan. "I knew it!"

"Knew what?"

"Papa keeps saying that he isn't old, but he is," Himawari triumphantly said. "Grandpa Kakashi's so old he has to have been Hokage for forever."

Naruto, despite himself, found Himawari to be a likable person. Even if she did think Hokage was really, really old.

He grinned. "Is Granny Tsunade still looking young? Because she's a whole lot older than even Kakashi-Sensei!"

Himawari snorted into her hand, holding herself together as she laughed. "Lady Tsunade isn't old! She looks younger than Mama!"

"It's a lie," Naruto said matter-of-factly. "That diamond on her forehead keeps her looking young, but she's as old as Pervy Sage!" He grinned. "Man, he must look awful!"

"Who's Pervy Sage?" Himawari asked, squinting in confusion.

"You know, Pervy Sage." Naruto didn't know whether to be glad that Hokage hadn't introduced the man to his family, or feel another of those strange emotions Hokage's family kept making him feel. "Really big, white hair, Summons toads?"

"Oh!" Himawari exclaimed. "You mean Jiraiya?"

"Yeah!" Naruto nodded. "He's–"

"Dead," Himawari finished for him. Naruto's grin faltered. "He died when Papa was fifteen."

He... what?

Naruto kept up the grin, trying not to let it show. He was thirteen now, and if she was right, then that meant that he only had a little over two years left with the guy. "Oh?"

"Yeah." Himawari nodded, unaware of how broken inside Naruto felt. "One of his old students fought him and he died. Then the student came here and destroyed the village. Then Papa came, and fought the student, and talked the student into becoming good!"

Naruto nodded, ill at ease. He was liking this future less and less. "Why did the student kill him?"

"Because the student was a bad person!" Himawari said. "He was with bad people that wanted to take Papa!"

"Akatsuki?" Naruto asked, feeling detached from everything. Himawari blinked, lost.

"I dunno," she said. "Papa says they were bad people."

"Right." Naruto picked up the empty plate. "I should go put this away. Don't want your mom to get angry with me."

"Mama wouldn't do that," Himawari said. "Papa sometimes eats in here too."

"He does?" Naruto looked around, really looked around this time, and saw a beat up couch to one side, with what looked like a small army of throw pillows scattered across it, and a fuzzy blanket draped over the back. "Does he fall asleep here too?"

Himawari shrugged. "I dunno. Papa stays up past bedtime a lot."

"Right," Naruto said again. He really wasn't liking this future. Even if there were some pretty neat things about it. Maybe in the morning, he would find out some answers, and something to like.