3. Beginning Again
“So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off… start all over again.”
- Frank Sinatra.
~.~
As Naruto blinked the heavy darkness out of his eyes, one of the first things he became aware of was moonlight. It shone down on him from above, momentarily blinding him as he groaned, slinging his arm over his eyes to block it until his he had had a chance to adjust. As he laid there, his mind spinning, he turned his attention to his ears - or, more specifically, what he could hear.
At first, all that was there was silence. Then, as he willed himself to focus - squeezing his eyes shut and blinking away the moonlight - he heard something. Something soft and quiet all around him… like the sound of many bodies breathing.
And then Naruto noticed something else, something that caused him to freeze up completely with his hand still lifted to his face. His fingers were… smooth? There were no calluses like he had come to expect. He had had them for most of his life from a very young age, and yet…
Slowly, he lowered his hand, dread coiling in his stomach.
The hands attached to his body were not the hands of a tired, aged man, nor were they the hands of a seasoned Hokage, or even the hands of a young teenage shinobi. Naruto had begun developing calluses when he was roughly five years old, immediately following his inevitable expulsion from the orphanage.
The hands-that-were-not-his (but were) began to shake as he tore his eyes away and peered into the darkness. Rows and rows of beds were crowded into the small room around him with hardly any space between them, the inhabitant of the one next to his being so close he could reach out and touch him without much of a stretch. All of a sudden, the sound of all the orphaned boys breathing drowned out everything else, second only to the beat of his own heart in his ears.
In the wake of his rising panic, Naruto reached inward for the only comfort he knew, down and down to the cage within his mind which held one of his oldest, dearest friends. But the attempt was like a child trying to touch the tallest shelf. He could not reach, he could not see, hee could not feel. There was nothing. For the first time in decades, he was completely, utterly alone.
Naruto's vision tunneled.
“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no, no.” He drew his knees up, his head falling to rest against them. His chest and throat tightened until they hurt.
There was the sound of shifting blankets somewhere beside him a ways, warped and twisted like from the end of a long hallway, and a shoe came flying at him out of the darkness. Naruto didn't move. He hardly felt the sting of it. His hands shook harder.
“Shuddup,” a young boy's voice grumbled bitterly, presumably the one who had thrown the shoe.
And then suddenly, it was all too much. With his heart in his throat, he threw himself out of bed, stumbling over his own spindly, awkward limbs in the dark. His foot, bare and unscarred and still far too small, got caught on the hardwood leg of another bed, sending him harshly to the floor. Several more children’s voices rose out of the darkness, confused and tired and angry at the racket he was making. Naruto hardly cared. He pushed himself up and lurched towards where a distant memory knew the door to be.
His eyes stung when he instinctively reached down for the door handle, only to realize that it was at eye level instead. His hand barely fit around the cold metal. It took all the strength in his weak, thin arms to pull it open and slip through into the quiet hallway, leaving the room full of protesting children behind him. He took off running.
The next several minutes passed in a blur for Naruto, who could focus on little else than the ache in his soft bones and untrained feet, and the fluttering of his frightened heart. When he finally stopped to catch his breath, it was with the moon on his face, the looming shadow of the mountain brushing his toes. The cold of the night seeped beneath his skin as he reached up to wipe at his eyes, a child’s fist coming back wet with a child’s tears. He stared at it for a moment, then looked past it, beyond and up and up, until his neck strained and his head could tip back no further. The face of his father stared back, with only untouched rock beside it.
With wide eyes and heavy limbs, Naruto slowly turned to face the village behind him. The trees were younger and smaller than he remembered them last, the buildings different and older in style, newer in shape. It was as if someone had reached into one of his old photo albums and plucked out a photo of the village of his childhood. His knees shook violently, then gave way, depositing him unceremoniously into the dirt.
Everything - everything he had done, everything he had built, the life he had created for himself through all the pain and the suffering - all of it was gone. All of it. He had to start over.
“But I…” His voice broke, a sob catching in his throat. “But I worked so hard…” his chest heaved, fresh tears rolling down his cheeks. His face crumpled. “It was so hard!”
Through the grief and the fear and the pain, a hot flash of anger burned through him. He tilted his head to glare accusingly at the sky. “Why am I here?! Why now? Why again?”
“Well, I would assume you're here because you ran here, Naruto.”
The voice was aged and soft, like wind over stone, weary and kind. Even after all the years that had passed since they had last seen each other, Naruto would know that voice anywhere. He scrambled to his feet, stil tool awkward and small, turning to face the shadow of the mountain. The Sandaime Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen, gazed down at him, a small frown on his lips. Had he always looked so worried for me? Naruto asked himself, taken aback by the realization. “...Jiji?”
“You've worried your caretakers, child,” Sarutobi said as he stepped out of the mountain’s shadow and into the moonlight. He bent down to better address him. “Now, what is the purpose of this late night adventure, hm?”
Naruto winced at the mention of his ‘caretakers’. His memories from his time in the orphanage were fuzzy at best, but he knew that the man’s careful use of the word “worried” meant that they had likely freaked out and demanded ANBU be sent after him, beast as he was. That was likely the reason the Sandaime was with him now.
“Well?” The Hokage asked, arching a questioning brow.
Naruto looked away, feeling chastised. Despite his mental age, he looked on his memories of this man with fondness and respect despite his wrongdoings. His foot scraped the ground. He couldn’t tell the truth, so... “I’m sorry, Jiji. I had a nightmare.”
Hiruzen blinked in surprise.
Naruto’s eyes widened with a sudden realization. He hadn’t ever really apologized for anything at this age, had he? It would certainly be odd for Hiruzen to hear it coming from him, especially after fleeing the orphanage in the middle of the night, as he was often prone to do. For an agonizing moment, he was afraid Hiruzen had caught on, that he knew the boy in front of him wasn’t the same Naruto who had gone to bed the previous evening. What if he was detained? Interrogated? Would he spend the rest of this life caged or tortured because of a mistake in wording?
He flinched back when he felt a hand on his head, his heart rate spiking, but every one of those thoughts fled when a gentle thumb brushed away his tears. The Hokage, usually so detached from him from what he remembered, kneeled in front of him now to see him at eye level, a smile deepening the wrinkles on his face. His large, time-worn hand ruffled Naruto’s hair.
“You’re a strong boy, Naruto. The nightmare will pass, as all things do.”
Naruto just stared back, too shocked to reply, and settled for a simple nod. Hiruzen hadn’t done this before, he was sure of it. A simple “I’m sorry” went a long way.
Hiruzen stood, touching his shoulder lightly as he passed. “Come, now. Let’s get you back to bed. A growing five year old needs his rest, don’t you think?”
So he was five, then. One year off from academy age. He filed this information away for later.
Naruto heaved a sigh - the sort of quivering gust of air one heaves after a particularly hard cry - and followed obediently after the man he hadn't seen in a little over ninety years. Tentatively, he reached out, grabbing a fistful of the Hokage's robe sleeves. No matter how distressing the situation was, there’s nothing quite like seeing someone you never thought you would see again. Seeing their face, hearing their voice… feeling that they were there, breathing, real…
If Hiruzen minded the child clinging to him as they walked, he did not say, and slowly, Naruto's heart began to settle, the feeling of his hand still lingering on his head, in his hair. He was still scared. He didn't know what had happened, why it was happening, or how he would get it to stop, but the logic and reasoning he had learned in the last few decades were beginning to replace the panic. All that was left to do was follow the old man back to the orphanage of his past, get a little sleep if he could, and try his best to begin again.
The moon shone down from above, a quiet witness to the events beginning to unfold.