Nightmares – they were haunting him all the time. After his early promotion to Genin, short before he was made a Jonin, after killing the first enemy. They were there all the time, always the same and different at the same time – an evil combination.

Snakes. Snakes everywhere. Their white bodies covered every bit of his body. It was hard to breath and even harder to move. Then they suddenly began to burn. They fire didn't touch him, didn't burn him. But it was still hurting.

Coffee didn't help all the time. Today it didn't. Yamato was standing in front of his window, staring out of it without moving. It had to stop. Somehow. The sleeping pills had stopped working properly a long time ago. Actually he couldn't remember that they had worked at one point in time. Maybe they never did. Probably they never did. He didn't know. Not now. Another gulp, he only registered it because he spilled a bit of the hot liquid, burning his hand.

The snakes were inside him. They moved through his veins. Made him feel like he was going to burst soon. Like he was going to burst now. It hurt. Especially because the snakes grew. A centimeter every minute, or even more, he didn't know. How could he know? The clock in front of him had stopped ticking long ago, making time stop. Next to him was someone else. A girl. She looked like she was in even worse pain, the snakes being big enough to make her look like she exploded. Then she did.

Yamato stumbled, nearly falling against a tree. The woman next to him turned around, her violet hair flying around. "Are you okay?" Yugao, her name was Yugao. Hayate's girlfriend. The firework made it look like her head exploded for a second. She looked like that one girl he used to know…
Yamato collapsed, without realizing it. When his face met the muddy ground he connected to reality again. "Obviously not." It was a terrible excuse for a voice what came out of his mouth. While the festival continued and people around them enjoyed it, he cried in her arms.

A small piece of ice dropped on his forehead, the only part that wasn't covered in boiling violet liquid. He knew he was soon going to drown in the foreign, alien feeling around him, soon he would vanish in this hellish throat that surrounded him. Like everyone did before him. Then suddenly, the little drops of ice that had been refreshing just a second ago were piercing his face.

To stop screaming had been one of the conditions for joining the ANBU. And losing the name he never had. Both were easy, easier than Yamato thought it would be. He often caught himself wondering if he would be the same if that incident hadn't been. Who would he be? Or rather, what?

A blonde boy was strolling through the streets of Konoha, proudly showing everyone he knows (and doesn't know) the new gap between two of his teeth and the wooden warrior his parents bought him. While presenting them to an especially nice-looking person said man opens his mouth and swallows him. Leaves him in a completely black hole until the boy is pushed into something wet. Something wet and cold. A pool filled with white, slim bodies. Human bodies. And snakes. Both with strange, wooden limbs growing from different places.

Yamato would never stop thinking about it once. He tried to do so many times and failed at it every time he did so. It was frustrating, frustrating and the reason why he didn't talk much. The reason for his loyalty to Konoha. Actually the reason for everything. Should he consider himself pathetic because of this?

He runs. The boy runs through endless corridors, with no door anywhere in sight. The boy runs even though acid is covering the ground, making it slippery and burning him every time he falls to the ground. Until suddenly another kid appears in front of him – he looks weak and has a bottle in his hand. Without saying anything he gives the bottle to the boy who knows it will help him escape – somehow. But as soon as he takes a small sip from the bottle, the liquid turns into fire. The weak child smiles a devilish smile, his hair turning white and his skin turning into scales.

Yamato remembered. There was too much time to remember while he was bound to the wall that slowly turned him back into someone he didn't remember. Only in his dreams. He remembers Kabuto, every little part of the snake he had always been. Now it is too late to regret, even too late to dream. He knew that Yamato would die here, on this wall. As well as Tenzou and all the other names he had had during his life. He would be someone else.

The hokage monument. A place where children admired their role models. All children except one boy with brown hair who stared into the face of the first in awe, in pain. He saw himself. He couldn't see a hero but pain. He didn't know what he was seeing. Doctors around him told him he was still weak. They told him he needed to relax, to accept what happened. Extracting the DNA now would kill. Tenzou didn't care. He wanted it to be gone.

The ground Yamato fell on was hard. And somehow muddy. Again it brought back memories although they seemed distant. Every bit of his body was hurting, every cell in its own way. It was a familiar pain. Somehow.

Snakes in his veins made it impossible to move.

It was similar to the pain he had felt in Orochimaru's test cave. But this time the DNA had been taken from him, not given. The first Hokage was almost entirely taken from his body and it was feeling more empty than expected. He looked up, seeing someone grinning at him.

From time to time someone went around, throwing hard stones at them. It took him some time until he was able to see that they were walnuts. Without their hard shell around them, easy to eat. They were probably what kept him alive.

Anko made a rash movement with her fingers and something hard hit his forehead. He realized the dark shadows under her eyes before he saw the small, brown stone on the ground in front of him.
"Don't look at me like that, it wasn't me who wanted to rescue you." She pointed behind herself, revealing a few other faces. More or less of course, considering the bandages everyone was covered in. Team Kakashi. His old ANBU-squad. Probably. Yamato's world turned black.

He opened his eyes, staring straight at a white lamp over him. And a worried face that relaxed when the person behind the mask realized his opened eyes. He had to guess their actual expression. "Welcome back to life." Were the first words he heard. It was the first Hokage who said "Thank you." A door opened and the boy was suddenly surrounded by white and sterile light.

A/N: Okay, I really hope you liked it, it's actually still a WIP so there might be a few mistakes in it I didn't see and so on ^^

One day this will be a present to a dear friend who adores Yamato and requested it a long time ago so... it would be really nice, not only for me but for her as well, okay?

Umm... there is not much to say, just that I know I twisted around canon with including Kabuto and stuff, but I just loved the idea and if you don't read the manga it works, so I guess it wasn't that bad.

So that's it for now, I really hope you liked it, as I said, reviews with construcive ideas are welcome, any other kinds as well but I won't bribe you to do it since I don't do comments a lot as well...