Blades of Green
The world comes back wrong.
Not violently. Not all at once.
But off, in that stomach-twisting, breath-hitching kind of way. Like stepping onto a staircase that isn’t there. Like blinking and finding the stars rearranged.
Too quiet.
Too bright.
Too… clean.
You suck in a breath—and choke. The air is wrong. Too thin. Too crisp. Like it hasn’t been breathed by anything alive in centuries. It cuts against your throat, unfamiliar and sharp, laced with the scent of wet stone and wind.
No blood.
No smoke.
No rot.
It’s sterile. Untouched.
Your fingers twitch against the ground. Soft.
Grass.
You blink hard, hand curling through the blades. Lush. Vibrant. Not crushed underfoot or speckled with pine needles. Not littered with ash or the smell of chakra-burnt earth.
You try to sit and your body revolts—head swimming, stomach rolling with a delayed wave of nausea. You brace on your elbows and retch bile into the grass, vision narrowing to static for a beat. Every inch of your skin feels wrong. Too light. Too thin.
The sun presses down on you with its open palm.
And yet you’re cold.
A dry, shivering cold that creeps beneath the surface. You pull your knees in, folding over them, forcing your lungs to expand. In. Out. In. Out.
Eventually, the shivering stops.
But the silence doesn’t.
It stretches around you—spacious and echoing. Not the watchful stillness of a cursed forest, or the tense hush before battle. This silence is… empty.
Your eyes slowly adjust. Trees surround you, yes, but not like the ones you knew. These rise like monuments—clean trunks, smooth bark, too symmetrical. Their leaves rustle gently, not in warning, but with lazy disinterest. There’s no tension in the canopy. No weight in the shadows.
You’re not being watched anymore.
You’re alone.
Too alone.
Your fingers curl into the earth again, instinctively searching for some grounding marker. Something to orient yourself. But there’s no blood-soaked moss, no chakra-scarred soil, no remnants of the forest that tried to eat you alive.
Just green.
Endless, perfect green.
Your mind gropes for the last thing it remembers.
That thing—sinking its claws into your chakra, hollowing you out from the inside. You were dying. You felt yourself dying. The cold was pulling your bones loose from your skin.
And then—
Him.
Kakashi.
His voice. Sharp, frayed at the edges with panic. His hands, gripping you too tightly. His chakra—bright and wild—forcing its way into yours. Your name, shouted like a curse.
Then—
The light.
Not light. Fire. Break. Noise.
Then this.
Now.
You blink rapidly. Reach for your neck, your arms—your skin’s still tacky with dried sweat, your pulse a fragile thrum beneath your jaw. But whatever was draining you is gone. The tether is severed.
But so is everything else.
“Kakashi?” you rasp.
The name doesn’t sound real. It vanishes into the wind like it was never spoken at all.
You wait.
Nothing answers.
No figure steps from the trees. No Pakkun. No footsteps. No shadow falling over you.
Your breath quickens.
If he saved you—why isn’t he here?
If he brought you back—why did he leave?
Unless he didn’t. Unless you only imagined it.
Unless you died.
You press your palm to the grass again. Press hard. Feel the press of muscle, the ache of your bones. No illusion. No dream. You’re here. Real.
But the world isn’t.
Not the one you knew.
There’s no sign of where you came from. No broken branches. No chakra signature. No scorched roots. No forest teetering on the edge of rot.
Only…
A lake.
You hadn’t noticed it at first—too stunned, too unmoored—but it stretches out to your right, wide and calm. The surface glassy and silver-blue, like a mirror forgotten by the gods.
You stare at it, numb. You don’t remember any body of water near the mission site. Not this size. Not this still. You shift slightly, knees drawn up to your chest, arms looped around them.
The reflection in the lake stares back—your face pale with exhaust and unfamiliar, hair tangled, eyes rimmed red.
You whisper again.
“Where am I?”
Quieter this time.
Even you don’t believe it.
No answer. No warmth on the wind. No chakra flare. Just the breathless quiet of a world that doesn’t recognize you.
Your jaw clenches.
You survived. Somehow.
But you didn’t come back.
You ended up somewhere else.
And wherever this is… it isn’t home.
Not anymore.
You walk carefully, every step placed with the precision of habit—weight balanced, heel never striking first, breath held in the hollow of your chest. Old instincts. The kind that kept you alive long enough to learn when something wasn’t right.
And this?
This isn’t right.
The trees thin ahead, golden light dripping through the canopy in streaks, but it doesn’t warm you. If anything, it only sharpens the strange cold in your gut. Like the air doesn’t belong to this forest. Like maybe you don’t.
You stop just short of the tree line, dropping low into the cover of brush where the earth still feels like home beneath your hands. Your fingers dig into the dirt, grounding you, but it’s no good. The world already feels too far away.
You lift your eyes.
And there it is.
Konoha.
Your heart stutters, then clenches.
The village stands just beyond the last stretch of road, sunlit and towering, surrounded by high stone walls. The main gates rise proudly, carved with the leaf symbol you’ve known since childhood—since before you had a name worth remembering.
But it’s… different.
They’re too new. The stone is pale, unmarred by scorch marks or weathered chips. The iron-banded doors gleam, freshly lacquered. The watchtowers have been reinforced. The whole structure stands like a monument to what Konoha should be, not what it was in your time—tired, battered, and always healing from the last hit.
Your breath snags in your throat.
Something’s wrong.
You shift your gaze upward, past the rooftops, and feel your stomach flip.
The Hokage Monument cuts against the sky, solemn and massive as ever, but your eyes find what shouldn’t be there almost immediately. You count them.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four—
And then five.
Your lungs forget how to work.
Long hair in pony tails. A strong jaw. That signature diamond on her forehead.
Tsunade.
It’s her.
Her face carved into the stone, weather-smoothed and impossibly permanent.
Your heart hammers against your ribs like it’s trying to escape.
No. No, no—this can’t be right. She’s not Hokage. Never was. Not since you could breathe. She’s still gone. Still missing. The village hadn’t even managed to track her down.
So what the hell is she doing on that mountain?
Your mind reels, but the blows keep coming.
Movement—higher up.
Scaffolding. Construction.
Your eyes lock on the shape just beginning to emerge from the stone—chisels carving out the broad strokes of a sixth face. Unfinished, obscured by rope and tarps, but undeniably real.
Kami.
They’re adding another.
Another Hokage.
Your heart thuds like a drumbeat of dread.
Who? How many years have passed here? What war, what tragedy, what shift in leadership brought this version of Konoha forward while yours stayed behind?
You sink back into the undergrowth, body low to the earth, pressing your chakra down, folding it into silence. Hiding. Your cloak rustles faintly as you tighten it around you.
It feels like standing on the edge of a dream you don’t remember entering. A version of your life rewritten without you.
The sound of footsteps jerks you still.
Two shinobi walk the forest path in front of the gates, chatting idly. Their uniforms are clean, not the patched and worn kind you’re used to. Their weapons are regulation. Efficient. Boring.
But you don’t know them.
Not by face. Not by chakra. Not even by reputation.
They’re Konoha shinobi. About your age.
And they’re strangers.
You watch them pass, barely daring to breathe. One gestures toward the scaffolding on the mountain, chuckling at something you can’t hear. The other responds with a shrug and a roll of his shoulders, already bored.
They don’t sense you.
They don’t expect to.
They have no reason to.
Because you don’t exist here.
Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Once they disappear, swallowed back into the village, you risk rising slightly from your crouch, just enough to see the rooftops again. You scan for something familiar. Someone.
But the world stays silent.
You’re an outsider in the village that raised you.
A phantom clinging to the edges of a place that feels like home—but isn’t. Not anymore.
“Please be alive, Kakashi…”
His name slips from your lips before you can stop it, a whisper carried off by the wind. It feels strange saying it out loud here, like it doesn’t belong in this air. Like maybe even he doesn’t.
You search the horizon for him. For the flicker of his chakra. For any sign that he made it through with you.
But there’s nothing.
Just birdsong.
Wind.
Stone faces staring down from the cliffside like gods.
You close your eyes.
Try not to let the panic creep in.
But it does.
Because this is Konoha.
And you’re utterly, completely alone.