Chapter One: An Unconscious Decision

The boy broke, but no one saw.

It wasn't often that Sarutobi Hiruzen felt like he was too old to hold up the Hokage mantle.

Like most days, it had started out as a perfectly wonderful day – the sun was bright, his ninja were cheerful, he had coffee on his desk and a morning of 'paperwork' (read: indulgence in his student's writings) and his Jounin-senseis had proved to be, if not intelligent, not dumb.

Oh, wait. Take that last one back.

"What did you say?" The Sandaime rubbed his temples and lifted the heavy hat off his head. It had been a long time since he last felt that the crushing weight of his title was too much for him to handle. A long time, but not long enough.

"You should have seen them," Kakashi told him, defensive. "If I hadn't failed that team, they would have died in the field. And," he added, voice softening, "you know I didn't want to fail them

Sarutobi rolled his eyes. "I did see them. You know I was watching your test. There's a lot riding on your team." The Hokage understood; there had been literally no chance to save the disaster that was Team 7, he had been watching, after all, and they failed the first chance, flunked the second—

"Yes, so with all due respect, I'd like to apply for an apprenticeship."

–then again, he had never had much hope for Team 7. The strange Team 7s in the past had worked out at first, against all logic and common sense, but all of them had fallen apart too. It was ninja life, and Sarutobi knew that; they die, they lie, they break apart. Nobody ever said the protectors were protected.

However, Sarutobi had hoped that Kakashi would see what he was doing and try to save Naruto. With the Uchiha on the team, it was almost guaranteed to pass. Almost, that is, until the team completely failed to show any sliver of teamwork.

After the news had reached the Merchant's Guild, they'd shown the reason why Konoha had one of the leading mercantile sectors among the Five Great nations.

The civilians loved the Uchiha, who had been a constant presence since the founding of Konoha, and were indebted to them for maintaining the inner police force. Many never saw the effects of the ninja that went on outer missions to secure money for Konoha, but the Uchiha had been a constant, calming presence.

After Uzumaki Naruto had become a genin, he was denied access to the Orphans' Fund of Konoha. After he failed the test, he was not a genin. As of now, Naruto had no access to any funds. Slowly but surely he'd run out of options and resources and would become an easy target for the hateful villagers. Furthermore, as he was no longer under Sarutobi's jurisdiction as a ninja, any crimes he committed would be submitted to the civilian council and police, and he would no doubt be placed in jail soon enough, or even worse, be condemned to death.

No doubt, Sarutobi could stop them. But the choice they had offered him was easy, and something that had to be done in any case. It was no trouble at all for a bloodless concession of equality to Naruto.

Sarutobi closed weary eyes, tired and tried. "At least one thing will turn out easy," he muttered. "Kakashi, you have full permission to take Uchiha Sasuke as an apprentice."

There was a moment of silence. The Hokage cracked open an eye. "What are you still here for?"

"Sir, I don't want Uchiha as an apprentice. I'm sure there are plenty of people who will take him." With a thick swallow, Kakashi admitted, "I'd like to be given Uzumaki Naruto, sir."

He was greeted with the loud voice of silence, who had evidently decided she hadn't been heard the first time.

The Hokage closed his eyes again and turned to view his great, mighty, and terrible city. What a beautiful city this is, he thought. What a beautiful city that Minato died for, that I will die for, that we will all die for.

What a beautiful disaster.

He turned, reaching for the words. They did not come, so he swallowed and did his best. "They'd put me in a bad spot, Kakashi," he said. "It was either throw Naruto to the mercies of the Merchant Guild or make sure Uchiha Sasuke got the best education I could offer."

"Hokage-sama, the two don't even have anything to do with each other. I won't-"

They didn't. He had been outraged, but if it was to choose between the Council's stupid pride in their last Uchiha and his surrogate grandson – well, that was no choice at all.

"It wasn't a suggestion." The Hokage's voice was steel. "As of now, you are Uchiha Sasuke's mentor. This will last for a period of two years, during which you will be removed from active duty."

Kakashi's voice was unnaturally loud. "So that's it, then? You're going to let them take Minato-sensei's son like that?"

The Hokage didn't turn, and Kakashi stood there for minutes, trembling with barely contained rage. Then, soft, like a whisper, the Hokage said: "Don't underestimate me."

It was not so hard the second time around.

If anything, it was easier.

The tower was virtually unguarded. The first couple of levels were still filled with working people, but there was even a window on the seventh level that was left open – open. From there, it was simple for the chronic prankster to avoid the basic traps and head toward the Hokage Office. A kunai trap there, a wire here… The traps had to be simple just because they all had to be taken down in the daytime for easy access. (It wouldn't do for a foreign ambassador to be injured by a security trap.) Naruto had known this for years, and had exploited it several (okay, many) times.

There were some chuunin on the seventh floor, but they were only finishing up their last tasks for the evening. It was simple enough for Naruto to evade them. He was, after all, a master prankster and had evaded even Jounin in the past.

The eighth level was easily surpassed; a staircase led right past it up to the ninth and final level.

He paused there. Naruto should have been breathing heavily, but due to being a veteran of chases and the container of the Kyuubi, his breathing was light. He looked, then, at the door that represented his dreams. It was a great, big, oaken door, worn smooth by time and thousands of admiring gazes.

Naruto had always wanted to be Hokage. But the reason why had eluded him for a long time. When he was young, he wondered if it was the pretty hat that drew him to the position. Later he thought, for a while, that he wanted the love and recognition a Hokage earned.

Standing there, before the doors, he wondered if it wasn't something else. The Hokage, to him, had always been the very definition of strength. And he, Naruto, had always been weak. He wondered, then, if he had just wanted to be strong. Maybe Uzumaki Naruto hadn't wanted to be Hokage for some deep, philosophical reason. Maybe that wasn't why he was drawn to the name.

Maybe it was because, for once, Naruto wanted to stand at the top of the world, look down, and smile.

The Forbidden Scroll was right there, as plain as day. For a moment, Naruto paused, almost certain it was another trap. He had been fooled once by Mizuki, twice by Kakashi, and damn if he was going to be fooled thrice. But the Scroll was free of any trap that he could see, and Naruto was a master at detecting and setting traps. (Disregarding, of course, those times he had been fooled.)

He tried to shrug off the admonitory feeling and succeeded. He reached out for the Scroll, took it in his hands, and did not look back.

"Hokage's orders." Kakashi stood calmly before the two night guards.

"Of course, Kakashi-sensei," one agreed. The other bowed reverently. There was some use to being an ANBU legend, Kakashi decided.

The two ninja flashed away from the Hokage tower immediately. Kakashi settled down for the night guard. He took out his orange book and tried to immerse himself in reading.

It was about midnight when he saw Naruto approaching. The boy had shed his neon orange for a dark brownish-black, and it had been hard to spot him at first. Kakashi was impressed, despite himself. If he had not been who he was, an ANBU and Jounin, he might have – possibly – missed the kid.

The boy didn't hesitate to exploit the open window and in a matter of minutes was in and out, and gone. If – no, when – he got a chance to teach the kid, he'd have to teach him to look underneath the underneath. The easy setup should have made him immediately paranoid. He should have stopped and wondered if it was a trap.

Naruto was too trusting – too much, like his father. But that wasn't a bad thing. "Good luck," Kakashi whispered, to the boy who could not hear him. "I'll be seeing you soon."

Before he was even aware of it, Naruto had made an unconscious decision.

He was going to leave Konoha.

Oh – it sounded bad, put like that. And from the beginning, it had not been like that at all. He had looked at his life up to that point and saw that the one thing that had helped him most toward his goal was that one hour with the Forbidden Scroll. So, obviously, he had decided to try for another hour with the Scroll.

But now that he had it in his hands a second time, he looked out at a village that hated him; thought of people that had betrayed and despised him, and knew that he could linger no longer. Sakura, whom he had only ever been nice to, had spat on him and declared him a loser. She had beaten him with fists and words, but he had never retaliated. Sasuke, who had been somebody to look up to and a measuring stick for his own growth, had looked down on him with unconcealed disgust. Iruka-sensei – even Iruka had hated him for a long while. That silver-haired "sensei" had dismissed him. His so-called "companions" during his Academy years left him without a second glance.

Even the Sandaime, though kind, could do little and had no time to do what little he could. And Naruto, like any other child, knew that more time was spent on more important things. Loud kids got more attention, so he'd tried being loud. He'd tried it all.

Nothing had worked.

It was with kind of a resignation that he turned away from the mountain. Although he let no thought of it – missing, abandon, leave, nukenin… - in his heart, the moment that he turned away was the moment that he knew he could no longer live here as he was: a weak boy dependent on others, because all the other people in these walls hated him.

In that moment, Naruto was invincible. He was a boy who had everything to gain and nothing left to lose.

True, there is no such thing as perfection. The master of every class holds the chance of defeat in his heart. True invincibility is being afraid of nothing. True invincibility is always looking forward. True invincibility is being at the very bottom of the ladder, and not the top. The weakest seed in the ground has nothing to lose but his life, and can only grow skywards.

With the Scroll in one hand and a feeling of invincibility in his heart, Naruto left the walls of Konoha and ventured into the forest.

The forest was dark.

Naruto, however, had always been able to see well in the dark. The branches and pitfalls of the dense thicket were no trouble to him. He ran easily, jumping over dents and ditches in the ground. His kill-me-orange jumpsuit, even under layers of mud and paint, glowed to his eyes. He could see every individual stalk of grass, bending under the weight of the wind of his passing.

Kyuubi – he thought, and at once he wanted to thank and despise the being. Without Kyuubi, he would not have survived all those years of torment at the hands of the villagers. He would not be able to see in the dark, create so many Kage Bunshin, or recover so quickly from the frequent beatings he had been subjected to. Without Kyuubi, he might not have gone through any of that at all. Without Kyuubi, he could have been normal.

For a second, his mind lingered on that thought. All he could hear was the deliberately ninja-sneaky quietness of his feet, the rustle of wind through the trees, and a soft beating of his heart. For a moment, he lingered there. What if he was normal?

But the moment passed, and Naruto scoffed at the fleeting notion, as he always did. It was no good to dwell on things like that. Better to laugh and shrug it off.

Interlude

When he was little, he had walked by two brothers. They had dark hair and kind faces. The older one carried the younger one on his shoulders, and he walked with the gait of a ninja. (Naruto knew because people who walked like that always hit harder.) People around them turned from Naruto to look toward them. (That's the prodigy…Sharingan…Itachi-san.)

The younger one had pulled at the older one's cheeks. "…Big Brother…don't you smile once in a while?" The distance between them carried away the words.

And Naruto thought about that – those words: prodigy, powerful. He thought about how somebody that great couldn't smile, and he decided that smiling must be a truly marvelous and hard-to-attain thing. Later, he realized that it wasn't true, but somewhere in his mind the notion remained.

So even then, in the dark, where nobody could see him, Naruto pushed away his thoughts, smiled, and decided that he had gone far enough to peek in the Scroll for the second time in his life.

So the orange-clad boy slowed to a stop, his breathing only just erring on the side of heavy after two solid hours of sprinting. His stamina, which he had blessed before, he no longer knew whether to curse or appreciate. It was, after all, a gift of the Kyuubi, wasn't it?

Better to bless it, then. There was no point in hating Kyuubi, now that it was all he had. He had only a head full of Kyuubi, a lifetime of bad memories, and the need to get stronger. From a life within a village that had despised him, he knew that just to survive, he had to rise above.

He sat with his back to a tree trunk – Shinobi Rule (what number, he didn't know): Never leave your back open. There was a pang in his heart as he thought this, because Sakura-chan – no, just Sakura – would know the number and the exact wording. But Sakura wasn't here, and she wouldn't care anyway, and that hurt, so he stopped thinking altogether.

Then he took the Scroll in his hands and opened it once more.

The first thing he noted was the solid block of text that he had worked his way painstakingly through the other night. His eyes skimmed the heavy terminology briefly, but he still found the complex wordings just as confusing as they had been before. He sighed, crossed his fingers, and pulled at the paper, revealing more of the Scroll.

There, in the margin, was something that he had not seen before, hidden as it was by the bulk of the Scroll. It was a small, messy written note, connected, by an arrow, to the particularly confusing last sentence. It read simply: clone's memories return to you.

It took Naruto's brain a while to process this.

His first thought was – So I'm not crazy! For he'd been noticing strange things about the technique; things like seeing himself from different perspectives, tripping and falling flat on his face but finding no telltale bump – things like that. Naruto had been quick to blame the strange, hallucinatory memories on the Kyuubi, because the fox seemed to be the root of most his troubles.

But, being a creature of the see-it-to-believe-it mentality, Naruto quickly created a clone and set the Scroll in his counterpart's hands. The clone scurried off behind the cover of some trees.

A moment later, Naruto shot to his feet and raced into those very same trees. He found the Scroll where his clone had left it, safely nestled in a clump of grass on the ground. Then Naruto took the Scroll and began unrolling it frantically.

It was true.

There was nothing there.

The paper was smooth and thick, in the way that high quality scroll paper often is. It had a slightly woody smell and a smooth-but-rough texture. Its color had the same consistency as cloud and a hue reminiscent to bread. Naruto's dirty hands itched to tear it and ruin its perfection – and not just because he was a troublemaker.

The paper was completely unmarred by ink.

Panic was his first thought – all of that for nothing? He was almost two hours away from Konoha, and had just committed a treasonous crime to get his hands on a Scroll that was completely worthless! His second rationalization was more logical. Calm down, he ordered himself, think. Thinking is what a good shinobi does.

Admittedly, Naruto thought little and was not a very "good" shinobi, but the sentiment remained nevertheless.

Maybe they just decided to put a bit of empty space between two jutsu, he thought, and kept doggedly unrolling the Scroll. I'll see a word the next time I turn this thing.

But no words appeared on the expanse of paper.

And when, for most people, sanity and desperation would have kicked in, a stubborn perseverance raised its head in Naruto. He called up two clones and they helped him unroll the thing even faster. Length by length of paper flew by, stretching, in its entirety, perhaps half a mile. Naruto gritted his teeth as whatever hope was left in him fled before the endless emptiness.

Goodness, if anybody had even scrolled out this much to write on it, they would never have gotten it all rolled up again!

But the thought stayed with him. If I just turn it one more time, I'll see writing. He couldn't give up now. He had come so far.

There was only a thin layer of paper left, rolled around the wooden roller. Naruto sighed and dismissed his clones, opting to dwell in another one of his failures alone. He painstakingly turned the centerpiece once, twice, thrice, and a final time, reaching the very end.

Would it be too dramatic to say that his life flashed before his eyes? A child, ridiculed no matter what he did, followed with hating eyes. A kid at an orphanage, with ears that could hear through the thin walls as his very name was used as a curse by the matron. A young boy, trying to figure out how to operate a broken stove. The only student who didn't pass the graduation test – three times. The fool that fell for Mizuki-teme's trap. The boy whose team failed his would-be-sensei's test.

All his life, all his memories were of disappointment. And if that was all he knew – if he had never won – then what could he be but a failure? Was he not only what society had created, a monster of desperation and loneliness? Wasn't he just an unwanted boy? Wasn't he just a failure?

I'm sorry, Sandaime-ojisan, he thought. You were wrong. I am a failure. And that's all I'll ever be.

What was he to do now?

Author's Notes: 10.28.2012: Minor grammar changes.

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