You Know Its Not the Same

Oh, he really should have known better than to try shunshin so soon after the last disaster, but it was an instinctive move.

Automatically, his chakra moved into a flicker and by the time he had realized what he was doing it was too late. The world warped and he only had a few seconds before his stomach was curling in on itself and trying to force itself out from his throat. But there was nothing left to go up- he had hadn’t eaten much of anything and what he had eaten was thrown up earlier.

It still tried.

As he dry heaved, Sukea once again cursed out his body. Why was it like this? What did he do to deserve this?

(A thousand (honey pot, assassination, genocide-) missions flashed through his mind, some of which made him sick to even think about.

Don’t answer that question, actually. Please don’t.)

He heaved harder.

His stomach twisted one last time before it stopped, but Sukea stayed in his position for a few moments before finally straightening his back. He pinched the bridge of his nose briefly as one last aftershock of nausea hit him before he finally took a step.

He looked around, finding himself to be surrounded by trees. Which wasn’t very conclusive; all of Konoha was surrounded by trees. Sukea sighed.

Picking a direction, Sukea went on his way. His pace was slow and unbothered, and he had a permanent slouch. 

The tree’s loomed around him, and the air was permeated with chakra. He breathed in the scent of the forest- the familiarity of it filled him with a sense of calm. It was nice to know that some things stayed the same.

Sukea went on planning his day; He would go to the market, pick up some apple sauce, maybe even a plant to screw with his younger self. It could be Mr. Ukki’s great grandfather. Definitely a book or two of Icha-Icha-

Sukea paused in his tracks, a horrible thought coming to him. Did Icha-Icha even exist at that time? His previously unbothered pace suddenly became very bothered, and he nearly ran towards where he knew the book store was.

If it didn’t exist, then what would he read? Its been his go-to for so long, he didn’t know how he’d find something else that got such hilarious reactions from his peers. (If it didn’t exist, it would only cement his reality even more. The reality that he wasn’t when he wanted to be.)

Sukea jumped from the trees onto a path, startling the few civilians that were walking on it but he honestly couldn’t care less. He beelined it to his favorite bookstore before he dramatically burst through the doors and started checking each and every shelf because it had to be there, it had to be.

When he got to the end of the isle that honestly had one of the least chances to have his book, he desperately flipped through every novel just incase it was under a different title and cover, but no.

No luck.

There was no Icha-Icha.

The cogs in his head that had been previously been whirling overtime halted to a sudden stop, because there- there wasn’t any Icha-Icha. His favorite book didn’t exist yet.

Mechanically, Sukea started to read the book he was holding, if only to distract himself. He was in the part of the book store that was sorted by author name in a last attempt to find anything relating to Jiraiya. Though, he doubted his precious Icha-Icha was even there. He knew that the owner made sure that books like that stayed in the section they were supposed to be in.

His eyes flitted over the first page, and something about the story threw him off. It wasn’t that it was bad, or that it was even particularly good, but it was just- familiar.

Sukea blinked, then turned over the book to get another look at the cover. The words The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi stared back at him.

Slowly, Sukea opened up the book in the middle. One of the first words to stare back at him was ‘Naruto’, cementing that, without a doubt, this was the book that his Sensei had loved so very much.

The nausea from before was coming back slowly, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to look away. 

Minato had made him read it years before, right after Rin's death. Sukea supposed he meant to use it as a way to tell him that you should never give up, though the only thing it did to thirteen-year-old him was make him more upset. The ideal shinobi never gave up; the ideal shinobi was happy and jubilant and everything that he wasn’t, the ideal shinobi didn’t kill his own friends.

Sukea’s eyes glazed over, and he flipped the page. He was barely even actually reading the book, his eyes glazing over the pages, getting caught a little each time the main characters name came up. Naruto.

He knew that Minato had a son, before, with that same name. ‘Because I want him to be like the main character!’, Minato had said. He felt a brief flash of guilt. Maybe if he had been better, had worked harder, Minato and Kushina would have still been alive. Would have been able to raise their child. 

Sukea’s eyes lingered around the edges of the page, and something caught his eye. His arm. There was a slight tremor in his arm.

What.

“What?” He murmured again aloud, because simply thinking it wasn’t enough to capture the sheer feeling of confusion going through him.

He was shivering? There was just- it was just a slight tremor going through him, but he was shivering.

The book shop was cold, yes (probably too cold, why was it so cold? That couldn’t be good for business-), not enough to shiver, and he certainly wasn’t upset enough to be shaking for that reason.

What is wrong with this body? He thought.

Now that he was paying attention, he could see that both of his arms were shaking. He was full on shivering.

If he thought about it, yes, maybe it was cold, maybe he could almost feel it down to his bones, but he had been through Kiri in the wintertime with only an ANBU regulation tank top and he barely even shivered then.

But, Sukea thought, sight trained on his still shaking arms, that was in a different body.

A body that had at least some muscle and fat to protect it from the cold, a body that wasn’t literally just skin and bones, a body that could actually regulate its temperature.

He took a deep breath before letting out a tremendous sigh, and he started walking through the aisles of the book store towards the exit. If he was so cold, maybe he would be less cold outside of the heavily air-conditioned building. It was summer, after all.

He was just about to exit the store before he heard a shout. “Hey! You have to pay for that, you know!” 

Sukea turned around, and was immediately hit with a wave of what must have been nostalgia. It was the same old civilian book-keeper from his time- if significantly younger- hair more brown than gray. His name was Watashi, if Sukea remembered correctly. The bookkeeper, of all things, was a constant presence.

Watashi was standing behind a counter, an angry fist raised in the air.

It was then that he remembered the slight weight in his hands was a book that he didn’t own, and almost automatically he went to the cash register and payed for it with a portion of the money he had in his pocket. 

He walked out of the store, slightly numb at this point. He could barely feel the tips of his fingers, for one, but he had hit a wall of apathy as well. 

He didn’t even know why he bought the book. It wasn’t like he was going to actually read it again.

Sukea slipped the book into his pocket, and decided to not think about it until a later date. Because he had other, more important things to deal with. Most importantly, food.

If he thought very, very hard about it, he could almost feel his stomach growl. Almost.

He was still shivering, but it was so much warmer outside. He was still wondering how he got so cold, especially since he was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, but he could deal with it later. Perhaps when he decided to read that book. Ha.

Sukea turned his gait to the food market. The book store (or at least, the book store that he liked to frequent) was near the edge of the village, as it wasn’t a very… popular one. For many reasons, but not discluding the entire three shelfs of erotic books that it sported. 

Honestly, Sukea didn’t want to have to deal with the walk to the food market.

He sighed, perhaps the deepest sigh all day, and walked through the paths of the village, collecting stares the whole way. He supposed it was justified. He was one of the last Hatake. That did not mean, however, that every pair of eyes he felt on him did not make his skin itch. Did not make him want to either run away or yell at them to just look away. Some were hateful, some were sympathetic, and others just wanted their share of the gossip. 

Suddenly, while awkwardly walking through one of the (unfortunately) most crowded parts of town, he heard a shout. Of his name. 

What.

“Sukea! It is you, right?” It came again, closer this time. Sukea tucked his hands into his pockets and hunched in on himself in an effort to make himself less noticeable, but it was too late. He had been spotted.

But by who? Well, that was a mystery.

“Sukea! Do not run away from me!” 

He walked faster. 

Despite his best efforts to high-tail it out of there, the increasingly insistent and loud shouts of his names became closer, and soon enough he sensed the chakra of someone far too close to him for comfort. It would have been a calm, soothing chakra signature (almost like herbal healing cream) if it wasn’t actively chasing after him

Sukea was not ready for this. This person, who likely knew Sukea (the one from before, his uncle) recognized him, was looking for him. They would probably- no, definitely- see that something was off. And if something was off, he would immediately get carted out of the village or executed, and he wasn’t sure which was worse. 

In a last ditch attempt to, well, ditch his followers, he ducked into an alleyway and jumped on the roof. If they were civilian (which was very, very unlikely, considering their chakra signature-), then great! If not, then, well. 

Lets hope he knew a city he hadn’t seen in seventeen years better than someone who knew it as their present.

Yeah. He was screwed.

The thump behind him disproved the smidgen of hope that, maybe, just maybe they were civilian and damn it all, Sukea ran.

Jumping from rooftop to rooftop, he briefly stared down at the world below him. It was all so… different than he remembered, which was to be expected, he supposed. Last he remembered it was a bit less than two decades in the future. 

He didn’t have time to focus on that though- he had to evade whoever it was that was chasing him.

Sukea took a hard left to a place that should lead to somewhere around his apartment, before belatedly remembering that over there wasn’t his apartment anymore, over there probably didn’t even exist. Actually, if he remembered it correctly, that entire section of the village hadn’t been built until after the Kyuubi attack. Which wouldn’t happen for at least another seven years, if at all.

A quick glance told him that he was correct. There wasn’t even a facsimile of an apartment complex; merely forest, forest and more forest.

His body, far to weak to be forced to run around after vomiting twice, nearly missed a step when he realized his screw-up. A small amount of panic was starting to fill him, because he really wasn’t ready to confront a past that wasn’t even his. This shinobi that was chasing after him was probably angry, or concerned, and he really didn’t want to take responsibility for mistakes he hadn’t even made.

If he had to, well, he didn’t know what he would do. Probably throw up again if the nausea he was feeling had anything to say about it.

In a move that would probably work in any other circumstance, Sukea halted to a stop and started to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction, hoping to throw off his pursuer.

Unfortunately, because he hadn’t had anything to eat in the last day or so, and because he was already feeling shaky, he… miscalculated. While putting his foot down for another jump, he put too much weight on his injured leg. If it was just the pain that he had to deal with (though formidable) he would be fine, and continue on, and deal with his body’s past another day, but it wasn’t. His leg was just too physically weak to hold his weight, even though he was probably less than a hundred pounds.

Sukea fell.

He hit the ground with a roll before ending up on his back, the scent of urine and trash permeating through the air. He had landed in a small alleyway, a dumpster on either side of him.

Sukea clenched his eyes shut. Somewhere during the shit show that has been his day he had developed a headache, and it seemed that it was deciding to try and burst out of the back of his head. 

Suddenly, he heard a loud thump behind him, and clenched his eyes shut even harder. If he could trust his body not to implode on itself, he would have shunshined away long ago. Sadly, he could not.

Sukea held his breath, and stopped moving besides the quite thump-thump-thump of his heart. Perhaps if he was still enough, they would go away?

Despite all of Sukea’s hopes and dreams, the person spoke. “Sukea, what was that? Did you just try to run from me?”

It seemed that his strategy of pretending that they didn’t exist would not work, and so Sukea squinted his eyes open just a tad and craned his neck to get a look at who he was dealing with.

His eyes ran over them as he categorized their looks; male, blond hair, blue eyes, no pupil.  Yamanaka, then. He was staring at Sukea with a disgruntled expression on his strong features, his short (shorter than usual, for a Yamanaka) pony-tail hanging in front of his face. 

“Ah, yes?” Sukea said. His voice was rough like sandpaper, and he cleared his throat. It felt like sandpaper, too. 

Slowly, he sat up, and Yamanaka glowered at him. “I haven’t seen you in seven years, and your first reaction to me was running?” The disgruntled expression slowly morphed into concern as the seconds ticked by, before Yamanaka finally said, “What happened to you?”

There were about a million answers to that question. ‘You’ve actually never seen me’, or, ‘Well, I blinked and then suddenly I was here sitting in a pool of my own regrets’, or a personal favorite, ‘I just got a bit lost on the road of life.’

Instead of saying any of that, though, Sukea just shrugged. With a bit of effort, he pushed himself up into a sitting position. He figured that he should try to stand as well, but his leg was still throbbing at him. 

Suddenly, Yamanaka grabbed his arm and hauled him up. His fingers dug painfully into what little meat that Sukea had on his arm, and he grunted as he was lifted like he was as light as a feather. Because he was. He was lighter than he should be, and the distinct reminder left him mildly upset. He really did need to eat.

Sukea stumbled forward a bit as the world spun, and when his head finally started to feel like it was screwed in right, he looked up. Yamanaka was staring at him with tight, concerned eyes, and Sukea blinked. Ah. Right. This person knew him. They supposedly hadn’t seen him since he joined ANBU, and they just saw him fall from a rooftop.

Sukea nearly groaned aloud. Couldn’t this encounter have been saved for another day? A day where he didn’t feel like each step was going to make him pass out? A day where he hadn’t already been viciously confronted with his failures? 

Yamanaka opened his mouth to speak, and Sukea had his answer. No.

Suddenly, he was cut off by a gruff voice from behind them. 

“Inodeki-san?” It called out, and nearly every single one of Sukeas muscles tensed in surprise. Someone had… snuck up on them? How? Sukea knew that the body he was stuck in had made him weaker (being severely underweight would do that to a man), but certainly he would have at least noticed if someone had entered the alleyway. He snapped his head around, uncaring of the dizzy spell it cast on him. 

There was another man there- Uchiha, he categorized after a moment of staring. Dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, and chakra like a wildfire. He had a vicious scar slashed across most of his face, and an eyepatch covering one of his eyes.

(Familiar…? No, he was certain that he had never seen this man in his life.)

Sukea’s eyes wandered over the Uchiha's face, looking for a reason that he felt like he knew this man. If he squinted, perhaps he could see a little of itachi mixed in there?

His chakra reminded him of the campfires that Obito used to make, when they were out on an overnight mission. It reminded him of long nights spent staring at foreign stars in quiet company. It reminded him of-

Briefly, their eyes met, and the feeling of familiarity increased ten-fold.

(His eye- his eye itched, it stung, something was crawling all over it and it wasn’t his, he took it from the dead body of his first friend and he wanted to claw it out, out out out-)

He blinked through the sudden wave of nausea that passed through him, and clutched his stomach as it rolled. He knew as well as it did that there was nothing left for him to throw up.

Someone was calling out to him, saying a name that he knew wasn’t his but still rang in his ears.

They shook him, and Sukea snapped out of it. “Sukea. Sukea! What is up with you? Do you need to go to the hospital?” The concerned eyes of Yamanaka (Inodeki, apparently) looked up at him, and Sukea shook his head. No hospital. He just spent too long there already, he was not about to spend more time there when he had a choice not to.

And also. He didn’t know what was up either- what was that? Genjutsu? 

He stared at the Uchiha some more, this time being careful to avoid eye-contact. Sukea had determined that he probably knew this Uchiha- based off of the familiarity and the (probable) genjutsu. An old lover that he had upset, perhaps?

The Uchiha’s expression told him that he was just about as confused as Sukea was, so that disproved that theory.

Sukea shook his head to rid himself of the lingering feeling of familiarity, just as Inodeki cleared his throat.

“Well.” He said, turning towards the Uchiha. His tone was somber and bleak and at least a little bit angry at the world, and Sukea had half the mind to ask why. “Kagami-kun, this is Sukea.”

Suddenly, Inodeki leaned towards Sukea and whispered, an angry sort of intensity injected in his tone. “I don’t know where you’ve been, or how I haven’t seen you, but Kagami’s amnesiac. Every single thing. Gone.”

…What?

Amnesiac? How odd.

Sukea whispered back, eyes still glued to Kagami, “How?” And just for good measure, as he had a pretty good feeling about how this man was like, “He’s stubborn enough to make sure that he remembered at least some things, right?”

Inodeki shook his head. “Another time.”

The Yamanaka leaned away just as quickly as he leaned towards him, and Sukea was left a little unsteady. Every single ounce of anger and sadness had been purged from Inodeki’s body, and he went and walked over to Kagami before whispering something in his ear. The Uchiha’s eyes widened a bit, before he looked over Sukea in a whole new light.

Suddenly, Inodeki beamed. “How about we have a team dinner? It’s been seven years,” at this, Inodeki sent a glare Sukea’s way, “Since team 5 has been together. It is definitely cause for celebration.”

He didn’t even wait for either of the two other men to respond, and Sukea was left reeling from the whole interaction. He almost felt like he wanted to just… lay down, and fall asleep. Perhaps forever. That sounded good. From what little he knew of the man, Inodeki was… a lot.

Kagami stared as well, before shrugging and following Inodeki. And well. 

Sukea really did need food.