(First Sunrise of the Leaf Village)
[Several months before the story starts in Chapter 2...]
The end of the year at the orphanage always smelled like dust and cold soap.
"Futons outside! All of them!" the matron shouted, clapping her hands at us like we were a flock of particularly dim chickens. "Anything torn beyond patching goes. Anything you don't use goes. We are not dragging old junk into a new year, do you hear me?"
A chorus of groans went up. Naruto's was the loudest, obviously.
"This is oppression," he muttered as he kicked his rolled futon toward the door. "This is how they break great ninja spirits before they even awaken."
"You break your own spirit every time you fall asleep with your sandals on," I said, lifting my futon into my arms. It was lighter than it should've been. The stuffing had bunched up in the corners over the years so the middle sagged, like it was tired of pretending to be a real mattress.
We shuffled downstairs in a sad procession: threadbare blankets, lumps of cotton batting, one kid dragging a busted dresser drawer like a dead pet. Out in the little yard, our breath puffed white in the winter air. Washing lines had been cleared to make room, and we propped the futons over them like pale bloated fish.
The matron stalked among us, arms folded in her sleeves, eyes sharp. "Check your trunks," she called. "If you haven't touched it since last year, you don't need it."
My stomach knotted.
My trunk wasn't much. A couple changes of clothes, a chipped mug, some socks with more darn than sock. But the important part wasn't the official inventory.
The important part was the space under the trunk.
I knelt, fingers already numb from the cold seeping through the floorboards, and eased it forward just enough to get my hand under. Paper rasped against my skin. A secret folder of folded drawings, old worksheets with red circles like battle scars, scraps of half-decent ink someone was going to throw out.
"Naruto, that shirt is more hole than shirt," the matron snapped somewhere behind me. "You're not keeping it."
"It's my lucky training shirt!" he squawked. "I can't just—"
"You wore it to nap, not to train."
I tuned them out.
Okay. Triage.
The rules were clear: anything the matron saw that looked "useless" was gone. But there wasn't a law against strategic hiding.
I spread the papers in a quick fan and skimmed them. A doodle of Naruto in a too-big Hokage cloak, cloak hem swallowing his feet. A sketch of Iruka grading exams, eyebrows knotted, his expression softer than he realized when he thought nobody was watching. Pages of eyes, hands, ink blots that had become foxes or frogs when I got bored.
The good ones hurt to look at. They always did. Proof that time had happened, and I'd been there to see it. Proof that it could all be lost again in one unlucky day.
"Remember," the matron called, voice cutting through my little panic spiral, "new year, new start. No use clinging to things that weigh you down."
Easy to say when you had a home that didn't fit in a box.
I picked out two or three that could pass as "practice pages" and left them on top. The rest— the ones that felt like little pieces of actual memory—went into a narrow cloth pouch I'd sown into the underside of my pillow last year. You can't throw away what you don't know exists. That rule went both ways.
By the time I shoved my trunk back, Naruto thumped down beside me with his own, breathing hard like the thing had bitten him.
"She took my shirt," he grumbled. "And my cracked kunai practice target. She said if I want to stab something that badly I can sign up when I'm a genin."
"That's… fair?" I said.
"It was a sentimental target."
"That's not a thing."
"Is now."
He flopped backward dramatically, arms flung out, staring at the wooden ceiling. Dust motes drifted in the cold shafts of light like little ghosts.
"If she makes me throw away anything cool," he said, "I'll just get cooler stuff this year. Then she'll be sorry."
"That's the spirit." I shut my trunk with my foot. "Fail upwards through material attachment."
He squinted at me. "I have no idea what you just said, but I'm taking it as support."
"Good. You need it."
By late afternoon, the dorms looked temporarily less like a slow avalanche of fabric and more like somewhere humans might live. Which was, of course, the matron's cue to shoo us all out before we ruined the illusion.
She stood in the doorway with a little cloth purse in hand, expression softening a fraction.
"The village is turning a page," she said. "You brats should, too. Here."
She pressed a few coins into my hand, and a few into Naruto's. Not much. Enough for a snack, maybe a cheap toy if you were willing to go to bed hungry.
"No wandering past the shrine district," she added. "Home before moonrise. Festivals bring pickpockets and drunk shinobi, and I don't want to go hunting you out of a ditch."
Naruto laughed like the idea of anyone carrying him anywhere wasn't even possible. I just nodded.
Outside, Konoha was already half transformed.
The winter sky was turning purple at the edges, and lanterns winked to life one by one along the main streets, painted paper glowing in soft orange circles. Ropes of little wooden rings hung between buildings, clacking together when the wind gusted. Someone had draped a thin strip of white cloth over the Hokage Monument faces, like the mountain was wearing a ceremonial scarf.
Naruto inhaled like he could eat the whole atmosphere.
"Smell that?" he said. "That's festival air. You can taste the street food in it."
"That's smoke and grilled fish."
"Exactly."
He glanced at me, eyes bright.
"C'mon, let's go see everything before the good stuff sells out."
We pushed into the flow of people: civilians in worn winter coats with fresh sashes, chunin in off-duty vests, kids with little bells tied to their sleeves. I kept one hand in my pocket around the coins and the other on Naruto's jacket so we didn't get separated. He was a human magnet for trouble and also a surprisingly good battering ram.
We hadn't gone far when a burst of color caught his eye.
"Whoa, look!" he yelped, veering hard enough to almost yank me off my feet.
It was a painted wooden board propped against a stall, big as a door and twice as loud. Nine animals marched around a circle: a tanuki with a leaf on its head, a sleek cat with a bell on its tail, a rain-shelled turtle, a monkey with a staff, a stag with curling antlers, a smiling slug, a beetle with spread wings, an ox mid-charge, and a fox standing on its hind legs, jaws open in a laugh.
Above them, someone had written: CHOOSE YOUR SIGN FOR THE NEW YEAR!
The vendor behind the board was old, with a back bent like a question mark and hands stained with paint. Little carved rings lay in a shallow tray before him, each one bearing one of the animals in miniature.
Naruto leaned over the tray, eyes huge. "Heaven Fox," he declared without hesitation, jabbing a finger at the carved fox. "Obviously."
The old man chuckled, the sound soft and dry. "Big risks, big returns, hm? Fox sign's for the ones who keep betting on impossible things and living long enough to annoy everybody about it."
"See?" Naruto said, puffing his chest. "Perfect."
The vendor's gaze slid to me.
"And you?" he asked. "What's your sign, girl?"
I looked down at the tray. The slug charm was simple: rounded, unassuming. The fox was bright, tail flared in a ridiculous arc. My hand drifted between them like it couldn't make up its mind.
"You look like someone who carries other people's trouble," the old man mused. "Slug fits. Steady. Takes the poison and lives anyway. But your eyes keep going back to the fox."
I swallowed.
He wasn't wrong.
"Maybe I don't want to jinx it," I said lightly. "I already have enough impossible things in my life."
Naruto elbowed me. "You should pick something cool, not slug. Slug's all squishy. No offense, Mister Slug," he added quickly to the tray, like he was worried about cursing us.
"I'll think about it," I said.
My fingers closed around one of the little fox rings anyway, feeling the shallow carving under my thumb. It was cheap wood, nothing special. But when I pictured it on a cord around Naruto's wrist or tied to his hitai-ate someday, it felt… right.
"How much for this one?" I asked.
The old man gave me a long, considering look, taking in my clothes, the worn hem of my sleeves, the way my coins probably clinked too softly when I dug them out.
"For the future Hokage's sign?" he said. "Festival price."
He named a number low enough that I didn't have to choose between the charm and dinner. Ridiculous. Maybe he was indulging his own superstition. Maybe Naruto had already infected half the village with "future Hokage" as a disease, and this was how it manifested.
I handed over the coins. Naruto bounced on his toes.
"You're getting fox?" he crowed. "Nice! We can be a matching pair of—"
"It's not for me," I said quickly, hiding it in my sleeve. "I just like the design."
His face did a little confused scrunch that would've been easy to read if he'd ever practiced reading anything. I turned away before he could press.
We drifted deeper into the festival.
Near the shrine district, the crowd thickened. Stalls here leaned more toward the ceremonial than the fun: fortunes on paper slips, protective ofuda, calligraphy brushes, little bundles of dried herbs knotted with red string.
And, dominating the square, a big iron drum atop a brick platform, fire already licking inside it.
A line of villagers snaked toward it, each holding something different: a faded charm, an old prayer board, a scrap of paper clutched like it contained something too heavy to say out loud.
At the base of the steps leading up to the drum stood Morino Ibiki.
He looked like someone had carved a man out of scarecrow wire and scar tissue, then stuck him in a long coat as an afterthought. Arms folded, face set in that permanent frown like the world had failed his test and was on thin ice about getting a makeup.
"I thought festivals were supposed to be fun," Naruto muttered under his breath. "Why's Scary Head Interrogation Guy here?"
I didn't bother asking how he'd learned Ibiki's name. Naruto collected gossip like other kids collected toys.
"Maybe they're interrogating the old year," I said.
As if he'd heard me—which he probably had, shinobi senses being unfair—Ibiki glanced over. His gaze dragged across us, heavy as a hand.
Then, to my surprise, he crooked two fingers.
"You kids," he said. "You know what this is for?"
Naruto's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Fire?" he tried. "For… uh… burning stuff?"
"Sharp as ever," Ibiki said dryly. "You write something you regret, on this." He held up a small blank strip of paper. "Or something you want to change. You own it. Then you burn it so it stops owning you."
"That's dumb," Naruto said immediately. "Paper can't own stuff. That's not how—"
"Naruto," I hissed.
Ibiki's scarred eyebrow twitched. I couldn't tell if he was amused or contemplating throwing Naruto into the drum.
"You fail every test I give you," he told him, "and you still show up for the next one. That alone means you've got more sense than some adults I know. So write something. Or don't. But don't whine about your life if you won't pick up a brush."
He handed us each a strip and a brush anyway.
Around us, people were muttering to themselves as they wrote. A woman with soot on her sleeves scribbled quickly, jaw tight. A boy about our age frowned, tongue poking out, then clutched his paper so hard it crumpled before he walked up the steps.
"What do we even put?" Naruto whispered, staring at his blank strip like it had insulted him. "Do I just write 'everything'? That's a lot of ink."
"Start smaller," Ibiki said. His tone hadn't changed, but I felt the words like an instruction pressed between my shoulder blades. "Or you'll never start at all."
He turned away to call the next person.
My hand shook a little as I dipped the brush.
What did I regret? There was a convenient list. Wrong lives. Wrong choices. Wrong moments frozen in my head like they'd been burned there instead of on paper.
If I tried to cram all of that into one strip, the ink would never dry.
The brush hovered over the paper.
I wrote: I'm sorry I didn't fight back sooner.
It wasn't even clear which life I meant. That was the point. It was all one long line to me, shared spine, different skin.
Next to me, Naruto scribbled something with wild strokes, tongue between his teeth. He hunched over so I couldn't see. He always assumed I'd make fun of his handwriting, which, to be fair, I absolutely would.
We climbed the steps together.
Up close, the fire was almost too hot, waves of heat hitting my face and making my eyes sting. Ash floated up in lazy spirals, carrying ghosts of characters burned into nothing.
I dropped my strip in. The paper curled black, then vanished. The regret did not explode out of my chest in a dramatic wave of catharsis. No weight fell off my shoulders. But something about the choice sat different in my ribs.
Naruto made a face, screwed his eyes shut, and shoved his paper in like he was ripping off a bandage.
"What'd you write?" I asked on the way down.
"None of your business," he said too quickly. His cheeks were pink from more than the fire. "You?"
"Same."
He grumbled, but didn't push.
Further up, the steps to the main shrine were crowded. Two chunin stood at the bottom, trying and failing to look dignified while kids used them as human posts to weave around.
I recognized them from around the village: one with a bandaged nose, one with dark hair and permanent tired eyes. Kotetsu and Izumo, the eternal "somebody else's problem" guardians of Konoha's paperwork.
Tonight, though, they had bells tied to their wrists and were clearly enjoying themselves too much.
"Name and sign for the new year!" Kotetsu barked at the next kid in line, holding out a hand like a toll collector.
"Why?" the girl asked, suspicious.
"So we can make sure you're not secretly a tanuki in disguise," Izumo said with total seriousness. "We've had… incidents."
The girl considered this, then solemnly replied, "Sayo. Turtle." They waved her through.
Naruto practically shoved people aside to get to the front.
"Naruto Uzumaki," he announced, puffing his chest out. "Future Hokage. Heaven Fox sign."
Kotetsu squinted at him. "I think this one's actually Gremlin," he murmured to Izumo. "Was that on the board?"
Izumo made a show of flipping through an imaginary ledger. "No, but I'm seeing a lot of red ink in his future."
"Hey!" Naruto protested.
"And you?" Izumo asked me, lips twitching.
"Sylvie," I said. "Uh. Slug, maybe."
Naruto made a sound of betrayal. "You picked slug?"
"Slugs are resilient," I said. "They eat your garden and you can't do anything about it."
Kotetsu chuckled and stepped aside. "Good answer. Go on up, Slug and Gremlin."
Naruto stormed past them muttering something about dumb gatekeepers. I caught Izumo's eye as I passed. For a split second, through the joke, his expression was gentler. Like he knew exactly how little we got to walk up these steps for fun.
The shrine itself was a flurry of motion. Incense smoke lay in thin layers over everything, catching the lantern light. People clapped and bowed before the offering box. Priests in white and red moved like slow brushstrokes through the crowd, ringing little bells.
We didn't have enough money to make a respectable offering, and honestly the gods of this world had already made their opinion on me pretty clear, but we stood at the edge and watched.
Naruto's shoulder pressed into mine, jittering with restless energy.
He was buzzing so hard he didn't notice when we passed a low table off to one side where three jōnin sat with sake cups.
I did.
They drew my senses the way campfires had in my other life: centers of gravity, places everything around them oriented itself without realizing.
The one with the cigarette had a beard-shadow and tired, kind eyes. Asuma. The one with red eyes and long dark hair I recognized as Kurenai. The third man had his hair pulled back in a low ponytail, forehead protector worn like he'd forgotten to take it off since the war. Shikaku.
Shikaku looked like he was halfway asleep. His chakra didn't. It coiled under the table in lazy spirals, a quiet whirlpool with a blade at the bottom.
Asuma watched kids run past, smile small but real. "The next batch looks rowdy," he said, cigarette bobbing.
"Rowdy is better than broken," Kurenai murmured, tracing the rim of her cup.
Shikaku grunted something that sounded like "either way, troublesome," without opening his eyes.
Naruto tugged me on, utterly oblivious to how much of our future sat at that table.
I filed away the image. Adults laughing under lantern light, smoke curling up to join the incense, their shoulders relaxed for once. For a moment, the village didn't look like a military machine. It looked like a place that might survive.
The year always seemed to end and begin at the academy.
By the time the last of the festival paper lanterns were lit in the street, Iruka was still in the staffroom, sorting through a stack of old classroom charms and half-graded kanji quizzes that wouldn't matter in a few hours.
His back ached. That was new. Or maybe he was just finally admitting it.
"Sensei, can I put this one in the burned-wishes bin?" a little girl had asked earlier, pressing a charm at him like it was cursed. "I used it all year and I still failed."
He'd told her no—then given her a new one, quietly, and kept the old charm for himself. It wasn't the paper's fault.
Now it sat at the top of his own bundle. A tiny strip of cloth with clumsy stitches, "DO YOUR BEST" sewn in crookedly. He remembered making it with numb fingers and too much earnestness the year he graduated. It had been taped above his desk through every exam, every all-nighter. Every time he'd almost given up.
Mizuki had laughed at it, back then.
Iruka stepped out into the corridor, intending to take the box to storage, and almost collided with him.
"Whoa, sorry," he said, shifting the box. "Didn't see you."
Mizuki had a stack of student rosters under one arm, pen tucked behind his ear. His smile showed teeth a little too sharply. "Maybe you should get your eyes checked, Iruka."
It hit Iruka, then, how much deeper the lines around Mizuki's mouth had gotten. How he carried himself like a man always braced for a blow that never came. Or hadn't yet.
"It's the end of the year," Iruka said. "Everyone looks blurry by this point."
Mizuki snorted.
They fell into step without discussing it, boots thudding softly on the wooden floor. Through the windows, Iruka could see the lanterns bobbing above the village like a second, human-made constellation.
"You heading home?" he asked.
"Eventually." Mizuki shifted the papers. "Rosters for next term. Our fearless superiors want the classes balanced just right. And of course, it's me stuck checking the handwriting."
"You're better at paperwork than I am," Iruka said. It was true. Mizuki had always been faster with forms, neater with chalk. Iruka was the messy one. The one whose notes sprawled off the edge of the board.
"Weak praise."
Silence stretched for a beat.
"Hey," Iruka tried, nudging the box up in his arms. "Do you remember when we used to sneak dango into the storeroom and blame the senior students?"
Mizuki's mouth twitched. For a second, the expression almost looked like it used to, when they were teenagers with more bravado than sense. Then it twisted into something sharper.
"We were idiots," he said flatly. "I try not to remember that phase."
Iruka huffed a laugh. "You're the one who talked me out of dropping out, you know. Sensei always said I owed you for that."
There it was. The flash.
The memory rose in his mind as easily as breathing:
The academy hallway, late, empty. His hands clenched on the strap of a bag he hadn't even finished packing. Mizuki shoving him back against the wall, eyes furious.
"If you quit now, they win," Mizuki had snarled. "You're just proving them right. Is that what you want? To be the weak one who couldn't take it?"
He hadn't wanted that. So he'd stayed. And somehow survived long enough to stand on the other side of the teacher's desk.
Now, Mizuki snorted again, but there was no humor in it.
"Kids like that don't thank anyone," he said. "They just take what they can and complain the world still hates them."
He didn't say Naruto's name. He didn't have to.
Something in Iruka's chest tightened.
"They're not us, Mizuki," he said quietly. "That's the point. They shouldn't have to be."
They stopped at a junction. The hallway branched: one arm toward the archive rooms, one toward the staff exit, and beyond that, the festival.
Mizuki shifted his grip on the papers. For a second, his knuckles went white.
"Right," he said. "Sure. Whatever you say."
He adjusted his smile by hand, like it was something he put on for work.
"Happy New Year, Iruka."
He said it like he was closing a ledger, not offering a wish.
Iruka watched him walk away toward the dark of the archive rooms, his silhouette folding into the shadows between lantern-pools. The little bundle of old charms in Iruka's box felt heavier.
They'd fought through the same war. Sat in the same funerals. Stood together on the same walls, watching the flames devour houses and praying that scream hadn't come from someone they knew.
How had they ended up so far apart?
He tightened his grip on the box and turned the other way, toward the door, the sound of children's laughter floating faintly on the cold air. He couldn't drag Mizuki back to the light with him. He could only keep choosing to walk into it.
If he spent the first sunrise of the new year anchored in old resentments, what kind of teacher would that make him?
Out in the street, the breeze smelled like grilled squid and incense and snow. He drew it in deep.
"Happy New Year, Mizuki," Iruka said softly, to no one. "I hope you find something worth keeping."
Then he started walking toward the shrine.
We'd exhausted the shrine district and Naruto was starting to vibrate in place from too much excitement and too little food. The coins in my hand had gone warm from being gripped so tightly.
We followed our noses to a side street where smaller stalls clustered in less organized rows. The lights here were dimmer, the crowd thinner, the conversations a little louder. Off-duty shinobi laughed with their whole bodies, leaning on each other. Civilians relaxed their shoulders now that they'd done their official prayers.
A grill hissed nearby. The smell of fat and soy sauce hit my brain like a genjutsu.
"Food," Naruto said reverently.
We were halfway to the stall when someone exploded out of it.
She was all purple coat and long brown hair and too many dango sticks, skewers clamped between her teeth and fanned between her fingers. The vendor behind her looked both relieved and resigned, like this was a natural disaster he'd learned to budget for.
"Festival rule!" Anko Mitarashi announced to the street at large, talking around a mouthful of sweets. "Anyone who survived another year in this hellhole gets free candy—courtesy of my incredible charm and questionable expense reports!"
Her eyes snagged on us instantly. Predators recognized other predators, even if one of them was currently disguised as a scrawny orphan.
"Oi," she said, bouncing over in two long strides. "You two look like you crawled out of the laundry basket. Orphanage brats, right?"
Naruto bristled on reflex. "So what if we are?"
"So you get extra," she said, and shoved a skewer into each of our hands before we could answer.
The meat was still sizzling. I bit in carefully, flavor bursting across my tongue so hard my eyes almost crossed. Naruto made a sound that would've been embarrassing from anyone else.
"New Year's rule," Anko said around her dango. "Brats who survived another one get a treat. That's it. No arguing."
She ruffled Naruto's hair hard enough to nearly crack his neck. He squawked but didn't pull away.
Up close, I could feel her chakra like static. Frenetic on the surface, whipping around in bright, sharp spikes of sugar and adrenaline. Underneath, though, it was hollowed out in places. Little dark knots where something had burned away.
Like someone had carved pieces out of her and she'd decided the solution was to fill the gaps with noise.
"You two staying out of trouble tonight?" she asked.
"No," Naruto said, at the exact same time I said, "Yes."
She laughed. "Good answer and bad answer. You'll do fine. Try not to die before graduation, yeah?"
She pivoted away, already waving down another shinobi and harassing him into arm-wrestling for dango. Up on a nearby rooftop, silhouettes shifted into view: a man with a senbon in his mouth and lazy posture—Genma—and another with a sword on his back—Hayate—watching the street below without moving much at all.
The village's immune system. Always there, just out of sight. Sometimes loud and messy, sometimes a quiet line of steel.
We ate the skewers in stunned silence.
"Why is she kind of cool," Naruto said finally, "and also terrifying?"
"That's probably the definition of jōnin," I said.
We wandered until the festival started thinning at the edges, lanterns fewer, voices quieter. The warmth of the crowd fell away, leaving the chill to creep back into my fingers.
"Hey," Naruto said suddenly. "Let's go this way."
He pointed toward a narrow path leading off between buildings. It sloped up.
"That's not the way home," I said.
"Duh. I know that. We're going to the training field."
"What, right now?"
"If I don't at least look at it, I'll feel lazy," he said. "And future Hokage can't feel lazy. It's like a law."
I rolled my eyes, but I followed.
The training field lay open and pale under the moon, the ground hard with cold. The practice posts stood like teeth. The targets were pockmarked circles, shadows biting into them.
We weren't alone.
"Youth!" a voice bellowed from the center of the field. "One hundred and twenty-three! Flames of youth do not rest even on the eve of a new year!"
Naruto and I froze, peeking from behind the fence.
Might Guy was doing fingertip push-ups with a boy who looked like a smaller, rounder mirror of him. Same haircut, same eyebrows, same green jumpsuit, slightly less horrifying teeth.
"Lee," Gai cried, sweat flying off him in arcs. "If we do not greet the new year with our muscles aflame, how can we possibly expect it to smile upon our efforts?"
"Y-Yes, Gai-sensei!" Lee gasped, body shaking. "I will not let my youth be outshone!"
They were both balanced on one hand now, the other arm raised toward the sky like they were saluting the moon with sheer insanity.
Naruto's eyes were huge. "They're insane," he whispered, awed.
"They're going to break the earth," I whispered back.
Without looking, Gai turned his head. Of course he did.
"Ah!" he shouted, grin splitting his face. "Two more youthful sprouts, drawn here by the spark of training! Come, join us! Let your blood race with the power of effort on this auspicious night!"
Naruto flailed, caught in the spotlight. "We—we were just passing by! Totally not spying!"
"Young man!" Gai declared, flipping upright in one smooth motion like gravity was a suggestion. "What is your name?"
"Na—Naruto Uzumaki," he said.
Gai's eyes shimmered. Literally shimmered. "The Hokage Monument already knows it," he breathed. "Splendid! You, too, must burn brightly! Join us for ten push-ups to greet the year!"
Naruto squared his shoulders like he was being challenged to a duel. "Only ten? I can do that in my sleep."
He dropped down. One, two, three—by five his arms were shaking. By eight he was making noises like a dying frog. By ten he collapsed flat onto the frozen dirt.
Lee applauded with genuine enthusiasm. "Amazing, Naruto-kun! Your spirit is most impressive!"
Naruto wheezed into the ground. "Told you. Easy."
Gai beamed at me next. "And you, youthful blossom! Will you not join us in this sacred ritual of sweat and suffering?"
"I'll cheer from here," I said, backing up a step. "Someone has to remain alive to tell the tale."
He threw his head back and laughed like that was the greatest thing he'd ever heard.
"Prudent!" he boomed. "Youth takes many forms! Whether in fists, in feet, or in the courage to remain standing and support others! Very well! Remember this, both of you: the new year is not magic. It is simply one more chance to decide you will not give up."
Lee sagely nodded, as if his sensei had just recited scripture.
Naruto pushed himself onto his elbows, cheeks flushed, eyes burning. "I won't," he said. "I'm gonna graduate this year. For real."
Gai's hand landed on his hair, ruffling it with less violence than Anko but more fervor. "I will look forward to your exam with great anticipation!" he said. "Let your youth explode, Naruto-kun!"
We left them still shouting numbers at the sky.
The path up to the Hokage Rock's viewing ledge was steep, narrow, and absolutely not meant for unsupervised children in the dark. Naruto attacked it like it had personally insulted him. I followed because the alternative was letting him go alone and tumbling to his death, which would be a very stupid way for the universe to handle our narrative.
By the time we scrambled over the last rocky lip, my lungs were on fire.
We weren't the first ones up there.
The Third Hokage stood near the edge, cloak wrapped tight against the wind, pipe tucked into his belt instead of his mouth. A small lacquered box sat at his feet.
For a heartbeat, panic. Then training kicked in. We straightened as much as two exhausted eleven-year-olds could.
"H-Hokage-sama!" Naruto yelped. "We weren't vandalizing anything, I swear! Yet!"
"Not helping," I hissed.
Hiruzen turned his head slowly, like it took effort to drag himself out of whatever thoughts had been lodged up here with him.
His face was old. Not just the "lots of wrinkles" kind of old. The kind of old where every new line had a specific story attached. Tonight, under the faint halo of pre-dawn light, those lines looked deeper.
Then he smiled.
"Relax," he said. "Even the Hokage is allowed to watch the new year come in peace. Preferably without pranks, though I suspect that may be too much to hope for with you two."
Naruto grinned, fear dissolving. "See? He knows me."
"Yes," Hiruzen said dryly. "Unfortunately."
He bent down, opened the little box, and gestured us over. Inside, neatly arranged, were rice balls, pickled vegetables, and slices of rolled egg. Simple food, but clean, fresh, and smelling like actual effort had gone into it.
My stomach clenched.
"Come," he said. "I brought more than I can eat. It would be wasteful to let it go cold."
I shot Naruto a look: this is not normal, do not screw it up. He responded with his usual expression of "I am going to say something stupid, try to stop me."
But he only bowed, awkward and quick. "Thank you, Old Man— I mean, Hokage-sama."
Hiruzen pretended not to hear the slip.
We sat. The stone was freezing through my clothes, but the food between us made a little island of warmth. The village spread out below, a patchwork of roofs and lanterns and faint smoke threads. From up here, the festival looked… small. Intimate. Manageable.
"What do people do for the first sunrise?" Naruto asked with his mouth already half full. "Is there a rule?"
"People like to say," Hiruzen replied, "that the way you greet the first sunrise shapes your year. I don't put too much faith in superstition." His eyes slid over the faces carved into the stone beneath us. "But I do enjoy the excuse to sit still and remember who we've lost, and who we haven't."
He handed me a rice ball. My fingers brushed his, briefly. His chakra felt like an old tree: roots sunk deep, bark scarred by storms, still standing because the alternative was unthinkable.
"What do you want from the new year, Naruto?" he asked.
Naruto didn't hesitate. He never did when it came to this.
"I'm gonna graduate," he said, spraying a few rice grains. "For real this time. And then I'm gonna get stronger and stronger and stronger, and become Hokage, and everyone's gonna acknowledge me."
He said it in one breath, like if he stopped halfway the universe would interrupt and tell him it wasn't accepting requests at this time.
Hiruzen's smile turned sad around the edges. "A big wish," he said. "But you've never been the type for small ones."
His gaze shifted to me.
"And you, Sylvie? What do you want from the year?"
My first instinct was to say something flippant. World peace. A lifetime supply of snacks. Less paperwork in the afterlife.
But his eyes were steady on mine, and behind them, something in me remembered standing in another world watching news footage of destruction, thinking: I would kill for boring right now.
"I…" I started, then stopped.
The wind tugged at the edges of my sleeves.
"I want us to still be here next year," I said finally. "Preferably not dead."
Naruto choked on his rice. "Wow, way to make it depressing."
"It's a reasonable goal," I said. "Ambitious, even."
Hiruzen laughed softly. He didn't say yes, of course, or promise anything. Hokage who'd lived this long didn't make vows they couldn't keep. But the way he looked at us changed.
"Survival is an underrated dream," he said. "I will do what I can to help with that."
The sky was turning from black to deep blue now, the edge of the world lightening like someone had drawn a line and started erasing night.
"People in other lands have all sorts of rituals for this moment," Hiruzen said, more to himself than to us. "Some climb mountains. Some stay awake all night in temples. Some drink until they forget there is a tomorrow."
He glanced down at us. "We get to sit on the faces of dead men and eat rice balls. I've had worse years."
Naruto snickered.
As the first sliver of sun crept over the distant trees, the village below caught it. Snow on the rooftops flashed gold. The ring-lanterns still hung across streets, now pale against the dawn, but when the light hit them, for a moment, it was like the whole village was threaded through with circles of fire.
The sun itself looked like a ring from up here. A circle appearing out of nothing, climbing the sky. The Ninefold Zodiac board flashed in my memory. The fox charm hidden in my sleeve grew suddenly very warm.
"Hey," Naruto said quietly. For once.
He shuffled closer, hand held out, palm up, fingers slightly curled.
"We should… I dunno. Make some kind of… thing," he said, words tripping over each other. "Like, uh, a promise. For this. For next time."
"A tradition," I supplied.
"Yeah. That. A… tridi—"
"Tradition," I repeated.
"Right. That." He glared at the horizon like it had corrected him. "We should do this again next year. And the year after. And the year after that. We'll come up here and watch the sunrise and see how not-dead we are."
He said it like a challenge, and like the idea of us not making it wasn't allowed.
"If we're alive," I said anyway, because someone had to say it.
He didn't even pause.
"We will be," he said firmly. "I decided."
Decision as jutsu. Maybe that was his real bloodline limit.
I took my hand out of my sleeve.
The little fox ring sat in my palm, wood smoothed by the pressure of my fingers. Up close, the carving was a bit sloppy. The tail was too thick. The grin too wide. It looked like something a kid might draw.
"Here," I said.
He blinked at it. "What's that?"
"A bribe," I said. "For your stupid impossible plans."
I pressed it into his hand and folded his fingers over it.
"It's the fox sign from earlier," I added. "If you're going to keep betting on impossible things, you might as well do it properly."
He opened his hand slowly, like he was worried it would vanish. The little charm lay there, catching the new sunlight. His breath fogged around it.
His chakra flared in my sight, bright orange shot through with a startling gold, embarrassment and delight and something sharper all tangled together.
"You… bought this," he said.
"Don't make it weird," I warned. "I had change."
He looked up, eyes suspiciously shiny for someone who made fun of me for being sentimental.
"I'm gonna wear this when I become Hokage," he said. It wasn't boasting. It was a simple, flat statement. "So you better still be around to complain about how it clashes with my outfit."
"I already drew you in the cloak," I reminded him. "You have to match that, or my composition will be ruined."
That got a laugh out of him.
"I'll make it real," he said. "Promise."
Down below, somewhere in the shrinking shadows, Iruka was probably shepherding some half-asleep kid home. Anko was probably trying to con a stall owner out of breakfast. Mizuki was… wherever he'd chosen to stand when the sun came up, facing whatever direction he'd decided was forward.
Up here, it was just us and an old man and a new circle of light.
I pressed my hands together, bowed over my knees, and greeted the sunrise the way everyone else did. It felt insufficient. It felt like the only thing I could do.
If the world really did move in circles, I decided, I wanted this to be one of the ones it came back to. Three specks on stone, a freezing wind, and a day we hadn't ruined yet.
On his way home, the streets mostly empty now, Iruka glanced up without meaning to.
The Hokage Monument cut a dark shape against the brightening sky. For a heartbeat, he saw three tiny silhouettes on the ledge: one tall adult, two smaller shapes crowded close together.
Too far to make out faces. Close enough to recognize the posture.
Kids, watching the sunrise like it might answer something if they stared hard enough.
He smiled, the ache in his back easing a little.
"At least someone got to greet this one properly," he murmured.
Then he turned his collar up against the cold and kept walking, carrying his box of old charms into a year that, for a few more breaths, hadn't gone wrong yet.