The first coherent thought was pain.
Not the abstract kind of pain one describes with pretty words, but something visceral and concrete—a deep burning in his chest, as if someone had shoved their hands between his ribs and was squeezing his lungs with their fists. Every breath was a negotiation. A silent plea directed at a body that didn't belong to him.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
The second thought came like an avalanche.
Images that were not his. Memories of darkness, of bone cages, of a man with yellow eyes and a snake's smile who smelled of formaldehyde and rotten promises. A childhood without a name of his own, without any identity beyond "the last Kaguya," without any purpose other than being a perfect tool. Years of training until his fingers bled. The constant cold of Orochimaru's cells. The fever. Always the fever.
Wait. Wait, wait, wait—
He opened his eyes.
The sky was the wrong color. Too saturated, too clean, with that impossible blue that only existed in one specific place in his previous memory—not in the memory of the body he now inhabited, but in the other one, the one where he had seen those same colors through a screen, from a couch, with a bag of chips in his hand and subtitles running along the bottom of the image.
Naruto. I'm in Naruto.
It wasn't an exciting thought. It was terrifying.
Because I know this moment. He knew exactly where he was, when he was, and what it meant to be here, in this body, in this specific second. The ground beneath his back was compact earth and roots. To his right, a formation of bones rose from the ground like an improvised fortress. And somewhere in front of him—though the body's eyes were half-closed and vision blurred from physical strain—there were two people.
Gaara. Rock Lee.
The name of the sand boy came with a weight that almost made him vomit. Not out of fear of the shinobi, but because of what that name implied about his own situation. Because if he was here, at this precise moment, then the body he inhabited had its days numbered. Weeks, at best. It had already given everything it had, had already fought with a ferocity no other shinobi of his generation could match, and at the end of the arc—
The disease is going to kill you. It's already killing you.
He could feel it. Now that his mind settled over the old memories like sediment at the bottom of a river, he felt it with clinical clarity—the lungs weren't working properly. His breathing was short and wet in a way it shouldn't be in someone this age. Chakra flowed with difficulty, like water through a rusted pipe. The body was extraordinary—the bones responded to his will with supernatural precision, the musculature was that of someone forged for combat since childhood—but it was sick. Deeply, irreversibly sick.
Unless—
A sound interrupted him. Footsteps. Someone was approaching.
Instinctively the body wanted to rise, to take a combat stance, to bare its teeth like the war dog Orochimaru had carved over the years. But he—the other him, the one who had lived a completely different life, the one who remembered working in an office and complaining about traffic and arguing on forums about whether the Chūnin Exams arc was the best in the series—that him pushed that impulse down with all the willpower he had.
Stop. Think. You have ten seconds before someone sees you move.
Current situation: Kimimaro Kaguya's body, somewhere in the forest during the Chūnin Exams. Fight against Gaara and Rock Lee, who according to canon logic should be… where? Still fighting? Had the fight already ended? The body's memories came in fragments, mixed with pain and the brutal physical exertion of the last few minutes.
It didn't matter. What mattered was this:
One: if I keep fighting, I lose. Canon is clear.
Two: if Orochimaru takes me back, I'll keep being his weapon until I die coughing blood in some basement of the Hidden Sound Village.
Three: there is exactly one person in this world who has even a theoretical chance of curing me.
The name came on its own, with the calm certainty of someone who had seen the end of the anime and knew exactly what ability existed in this universe to deal with what this body had.
Tsunade.
It wasn't a plan. It was barely the skeleton of one. The Fifth Hokage was a medical legend, the best in decades, possibly the only person in the shinobi world capable of treating diseases that ordinary doctors declared terminal. But she was also someone who, at this moment, probably hadn't even accepted the position of Hokage yet, who was somewhere in the world running from her own pain, who had absolutely no reason to help the last survivor of an exterminated clan who had been serving Orochimaru.
But I know things she needs to know.
The footsteps stopped.
He opened his eyes fully for the first time.
Rock Lee stood a few meters away, with those thick eyebrows that under any other circumstance would have been comical, looking at him with an expression that mixed caution with something that—and this unsettled him—looked like genuine compassion. Behind him, Gaara remained motionless as always, his unblinking eyes fixed on the body lying on the ground, sand hovering around him like an unanswered question.
The situation was simple and brutal: two Konoha shinobi, both dangerous for completely different reasons, looking at what was technically an unconscious enemy. In canon, this was where Kimimaro died. The disease did the final work that no opponent had managed to complete.
But he wasn't Kimimaro.
He was someone who had watched enough anime to know that dying in the first chapter was a completely unacceptable option.
He coughed. Once, hard, and the taste in his throat was enough to confirm what he already knew. Then, with an effort that cost him more than he would have liked to admit, he turned his head toward the boy with the eyebrows.
The voice that came from his throat was Kimimaro's—low, with that dry quality of someone who had spoken very little in his life—but the words were entirely his own.
"I'm not going to fight."
Silence. Lee blinked. Even Gaara, who rarely reacted to anything, tilted his head a millimeter.
"I need to speak with someone from Konoha." Another cough. Brief, controlled, though the effort to keep it that way was considerable. "I have information about Orochimaru. About his bases. His experiments. His plans."
It was half a lie. He had information, yes—fragmented, mixed between the body's memories and what he remembered from the anime—but that wasn't what mattered right now. What mattered was buying time. Credibility. A reason for them not to leave him to die here in this forest.
"I know you have no reason to believe me," he continued, and he found it ironic that the body's voice sounded so calm when inside the panic was a living, frantic thing slamming against the walls of his skull. "But you can also clearly see that I'm not in any condition to pose any kind of threat right now."
Which was true. He was lying on the ground, breathing with difficulty, in a body that had burned an obscene amount of chakra in the last few minutes. Any shinobi who called himself competent could read the situation.
Lee looked at him for a long moment. Then he glanced at Gaara. Gaara didn't return the look—he kept observing the boy on the ground with that fixed, emotionless attention that was hard to withstand.
"Why?" Lee finally asked. Simple. Direct. The right question.
And this was where he had to be careful. Because the honest answer—because I know what awaits me if I go back to Orochimaru, and I'd rather gamble on the compassion of my enemies than the loyalty of my master—was too much, too soon. The body's memories pushed upward like water seeking cracks: Orochimaru's face, the hours in cages, the absolute certainty that the only reason he was still alive was his usefulness as a weapon.
The disease, however, was real. And the disease was an argument that needed no elaboration.
"Because I'm going to die," he said, and for the first time since opening his eyes in this body, the words sounded completely honest. "And I don't want to do it in his name."
The forest fell silent for a moment that felt much longer than it probably was.
Then Rock Lee did something he didn't expect—he crouched down to his level, looked him directly in the eyes, and nodded once with that solemn seriousness that was completely characteristic of him.
"Alright," he said. "We'll listen."
And he—the anime fan now living in the body of a boy who should be dead—thought, with a mix of relief and terror in almost equal measure:
First step complete. Now the hard part begins.
To be continued.