Eden
I. Sasuke Uchiha
His life had fallen apart when he was seven years old. He woke up one day, ate breakfast with his mother and father. "Your brother left for a mission. He'll be back soon." His mother told him, kissing his forehead before ushering him out of the house. It was Tuesday; he had to attend lessons at the Academy. He, unlike his brother, was not a genius prodigy who flew through civilian and shinobi core subjects like a knife through air. The day passed as it always did. A refugee student slammed the handle of a kunai into an instructor's stomach after he insulted his orange jacket for being 'unacceptable for ninjas'.
When Sasuke came home, the sky was dark. He didn't understand why or how, he normally got home before sunset unless he was training. His father had wanted to train him that day, though, so he wanted to rush home. It was strange, yet he didn't think anything of it at the time. He walked into his clan's compound- isolated from the rest of the village- in search for his parents. He wondered if his brother was home.
He saw pools of blood, bodies sliced in half, heads dozens of feet away from necks. Whatever illusion that was wrapped around him shattered. He panicked. He raced towards his home, hoping to find his parents. He found them with their throats slit, his brother standing over their bodies with a dripping katana. He watched as Itachi shut their eyes and whispered an apology.
Sasuke's Sharingan awakened that day. He was angry, fearful, confused. He attacked his brother, but Itachi only dropped his weapon. He was cradled to his brother's chest and taken to the hospital, where he was treated for shock and given a sedative.
He woke up to the knowledge that his clan was dead. Only two members of the Uchiha clan remained alive; himself and his brother Itachi. The Uchiha clan had plotted a coup, to kill the village's elite officials and the Fifth Hokage. Itachi killed every Uchiha, man, woman, and child, to spare his own brother's life. Rumor stated Itachi offered to kill himself, but no one truly knew. Only that the Uchiha clan were traitors, mercilessly executed by one of their own.
"I'm sorry, Sasuke." Itachi had told him. "Killing them all was the only way I knew you'd live. I couldn't let you die."
Sasuke couldn't look at his brother for months. The Uchiha clan compound was half-demolished, transformed into something new. A single, large home surrounded by training grounds and gardens. Itachi retired, offered to train Sasuke every morning. Eventually, he accepted.
At school, no one wanted to be near him. The Uchiha name was sullied. Traitorous in every way- traitors to the village, traitors to their own. Murderous, one member had killed in the most brutal of ways. Powerful, the surviving members consisted of a young boy who already had his family's famously powerful Sharingan and a teenager who defeated hundreds with the Sharingan. The only boy who would ever willingly sit next to him was Naruto Uzumaki, the refugee boy who liked orange too much, but he was just as much of an outcast.
Sasuke was never the same, all from a day that seemed so normal.
II. Sakura Haruno
Her father was a retired chūnin, who now worked in the village as a cook. Her mother was always a civilian, a proud homemaker. Sakura didn't have to become a ninja, she didn't have to enter the shinobi courses at the Academy. There were fine young boys around the village she could meet, marry one day. Plenty of jobs for her to take, people willing to train her to become whatever else she wanted to be. But she wanted to. She saw ninja often, they were treated like gods by the civilians and lived in the nicest homes. They never seemed to lack anything.
The life of a shinobi was supposed to be tough. Many didn't live to become elderly. They traveled often, unable to enjoy many luxuries due to their work. Food on the road was reportedly horribly nasty. Learning to control chakra was hard, not to mention techniques, from ninjutsu to taijutsu. Sakura was warned from it, but she knew she wanted to do it. She wanted the respect, something she couldn't get if she was just a civilian girl. She'd be destined to marry someone, pop out a kid or two, raise them, then die. It wasn't very appealing. She'd rather die on the battlefield than on a bed, after a long, boring life.
She only hesitated once in her life.
When she was ten years old, there was a lesson at the Academy about the Tailed Beasts.
"There are Nine Tailed Beasts." The instructor said. "A long time ago, they roamed freely. They left behind destruction and chaos, known for their great power. As humans gained control of chakra, they captured the Tailed Beasts and learned how to seal them into people. Those people could then use the Tailed Beasts' power as their own. Certain shinobi villages each own a Tailed Beast, or two. We, Konohagakure, own the Nine-Tailed Fox."
Sakura raised her hand. When the instructor gestured for her to talk, she asked, "Where is it then?"
"The Nine-Tailed Fox is sealed into a child who was born the same night of its attack about ten years ago." The instructor stated. He turned to stare at the refugee boy, Naruto Uzumaki, who she didn't really know. He was always getting into fights, she was always surprised he hadn't been expelled from the Academy yet. "The child was a refugee boy, but the only child the Fourth Hokage could find that could contain the Nine-Tailed Fox. The Fourth Hokage had been gravely injured during the fight, but used the last of his power to seal the Fox into the child."
Naruto Uzumaki glared at the instructor. She knew it must've been him, the container to the Nine-Tailed Fox. It frightened her to imagine that the strange, violent boy contained so much power. She imagined there were eight other people in the world who held so much power, and many more with who weird or obscure powers. She glanced to Sasuke Uchiha, who was staring at Naruto curiously, then at Hinata Hyūga.
It was strange. She had never thought of the odd powers that certain shinobi, or shinobi-in-training, had until that day. It made her scared, worried that maybe she shouldn't be a ninja after all. She didn't have anything special about herself. What chance would she have?
Then, she looked at the rest of the class. She realized it was the few who had unique abilities, everyone else was just as normal as she was, would have to work as hard she would. She relaxed.
Sakura hoped she never ran into many people with special powers, or that she was able to develop her own form of greatness before she did.
III. Naruto Uzumaki
He didn't like a lot of people. A lot of people didn't like him. Naruto figured it was the way the world worked, not everyone liked everyone else, just most people had common decency not to openly show their disdain. He didn't receive any common decency, so he often didn't give any back. He survived just fine without everyone liking him/pretending to like him. It could make his existence a little bit harder, yeah, but he could survive. He had his ways.
When a store wouldn't sell anything to him, he'd come back after-hours and pick the locks. He'd take what he wanted and then some, selling the extra off to the black market pawn shops in grimy alleys or cheap apartments. There was never any evidence that he was the thief, though there was always plenty of accusations. Even when it wasn't him! Naruto got along well with the teens and adults who bought whatever he came with, he sometimes bought things from them.
As a child refugee and orphan, Naruto got a monthly allowance from the village. It was enough to survive in the dirty, ultra-cheap and crime-ridden spot in Konohagakure. He didn't want to live there, though. He made extra money stealing, from unfair stores and the asshats who walked the streets with jingling pouches and thick wallets. He ran the occasional errand, he was known for his speed and inability to get caught, he was a favorite of the greasy men and women who gave him sealed cases with undisclosed contents. He was able to afford a nicer apartment, still not in the nicest spot but a lot better. It wasn't amazing, either. The other inhabitants of the building included prostitutes, mostly poor families unable to take a chunk of the wealth that Konoha flowed with, and the occasional addict or alcoholic.
Naruto didn't have the ambition to become a ninja, not on his own. He would like to make a living out of being a thief and a conman, to leave Konohagakure and find wealth beyond it. He knew he couldn't leave though. Not because he was a child, or because he was a jinchuriki (fuck the Fourth Hokage with a three-inch thick, ten-inch long branch), but because he couldn't bring himself to leave the dreams his mother undoubtedly had.
He'd broken into the village archives once. He discovered his documents and that of his mother's- Kushina Uzumaki, a refugee from the Land of Whirlpools. The land had been partially destroyed in the Second Shinobi World War and completely in the Third. She had visited Konohagakure once before and came back after the destruction of her home. She was never able to achieve citizen status, remaining as a refugee until the day she died. She became pregnant with him. On the day the Nine-Tailed Fox attacked, she escaped the village. She gave birth off of village grounds, making him just the child of another refugee. If he'd been in the village, he would've been a citizen. Fate wouldn't have it. She died giving birth, alone in a forest. The Fourth Hokage must've found her, and him. Then, Minato Namikaze took him and sealed the Nine-Tailed Fox into him.
Naruto's name meant 'whirlpool'. It also meant 'spiral' and was something he liked on his ramen. He was an Uzumaki, and the Uzumaki clan was from the Land of Whirlpools. He once introduced himself as, "Whirlpool, from the Whirlpools." But no one got the joke.
He sometimes wondered if his mother had named him, but he didn't know. For all he knew, it could've just been a name chosen by someone when he was being documented. Naruto thought it had to have been someone who knew his mother, or at least knew the name Uzumaki well, because it couldn't be a coincidence he was given a name that meant whirlpool.
His mother came to the village in hopes of being a Konohagakure citizen. She had probably hoped he would be one, too, but unforeseen circumstances prevented it. She was documented as a non-civilian, someone with shinobi training and background. Naruto knew she would want him to be a ninja, too. He was going off documents in the village archives and a lot fo guessing, but it was all he had. It didn't make any sense that she wouldn't want him to be a Konohagakure citizen when she came to the village and never prevented a pregnancy, and why wouldn't she want him to follow in her footsteps?
Naruto entered the Academy. Naruto studied. Naruto trained. Naruto worked a lot harder than everyone else, that's for sure. He kept to his work as a thief in order to make the right amount of money to survive the way he wanted. He did all of his homework, focused during lessons. He trained at least two hours every day.
He had a temper. He got into fights a lot. When someone insulted his orange clothes, he preferred to attack than just talk. Most of the time he could remain calm, he was used to it. When Kiba Inuzuka called him revolting (and said he was just another refugee who wasn't going to do anything) it wasn't his fault that the bastard's dog was within reach, so was a window. The mutt didn't die! He just reacted without thinking. He was a child. He wasn't mature yet!
Most people didn't like Naruto for a grand sum of reasons. He wasn't always polite, they thought he was a thief without any proof (and, fine, they were right), he was a refugee living of the kindness of a village who gave him a monthly allowance that came out of citizen's taxes, and he was the container to the Nine-Tailed Fox that had killed thousands and took away the village's beloved Fourth Hokage. Two of those things he couldn't control and the other two was a result when someone wasn't being respectful in the first place. One could be easily avoided, one he'd still have because he didn't want to live in a apartment that was falling apart next to a bunch of hopeless assholes who never bothered to move past their refugee status, instead mourning a life they'd never have back- he thought they should be able to move on, not just drain the world around them. It wasn't fair that, because of them, people assumed the worst of the few refugees who actually wanted to become a part of Konohagakure, ready to move past what they lost or, in Naruto's case, never had.
In the end, Naruto thought not everything mattered. He wanted to become a citizen in Konohagakure. He could achieve that by becoming a genin. He wanted to become an amazing ninja, in memory of his mother who was a ninja herself. He wanted to become rich, too, live in luxury and never have to steal again in order to have what he wants. He wanted people to see him something different than the refugee kid, the orphan, the thief, or the jinchuriki. He'd like to be known as Naruto Uzumaki. He could achieve that by proving himself as a ninja, at least he guessed (hoped) so.
!Notes!
This is basically the first Naruto story I've written in a very, very long time. I think the last one I wrote was in 2015 in my old account! This is the only Naruto story I have on this account. wow tbh
Basically the premise to this story is a LOT of shit that went down in canon didn't. Like I don't give a fuck about the goddamn god tree and fucking kaguya or whatever her goddamn name is...A lot of shit that's canon doesn't exist or is heavily altered to create the shit you just finished reading. or, i hoped you finished reading and that you aren't reading this because you scrolled down to to the review box to insult this story and possibly my existence.
I MIGHT add onto this. I don't know. I got other shit I should be doing (but obviously I'm not), basically one on-going harry potter fic, a sequel to one of the fics, and the final addition to a harry potter trilogy on my ao3...YET HERE I AM, WRITING THIS FOR NARUTO. AHA hA
But anyways. If you like, review! If you're interested in more of this 'verse, please tell me! If no one gives a shit, I won't bother to continue it anywhere except for in my head.