Chapter 9: Hokage for a Day part 3

Seeing the empty space in front of his father in the frame made Boruto wonder if he was truly misguided. No, he knew he wasn't. Just the pose in the photo proved it. Naruto looked like he had his hand around something because Boruto knew his father's hand was around his shoulder in this photo. They had the same one at home.

Home. Of course. He did exist. There was undeniable proof at his house.

"Shikamaru, come with me and I'll prove it." Boruto reached out to grab Shikamaru's arm. "I know where there's proof."

The skeptical man sighed heavily and gave Boruto a pleading look, as if he were being asked to do a dreadful chore. "If this is your way of getting out of work…"

"I mean it. I'm serious. Please, Shikamaru."

"Ah…" Shikamaru shook his head with another sigh. "Alright, fine. Let's see where this goes."

Boruto took Shikamaru back to his house and let himself in through the unlocked door. He called inside, hoping his mother and sister were home but there was no answer. If Shikamaru didn't remember him, Boruto doubted his own family would. His mother might mistake him for her husband and think he was sick if he started trying to convince her of something only he seemed to know.

"Come on, up here. Quick." Boruto led the way up the stairs to the bedrooms.

Shikamaru followed slowly up the stairs with his hands in his pockets. He didn't believe Boruto in the slightest but he was curious how Boruto intended to prove something so outlandish. He was also happy about the detour, needing a break himself.

"Yes!" Boruto jumped up and down, pointing into his bedroom. "It's still here. I told you. This proves it."

Shikamaru stuck his head in the room. "Proves what?"

"That I exist. That Naruto has a son. See? This is my room. Hima's is over there. If I didn't exist, why is this room here with all my stuff in it?" Boruto was elated to find that everything was still here. He had woken up in this room this morning so he knew it was real. Finding it still there exactly as he left it confirmed that he wasn't insane. He felt so proud of himself, certain he had convinced Shikamaru.

"This doesn't prove anything," he said. "This could just be a spare room you gave to a relative or a friend. There's nothing in here that proves who it belongs to or their relation."

Boruto almost collapsed in the doorway. Shikamaru was right. The fact that the room existed was hardly proof that he existed. It could have belonged to anyone.

This was his best shot and he blew it. He had no hard evidence.

"Kurama," Boruto said. "Kurama spoke to me. He knew I wasn't Naruto. He said I had to find a way to change things back to normal. He knows."

He could only hope this would be enough.

"Can you prove that's what he said to you? Were there any witnesses?"

"Well, no. It was a private conversation so no one would know about it but us."

"So, your only witness is a being only you can see and hear with no way to interact with outside of your head?"

Boruto gulped, knowing how bad it looked. "Kinda."

"Even if that were the case, why would I trust the word of that tailed beast? He could be lying to you to mess with you."

Could Kurama have been lying to him? For what purpose? What was to be gained?

"Switch with me," said the sinister voice in his head. "I can talk directly to him for you. Then he would have his proof. He'll get it straight from me."

"Uh," Boruto began hesitantly. "He says I should switch with him to talk to you. He'll let you know what's what. I'm just now sure how to…"

"Don't," Shikamaru warned him firmly. "This could be a trick for you to break the seal and release him. And if you think you're someone else, then I shudder to think how badly you could screw this up."

There was no guarantee Shikamaru would believe anything Kurama said anyway.

Was there truly no way to prove this? If no one believed him, there was no way for anyone to help him. He had to convince someone that he was really Boruto stuck in Naruto's body in order to get any help changing back. If he couldn't do that, then he really was stuck like this for the rest of his life.

Boruto looked at the open magazine on his desk and wondered if there was anything to prove his existence with that. Wanting a videogame wasn't going to be enough to prove he wasn't his father. His bag with his ninja supplies was still sitting under his window on the floor, but as Shikamaru pointed out, it could have belonged to a houseguest. These posters, too. His bed his mother regularly washed. Maybe some of his hairs could prove… No. He could still argue the houseguest theory.

He looked into the hall, eyes wandering across the wall slowly until they landed on something that gave him hope.

"Shikamaru, look."

"Enough's enough. Can we just go back now?"

"Just look!" Boruto forcibly turned him and shoved him towards the wall. "See?"

"See what?"

Boruto pointed. "The photo."

Shikamaru looked. "What about it?"

"What do you see in it?"

Shikamaru looked at the photo in the frame. "Nothing."

"Exactly," Boruto said with glee in his voice. "Why would Mom frame a blank photo on the wall?"

Shikamaru looked at the photo again, studying it closely. There was no one in the frame. Just a blank background, so there wasn't even scenery. It was just blank.

"I guess that is kind of odd."

"Yes, exactly," said Boruto. "And this one, too. Look how off balance it is."

There was a picture of Himawari on the left side of the frame blowing bubbles in the grass, a large amount of empty space behind her and to the right.

Boruto didn't just remember that he and his sister were in that photo together when they were little to know something was off. It was the placement of his sister in it. If it hadn't been for that designer woman going on and on about balance and flow, he wouldn't have gotten the idea to argue that something was amiss about having Himawari off-center.

In other photos, too. It was as if Boruto had become invisible in all of them. It was either a blank photo or one with an unclear focal point. There were ones just of Himawari, but was always in the center of the image. All the ones with the two of them together had her in a corner or off to the side to make space for someone who should have been there.

Faced with this, Shikamaru knew something was odd.

Hinata could have taken the photo out of the frame to clean it or replace it with a different photo. That was reasonable, but putting the frame back on the wall without an image was strange. Even Temari would keep the empty frame on a table until she had something to put in it. It wasn't even that the frame was empty. It had a photo but the photo was empty. Who would take a picture of a bare wall and frame it?

Maybe there was something else going on and Naruto wasn't losing his mind.

"Ok, that is strange. But it still doesn't mean…"

Boruto had another idea. "Team 7. Big Bro Konohamaru leads it, right?"

"Yes."

"And the teams have to have three members, right?"

"Yes, that is standard."

"Who's on that team? You should know that, right?"

Shikamaru pictured the squad in his head. "There's Konohamaru who leads it. There's Sarada Uchiha. Mitsuki… and I forget the third member."

"I'm the third member. Boruto Uzumaki. You can go look it up, can't you?"

"I guess we're going back to the Hokage building again to check the records."


Shikamaru brought Boruto with him to the records room which had every shinobi in the village on file, even ones dating back several generations. The filing cabinets lined the walls from floor to ceiling, leaving very little wall to speak of; nothing but square drawers as far as the eye could see. He riffled through a drawer of files before he found the one he wanted. "Here we are. Team 7."

He rested the file on the open drawer and opened it. The pages were all secured to the file with bendable metal flaps so Shikamaru had to lift each one up carefully. Boruto was relieved to see how it was bound together so there was no excuse his file could have simply fallen out or gotten misplaced.

He saw Konohamaru's page listing his name, specialties, test scores, past S-ranked missions and a lot of handwritten notes he couldn't read as Shikamaru turned to Sarada's page. Then a blank file between hers and Mitsuki's, which Shikamaru immediately went back to.

"That's weird." There was a photo mounted on the top corner of the page but there was no one in it; just the standard background they used for every shinobi ID photo. To the side of the photo under 'name' was a blank line. Everything on the page was empty, as if it had been erased.

Nothing was listed, not even a face though the photo was there. This blank file was treated the same way every shinobi file was treated.

"There's nothing here. But… that can't be." Shikamaru ran his hand over the paper to see if there was some sort of trick, like invisible ink and he could feel the pressure grooves the pen left behind. "No one would put a profile in here if it were blank. And we can't have a squad with only two members."

"I told you something was going on," Boruto told him. "It's like everything about me is being erased. Even my ID is blank. But it exists. It's just everything on it about me is invisible."

He was right. These papers existed but not Boruto's image or information. If he wasn't real or a figment of Naruto's imagination, this page shouldn't be here at all. Reality was trying to correct for Boruto not existing outside of Naruto. That's how it appeared.

There was a Team 7, which meant there were three members, but the file only indicated two. There was a bedroom with his belongings but no person to place in the room. There were framed photos documenting his experiences but no image of him actually existing.

For the first time, Shikamaru was starting to believe Boruto.

"Ok. This is pretty irrefutable."

"Yes. Yes, exactly." Boruto put his hands on the open drawer to bring his face closer to Shikamaru, making sure he saw him and knew he was there. "I told you I'm real. It's just that… nothing in this world will make people believe it. All proof of me existing is being erased."

"But only your physical self. Objects you own are still there. Anything with your name on it has vanished. Along with people's memory of you being a real person."

Boruto put his hand on Shikamaru's to make sure he knew he was there. He was afraid that if he didn't physically touch another human being that he would be just a figment of someone's imagination. "You gotta help me, Shikamaru. I don't want to be like this. You have to figure out how to change things back. Get me out of my dad's body and into my own so he can go back to doing what he does and I can go back to my own life."

"I don't even know what this is. Or how to explain it," Shikamaru told him, closing the file. "If this was a jutsu, it should have worn off by now. If it's anything like Ino's jutsu, at least."

"But my body doesn't exist," said Boruto. "What jutsu can insert someone's mind and body into another?"

"I don't know of any. I think it'd be impossible. Transferring your mind is one thing, but mind and body?" Shikamaru put the file back and closed the drawer. Boruto staggered without the drawer to lean on. "If this is a new jutsu, I got nothing. And it's inconceivable of one being able to distort reality in addition to this effect."

"Meaning that it can't do both?"

"A genjutsu would be able to prevent us from seeing any trace of you in images or on paper, but…"

"I tried releasing the genjutsu but it didn't work. I don't think that's what this is."

"Sounds like it's self-correcting," same Kurama's voice inside Boruto's head. "You can't exist as long as you're inside Naruto's body. That includes people's memory of you."

"So, we didn't switch places, otherwise Dad would be in my body and running around somewhere and the photos would be unchanged," said Boruto. "My body just disappeared. Or it's somehow in here. All my stuff's there but nothing attaching it to me. No one knows who I am because while I'm in Naruto, I don't exist."

"And everything will correct to fit that," said Kurama.

"Then do you know what this is?" Boruto asked Kurama, but he had spoken it aloud so even Shikamaru could hear and thought the question was meant for him.

"I told you before that I didn't. My answer hasn't changed, though my understanding of the situation has."

"I have no idea what could have done this," said Shikamaru at the same time Kurama was speaking in Boruto's head. "And it would be troublesome to try to convince others of the situation. It'd be easier to convince them that we were both mental."

"If this is self-correcting or whatever," said Boruto, "does that include important experiences with other people? What I mean is, if I impacted someone's life, and they're living the way they are because of me, would they still not know who I am? How could they remember the experience but not me, especially if I had a direct impact on it? Does the memory not exist or is it replaced by someone else or is it just blank like the photos?"

"I don't know," said Shikamaru. "It could be that it just never happened. But if it was a direct impact that changed a person's life, then… maybe their brain just never makes the connection. Why? Do you have something in mind?"

Boruto couldn't think of something where he had a direct impact on someone just the two of them without someone else being involved. Mitsuki was very attached to him but he doubted he had that much impact on him. Was Mitsuki even the same person if he no longer remembered him?

When they went to the movies, to his mind, had Mitsuki gone by himself? When he trained with his aunt to see if he had the Byakugan, did that just never happen? He couldn't think of anything he could have done for a person that had a life-altering effect on them.

Giving someone a necklace they always wore probably wasn't impactful enough. The person could have worn it without knowing why or thought someone else had given it to them without remembering who it was. Wrecking the Hokage monument could have been done by anyone and didn't have to have a name. Just some person no one knew.

Just like having a bedroom that could have belonged to anyone.

"Is there really nothing we can do? I'm stuck like this and Dad's mind's just…?" Boruto was stumped. He had no ideas, no clue and felt just as blank as those photos.

As far as everyone knew, Boruto Uzumaki didn't exist. There was no proof. No one remembered him and there was no way to convince them otherwise. Shikamaru was one thing, but how was he supposed to convince an entire village? His own mother and sister wouldn't know who he was. He didn't even know where they were. They seemed to have vanished as well.

Even with Shikamaru's help, there was no way they could prove Boruto existed or that he wasn't Naruto. The village would probably call them both insane.

If no one believed him, he would be forced to continue life as the Hokage. The village needed a leader. If he told people what he had been trying to convey to Shikamaru all this time, they would have assumed he was pulling a prank. The strategy cognoscente himself believed Boruto was merely joking. They would have dismissed his cogent claims and ordered him to resume his duties or ignored him and carried on with their day. If they took him seriously, rather than help him, they would have locked him in an asylum. Doctors would brainwash him into thinking he really was Naruto, thus, eliminating the last trace of Boruto's very existence.

He wasn't qualified to be Hokage. He was already making so many mistakes. He didn't want to be Hokage. His mercurial comport made it difficult to do the job, but he could no longer use the excuse of him being a child since he no longer looked like one. Rather than claim he was incompetent, they would say it was the Hokage's solipsism and complain about that. He couldn't handle the bumptious executives and managers or the grumbling villagers all wanting their desires granted instantaneously and not one being the least bit skilled at communicating. It was too stressful.

He was scared and confused and felt so hopeless. To make matters worse, there was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do.

Boruto would have to remain as his father, the Hokage, for the rest of his days. There was no way out.