Chapter Text
Naruto wakes up to the sound of waves crashing against the rocks that surround the coastline of Uzushio. The air has the salty tang of coastal lands and, in the distance, Naruto can hear birds calling out for one another.
When he opens his eyes, the sky is a beautiful blue that Naruto has not seen in a long time, white clouds peppered all over it. The air is clear of the smell of rot and dead, and Naruto feels like he could choke on it.
Even with the ruins and destruction surrounding him on all sides, the place still manages to look like heaven.
Naruto twitches in place for a second, trying to take stock of his body and his chakra.
He feels like he was chewed, crushed, and then thrown across space and time at neck-breaking speed. His bones ache in a way Naruto's not even sure he's ever experienced, and even his eyelids feel heavy when he tries to blink. His skin is literally steaming - and not the way it does when Kurama is healing him.
Speaking of... Kurama?
The Kyuubi does not respond.
The only reason Naruto doesn't start panicking is that he can still the warmth of the being's presence in his mindspace, and the fact that his head is already pounding and panicking will only make it hurt worse.
Kurama is alive.
Probably exhausted and asleep, but he's alive.
The seal worked.
... Of course the seal worked: some of the brightest minds of his time had come together to create it.
His time.
Naruto’s eyes fall close again, an agonizing sort of pain expanding from within his chest to rival what he feels in the rest of his body.
His time.
His time, because it's different from the time he is in now.
Because he’s not in his time anymore.
He’s not where – when? – he was before. He’s not fighting Kaguya and her army of undead Zetsu, surrounded by his friends and comrades. He’s not wearing his Shinobi Alliance hitai-ate and white cloak, and he’s not helping friends fight against foes wearing his former comrade's faces.
He's not doing any of that because...
Because none of it has happened yet.
None of it will happen if Naruto succees. If Naruto manages to do the impossible. If Naruto.
Because Naruto is back in the past.
Because Naruto has gone back in time.
Naruto is not sure of when, exactly, he is.
The seal they created – the seal Naruto had created with the help of Tobirama, his father, his mother, and Shikamaru – had been unbalanced and imperfect.
They had done the best they could, but even Tobirama and his father had admitted that time-space was a complex thing to work with. It was one thing to work on time-space ninjutsu while focusing on the 'space dimension' component of it; it was another thing entirely to play around with the 'time dimension' component.
They hadn't had a choice, though. The seal had been their final chance, the last shot at survival; it had been a desperate sort of final attempt, when the idea of survival had started to look just as bleak as dying at the goddess’ hands.
(What's the point of survival if everyone else is dead? What's the point of surviving if everyone you loved and cared about was dead? What's the point of surviving if the world was in flames all around you?)
The main problem with the seal had been its instability. The only way they had been able to maintain and power the time component of the seal had been to have it fully reliant and dependant on the chakra output created by Naruto during the activation.
However, his ability to retain his sanity, mind, and body was also reliant on his chakra. They had drawn protective seals all over his skin to make sure his displacement through time wouldn't tear him apart, but those seals were also reliant on his chakra.
In layman terms, this meant that Uzumaki Naruto, the person with the worst chakra control out of everyone still alive around, was supposed to figure out the perfect ratio of chakra necessary to make sure he could travel through time and space without being destroyed by the travel, while still having enough to be able to travel as far as necessary into the past.
In the end, it had been Kurama that had saved him.
Kurama and his mother’s edo tensei had managed to seal all of Kurama’s chakra inside of him - an incredibly painful experience Naruto hoped he'd never have to experience again - and while Naruto focused on burning through the chakra necessary to go back in time, Kurama had focused on keeping them both alive through it all.
Naruto had absorbed all of Kurama's ying chakra and burnt through it all in order to ensure the two of them made it back to Uzu in one piece.
Naruto can't wait to rub it into the old fox's face that he was, once again, helping humanity survive.
He closes his eyes.
He misses him already.
It shows.
Naruto's absorption of Kurama's ying chakra is very obvious to see.
Naruto's not too sure how long it takes him to wake up again and start exploring the little that remains of Uzushio.
He had opened his eyes, at one point, to a dark night and a missing moon in the sky, and had panicked so hard he had passed out again.
True or false? Nightmare or reality?
The next time he had woken up, the sun was back in the sky, and Naruto had decided to get up.
Which is how Naruto finds himself staring at a familiar yet unfamiliar image on a piece of reflective glass near the shore.
His hair, once the same shade of blond as Namikaze Minato, is now just a shade colder than that of his mother (Uzumaki red). A mix, Naruto thinks, of his original hair colour, and Kurama’s firey chakra.
Even his eyes, the same blue of the Yondaime's, has burnt into something more violet than dark blue.
Naruto has only seen a couple of pictures of his mother, and he wonders if it's really a coincidence that he suddenly looks so much like her.
He’d ask Kurama, but the fox is still seemingly unconscious inside of him, which is why Naruto had decided to busy himself scavenging, gathering and preparing.
Though...
Naruto sits down on a broken piece of wall, continuing to stare at his reflection for a few more seconds.
The general plan his friends had drilled into his head before pushing him through time had been: destroy Zetsu, stop the Akatsuki, save the Leaf. Other requests had included 'please save Obito', 'please stop the massacre', 'please help Itachi', 'please stop Danzo' and 'save *insert the name of yet another shinobi who shouldn't have died*', but the main points had been the previous three.
He had also been given parameters to stick to, such as: tell the Sandaime as little as possible, don’t let people realise you have the Kyuubi inside of you, and keep your identity as secret as possible.
The problem with this is that, unless he managed to go all the way back to before his birth, there would already be an Uzumaki Naruto running around.
There already is (should be) a kid out there in Konoha with blond hair and blue eyes, probably confused as to why everyone hates him and avoids him, with big dreams of becoming Hokage, living as the container of the Kyubi and the legacy of parents he doesn't know he has.
That boy wears his name with pride, because it's the only thing he has, at this point. It's his birthright – his mother’s clan name, and the name his father chose. His name: the one and only thing his parents had given him that the Sandaime and everyone else had been unable to take from him.
My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and I’m going to be Hokage! Believe it!
The boy, that boy, needed his name. It was the only thing he had.
Uzumaki Naruto is the jinchuuriki of the Kyubi no Kitsune, son of Namikaze Minato and Uzumaki Kushina, god-son of Jiraiya of the Sannin, loudmouth knuckle head, ramen enthusiast, lover of toads, hater of veggies, and little more.
Naruto... well, Naruto is those things. He’s still his parent’s son. He still has Kurama inside of him. He still loves ramen – he misses ramen – and he still likes toads.
But he can’t be Uzumaki Naruto. He can’t be the person he was, because someone else is that. Someone else needs that.
He looks different. He is different.
He now has to continue being different.
He has to continue being... not-Uzumaki Naruto.
He’s always looked like a perfect mix of his mother and father. He looked like a younger Namikaze Minato, according to Kakashi-sensei; but his face was all Kushina.
Now he just looks like his mom.
Naruto is not a sealing master. He has a talent for the arts – something that had surprised no one except Naruto – but he is nowhere near the likes of Jiraiya, his father, or his mother.
What Naruto did have, prior to his arrival in the past, was his parents’ teaching; and now, he also has pretty much unlimited access to everything Uzushio has managed to hide from Kiri and Kumo.
And, for a pillaged and destroyed village, there is a lot still hidden in Uzu.
Because the people of Uzushio, unlike their destroyers, did know a thing or two about seals, and used said knowledge to hide their secrets.
Seals in the walls. Seals in the ceilings. Seals on the ground. Seals in the sand.
Seals that you couldn't find unless you knew what you were looking for.
Seals that would only open if one had the right key.
Or, more correctly, the right blood.
It’s fascinating, Naruto finds. For years he was despised for what he was. People had used his name as a synonym for monster and for the Kyubi, and had spat it at him with disgust and disdain.
He had never realised just how much history and power his name actually held - how much history and power his blood carried.
It had purposefully been hidden from him.
With nothing but a flare of his slowly recuperating chakra and a drop of said blood, a vault of information opens in front of him.
It’s both intimidating and fascinating.
Naruto dives into it.
Naruto ends up having to eat a lot of fish. He is still too weak to venture into the forest on the western side of the island, though he has finally managed to start using his clones again, and there isn’t much of anything else in terms of food.
There's a couple of birds that he catches and cooks, and mostly a lot of rats and other vermins.
Naruto is not going to eat rats and, most importantly, he's not going to be eating rats that had probably, at some point or another, eaten the remains of the people of Uzushiogakure; so he sticks to fishing, and the little bird meat he can get his hands on. He finds some wild tubers on his third day – surprising, considering all the rest of farmable land has been burnt to a crisp – but he can’t figure out how to cook it in a way that makes it taste at all appealing, so he chooses not to bother with it. He also finds ginger and a couple of other herbs, but nothing else that can be eaten by itself.
At least there is some variety in the fish that he catches.
(Every now and again, he catches the remains of one of his potential? ancestors, and adds it to the large mass grave he had dug on his fourth day of stumbling over old bones.
Then, two weeks into his stay he finds a book on the cultures of various shinobi villages. After reading the chapter on Uzushio, Naruto then spends an entire days burning their remains and returning them all to the sea.
If Naruto cries while he does this, well: with Kurama asleep, there’s no one call him out on it)
In the bowels of Uzushio, under what Naruto assumes was the Uzukage’s tower/mansion/building, Naruto finds a intact wall, filled with chakra, with the Uzumaki family line depicted on it.
The seal matrixes used are confusing and Naruto can't figure out how it works other than to tell it’s somewhat powered by natural chakra. Which is why, despite Uzushio having been destroyed, Naruto finds the name ‘Uzumaki Naruto’ written under that of 'Uzumaki Kushina'.
Apparently Naruto is related to the Uzumaki Mito through the woman’s younger sister. Which means he’s related to Senju Tsunade via Mito, even though the woman’s name on the tree is ‘Uzumaki Tsunade’.
Throughout his entire life, Naruto’s known the names of only four Uzumakis: his mother; Uzumaki Mito; Nagato (though he hadn’t realised Pain was an Uzumaki until much much later); and Karin (who he had learnt of after her death, from Sasuke).
There are a lot more names on the wall in front of him, and Naruto stares at them for a very long time.
He traces the kanji he can reach, and wonders about the whereabouts of the people whose names are still stark and brilliant in the stones (he assumes those are the names of the Uzumaki who are still alive) ('Uzumaki Naruto' is burning bright, as is 'Uzumaki Tsunade'; but 'Uzumaki Kushina' is dark).
He wonders how many of them still wear their names with pride. He wonders how many of them had traded 'Uzumaki' for a safer adjacent name, or dropped it completely. He wonders where these surviving Uzumaki's are hiding. He wonders if they had ever tried to come back to Uzushio, or even if they had ever lived on the island.
He asks the wall all of these questions (he has to ask out loud. He has to speak, because if he doesn't, then there will be no noise on the island other than distant birds and waves crashing, and Naruto would go insane).
The wall doesn't answer.
Naruto finds a summoning scroll for foxes about two months after he wakes up in Uzushio.
He probably sounds crazy, as he laughs to himself on a deserted island, but who cares?
"Have you completely lost it?"
He probably sounds crazy, as he cries to himself (and Kurama, because Kurama is here, Kurama is listening, Kurama is back, Naruto is not alone-) on a deserted island, but who cares?
During the last months of the war, Naruto’s mastery over his bunshin had shocked and impressed Tobirama, his parents, and even Orochimaru.
He could summon clones without saying the words or doing the hand signals. His clones could last days without the need to dispel themselves. He could switch himself with his clones without byakugan or sharigan users being able to tell. He could have different clones do different type of transformation jutsus semi-independently. He could send information to his clones mentally (and viceversa, but that was a little more painful). A clone created while he was using sage mode could maintain sage mode for a time even if the original had to exit it.
Naruto's not a genius like his father. He can’t recreate the hiraishin – can’t even begin to understand how the damn thing works – and can’t seem to grasp seals as fast as either of his parents are able to. He can’t just create jutsus like his father and Jiraiya (or Orochimaru).
He can learn, though, and learn fast.
And, as his chakra reserves replenish, Naruto’s clones start to tackle the various tasks that, alone, would have taken him months to complete.
Once he locates the scroll, he sets over a dozen clones on learning how to access and use the Adamantine Sealing Chains. He has another ten copying down as much information on jutsus and sealing as he can, and five clones practicing the techniques per jutsu (Uzumaki Naruto, after all, will eventually learn the rasengan and the hiraishin - maybe - so, other than the clones, Naruto will have to find a different signature jutsu). A number of clones are dispatched to practice and try to better the seals Naruto has started to improve upon, little by little. He also has five clones constantly retrieving, cremating and releasing into the sea the remains of whatever Uzushio-nin or civilian he finds.
By the end of the day, there are hundreds of Narutos scattered all over Uzushio, all hard at work.
By the end of the night, Naruto is attempting to deal with a horrible headache so that he can sleep but, by the next morning, he's recovered enough to start all over again.
It’s hard to wonder or explore things to do with gender when the whole village hates you for you, specifically. Or when you're travelling with a perverted godfather. Or when you have the fourth shinobi war at your doorstep. Or when you have a rabid moon goddess trying to end life as you know it.
There is a science-y and psycho-brain-whatever book about gender on the island that Naruto finds and then tries to read, but his eyes glaze over two pages in.
There is also a scroll on body modification seals that Naruto finds much more interesting.
Fox summons are not like toad summons. They are much more independent, and much more fun.
They don't believe they can be contained by summoning contracts, and have a very specific test in order to decide if you're worthy of being their summoner.
The official test is 'can you outfox the fox?'
The real test, as a human cannot outfox a fox, is 'do we like you?'
Naruto finds that while they no longer appreciate or like 'Uzumakis', the foxes love a good prank. Kasumi, a small kitsune with three tails, tells him that time travel to outfox a bunny goddess is probably the most funny and complex prank she's ever heard of.
And while only the younger kitsunes seem to find his timetravelling 'funny', they are all big fans of the Nine Tailed Kitsune, the 'great Kyubi-no-Yoko'.
They call him 'Kurama-sama'.
Naruto, prudently, does not laugh at this (... outwardly. Inside his mindscape, he's outright cackling, much to Kurama's great offense).
Uzumaki Kushina and Namikaze Minato had a blond haired, blue eyed son who will, one day, probably inherit or earn the toad summoning contract.
Uzumaki Naruto.
There are a lot of names on the mural.
Five months after 17 years old Uzumaki Naruto woke up in Uzushio, tired, and alone, and desperate, 17 years old Uzumaki Nari, named after Uzumaki Mito’s younger sister, leaves the island.
There is a new name on the mural.
If the dead could talk, they’d say Uzumaki Nari looks just like her first cousin, Uzumaki Kushina. They’d say she’s practically her clone – was it not for the deep whisker like scar birthmarks on her cheek and her tanned colouring.
The Kyuubi no Kitsune says she looks better as a girl than as a boy.
Nari ignores him, and sails for the shores of the Land of Fire.