Naruko Uzumaki woke before dawn.
Not out of discipline. The Kyuubi had been screaming inside her skull for three straight hours, and insomnia was no longer a nuisance but a permanent condition.
She sat up on the futon, blond hair plastered to her face with sweat, eyes irritated, a hot determination beating in her chest.
Today she would find him.
She dressed in a rush, ignored breakfast, and leapt out the window of her apartment onto Konoha's still-dark rooftops. The cool air of early morning struck her face as she ran, and for a second the Fox lowered the volume, as if even it were curious.
It took her seven minutes to reach the forest's edge. Three more to find the clearing.
And there it was. The evidence.
Naruko stopped at the edge of the clearing, breathing hard, studying it with narrowed eyes.
Seven trees.
Seven trunks with bark shattered by clean punches, some with layers of damage overlapping: fresh bark torn over wood that had already begun to scar, over older marks beneath that. The guy had been coming here for days—maybe a week—breaking trees with his bare hands.
She approached the first one. Ran her fingers over the dark stains embedded in the fibers of the wood. Dried blood. She lifted her hand and smelled it. Metallic. Earthy. Mixed with pine soil.
Her stomach flipped—and it had nothing to do with hunger.
She knelt beside the most battered trunk and examined the ground. Boot prints. Large. Deeply sunk into the damp earth. That meant weight. An adult, not a teenager.
She measured the height of the strikes with her own outstretched arm. They were above her head. Tall. Taller than Iruka-sensei.
"Male," she murmured, touching the highest mark. "Adult. Big. Not a ninja."
That last part mattered most. A ninja wouldn't train like this. They had official training grounds, chakra reinforcement techniques, Taijutsu scrolls. Punching a tree until bleeding was something done by someone with access to none of that.
A civilian.
"And what are you going to do when you find him, stupid creature?" purred the Kyuubi. "Ask him to hug you?"
"Shut up," she hissed. "I just want to understand why it works."
"You're lying."
Naruko clenched her teeth and sat against the most damaged trunk—the one with the most layers of blood. She crossed her arms, lifted her chin, and waited.
The sun rose. The forest shadows shortened. Birds sang their full repertoire and began repeating songs.
No one came.
One hour. Two. Three.
The clearing remained empty except for her and the mosquitoes.
Frustration climbed her throat. She jumped up and kicked a root.
"WHERE ARE YOU?!" she shouted at the empty forest, her voice bouncing between trees without reply.
Silence. Not even the Kyuubi responded, likely savoring her misery.
What Naruko didn't know was that two kilometers southeast, on a dirt path along the riverbank, Kael was running.
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My lungs burned like someone had poured acid into them.
The trail was uneven, filled with loose stones and roots trying to assassinate my ankles with every stride. I'd been running forty minutes and my body was begging for mercy in every fiber.
I ignored it.
Today was legs and cardio. I'd decided to rotate training zones: the forest clearing for strikes, the river path for runs, and the stairs behind the Hokage Monument for squats.
It was a crude system, loosely based on military training programs I remembered from my previous life, adapted to the fact that I had no weights, no gym, and no idea what I was doing.
But it worked. Pain was proof.
I stopped by the river, bending over my knees, watching my pathetic reflection pant in the water's surface.
"Status," I coughed.
[USER INTERFACE]
Name: Kael
Age: 20
Affiliation: Konoha Civilian
Strength: 0.91 ➔ 0.94
Speed: 0.98 ➔ 1.02
Stamina: 0.83 ➔ 0.88
Defense: 0.88 ➔ 0.91
Chakra: Inaccessible (Calcified Channels)
Skills: None
Stamina had made a decent jump. Running boosted it the most. Strength was still crawling like a blind snail. Speed had finally passed 1.0.
I sat on a flat rock by the shore, drinking river water with my hands, letting my mind drift.
The notebook. Naruko. The crack in my future knowledge.
I'd been obsessing over it since yesterday. If the protagonist was female, the entire story dynamic could shift unpredictably. The fights would probably remain the same. Villains wouldn't stop being villains because Naruto had breasts. But relationships…
Would Sasuke still leave the village if his rival was a girl clearly crushing on him? Would Sakura remain his number one fangirl, or would two girls competing change everything?
And the final battle? Naruto versus Sasuke at the Valley of the End. Naruko versus Sasuke? Would it carry the same intensity? The same outcome?
I splashed water on my face.
"Stop overthinking," I ordered myself. "You can't control what you don't understand. Control what you can: your body."
I stood, stretched my quadriceps against the rock, and started back. I planned to pass through the market for bandages and rice, maybe do squats before dusk.
The midday heat was suffocating. Halfway along, I took off my black shirt and hung it on a low branch beside the trail to grab on the way back. It was soaked with sweat and weighed like a wet rag.
I kept walking bare-chested, enjoying the breeze. A small luxury.
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Naruko returned from the forest furious, hungry, and wounded in pride.
Team 7 had D-Rank missions that afternoon. Catching Tora, some important person's cat. For the third time that week.
She chased the damn animal across the rooftops of the Commercial District, shouting obscenities while Sakura complained about the heat and Sasuke did all the work with irritating efficiency.
But her mind wasn't on the cat.
Male. Adult. Civilian. Trains in the forest. Punches trees until bleeding. Didn't come today.
Why didn't he come? Was he injured? Did he move? Had he seen her and gotten scared?
That last possibility churned her stomach.
"They all run from you, brat," the Kyuubi sang. "Why would this one be different?"
"Because he doesn't know what I am," she muttered between jumps. "The clone remembers he looked at me. And he didn't run."
"He didn't stay either."
Naruko landed badly, scraping her knee on tiles. She cursed, got up, kept running.
They captured Tora at four in the afternoon. Naruko handed it over without her usual fanfare, earning a curious glance from Kakashi over his orange book. He said nothing.
When the team dispersed, Sakura chased after Sasuke, and Naruko stood alone in the street, the sunset painting her face in orange and gold.
Her feet carried her back to the forest.
Not to the clearing. This time she walked farther, following an instinct she couldn't name. Her sandals crunched over dry leaves as she explored paths she hadn't walked before. The forest darkened as the trees thickened.
And then she saw it.
Hanging from a low branch at eye level—a black shirt. Soaked with sweat, wrinkled, collar stretched from use. It swayed gently in the breeze like a forgotten banner.
Naruko stopped cold.
Her nose wrinkled. The scent hit before her brain processed the sight.
Sweat. Salt. Soil. And beneath it all—him. That nameless scent her clone had absorbed the night of the Forbidden Scroll. That she'd felt briefly in the market street. That saturated the bark of shattered trees.
The Kyuubi went silent.
Not gradually. Not like lowering volume. Like someone had ripped the cord from the wall.
Silence.
Naruko let out an involuntary sound, low and guttural from her diaphragm. The relief was so sudden her knees trembled. She leaned against the nearest trunk, breathing unevenly, eyes closed.
It's his, she thought. The shirt is his. And its smell makes him shut up.
She opened her eyes. Looked at the shirt. Looked around. Alone.
She took it with both hands, gently, and lifted it to her face. Pressed her nose into the fabric.
Inhaled.
Peace flooded her like warm water filling an empty tub. Every muscle in her body—tense since memory began—relaxed at once. Her shoulders dropped. Her jaw unclenched.
"God…" she whispered into the cloth, and she wasn't even religious.
She stayed like that for a full minute. Two. Five.
The Kyuubi tried to return. A distant, weak growl. The shirt held it back like a shield of fabric and sweat.
Take it with you, a voice whispered—and for once it wasn't the Fox. It was her own need, naked and starving.
"I can't steal his clothes," Naruko muttered, biting her lip. "That's… weird. That's what perverts do. I can't."
But her fingers didn't release the fabric.
He'll come looking for it any moment. If you take it, he'll know someone was here.
The rational part was right.
Naruko hung the shirt back on the branch, smoothing it with near-reverent care. She stepped back. Then another.
She turned and walked toward the village. Each step away from the shirt raised the Kyuubi's volume a little more.
By the time she reached her apartment, the Fox was howling.
She went to bed without dinner. The futon smelled of cheap detergent and loneliness. She shut her eyes tight, trying to sleep, but every time consciousness loosened, the Kyuubi dug its claws in.
"Weak…"
"Trash…"
"No one wants you…"
Naruko rolled onto her side, hugging the pillow.
The image of the black shirt hanging from the branch burned behind her eyelids. The memory of the scent. The peace.
It's out there. Right now. Hanging on a tree. Waiting for you.
It wasn't rational. It was a pulse. A hot, liquid need that seeped from some deep corner of her psyche into her chakra channels—and from there into the world.
She didn't feel it form. She was half-asleep when a thread of chakra slipped from her body and condensed beside her bed.
The clone opened its eyes.
It didn't look at Naruko. Didn't look at the apartment. It turned its head toward the open window, where the night breeze carried scents of the sleeping village—and among them, like a lighthouse in fog, that one.
Salt. Sweat. Soil.
The clone slipped through the window without a sound. Bare feet touched the roof. It ran.
It ran across Konoha's rooftops under the waning moon, leaping alleys, dodging water tanks, guided solely by a sense amplified by its creator's desperation. It wasn't fast. Not agile. A weak, translucent clone with one directive: Reach the silence.
The forest swallowed it. Branches scratched its face and arms, but it didn't care. It followed the trail to the path where the shirt hung, swaying in the night breeze.
The clone grabbed it.
The instant its fingers touched the cloth, the echo of the Kyuubi vibrating even in copies shut off. The clone exhaled softly, trembling, pressing the shirt to its chest.
It buried its face in the fabric. Inhaled deeply. Eyes closed. The expression on its face was happiness so pure it bordered on obscene in its simplicity.
It didn't linger. It couldn't. The chakra sustaining it was fragile. Minutes before dispersal.
It ran back.
Crossed the village like a translucent orange ghost, clutching a black shirt to its heart. Slipped through Naruko's apartment window, walked to the futon where the original slept restlessly, murmuring in dreams, and with a tenderness no jutsu could program, slid the shirt into Naruko's embrace.
The original clutched it instinctively. Fingers tightened around fabric. Nose buried in the collar.
The Kyuubi went silent.
Naruko's sleeping face relaxed. The crease between her brows vanished. Her lips curved into the smallest, most genuine smile she'd worn in months.
The clone stood beside the bed a moment. Smiled the same smile. Then vanished in a puff of white smoke.
----------------------
Naruko woke with sunlight on her face and something soft pressed against her chest.
She blinked, disoriented, staring at the wrinkled black fabric in her arms. For a second she didn't understand. Then the scent hit, and the clone's memory flooded her brain like a waterfall.
The forest. The night run. The shirt torn from the branch.
She sat up on the futon, holding the garment before her with both hands. It was wrinkled, sweaty, stained at the collar with what looked like dirt. The ugliest thing she'd ever seen.
It was perfect.
She lifted it to her face again. Inhaled. Silence returned, soft as a blanket settling over her shoulders.
"Mine," she murmured into the cloth, and the word tasted true.
She didn't wash it. Didn't hang it. She folded it with absurd care—as if it were a forbidden scroll—and slid it beneath her pillow.
When she left for missions that morning, she was smiling.
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On the other side of the village, Kael returned to the river path to retrieve his shirt.
The branch was empty.
He stood there a moment, staring at the vacant space, scratching the back of his neck.
"Did the wind take it?" he muttered, scanning the ground. Nothing. He shrugged. "Shit. That was the one with the fewest holes."
He sighed, turned around, and went back to his routine.