Chapter Four: The Face In The Water

The forest did not appear to have an end, and after a while Naruto began to suspect that this was less a matter of size than of temperament.

Every tree looked as though it had been standing since before anybody had thought to invent a calendar. Their roots crossed over and under one another in a slow tangle that spread for miles, so that walking through the place felt like picking a path across the back of something that had fallen asleep in the middle of a game and never finished it. He walked through it for three days, and the strangest part was not that he kept finding himself back at landmarks he had already passed.

The strangest part was that his body did not care.

He did not get tired. Not once, not in three days, not even the pleasant heavy ache that should have settled into his calves after the first afternoon. His legs simply kept going, as though nobody had ever explained the concept of exhaustion to them. His stomach did not growl. He ate anyway, out of habit and out of stubbornness, working his way through clusters of sweet tart fruit that grew in the lower branches and dripped juice down his chin, and the fruit tasted good and did nothing whatsoever to a hunger that had never shown up.

He also did not need to relieve himself. Not once in three days. He stopped mid-stride when he worked that out, standing very still in a patch of moss with a half-eaten fruit in his hand.

"Okay," he said aloud. "That's definitely not normal."

By then he had already arrived at the larger conclusion and had simply been avoiding shaking hands with it.

This was not his world.

There was no chakra in the air here. None. Not a trace, not a residue, not the faint background static that a shinobi stops noticing by the age of nine the way a fisherman stops noticing the sea. He had stood still and reached out with everything he had and found nothing at all, which was an experience roughly comparable to opening your mouth to speak and discovering that language had been removed from the world overnight.

What was here instead was that other thing. He had no word for it and he needed one, so he stole the closest one he had ever overheard and settled on mana. It was woven through the land like a second heartbeat, and the more he paid attention to it the more he found it, in the soil, in the water, in the bark of the trees, in the light itself.

His own body was not the same either. His skin, which had spent seventeen years being tanned by whatever season was currently available, had gone pale. It looked the kind of pale that belonged to somebody who had been indoors with a long illness. And when he looked inward, properly inward, the way he had been taught to do before any serious exercise, the map was gone. There were no pathways. There were no tenketsu. Everything a Hyuga would have been able to describe in detail no longer existed inside him. In its place there was a steady, unhurried swirl of energy that moved through him in no particular channels at all and seemed perfectly content with the arrangement.

He had tested himself anyway, because sitting around being confused was not a thing he was built to do for long.

Shadow clones worked. That had been a relief so large he had nearly sat down.

The Rasengan worked as well. It formed in his palm the way it always had, spinning up fast and tight, which was when he discovered the difference. It was not blue. The old one had been a hard bright blue, the colour of a summer sky reflected off metal. This one was green, deep and dark and shot through with lighter spirals, turning slowly in his hand like a small planet that had been handed to him by mistake.

He had stared at it for a long time before he let it go into a tree. The tree came apart the way trees always did. That, at least, was consistent.

Sage Mode was a disaster.

That had been the worst discovery, and he had gone at it four separate times before admitting it. The natural energy in this place was not scarce. It was abundant to the point of suffocation, pouring in from every direction the moment he sat still and opened himself to it, so much of it and so fast that there was no question of gathering it, only of surviving the arrival. Inside him it refused to balance. It went everywhere at once, sloshing like a bucket carried by a drunk, and the sensation was less like power and more like standing on a boat in a storm while somebody kept moving the boat.

The fourth time, he felt his left forearm start to go stiff and grey, the skin hardening in a way that he recognised from Fukasaku's warnings, and he dropped the whole thing so fast he fell over backward into the moss and lay there with his heart going like a drum.

After that he left Sage Mode alone. He was not eager to spend the next thousand years as garden decoration in a forest nobody visited.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

On the fourth morning, after spending a night wedged in the fork of a tree wide enough to have swallowed the Hokage Monument without noticeable effort, Naruto reached a decision of some urgency.

He needed to wash.

This was not a preference. His stolen sheet had developed a personality, and the personality was hostile. His hair felt as though a family of birds had moved in, held a meeting, and decided against it. Three days of forest and sweat and fruit juice had accumulated on him in layers, and he was at the point where he could smell himself from what felt like a polite distance.

So when he pushed through a curtain of hanging vine and found the bottom of a waterfall, he actually laughed out loud.

It was a good one. The water came down a shelf of dark rock in a wide white curtain, roaring steadily, throwing up a haze of fine spray that caught the early light and hung in the air as a permanent, patient rainbow. Below it lay a pool, deep and green at the centre and clear enough at the edges to show every stone on the bottom, ringed by flat sun-warmed rock that looked as though it had been placed there by somebody with an eye for it.

"Oh, absolutely yes," Naruto said, and dropped the sheet on the grass, and ran.

The cold hit him like a slap and then turned into something wonderful. He went under, came up shouting, went under again, and swam in lazy circles on his back with his eyes shut while the roar of the falls filled his ears and the current pushed him gently around the pool. Three days of grime came off him in a slow unhurried peeling. For the first time since he had opened his eyes in this place, he felt something close to ordinary.

Eventually he waded in toward the falls themselves, into the churn where the spray was thickest, and started properly scrubbing. He cupped the icy water and threw it over his face. He worked at his cheeks with the heels of his hands, at his temples, up across his forehead, pushing his soaked hair back out of his eyes.

His fingers brushed against something hard.

Naruto stopped.

He frowned, and ran his hand up to the hairline again, more carefully this time, expecting a pebble caught in the tangle or a lump from a knock he did not remember taking. Instead his palm slid over something that was solid, and smooth, and curved.

It was growing out of him.

"Heh." The sound came out of his throat without any real conviction. "Okay. Funny. Like horns or something. Right? Ha."

The laugh stopped somewhere in the middle and did not come back.

He turned, slowly, toward the still water at the edge of the pool where the sun came in at just the right angle to make a mirror of the surface.

The face looking back at him was not his face.

Not the spiky blond hair that had taken seventeen years of failing to be flattened by anything. Not the sun-warmed skin. Not the pair of deep blue eyes that had glared enemies into hesitating and had grinned at friends across a hundred bowls of ramen.

The boy in the water had hair split straight down the centre, half of it gold and half of it a deep arterial red, as though two people had been pushed together and the seam had never quite healed. The eyes did not match. One was a dark blue, the stormy kind that looks almost navy in shadow. The other was a pale, bright, almost luminous blue, and it caught the light in a way that was frankly unsettling to look at.

And rising from his forehead, just back from the hairline and angled slightly outward, was a pair of horns. Pale grey, close to bone in colour, ridged along their length, uneven, tapering to points that were not decorative in the slightest.

Naruto's breath stopped somewhere high in his chest and stayed there.

"What?"

The boy in the reflection did not answer. He simply looked back with those mismatched eyes while the water shivered and blurred him and reassembled him and the waterfall went on roaring behind them both.

And for the first time since he had arrived in this world, something cold went up the length of Naruto's spine and stayed there.

He backed up a step and the water sloshed around his knees. His heart was going hard enough that he half expected the falls to be drowned out by it.

"No. No, no, no." He shook his head the way you shake a page you do not want to have read. "This is just. Okay, look, maybe I hit my head somewhere between dying and waking up here. That happens. Head injuries do that. I'm seeing things."

He brought his hands together in the cross seal, the shape his fingers had made ten thousand times, the shape they could make in the dark at a dead run.

"Henge nō Jutsu."

Smoke snapped into the air and rolled away, and he looked down at the water and his whole chest unclenched at once.

There he was. Blond, spiky, blue-eyed, whisker marks on both cheeks, the face he had spent his life wearing.

"Ha," Naruto said, and there was actual relief in it. "Knew it. Just my brain playing games. Just a little bit of—"

He released the transformation.

The smoke cleared for the second time, and the split-haired stranger with the mismatched eyes and the pale grey horns came back and sat there on the water, looking at him.

Naruto's stomach turned over.

"What the hell."

His hands went up to his head. He got a grip on the left horn, closed his fist around the base of it, and pulled, because there was a version of events in which these were fastened on, a prank, a cruel joke, something with an edge you could work a fingernail under.

Pain went off inside his skull like a flare.

"Agh." He let go instantly and doubled over, both palms pressed hard against his temples, eyes screwed shut, breathing through his teeth. "Okay. Okay. They're real. They're real, they're real, they're real."

The cold truth of it came down into him like a kunai driven into soft ground and standing there quivering.

He was not looking at something. He was looking at himself.

And in the same second, before he had any chance to get his footing, the village came back to him all at once. The woman with the armful of wet washing and the way her scream had changed pitch when she really saw him. The men in the lane with the rusted pitchforks. The boy with the burning rag on a stick, fourteen years old at the outside, wading in at the front because nobody had told him not to.

That word.

His throat went dry.

"They weren't scared because I was naked," Naruto said, quietly, to the water.

They had been scared because of this. Because as far as they could tell, something with horns and two different coloured eyes had walked out of the ancient forest at the edge of their village wearing a stolen bedsheet and a grin, and had come toward them, and had said words.

He sat down heavily on the wet rock at the edge of the pool and let his arms hang over his knees. Spray from the falls came across his back in cold sheets, and he did not feel much of it.

He had spent a childhood being looked at that way and had never once understood it. He had known, in the abstract, that people were frightened of him. He had known the reason. But he had never been able to make the reason sit comfortably beside the fact that he was just a kid who wanted to be noticed, and so it had always stayed a cruelty somebody was choosing to perform, something done to him rather than something anybody had actually felt.

Now, for the first time in his life, he sat on a rock beside a waterfall in a world that was not his and understood precisely why a person might look at him and see a monster.

And he hated it. He hated it more than the pitchforks and more than the shouting and more than the rock that had gone past his ear, because those things had been done by other people and could be blamed on other people, and this one could not.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

He sat there for a long time, watching the split-haired stranger in the water, and the sun moved a good distance across the sky before anything in him changed.

What changed it, in the end, was not grief and not acceptance. It was the plain fact that Naruto Uzumaki had never in his life been able to hold still and feel sorry for himself for more than about an hour before some deeply annoying part of his personality stood up and started making suggestions.

No. He was not going to crawl into a hole and live in it because his face had been redecorated.

He had been called a demon before. He had spent whole years walking into rooms and smiling like he belonged there while every pair of eyes in the room said otherwise, and he had gotten quite good at it. That skill had not gone anywhere. It had just been handed a harder job.

Still, he was not stupid, whatever the collected opinion of Konoha had been on the subject.

He could live out here. He genuinely could. He knew how to lay snares, how to read which plants were safe, how to sleep in a tree without falling out of it, how to purify water and start a fire in the wet. Given a month he could have put up a cabin that would keep the rain off, and given a year he could have made it comfortable. That was not the problem.

The problem was that a man alone in a forest learns nothing. No news, no maps, no names, no explanation of how a dead shinobi ends up breathing in a world with no chakra in it, and no chance whatsoever of finding out whether there was a road home. Out here he would simply grow old, assuming he still could, and get very good at being alone, which was a skill he already had more of than he wanted.

He needed clothes. He needed money. Most of all he needed to talk to people, and people, as had been recently and vividly demonstrated, were going to be a problem.

Which meant the first job was blending in.

Naruto stood up, shook the water out of his mismatched hair, and brought his hands together.

"Henge nō Jutsu."

Smoke, and then the stranger in the pool was gone. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Whisker marks. A perfectly ordinary teenage face, the sort that could pass through a crowd and leave no impression on anybody in it.

"Better," he muttered.

It felt like putting on a mask before a mission. There was something clean about that, and something else underneath the clean thing that he decided not to look at directly. Nobody had to see what was under it. That was the whole point of a mask.

He spent the rest of the day moving through the forest with the henge wrapped around him like armour, and he did not meet a single person. No footsteps. No voices. No chakra signatures, obviously, and no killing intent either, only that enormous slow hum of the land going about its business. By the time the sun slid down behind the canopy and turned the leaves the colour of amber and old blood, he had found a high branch and made himself comfortable against the trunk with the sheet around his shoulders.

He was not tired. He closed his eyes anyway, out of respect for the idea of night, and listened to the leaves and to something that hooted at long intervals somewhere far off, and eventually the dark filled up with all of it.

Morning came thin and pale, with mist lying low between the trunks. Naruto climbed down, stretched, checked his henge in a puddle, and started walking toward the place where the trees looked thinner.

He found it before midday.

It was a road, or the honest ancestor of one, a narrow band of packed brown dirt cutting through the forest like a ribbon somebody had laid down and forgotten. The edges were worn where feet had strayed off it over the years. Down the centre ran a pair of shallow ruts, the width of a cart axle, pressed in by generations of wheels.

No one was in sight. No voices, no footsteps, no dust hanging in the air from anybody who had passed recently. Only the wind coming through the trees on either side.

Perfect.

Naruto adjusted the henge one final time, smoothing the blond hair down, checking the ordinary features from the inside the way a man checks a jacket in a shop window. He took a breath. He stepped out of the treeline and put both feet on the road.

"Alright," he said, sliding his hands into pockets that did not exist on a garment that was technically a bedsheet. "Time to blend in."

And he started walking, one more traveller on an empty road, in a world he did not understand and had not agreed to.

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