Chapter One: The Boy Who Fell From the Stars
The village of Konoha was alive with the unhurried rhythm of an ordinary afternoon.
Merchants haggled pleasantly over the price of summer vegetables, children chased one another through winding back streets, and shinobi moved between rooftops with the casual grace of people who had long ago forgotten the earth was even there. Nestled deep within the Land of Fire, the village hidden in the leaves was a place of earned comforts - stone walls draped in ivy, the smell of woodsmoke drifting from kitchen windows, the distant laughter of the training grounds. It was, in nearly every respect, a perfectly unremarkable day.
Until the sky screamed.
The sound came first - a piercing, descending whistle that cut through birdsong and market chatter alike, silencing the village the way a sudden cold front silences a summer evening. Heads turned. Hands rose to shield eyes against the afternoon glare. Somewhere to the east, a child pointed.
High above the canopy of trees, a small dark object carved a burning trail across the pale sky. It was round, metallic, and impossibly fast - a falling star that had forgotten to burn up. For one breathless moment, the villagers dared to hope it would simply pass overhead. And then it did, clearing the rooftops with just enough altitude to spare, and vanished beyond the treeline to the north.
The impact came seconds later: a concussive shudder that traveled through the earth like a held breath finally released. Windows rattled in their frames. Loose roof tiles clattered into the streets. Dust rose in a lazy column above the forest.
In his office high in the Hokage tower, Hiruzen Sarutobi - Third Hokage of the Hidden Leaf, and a man who had long since learned to take the extraordinary in stride - paused mid-sentence and turned toward the window. His white robe, emblazoned with the fire-shadow kanji, swept softly against the floor as he stepped toward the glass. Below him, the village was still buzzing with nervous energy.
Now what could that have been, he thought quietly.
The door to his office burst open before he could arrive at an answer.
"Lord Hokage!" The young jonin named Yamato stood in the doorway, slightly breathless. He was a capable young shinobi with dark, serious eyes, and at this particular moment, those eyes were doing very little to conceal the alarm behind them.
Hiruzen offered him a calming smile. "Yamato. Good to see you are unharmed."
"With respect, sir - what was that?" Yamato crossed the room in several quick strides. "Could it be Orochimaru? An attack from one of the neighboring villages?"
The Hokage was quiet for a long moment, fingers laced behind his back as he studied the distant plume of smoke rising above the canopy.
"No," he said at last, with the measured certainty of a man who had seen too much of the world to be easily startled. "Whatever passed over our heads just now, it carried a force far beyond anything Orochimaru could project from that kind of distance. And none of the other villages would strike without provocation - not so randomly, and not like this." He exhaled slowly. "It was something else entirely."
Yamato hesitated. "Then where did it come from?"
Hiruzen turned from the window and looked at his jonin with the patient expression of a man who had spent a lifetime asking questions he couldn't yet answer.
"That," he said, "is precisely what I need you to find out."
Among those who raced toward the crash site were two civilians who had no business being there - and who couldn't have stayed away if they'd tried.
Kizashi Haruno was a salesman by trade, a shinobi by training, and an incurably curious man by nature. His wife Mebuki was sharper in temperament and a good deal more sensible, though she was just as capable of throwing caution aside when the moment called for it. They kept pace with the jonin through the trees, driven forward by something neither of them could name. A feeling. An insistence, the way some things simply must be seen.
The crater, when they reached it, stole the breath from every one of them.
It was enormous - a scorched oval gouged deep into the earth, the surrounding trees sheared away or scorched to blackened stumps. The vegetation had been erased in a perfect radius, and the soil at the crater's rim was still smoking gently in the afternoon light. At the bottom, half-shrouded in a haze of steam and heat-shimmer, sat the object.
It was a pod.
Spherical, metallic, roughly the height of a grown man - though its hull was so blackened by re-entry that its original color was impossible to determine. It had clearly survived its descent without catastrophic damage, and the very fact of its survival seemed to impress the shinobi more than its arrival had.
"I've never seen anything like it," one of them murmured.
"None of us have," said another, flatly.
Mebuki studied it from the crater's edge, her arms folded. "Whatever it is," she said, "it didn't come from around here." Her husband, standing beside her, could only nod.
They waited for the hull to cool before descending. The shinobi fanned out around the pod in a loose perimeter, hands near weapons that were entirely useless against something like this, though the habit was deeply enough ingrained to be comforting. Several minutes passed.
Then, with a hiss of pressurized air and a thick billow of steam, the pod's hatch unsealed.
Every shinobi in the crater dropped into a fighting stance. Someone called a formation. Someone else reached for a kunai.
The steam cleared slowly, drifting sideways in a lazy curl.
The pod was empty.
Silence. Then: "Down." The word came low and urgent from one of the jonin - a woman with red eyes who had already shifted her gaze to the ground just in front of the hatch. "Look down."
They did.
Sitting on the scorched earth, regarding the assembled shinobi of the Hidden Leaf Village with an expression of enormous, untroubled curiosity, was a child.
He couldn't have been older than two or three. His skin was a deep, warm brown, and his hair - impossibly, magnificently - was a vivid spiked orange that caught the last of the afternoon light like a lit match. His eyes were dark and bright and utterly calm. He was powerfully built for a toddler, with shoulders that seemed almost comically broad for such a small frame, and he wore what could only be described as armor - small, fitted plates of an alien design that managed somehow to look both ancient and impossible. And from the base of his spine, curling contentedly against the ground, was a tail.
A brown, soft, unmistakably real tail.
No one moved. The child tilted his head, first left, then right, studying the ring of adult faces looming over him with the patient, unhurried attention of someone who has all the time in the world and absolutely nothing to fear. Then he plopped back onto his bottom and blinked at them.
It was Kizashi who moved first.
He had a daughter at home, not much younger than this boy appeared to be. He knew the look of a child left too long without someone kind nearby, and something about it simply would not let him stand still. He lowered himself to one knee at the edge of the cluster of shinobi, putting himself at eye level with the child, and offered his most unhurried smile.
"Well, hello there, little one. What are you doing all the way out here?"
The child stared at him. He did not speak, but he did not look away either. There was nothing frightened in his expression, only a vast and open interest, as though Kizashi were a puzzle he was happy to take his time with.
Mebuki came to kneel beside her husband. "Do you have a name, little one?"
Still nothing. The boy tilted his head again, and then - as though reaching some internal verdict - he smiled. It was a slow, warm, genuine smile, the kind that arrives in stages and then stays, and it reached all the way up to his dark eyes.
Mebuki's heart, which had not been given adequate warning, capitulated completely. She reached forward and gathered the child into her arms, and he permitted this with the regal composure of someone who had decided the situation was acceptable. She pressed a soft kiss to the top of his orange head.
"Oh, you precious thing."
Behind her, the jonin exchanged glances.
"You're certain this is wise?" The one who spoke wore an Anbu mask painted to resemble a cat. Her voice was carefully neutral.
Kizashi looked up from where he was still crouched. "This child needs someone to look after him until his family can be found. That's all." He paused. "We can give him that."
Kurenai - one of the jonin, a young woman with striking red eyes - looked around at her colleagues and found no compelling argument against it. "He needs someone," she agreed. "And I can't think of better candidates." She glanced toward the pod. "Though we'll need to do something about that."
They buried it. Earth and wood-natured jutsu were applied carefully, patiently, and the pod disappeared beneath a mound of rock and living moss that within a few seasons would look like it had always been there. No passerby would give it a second glance.
By the time they finished, the child had fallen asleep against Mebuki's shoulder. His tail - warm and surprisingly soft - had wound itself around her forearm like a small, living bracelet.
She walked the whole way back to Konoha without moving that arm.
"We'll need a name for him," Kizashi said quietly, walking beside her as the gates of the village came into view.
"We can't very well call him 'little one' forever," she agreed.
Kizashi studied the sleeping child as they walked - the spiked orange hair blazing even in the early evening light, the broad small shoulders, the impossible calmness of his sleeping face. Something about looking at him felt like looking at something the world had not quite gotten around to categorizing yet.
"Houjin," Kizashi said.
Mebuki considered it, turning the name over. "Flame," she murmured. The child stirred, as though the word had reached him through whatever great depth of sleep he had sunk into, and made a small sound of contentment.
Kizashi smiled. "He likes it."
"He likes it," she agreed, and kissed the boy's forehead again. "My little Houjin. Let's take you home."
Twelve years later, the Haruno household woke badly.
Specifically, it woke in the form of a pink-haired girl thundering down the staircase with one sandal half-on and her breakfast already over, followed immediately by the voice of her older brother drifting through the front door from the street outside.
"Sis. We are going to be late."
Sakura Haruno - twelve years old, sharp-tongued when startled, and genuinely incapable of staying annoyed at her brother for longer than thirty seconds - grabbed her bag from the hook by the door and skidded outside to find Houjin already waiting on the path, arms folded, wearing an expression of theatrical patience that did not quite conceal his amusement.
He was, by any objective accounting, impossible to miss. Houjin Haruno stood a full head taller than most of his peers, with the broad, relaxed frame of someone whose body had long since decided it was going to be built the way it wanted regardless of anyone's opinion on the matter. His hair - that vivid, improbable orange - caught the morning light the way a lit flame does, and his dark eyes were warm and quick to laugh. The armor he wore, a gift from their father, marked him as something singular even in a village full of singularly unusual people. And the tail, of course. The tail he'd had since before any of them could remember, brown and expressive and entirely his own, was presently curled with great dignity around his left ankle.
He and Sakura could not have looked less alike if they had tried.
Neither of them had ever particularly cared.
"Morning," he said.
"I know," she said, which covered both greeting and apology, and they set off at a run.
They made it approximately halfway down the block before Houjin's patience with the pace ran out. He shot a quick glance left and right - the street was empty - and then, in one smooth motion, swept his sister up into his arms without breaking stride.
"Nii-san!" Sakura's squawk of indignation was mostly swallowed by the wind. "What are you doing - "
"No time. Hold on."
She grabbed his collar. He accelerated.
The village blurred past in a streak of morning color, and Sakura's shriek carried several birds off their perches across the Naka River district before the academy gates appeared ahead of them and Houjin slid to a smooth, unhurried halt.
"Made it," he announced, with the satisfaction of a man who has accomplished something of consequence.
Sakura, hair standing in three separate directions, turned to look at him with an expression that had not yet decided whether it was fury or laughter. It eventually settled, as it usually did, somewhere between the two.
"My hair."
"...right. Sorry."
"You said that last time."
"I meant it last time too."
She puffed her cheeks and stared at him for a long moment. He stared back, thoroughly unrepentant in the way that only older brothers can manage. Then she sighed, the way one sighs when they've lost an argument they were never really having.
"Fix it."
He did - carefully, with the unselfconscious competence of someone who had performed this particular act of atonement enough times to have developed a technique for it. By the time the bell rang, Sakura's hair was presentable again, and the two of them slipped inside to find their seats.
The classroom arranged itself around them the way classrooms always do - in the specific social geometry of who knows who, who tolerates who, and who is quietly hoping no one notices them.
Sakura settled beside Ino Yamanaka, who immediately slid into the vacancy left by Sakura's absence with the practiced ease of a best friend. Around them sat the small constellation of girls who had found each other over the years: Hinata Hyuga and her younger sister Hanabi, watchful and composed in their matching dark jackets; Kazumi Uzumaki, bright-eyed and quietly warm; Midori Uchiha, who had her brother's bone structure and thankfully none of his sulkiness. They greeted each other with the comfortable shorthand of people who had long since moved past the formality of greetings.
Across the room, Houjin sat alone.
He always sat alone. It wasn't drama - he didn't make it drama - he simply arrived, chose a seat, and occupied it with the same unhurried equanimity he brought to everything. The other students arranged themselves around him the way water arranges itself around a stone: smoothly, and with no apparent acknowledgment of the stone's feelings on the matter.
Sakura noticed. She always noticed. She tried not to let him see that she noticed, because she knew exactly what he would say about it.
"Your brother's still getting the cold shoulder," Ino murmured, following her gaze.
"Yeah." Sakura's voice came out flatter than she'd intended.
"Why does he let them?" This from Kazumi, who had the particular directness of someone raised in a household where difficult questions were simply asked.
"He doesn't see any point in fighting it," Sakura said. "He thinks they'll come around eventually." She paused. "He's too forgiving for his own good."
Midori tilted her head thoughtfully. "Or maybe he just doesn't want you worrying."
Sakura went quiet. She hadn't considered it from that angle, and the fact that she hadn't bothered her more than she let on.
Iruka Umino arrived then, carrying a stack of papers and the brisk efficiency of a man determined to make this last day of classes count. The room settled into attention.
The day passed quickly, the way last days do - with the specific bittersweet weight of something ending and the particular brightness of something about to begin.
They walked home together, as they always did, and Sakura chose the direct approach.
"You're being bullied, Nii-san."
Houjin didn't stop walking. He did, after a moment, exhale quietly - the sound of someone accepting that a thing they hoped to defer had arrived.
"I wondered when you'd figure it out," he said.
"I figured it out weeks ago." She kept her voice level, the way she'd practiced. "I just didn't know how to ask."
"I didn't tell you because I didn't want you worrying." He glanced sideways at her, then back to the road. "It's not as bad as you're probably imagining."
"How would you know what I'm imagining?"
"Because I know you."
She couldn't argue with that. She walked beside him for a few steps in silence, working something over in her mind.
"I've been wondering why I'm different," he said, before she could continue. It wasn't deflection - his voice carried a genuine, contemplative weight, as though he'd been sitting with the question for a while and had only just decided to say it aloud. "Not why they treat me that way. That's their problem to figure out. But... what I actually am. I think I'll talk to Dad tonight."
Sakura nodded slowly. "Should I come?"
"No. Just... don't tell Mom, okay? I don't want her to worry."
"You never want anyone to worry."
"And yet here you are, worried." He smiled at her - the same warm, unguarded smile he'd had since he was small. "I'm alright, Sis. I promise."
She believed him. She always believed him, even when she probably shouldn't.
That evening, after the dinner table had been cleared and the comfortable quiet of an ordinary family evening had settled over the house, Kizashi rose from his chair. He looked at his son across the table - at the orange hair and the dark eyes and the patient, thoughtful face that was his and no one else's - and made a decision that had been twelve years in the making.
"Come with me, Houjin. We need to talk."
Mebuki watched them go with the composed expression of a woman who has spent years preparing for something she's still not quite ready for. Beside her, Sakura watched the door close and then turned to her mother with a careful frown.
"Is Nii-san going to be alright?"
Mebuki covered her daughter's hand with her own. "He'll be fine. This is simply something your father and I should have told him a long time ago." She paused. "It's past due."
Sakura nodded, and said nothing else, and spent the next hour very pointedly not listening for footsteps.
They walked through the village in the early dark, past the genin who waved from their post at the gate, and into the forest beyond. Kizashi led without explanation, and Houjin followed without asking for one. The relationship between them had always had room for silences like this.
When they stopped, it was before a mound of earth and rock and thick moss that had grown there for as long as Houjin could remember. He had passed it before, on training runs and in idle boyhood wanderings, and had never thought much of it. Now, standing before it with his father's hand on his shoulder, he looked at it properly for the first time.
He felt something shift behind his sternum.
"Dad," he said carefully. "What is that?"
"That," Kizashi said, "is what brought you to us."
The feeling crystallized into knowledge with a speed that surprised him - not gradual recognition but immediate, complete, as though the information had always been there waiting for him to look at the right thing. He knew what it was. He knew in his hands and his chest and some older place beneath both, in the way you know the sound of your own name.
"It's the ship I came in," he said quietly.
"Yes." Kizashi's voice was steady and gentle. "Which is why what I'm about to tell you shouldn't come as a complete shock." He turned to face his son. "You aren't human, Houjin. You never were. Your mother and I found you when you were very small, and we chose you - because that's what it was, a choice - and we have never once regretted it. Not for a single day."
Houjin looked at the buried pod for a long time. The forest was quiet around them, the way the forest is quiet when it's paying attention.
"I didn't know what I was," he said at last. "But I didn't think I was like everyone else, either."
"No. You're not." Kizashi put his hand on the back of his son's neck, the way fathers do. "But you are mine. That doesn't change. It never will."
Something moved in Houjin's throat. He turned and embraced his father - not dramatically, not with the careful dignity he usually kept about him, but simply and completely, the way a son holds onto the person who taught him what holding on means.
"Thank you, Father," he said, muffled against Kizashi's shoulder.
Kizashi held him for a moment, then reached into the bag he'd carried out from the house. "I was going to give you this tomorrow, at graduation," he said. "But I think now is right." He held out a set of armor - fitted, alien in design, and somehow already familiar. "Consider it a gift from me."
Houjin took it and turned it over in his hands. He didn't ask where it had come from. He thought he already knew.
They walked back through the gates of Konoha together, father and son, and for the first time in a long time, Houjin felt entirely like himself.
The morning of graduation arrived the way important mornings do - too quickly, and bright.
Houjin and Sakura made their way to the academy at something approaching a responsible pace, which for them meant they only ran the last two blocks. The armor sat across Houjin's shoulders like it had always belonged there. Sakura noticed the change in him before she could name it.
"You seem different," she said.
"I feel different."
"Good different?"
He thought about it honestly. "Yeah," he said. "Good different."
She smiled and didn't push further. Some things, she had long since learned, were simply hers to watch over without understanding, and she was at peace with that.
The academy courtyard was full of families and noise and the specific kind of nervous energy that attaches itself to ceremonies. Headbands were distributed. Names were called. Pride and relief and years of accumulated effort moved through the crowd in warm waves.
Not far from the celebration, a boy sat alone on a swing.
Naruto Uzumaki was twelve years old and had failed his graduation examination three times. He sat with his hands in his lap and his blue eyes directed at the ground, watching from a safe distance while the village celebrated children who had achieved the thing he wanted most. Around him, adults murmured unkind things with the comfortable carelessness of people who believe they are not being heard.
Hinata Hyuga stood not far away with her sister and her father, and her gaze kept finding the boy on the swing with the helpless persistence of a compass returning to north. She wanted very badly to cross the courtyard and say something kind to him. She didn't know what held her back, except that it was the same thing that had always held her back - the vast, complicated architecture of who she was expected to be.
Hanabi, standing a half-step behind her father, noticed something else entirely. She was watching the dark-skinned boy across the courtyard - Sakura's brother - and frowning at the space around him with the focused intensity of someone trying to read a message written in a language she almost knew.
The energy she felt from him wasn't chakra. It was something that wore chakra's shape the way a river wears the shape of its banks, and it ran so deep she couldn't find the bottom of it. She had never encountered anything like it. She filed the feeling away carefully and resolved to investigate.
When the ceremony concluded, she crossed the courtyard toward him.
"You call her your sister," Hanabi said, as they walked a slow circuit of the courtyard's outer path. "Even though you look nothing alike."
"Because she is my sister," Houjin said simply.
"You're not related by blood."
"No." He glanced at her. "Is that the only kind of family that counts?"
Hanabi was quiet for a moment. It was a more complicated question than it appeared, and she gave it the consideration it deserved. "The village treats you poorly," she said, changing direction. "I've seen it. But you never respond. Doesn't it bother you?"
"Of course it bothers me," he said, without any particular drama. "I'm not made of stone. But what they think of me doesn't determine what I am. My father taught me that." He paused on the path, looking out over the courtyard where the celebration continued without him. "And I'd rather spend my energy on the things I can change than on fighting people who've already made up their minds."
He said it without bitterness, which was almost the most remarkable thing about it.
Hanabi watched him for a moment, the way you watch something when you're trying to understand the shape of it. Then she spotted her clan's attendant waiting at the gate and turned to go.
"You've given me something to think about," she said.
"Glad to help."
"I'll likely see you tomorrow." She paused, almost as an afterthought. "Congratulations on graduating."
He watched her go with mild curiosity, then turned and made his way home. He found that he was looking forward to tomorrow.
That evening brought with it a crisis that was not, in the end, a crisis - though it wore the face of one convincingly enough to unsettle everyone involved.
Naruto Uzumaki, in possession of a borrowed scroll and a borrowed hope that turned out to be neither borrowed nor genuine, spent several desperate hours learning that the people who offer to help you aren't always the ones you should trust. He ended up alone in the forest with the weight of a decision he hadn't fully understood when he made it, surrounded by ANBU and the voice of his own regret.
Houjin felt it from across the village - not chakra exactly, not any sensation he had a name for, but a certainty as clear as a struck bell. Something was wrong. His friend was in trouble.
He arrived to find Mizuki standing over both Naruto and a wounded Iruka, wearing the expression of a man who has confused cruelty with strength. Houjin crossed the distance between them with a speed that gave no one time to argue about it, seized the rogue jonin by the collar, and introduced him firmly to the ground.
"Stay down," he said.
Mizuki did not stay down. He said something unpleasant about Houjin's appearance.
Naruto and Iruka both briefly covered their eyes.
The crater that resulted was more than six feet across.
"That," Naruto said into the silence that followed, "is why you do not make Houjin angry."
Iruka, bleeding and thoroughly impressed, could only nod.
Naruto sent the rest of Mizuki's evening to its logical conclusion with a shadow clone technique learned from a stolen scroll, delivered with the exuberant precision of someone discovering for the first time that they are, in fact, extremely good at something. Hundreds of copies of him poured out of the treeline and the rogue jonin went down for the last time.
By the time dawn began to lighten the sky, the three of them stood together in the clearing - tired, scratched, and in Iruka's case bleeding moderately from a wound that was going to need proper attention. Iruka turned to Naruto and reached into his vest pocket.
"Close your eyes."
Naruto did. His face wore the expression of someone trying very hard not to grin.
The headband settled onto his forehead with a soft metallic clink. Iruka tied it carefully, the way you tie something you want to last.
"Open them."
Naruto's smile, when it arrived, could have lit the whole forest.
"Congratulations," Iruka said quietly. "You've earned it."
Houjin watched from a respectful distance, and felt something settle warmly in his chest. He raised a hand in farewell as Naruto was still shouting into the dawn about Hokages and destiny and the profound injustice of having been made to wait this long. Then he turned and walked back toward Konoha, toward his family, toward whatever came next.
Behind him, the sun cleared the treeline and flooded the forest with gold.
Somewhere in the village, a boy with orange hair and a tail was just getting started.
End of Chapter One
Hey guys, Hopefully you enjoyed the first chapter of the rewrite. There will be some changes from the original story but the overall plot will stay the same. There's a few more characters in it this time, so that's one change. As you know the main pairing is Houjin x Hanabi for this story. But what are some of the other pairings you'd like to see? Here's a few polls:
Who should Sakura fall in love with?
I: Sasuke
II: Eleryc (new character)
III: Rock Lee
Possible pairings we could see: vote for which ones you guys like.
Kasumi x Kazuna
Eleryc x Midori/Ino
Sasuke x Sakura
Jinjer x Kiba
Lee x Jinjer
Neji x Ten Ten
Eleryc x Ino
Goku (Black) x Shizune
Naruto x Hinata
Naruto x Sakura
Eleryc x Hinata
There are others that could show up, but these are the immediate ones I thought of. Leave a comment or review of the the story and tell me what you think? Let me know how I can make the story better. Also openings and endings for the story will be revealed next chapter! That's all for now, see you guys in the next chapter!
Next Time, Chapter 2: Team 6 has... Saiyans?!