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The Naruto who wakes up days later...

He’s not the Naruto that they know.

Well–

He’s the same person, yes—those are his blue eyes taking everything in, that’s an echo of his smile.

But he’s not the same, and it shows.

Sakura confines him to bed rest and is immediately suspicious when he smiles agreeably and says nothing.

She doesn’t yet register that his eyes are focused on something she can’t see, that he’s listening to something she’ll never be able to hear.

He’s there, but he’s not.

He doesn’t crack jokes, doesn’t flirt with danger or insist he’s totally fine. He doesn’t burst into rooms like an explosion with the full certainty that he belongs there.

He walks instead. Quietly. Aimlessly. Barefoot, most days. Touching walls, tracing wood grain.

Breathing like it’s a conscious decision and not something his body just does.

He doesn’t show up to Sakura’s for dinner uninvited. Doesn’t beg Iruka for ramen or wander into Yamato’s patrols with a full thermos and a dumb grin that lightens the mood every single time. He doesn’t sit with Sai and compare brush stroke techniques or drape himself over Kakashi’s desk while they pretend not to be bored out of their skulls with paperwork.

He just...

Exists.

Reverent. Quiet.

Like he’s still trying to squeeze himself back into his skin.

Sakura checks his vitals every morning. They’re always fine.

Too fine—he’s running like a perfectly tuned machine. And that’s how she knows something is wrong. His body is perfect, and it doesn’t make sense.

She wants to yell, provoke him. She wants him to argue with her, the way he always used to. She wants to hear a single goddamn emotion in his voice for once.

But she sees a stillness in his eyes—not empty, but deeper than it has any right to be—and she can’t bring herself to break it.

So she brings the flowers he would normally pick. She tells the bad jokes he would normally crack in an attempt to make her smile on a bad day.

She waits.

Yamato finds Naruto already on the Hokage Monument when he arrives for his shift—just as he has every time thus far.

The blond doesn’t speak. He just sits there, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in tandem with the breeze around him. He’s in sync with the village.

Like a conductor listening to the orchestra from inside the music.

Yamato misses the chaos. He misses the passion in Naruto’s voice, the light in his eyes. He misses cleaning up the blond’s messes and pretending that he isn’t absolutely wrapped around his finger.

He misses being able to fix the problems that arose.

But Naruto doesn’t need fixing. He’s healthy, whole. Just... dispersed.

And Yamato doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with that.

Sai draws Naruto over and over.

Naruto, still. Naruto, serene. Naruto, smiling without showing his teeth.

Each sketch feels wrong, winds up torn to shreds and set ablaze as Sai stares blankly at his canvas.

He misses the movement. The fidgeting. The endless stream of consciousness on what it means to have a heart and a history. To be human.

Now, Naruto stares at the world like he’s made of it.

And Sai wonders if one can ever hope to be human again if they can’t ever fully come back from being more.

Iruka knows Naruto isn’t back—not all the way—when he stops showing up for lunch. It sits heavy in his stomach as he stares at the ramen he bought for them, the broth cooling with every minute Naruto doesn’t arrive.

The next day, Naruto doesn’t wave from across the street.

And the day after that, Iruka catches him standing in the middle of the training field—barefoot, still, staring at nothing like he’s listening to music no one else can hear.

He calls out.

Naruto blinks slowly, like the name doesn’t quite belong to him anymore.

And something twists, low and deep in Iruka’s chest.

He knows what this is. He’s seen it before.

People don’t just disappear.

They stop connecting first.

They fade in pieces.

Naruto isn’t leaving him—

He’s losing his way back to him.

So Iruka starts showing up again.

He leaves a bento on Naruto’s doorstep, even though Naruto isn’t there to find it.

He keeps watering the plant Naruto shoved at him three birthdays ago, even though it’s outlived the joke and the lesson.

He writes down absurd things his students say—because someday, Naruto will laugh again. He will. Even if he’s been avoiding the Academy like someone else’s life depends on it.

And he keeps talking.

Even when Naruto doesn’t answer.

Even when Naruto isn’t really in the room.

“You’re not getting rid of me,” he mutters one afternoon, setting down another bento. “I raised you. I can outlast whatever metaphysical bullshit this is.”

He just needs Naruto to come home.

And if Naruto forgets where that is—

Then Iruka will leave the light on.

Every single goddamn day.

Until he remembers the way back.

Naruto is there, but he isn’t.

He just is.

Maybe that’s the problem. He’s not himself, he’s not the village, he’s not the breeze, he’s not the rays of light filtered through the clouds above them. He just is.

Every morning, he sits on his father’s stone head and stares out at what has become an extension of him. Or maybe he’s an extension of it? Are they separate? Will they ever be?

Have they ever been?

He doesn’t really understand what time is, not anymore. He knows he finished the seal – that much is absolutely clear. It’s the last real thing he remembers doing. He remembers that final breath that he took, the way it had felt to press himself into the very being of the village he loves more than anything.

He doesn’t remember breathing in again.

And as he sits there, he’s not sure he remembers how.

Every evening, he walks the boundary of the seal. He feels Kakashi trailing behind him, every night, every lap. He's not hiding—nothing can hide from him anymore, not here. He's watching. Waiting.

And Naruto hurts for him because he doesn't know how long Kakashi will have to wait.

If it'll be a forever that only Naruto, as intertwined in the village as he is, can experience.

He feels the way his friends hurt.

And he hurts with them.

The hurt grows, or maybe he's just learned to focus on it more. He chases that feeling, and it feels like home. It's sad, it's grieving, but it's HIM. It's HIS connection to his family that he's feeling, not the village's connection to everything he's become the conduit for.

The world coalesces around him, solidifying bit by bit, and he feels smaller—but not in a bad way.

And one day, he blinks back to awareness.

He's in Kakashi's office, because of course he is.

He's been chasing home, and that has always, always led to the one who’s stayed.

So he sits.

And he waits.

Kakashi wakes and braces himself for another day of waiting, of existing in a loop no one is sure will ever end. Unsure if today will be just another in a countless number of days where they all watch an echo of sunshine walk through the village.

But no matter how it goes, how it ends, it starts the same as it always does. Because the Kakashi of Before may have shirked his duties as much as possible without outright neglecting anything—he'd never wanted the hat, never wanted the weight—but now?

The Hokage serves the village.

And the village is Naruto.

It's a foregone conclusion, what he has to do, and the weight of the hat settles more firmly, more naturally than before.

Naruto is the village.

And Kakashi serves Naruto.

And so his day begins, as always, in his office. A place he still steps into with a half-formed expectation of laughter and bad jokes and truly terrible (wonderful) commentary of every council member's current actions. Today, he knows better.

When he steps inside, gray eyes meet clear blue, and the ground stabilizes beneath Kakashi's feet for the first time in months. He's on his knees in front of Naruto, pressing their foreheads together, shaking hands cradling Naruto's jaw. "You are never allowed to do that again."

Naruto laughs, rusty from disuse but heartbreakingly him. "Konoha is a jealous thing. I don’t think I could do it again if I wanted to."

Naruto still struggles with being himself. It feels more real every day, and it helps that Kakashi is an anchor that never wavers, never lets him drift, but there's still something at the edges.

He'll be in the middle of talking to Sakura when he breaks off mid-sentence before continuing a conversation he's in the middle of with Sai—who is districts away, nowhere near them. Sakura swallows and gently pulls him back, refocuses.

He walks into things now, and that might be the most jarring visible tell. He forgets he has to move out of the way of things, that he isn't everything around him, that his body is him and separate and tiny, and he can't just phase through furniture. Yamato laughs, but it's tinged with a slight sadness.

Naruto is back, he's here, but he's different.

Kakashi, who has never been good at asking for what he needs or letting himself accept what's being freely given, never lets Naruto out of his sight. There's no shame, no hesitance, no stumbling through the words—Kakashi moves Naruto into his home and spends his days anchoring him to the here and now.

At night, sharing a bed while Kakashi runs his fingers through hair Naruto keeps forgetting to cut, Naruto will keep a hand over Kakashi's heart and try to explain the feeling of being that he's never experienced before.

Kakashi listens, never really fully understands—but he's there. And so is Naruto.

Sakura notices it first. It’s subtle, quiet, slow—nothing like how she would have expected Naruto to return.

But it’s happening.

She can see it in the way that he starts leaning into Kakashi’s side when they’re all in the same room. The way he reaches for Kakashi’s hand on reflex. The way his chakra isn’t stretching so thin anymore, no longer reaches out–

Because it’s coiling tighter, closer.

Around Kakashi.

And Sakura wonders if Naruto will ever be able to pull himself back together all the way—if he knows how to want to.

But no matter how lost he gets, how thin he spreads, he’s found an anchor.

And Kakashi leads him home every time.

The first time Naruto shows up at the Academy again, Iruka nearly drops the tray of tea.

It’s the middle of the lunch period. The students are outside. The halls are quiet, peaceful. The kind of quiet Iruka used to like.

Now it makes his skin crawl.

Then he hears the door creak open.

And there’s Naruto, standing in the doorway like he belongs there. Like he remembers belonging there.

He doesn’t say anything. Just gives Iruka a small, tired smile and holds up two bowls of ramen like a peace offering.

Iruka doesn’t ask where he got them. He just nods toward the desk, and Naruto sits like he never stopped coming.

They don’t talk about the seal.

Naruto never brings it up, and Iruka doesn’t push.

Not because he isn’t curious—he is—but because he knows.

Knows that if Naruto starts talking about it, he might disappear again mid-sentence. Might follow some chakra current back into the cracks of the village and forget to come back.

So they talk about everything else.

Iruka’s students. The idiotic thing Kakashi did last week. A rumor about Sai being banned from the market for handing out unsolicited caricatures and life advice.

Naruto eats slowly, like he's still remembering how to chew. But he laughs.

And for Iruka, that’s enough.

Izumi shows up once.

They’re small and quiet, sharp around the edges in a way Iruka recognizes too well. They’re the one—the student, the spark that lit all of this.

Naruto freezes when he sees them.

Izumi doesn’t bow. Doesn’t smile. They just look him in the eye and say:

“You saved me. I don’t know why you did it like that. But I’ll remember.”

Naruto blinks. Takes a slow breath. Then nods.

“I did it like that... so no one else would ever have to.” He looks at them, pinning them with eyes that see everything and nothing. “I hope you live a long life.”

Izumi nods, solemn as a priest, and walks away.

Neither of them speak for a long while after they’re gone.

Eventually, Naruto leans his head on Iruka’s shoulder. Not heavy—just present. “Thanks for waiting,” he murmurs.

Iruka doesn’t answer.

He just pours another cup of tea and slides it across the desk.

It takes months after that morning in Kakashi's office. Naruto's gaze sharpens over time, and he moves with the graceful, economic flow his body had been trained for and his mind is remembering. His pauses grow shorter until they're only visible to Kakashi, who never stops watching.

Kurama wraps himself around Naruto so tightly that it should feel suffocating for both of them—and it never does. They breathe together, hearts in sync, and Naruto actively chooses to stay, every day they wake up and face the world together.

Sakura cries the first time he throws a glitter bomb into her open office window.

Full body shaking, can’t catch her breath, can’t see–

Because she’d yelled on reflex, and he’d laughed, and she hasn’t heard that sound in almost a year.

Naruto had watched her with a sad smile and reached for her, brushing the glitter away from her face.

“You l-left,” she bites out, trying to pull herself back together.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “I didn’t mean to.”

There’s a moment when the only sound in the room is her trying to catch her breath. When she can string more than two words together, she takes a breath. “I missed you. So much.”

He watches her with eyes older, heavier, more serious than they have any right to be.

But she can see the love buried deep like an absolute truth, something Naruto has fought for.

“I missed you, too.”

Kurama has tried not to show it. Has stayed silent when the others watched too closely. Has growled when they hovered, barked when they fretted.

He doesn’t need them.

He just needs him.

So he wraps around Naruto every night like armor. Fills the gaps when the boy forgets to move, to eat, to blink. Breathes with him when he forgets how.

He carries the weight of them both because Naruto once carried the whole damn world.

But the ache doesn’t fade.

Because Kurama can feel the difference—between being together and being inhabited.

This body is shared, but Kurama has never felt more alone.

Until this moment.

Until that soft, instinctive shift—the chakra pulse that hums here I am instead of I am everything.

Until the heartbeat stutters, just slightly, like a footstep catching mid-stride—and Kurama feels the edges of Naruto’s soul snap inward, folding back into shape.

Not Sage Mode.

Not village-anchored, spirit-stretched, seal-born awareness.

Just Naruto.

Present. Sharp. Singular.

Himself.

Kurama doesn’t dare speak. Doesn’t move.

He just listens.

Feels.

And when Naruto’s chakra brushes against him—gentle, deliberate, intimate—

He’s never needed it before, but he finally, finally feels like he can breathe.

Kakashi watches, and he sees the way Naruto settles into himself bit by bit. His body becomes something that he is rather than something that fits poorly, and it shows in the way he goes about his days.

There’s no dramatic moment, no world-shaking realization.

It’s as simple as Naruto remembering to breathe like his lungs belong to him again.

Not the village. Not the wind. Him.

It shows in the little things:

A cup of tea appearing beside Kakashi’s hand before he reaches for it.

The correct report handed over before Kakashi asks.

A shared look across a meeting room, Naruto smirking—because someone had said something stupid, and he doesn’t need words to let Kakashi know he’d noticed too.

Then one night, Naruto shifts in his sleep, curling tightly against him. “Stop watching me,” he mumbles, breath warm against Kakashi’s skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Kakashi doesn’t let him out of bed the next day.

Naruto still loses time.

Still stares too long at the streetlights or tilts his head as he listens to something no one else can hear. He’ll pause mid-conversation, eyes distant, like a wave pulling back from the shore. Like he’s about to leave again.

But then he reaches back to Kakashi every time. A simple touch—brushing their hands together, clutching the hem of his sleeve, leaning his forehead on Kakashi’s shoulder—always brings him back.

And he stays.

Kakashi never says, “You scared me.”

He never says, “I almost lost you.”

He doesn’t have to—he knows he screams it every time he holds Naruto too tightly, watches him too intensely.

Naruto never apologizes, but he may as well write in the sky with the way he curls against him at night, pressing a hand over Kakashi’s heart as he breathes in time with the rise and fall of the older man’s chest.

They both know what they’d almost lost.

But they’re here now.

The thing that rocks Kakashi to his core, that finally lets him believe that Naruto is back, is something so mundane he wants to cry.

Naruto walks into his office one morning without knocking, sits on the corner of his desk, and launches into a rant about the budget line for new mission gear like he’s been arguing about it for years.

Like he’s always been here.

Like he’d never left.

And all Kakashi can do is sit back and listen, heart in his throat. He watches the way Naruto flails and gesticulates, hears the way he mispronounces bureaucratic terms Kakashi knows he knows how to say correctly.

He’s so bright, it hurts to look at him.

He never looks away.

It takes years.

Years of uneasy peace. Of whispered intelligence and distant warnings. Of watching the horizon and wondering if the storm will come.

Then it does.

Not subtle. Not strategic.

A wall of chakra, monstrous and cold, barreling toward Konoha’s gates like the hand of a god come to crush the land.

ANBU scramble. Evacuations trigger. Barrier teams form a hasty perimeter. There are screams, alarms, panic.

And then, just as the enemy crests the final ridge and the village prepares to burn—

Everything stops.

The air thickens.

Not with fear. With presence.

The birds go silent. The wind dies.

And from the center of the village, where a hundred invisible seals converge beneath stone and soil and blood, the world shifts.

Because the village is breathing.

And it is angry.

Chakra pours through the streets like sunlight turned molten.

The earth glows with kanji no one remembers how to read. The buildings hum. The trees bend. And on every rooftop, every path, every wall, the ancient seals Naruto carved into the bones of the village come alive.

He doesn’t appear at the gate.

He doesn’t need to.

Because he’s already there.

He’s everywhere.

The enemy commander halts—sensing something they don’t understand but instinctively fear.

And then—

He steps forward.

A ripple of chakra, golden and red and vast as the sky, coalesces into a shape. A boy. A man. A myth.

Eyes like burning blue suns. Cloak of chakra blazing like wildfire. The air around him warps.

And the seals sing.

“You’ve made a mistake.” Naruto’s words emanate from the stones, from the trees, from the ground under the enemy’s feet. “You came for a village.”

He snarls, and Konoha bares its teeth.

“You get me instead.”

And then the world breaks.

The battlefield bends. Gravity folds inward. Time stutters.

The sky ignites as Naruto releases every defensive matrix, every spatial anchor, every buried line of sealwork he wove into the village with his own blood and soul.

He doesn’t cast jutsu. He invokes them.

He doesn’t fight.

He reaches out.

And the earth answers.

When the dust clears, there’s nobody left of the enemy’s force.

Just silence.

Just peace.

Just Naruto, glowing with the remnants of fury, standing at the edge of Konoha’s heartbeat like he never left.

He walks in without knocking, soot streaking his jaw, chakra humming so loud it makes the glass shiver.

Kakashi doesn’t look up from his desk, but Naruto reads the unease in his chakra.

“Problem?” he asks dryly.

Naruto shrugs. “Not anymore.”

Chakra quieting slightly, Kakashi sets down his pen, stands, and reaches for him.

This time, Naruto meets him halfway.

Because the village is safe.

Because the anchor held.

Because Naruto was right.

And now the whole world knows:

You don’t threaten Konoha.

Because Naruto is Konoha.

And Naruto doesn’t lose.

At first, the villagers are silent.

The kind of silence that comes after lightning strikes far too close—the kind that buzzes in your bones and makes your skin itch.

And then, slowly, the silence shifts.

To laughter. To stories. To awe.

Because the thing is—this wasn’t a surprise.

They knew.

They’ve felt it for years in the hum of the ground. The warmth of the wind. The way the air wraps around them when they’re scared and suddenly... they’re not.

They’ve always known.

A child stands near the crater edge, hand in her guardian’s. She stares into the ruin, eyes wide, and whispers:

“Is he a god?”

The guardian doesn’t hesitate.

“No.”

“He’s... ours.”

The stories spread faster than the smoke clears.

How Naruto didn’t just stop the attack—he unmade it.

How the seals sang his name. How the trees leaned toward the chakra like sunflowers chasing light. How time stopped for a breath so the village could live one moment longer.

They call him a guardian. A ghost. A fox. A firestorm.

But mostly?

They just call him theirs.

Old ANBU leave offerings on rooftops. Civilians plant flowers near the foundations of the tower. Children sleep easier, knowing if anything ever comes for them, he’ll feel it first.

They don’t bow to him.

They don’t worship him.

But when he walks the streets again, soot still in his hair, smile lazy and body worn—

They look up.

And in every glance is the same unshakable truth:

He is the village.

And they belong to each other.

The village is too quiet when he walks through it.

Not actually silent—he can hear the kids yelling down by the river, smell the burnt takoyaki, feel the buzz of rebuilding in every stone.

But the people go still when he passes.

Not afraid. Not reverent. Just... watching.

Like they’re trying to confirm he’s still flesh and blood and not the storm he became.

And Naruto hates it.

He doesn’t stop walking.

He waves, grins, jokes. Lets his chakra reach out gently to assure people he’s okay, they’re okay.

But the whispers follow him:

“He stopped time.”

“I heard he never touched the ground.”

“My cousin saw the seals glow—on their own.”

“They say he’s not human anymore.”

He hates that most of all.

By the time he gets back to Kakashi’s, he’s dragging.

Not from fatigue. Not really.

From weight. From being seen the wrong way. From knowing that no one else saw what it cost him.

No one except his family.

And of course—because he’s predictable and an idiot and never stops to think—he mutters, half-laughing:

“They’re making it sound like I did something impossible.”

There’s a pause.

And then Sakura throws a rolled-up mission scroll at his head.

Hard.

“You did something impossible,” she snaps. “You tore yourself apart and wove yourself into the goddamn chakra net. You nearly unmade yourself trying to hold us all.”

Naruto flinches, not from pain, but from the truth in her voice.

Yamato leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. “You scared the trees,” he says. “Do you understand how weird that is?”

Sai’s sketchpad flutters as he turns a page. “I saw a deer the other day that had your eyes. I tried to draw it, and it disappeared in a tornado of leaves.”

Kakashi doesn’t say anything.

He just walks up, places both hands on Naruto’s shoulders, and holds.

Steady. Firm.

“Stop brushing it off,” he says softly.

Naruto wants to joke. Wants to say I’m fine, it’s over, it worked.

But then Kakashi adds:

“Because we won’t.”

And Naruto breaks.

Not loud. Not messy. Just folds a little.

Because he knows they’re right.

He knows what it cost him, even if he’d do it again in a heartbeat. Even if it was worth it. Even if he’d never admit how close he came to not coming back.

But they know.

And they’ll carry that weight with him.

So when Kakashi pulls him into a hug, Naruto leans in.

Lets it happen.

Because he doesn’t have to be everything anymore.

He just has to be theirs.