So this is my first venture into a pretty big, multi-story series. It started with a conversation I had with my wife after watching Road to Ninja that got me thinking of Menma, the alternate version of Naruto, and how underutilized he was. This story is not about THAT Menma, but thoughts about that kinda morphed into an unrelated story, and this is the result. If the universe interests you there will also be a fic called The Story of Menma coming in the future that's pretty much a prequel to this one.

Fair warning that this story NOT canon compliant. There's plot divergence, yes, and a lot of it. But there're also a lot of things that don't fit with canon at all, examples being that Obito's sharingan degrades with usage like other sharingan, and that the effects of the nine-tails sealed within Naruto are more extensive than what's seen in canon. Having the nine-tails from birth has a lasting effect on him. Also, the timeline has been mostly rewritten. Kakashi was in ANBU most of his life, people who died are alive and people who are alive are dead etc. There are more, a lot more, but that's all you really need to know right now. Don't be surprised if something doesn't line up with canon, because there will be a loooot of things that don't.


The matron was a woman of smiles and compliance. She greeted him as such, her hands clasped before her, the glasses askew upon the bridge of her nose. He tried not to slouch when her eyes fell to him, but long-standing habits were hard to break.

"Kakashi Hatake," she surmised, her voice short and sweet. Then there was a hand held out to him in offering, one that he didn't take, one that he didn't think to take, and it hung there awkwardly before the matron pulled it back and adjusted. The smile was still there, strained and unimpressed. He knew that he should be trying to make a good impression but doubted that it would matter in the end, that it mattered to anyone whether he made a good caretaker or not. "We were expecting you. Lord Third informed us of your interest in one of our children."

"Did he, now?" He knew. Of course he knew. Without approval from the Hokage, this visit would have been meaningless.

They wouldn't give up the jinchuuriki boy to just anyone.

With careful niceties and practiced charm, the woman drew a path through the long halls of the orphanage with Kakashi in tow, a hand shoved into his pocket, his fingers turning and twisting the metal ring of the kunai hidden within. Old age made him paranoid. Perhaps that was another habit better left buried in another time. But, well, habits were hard to break, harder still when they came from a place of desperation.

He wouldn't use it, he told himself. He would see that boy for himself, would see and wait to judge.

Konoha Orphanage was a short two stories tall, all aged wood and dusty windows. The orphanage received quarterly funding through the Hokage so there was little excuse for the lack of updates on the building, but he didn't doubt that a huge portion of those funds went to staffing and food. There was a leak in the corner at the far end of the wall, a bucket half-filled resting below it. The matron brought no attention to it and he didn't ask; he wasn't there to be critical. He was there for a reason.

As his eyes wandered from corner to corner and wall to wall, Kakashi couldn't help but think that this was a fitting start for his most hated person, that the stale air and creaking floorboards and implacable smell of age set the stage for the atrocities to come, a cautionary tale of long-standing tragedy. Or maybe he was thinking too hard. He tended to do that in old age.

He couldn't use age as an excuse. Not anymore.

"I find it the smallest bit… unusual that you've taken interest now, of all times," the Matron hedged, wringing her hands together. Her smile was tight but still present, so he gave her points for trying.

"That so?"

"There is nothing wrong with it, of course," she assured, and he could see her mental backpedalling. "But the Uzumaki boy is weeks away from his fifth birthday. Lord Third intended to remove him from the program and place him in a home of his own."

'On his own,' Kakashi corrected internally. It was a bitter reminder of a past he lived, alone in that small apartment. Even if it was the Uzumaki boy, it didn't sit well. He understood; no one wanted to be within ten feet of that damnable fox, not even his caretakers. Rumors spread like a virus in places like that; there was no doubt that the secret of the Uzumaki boy's identity was common knowledge by the time the kid was two weeks old, gag order be damned. People feared him. They had every right to. And they wanted him gone.

Well, he would be gone. One way or another.

"I suppose it doesn't matter now," said the matron, her heels clacking a rhythm against the wood as she walked. "What matters is that you're here now. We'll get Uzumaki in to see you shortly."

"Good."

Kakashi's dull eye strayed from the hall to the long line of windows on his right, framing the grassy play area outside. The older children were out playing in that way children did, with the running and the throwing of both safe and unsafe objects. There were toys, sure, but he saw one boy throwing a rusted, wartime shuriken. He thought better of mentioning it to the matron; he wanted in and out of there as quick as possible, not to make a scene, so much so that weeks prior to this visit he considered donning his ANBU uniform and breaking in to be an acceptable course of action before a long talk with the Hokage about just how horribly, stupidly, terribly wrong that idea was made him change his mind. Plus, he was sure one of the supervising staff would notice soon-the kid was throwing it at other small children-and sure enough a woman with her hair in a bun and an ankle-length skirt came flailing out from behind the wall.

Well, it was bound to happen; this land was a battleground in the last war, and it was inevitable that now and then a few relics of the past would be uncovered by the curiously sticky and unreasonably stupid hands of the little hellions they were raising there.

Point-blank, Kakashi did not like children. This was the last place he wanted to be. It was the last place he would ever be, but there he was, because the world had ended and he was out of options.

His steps faltered when, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of yellow crossed his path. He straightened his back and inclined his head towards the image of blond hair darting about the wildgrass like a hunter on the prowl. The small body squirmed on all fours, pressed close to the ground, wriggling in place.

All Kakashi could see was the fox, its nine tails flicking and twitching and crushing the village beneath a strength that could level mountains.

But there was no fox, just a small boy with gangly arms and unruly hair and a grin on his face.

The boy bounded forth and pounced at the shuriken-wielding menace who had taken to running from their supervisor. The boys rolled, grass and weeds and flowers crushed beneath their path, until the shuriken brat was pinned beneath the fox hell-child with his arms at his sides and horror in his eyes. His grip faltered, the rusted weapon slipping out of his hold and into the dirt.

Uzumaki grinned and snatched the shuriken up. He bounced to his feet with a bubble of excitement, spun on his heel, and presented the weapon to the frantic woman who'd been trying to break the boys up for the past ninety seconds.

She ripped it out of his hands. Kakashi couldn't hear, but he thought she yelled. If the way the fox brat shrivelled up was any indication, she yelled. He was the one in trouble. He was the one at fault.

Well, Kakashi couldn't say that he cared.

"Mr. Hatake?"

A lazy eye found the matron waiting at an open door and his steps started up again. He sighed, stepping through the threshold. The room was small and quaint. There were toys scattered about, crude crayon pictures on the wall, and in the centre was a small table with two chairs. The walls were painted with childish colours and he was in hell. This was actually hell. He died as an old man of forty-two and this was actual hell.

None of that showed on his face as he dropped onto one of the chairs and looked up at the woman with a lazy eye, waiting, expectant.

She hesitated under his stare and looked out into the hall. "I'll—" She cleared her throat. "Little Uzumaki should be outside playing. I'll get him ready. He's been so excited to meet you-this is the first time anyone has considered him for adoption, you see."

He did see. He saw how fake her sincerity was and how far she had to reach for words of sympathy. It didn't matter. Soon the boy would be Kakashi's problem, not theirs. Then he could worry about faking sympathy.

When he didn't say anything, the matron fidgeted and scuttled away.

Kakashi closed his eye, tipped his head heavenward, and sighed. He lifted a hand to brush across the headband covering his sharingan. "I'm doing this for you," he muttered softly. "To clean up your mess. Save me a seat in hell, old friend."

There was a window to his left. He opened his eye and lulled his head to the side. The world was all blue skies and sunshine and fluffy clouds like the objectively atrocious crayon art that the staff thought worthy of showcase on the walls.

He couldn't get out of there fast enough.

"Um—"

Kakashi stilled. The voice was small and squeaky, unused. He lifted his head to find a small boy barely knee-height looming in the doorway. The moment Kakashi looked, the boy ducked his head, stubby fingers gripped tightly to the hem of an oversized white shirt.

Behind the boy, the matron ushered him into the room, over to the table. She crouched down next to him with a plastic smile. "Naruto, this is Kakashi Hatake. Say 'hello.'"

Blue eyes flickered up and then back down. There was fidgeting, an old shoe scuffing the floorboards. Twisting.

When Kakashi thought about meeting the child that ruined the future, this was not what he was expecting.

There was still no greeting and Kakashi exchanged looks with the matron. His eye crinkled into an easy, practiced smile.

"Why don't you leave us to get acquainted? I'm sure Naruto here is just a little shy."

"But—" She held her tongue on her protests with a glance to the blond runt and stepped back. "Of course. If you need anything, my office is right next door."

"I'll keep that in mind."

The door shut with a soft click and they were alone.

Legally speaking, there was a lot wrong with this picture. Were it any other child, Kakashi knew that the whole visit would be supervised. Of course, this was the fox brat, the Uzumaki boy, the one that the staff wanted to get the hell out of there by any means necessary. If it meant pleasing the man intent on taking the fox child away, they would go to any lengths.

Naruto looked back at the door, large eyes blinking in confusion, and then he twisted back around to turn that confusion on Kakashi.

The last time their eyes met, Kakashi was forty-two years old. It was raining, a constant hiss enveloping them like white noise within a grey and broken world. Across the valley stood a masked man encased within a corrosive red chakra, tapering out into nine tails behind him, something innately inhuman about the way he stood and moved. The wind carried with it smoke and pine, the air thick with the overpowering scent of sulphur. The image was burned into the fading vision of his sharingan, his soon-blind eye, a permanent afterimage behind the cover of his headband.

Now their eyes met again and Kakashi was nineteen, and he wasn't quite five, all small and jumpy like a stray cat.

"Um," the child said again, twisting the toe of his shoe into the floor, tweaking the fabric of his shirt between his fingers. "Are you gonna be like, my dad or somethin'?"

There was something very wrong with this picture and Kakashi sucked in a steadying breath. "Well," he started, leaning forward to rest his arms on his knees, "I'm something."

Naruto's eyes lit up. The unsteady frown curled upward and he pulled the empty chair out from under the table and scrabbled onto it. He bent his legs beneath his body to give himself more height-though even with that, he looked small-and placed his hands firmly on the table top. He stared openly, first at Kakashi's headband and mask, then down to the standard uniform he came dressed in-because he wasn't wasting money on a new outfit just for this.

"Hey hey," Naruto's fingers drummed a rhythm into the wood and he scooted closer to the edge of his seat. "Are you a ninja?"

Kakashi's mouth twitched and he was grateful to his mask for hiding away his hard-set frown. So the kid was already interested in ninjas. He wanted to be a ninja. He entered the academy. From there, he renounced his name and his village and then he was gone. Then his face was in the bingo books. A missing-nin. Konoha's missing-nin.

Then a grey world and smoke and pine and red chakra.

Kakashi couldn't fake a smile. "Yes, Naruto. I'm a ninja." He was still ANBU at that point. Reliving old missions was a complicated feeling. During the first week, there was a part of him that worried that his prior knowledge would change something. By week two, he realized how foolish his concerns were; he was there to change things.

He would keep his promise. He would right Obito's mistakes.

He would give the fox child one last chance in memory of Minato and if that didn't work, he would kill the boy where he stood. He owed Minato that much, at least, for believing in him.

Naruto's hands slammed down on the table and Kakashi's went for the kunai in his pocket. The boy sprang up with a bolt of newfound energy, wobbling atop the rickety old chair with starlight in his eyes and wonder on his face. "That's so cool!"

Kakashi stilled, slowly releasing the kunai.

Naruto leaned in further and almost fell forward, righting himself at the very last second with a poorly repressed giggle. "You gotta know lots an' lots of awesome jutsu. Hey hey hey-when you adopt me, are you gonna teach me? You gotta."

Kakashi leaned back in the chair and considered the child with a lazy, upfront glare. The last thing he ever wanted was to be responsible for the fox child figuring out how to ninja. "I—"

"You gotta promise," said Naruto, matter-of-factly with his hands on his hips. He nodded, agreeing with himself. "Okay. You're good. You can adopt me."

He blinked slowly, trying to unravel what just happened.

"Can we go now?"

"It doesn't work like that," Kakashi said bluntly. His shoulders slouched and he decided to roll with the flow and not think too much about the inner workings of a not-quite-five-year-old's mind.

Naruto pouted and plopped back down onto his butt. "Well okay. But soon?"

Was it really that easy to win over a child?

"Sure," he said noncommittally. "When I can."

Naruto lit up and scooted off the chair. He rounded the table and held out his hand. "My name's Naruto Uzumaki, an' I'm gonna be the Hokage!"

Kakashi's eye widened.

This boy. This hellspawn. This jinchuuriki of the nine-tailed fox, this embodiment of everything that would go wrong.

Hokage.

What a cruel joke.

Kakashi breathed. It took a lot for him to reach out, it took his everything to accept the hand, to take it in his own with its stubby fingers and unmarred skin, but he did it. He did it for the future, for everyone that he left behind and everything that he would erase. That hand was so small, dwarfed by his own, and he couldn't help but stare. One day that hand would destroy the village. One day, if Kakashi failed, he would relive the worst day of his life.

Today was not that day. Today, Kakashi was nineteen years old and making a change. To fight for that change he would bite back his bias, bury away his contempt, and smile.

"I'd like to see that."


I'd love to hear what you guys think! I decided to post the prologue for the holidays, but there will be a delay in uploading the rest as I'll be posting the next chapter with chapter 1 of The Story of Menma once Calamity's a little further in. Happy holidays and enjoy yourselves!

Adieu~