Naruto: The Prince of Lust

"You can read my mind!?" Naruto calls out, nearly falling from the branch he was using to scale a tree in search of the hidden prankster. After regaining his balance, he hops to the ground, beginning to entertain the notion that there's no one to find because there was no one around.

'Oh, this is going to take a while... time we don't have,' the voice couldn't help but exhale. 'Look, I really am you from the future and I can prove it. You should be Genin by this point, at least that's what I was aiming for. Our- your Jōnin-sensei is Hatake Kakashi, and your teammates are Haruno Sakura-chan and Uchiha Sasuke.'

"Beh! That doesn't prove anything," Naruto quickly retorts, still looking around. "They announced it in class. Everyone heard."

'Fair enough,' the young deeper voice concedes. 'How about something only we- you would know? Like the first time you had Ichiraku's Ramen. We- you were eight-years-old and Teuchi-jiji found you unconscious in the alley where he dumps his trash. You were scared but he was kind, and let you sit in his stand. Ayame-nee bandaged you up while Teuchi-jiji made you a bowl of pork and beef ramen. We knew instantly, outside of Ji-chan, he was one of the few safe adults in the village. And Ayame-nee was just as awesome. Who else could know that but us?'

Naruto doesn't respond for a few moments, absorbing the nature and the truth of the voice's accurate claims. He did meet Teuchi-jiji and his daughter when he was eight. The civilian adults stopped attacking him long before that but teenage bullies were another matter entirely and would chase him down every time they spotted him. It's true no one would know what Teuchi-jiji and Ayame-nee did...

"Wait," Naruto sluggishly speculates aloud. "They would know. Jiji and Nee-chan could've told you."

'I mean I doubt they ever would, but fine,' the voice states. 'We're low on time so I'll name a few things quickly; stuff only we know. We- ...you first developed the Oiroke no Jutsu(Sexy Technique) because you noticed how girls are treated better and how much more attention they'd get. You found a box of Barely Legal and Raw Kunoichi magazines in the dump, peeped on girls in the bath houses, and finished the jutsu in six months.' Though wide-eyed in shock and red in the face, Naruto refutes nothing as the voice continues, 'you found your green goggles in the park by the academy. You stayed there for nearly three hours waiting to see if anyone would come back for them. When no one did, you kept it on your head in hopes someone might recognize them. You found a fat toad in that pond by the Hyūga compound. You became best friends and named him Gama-chan.' Naruto can hear the levity in his voice all but disappear when he continues, 'we were really sad when some of the Hyūga kids killed him. That was a hard month, but while you were scavenging the dump, you found a toad wallet that reminded you of Gama-chan and kept it. Your shinobi tools were mostly scavenged from corpses in Training Ground 44. Everything else in your apartment is a hand-me-down, clearance sale, or found in the dump because nearly all the shops in the village make you pay more. You sent a letter to yourself when you first learned how to write because you never got any mail and you wanted to know what it felt like-'

"Okay," Naruto finally said, calling an end to the voice's rather depressing tirade of his life. "Uh... whatever, I still don't think you're me from the future, but, I'll hear you out. Start by telling me how awesome I become. How fast do I become Hokage?"

'First,' the voice interrupts, cutting off some of Naruto's excitement. 'You have to know I won't always be with you like this—speaking to you like this isn't a constant thing. What I'm doing takes a lot of effort and concentration to keep up. I'll explain what that is next time. As we speak, it's getting harder and harder to stay, so until I can get a better handle on this, for now, I can only talk for minutes at a time, maybe twenty if I really try.'

"Sounds complicated," Naruto grumbles. "Why can't you tell me now?"

'Not enough time,' the voice says. 'I'll be back, though—once I've rested—but for these last few minutes, I just want to explain a bit of why I'm here. The short version is, there's a fourth great shinobi war, and basically, we lose. Lots of people we know will die, and the rest are trapped in a never-ending, unbreakable genjutsu. I'll explain more next time but, the reason we lost is because I wasn't strong enough. Team seven, our friends, our village, the entire shinobi world is a slave to this really bad guy because we weren't strong enough to stop him. It was all too easy to manipulate us—the nations, I mean—because we were all too busy hating each other and fighting amongst ourselves to stop and think. In the end, we couldn't stop this cycle of hate, which meant, we couldn't stop him.'

"Are you serious?" Naruto huffs with wide eyes.

'Hehe, yeah, I guess that would be hard for anyone to accept,' the voice admits. 'But it's true. There's something else, and this is going to be really important. You already know Kage Bunshin, right?'

"...Yeah," Naruto slowly acknowledges.

'Good,' the voice affirms. 'What you probably don't know—or won't know until years later for some odd reason—is that any knowledge or experience your bunshin experiences, you'll learn as well after it's dispelled. T-Try this... if you don't... believe me.'

"Oi, oi, Naru-nii, you okay?" Naruto asks uneasily, sensing the struggle in the Voice's speech.

'I only have... seconds,' Naru-nii barely manages to get out. 'Make... a Kage-Bunshin. Make... it... talk... to Teuchi-jiji... or Iruka-sensei... somebody. Then... dispel it. You'll... learn... e.. e.. every... thing... it... learnned.'

Quiet fills Naruto's expectation of further conversation. After several moments of silence, Naruto can't help but call out, "Neh, Naru-nii? Naru-nii, you still there?" Other than the wind breezing through grass, leaves, and branches, and the birds singing, Naruto is met with silence.

Head tilting to the side, Naruto scratches his smooth hairless chin, pondering everything that's happened. He questions the merits of this complicated prank... if he can even call it a prank. Humming inquisitively against the rustling sounds of blowing trees, he slowly reflects on the voice and how it knew things about him that no one else could know. Naruto was fairly sure if the voice continued, it would've only mentioned more anecdotes about his outcast of a life, so, it's either the most elaborate prank in the history of pranks, or...

"Meh!" Naruto shrugs forming the hand seals for the Kage Bunshin. He's always been a practical guy, not that he wouldn't love the brains to think his way through problems but the academy pointed out to him a long time ago he just wasn't smart enough for that kind of rational approach. What's more, he isn't really doing anything dangerous, or suspect, like how Mizuki tricked him into stealing the Scroll of Seals.

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" From a quickly evaporating puff of white smoke, nine shadow clones of himself pop into existence. "He said one... but whatever," Naruto mumbles, taking a commanding step in front of his troops. "Alright, listen up. I want three of you to go... somewhere. Ah! One goes to Ayame-nee, one to Ji-chan, and one to... Iruka-sensei. Break into his room if you have. Just see him. You can dispel after that."

With little more than a quick look between the nine, three immediately break off. How those three knew they were the ones, the original didn't know, nor care. "What about us," one clone calls.

"The rest of you go to look for the shuriken I threw earlier. When you find one, leave it there and dispel. I guess I'll learn where it is."

"Yosh!" The rest of the clones call, fists in the air, and Naruto watches them rush off to get to work, all the while shrinking a bit at what he's heard. It's not every day you're told the fate of the entire shinobi world rests on your shoulders, much less failed when it mattered. Lives of families, friends, strangers, ninja, civilian, and everything in between somehow are depending on him and he doesn't know why. Ji-chan is the strongest person he knows. Why wouldn't they rely on him instead?

If for some absolutely insane reason, everything Naru-nii said turns out to be true, he can't help but compare it to Iruka-sensei. He failed to keep his sensei safe, even ended up hurting him worse in his great panic, and that was only one person. What Naru-nii is talking about is for the fate of everyone; Ji-chan, Teuchi-jiji, Ayame-nee, Iruka-sensei, Sakura-chan, maybe even the people that hate him. Naruto can't see how everyone could depend on him like that. Wouldn't he just fail to keep everyone safe as he had his favorite sensei? Naruto felt restless, like he's been sitting for too long and itching to get up. All these questions he has no answers for is making him doubt himself.