Being a baby is not as easy as it looks.
From the outside, it probably seems simple enough — sleep, eat, cry, repeat. But from the inside, from the perspective of an old soul named Kenji Matsuda trapped inside this tiny body, the experience was far more complicated and far more exhausting than I could have imagined.
This body refused to cooperate.
I wanted to move my hand to the right, but what happened instead was my hand slapping my own face. I wanted to sit up straight and look around, but my neck muscles weren't strong enough yet and my head flopped sideways like a flower that had been overwatered. I wanted to speak, to ask questions, to do a thousand things I used to do without a second thought — but all that came out of my mouth were vague, shapeless sounds that even I couldn't decipher.
Frustrating? Absolutely.
But Kenji Matsuda had lived eighty-three years. He had learned that the best things in life require patience.
So I waited. Observed. Absorbed.
The Uzumaki family home was neither too large nor too small.
From the perspective of a baby who spent most of his time in a crib or in someone's arms, I mapped every corner of every room I could reach with my still-frequently-blurry vision. Wooden walls with a modern touch. Family photographs hanging in neat rows — and every time my eyes managed to stay focused long enough on one of those photos, my chest filled with a strange and overwhelming feeling.
That was Naruto in that photo. The real Naruto Uzumaki. His smile was exactly as it had been in the anime, though now there were fine lines at the corners of his eyes and his hair was slightly shorter than in his youth.
And beside him, Hinata. Her face more mature, but her smile just as gentle as it had always been.
I, old Kenji who had cried three separate times watching the Pain arc, nearly cried again looking at that photograph. Fortunately, as a baby, crying was perfectly normal and no one suspected a thing.
Boruto came home every night.
That was the first thing I noticed about my father in this life. No matter what mission he had been running, no matter how early or how late the hour, Boruto Uzumaki was always home before I fell asleep. Sometimes he walked in with a dirty uniform and a few small cuts on his arms, but he always stopped by my room first before he showered.
He would stand at the edge of my crib and look down at me with an expression I found difficult to define.
Not the expression of someone who didn't know what to do — more like the expression of someone who understood exactly how precious something was, and for that very reason didn't dare touch it carelessly.
"Hey, Saruto." His voice always dropped an octave when he spoke to me. Different from how he spoke to Sarada. Different from how he sounded reporting to the Hokage. "Dad's home."
I looked back at him.
And that, perhaps, was where the first problem began.
Sarada was the one who noticed it first.
I was around three months old when she brought it up to Boruto in a careful tone one night, while they thought I was already asleep.
"Boruto." Her voice was quiet but clear. "Don't you think there's something strange about the way Saruto looks at people?"
"Strange how?"
"Babies his age usually aren't that... focused. They still tend to stare at empty space, and they respond to sounds more than faces." A brief pause. "But Saruto — every time someone walks into his room, he finds their face immediately. He follows it. Like he's analyzing."
Silence from Boruto's side.
"You're overthinking it," he said at last, though his tone wasn't entirely convincing.
"Maybe." Sarada didn't sound like someone who believed that. "But you saw it yourself earlier. When Dad came to visit, the way Saruto stared at Sasuke — Boruto, that is not how a three-month-old looks at someone."
I lay in my crib, staring at the ceiling, and quietly admitted that my mother was extraordinarily perceptive.
The Uchiha bloodline didn't lie.
I needed to be more careful.
Easier said than done.
The problem was that Sasuke Uchiha genuinely deserved to be stared at. When my grandfather on my mother's side visited for the first time, I honestly could not help myself. This was Sasuke — Uchiha Sasuke — in the flesh, standing two meters from my crib, with that signature cold gaze and the left arm that had been gone since the war.
The coolest human being in the entire Naruto franchise, according to Kenji Matsuda's personal rankings.
He looked at me. I looked back.
And that was when Sarada, standing beside me, furrowed her brow.
Because three-month-old babies do not stare at their grandfathers with the expression of a devoted fan who has finally met their idol after forty years of waiting.
From that point on I made a deliberate effort to behave more appropriately for my age. Moving my hands aimlessly now and then. Letting my gaze drift toward empty corners of the room. Pretending to be startled by sounds I had already anticipated.
Decent acting, all things considered.
Three years old was the turning point.
Not because of any dramatic event. Not because my power suddenly erupted or the Spirit Roh revealed itself theatrically in the middle of a family dinner. But because at three years old, my body finally began to cooperate properly, and the gap between what I wanted to do and what I was actually capable of doing started to close.
I could walk steadily. I could speak in short sentences people could understand. I could pick up what I wanted without knocking everything else over in the process.
Small freedoms that felt enormous after three years of depending entirely on others for everything.
And with that freedom, I began to explore.
This house turned out to be larger than what I could see from my crib. There was a wide enough backyard with a big tree standing at the far corner. There was a small training room beside the garage — its floor worn down by years of footwork, its walls covered in impact marks that had been patched over and over again. Boruto's, clearly. Sarada's as well, probably.
I stood in the middle of that training room one afternoon and looked up at the low ceiling.
In my past life, I had never done a single day of martial arts. My old body had struggled to climb stairs toward the end. But now I had a new body — a body carrying the blood of both the Uzumaki and the Uchiha, two of the most powerful clans this world had ever produced.
And somewhere deep inside, the two pistols were still there. Waiting. Patient in a way I could never match.
Not yet, something inside whispered. But soon.
That night, Boruto found me in the backyard.
I was sitting on a large stone beneath the tree, staring up at a sky full of stars with an expression that had apparently slipped out of age-appropriate territory again. Boruto stood in the doorway for a few seconds before walking over and sitting beside me on the same stone.
He didn't speak right away. That quality, I had apparently inherited from him — a comfort with silence.
"Saruto," he said eventually. "Do you like looking at the stars?"
"Yes, Dad."
"Why?"
I thought for a moment. The honest answer was: because in my old world the city sky was always too bright to see the stars clearly, and this was a view I never really had. But of course I couldn't say that.
"Many," I answered finally, with the limited vocabulary of a three-year-old.
Boruto laughed softly. "A lot of stars, you mean?"
"Yes. So many."
He looked up at the sky too. His shoulders dropped slightly, releasing a tension I hadn't even noticed he was carrying until it was gone.
"Dad used to like looking at the stars when he was little too," he said quietly. "When the world felt too heavy."
I glanced at him.
Under that starlight, Boruto Uzumaki was no longer the anime character I had come to know through hundreds of episodes and dozens of manga chapters. He was my father. A real person with real burdens and real happiness, both equally present and equally genuine.
A strange feeling moved through my chest. Warm and heavy at the same time.
Old Kenji, I thought to myself, you really are lucky.
"Dad," I called.
"Hm?"
"Saruto wants to be strong."
Boruto turned. His eyes — the same blue eyes that looked back at me from every mirror — studied me with an expression I couldn't quite read.
Then slowly, he smiled.
"Yeah," he said. "Dad knows."
Lanjut Bab 3?