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Naruto doesn’t remember everything. That would probably be too much, to have the complete memory of an entire lifetime within him from the start. He recalls important bits, flashes of the sun or moments where everyone is laughing. Names and faces and the idea of importance. In his heart they all remain imprinted, whether he has enough memories to share or not.
He’s born by the coast.
It’s been long enough now that the continents have shifted a bit, and the language in his head doesn’t exactly fit the one he speaks now. Chakra is an outdated concept, one that is used for magic tricks or coveted by monks in faraway temples. It still resides within everyone, but their cores shrink once they go years and years without touching it. This world is one made for civilians. Peace destroyed the shinobi world, and time took care of the rest.
Nothing lasts forever.
People continue to fight and hate, falling back into the same cycles. The world is divided, but this time they use weapons of man rather than jutsu. Naruto isn’t even sure what became of the various summoning creatures. Perhaps they’ve sealed away the entrances to their realms as the humans forgot about them. It’s not as if anyone can activate a sealing scroll anymore.
Naruto is around four when he realizes something is different. He cries for a week straight, claiming his parents are dead. Both his mother and father were perfectly alive and entirely worried about their screaming child. Neither of them remember anything. He can tell.
It’s in the way they look at each other, in the way they look at the world, in the way they look at him. Even when he drops little hints or names they’ve never heard in this lifetime, there’s never a moment where recognition flashes across their faces.
Naruto thinks that’s fine enough. They deserve a life; a long, long life, free of those memories and stresses. He loves them, and they love him in return. It’s everything he could have asked for in that first life.
He spends most of his free time by the beach, swimming with cousins and family he’d never known before — but now has more than he could possibly know what to do with. Every day he runs and laughs and exists under the sun and salt. The Uzumaki family is large.
Naruto has never been happier.
When he’s sixteen, his class goes on a field trip to New Konoha to visit a museum. He’s never been the most academically inclined student, but the maturity that comes with another life in your head has tempered quite a bit of his original childishness. So many years of paperwork as Hokage has changed how he approaches school work. Maybe he’s still not the best at math, science and those technical subjects, but he’s organized in a way that his own mother envies.
There’s no Shikamaru here to help him, but everyone can see that he’s trying and that’s all that really matters. He’s not a perfect child — but he still hears the praise his parents receive at raising him. It makes him happy. He wants to give them everything in this life, perfect child included.
He’s never been to the museum before. It’s never interested him too terribly. History is compelling, but everything he needs these days is on the internet. It’s all steeped in myth and intrigue, and he laughs over the false facts and guesses. What would they say if they knew the answers all lay within his memories?
They’re free to wander; the goal is to find one exhibit and do a research paper on the subject. Naruto isn’t looking forward to it, despite his knowledge of accurate history — actually that’s exactly the reason why. Picking apart the facts in his head and the facts that the public world is aware of will be a trial and a half.
There’s a ton of art — paintings and statues and bits of pottery. He envisions black hair and black eyes, a pale face and rough hands. Naruto stops in front of a massive scroll, incredibly aged yet somehow still hanging on by a thread. It’s preserved with the utmost care, the splashes of ink not as vibrant as they used to be but still bold against a yellowed canvas. He barely holds himself back from tracing the lines with his fingers.
The scene is...a war. The plate beside it speaks of a mythical war depicted between gods. Naruto laughs a little, because there hadn’t really been anything mythical about it. And there had only been one god — if you could call her such. He looks at the full moon hanging over the heads of the nine creatures, and imagines the tomoe within spinning, spinning, spinning.
They don’t know his name anymore. It would be weird if they did, he thinks. His name is Namikaze Naruto this time, because Clans aren’t Clans . There’s no special attachment to the Uzumaki name, not anymore. No chakra chains or healing or sensory abilities. Just red hair, impossible to stamp out of their genetics.
Naruto writes his paper about ancient pottery.
When he’s twenty-one, he moves to the city. New Konoha is a city built with technology in mind. Tall, spiraling buildings and bright lighting — he has to squint even at night. The moon is white and blurry with light pollution. He lives in an apartment building tucked between two large ones, with the view of a brick wall. It’s perfect.
Naruto takes a video of himself walking through the entire place as he unpacks. He sends it to his parents and ends it with his habitual I Love You’s. Not once has he ever skimped on those words, even when he went though the age (again) where liking your parents was uncool. To him, his parents were always the coolest; in this life and the previous one.
Aside from that museum trip, he’s never been to the city. Certainly not for more than a few hours. Living here is new and different and exactly what he needs. Even feeling thrice as old as he really is, Naruto still craves movement and adventure. His little seaside town was a good place to grow up in, but not the place he wanted to remain for his entire life. When he was old and gray, he’d return for good. Live out the last of his days by the ocean spray and the other Uzumaki’s, hot sand under his feet and maybe even...maybe even someone at his side.
People don’t have children young anymore.
It’s not the norm, not the standard; there’s no war and accompanying short life expectancy hanging over his head, forcing him to repopulate as quickly as possible. He’s not a shinobi, he’s a college student now, after taking two years off to work and figure out where he really wanted to go. All he has ahead of him is...life.
When he was first this age, Boruto would have just been born. So tiny and fragile in Naruto’s hands. He remembers that day easily, like breathing; the picture of his wife’s sweating, flushed face and their squirming newborn son is carved into his brain for the rest of his existence, no matter how many lives he lives.
Naruto has never met anyone else from his first life aside from his cousin, Karin. He thinks it should be easy finding everyone with the way social media is these days, but it isn’t. So many people have the same names, or use fake ones. There are a few he recalls that would mostly likely choose not to make any accounts at all. The world is vast and growing, populations booming and buildings reaching higher and higher into the sky.
New Konoha is loud and bustling. He falls asleep to the sound of car horns and the hum of electricity. He wakes to the yells of pedestrians and early morning traffic. He loves every second of his day.
There’s a coffee shop down the street, tucked on the corner by a crosswalk. You have to wait as traffic lights click, click, click from green to yellow to red before crossing. He makes the walk every day, smiling brighter than the sun and ordering the same thing over and over again. They learn to memorize his order. He makes friends with the workers, until they have inside jokes and they toss him free drinks and laugh when he almost drops them.
Naruto misses his children. He misses his wife. He misses his friends. But they all lived their lives, so he can’t feel any regret. They exist out there, he knows it. Maybe broken apart by time or location, but they will all continue to exist as the world continues to turn.
(Asura knows it.)
Naruto is twenty-four and at the start of his last year of college.
There’s a photography studio on campus, one he’s used pretty frequently for his photo design class. It’s an elective, because while he can appreciate art, he’s not entirely suited for it. Too impatient, even now. Photography is nice though. He likes capturing moments in time. Someone smiling, someone mid movement — from close up or far away. People living, just being alive.
His major is creative writing. He wants to travel the world writing silly stories, maybe run a blog or something. Back in his old life, he used to edit Jiraiya’s books; it gave him a taste of the process. There’s not much else he really….wants to do. There’s no people to lead, unless he wants to be a politician, but the game is different now. He doesn’t think he’d make a good actor, and even if he tried out for sports there isn’t a particular one he feels super passionate about. Definitely not enough to pursue as a professional.
(He still does his stretching and the kata he remembers every morning as a warmup. He bounced from Judo to Karate to Jujitsu and even tried wrestling all through his younger and teen years. It was fun and kept him occupied and he was good at it — but he didn’t need it. Not anymore.)
So creative writing was fine. He took plenty of electives that were all over the place to get a taste of everything. Photography just ended up...fitting. It felt nice.
He has a nice camera of his own. One that he saved up for. He has a job at a bakery, in the opposite direction from his favorite coffee shop. While his parents aren’t badly off, he wants to be able to afford some of his own expenses while in college. He works there about two to three days depending on the week.
Whenever Naruto takes his camera over to the campus studio, he always takes the time to peek into the art classes. Half the teachers know him by name, the rest simply by word of mouth. He likes looking at all the pieces everyone is working on. When he goes around praising the artists, they all laugh, flustered.
They say things like: “You sound like a dad!”
“What? Can’t take a compliment?” He’ll reply, though his heart is heavy and they all feel so young to him.
When he peeks in at the new freshman, he sees black hair and black eyes and has to take a moment to breathe.
Sai laughs and smiles freely at the words of another. He must be eighteen at most, young and dressed in clothes a size too big. There’s no darkness to his gaze, and he interacts so freely —
Naruto leaves the area before entering. Sai doesn’t remember anything.
That’s okay.
He still befriends the man. It’s easy enough to do, but odd at the same time. This Sai isn’t like the Sai from before. This one was raised in a perfectly loving family. He never had a brother, but the neighbor’s boy always felt like one. Shin is twelve, and Sai babysits him often.
Naruto learns little things here and there. They listen to music and drive all the way to the beach or the gardens just so Sai can paint, because Naruto has a car and a license. When he paints portraits, he always asks for Naruto as a model.
“You look old.” The boy will say, still incredibly blunt. “In your eyes.”
Naruto will laugh, but he says yes every single time.
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve heard your laugh before.” Sai will say.
Naruto will smile, and think to himself that this is enough.
He’s never been much of a drinker. In his first life, he used to get drunk at parties because everyone did, and parties only happened after the war. They were supposed to be happy. He was happy.
These days he’s not too interested in getting drunk. Alcohol still doesn’t taste great, and he doesn’t have a convenient chakra fix for hangovers. When he does go to a bar, it’s with a group of students in his graduating class.
Naruto is the friend of all, the mediator, the person everyone goes to with their problems. If someone told him (in his first life) that he’d end up the therapist friend, he would have laughed his ass off. Advice? Him?
But this time around, he’s an aged soul and these are kids finding their way in the world.
The alcohol is bitter on his tongue, and he wonders not for the first time if it would have been better if he’d just — had he… if he…
If he had no memory of before at all.
If he could just be Namikaze Naruto, without tripping up and wanting to say Uzumaki.
“Rough night?” The bartender drawls.
The voice makes Naruto tense.
“No,” He manages to say, choking a little. “Maybe.”
When he gets the courage to look up, he’s met with dark eyes and a shock of silver hair. There’s no scar slicing through the man’s face, no white, lichtenberg scars from too many lightning jutsu burned into those crafty hands. Just a crooked smile accented by a birthmark and stupidly balanced features.
Naruto almost laughs. Kakashi can’t be more than three years older at most — then again, the man is the type to never age.
He’s a pretty boy, just like Sasuke and Sai. Naruto tosses another shot back. It burns all the way down.
When he’s twenty-six, Naruto has three coveted names in his phone. Sai, Kakashi, Karin. Hers he’s always had — Karin grew up down the street, a second cousin and just as loud as every other redhead in that little seaside town. But the other two...
He tries not to be sad about how few of his old friends he’s met, but when you consider the size of the world it’s —
Well, it’s a miracle he found anyone at all.
It’s been ten years, but he finds himself at the steps of the city museum once again. His memory of the building is hazy, but the large, white arches and traditional Japanese roofing sparks familiarity. It’s loud outside, but once he steps within the voices are quiet. Respectful. It’s like a library, there’s an unspoken rule about noise level. Naruto pays for his ticket and wanders around to look at artifacts from his last life.
Maybe he’s just feeling nostalgic.
The scroll painting is still there. He wonders what Sai would think if he knew that it was him that painted it all those millennia ago. Naruto smiles at it but walks by without pausing too long. There’s other paintings to be seen. Some even by Sai’s son.
He sees a collection of pots, a tea set he remembers Sakura owning, a set-up dedicated to the Nara and their deer. There’s nothing about shadow manipulation, nothing about super strength or healing through chakra. Naruto walks all the way over to the center of the exhibit, where a statue without a face sits. It’s meant to be him, Hokage cloak and all. The plaque tells a story about the hero of their world’s largest war. He’s not so much a hero, he thinks. And it wasn’t just him. Had he been alone, he surely would have died.
He’d have died without Obito, ironically.
“No touching the statues.”
Naruto jolts. “I wasn’t—”
Red eyes smile down at him, attached to a human face. He wears the garb of a security officer, and fiery orange hair is tied back, poking out from under a low hanging cap. The smile he wears is too sharp, with prominent canines. On each cheek are three lines, three very familiar scars that Naruto used to wear in his old life.
“Kurama.” He says, shocked. “You’re — what?”
“Oh, it’s a false form, obviously.” The fox replies casually. “It’s just more useful for this day and age.”
“You look terrible.”
“So do you.”
Naruto smiles. “I missed you.”
Kurama sniffs and turns away. “If you’re about to hug me, I’ll puke.”
Naruto has four names on his phone that he covets.
One belongs to a man that is in fact a fox, and the others to friends that don’t remember. As he gets older in years, he wonders exactly what he wants out of this life and where he can go forward. He thinks he wants love, he thinks he wants a family. But he’s almost thirty and he hasn’t met Hinata yet — because it was her last time, so it has to be her this time, doesn’t it?
He still loves her, even if it’s been decades...but.
Naruto has a big heart.
His phone beeps. He pulls it from his pocket and rolls over on his bed. His hair is a mess and it’s nine pm on a saturday. The plan had been to stay in and binge an anime that Sai recommended. He wonders for a moment if it’s Sai —
Kakashi’s name flashes on screen.
Naruto opens his phone, blinking at the text.
[Are you free tonight?]
The blonde hums — smiles.
[ yeeeeah man wassup ] He types back.
The little icon blinks. [ Dinner? ]
[ bro its 9? ]
[ At my place. ]
Naruto huffs a laugh. His heart jumps into his throat. The words on the screen are so carefully punctuated. Typical Kakashi, ignoring the questions he doesn’t want to answer. He stares at his phone for a bit longer before rolling out of bed. So much for watching anime.
[ I’ll be there :))) ]
His phone vibrates not even a second later.
[ It’s a date. ]
And that….doesn’t sound so bad. Naruto inhales. Exhales. No, it doesn’t sound so bad at all.
As for the future...he’ll see where it takes him.