Chapter Text
Shinachiku Uzumaki was twelve years old, mildly bored, and only in his father's office because his mother had a late shift at the hospital and someone had to keep an eye on him after the academy let out.
"Almost done," Naruto said, not looking up from the mountain of paperwork that had somehow doubled in size since lunch. "Ten more minutes, I promise."
"You said that twenty minutes ago."
"...Fifteen more minutes."
Shinachiku sighed the long-suffering sigh of a child who had inherited his mother's patience for incompetence and his father's complete inability to sit still. He wandered the office instead — the framed photos, the row of Hokage portraits, the shelf of "do not touch, seriously, Shinachiku" scrolls that lined the back wall like they were daring him to touch them.
He wasn't going to touch them. He was just going to look.
Looking, it turned out, involved leaning a little too far over the shelf, which involved his elbow catching the edge of an old, faded scroll case that had clearly been sitting there since before he was born. It teetered. He lunged to catch it, the way you do, hands moving before his brain fully caught up — and the seal on the case cracked open the second his fingers touched it, spilling chakra-charged ink into the air like startled birds.
"Shinachiku, don't—"
Too late. The scroll unrolled itself in a burst of light that tasted like static, and the last thing Shinachiku heard before the world folded in on itself was his father's voice, several octaves higher than usual, shouting his name.
There was no dramatic tumble through the sky, no graceful landing — just a sudden, disorienting lurch, like missing a stair in the dark, and then Shinachiku was sitting upright in the middle of a training field with absolutely no memory of how he'd gotten there, blinking hard against the sun and half-convinced for one dizzy second that he'd simply fallen asleep somewhere strange. The air was warmer than it had any right to be, thick with the smell of turned dirt and cut grass, and somewhere off to his left a training post creaked in a breeze he hadn't felt a second ago. His palms stung where they'd hit the ground. That, more than anything, was what convinced him this wasn't a dream — dreams didn't usually bother with gravel.
He hadn't. The trees were shorter than they should have been. The mountain in the distance was missing two entire faces that had definitely been there that morning.
"...Okay," he said out loud, mostly to hear his own voice and confirm the world hadn't gone completely silent along with everything else. "That's new."
He wasn't panicking, which struck him, distantly, as a little strange. Some calm, stubborn part of him had already decided this wasn't the kind of problem that stayed a problem forever — either the scroll's chakra would burn itself out eventually and spit him back where he belonged, the way anything unstable enough to fling a person through time probably wasn't stable enough to keep them there indefinitely, or his dad would fix it. His dad had been standing right there when it happened — had seen the light take him, had shouted his name at the exact moment he vanished — which meant there was no missing-person mystery to solve on that end, no wondering where he'd gone. Just a father who already knew exactly what had happened and would tear the village apart, backward through time if he had to, until he got his son back. That certainty was the only thing keeping Shinachiku's hands from shaking.
"Konohamaru, I swear, if this is another transformation prank—"
Shinachiku scrambled around at the voice and found himself looking up at a boy who couldn't have been older than seventeen — spiky blond hair sticking out in every direction under a dark forehead protector, an orange-and-black jacket that looked two sizes too enthusiastic for the person wearing it, blue eyes currently narrowed with deep suspicion. Something in Shinachiku's chest lurched sideways, because he knew that face. He'd grown up looking at it across the breakfast table every single morning of his life — just younger, and louder, and missing about two decades of laugh lines.
"...Dad?" he said, before his brain could stop his mouth.
"What?" The boy — teenage Naruto, there was no other explanation, none of this made any sense but that was the only explanation that fit — took an alarmed step back. "I'm not — how do you know my — Konohamaru, seriously, this isn't funny anymore!"
"It's not Konohamaru," said a girl's voice, and Shinachiku's whole chest went tight and strange all over again, because he knew that voice too — quieter here, sharper at the edges, missing the particular warmth two decades of exasperation with his father would eventually soften into. She stepped into view a moment later: seventeen, maybe eighteen, pink hair grown out long and loosely tied back, a dark red top and the practical split skirt of a field medic, a pouch of supplies slung across one hip. Her green eyes were already fixed on him with the same clinical focus she'd one day use on patients whose symptoms didn't add up. "Konohamaru doesn't have chakra reserves anywhere close to that. Whoever this is, that's not a henge. That's real."
"How do you know that just by looking at him?"
"Because I'm not an idiot, unlike some people." She crouched down in front of Shinachiku, and he had approximately one half of one second to panic before she asked, with the bluntness that would apparently never, ever go away no matter what decade she was in: "Who are you, and why do you look like somebody botched a fusion jutsu on Naruto and me and never bothered to reverse it?"
Shinachiku, staring up at his own parents as teenagers, made an executive decision that would define the rest of his week.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," he said. "I'm just a kid. From a village. Nearby. That got lost."
Sakura's expression made it extremely clear she did not believe a single word of that.
It struck him, in the quiet second after, how different they both sounded — not wrong, just younger in ways that went deeper than the obvious. His mother's voice didn't have the low, worn patience yet that came from twenty-odd years of running a hospital ward; this version was all sharp edges, quicker to temper, not yet softened by the version of tired that made her gentle instead of short. His father laughed with his whole chest, loud and unguarded, in a way adult-Naruto only really did at home, behind closed doors, when he thought nobody outside the family was watching. Even the way they stood was different — some careful half-step of distance between them that Shinachiku had never once seen at his own kitchen table.
He tucked all of it away without a word, and let himself, just for a second, miss the finished versions of both of them.
Shinachiku had never met this Kakashi Hatake. The one he actually knew — the one who showed up to birthdays too late and left too early, who still called his dad "boss" half-joking and half not, who'd once fallen asleep mid-sentence at their kitchen table and gotten a permanent nickname for it — had always been older, softer around the edges, silver hair gone a little gray at the temples, perpetually late with a smile that suggested he'd already seen the punchline. This man looked younger, sharper, and far more dangerous, and it was deeply unsettling to stand in front of someone he'd known his entire life and not be recognized back.
Which was, he realized with a fresh stab of nerves, an extremely inconvenient person to be standing in front of right now.
He's going to see straight through me, Shinachiku thought, watching Kakashi's single visible eye track him with lazy, unhurried focus, and felt something cold settle low in his stomach. He's going to see straight through me and I don't even know what I'm supposed to be hiding it behind.
Kakashi didn't say much at first. He just watched — closed his book without comment, studied Shinachiku for a beat too long, and then, apparently at random, let his empty teacup slip off the edge of the desk.
Shinachiku's hand shot out and caught it an inch above the floor, pure reflex, and only registered what he'd just revealed after the fact.
"Hm," Kakashi said, mild, taking the cup back like nothing had happened. "Fast hands for a merchant's kid."
"...Lucky catch."
"Sure." Kakashi didn't push it further. He just tilted his head, watching Shinachiku a moment longer with an expression that gave away nothing at all. "Let's start simple. You got a name?"
Shinachiku hesitated for exactly long enough to make it obvious he was considering lying about it, then apparently decided a name was safe enough to hand over honestly. "Shinachiku."
"Just Shinachiku?"
"Just Shinachiku."
"No clan name to go with it?"
"No clan name."
Kakashi hummed, tucking it away without comment — one true thing, apparently, in a conversation otherwise built entirely out of careful evasions. "Alright, Shinachiku. Suna, was it? Merchant family?"
"..Yeah."
"What'd your father sell?"
Shinachiku hesitated a half-second too long. "Fabric."
"What kind?"
"...The woven kind."
Kakashi didn't call it out. He didn't need to — Shinachiku watched the words land and disappear behind that unreadable eye, logged without a flicker of reaction, the way a man might mark the exact spot where a trap had almost sprung.
"Where are your parents?" Kakashi asked, conversational, like the subject hadn't just shifted at all.
"...Traveling," Shinachiku said, which was true.
"Coming to get you?"
"They're not here." Also true.
"How'd you get separated?"
Shinachiku held his gaze for a second too long before answering, something tired and a little sad flickering behind his eyes. "...Far enough that they can't get here."
Kakashi's expression didn't change, but something in the quality of his silence did — the particular stillness of a man setting a very strange answer aside, in a drawer he wasn't ready to open yet.
"Alright," Kakashi said instead, easy, almost bored. "We'll leave it there for now."
"You don't believe me."
"Didn't say that." He turned to go, pausing just long enough to add, over his shoulder: "Stick close to Naruto and Sakura. We'll talk again once I've asked around."
He left before Shinachiku could think of anything else to say, which struck Shinachiku, even in the moment, as probably deliberate.
Tsunade's office, an hour later, was considerably less patient about the whole thing.
"Nothing," she said, dropping a thin folder onto her desk with more force than it strictly required. "No missing persons report out of Suna. No merchant caravan matching that description. No family, no guardian, no one asking where he is. As far as the entire shinobi world is concerned, this kid doesn't exist."
Kakashi said nothing right away. Tsunade exhaled, some of the sharpness draining out of her shoulders as she glanced toward the window, where Shinachiku was visible in the courtyard below, kicking idly at a loose stone while he waited.
"He's just a kid," she said, quieter, almost to herself. "Whatever else he turns out to be. I keep having to remind myself of that before I start treating him like a case file." She rubbed her temples, and when she spoke again, the Hokage was back in her voice. "That said — I have an unidentified, combat-trained minor sitting in my village with no verifiable history and no guardian. I'm not locking up a kid who hasn't done anything wrong. But I'm also not letting him wander around unsupervised until somebody figures out what he actually is." She fixed Kakashi with a look that had ended arguments with far more dangerous people than him. "Congratulations. He's your responsibility until we sort this out."
"...Lucky me," Kakashi said, entirely without enthusiasm.
"Keep him close. Watch how he handles himself. If he's a threat, I want to know before it matters. If he's not—" she waved a hand, tired, "—then we figure out where he actually belongs. Either way, I don't want him left alone."
Kakashi delivered the verdict without much ceremony, finding Shinachiku exactly where he'd left him — sitting on the low stone ledge that ringed the tower's inner courtyard, picking anxiously at a loose thread on his sleeve. A small, restless motion that snagged at something in the back of Kakashi's mind, familiar in a way he couldn't quite place.
"Until we know who you are," Kakashi said, "you're under observation. Mine, specifically, since apparently I drew the short straw." He didn't sound especially put out about it. "You'll stick close to Naruto and Sakura for now."
"I'm not a problem."
"Probably not," Kakashi agreed, easy, already turning to go. He paused at the door, something faintly, uselessly nostalgic tugging at him as he glanced back — the kid was fidgeting again, bouncing on the balls of his feet like standing still cost him something. It reminded him, oddly, of a much younger, much louder genin he'd once been saddled with. He shook the thought off without examining it too closely and left.
He paused in the hallway a moment longer, glancing back through the window toward the Hokage Monument, sharp against the afternoon sky.
"...That's an awfully familiar face," he murmured, to no one in particular, and did not open his book again for several minutes.
— END OF CHAPTER ONE —