Chapter Three: Step One, Find People

Naruto came awake the way a drowning man comes up, with a gasp so violent it felt like somebody had taken a fistful of his hair and hauled him out of the deepest part of an ocean.

His back arched off whatever he was lying on. His lungs went to work immediately and painfully, burning on the first breath and the second and the third, and his arms flew out in a wild uncoordinated panic until the back of one hand hit something rough and solid with a thud that jarred all the way to his elbow.

His eyes snapped open to find a tree trunk approximately the width of a hand from his nose.

"Eh?!"

He jerked backward so fast his heels dug furrows in the leaf litter, heart going at a pace that suggested it had not yet been informed about the change in circumstances. For a long moment he simply stood there in a half crouch with his chest heaving, glaring at the tree as though it had started the whole thing.

Then he looked around, and the panic changed shape.

There was no endless white. There was no weightless nowhere. There was no red-haired woman with a hand raised to hit him on the head. There was a forest, and it was a forest of a kind he had never walked in.

The trees went up and up, thick as watchtowers at the base, with moss growing in deep green cushions around roots that had shouldered their way through the soil generations ago and then simply stayed. The air was heavy and damp and smelled of wet earth and broken leaves and something faintly sweet underneath, like fruit going soft somewhere out of sight. Sunlight came down through the canopy in narrow slanting shafts and laid coins of gold all over the ground, and those coins moved whenever the wind went through the branches. It was quiet, but it was not the dead kind of quiet that means something dangerous is holding still. There were birds. There was rustling low in the undergrowth. Somewhere off to his left there was the steady white noise of moving water.

Naruto took all of this in with the practised speed of a shinobi assessing unfamiliar terrain, cataloguing sightlines and cover and escape routes, and then his assessment reached a detail somewhat closer to home.

He looked down.

"Oh no."

Nothing. Not a stitch. No sandals, no jacket, no headband, no mesh, no gloves, no weapons pouch, not so much as a length of bandage. Just him, standing barefoot in the middle of an enormous unfamiliar forest with absolutely nothing on at all.

The noise that came out of him was somewhere between a yelp and a wail.

"What? No, no, no, no, no." Both hands went down to cover what they could while his head snapped left and right, scanning the undergrowth as though there might be a ninety year old woman crouched in the ferns with an opinion. "Are you kidding me? This is the worst. This is the actual worst."

His face went hot enough to bake bread, despite there not being another living soul within any distance he could measure. He bent his knees slightly, which improved nothing and which he did anyway, and continued turning in slow paranoid circles.

Eventually he made himself stop and breathe.

Think, he told himself. Think about literally anything other than this.

So he made himself pay attention to the air, and that was when he noticed that the air was wrong.

Not bad. Wrong. There was energy in this place, thick and everywhere and enormously alive, and it was not chakra. It moved through the soil and along the roots and up the trunks and out into the leaves. It sat on the wind and brushed his skin as the wind went by. It had a pulse, slow and deep, the sort of rhythm you would expect to feel if you put your ear against the ribs of something the size of a mountain.

He reached for it with a habit older than conscious thought, the way he would have reached for nature energy at the top of Mount Myoboku, and the energy came toward him at once, friendly and interested and completely unmanageable. It sloshed. He let go of it fast.

It did not feel hostile. If anything it felt hospitable, which was worse, because hospitality from something that large is not a thing a person should be comfortable accepting.

It also, he noted, did absolutely nothing to solve the fact that he was standing there naked like some kind of forest lunatic.

"Okay," he muttered, straightening up and squaring his shoulders with as much dignity as the situation permitted. "Step one, find people. Step two, find clothes. Step three, never think about any of this ever again for the rest of my life."

He started walking, keeping one hand employed in the interest of modesty and using the other to shove branches out of his way, and he tried very hard not to picture what he looked like from behind. Every rustle in the leaves sounded like somebody snickering. Every gust of wind felt personally pointed.

And underneath the humiliation, coiling up slowly, came the first properly cold thought he had managed since opening his eyes.

Wherever this was, it was not Konoha. It was not the Land of Fire. He had walked or run through most of the countries on the eastern half of the continent by the age of sixteen, and he had never once seen trees like these, or breathed air like this, or felt an entire landscape hum at him like a struck bell.

He kept that thought at a distance for as long as he could, which turned out to be about an hour.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

He walked for what he judged to be most of the day, by the angle of the light and by nothing else, since he had no watch and no shadow to trust and his own sense of time had apparently been thrown out along with his clothes.

His feet sank into damp dirt and came up black. Insects found him early and made a project of him. He swatted, he cursed, he swatted again. At one point he stepped on something that squelched, and he made a decision not to look down, and he kept that decision.

He did not get tired. He noticed that and shelved it for later, because it belonged to a category of problems he could not do anything about while unclothed.

There were other things to shelve as well, and the pile grew as the afternoon went on.

He had tried, early, to find a chakra signature. Any chakra signature. A shinobi walking unfamiliar ground does that the way a man entering a dark room feels for the wall, and he had done it without even deciding to, spreading his awareness out in a slow ring and waiting for something to come back. Nothing came back. Not the faint static of a sleeping village. Not the hard bright points of anybody awake and alert. Not the background presence of chakra in the soil and the water and the air, which had been there under everything his entire life in the way that the sound of your own breathing is there.

It was not that he could not find anybody. It was that the thing he had been looking with had nothing to look at.

He stopped in the middle of the path with that realisation and stood still for a while. A beetle the size of his thumb walked across his foot and he did not move.

The second thing he noticed was the animals. There were birds in the canopy and something that sounded like a deer moving off to his right at one point, and none of them ran from him. Not one. Animals had been running from him since he was small. It was one of the several facts about his life he had simply accepted and stopped examining, the way you accept that a particular door in your house sticks. Foxes had been the worst about it. Dogs had always known, every single time, and Kiba had never once let him forget it.

Here, a bird with green banding on its wings dropped onto a branch four feet from his head, looked at him for a while with its head tilted, and then went about its business.

Naruto looked back at it and felt something he could not identify and did not much enjoy.

Then, through a gap in the trunks ahead, he caught the hard straight line of a roof.

His heart gave an enormous, undignified leap. People. Actual people. Thank Megami currently taking requests.

He slowed down and went forward carefully, the way he had been trained to approach any settlement he had not been briefed on, moving from trunk to trunk and keeping low, and when he got a proper look at the place he stopped and stared.

It was old. Not small-village-on-the-edge-of-the-Land-of-Fire old. It was the kind of old that belonged to the dusty scrolls Iruka used to unroll on Friday afternoons, the ones that could put an entire classroom under within ten minutes. Cobblestone streets that had been laid by hand and then worn smooth by three centuries of feet. Buildings of dark timber with thatch on the roofs, going grey where the rain hit hardest. A low stone well in the middle with a bucket on a rope. No post office. No mission board. No shinobi anywhere, not on the roofs, not at the approaches, not a single sentry anywhere he looked, which was either enormous confidence or a complete absence of the concept.

And there, strung between two posts at the side of a little house at the edge of the village, hanging in the late sun and swaying gently, was a laundry line.

Naruto's entire life narrowed to that laundry line.

He checked left. He checked right. He extended his senses and found nobody within thirty paces. Then he crossed the open ground fast and low, got a hand on the thickest and most opaque item present, which was a heavy white sheet, and pulled it down off the line.

"I'll pay you back, I swear," he whispered to the sheet, to the house, to the general universe. "I'm good for it. This is just, y’now. A naked emergency."

He had the thing about halfway wrapped around himself in a passable imitation of a robe when a voice happened behind him.

It was a heavy voice, and a very confused one.

"What the—"

Naruto went absolutely still. Then, slowly, with the awful care of a man who already knows exactly what he is going to find, he turned around.

A large middle-aged woman stood ten feet away with an armful of wet washing. She blinked at him. He blinked at her. For about a second and a half, the two of them simply established eye contact and let the moment develop.

Then she screamed.

Naruto yelped and nearly went over backward, flinging both hands up in the internationally recognised posture of surrender, which had the immediate effect of putting the sheet in serious jeopardy.

"Wait. Wait. I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to, it's just, I was naked, and that's really uncomfortable, and I was going to bring it back, I swear, you can even keep my"

He stopped.

Something in his gut had gone tight, and it was not embarrassment. It was the small cold tug at the base of the spine that had kept him alive through three years of increasingly bad decisions. It was the thing that told him when a person's fear was the ordinary kind and when it was the other kind.

She was not screaming because a stranger had taken her sheet.

She was screaming because she had decided she was about to die.

Naruto frowned. "Hey. Lady. Hold on, I'm not going to—"

He never got there.

The door of the house banged open hard enough to bounce off the wall. Somebody further up the street began shouting, and then somebody else took it up, and within the space of ten heartbeats the whole village was pouring out of its doorways and into the lane. Men with pitchforks that had gone orange with rust. Women holding broom handles the way people hold spears when they have never held a spear. A boy of maybe fourteen with a stick, the end of it wrapped in rag and already burning.

Their faces were white. Their faces were also absolutely furious, which was a combination Naruto had seen before and had hoped never to see again.

"It's a demon!"

"Kill it!"

"Get it before it gets inside."

"Whoa!" Naruto spun on his heel, the sheet flaring out behind him like a very stupid cape. "Hey! Hey! What is your problem? I didn't do anything."

They were not listening. They were not even close to listening. They came forward in a ragged surge, voices climbing over each other, eyes wide and bright with a hatred so pure and so immediate that it had clearly not required any information to reach that temperature.

And that word came through the noise and landed in him.

It.

Not him. Not that boy. Not the thief, or the stranger, or the lunatic in a bedsheet. It.

For a second Naruto just stood there, genuinely stunned, which was a mistake and which he knew was a mistake even while he was making it.

He had been called a demon before. He had heard it through half his childhood, in the whispered version and the muttered version and occasionally in the version delivered straight at his face by a drunk who had stopped caring about consequences. He had grown a sort of callus over it. But those people had at least had a reason, bad as it was. They knew what was sealed in his stomach. They had been at the funerals. He had been able to look at them and follow the reasoning they were doing behind their eyes, and hate it, and still follow it.

These people had never seen him before. They did not know his name, his village, his family, or the fact that he had been dead a few hours ago. They had looked at him once, in the space of a single glance, and arrived at a conclusion.

A rock went past his ear close enough to move his hair.

That snapped him out of it.

"Right," Naruto said, quietly. "Fine."

And he moved.

His bare feet hit the packed dirt of the lane and the world blurred sideways. The sheet snapped and cracked behind him. A man swung a pitchfork at where he had been and hit a fencepost hard enough to break the handle. Naruto went between two houses, put a hand on the top of a wall and was over it without slowing, cut left across a vegetable patch, took the low roof of a woodshed in one bound and came off the far side into the treeline, and by the time the front of the mob had reached the edge of the village they had lost so thoroughly that they were still arguing about which direction he had gone.

He did not stop for a long way.

When he finally did, he was several miles out, standing in a stand of pale-barked trees with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. Not from the running. His body had barely noticed the running. He was breathing hard from something else entirely, something that had gathered in his chest during the sprint and had nowhere to go now that he had arrived.

"Calling me a demon," he said to nobody, and kicked a tree root hard enough to hurt his toes. "I didn't even do anything. I stole one sheet. One. And I said I'd bring it back."

The sheet had sagged around his shoulders. He pulled it tighter and knotted it at the front with more force than the knot required.

"And calling me it." He said that part more slowly. "That's just rude."

He had been insulted a great deal in his life. He had been insulted with skill, with volume, and with a creativity that occasionally bordered on the artistic. None of it had ever landed like this, and he stood there in the fading light trying to work out why, and getting nowhere.

Part of it, he decided eventually, was the speed.

Back home it had taken people time. They had to see him coming down the street, and remember who he was, and remember what had happened the year he was born, and let the two facts meet each other in their heads, and only then did the expression change. He had learned to watch for that whole sequence. He had even, in a bleak private way, learned to time it. Four seconds for a shopkeeper. Two for anybody who had lost family. There had been a process, and a process could be interrupted, and he had spent a childhood inventing increasingly ridiculous ways to interrupt it.

Here there had been no process. The woman had looked at him and been afraid inside the same instant, before she could possibly have thought anything at all. There was nothing to interrupt. There was no gap to shove a grin into.

The other part, the part he liked even less, was that he had no idea what they had seen.

He kept going back over it. He had been standing still. He had been holding a sheet. He had said something apologetic and slightly pathetic about being uncomfortable. He had not so much as raised his voice, and a woman had looked at his face and made the same noise a person makes falling off a roof.

Naruto pulled the sheet tighter and told himself that people in strange countries were strange about strangers, and that he had walked into a village out of a forest at dusk, and that anybody might have reacted badly.

It did not fit. He could feel it not fitting, the way you can feel a stone in a sandal long before you stop to shake it out. But he had no better explanation available and he was tired of standing in one place, so he took that one and walked on with it.

Around him the forest went on humming, that vast slow pulse moving through the soil and the roots and the wind, and for a moment it seemed to pause, the way a person pauses mid-sentence when they notice something.

Naruto looked up sharply.

Nothing. Just trees, and the last of the sun coming through them sideways, and a wood pigeon complaining somewhere above his head.

He blew out a breath and started walking again, in no particular direction, wrapped in a stolen bedsheet in a world that had already decided what he was.

Join my Discord Server: https://discord.gg/X7sphRUsxJ