Chapter 25: Near, Far

Minato didn't really know much about the life his friend had led before Konoha, and he thought that perhaps he might learn some more if he took a few steps back to look things over from a distance.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.

There wasn't any real planning that led him to the fairly peaceful streets of Chotto, since it was just sheer chance that the route back home from his mission headed straight through the small village where his friend had lived temporarily. Just a few weeks, but he had apparently made a mark.

"Good afternoon, Brandt-san. I didn't know—" When he turned around, the elderly woman gave a small start. "Oh dear… my apologies, Shinobi-san. I mistook you for somebody else."

"It's perfectly alright." He chuckled. "I didn't know Axel and I look so similar from behind."

Now she was surprised for a different reason. "You know Brandt-san?" A pause, then she nodded to herself. "Well, I suppose that's not so odd— you both live in the same village now, after all. Tell me, is he doing alright?"

They traded a few more pleasantries, she shared some news of her grandson that she asked him to pass on for her, then they went their separate ways.

She was the third person to mistake him for Axel; it was like people saw his blond hair first, and just didn't process any other details until later. A tendency that made quite a bit of sense, he realized with surprise. After all, blond hair wasn't particularly common outside of the shinobi villages.

Which made him once more wonder just where Axel had come from.

The town was called Mun-shen, according to Jiraiya-sensei, though Axel gave the the word a tighter twist in the middle so it sounded slightly different. A lot of his friend's strange words were like that, with a sort of contrary inflection or emphasis that was different from anything else he'd ever heard.

Mun-shen. München.

Well, whichever way it was pronounced, trying to find information on that place had led nowhere. It was as if it simply didn't exist at all.

Then again, it may just be too small to find easily—goodness knows there are countless tiny villages scattered through every country, it's impossible to know them all. And if such a small town had been wiped out in a shinobi skirmish, then it may just be another overlooked casualty of the war.

But neither of those explanations added up quite right in his mind.

For one thing, Axel seemed used to most of the amenities his store came with: the stove, lights, heater, and so on never gave him pause save figuring out the controls. He just seemed to accept them as normal, so Minato would have expected his home town to be fairly large or wealthy. Luxuries like electricity and running water were usually only found in the capital, the hidden villages, or the rare wealthy mercantile city—not places that could simply vanish from a map.

Chotto itself was something of an exception to the rule. It may be small, but it was near the center of the Land of Fire and close enough to trade easily with Konoha, both facts that came with a host of benefits.

"Oh!" A surprised voice, right in front of him. "Are you Namikaze-san?"

He blinked, registering the teen—just a few years younger than himself, really—who had just walked out from a grocery store with bags of food and an expression like he recognized him. Maybe.

"Sorry, I mean, my dad was telling me about you 'cause you're friends with Axel-nii so he, uh…" His sentence petered off, embarrassed and not sure where it had been heading.

Still, the rambling had cleared things up. "Would you happen to be Kichirou-kun?"

"Yeah!" The boy shifted his bags around to free up a hand, then offered it to shake. "It's good to meet you!"

It was a civilian greeting Minato was only vaguely familiar with, and even then it was only because a handshake is often used to seal business deals.

"Back at you," he replied with a smile, accepting the gesture only after taking a split-second to check for potential weapons: shinobi paranoia in action. "Morimoto-san has told me about you, too. I hear you're the one who found Axel in the woods?"

The teen grimaced. "Yeah. He… wasn't in good shape."

Minato couldn't help but ask, "What happened?"

Kichirou-kun shrugged. "I dunno. There weren't any signs of a fight nearby, and he was pretty far away from the village, so—" He immediately cut himself off, looking like he very much regretted that last statement.

And no wonder, given what Minato had been told by both the boy's father and Axel himself. "I thought you found him just a few minutes away."

"Yeah, well, uhm…" He shifted from one foot to the other. "Anyway, it was nice meeting you but, uh, I should get these groceries home."

An obvious attempt to dodge that conversation, and Minato was not having it.

"Oh, let me help you," he said, and there was nothing in his voice that might betray the numerous strings attached to that offer. Well-meaning strings, but strings nonetheless. "You can tell me more while we walk."

He would get an explanation.

"Nah, I mean, I can handle it."

"I insist," Minato pressed, holding out one hand to take some of the groceries.

Kichirou-kun heard that very particular emphasis and met that determined look, thought things over for a moment, and then sighed. "Fine. I can tell you're worried." He handed off one of his bags. "I'll tell you what happened, but you can't go spreading it around, okay?"

"Sure, if—"

"And," he cut in, "don't go acting weird about it to Axel-nii. Got it?"

Minato's eyebrows vanished behind his forehead protector, surprised at the uncompromising tone, and he couldn't help but wonder just what had actually happened back then. If Kichirou-kun was this serious, then he must have lied for a bigger reason than just having wandered farther from the village than he was allowed.

He nodded. "I promise."

The walk to the house was short and quiet, save for the occasional greeting from passersby. Some of which did funny double-takes when they realized Minato was not Axel—despite his matching hair color—and that Kichirou-kun had managed to run into another blond to help him with groceries.

When they arrived a few minutes later, the front door was unlocked.

"I guess Dad's still here," Kichirou-kun muttered to himself with a small frown, one hand on the knob. Thought for a moment, then he pointed out an open window on the upper floor. "My room's that one. Can you…?"

Minato smiled, quietly amused; he was a shinobi, a jump like that was stupidly easy.

So, to answer, he simply put down the groceries he had been carrying, dusted off his hands, and leapt. He was inside before the teen even picked the bags back up.

It was a small room, made smaller by a number of unfinished craft projects scattered around the floor. Papers were pinned up on the wall. Notes and doodles, mostly, written by a number of people: he recognized Axel's unsteady handwriting mixed in there, too. And there, on the desk, sat a familiar colorful cube.

He picked up the puzzle and sat beside the window, careful that he couldn't be seen from outside. After sliding the sides to further shuffle the already-mismatched squares, he turned the cube over in his hands. Considered, then began twisting segments. By the time Kichirou-kun joined him, he had it nearly solved.

"Dad's left," he said, once the door had shut. "He'll probably be gone— Hey, that's mine!"

Minato set aside the cube with a sheepish smile. "Sorry, just passing time." He sobered, refocusing on the question at hand. "So. What actually happened back then? Why lie?"

"Because I actually found him… somewhere else." Kichirou-kun wasn't looking at him, instead just staring somewhere off to the left. "And I didn't want people to be scared of him."

That's… an interesting sentence to try and unpack.

"Scared? Where did you find him?"

"At the—" Kichirou-kun paused, and gave him a look. Like he was bracing himself and hoping for the best at the same time. "At the edge of the Tamashī no Mori."

Minato blinked, processing the name and finding it unfamiliar. "The Forest of Spirits?"

"You haven't heard of it." It was question and statement in one. "It's due east of here, just a few hour's walk. It's basically halfway between here and Konoha. You really haven't heard of it?"

He shook his head. "Not by that name, at least."

"Huh. I thought… well, I guess shinobi are fast enough, so they wouldn't have to worry about that stuff."

Minato raised a brow, even more curious that before. "What stuff?"

"Lotta people think that place is haunted," Kichirou-kun said frankly. "Even Dad used to tell stories that his dad told him, about sometimes hearing voices they couldn't understand or seeing flashes of light and stuff like that. It's why the road doesn't just go straight to Konoha from here, and goes a bit north instead." He shrugged. "Most of the villagers tend to steer clear, and don't want anything to do with it."

"Which is why you lied."

He nodded. "I didn't believe it, until… well, I found Axel-nii there."

From that tone, something more had happened. "I take it you didn't just happen across him."

"No. I had been camping for a few days, and chopping trees for firewood back home. The forge uses a lot, and we had been running low." Kichirou-kun paused, gathering his thoughts. "I thought it would be fun to try and spend the night there, yaknow? I wasn't scared of no haunted forest! And Dad didn't know I went out that far, which I guess is for the best now…"

He stopped, and an uncertain silence settled in the air. Hesitant, as the teen tried to find the right words to use for what came next.

Minato waited for a moment, then prompted, "So you found him at night, I'm guessing?"

A nod. "There was a rumble," he said. "It woke me up even though I could barely hear it, and I thought I might have been imagining things. But then there was a flash, crash—" He shook his head. "I followed it, and found him."

Which certainly warranted being a bit tight-lipped about the where and, in particular, the how he'd found an injured man unconscious in the woods. Somebody who had been knocked out can't call for help, after all, and the forest was massive.

"I had the cart with me, for the firewood," he continued. "That was lucky. I never would have been able to get him back to the village without it—it took hours. I'm glad he made it. And, well, I guess you know the rest."

Another silence fell between them, less unsure and more thoughtful than the last, and Minato considered this new version of events. It raised more than a few questions, to be sure, but it… felt correct. It didn't really help piece together any of the oddities he'd noticed, but the frame it set them in seemed solid. If weird.

But then, Axel had always been a bit weird. One more thing—even something like being found injured in a haunted forest—didn't change that.

So. "I see why you lied."

Kichirou-kun looked relieved. "Right?"

"If people really are as spooked as you say…" He nodded, decided. It was on the way back, anyway. "What else can you tell me about this forest?"

Half an hour later, bounding through the trees as he made his way home, Minato was still trying to reconcile the stories he'd been told with what he knew of the area. Stories about unintelligible voices from nowhere, lights in the dark, small things appearing or vanishing: all that was news to him.

Minato jumped from one branch, landed on the next, then jumped again.

"It's strange," he mused to himself.

And it was strange because, well, he'd never thought this forest was strange. He'd been through here before, and never noticed anything really off about it: certainly nothing worth the name it had apparently earned among civilians.

"Tamashī no Mori."

Another leap, longer as he passed over a gap in the trees.

Mid-jump, something on the ground below caught his eye. It was small and white, or some other light color, and therefore very out of place against the dark forest floor. He stoped on the next branch, turned, dropped down to the ground, and made his way back to get a closer look.

It was a single pale-blue flower petal.

He glanced around, wondering where it had come from, but…

Well, as he had already noticed, there were no blue flowers in the area.

The air might have been just a touch more chill than it had been a second before, a gentle breeze whispering through the trees like a sad voice, and he decided that he had seen enough. He definitely wasn't spooked by the idea of ghosts. Certainly not.

With a jump back up into the branches, he hurried toward home.

He had quite a bit to think about.

And some new questions for his best friend.

=X=X=X=

There was a chime from the front door, but Axel was a bit distracted at the moment.

"Hey man," came a bright greeting. "I need a new set of kunai, my last ended up…" A pause, then: "Blacksmith-san, what are you doing?"

More and more people had taken to calling him that, and he hadn't quite decided how he felt about it. It was understandable; most found his first name hard to pronounce, though he hadn't realized 'Brandt' would be such a tripping stone as well. Still, while people dropping his real name in favor of just 'Blacksmith' made sense and was even kind of flattering, it was also… just a little bit depressing.

He shook off those thoughts, instead whacking his wooden pole against the kunai jammed in the ceiling. The metal hook he had stuck on that end was technically small enough that it could fit through the loop on the knife, but actually getting it to was another matter entirely.

"Trying to get it out." Another dull clang, but the kunai wasn't budging. He sighed and lowered the pole, switching his attention to his customer. "Not working. How can I help you, Aoba?"

At this point he had a little bit better grasp on honorifics, though he still left them off. Not the smartest choice in some cases, probably, but it was his decision to make. Call it defiance to this reality, or maybe some sort of denial… he just couldn't quite convince himself to use them.

"Yeah, uh, I need a new set of kunai. My last one kinda… well, I got some of the bits to trade in."

"Bits?" he echoed, curious.

The young genin pulled out a scroll and unsealed a pile of blobby metal scrap. He'd probably melted them with a fire technique during training—either accidentally or on purpose.

"Ah." Axel nodded, taking the offered metallic chunks and looking them over more closely. "Bits."

Aoba wasn't quite a regular, though he'd stopped in enough times over the past month that he was starting to see a pattern. The kid would buy a set and either lose or destroy the knives within a week. Losing them wasn't unusual, since they were throwing weapons, but the destruction was a bit odd.

His jonin friend went through kunai like candy when he was testing some new technique, of course, but this kid was just a genin. It should be a few years before he started getting creative with his knives.

"At least my aim is better now, kinda," he said, sheepish.

"Your aim with what?" He shook his head, amused. "Well, get a set. Two free, for the scrap."

Axel could—and would, in just a few minutes—go out personally to collect what bits of metal he could scavenge from long-abandoned streets, but he thought he'd been pretty clever to offer a deal to get his customers to bring in more. It was a good idea all around: he got more metal to work with, his customers got a discount, and the district got just a bit cleaner with every old can or broken kunai they turned over to him.

"Sweet."

"Quick, though," he added. "I'm about to close."

The genin said something under his breath—probably a curse—and hurried over to get what he wanted. It was a quick purchase, finished in under five minutes, and then Axel was free to lock up the house and head out for his evening stroll (and clean up any litter he might find on the way).

The clean-up part was fairly new. When he'd started going on daily walks—with Dach, of course—it was just because he didn't have much to do after he closed shop for the day, especially with his friends out on missions at the moment. Cleaning up trash as he went just seemed like a good idea.

Plus, the dachshund seemed to treat the garbage collection like a game of fetch: he'd run ahead, find some litter, and carry it back, tail wagging all the while.

Like now, actually.

A bark drew his wandering attention to his feet, where Dach had dropped what looked to have once been some kind of food package, before weather and dirt made it into a clump of barely-distinguishable plastic

Axel took his pole—hook replaced by a sharp spike—and stabbed it through the rubbish. Then he shook it off of the end of the skewer into the bag he carried full of similar bits of litter.

It was so weird that this world had plastics, but not so many of the other things he associated with modern life.

He'd actually asked Minato and Akaiko about it—even Pei, and sometimes his customers, if they'd caught him in a contemplative mood—and though he'd tried to choose his words carefully, they all tended to give him odd looks for his trouble.

His friends usually just rolled with it, or asked questions of their own, but there was always that split second of confusion. Not that he really blamed them for it, given he probably sounded like a crazy person.

In fact, he probably sounded pretty weird (read: semi-delusional) quite often. He was just glad it hadn't gotten him locked up somewhere or anything. Yet, at least.

And that would be why he'd decided to set aside those sorts of questions.

Mostly.

He stabbed another piece of trash, plus the empty instant-ramen cup Dach carried over, and added both to his garbage bag.

There was the library, of course, though he had only visited once or twice; from the perspective of a curious dimension-lost civilian, it didn't offer much helpful information. History books about the warring clans and establishing villages were all well and good—if probably more than a little biased—but they weren't really what he had been looking for. Novels and other fiction seemed remarkably rare, and most of the non-fiction technical books seemed to be restricted as ninja-only.

So in the end, he did still pester his friends with questions: they didn't mind if he was a little odd sometimes, and he trusted them. There was only so much he could work out on his own, after all.

He'd poked around at one of the lights in his house, and it did appear to be electric. Unfortunately he hadn't been able to figure out how to shut off the power, so he couldn't get too close without risking frying himself.

Still, no power outlets: none here or in any of the other shops he'd been in. There might be some in the hospital, given that the only one he'd seen had been back at the clinic. If a small infirmary in a small town had power outlets, it stood to reason that the much larger medical facilities in Konoha would as well.

Not that he was planning on a visit to check. After all, a hospital filled with ninja trained to know the human body probably had the best chance to notice his… oddities. Like, say, having neither chakra nor a chakra system.

So yeah, he tended to steer clear.

Back to the power outlets, though, Axel had eventually decided that it was probably just a paranoid ninja thing: not wanting to spread casual use of electricity in civilian society. They had it, but it was kept as more of an elite ninja-only thing.

Another jab with his stick, then a shake to knock the trash off into the bag. The old soup can in the gutter that he found a few meters later, he added to a smaller pouch he had slung under one arm: more scrap for the forge.

So it went, stabbing rubbish and gathering junk metal. It was monotonous, and a little boring, but at least he felt like he was… well, 'helping' wasn't quite the right word. And he didn't feel like he was making a difference to the world, certainly not given the scale of events to come—he was just cleaning up trash.

Still, he mused as he made his way between empty buildings, he liked feeling productive.

A little over halfway into his walk, and Axel became aware of familiar voices nearby.

Rounded the corner, and nearly ran smack into the familiar people those voices came from.

"Minato!" he blurt out, surprised. His friend looked tired and a bit disheveled, so he must have only just gotten back from his mission. "Welcome back!"

Dach barked a hello of his own, trotting back from wherever he had been sniffing around.

"Axel!"

Happy to see him, he judged, though slightly started by his abrupt appearance—it was unexpectedly easy to sneak up on ninja sometimes. Even the heavy-set ninja standing beside Minato was a bit surprised, though it was probably easier to miss light footsteps when the genin team you taught was as… loud as his.

"Hello, Brandt-san!" shouted the green spandex-clad wonder, spotting him from across the street. And Gai was this close to bounding over to them, before his teacher spoke up.

"You all keep working," Chōza reprimanded, trying to keep his students from getting too distracted. "You're on a mission, remember?"

"Yeah, a D-rank mission," scoffed one of the other genin—Genma, if he recalled correctly.

Amused, the jonin shook his head with a fond smile. "Brats."

"Ah, but they're your brats," Minato said, likely thinking of his own students.

"So they are." He sounded a little rueful, but certainly not unhappy. "I can just tell that they're going to grow up from little menaces to, well, big menaces."

Watching green blaze down the street, probably having set a personal challenge to pick up as much trash as possible in the least amount of time possible, Axel nodded. He'd seen clips of his future, essentially. "Untertreibung," he murmured quietly.

Because really, 'menace' didn't quite do the Green Beast justice.

"I have done it, and with seconds to spare!" Gai cheered suddenly, loud and clear even from the other end of the street. "So next I must be twice a fast!"

"Gai, wait up—!"

"This is a team activity, come back!"

The other two genin sprinted down the street to catch up, and all three vanished around the corner. Their jonin teacher sighed, but made to follow after.

"By the way…" Axel began, and the ninja paused. "If you find any old metal stuff—"

"Bring it 'round to your shop, right?" Chōza nodded. "That deal you've got set up for scrap is at least half of why we're doing this. D-ranks to clean up this district have been posted for ages, but just hadn't been worth it before."

He blinked, taken aback.

"You've got a deal for scrap?" asked Minato, interested. "Like, a discount?"

"That he does," the large man replied with a chuckle." So brace yourself, Blacksmith-san. They're really looking forward to a shopping spree after this is all done."

He waved, and left to go find his students.

"Maybe I should replenish my stock now, before you're sold out," Minato said, thinking aloud. Then he gave his friend a sideways glance. "But you've already closed for the day, right?"

Axel rolled his eyes. "You come by whenever."

"Was that permission, or just an observation?"

"Both."

That earned a tired laugh, that then faded into a sigh. "I'd talk longer, but I guess I should get going too." Minato glanced toward the center of the village. "I still need to give my report to the Hokage."

And Axel was suddenly ambushed by the thought that, well… This was the first time he had seen his friend since he found out. Since he had learned some of what might happen.

That his friend was going to be Hokage one day.

That he was going to die as Hokage, to save his family and his village.

He swallowed, throat suddenly dry.

"Okay." Axel managed to keep his voice steady. "See you later?"

"We'll see if I'm still awake after giving my report," Minato replied, smiling. Then, with a wave goodbye, he vanished up to the rooftops.

Axel thought—and not for the first time—that maybe he knew a bit too much about what the future might hold for his ninja friend. That maybe he shouldn't have opened that folder, shouldn't have seen those pictures.

Still, he knew now.

And maybe, just maybe, he was close enough to make a difference.

Author's Note:

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Some things might be closer than they seem.

Sorry for the delay, guys. Hopefully one day late isn't too bad.
At least it's a longer chapter, yeah?

Updates on the 15th (or thereabouts, apparently) of every month.
Thanks again for the support in every review, favorite, and follow!

Translations:
"Tamashī no Mori." = "Forest of Spirits."
"Untertreibung" = "Understatement"

Guest: I don't purposefully try to use the author's note as padding to make my chapters seem longer, though I guess I can see why you might think that. As for my schedule, I try to stick to it so I keep writing; I know from some of my personal projects that not keeping deadlines can result in no progress being made at all.
Hopefully this longer chapter (a day late, granted) makes up for at least some of the string of shorter ones, and I'm glad you have such hopes for the story!

See ya on the flipside, everyone!