The first thing he noticed was the air, dry and abrasive, stripping ease from his lungs and scraping his throat raw.
It was not the familiar smog of the city that had once clogged his chest, nor the sharp frost of winter that bit deep into the bone.
Each breath carried dust that coated his tongue and scraped his throat, the grit working under his eyelids until every blink burned.
The walls near him were cut from sandstone, pale and cracked under the relentless weight of the sun, and when his hand brushed against them the surface flaked beneath his touch, still warm with the memory of daylight.
Above him, crude slabs of clay had been set in place for a roof, but they were fractured with time and thin enough to let in threads of moonlight. The pale light pooled faintly on the floor, casting long, skeletal shadows across the room.
The mattress groaned when he shifted, stalks snapping beneath his weight like old parchment left too long in the sun.
Silence hung thick, so complete that even his own shallow breaths seemed loud, until a high-pitched shriek cut across the stillness. A kettle, somewhere far away, screaming until its cry broke off and vanished, leaving the quiet sharper than before.
He tried to rise, his arms trembling under the strain of what should have been a simple effort, and felt the dryness in his throat deepen until it seemed he had swallowed ash. Then memory surged into him with a sudden violence. The morning streets, the car, the horn blaring, tires screeching, pain so sharp it split him apart... and then nothing. Until now.
"Where the hell am I?", the words slipped from his mouth in a voice that startled him, soft and high-pitched, like that of a child's.
The room around him was lined with children sprawled across thin mats, their thin, patched clothes barely covering them. Some were curled tightly into themselves as if protecting what little warmth their bodies could hold, while others were spread out in restless disarray, limbs twitching in dreams or discomfort.
The air was still and cold, stripped of moisture, and the only light came from a faint strip of moonlight slipping through a rice-paper door, casting a silvery shimmer across the bare floorboards.
When he raised his hands to his eyes, he froze. They were small, tanned, and delicate, the hands of a boy who could not be older than six or seven.
His breath caught as the truth hit him: this body wasn't his own.
The door slid open with a muted rasp, like dry leaves scraping together, and a woman entered with a single candle balanced on a shallow ceramic dish. Its flickering light softened her form, though her face betrayed the years etched into her skin, deep lines marked her cheeks, the kind carved only by years under hard sun and harsher winds.
Her robes were plain, their faded ochre and brown tones blending with the clay walls, yet there was an authority in her bearing that filled the space more than her voice.
"Isan.", she said gently, her tone weighted with recognition rather than surprise. "You're awake."
The name struck him strangely. He had heard it before, drifting in fragments through his half-dreams, but it had not been his choice to take it. Now, however, it clung to him as firmly as flesh to bone.
"Yes, Obasan.", he answered, the reply slipping free without thought, though his younger voice felt strange in his ears.
She gave him a small smile, weary but not unkind.
"You gave us quite a scare. Collapsed in the market... heatstroke, most likely. You're safe now. Harsh weather, harsh place. Sunagakure is always the same."
Sunagakure
Although the name felt distant at first, it suddenly dawned on him, hitting like a punch to the gut. He didn't need any more information or to see a map. He knew exactly where he was.
Sunagakure no Sato. The Village Hidden in the Sand.
One of the five great shinobi villages. The desert fortress. The unforgiving crucible.
He was in the Naruto Universe.
He had been an avid watcher of the anime. And now, somehow, impossibly, he was part of it. Even more in one of its most violent corners, at that. Sunagakure and Kirigakure were infamous for their cutthroat settings and cruel traditions.
His mind raced. This world was dangerous and brutal; it was in constant war and filled with death, schemes, and betrayal. Children were trained and made into soldiers. Power dictated survival.
Names and faces spun through his mind, tangled threads of stories now dangerously real.
He took a slow breath, brushing aside the storm in his head. Then he stood and bowed slightly to the old woman.
"Thank you for taking care of me."
She raised an eyebrow, then chuckled softly.
"Such manners. Perhaps you will become a fine shinobi one day."
Weeks Later
Isan was no longer reeling but adapting, though adaptation was its own battle.
He had spent some time carefully studying and taking a good look at this new body that he now found himself in; as he looked himself over, he observed that he was at a fairly average height for a boy of his years, since he didn't know for certain how old he was.
His build, though, told a more alarming and troubling reality that could not be ignored. He was lean, and alarmingly so, in a way that gave cause for concern.
His arms and legs were thin to the point of frailty, his ribs faintly visible beneath the rough linen tunic that hung from him, his shoulders narrow, his weight too little. This was the body of a child who had gone to bed hungry more nights than he could count, a body marked by hunger's quiet cruelty.
The skin he wore bore the bronze of unyielding sunlight, and on it lay scars both old and fresh, scattered across his arms, legs, and back. Some had healed poorly, ragged reminders of falls and cuts that had never been tended.
Others were recent, bright lines that came from rough floors, cruel games, or the fists of other children. His face had grown sharp where it should have been round, his cheekbones jutting too high, his eyes set above hollow shadows darkened from years of poor sleep and weaker meals.
His hair, black as pitch, refused to be tamed. It stuck out in jagged clumps where caretakers had cut it with dull blades, matted often with sweat or dust. He gave it little thought. In a place where food was scarce and kindness rarer, vanity was meaningless.
The only feature that truly stood out were his eyes.
They were green, sharp, and alert, too focused for a boy so young. Where most children's gazes were dull with fatigue or ignorance, his seemed to calculate and measure, lingering too long, too steady.
He rarely had a smile on his face. Yet, in those few instances that he did it was a small and calculated smile, a fleeting glimmer of something old and deep within a face that was much too young to contain such a sense of peace.
Even the other kids who lived in the orphanage were not oblivious to this idiosyncrasy. Isan had a strange aura about him. He moved about with an inordinate amount of care, enunciated his words with exceptional clarity, and incredibly, he never cried, not even when he felt the sting of bleeding.
Orphanage life was simple, yet harsh. Food was a luxury item, and even when it was available, it was served in meager portions of, for the most part, dry rice and flatbread. Cactus fruit, if they were fortunate. Water was strictly rationed, particularly during the warmer weeks.
There were no toys. No soft and warm beds. No comforting lullabies.
The matron, Obasan, as they called her, was stern but fair. She made no promises, offered no false kindness, and never sugar-coated the truth.
"If you want to live long,", she once said, while handing out chipped bowls filled with watery soup, "you'd better learn to be useful."
It was the kind of lesson that stuck.
The other children, most of them orphans of the last great war, had grown sharp-edged in their play, turning laughter into cruelty and games into brawls.
A single piece of bread could drive them into fists, and the theft of a water cup could leave a boy unfed. They were fatherless, clanless, remnants of conflict, learning too young that survival meant taking what you could.
Yet Isan stood out.
He learned to read and write the local language faster than anyone expected.
He didn't laugh along with them. Didn't play or wrestle in the desolate ground. He stood simply to the side observing, silently.
He watched as the shinobi slipped in and out of view, their brown cloaks flowing behind them with a fluid elegance. Their faces hidden behind cloth veils or masks, fashioned specially to protect them from the constant barrage of the sand.
He crept behind the laundry hut, painstakingly replicating the motions he was able to remember from his past: the basic hand seals that were widely utilized; although his fingers were still clumsily small and awkward as they tried to create the complex forms.
He devoted himself to attempting to control his chakra to the best of his abilities, trying his best to sense something, anything at all, under his skin, in an attempt to access the energy that was inside him.
At night, when the winds outside howled and the candles burned low, he would lie awake and gaze at the cracked ceiling.
'I don't know how much time I have,', he thought, while staring at the cracked ceiling, 'but I'm not going to waste it.'
He obsessed over the timelines. The Third Shinobi War was over, that he had already caught wind of. But when? Was Minato still Hokage? Had Itachi joined the ANBU? Was the Uchiha Massacre imminent?
The uncertainty gnawed at him.
Other orphans started to take notice of him. Some with interest, others with bitterness.
He was odd in comparison to them, he was too quiet, too polite and too calm.
One of the girls, Daiana, gave him a nickname.
"Little Monk."
Still, not everyone found it charming or endearing.
One night, after the lamps had been dimmed, two older boys cornered him by the water barrels.
"You honestly think that you are better than us?", the taller one snarled in a low, threatening voice, his arms folded tightly across his chest, making him a larger figure as he towered menacingly in the darkness.
"With your big words like you're some shinobi already?"
Isan didn't answer. He knew their type.
Not cruel because they enjoyed it, cruel because it made them feel less powerless.
The smaller boy stepped forward, his breath reeking of spoiled food and rot.
"What, too good to talk to us now? Or are you just scared?"
Isan's eyes flicked between them. One was taller and heavier. The other is quicker, more impulsive. He was cornered, outnumbered, and smaller.
The smaller one grabbed at his collar. Isan reacted immediately.
He quickly and forcefully jerked the boy's arm ahead as he twisted his own body to the side, using the boy's own momentum to slam him face-first into the solid wood water barrel.
There was a sharp, wet crunching sound as his nose made contact with the unforgiving surface of the wood. The boy collapsed immediately to the ground with a cry of shock and pain as his hands reflexively shot up to his face.
The larger one lunged.
This time, Isan didn't sidestep, he stepped into the attack.
He ducked low, wrapped and grabbed with both arms around the boy's outstretched limb, and dropped his full weight while twisting and pulling hard. There was a sickening crack followed by a howl of pain.
The boy collapsed to the ground, clutching his arm and writhing in the sand.
Isan stood above them, his chest heaving and eyes cold
He felt nothing as he looked at them, neither satisfaction nor anger, only the steady rhythm of his own breath.
He looked at the boys on the ground and knew what weakness bought in this place: blood and pain. Without strength, kindness was nothing but a mark for others to strike.
The perfect example of such was the little boy known as Naruto, in Konohagakure, bullied and isolated when young and powerless, but surrounded when he sacrificed himself to protect the same people that once bullied and mistreated him.
The smaller boy whimpered from behind the barrel, blood trickling from his nose.
"You try that again,", Isan said quietly, "and next time I won't stop at your arm."
He turned his back and started walking away, his heart still racing quickly in his chest. He had not wanted to hurt them or make them suffer, but he needed to show them something vital.
The next morning, the mood within the orphanage was electric with a buzz of whispered and muted conversations. One boy was in the infirmary with a dislocated shoulder, and another boy was wearing the evidence of a recent fight in the form of a swollen nose and two clear black eyes that contributed to his apparent misery.
Even though nobody called him or punished him, the other kids kept their distance from that day forward, not because they respected him but because they feared him.
That night, long after the others slept, Isan climbed to the orphanage rooftop.
The desert wind swept through the narrow streets, carrying the hiss of sand and the faint smell of smoke. From above, Sunagakure looked like a patchwork of cracked clay walls and twisting alleys.
Most visible windows were dark or closed, a few stubborn lights burned lightly. In the distance, the great village walls loomed, stark and unyielding.
Isan hugged his knees, staring out at the darkened village.
Gaara, Temari, Kankurō were somewhere out there, alive and real. The stories he once knew were now reality and far more dangerous than one could think.