Konoha Year 59.
In a dilapidated wooden building on the east side of the village, a blond teenager sat bolt upright in bed, eyes wide, chest heaving.
"Sigh! Am I dreaming?" He pinched his cheek, hard, and the sharp sting that followed scattered whatever fog had been clinging to his thoughts.
"Ouch… ouch. Definitely not dreaming."
The blond rubbed his face and let his gaze drift across the room. Paint peeled from the walls. Empty cups of instant ramen clustered on the table. Clothes lay where they had been dropped — on the floor, draped over the chair, flung halfway up the wall. The whole apartment smelled faintly of salt and just plain stinks.
He swung his legs off the futon, stood, and crossed the creaking floor to a mirror propped against the far wall. The reflection that stared back made him forget how to breathe.
Fifteen, and unmistakably, impossibly him — blond spikes jutting in every direction, three whisker-like marks on each cheek, blue eyes that had seen too much for any face that young. He was wearing a faded orange jumpsuit, patched so many times the patches had patches of their own, the unofficial uniform of the one person in Konoha nobody wanted to look at twice.
"This is me," he whispered.
Uzumaki Naruto, son of the Fourth-Hokage, Jinchūriki of the Nine-Tails, future hero of the shinobi world. In a parallel universe, a version of him had grown up to wear a flowing white cloak and a sad smile, to carry an entire village on his shoulders, to die beloved and exhausted. That version was not this version.
This version was a fifteen-year-old academy failure standing in a dirty apartment, wearing a jumpsuit that should probably be arrested for crimes against fashion.
Two sets of memories sat inside his skull like overlapping transparencies on a single lantern. One belonged to the boy who had lived in this room, who had pulled pranks and skipped class and craved attention so badly he'd shaped his whole personality around being loud. The other belonged to a twenty-year-old who had washed out of life in another world entirely — a directionless, hot-blooded nobody who had drifted from one dead-end job to the next until the universe had apparently decided to recycle him.
The seams were ragged, but they held. And now he was awake.
"Okay," he said to his reflection.
"Okay, okay, okay. Think. Use the brain. The one you didn't use for the last fifteen years."
He started pacing. The floor protested with every step, which was fair, because the floor was older and more tired than he was. Outside his window, the carved faces of the Hokage Mountain caught the early light.
"It really is the ninja world." He laughed, short and a little wild.
He tried to marshal the memories into something useful, but they kept slipping. Names first — familiar, even if the faces attached to them didn't quite match. Sakura, Sasuke, Ino, Shikamaru, Hinata, Kiba, Shino, Choji, Tenten, Lee, Neji. All the same ages he vaguely remembered from the story he had watched and read in his previous life. All around fifteen. All still in the Academy.
The adults, though — Kakashi, Guy, Kurenai, Asuma, Genma — were older. Closer to twenty-six. The Sannin, Tsunade, Jiraiya, and Orochimaru, were nearing fifty, and Sarutobi Hiruzen and his group were pushing seventy and eighty. Something was different here, something fundamental.
"Why am I fifteen and still in the Academy?" He grabbed a fistful of blond hair and tugged.
"In the version I know, genin graduate at twelve! Twelve! They get weapons and a headband and a mission scroll and a chūnin exam invitation, and off they go to die gloriously in the Forest of Death. What kind of insane world pushes graduation to sixteen and starts Ninja Academy at 10?"
He thought about it, actually thought about it, and an answer surfaced from the memories.
The Third Ninja War had ended, but not cleanly. Too many children had died in it — children barely old enough to hold a kunai, conscripted into service because the villages had been desperate and the dead had been everywhere. The Fourth Hokage, his Father, had been one of the loudest voices arguing for change. The graduation age had been pushed. A full sixteen years of graduation age had become the new standard, giving kids time to grow into their own bodies before being sent to risk those bodies on C-rank border patrols. His father had literally rewritten the rules of the village to keep more children alive.
"So the world is kinder, then," Naruto murmured.
"Or at least, Konoha is. Other villages might not have followed suit. Which means more time to learn, more time to prepare, and also —" he counted on his fingers
"— five more years of wearing this jumpsuit. Five more years. The jumpsuit might actually outlive me."
He slumped onto the bed, and the springs made a sound like a dying animal.
"This is a parallel world," he said, mostly to hear the words out loud.
"Not the one I knew. Close, but the pieces have been rearranged. The village is the same, the people are the same, but the timeline is stretched. I can't predict what's coming just because I watched the show."
He thought about the future. About Akatsuki and their dream of nuclear peace. About Obito and his crushed, ruined heart, still hiding behind a mask somewhere. About Madara, ancient and patient, pulling strings from a grave. About the politics of the five great nations, each one gnawing at the others. About the konoha F4 sitting in their comfortable offices, siphoning funds from the very village they were supposed to serve, and even beyond these there were even bigger ones lying in the darkness waiting for their chance. So many ways for a young shinobi to die, and most of them didn't even require a legendary villain — just a bad mission, a careless mistake, a moment of hesitation in the wrong moment.
"This world is dangerous," he said quietly.
"Even with an extra five years of training. Even knowing what I know. Even with the fox, it's still very dangerous."
He let that sit for a moment, then laughed again — a real one this time, surprised out of him.
The grin that spread across his face was slow, dangerous, and entirely too pleased with itself.
He closed his eyes, and the thought came uninvited.
Hinata with her shy, devoted gaze; Ino with her sharp tongue and softer heart; Tenten, precise and quietly fierce; Sakura, who was going to be devastating once she stopped being obsessed and further out, brighter, almost too bright to hold — Tsunade, the legendary sucker. His mind couldn't help but wander.
"Oh," he said, to no one.
"Oh, no."
"What is wrong with me?" he said aloud, and the laugh that followed was slightly hysterical.
"It's been twenty minutes. Twenty minutes since I woke up with my past memories, and I'm already building a harem in my head."
He slapped himself across the face, lightly, to reset.
"Focus. FOCUS. Beautiful women will still be beautiful in an hour. I have actual problems."
He sat back down on the futon and tried to do something he had apparently never done in fifteen years of Academy life: think about his schoolwork. The boy he had treated theory classes the way a cat treats bathwater — with total, screaming rejection. He had skipped lectures, hidden in trees, organized pranks, and somehow still passed year after year through a combination of natural talent, Iruka-sensei's quiet mercy, and a complete unwillingness on the village's part to let go of a kid with a sealed demon in his stomach. The actual content of those lectures, though? Lost to him. A blank.
"Chakra," he muttered, testing the word.
"Taijutsu basics. Will of Fire doctrine. History of the Warring Clans period. Hand seals, the three body — clone, transformation, substitution. I only know the Transformation Jutsu perfectly. The others are very vague." He pressed his palms against his eyes.
"Five years. Five years of sitting in that classroom, and I retained nothing."
Something had changed, though. The thoughts that had always slid off his brain like water off a hot pan were starting to stick. Concepts that had once seemed like noise were arranging themselves into shapes. He could feel the difference, like a muscle he hadn't known existed finally being asked to move.
The doorbell rang.
Naruto stared at the door.
"Great," he said.
"Day one of me starting anew, and I'm already being interrupted before I've even brushed my teeth."
He crossed the room, patted down the worst of his bedhead with one hand, and opened the door.
In front of him was-