The restaurant smelled of burnt oil and the deep, settled gloom of a place that knew better than to be open past midnight.
The Tipsy Tanuki was quiet now. The festival outside had died down to a dull thrum, and the only sound in the narrow room was the clink of Naruto's chopsticks hitting an empty bowl.
"More!" Naruto announced, slamming the bowl down.
"Naruto," Sylvie sighed, adjusting her glasses. "You've eaten three bowls. Your stomach is going to rebel. Statistically."
"I'm training!" Naruto argued. "I need fuel! Right, Shizune-neechan?"
Shizune didn't answer. She was staring at the necklace hanging around Tsunade's neck.
Tsunade wasn't there. She had stormed out ten minutes ago after the "girlfriend" comment, leaving a wake of terrified waitstaff and a very confused bill. Jiraiya had followed her, looking unusually grim.
Which left Shizune alone with the kids.
And the necklace.
"It's not just jewelry," Shizune said softly.
It didn't just look expensive. In the low light of the tavern, the crystal seemed to hum, a deep green vibration that felt less like a gem and more like a trapped breath. Sylvie felt it tug at her nerves, a resonance she couldn't name—like a warning wrapped in history.
The words slipped out before she could stop them. She hadn't meant to speak. She had meant to be the quiet, competent assistant who paid the bill and ushered everyone to bed.
Naruto stopped chewing. Sylvie looked up from her notebook. Anko, who was halfway through a bottle of sake, paused mid-sip.
"Huh?" Naruto asked.
"The necklace," Shizune said. She looked at the empty space where Tsunade had been sitting. "The one she bet you. It's not just expensive. It's..."
She trailed off.
Cursed, she wanted to say. A death sentence.
But she couldn't say that. Not to a boy who looked at the world like it was a present waiting to be unwrapped.
Sylvie stopped writing. The static in her head spiked—a high-pitched whine that tasted like copper and old blood. She looked at the empty space on Shizune's neck, imagining a weight that wasn't there.
"It belonged to the First Hokage," Shizune said instead. Her voice was flat, reciting the facts she had memorized over years of drunken confessions and sleepless nights. Some part of her knew this weight would not stay in one hand for long.
"Hashirama Senju. Tsunade's grandfather."
"Whoa," Naruto breathed. "The First?"
"He wore it when he founded the village," Shizune continued. "It's made of crystal chakra ore. Unique. Irreplaceable. It was meant to be passed down to whoever held the title of Hokage."
She looked at Naruto.
"Tsunade stopped believing in the title a long time ago," she whispered. "But she never stopped wearing the necklace. Until..."
She stopped.
She saw the question in Sylvie's eyes—the analytical, dissecting gaze that was too sharp for a genin. She saw the sudden stillness in Naruto.
This wasn't ramen chatter. This was a warning.
"Until she started giving it away," Shizune finished. "To people who had dreams."
Twenty years ago.
The sun was too bright. It always was in her memories of him.
Nawaki was laughing. He was twelve, loud, and so full of life it seemed impossible that his body could contain it all.
"Look, sis!" he shouted, pointing at the Hokage Monument. "One day, my face is gonna be up there! Right next to Grandpa!"
He puffed out his chest. He looked ridiculous. He looked perfect.
Tsunade smiled. She took the necklace off her own neck—the heavy green crystal, warm from her skin.
"Here," she said, draping it over his head.
It was too big for him. It hung low on his chest, a heavy pendulum.
"Wear this," she told him. "Grandpa's necklace. It'll protect you until you get your dream."
She believed it.
She was young, and she was a Senju, and she believed that love and legacy were shields. She believed that if you gave someone a piece of history, history would look out for them.
Cut to:
The smell of wet earth. Rain mixing with copper.
The body bag was too small.
Orochimaru standing over it, face blank. Jiraiya looking away.
Tsunade staring at the ground, where the necklace lay in the mud. It was cracked. A hairline fracture running through the green crystal.
It hadn't protected him. It had just marked the spot where he died.
A tiny pulse lingered along the fracture, almost like the crystal remembered what had been lost—and waited.
She picked it up. Her hands were shaking. She wiped the mud off, but the crack remained.
Medicine, she decided then, the thought cold and hard as a scalpel. Dreams don't work. Magic rocks don't work. Only science. Only rules. Only stopping death with your own two hands.
Years later.
Dan was different. He wasn't loud. He wasn't Nawaki.
He was quiet strength. He was shared vision. He talked about reform, about medical corps, about systems.
He made sense.
"I want to protect the village," Dan said, his eyes gentle. "I want to be Hokage so no more sisters have to bury their brothers."
Tsunade felt the hope stir again. A treacherous, stupid thing.
She took off the necklace.
"Take it," she whispered. "For luck."
She didn't believe in luck anymore. But she wanted to.
Cut to:
The tent. The smell of antiseptic failing to cover the smell of perforated organs.
Blood everywhere.
Her hands were inside his chest. Slippery. Frantic. Pumping chakra, knitting veins, screaming at cells that were already dead.
Live. Live. Live.
The necklace was around his neck, soaked in red. It glittered, mocking her.
His heart stopped under her fingers.
She pulled her hands back. They were stained crimson. She washed them. She scrubbed them until her skin was raw.
But the red didn't come off. It never really came off.
Tsunade stood in the alley outside the Tipsy Tanuki, staring at her hands in the moonlight.
They looked clean.
But she could still feel the phantom warmth of the blood.
"One week," she whispered to the empty street. "I gave him one week to die."
The restaurant had gone quiet, a stillness that felt less like peace and more like holding breath. Shizune had stopped talking minutes ago. She was staring into her tea as if the dregs at the bottom held the secrets of the universe, or perhaps just a reflection she wasn't sure she wanted to see.
Naruto sat back in his chair, the wood creaking under his shift in weight. The adrenaline of the bet—the rush of shouting in Tsunade's face—had faded, leaving behind a cold, heavy feeling in his gut. It settled there like a stone he'd swallowed whole.
She gave it to them, he thought, the realization echoing in the silence. And they died.
His hand drifted up to touch his chest, almost unconsciously. Under the rough fabric of his orange jacket, he could feel the hard, smooth wood of the ring he wore on a chain—the one Sylvie had given him back in the winter, before the exams, before the invasion, before everything broke.
For a heartbeat, the ring seemed to thrum against his skin, vibrating in time with the crystal's echo that still hung in his ears. A silent rhythm of consequence.
The Fox ring.
For half a second, a thought slipped through his defenses, sharp and unbidden.
If I die... does it curse her?
Does everyone who gets close to a dream end up in the ground?
His eyes flicked to Sylvie. She was frowning at her notebook, her pen tapping a nervous, staccato rhythm against the page. Then he looked at Anko, who was staring at the bottom of her sake cup with a gaze that looked suspiciously like grief.
Naruto's jaw tightened. He rejected the thought. Violently. He shoved it out of his head like he was shoving a clone off a cliff, refusing to let it take root.
No.
He stood up abruptly. The chair scraped loudly against the floor, a harsh sound that made everyone jump.
"Thanks for the food!" he announced.
His voice was a little too loud, booming in the small space. His grin was a little too wide, stretched tight over his teeth.
"I'm gonna go train! I only got a week, right? No time to sleep!"
Shizune looked up, startled out of her reverie. "Naruto, wait—"
"I'm gonna master it!" Naruto shouted over her, pumping a fist into the air. "And then I'm gonna take that necklace, and I'm gonna become Hokage, and I'm gonna show that Granny that curses are stupid!"
He didn't wait for a response. He turned and ran.
He bolted out of the restaurant, his sandals slapping against the pavement, bursting into the cool night air. He ran past the stalls, past the lights, past the few lingering drunks, not stopping until his lungs burned and the sounds of the town faded behind him.
He didn't stop until he reached the edge of the woods, where the shadows were deep and quiet.
He stood there, panting, hands on his knees, looking down at his palm. The lines of his life were etched there, dirty and calloused.
"I'll just have to not die," he whispered to the trees.
He straightened up. He formed the cross seal.
"Let's go."
A clone popped into existence beside him with a burst of smoke. Naruto held out his hand.
Blue chakra swirled into existence between them. It was wild, jagged, and dangerous. It felt alive.
Legacy wasn't a curse. It was a dare.
And Naruto Uzumaki never backed down from a dare.
Some dares are watched by things that do not blink.