The young blond man stared hard at the sky, as though seeking to memorize its patterns. A little hissing grunt of breath escaped him, giving voice to the unhappiness in the lines of his face. There was something missing, something that he really ought to recall…
Thwap! The scroll that slapped his fingers made a surprisingly heavy sound muffled by the layers of papyrus as the metal rod it was wrapped around made contact with his knuckles. Offended, his gaze whipped around to meet those of his stern tutor, and the blond sighed and deflated as he saw the tutor’s expression.
“Tch… troublesome,” the Nara murmured moodily. “Why do I even bother, Naruto-hime?” he teased, as though putting forth the effort to mollify the prince before reverting to his more reserved, calculating behavior. “Is it the calling, again?”
Naruto swallowed. How could he even begin to describe it to Shikamaru? Especially, one considers, when it was supposed to be beyond him? Then again, he’d never asked to be a prince. At first the blond had enjoyed the freedom and luxury of growing up as the firstborn son to the king of the Land of Fire and the Queen of the Land of Whirlpools, but as Naruto aged he noticed more and more that being a prince was something akin to being a caged bird. No matter how gilded the cage he lived in, it was still a cage, and something within him felt… lost.
“No,” he responded slowly, flicking his gaze to the window again and then back to Shikamaru; to Nara-sensei. “I was lost in thought. I apologize for my rudeness; you have my attention. Please, continue.”
The brown-haired tutor with tanned skin, a contrast to Naruto’s ‘royal’ near-paleness (not that Naruto enjoyed being locked away at nearly all times, kept out of the sun and the breeze), laughed quietly with little humor. “Ah. I suppose you do have a reason to be lost in thought,” Shikamaru agreed softly. “Take a ten minute break, clear your head. You’d only neglect to take in what you’re learning right now.”
Naruto nodded, feeling inordinate relief and a slight twinge of guilt, and escaped the classroom only he made use of. Even princes weren’t perfect, but did his flaw have to be so unusual? Without meaning to, his feet led him to his room, where he could open the doors to his balcony. The grand double-doors were locked at night, ever since he was a child, though he knew not why; and he knew having them open for too long a day would cause them to be locked early as soon as he left the room. Still, it was the only place in the castle that Naruto was allowed to be anywhere near the outside without supervision. Eyes slipping shut without his say, Naruto lifted his chin and took a deep breath of the sweet, cool spring air. It felt invigorating, and the breeze ruffled his hair as if in greeting, as always. A soft smile sprang, unbidden, to his lips; and he whispered a greeting to the open air, as though someone was there. It made him feel silly, but it also made him feel a little closer to his dreams, the ones he could barely remember having. It didn’t help him recall their contents, but that same, strange, and comforting feeling took him when he thought back to them like this. What were they…?
A pink-haired guard, lean, wiry, petite, and very strong, walked into his chambers through the still-open door. The slight clinking of her armor rubbing and knocking against itself was a pleasant audible offset to the smell in the air, but Naruto knew that she had only made noise to alert him to her presence. Sakura was his favorite guard from his personal retinue, and she had learned the extraordinary skill of remaining completely silent even in full armor when it would be advantageous to do so.
“Naruto-ōji,” Sakura greeted him, her tone lukewarm and matter-of-fact, as dictated by her position. Referring to him by his first name, despite the addition of the respectful honorific, was above her station; Naruto had been very persistent, and had finally gotten her to use his first name in private. After all, she wasn’t any lesser than he was just because she hadn’t been born a princess.
“Sakura-ohime,” he teased warmly as he turned his head to look at her over his shoulder, just to see her fight off a blush with a staunch expression.
“Please, do not humble yourself like that,” Sakura rebuked, her lips twisting into a frown haphazardly slashed across her face. “There is a storm on the horizon. I’m sorry, but I need to lock your balcony doors.”
Naruto’s expression fell slightly, but it wasn’t the crestfallen devastation that once plagued him as a child. Sighing, the prince turned his gaze out to the open air and took a deep breath just to fill his lungs with the sweet smells and invigorating feeling in the air before he closed the doors, moving away to sit at his writing desk. Gazing at Sakura as she walked silently to the double doors, he watched as she brought the latch down, and put the lock in place… without snapping it completely shut. With a little smirk, she winked in response to Naruto’s shocked expression, and whispered, “Be cautious that you aren’t caught.”
“But… why?” he asked, confused.
“Because I remember your dreams,” Sakura told him, “besides, before you didn’t have a deadline before this.”
“My… dreams?”
“It wasn’t a fox that clawed your cheeks, Naruto... not a normal one, anyway,” the pinkette answered, looking at the door she’d closed behind her when she entered, then off into the distance. “You had dreams of strange things, and one night you woke with those scars. Why would your Honored Father, may he rest peacefully, ever be unwise enough to bring a toddler out on the hunt that claimed both him and your Honored Mother? And how would you have survived it? No, Naruto, that is a lie your Regent told you. Worse, so is the hunt. I finally found proof of it yesterday. Look,” and she held out a tattered scroll to him.
Naruto took it with shaking hands, and read the unmistakable writing of his Regent, fists clenching around the paper as he felt his knees weaken. His Regent had staged the hunt to coincide with a clever assassination, taking the lives of his parents in a terribly unfortunate mishap, which nobody could have expected and wasn’t it so sad? But of course he would happily take the throne while the boy was young, keep him from his birthright, and ensure that the client would have no further problems with the way the Land of Fire was run.
“What did you mean,” Naruto said, voice cracking, “about a deadline? For what?”
“You need to remember your dreams,” Sakura said, sympathy flitting across her features, before it was replaced with a stony expression. “You need to remember them, and you need to learn how to use your power again. The fox will help.”
“What dreams? What power? What fox?!” Naruto said loudly, working his way up to a yell before Sakura held up her hand and quieted him.
“You won’t get any answers,” she said harshly, “If you bring in the other guards with your volume.”
Chastised, Naruto lowered his head, emotions still storming beneath the surface. “You were saying?” he prompted, still feeling too uncooperative to really be polite.
“You need to remember your dreams. To start with, I’m going to have to unseal you. Then you’re going to meditate until you remember. Then you’re going to spend a night trying to master what you barely began to learn before you were made to forget. Then you’re going to use the wind to survive the attempt your Regent is going to make to execute you tomorrow morning at sunup.”
“What?!” Naruto hissed, eyes wide in a panic. “What do you mean!?”
“Danzou is power-mad,” Sakura sighed, “and he’s finally ready to try to solidify his claim on the throne, just in time now that you’re nearly ready to take it from him. That’s probably another tactic of his; if you were a child, the nation would have thrown itself on its knees in mourning and demanded another of the bloodline. Now that he’s had a chance to rule for a while, and people are used to him and would see your death as a tragedy rather than a disaster, they’ll be more likely to accept him as king.”
Naruto stared her down, unsure of what to say, or how to say it. Finally, after a few moments, his mouth moved for him. “Are you,” he paused, hesitating, “are you on his side?”
“No, you idiot,” Sakura reassured him, concerned, hesitatingly resting her hand on his shoulder. “You mean the world to me, Naruto-ōji. You are my future king. I am loyal to no-one else. I am merely telling you what I know of your enemy. Remember what Shikamaru-san says?”
“Know your enemy,” Naruto breathed, taking a moment to try to relax. “What was that about unsealing me?”
“Kiba-san, the kennel-master’s son, you know him?”
“The Inuzuka heir? Yes.”
“He’s shockingly good at seal-work,” Sakura informed him. “He taught me enough to remove the seal on you, though he is the only other person that knows of what is at work here besides Shikamaru-san. It would be too suspicious if he came to you himself. His movements as a budding seal-master, and yours, are watched to ensure that neither intersect. However, as the captain of your personal guard, it’s expected of me to touch base with all the members of the staff here in the castle.”
Naruto looked from Sakura to the solid, almost pretty stonework of the walls around him, and back again with a swallow.
“You’ve been planning this,” he accused weakly.
“I’ve been dreading this,” she responded cheerfully. “Danzou thinks he’s the cleverest one in the castle. Unfortunately, he didn’t think too hard about Shikamaru-san, Kiba-san, or myself being here. Listen, I need to unseal you. After that, you have thirteen hours to prepare. We’ll do whatever we can for you. If you need something, knock on the door. I’ll be standing guard all night. If you died because I didn’t stay up through the night I would be dishonored,” she argued, not willing to let Naruto get a word in edgewise when he looked ready to debate the merit of her losing sleep. “Better that I sleep tomorrow than you going unguarded. Now strip.”
Naruto blushed heavily at the idea of taking off his clothing in front of a lady, eyes widening; Sakura blushed too after a moment, raising her hands and balking.
“It’s-- the seal is on your back! So you can’t see it!” she hissed, “I can’t unseal you through your clothing!”
“Oh, well since you asked so nicely,” Naruto snarked to cover his embarrassment, before turning away and pulling his yukata open and then down to pool around his waist.
“Oh, shit,” Sakura breathed faintly. “I’m really glad I insisted on the advanced lessons from Kiba,” and she puttered around for a moment with a pot of ink before resting a steadying hand on his shoulder.
“Okay,” she said from somewhere behind him, “You’re going to feel something cold brush against you. That’s the brush and the ink. This will come off, but it has to be done in ink to turn off the seal’s effects first. Do not move, or it could cause very awful things to happen.”
“Awful things?” Naruto parroted, starting to worry. He worried more when he didn’t get an answer, bracing himself for the cold. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as he thought it might be, more of a lukewarm wetness; though the brush did tickle slightly it wasn’t enough to cause him to move more than his regular, deep breathing moved him.
“Alright,” Sakura hummed. “Do you feel any-”
Naruto’s senses skipped a beat, the world around him cutting in and out ever so briefly, just for a heartbeat.
“-ing different?”
“What the shit,” he asked, weakly, his voice coming out a little more breathy than usual. “What the actual shit was that? It… was like everything stopped being real for a second.”
“Stopped being real?” Sakura responded, worried.
“Like… like a torch being mostly snuffed, but then the fire comes back to life? My sight, hearing, everything, just… off and then on again, but not like just blinking, there was a sense of light and weightlessness, and even though I didn’t hear anything it felt like there was a thunderclap…”
“Good,” Sakura replied, relaxing. A warm cloth wiped at his back for a few moments, and then the things Sakura had been using were packed back away (where, he might never know). He turned to regard her with a frown, and she returned it, equally serious.
“Lay in bed and cast your mind back to your childhood, and think of the coming wind and storm,” she offered quietly. “Think of the breeze, and how you used to tell me it felt like it would play with your hair.”
Then she was gone, outside of his door, and Naruto was left alone to think back on days he could scarcely recall. Unlike before, however, this time it felt… less fuzzy, less… distant. There was something freeing, and he remembered sneaking out at night, jumping from his balcony. That balcony was several levels off the ground, how on earth had he survived? He’d… he’d… floated?
Ten hours of frustration, shock, and worry later, Naruto threw open his balcony doors and let the wind pour into his room, the maelstrom of emotions in his chest matching the storm’s fury, and he lifted a hand to the storm and twisted, and watched with grim satisfaction as the wind lifted him into the air.
He would never admit the oaths that fell from his lips when he promptly fell onto his ass, nor would Sakura ever admit to giggling as she heard the loud thump of him falling.
The wind picked him back up again, helping him to his feet, and Naruto breathed a thank you into the air. The storm stole his words away, so that not even he heard them, and the smell of ozone was overpowering as a fox made of wind started to run circles around him.
His mother had told him, “The wind will sympathize with you, even when nobody else will,” and she had rested a gentle hand on his shoulder with a smile. “Never be afraid to tell it your troubles.”
“You were born to be free to follow the wind and to follow your heart,” his father had told him, showing him the path to the throne. “Your destiny is to use them to help others do the same.”
Naruto cocked his head in curiosity as the fox showed him that he could use wind to cut deeply into the wooden doors, and even do the same to stone with enough effort.
It was time to take back his kingdom.