Five-year-old Uzumaki Naruto was lonely. Everyone in the orphanage ignored him. They were not explicitly mean to him—the only matron who tried was escorted away by masked shinobi—but they only interacted with him when required. It started with the matrons and trickled down to the other orphans. Occasionally a new child would play with him for a short time, but they all eventually gave in to peer pressure. Several times a few kids had tried to pick on him. The matrons stopped that quickly enough, but in the process they encouraged the bullies to ignore him. All he wanted was a single friend. Was that too much to ask?
The only person who was his friend was the Old Man that everyone called "Hokage-sama," but he only visited Naruto once a month for about an hour. The Old Man always took him to get ramen at a little stand. The shop owner and his daughter were both friendly, but they were usually too busy to do more than greet him.
Naruto lay in his bed staring at the ceiling. Unlike the other orphans, he got his own small room. The matrons talked like it was a privilege, but he felt like it was just another tool to keep him lonely. He sighed and rolled over and tried to go to sleep.
Naruto awoke in a meadow. The sky was a pale gray that seemed to fade into white. He could not tell if the gray was due to fog or something else. The edges of the meadow seemed to fade into gray where there were not any trees, so he figured it was an odd fog. The only prominent things in the meadow were a small creek and a two-story house about the size of the orphanage.
Shrugging his shoulders, Naruto approached the house. He knocked on the door, but nobody answered. After a minute, he tried the door knob. It was unlocked, so he opened the door and went in the house. The house was nicely furnished. He noticed some pictures on the wall. The pictures were of a pretty red-haired lady and a blond man, either alone or together. Oddly, the face of the blond man was always fuzzed out. There was a bookshelf. He scanned the books. He did not know many kanji yet, so most of the book titles were meaningless to him. One however, stood out: History of the Uzumaki Clan. He excitedly picked it off the shelf and opened it up. More kanji—most of them were unfamiliar. With a sigh, he placed it back on the shelf.
He wandered around the main floor, there were two locked doors. One might have led to the basement and the other to an office. Upstairs appeared to be mostly bedrooms. One appeared to be a guest room and most of the rest were empty. One of them pulled at his heartstrings. It was a nursery with the word "Naruto" spelled out in hiragana on a crib. The room was lovingly set up. It was only missing a baby. He climbed into the crib and lay there for at least ten minutes. He had to scrunch up his knees, because even though he was small for a five-year-old, he was too big to lay flat.
Eventually, he left the room to look at the rest. In the largest of the bedrooms, a red-haired woman lay on the bed. She was wearing a green dress over a white blouse and her hair was kept out of her face by a green hairclip. She was the same woman as in the pictures, and she appeared to be asleep.
Naruto imagined that she was his mother. He thought she must be a relative, at least, between the crib and the Uzumaki book.
He frowned. This must be a dream. There was no way he would just go to sleep in the orphanage and then appear here otherwise. He sighed. It was a good dream.
He put a hand on the woman's elbow and shook it a little. Even if it were a dream, it would still be nice to know what was going on.
She began to stir.
"Excuse me, Ma'am," he said. "I'm not sure where I am. Can you help me?"
The woman sat up a little and looked at him. "Naruto-chan?" she asked.
"Yeah, I'm Naruto. Who are you?"
"I'm your mother," she said, smiling brightly.
"Momma?" Naruto responded as the woman gathered him into a hug.
He started to sniffle a little.
"What's wrong, Naruto-chan?" she asked.
"This is such a nice dream. I'll be sad to wake up."
"Do you have such a bad life, Naruto-chan?" his mother asked.
"I don't know. Nobody's mean to me, but nobody will play with me either. Only the Old Man and the Ichirakus are nice to me."
"Ichiraku? The ramen stand owner?" she asked.
He nodded.
"They have the best ramen!" his mother said happily.
He nodded enthusiastically. "Did you eat there often?"
She chuckled. "More than I should have." She got a serious look on her face. "This is a special kind of dream, Naruto-chan."
"Special? How?" he asked.
"I was dying because of something that happened the day you were born. Your father and I made a special technique that put part of me inside you before I died. It took a while for you to get enough chakra to support that piece of me, but now that you do, you can come to this special place in your mind and talk to me. At first you'll only be able to do this while asleep, but eventually you'll be able to enter a special trance to come here whenever you want."
"Is Daddy here too?" Naruto asked.
She shook her head sadly. "We didn't have enough time to figure out how to put both of us in here. I think he left enough of himself in here to last a few minutes, but I want to save that until you're older."
"Why is his picture fuzzed out downstairs?" he asked.
"Your daddy and I had enemies that we don't want to find out about you yet. I won't tell you our names until you've shown me you can keep a secret. Your daddy has a very famous face, so I fuzzed out the pictures while I was creating this place."
"You made this?" he asked, impressed.
She smiled. "The technique that your daddy and I made gives me limited control over this part of your mindscape. I chose to make it look like our house."
"Mindscape?"
"It's a fancy word for the part of your mind where we can meet," she said.
"I saw the Uzumaki book downstairs. Is that Daddy's family?" he asked.
She smiled again. "No, Sweetie, that's my family. Did the Sandaime give you the Uzumaki name?"
He nodded.
"Good. I don't want you to talk about the book to anyone outside the mindscape. This will be your test, okay? If you can keep the fact that you're a part of the real Uzumaki clan a secret, I'll tell you about your father when you turn eight, okay?"
"Not even Jiichan?" he asked.
"Not yet, Naruto-chan."
They spent several hours talking. Naruto told her about the orphanage and the Old Man. His mother told him about how pleased she and his father were to have him and a little bit about her life. Eventually he fell asleep for real.
The next night Naruto appeared in the mindscape meadow again after going to sleep to his immense relief.
"I'm glad it was real," he said to himself.
His mother was waiting for him in the front room of the house.
"What do you want to do when you're older, Naruto-chan?" she asked.
"You and Daddy were shinobi, right?" he asked.
"That's right," she answered.
"That's what I want to be too!" he exclaimed.
She smiled at him. "Good, I can start you training in the mindscape. You'll still have to practice in the real world."
"I'm ready!" he exclaimed. "What is it?"
She giggled and ruffled his hair. "The most important thing for an Uzumaki shinobi to learn is calligraphy!"
"What!?" he shouted.
"Our clan was famous for its sealing skills. Your father was pretty good at it too, even though he wasn't an Uzumaki. You need to have very good handwriting and calligraphy skills for sealing."
"Okay!" he said.
The orphanage matrons were not too pleased at the amount of paper and ink that Naruto wanted to use. They could not forbid him completely since they were supposed to be teaching the children to read and write, but they limited him to a sheet of paper a day. He thought about asking the Old Man for more paper and ink, but decided not to since he did not have a good excuse for it that would not expose his secret.
His momma had him practice writing with both hands because it "would not do to lose your most versatile and valuable tool due to an injury."
The other thing his momma had him doing was physical exercises. Most of them did not have any effect in the mindscape, so she showed him how to do them and then told him how many of each to do in real life.
The orphanage taught him the standard kanji he should know for his age, but ignored him when he asked for more. Luckily, his momma taught him as much as he wanted to know. In general, he did not care for reading, but whenever he asked his momma to read The History of the Uzumaki Clan book to him, she told him to read it himself. He suspected it was to motivate him to learn his kanji.
He asked her how she had made the books appear in his mindscape. She had told him that it was a special seal that had captured the state of their house at a specific point in time and then allowed her to reconstruct anything that was in it at that time in her mindscape. She told him that it was useful for studying on long missions.
He asked his momma why everyone was so cold to him. She got sad and told him that she would tell him when he was twelve.
"It's not your fault, Naruto-chan," she said. "People are stupid, especially when it's about things they really don't understand. The reason is a little complicated and I don't want you to take it the wrong way, so I'm going to have to ask you to wait."
"Okay, Momma," he said. "As long as you don't hate me, I'll be alright."
When Naruto turned six, his momma started teaching him basic taijutsu and told him how to awaken his chakra. After he awoke his chakra, she showed him chakra control exercises, starting with leaf sticking.
When he complained how boring it was, she said, "I know it's boring, but if you don't start controlling your chakra now, it will be much more difficult to do it later."
"What's so important about that leaf sticking can teach me?" he asked.
"It leads to walking on walls and water later," she answered. "That's pretty cool, right?"
He nodded and started bouncing excitedly.
"There are also a few other cool things you can do if your chakra control is good enough, including my signature technique. Do you want to see?"
"Yeah!"
She held out her hand and a chain flew out of it and struck a tree on the edge of the meadow.
"Cool!" he exclaimed. "Will I be able to do that?"
She nodded. "If your chakra control is good enough, you should be able to. Most Uzumaki can. My chakra is special in that my chains can suppress other people's chakra. That's actually fairly rare, so I don't know if you'll be able to do that, but you should be able to form the chains. The few Uzumaki who can't do it, can duplicate the ability, including the chakra suppression, with a seal.
"The other very useful thing you can do with good-enough chakra control is to manifest a temporary seal with your chakra. It only works with seals you've memorized absolutely, but it allows you to use them in combat once you get good at it. I can actually make the seals form at the end of my chains."
"Awesome!" Naruto exclaimed and redoubled his efforts at leaf sticking.