Authors note: This is an Alternate Universe piece.

My promises to you, the reader.

1)No Yaoi/Yuri among cannon characters. Not even jokes about Orochimaru.

2)No Mary Sue.

3)A signed review will elicit a personal e-mail reply. Replies will not take up the space of this fic.

4)Angst in moderation only.

The Memoirs of Uzumaki Naruto

Book the First: Dead Last

Chapter 2 – The Idiot's Guide to Ninjas

Having decided on my career path at the tender age of seven, I quickly discovered an unexpected flaw in my plan. Being a ninja was HARD. Sure I knew in a very abstract way that I would be embarking on a long and difficult journey. However, such foreknowledge somehow doesn't quite convey the feeling of staring at a half finished essay at two in the morning, trying to remember just three more branches of hand seal theory, while doodling your teacher being killed in thirty different ways at once on the dinner table. For those of you who don't know about ninja training, the initial academy accepts three classes of thirty people each. Out of these ninety people, only nine manage to become genin. For anyone wanting to become a ninja, this was a massive uphill battle.

The cutthroat nature of ninja exams is one of the reasons that ninja clans arose. Children whose parents were ninjas gained a personal tutor to help them with their ninja skills, explain the finer points of chakra manipulation, and teach them their family techniques. In a climate where the most minuscule advantage was of the utmost importance, this was a massive advantage over those who only had a textbook to follow. Hence, certain families will constantly graduate ninja, while everyone else had to struggle to graduate.

Of course, I didn't have the advantage of a ninja family, or the advantage of having a family at all. I cooked my own food, painted the walls myself, occasionally cleaned, and in one memorable occasion I attempted to fix my own plumbing. That incident (which eventually led to the septic tank being replaced) got me kicked out of my old apartment. The Hokage was going to send me to another apartment, but I got him to send me to a small house on the outskirts of the village. Not only would I have more freedom, but I would be out of the way of most of the villagers. Plus, I could grow my own crops and not have to buy them from villagers at inflated prices. By doing everything myself, I could grow independent from the village and not have to depend on them for survival.

Upon retrospect, I could have avoided a lot of my problems by just using Henge and pretending to be someone else. While it was nice to be on my own, growing crops took time, preserving them for long term storage took more time, maintaining my own house took time, and the one hour walk between the academy and my home took yet more time, time I could ill afford to lose. That, combined with the fact that my textbooks kept being stolen, most of the academy teachers couldn't be bothered to help me, and my poor chakra control and it was a wonder I managed to stay in the class at all. I have no idea how I managed it but somehow, between the late night study sessions, copying books from the library, and sheer determination, I made it to the final exam, which I flunked.

The reason I flunked the exam was because of yet another disadvantage that I had, the Kyuubi. I didn't know this at the time, but the seal that was holding Kyuubi in was steadily leaking chakra into my chakra system. Since I didn't have a lot of chakra when I was a kid, this made my chakra unpredictable and hard to control. The control issues got better once my chakra pool began to grow, so the leakage wasn't as apparent. However, back in my pre-genin days, the only way to help the control issues was to draw a lot of chakra at once. This tired me out quickly, and my teacher, Umino Iruka, was constantly yelling at me for spending half my chakra to perform a single Bunshin. By the time the final exam came, I could do a Henge, but the test was for a regular Bunshin.

I HATE the generic Bunshin. I'm a master of twelve different variants of Bunshin, and can form them from Water, Sand, Chakra, or even Ramen. However, the standard Bunshin uses a tiny amount of power, and I'm not good at emitting small amounts of power at a time. Even now, I'll occasionally fail if I attempt a regular Bunshin. At that age, I didn't have a hope.

Naturally, failing the exam made me extremely depressed. Years of hard work down the drain because Iruka selected the one skill out of the entire academy repertoire that I couldn't do. I half wondered if he did it on purpose or not, but I didn't have any evidence, and he was right about the skill being essential for survival. Still, it was galling to think that after having the deck stacked so heavily against me, that I should fail once again because of dumb luck.

I was so depressed over this turn of events, that when Mizuki offered a special way to let me pass, I accepted almost immediately. Finally, this was the opportunity that I've been waiting for. This was a chance for me to not just be another student, but to do something extraordinary. Surely sneaking into the Hokage's residence and stealing a scroll from under his nose was a lot more prestigious than performing a Bunshin. For one shining moment, my future opened up before me.

However, just as quickly the doubts began to rise up, questioning this turn of events. Why did Mizuki want me to graduate so badly? I haven't heard about him doing this with anyone else, or that there were alternate ways to graduate at all. Wasn't what I was going to do illegal? Did he talk this over with the Hokage previously and get permission? If I failed, would I be killed as an invader? Was that the entire purpose of the "offer"? I hadn't had anyone try to kill me yet, but that was more likely than someone wanting to help me out of the blue. Unfortunately, by the time I was finished thinking things though, I had already agreed.

I decided that the best course of action was to simply play along. I didn't lose anything by verbally agreeing. If I decided not to do it, I could simply say I failed, or turn Mizuki over to the ANBU, depending on the situation. After grilling him on what to do, it turned out that he was going to use Genjutsu to distract the guards and cover my breaking, leaving the task of avoiding the most powerful ninja in Konoha to me. This was looking to be rather "unofficial" and I was beginning to suspect that I was being set up.

Now, the intelligent thing to have done was to just smile and nod, then turn Mizuki over to the ANBU as soon as I could. However, the idea of a scroll filled with powerful techniques was incredibly tempting. After all, if I was to become a powerful ninja, but couldn't become an official one, I would need other methods of gaining skills. If the techniques in the scroll were powerful enough, I could at least use it to defend myself if attacked. Besides, I could blame it on Mizuki if I was caught. So after much deliberation and thought, I decided to break into one of the most fortified buildings in Konoha, trusting in a known liar to protect me, risking being killed on sight as an intruder, all to steal a scroll full of techniques that are extremely dangerous to use.

Sometimes I wonder how I survived childhood.

The actual break in was pretty easy. Mizuki did a good job in distracting most of the guards, and years of experience in keeping out of people's way helped me avoid the rest. There was one incident where I was almost caught, but I managed to Henge into a patch of carpet (blending into the existing carpet) and thus avoided detection. After making sure the Hokage was gone, I managed to get to the library and get my hands on what I hoped to be the Scroll of Seals.

As I mentioned before, my textbooks had a nasty habit of being mutilated or stolen. Since the teachers were constantly unhelpful about this, I eventually learned the skill of quickly copying the chapters off the school textbooks to take home and study. This was of great help to me as I unrolled the Scroll of Seals and began to copy the contents as fast as I could. I was afraid that the contents of the scroll would be in some sort of code, but in a rare instance of good luck, the instructions were plainly written out for anyone to follow.

Upon retrospect, one thing I should have done (besides not being stupid enough to do this in the first place) was look over each technique and see if it would help me or not. I was concentrating on listening for the faintest sound of a guard or the Hokage himself and not really paying attention to what I was copying. Hence, there were two techniques that I copied that I couldn't use, and one that wasn't really suited for me. Still, I did manage to get a good number of techniques down before I heard the purposeful steps of the Hokage approaching the room.

Now sneaking my copied notes out of the room was a challenging task. Fortunately, I had the aid of one of my favorite jutsus, the Henge. The ability to turn into almost anything and anyone is something that is much overlooked. Not only can one copy other people, but one can become weapons, shields, wheels, an inconspicuous rock, animals, and hundred other things depending on the situation. Most people simply use it to impersonate other people, which is a terrible waste of potential. In this case, I could not have used the Henge to impersonate someone else. A few simple questions, paired with the Hokage's eagle eyes observing my body language, and i would have been found out instantly. Instead, I Henge-ed into myself, only without the paper or ink stains. Someone who looked like Naruto, talked like Naruto, and acted like Naruto, and was actually Naruto would never be suspected to be under a Henge.

The Henge was just a failsafe. I was planning to make a daring jump out the window, followed by dashing across the rooftops to the market districts, then ducking down into the river and trying to escape through the sewers. I got to the "jump out the window" part, before I came face to face with a half dozen ANBU, cutting my escape plans short. Thankfully, I wasn't killed on sight, but things really weren't looking good for me. It seemed like my strain of bad luck was still going strong.

Notes:

The ninety academy entrance figure is taken from Sasuke's report card as a kid.

Since Naruto didn't perform his pranks this time around, no one really interacts with him.

Naruto tries to keep out of people's way this time. This, combined with better coordination with Mizuki, enables him to break into the Hokage's residence without being caught.