As she spoke, she grew more and more embarrassed. It felt like such an incredibly small thing when she explained it all again now. She’d left in a huff—like a child—because people didn’t believe the star she’d found existed. Here she was saying that she wasn’t good at working with other people, but in the end hadn’t she wanted someone to recognize her efforts?
Wondering if Naruto was exasperated with her, Chihare looked at his face and found him nodding vigorously.
“Makes sense,” he said. “That’d be a shock all right.”
“. . .”
“I mean, if it were me, I’d super hate it. This thing really exists, and these people are all saying no, it doesn’t. Just because it shouldn’t.”
“Well, that’s all over now, so.” Chihare felt a prickle in her nose and forcibly ended the conversation.
She relaxed when she was with him. He had a mysterious magnetism that she instinctively wanted to move toward, like being drawn to a sunny spot on a cold winter’s day.
She moved to one end of the shelves as if running away and kept working.
A few minutes later, Naruto stuck his face in between the shelves, drops of water falling from his wet hands. “I washed all the petri dishes. What should I do now?”
“Oh … Please dry them.”
“Yup.” He slipped through the shelves and headed toward the drying room when suddenly the sound of his footfalls stopped. “Hey, Chihare? What’s on this shelf here?”
“The petri dishes I just prepared,” she said absently. “I think it’ll still be a while before there are any results there.”
“But there are,” he told her.
“What?” She craned her neck.
“See? There. Chakra’s seriously overflowing. Like water on dry ice.” Naruto’s finger was pointing to the top of a shelf, but Chihare’s eyes could see nothing.
She moved over to the shelf to get a better look when she heard the sound of glass breaking in her breast pocket.
“What …”
The scouter she used to measure the amount of chakra had cracked. Wondering why, she turned to get her spare, and then rethought the situation and stopped.
It can’t be.
She checked the cracked scouter once more and found that the needle had shot up to the maximum value. She looked at Naruto, then at the scouter, then up at the shelf before turning back to Naruto once more.
“What … ?” She hesitantly brought the cracked scouter toward the shelf, and the overwrought needle snapped off at the base.
There was no mistake. Gaseous chakra filled the area around the shelf. An incredible amount of it.
“This is the first time,” Chihare squeezed out, her voice almost shaking, “I’ve gotten a result.”
“Yahoooooo!” Naruto scrunched up his face like a child and threw a fist into the air.
Insisting that they had to go grab a bite to celebrate this exciting progress, Naruto brought Chihare to a small food cart with a lantern hanging from it that said “Ichiraku.” It was apparently a branch of a long-established ramen shop in the old city.
“When something good happens, you gotta have ramen,” he told her. “Usually.”
She didn’t know what “usually” meant, but it was a pretty ordinary dining experience for the Seventh Hokage. The curtains hanging around the seating area were inherited from the main branch after its renovation and were quite dirty, stained with oil. On top of that, in this day and age, the place was powered with propane gas of all things.
Four of the mere six seats at the counter were already occupied. The eyes of the child sitting in the middle grew wide as soon as he saw Naruto’s face.
“Ah! Dad!”
“Oh hey, Boruto. You’re here too?”
Boruto, Mitsuki, Sarada. And the principal of the academy, Iruka, was sitting alongside them.
“Right now, Sarada’s staying at Master Iruka’s place,” Boruto explained. “So we tagged along with them to Ichiraku.”
“Lucky you. Getting Master Iruka to buy you dinner all the time,” Naruto joked.
Iruka turned exasperated eyes on him. “Listen, you …”
Thoughtfully, the children shifted seats before Naruto had the chance to stop them, so Naruto and Chihare sat down in the two now-empty seats in the middle. From the left, it was Iruka, Naruto, Chihare, Boruto, Sarada, and Mitsuki—four generations sitting in order of age without anyone planning it.
“Brings back memories seeing you two sitting next to each other.” Teuchi, on loan from the main branch, lowered his eyebrows happily as he set bowls of ramen out on the counter. “Aah. Master Iruka, you used to always bring Naruto with you back when he was a student at the academy.”
“I still totally remember the first time Master Iruka brought me to Ichiraku,” Naruto said. “After class, okay? He would always treat us to ramen. I was shocked to find that ramen this good even existed.”
Iruka laughed fondly as he broke apart his wooden chopsticks. “Your eyes got so huge. You said something like ‘this is nothing like instant ramen.’”
“Yeah. Ichiraku ramen’s the best in the world! Believe it!” Naruto cried.
The ramen the Seventh Hokage’s head over heels about …
Chihare scooped up the clear brown soup with a ramen spoon and looked at it intently. Sure that it was bound to be incredibly flavorful, she plunged her chopsticks into the noodles in the soup and lifted them to her lips. She unconsciously cocked her head to one side. Sure, yes, it was good, but … it was just regular ramen. Although it did warm her up. “Is it really that good …”
She hadn’t meant her words for anyone else, but Boruto next to her heard her.
“Right?” he agreed in a voice quiet enough that Naruto and Iruka chatting with Teuchi couldn’t hear, and lowered his voice even further before continuing. “But Dad and Master Iruka both love Ichiraku. I think Thunder Burger in the new city’s way more delicious, hands down.”