Chapter Text
I meet the kid that changes my life on a day with beautiful weather. Not unusual: Konoha is always beautiful somehow. Even on rainy days, the village takes on a low verdant glow, like someone has wiped the place down with a wet cloth and buffed out all the scratches till it gleams. Look at this place. Magical, right? Alive, right?
It isn’t raining today. The sun looks as though it has never set on this village. Late afternoon, I am sloping home from work, and the whole place is lit from within like a piece of glass held up to the sun, the kind of scene that painters dream of.
Maybe that’s why the kid stands out to me. Everything around him is polished clean. It makes him seem smaller, somehow, as though the village itself is trying to rub him out. My eyes catch on the dusty orange of his windbreaker, and then I see the rest of him, tucked up on a lonely swing. It’s the quietest thing I’ve ever seen. I wonder idly who he’s waiting for, who will walk home with that little boy; Konoha’s a safe place to be out late, but not very fun to be alone in.
What do I do here? Shamefully little. With hindsight I know how cruel that was – to see and unsee him like that. But today I keep on walking home. I don’t think again about that boy for the rest of the night, too concerned with my empty fridge, my aching heels, my shift tomorrow. He slips in and out of my mind easily.
I see him again the day after, still in that same shape. I’m looking past the broad strokes of his person now and seeing the details. His face looks sad. The dust on his orange jacket is still there, smudgier. His sandals, scuffed and well-used, don’t quite reach the grass where he sits. He’s young.
I still walk away. I’m a stranger, and I don’t know this kid, and there could be a million reasons why he’s sat there. But the picture of him lingers in my mind this time, and when I get a quiet moment at work in the morning, I ponder that burned afterimage. I haven’t seen him before this week. But he’s been there, on that swing, two days in a row. Looking sad.
Could be anything. Anyone’s kid. Maybe they’re late to collect him. Deep down, though, there’s a feeling that… something isn’t right. I don’t know what yet. But I’m missing something about the kid.
I see him again the day after that. And I must be looking too hard, but this time his head lifts up, a little robin in the snow, and he notices me noticing him. This time, I wave.
It’s like he’s never seen it before – a wave, I mean, a greeting meant for him. The journey his face goes on, too young to think about hiding it, makes my heart twist like dough. I think this is when I realise that nobody ever collects him. But that’s a big thought to arrive to, and I don’t have all the pieces, so I don’t say it to myself just yet.
What I do say to myself is this: I bet I’ll see him again tomorrow. I bet he’ll wave back.
And I’m right.
“What kind of sweets do kids like?”
It’s a lull in the workday. I doodle suns and moons on the corner of my registers.
“Stupid question. All of them. The better question is ‘what kind of sweets should kids have?’ And the answer is none.”
“Boo. You’re heartless.”
“I’m a dentist. All children should be eating fruit.”
The dentist leans easily against my chair, watching for a brief moment. She’s as bored as I am without patients to see, but Miyako is more professional than me, and doesn’t resort to doodling. Just judgement.
Fruit. Alright. I can get the kid some fruit.
I get the kid too much fruit, but I rationalise it away by thinking that I will eat some too, Miyako’s advice surely extends to adults as well, and fruit’s less suspicious than sweets anyway. What’s threatening about an orange?
When I loop back to my usual route home, carrying two shopping bags in my hands, he’s where I expected to see him. He notices me first this time, and there’s a little pop of awareness in the two of us – he expected to see me too. Or didn’t expect to see me, maybe. Either way, he has his head up, looking straight at me, before I even looked for him. It’s a detail I think about a lot over the night.
“Do you want an orange? I bought too many.”
There. Honest, even if he doesn’t know it, and no strings attached. He looks suspicious anyway, still in his shrunk-back position from when I took that step onto the green grass towards him – but he nods, and I toss it over easy, and that’s that. First contact. Success.
I walk away again after that. Something tells me I’m gonna have to approach this boy in steps, and that this one, however small it is, means a lot.
It feels like nothing, right? An orange on my walk home. I don’t even sit with him while he eats it. The rest of my evening, and the day after that, they pass like normal: I think of him, but I think about work too, and time carries on like that. I still take the usual route home, though, with the same paper bags in my hands.
Baby steps, I said earlier. He’s the one who takes the next step: when I chuck him an apple this time, he speaks to me.
“Why’d you give me that?”
He sounds like he’s got a missing tooth somewhere. I shift my mental age for him an increment younger. I’m still not that close to him – he stays on the swing, leaning forward to peer at me carefully, and I am a whole green lawn away.
“Told you. Bought too many.” Still not a lie. “I like to haggle at the grocery store but I can’t actually eat all of it.”
“What’s haggle?” He’s quicker to ask me that.
“It’s... hmm... it’s when you argue with someone who doesn’t want to give you something that you really want. I wanted lots of apples today.”
“You said you can’t eat them all though.” The kid has an expressive face. Moves to new shapes quickly. The swing starts to sway as he peers harder at me.
“Yeah, but I like arguing with the guy at the grocery store. He’s annoying.”
I give him a conspiratorial nod, and his responding grin is slow to come – first there is a pop of light in his eyes, and then a big beam of gappy teeth and joy. It leaves me dizzy. I feel as though I stumble away that evening, deeply aware of his baby gaze on my back.
Of course I speak to him tomorrow. Again, and again, and a week passes like that.
The adjustment to my day is minor, and even beneficial for my health (Miyako was right about the fruit). His name is Naruto. He’s a sweet boy. Our evening chats, just a few minutes long and always with some fruit between us, are surprisingly interesting. He hates school, but attends every day. He’s freaked out by the idea of dentists, but also keeps asking if his teeth are good. And he loves ramen, but could do with or without narutomaki. I shouldn’t find that as cute as I do.
I feel like I could have guessed he would be chatty, but it’s still a surprise after how quietly sad he was only a few weeks ago.
Work picks up; as much as it can in a dentist’s practice, anyway. Miyako has always had a strong link with the hospitals, and their basic dental package for ninja is usually enough. It takes some serious pain to be sent to Miyako. She thinks the new sweet shops opening near the Hokage Tower are to blame. I tell Naruto this, and he tells me quite seriously that they should be eating ramen instead.
The list of people I talk to semi-regularly now includes a ten-year-old. There’s a lot that worries me about that. Firstly, he's higher up on the list than some of my neighbours – Naruto actually knows where I work, which is more than Fujiyama in the apartment down the hall will ever know about me. It really exhibits in full clarity the sad state of my life since coming back to Konoha.
Secondly, and this links to the fact that I even know that Naruto is a ten-year-old, is that he’s desperately lonely – not the kind of lonely that kids sometimes get when they’ve got busy parents, or few friends. He comes to life when I speak to him. I can see his little face glow with any returned interaction; there’s this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that he waits for me every day.
I don’t know if anyone talks to him.
But it’s a few apples each week out of my pay packet. Oranges when the cashier at the grocery is in a good mood. A few minutes from my day to talk to a lonely kid; that’s easy enough.
Why do I pretend I’m not invested in this kid? I suppose because it’s hard to explain. We really are nobodies to each other, at this point anyway – a little boy on a swing and the white-collar worker walking past. But I can admit to myself now, that my concern was about more than just balancing out his diet with natural sugars. Why was he so, so alone?
“Something on your mind, secretary-san?”
I’m pulled out of my troubled thoughts by a lingering patient, who taps the paper form between us. I give an embarrassed smile. Hopefully Miyako hasn’t seen me slacking.
“Sorry, I’ll file that away now.”
But the patient doesn’t leave when I take the form. I realise that, for some reason, they were not asking rhetorically.
“Just wondering what to have for dinner,” I end up saying, because I’m not telling a total stranger about the boy that has caused me so much worry.
“And that put such a frown on your face?”
“Eating well is a serious concern,” I say cheerfully. “Have a nice day!”
The patient gets the message now. They leave after a tilt of their head (but not a verbal reply – some people!) which releases me to settle back into my internal spiralling down.
What do I do about Naruto?
Something isn’t sitting right with me. But I don’t know where to begin at all. I don’t have any real resources to help if he’s what I think he is, which is neglected. And I’m scared that I’m going to spook him. There’s this feeling, deep in my gut, that everything is precarious: that with one wrong move, I won’t see him again.
I’m the one intruding on him – I’m the one walking onto that sunburnt lawn towards his swing, and into his space. I don’t have a right to cause problems in his life by getting the police involved, or talking to his school teachers.
But then – like before, it’s Naruto who takes the next step. I've made no decisions about how to approach this looming problem, and keep walking that same route to the park with fruit in my hands, like a tidal wave. I am big enough to admit that if it had been down to me, I'd be doing that same two-step until Naruto was old and grey.
Except, on one particularly warm night, Naruto is jittery – I see him bouncing up and down as I walk towards the park – and, strangely enough, quiet too. I let the silence sit between us for a bit. Wondering if it’s my cue to step back for the night. Until, shyly, he presents me with a pear: bruised but polished, and sitting still in the scuffed palms of his hands.
“I haggled,” he says proudly.
I blink at Naruto, and take it gingerly from him. Under his big, bright eyes, I bite into the soft pear-flesh. It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted: like sun-warmed honey.
“Thank you,” I say, with a smile. He smiles back.
And that’s it, isn’t it? That’s me getting my indecision handed to me by a ten-year-old. My cowardice, really. I want say that something clicks for me then, and I figure out how to help him. But I haven't. All I know is that this pear is delicious, and I am happy to be eating it. Happier to have been gifted it.
I have to step up now.