Senju's Heir

It was at the tender age of nine that Naruto felt his chakra change. Change being an expressive term, of course. Chakra was far more complicated to explain.

In simpler terms, chakra offered strange properties that most civilians would likely never experience, ones that calmed and soothed you, stripping your body of most -if not all- physical weight. That could sometimes be avoided with rigorous training, but some were just born with it, like he.

The problem was the endless desire his chakra had to change into something... more. At first it had started as a minor cold, switching between coughs, shivers and uncontrollable wastes of half-digested ramen. It wasn't long before it had started getting worse, making him consider going to the Hokage directly about his illness. Sickness was a rarity for him overall, yet this had nearly crippled him.

...

Then, after days of enduring, the symptoms just vanished from one day to another...

It wasn't long before he started feeling like he could communicate with every living thing around him. Trees, grass; anything holding life and possessing a proper connection to the ground. He didn't know what to make of it at first, but it had increased his pranking success-rate by a whomping thirty percent.

Iruka-sensei had never been more miserable.

After his improved sense of nature and overall control of chakra, Naruto figured it had been some weird tantrum his network was putting up with.

But oh, had he been wrong...

Oddities had surfaced in him, the kind that made him feel somewhat nostalgic every time his feet were pressed against the ground. It had gotten to the point that he felt uncomfortable whenever he wasn't near a good patch of soil or a living, breathing tree. At some point, he had even started taking naps under trees much more frequently.

He didn't know why he did it, it just felt natural; in an incredibly inexplicable way.

...

Months after that, he started feeling like every living thing around him was an extension of himself. He could tug on the leafs of a tree just by concentrating, feel the footsteps of people walking on grass, and make unwanted weeds retreat with so much as a look of contempt.

It was a new and exciting quirk almost every day.

One morning, Naruto had woken up to see his eyes, normally violet, even more intense and vivid. He was accustomed to seeing them that color, but now they were like freshly cut diamonds; imposing and sharp. He consoled himself with the fact that somehow, thanks to such a change, he felt even more connected with nature.

In class, he took a break from acting out. He wasn't even pestering Sasuke for spars anymore. Instead he slept -or at least acted like he did-, and played with a few bulbs he had "borrowed" from a gardening shop near his shanty apartment. He used most of his time trying to make them sprout and grow, but it proved to be a much more difficult process than originally anticipated.

After a couple weeks of struggling, he finally made them sprout with his mind's eye. After they had grown to reasonable dimensions, he planted them. Overjoyed was an understatement of how he had felt then.

At the time, however, Naruto didn't know that a curse had sprouted at the same time his abilities had. Nor would anybody else until it was far too late.

Now, as he wandered the same park that had served as his grounds to improve his abilities, Naruto ran across the field of green pasture with his eyes closed to test just how deep his sensing went. He ran in between and over sleeping adults, across children that were giggling and playing, and all without bumping against anyone.

...

He stopped his little feet and opened his pair of lilacs, staring at what seemed to be a young girl with indigo hair and delicate-looking fair skin. He ran his way toward her and saw that she was crying under the same tree he usually used for naps. His eyes inspected her for injuries, but she held none.

Finally, he found the culprit of her tears. Before her whimpering, kneeling figure, stood a pair of stomped variegated tulips. He scowled seeing this, for they were the very first and same flowers he had bloomed with his strange abilities.

"Are you crying because they stomped the tulips...?" Naruto asked.

The girl, feeble her composure and hoarse was her voice, nodded and spoke. "Y-yes... I have been coming over every evening to water them for the past two weeks... I-I wanted to take them to show-and-tell after they had matured enough but, somebody was mean to them and squished them... They're broken beyond repair now...!"

'She was the one watering them?' He had wondered why the flowers were growing at an unusual pace ever since he planted them. "Show-and-tell...? By any chance, do you mean the one tomorrow in the Academy?"

The girl nodded once. "Yes... But I won't be able to show anything anymore..."

"Hmm..." Humming, Naruto sat next to the girl and stared at the decimated flowers. True, these flowers would no longer breathe; even his uncanny abilities would be unable to fix something of such a caliber.

He turned to her and saw her sadness materialize with whimpers and sniffles. He sighed and stood back up. "You must be in my class if you're having show-and-tell. Yosh, I'll bring you some tulips to class tomorrow! Some even bigger than these, so look forward to 'em! Bye!"

After another minute of crying, Hinata looked over her shoulder and saw nobody there. 'That voice...' She tinkered with the thought. 'Was that...? No, that's impossible...'

After much hassle, Naruto finally managed to get a couple of variegated tulip bulbs. But since he had been running around for the better part of the evening, his exhaustion quickly became too much to handle. He dcided to sleep it off and make the bulbs sprout the next day first thing in the morning.

...

Naruto had underestimated just how tired he was, however, and had -unsurprisingly- ended up oversleeping. After a slurp from one of his random juice boxes, he rushed out of his apartment and paved way toward school. As he turned a corner, he patted his pocket to reassure himself that the bulbs were coming along with.

Jumping over the Academy's gate with a simple discharge of chakra, Naruto trekked on with all the speed his blasted short legs were capable of offering. After he flipped his way in through a window, he pressed on toward his classroom. Once reaching the appropriate hallway, the sliding door came into view and he wasted no time heading for it.

He shot the door open and stepped in grinning from one side of his face to the other. "Safe!"

All annoyed eyes came to rest on the blond, though none more annoyed than Iruka. "You're forty minutes late and your shorts are unbuttoned. Exactly how are you safe, Naruto?"

Naruto fixed up his shorts and puffed his chest. He pointed at the girl shyly standing next to Iruka. "Because I wanted to get here before that girl was done with her show-and-tell. Look," he shoved his hand forward and opened it to reveal the pair of bulbs inside. "I told you I would bring you tulips, right? Here they are!"

"Naruto..." Iruka's eyes resembled those of a parent seeing his child doing something foolish. "I may not be much of a gardener, but those are definitely bulbs... I think..."

The concurring laughter made Naruto's cheeks rosy, but he merely stepped closer to Iruka with his arm still outstretched. "I know they're bulbs, Iruka-sensei... But this is also my show-and-tell project, one that involves this girl too... I was gonna use something else, but this works fine..."

"Oh, really now?" Iruka inquired with some snark. "So you've made a friend, Naruto?"

"Well, something like that..." He portrayed the bulbs before the girl's eyes, unaware that her cheeks were growing redder by the second. "Alright, now look at this, Iruka-sensei!"

Eyes widened, chairs were flipped and gasps were heard as Naruto lifted one of his hands and started shoving chakra into the bulbs, forcing them to grow stems, ovules and petals. The latter parts stretched out magnificently until they could grow no more. The ovules, circular in shape, grew its separate anthers, and the stems were thin but in no way imperfect.

"Done!" He claimed, its colors a perfect copy of his own eyes. He exhaled and relaxed his posture. Smiling, his eyes peeked at Iruka in search of praise, and saw that instead of amazement or anything around that venue, Iruka was looking at him with shock and worry. "Um..."

Turning towards his classmates, he saw that they too were staring at him with more denial than surprise. Even the emotionless Sasuke was staring at him with broad, boggled eyes and with his mouth slightly agape.

Naruto scrunched up his small face in confusion and muttered the only logical word in that situation.

"What...?"

A/N: Guys, just so you know, yeah: this is a NaruHina. But I won't be putting much emphasis on that. You will get glimpses of their relationship developing so it doesn't feel forced in the end, but that's pretty much it. This story's more about family, as the genre states. It's not a romance.

Also, if you're worried about that whole Curse of Hatred thing, know it'll be used -mostly- to boost Naruto's power, not change his personality. This isn't a story where Naruto becomes evil at some point. He will remain similar to the original -pure, determined and with the dream of becoming Hokage- and will change relative to the story. There's no story without character development, after all.

I will do my very best to provide an entertaining story. Hope you find something worth remembering it by.

~Seldom Pro~

Beta: PrincessDystopia, July 29, 2016.