Ah, I dunno what this is. I guess I didn't want it to end for Naruto.

Sakumo Hatake was many things.

He was a man. A father. A comrade. A shinobi. A failure... And broken.

Completely and irreversibly broken. He had been forsaken. Not in a physical sense, but in an emotional sense. His comrades and the people... the villagers that he had lived to protect… they shunned him. They whispered the poison that was his name back and forth amongst themselves, they sneered, or shook their heads at how pitiful he had become. And pitiful he was indeed. His son, just five years old… a genius in his own right could even see it. He saw Sakumo's misery. It was in the way that Sakumo's shoulders no longer held strong, but how they were perpetually slumped with an invisible burden. He saw it in the smudges of black beneath his father's eyes from lack of sleep. He saw it in the abyss that Sakumo's dark gray eyes had become. They were deep in a new sense in recent days.

They were pools of infinite sadness, self hatred, and shame.

Sakumo's skills as a shinobi had suffered from the depression that clung to him. He was no longer revered as the White Fang of Konoha, the living legend that had gone toe to toe with Hanzo the Salamander for days on end. Instead, he was the failure that had chosen to save his comrades instead of completing his mission as expected of him. His comrades had lived, but the village suffered a blow due to his decision. As a result, he had stopped carrying his White Chakra Saber, feeling undeserving to use it. He was no longer a shinobi worth carrying such a tool. He was no longer a shinobi worth the name he had carried with pride.

One could argue that Sakumo had only done what Konoha taught its shinobi to do. He had valued the lives of his fellow ninja and protected them as he had the ability to, but that was overlooked. He had failed a mission too important, and the ones he had saved held no thanks for him.

They shunned him as well.

Sakumo could see the sympathy in the Hokage's brown eyes whenever the man's wise gaze fell upon his defeated form, but there was nothing either of them could do. The damage had been done, and there was no way for Sakumo to redeem himself.

And so he roamed.

Others allowed him this one vice. He roamed outside the gates of the village at any time he felt the need to breathe again. He walked and walked until he felt he had been gone long enough and needed to return.

As usual, he walked for hours on end before some distant part of him reminded him that he needed to return home, to the son that he had let down more than anyone else.

It was dark out, well past ten o'clock at night, and Sakumo had wandered off quite far. With his less than determined stride, it would take him about two hours to get back to the village.

Sakumo looked up at the dark blue blanket of stars above, trying to discern a more accurate perception of the time. Trees and their night darkened leaves surrounded him, obscuring his vision.

He took a few steps back, but instead of focusing on the stars beyond the twisting branching, he peered into them.

"What in the…" His voice trailed off, slightly hoarse from disuse, quiet and cautious.

There was something in the branches.

But no. It was not a something but a who.

A someone.

And that someone was a little girl. It was too dark to tell what she looked like or what color her hair was, but Sakumo could at least gather that she was quite young due to her size. That or just extremely short. She appeared to be wearing only a dark shirt that was in utter tatters, the sleeves long and falling past her hands, hiding them. Her hair was long, a tangled mass that was ensnared painfully in the branches she hung from like some twisted ornament.

She was still in the way that only near death could make possible, but when Sakumo stretched his keen senses for the first time in quite some time, he heard her ragged and faint breathing. His nose scented old blood, and chard flesh. The smell of battle.

Without thinking, he channeled chakra into his feet and ran up the length of the tree bark. He reached her in a matter of seconds. Sticking to the side of the tree, he reached out with gentle hands. He didn't call to her, because he knew her consciousness was in a shaky place. Had he walked away, none the wiser to her presence, she would've been dead before midnight.

He had nothing sharp to cut her down with, as some part of him had made him leave his weapons behind, in case he stumbled across someone who was willing to kill him and therefore end his suffering.

So, Sakumo had to get the girl down by hand. And since he was closer to her he could gather that she was indeed a girl, and indeed very young. Probably around his son's age. And five was much too young to be out in the middle of the forest neck deep in death, left to die in the cold all alone.

The Hatake carefully yet swiftly untangled the girl's hair from the branches it was twisted around. He scented more fresh blood as he did so, knowing that there were tears around her scalp from the stress put there as her full weight pulled the long tresses sprouting from it. Her body was covered in little scratches healed to various degrees, and Sakumo could tell that she had fallen. She'd fallen through the branches from above, and they had injured her even more before her hair had gotten snagged and she lost consciousness, left to hang until she expired.

'But fallen from where?' He wondered, unwrapping a particularly stubborn lock from around a long twig. 'Where did this child come from?'

Finally, after a long while he freed her, quickly grasping the little one as freefall took her and cradling her to his chest. He was alarmed at what he found.

The right sleeve of her tattered shirt was empty. Most of her arm was missing. Sakumo hopped down from the tree, landing with silent grace that had been ingrained in him long ago. He held her with his right arm, and she was slumped against his chest.

Using his left, he rolled up her sleeve, eyes widening at what he saw. From the elbow down, as he knew her arm was gone. But it wasn't an infected bloodied stump. No, the injury appeared to be old yet healed, and there were bits of a white substance clinging to it, the remains of some odd prosthetic. He ran his fingers over the white substance gently, shivering because it felt like human flesh.

"Just who are you?" He whispered.

The Hatake rolled her sleeve back over her stump, and then he turned towards his village and ran.

He was still swift, a force to be reckoned with, but nowhere near what he had been, so it would still take him a while to get to the village.

He traveled in a blur, a silver ghost in the night, and for a moment, he felt his beaten bundle stir.

Her eyes didn't open but she spoke. She said something in a little raspy voice that was almost a whisper, a pitiful string of sounds that would have been missed by anyone else but someone with his senses. And what she said… no matter how quietly, it resonated deafeningly loud in the deepest part of his soul. And Sakumo knew. He knew that he had stumbled across a kindred spirit.

"I want to die."

Sorry Naruto, doesn't look like you found your peaceful sleep. :(