"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

-Aldous Huxley

I honestly couldn't say what I had expected.

Brimstone and fire? Death, destruction, mayhem? Maybe a nice musical number and a row of sullen orphans tap-dancing to the sound of, "It's a Hard Knock Life?" I wasn't quite sure.

The idea of an orphanage had always been one of those unreal realities. You see them in media, in movies and books and shows, but never really heard about people living in them, at least in this day and age. It was all foster homes and parents now.

Konoha obviously did not get the memo.

Konohagakure was a large village – a lot larger than I had imagined. I'd lived in a relatively large town, but it was positively dwarfed by the hidden village – probably closer to some of the smaller American cities. It was no New York City, there were no streetlights or skyscrapers, just a bizarre hodgepodge of traditional eastern architecture and the occasional bizarrely modern amenity.

It was mind-boggling to see first hand. Yet another thing I didn't really know what to expect – I felt like a tourist on vacation, trailing awkwardly behind Isao, who had shortened his strides so that I could catch up. He'd offered me his hand, probably noting with those stupid pale eyes my nervousness, but I had staunchly refused it.

Coma-dream or not, I wasn't actually a four-year-old girl, and I was self-sufficient enough to walk to my potential doom alone.

Konoha was alive in a way I didn't expect – honestly, I was a bit dumbfounded my mind was even capable of coming up with a site such as this. It was similar to what I'd remembered from the anime, though god it'd been years since I'd actually watched an episode, but the colors weren't the same saturated hues from Netflix, instead earthy and natural and real.

It felt real.

It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that it wasn't.

The orphanage itself wasn't all that different from the buildings surrounding it, if a bit bigger. It was two stories and quite large, with a variety of windows and traditional Japanese architecture elements. It was a light tan color, but obviously old. Even from hear I could spot chipped paint and moss, and parts of the wall where the texture didn't quite match. It honestly looked like the building equivalent of fixing a broken project with hot glue and then painting over it – rushed and ugly, but it worked.

It wasn't obviously an orphanage by any stretch of the imagination. It's not like they had a sign or anything, and there weren't toys scattered across the yard, though on the way in I had thought I'd seen a swing in the backyard. It wasn't super loud, but once we'd entered, I could hear the muffled sound of laughter.

Isao had walked me in, patted my head and chatted with the lady who greeted us far too quickly for me to keep up with, and then left me.

The fucker left said a brief, "Mata ashita, Naruto-chan!" and disappeared into a small flurry of leaves and I was left standing there, bug-eyed, fists curling in the fabric of my t-shirt and feeling like a gnat under the eyes of the woman in front of me.

A half hour later, and here I am.

Apparently the woman was the orphanage's matron, who was to be called Kayo-san, and the orphanage I was in was just one of many in Konoha. She cut a severe figure, with dark brown hair cut at her chin, narrow black eyes, and, perhaps most prominently, only a single arm. Kayo walked with her shoulders back, a bleak expression on her face, and every word that left her mouth seemed like it took an enormous effort.

Maybe she was a Nara. Then I'd just need an Akimichi to complete the set.

"This is your room, Uzumaki." She drawled, arms crossed from where she loomed behind me. I couldn't help but hunch my shoulders, even as I nodded and peered through the door into the rather small room.

The walls were a mottled beige, and there were four small beds pressed almost against each other – there was barely any room to walk, and just thinking about living in there with three other breathing bodies made me claustrophobic.

I cautiously stepped in, eyes darting back to see if Kayo had anything to say, but she remained silent.

None of the beds looked particularly lived in – there was a small dresser shoved in the far corner of the room, but the beds were all made the same, and I didn't see any stuffed animals or clothes.

"Kayo-san?" I asked, eyebrows furrowed, unable to completely swallow the thrum of anxiety inside of me. God, I never thought I'd miss the chemical smell of the hospital, but here I am. Missing it.

I blamed Isao.

"Hm?" The older woman's turned to me slowly, eyes half-lidded. "What is it?"

I gestured to the beds around me. "Mine is?" I questioned, only to pause a moment after, lips twisting. I was, like, 500% certain that that made absolutely no fucking sense. Um, okay, maybe- "The bed mine is?" Maybe?

There was a brief stilted pause before the older woman let out a sharp sigh. "You mean which bed is yours?" It took me a minute to understand her words, as she talked far faster than Isao did, but I hesitantly nodded.

On the bright side, I no longer had to parrot back everything that was said to me, so that was nice.

Kayo pushed off from the door frame and followed me in, pointing at the bed pressed against the window, which made me give a slight sigh of relief. It was better than being shoved in the middle, if nothing else. "That one's yours. Your roommates are Ringo, Fujio Hatsue, and Hanata Chinami." As each name was said she gestured to one of the beds – I slept next to Chinami, apparently.

"They… know me?" I asked, eyebrows furrowed. The names were all unfamiliar so I certainly didn't know them, but maybe Naruto did?

Kayo hummed in response, watched me through heavily lidded eyes. "Ringo-chan and Chinami-chan have been your roommates since they entered the orphanage. Hatsue-chan arrived while you were in the hospital, and your old roommate got-." A word I didn't recognize.

I blinked dully at her for a moment, trying to sort through all the words, but what she'd said was more or less understandable after a moment. There was only the one word I didn't understand, but I could context-clues that one to assume she meant adopted.

"…Yes." I responded after a moment, seeing that Kayo had apparently expected a response. What else did she want me to say? 'Cool, don't know who literally any of them are.' Wait, were they Naruto's friends? Because I was pretty sure Naruto didn't have any. "Are…" Oh shit what was the word for friend? "Do they… like me?" Better.

Kayo's expression blanked at the question and I winced a bit. Ah, figured.

Well I'd always liked kids, so maybe this wouldn't be too bad. I could probably deal with them a lot better than an actual four year old could anyway.

Oh god I could not deal with this at all.

Nothing in twelve years of schooling could have possibly prepared me for the experience of being roughly shoved by what was little more than a toddler with a smattering of freckles, missing front teeth, and blue hair.

It started like this.

After showing me my room, Kayo had given me a brief tour of the orphanage – this is where we eat, this is where we hold lessons, this is the bathroom, etc. She's seem all too eager to finish her job and go back to whatever it is she did when not showing supposed amnesiac orphans the place they grew up in. As soon as she finished showing me the kitchen, she trotted me out to the backyard where about twenty kids were running me around, and left me with little more than a, "Be good."

It felt like this was becoming a bit of a running theme.

Nevertheless, I was thus alone, standing awkwardly outside the back door, looking over the children as best as I could.

The seemed to come in a variety of ages – I could make out babies laying on their backs on a blanket in the far corner of the yard, being watched over by a girl who looked to be about twelve. There were a smattering of boys playing what may have been tag, a group of girls making flower crowns out of dandelions, and a few kids playing around on a rather dilapidated swing set. It gave me more elementary-school recess vibes than anything.

I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself.

With a feeling almost uncomfortably like stage fright, I decided to do what I do best and wallflower it up, making my way as quickly as possible to one of the many trees in the yard and promptly sitting down behind it. The trunk was wide enough that no one should really be able to see me from most spots in the yard. As much as I loved kids, I had -3 desire to talk to one right now.

I was exhausted.

My head ached with phantom pains, and the mass of energy in my veins was moving sluggishly through my limbs now that I was sitting. It was so easy to forget that I'd been in the hospital for weeks, where the most physical activity I got was walking to the bathroom most days.

My muscles, or rather Naruto's muscles, hadn't atrophied by any stretch of the imagination, still retaining the childhood elasticity that I could vaguely recall having myself once upon a time. I felt remarkably better than I had when my chakra had still been sealed off, but after walking halfway across the village and being dragged across the house, I felt like I could sleep for the next year.

And then the talking. No one had ever mentioned how draining it was to have to sit and purposefully translate everything you heard. It wasn't like simlish-Japanese was my default – everything I heard sounded like gibberish more or less unless I sat there and forced the connections to form. It took a lot more effort than I'd expected, probably because I was used to the nurses and Isao purposefully slowing down their speech.

Kayo did not seem to bother with that.

I needed to get better, I realized with a twist of my lips. Honestly, talking to the other children would probably help with that, since kid's vocabularies were more simplified and everything, but—

…Why was I bothering? I shook myself, clenching my fists in the grass as I let out a soft sigh. It was too easy to forget that this wasn't real. Kayo and Isao and even the Hokage were just figments of my imagination, just pieces of a dream I was going to wake up from. I knew that, I really did, but god sometimes it seemed too real. I could smell the magnolia tree I was sitting under, I could hear the muffled singing of the little boy on the swings, feel the soft breeze against my cheeks and taste the rice I'd eaten that morning. The sensations seemed so horribly, horribly real, and sometimes I almost wanted to pretend.

It would be so easy to just play along. Of course I'm Naruto, savior of the world, yadda yadda. Pretend stuff like this actually happened, that I could be important and do things with my life that mattered. But honestly, I knew pretending would just backfire. If I remembered this when I woke up, I'd just be disappointed. I had to face reality.

Abruptly, though, reality was facing me, and they were a little over 3ft tall.

"Eww, who let you back in?" A high pitched voice said, causing me to look up from the increasingly large pile of grass I was creating, bewildered.

It was a bunch of girls. The girls who had been making flower crowns, I realized, noting the yellow dandelions tucked in pockets or stuck haphazardly behind ears. The one who was talking was the smallest, which was saying something, dressed in an oversized grey t-shirt and a pair of green capri-like pants. She was barefoot, and her pale skin was covered in freckles. Oh, and she had blue hair. Blue hair. Ridiculous. Punnet squares are bursting into flames as we speak.

So startled was I at this genetic anomaly that I didn't respond, which apparently was not the response she wanted.

The little girl huffed and stomped her foot, scowling down at me with all the ferociousness a toddler can muster – a surprising amount, actually. "What, didja get even stupider when you were gone, fat-face?" She asked, and the girls behind her snickered, grinning.

I blinked, because oh my god? For a moment I had wondered if I had translated that right, because fat-face? I was almost hurt for a moment before I realized that I wasn't in my actual body, but rather in the body of a by-no-stretch-of-the-imagination-fat four year old. This was the epitome of toddler insults. Wow.

"…no?" I responded hesitantly, because seriously what the fuck do I do in this situation? The blue-haired girl huffed, crossed her arms and sneered. The girl beside her, who was a good few inches taller and had a full head of remarkably normal brown hair, scrunched her nose up.

"Heard you messed up so bad you f'got everythin'!" Brown-hair piped up, like she'd said something particularly witty. The other girls tittered as if she had. Low standards, maybe?

"…Yes? I did?" It sounded like a question when I responded, but the only person I was really questioning was god. Or Kami or whatever the fuck deity. Whoever put me in this situation, honestly.

"S'cause you're a waste a' space! Ain't got no room in your head for stuff, just room for ugly, fat-face!" Brown-hair crowed, and Blue-haired grinned down at me, crossed her arms and looking satisfied. It took me a minute to decipher that, because for all that the words were simple, it was harder to pick them apart when they were slurred together like that. Even so, what, was I supposed to cry? Would I have cried at this when I was actually four? …Probably, actually. Or I'd have hit them.

I'm not going to hit them now though, I do have some morals.

"…Okay?" It had been amusing for a minute but watching a group of children try to bully me was not exactly how I'd wanted to spend my time. I'd much rather take a nap or something. Apparently, said group of children did not agree, because not a moment later I found myself being roughly pushed back, letting out a yelp of surprise as my head banged against the trunk of the tree, because holy shit?!

It had been blue hair that pushed me, and as I'd not been respecting her to actually hit me because what the fuck, I'd been unprepared for the rough shove. And it was rough, enough that my head stung like a son-of-a-bitch as it happened.

"You better remember your place, fat-face!" Blue hair spat, apparently attempting to loom over me. "Your nothin', you hear me? I'm gonna be a great kun'ichi and your gonna eat dirt and die!" And okay, holy shit, holy shit? This child was intense? Were children always this intense or was this just the coma dream amping it up for the drama value?

I decided to just not reply this time because that obviously hadn't made them happy before. Brown hair high-fived one of the other girls and blue-hair looked smug, content in having caused me physical harm, apparently. They got ready to leave, but brown hair called out a single parting line.

"Next time you fall offa roof, make sure it's a taller one!" She shouted, looking immensely vindicated, and then they were gone, and I was left with the knowledge that I had just been thoroughly bullied by a pack of young girls.

Wow.

I wasn't feeling particularly emotionally damaged being, you know, a legal adult and everything, but if that was the kind of stuff that Naruto had grown up with? Jesus Christ, it's a miracle the kid didn't kill himself or everyone around him. It's one thing for little girls to tell each other they're ugly and everything, but that had been a lot of, "please go die, but painfully," on top of the usual meanness of little girls.

I slowly leaned forward again, reaching a hand up to prod the back of my hand, startled when I realized my head was wet. A quick survey revealed a little bit of blood. A little girl with blue hair made me bleed, I realized dully. But, I noticed as I prodded my head a bit more, it didn't hurt at all. Seeing as how the chakra juice in my veins now seemed to be contentedly burning in my skull, I'd wager a solid guess as to that being why.

Chakra was so weird. I really needed to figure out what medicine they put me on to feel like this when I woke up.

Still, I thought as I wiped the blood off absently in the grass, staring down at my slightly stained fingers. There was something unsettling about that. About watching children be so cruel. A thrum of unease went through me as I thought of my own little siblings.

The twins were supposed to be turning ten in only a couple months. They'd be in fifth grade next year. I was almost positive that they'd never dealt with any like that before.

I hoped they were okay.

I missed them.

I really wanted to wake up.

And I'm back at it again, half a year later (woops). The chapter cuts off at a bit of a weird place, but if I'd left it, chapter 4 would be equal in length to the first three chapters combined, which I wanted to avoid. The tone for this chapter is still fairly light-hearted, but fair warning: the tags don't lie.

Confession time though, I have chapter 7-9 written, but these next few ones are /killing me/ so I've been avoiding them and skipping around. My bad!

Would love to see thoughts, critiques, and comments!

Question of the Chapter: If you had to wake up as a canon character, who would you pick and why?