Chapter Text
Naruto is four the day he wanders from the orphanage further than usual. Well, first he just goes to the playground, but one of the other orphans sees him there and beats him up and steals his shirt and shoes. He doesn’t want to play after that, but he also doesn’t want to go back and get yelled at by the matrons for losing his shirt and shoes and messing up his pants. Even if it’s not his fault this time, they won’t believe him.
Meanwhile, the child who stole his shirt and shoes also wanders off, but in the direction of the Forest of Death. (All they find of him when the search party for Naruto finally comes across his corpse a week later is some broken, tiny bones, a too small mauled and bloody shoe, and a few recognizable scraps of generic pants and the shirt that Naruto was last seen wearing, soaked in dried blood and small bits of rotting flesh. At this point, Konoha makes an ASSUMPTION.)
But back to Naruto, whose route took him south, at some point along the slick and grassy banks of the Naka, where he falls in and almost drowns but is pushed to shore before he can by a stray eddy. He struggles out of the water, getting covered in mud for his pains, then hightails it away from the scary river that, unknown to him has taken him past the protective walls of Konoha. It is not long before he’s thoroughly lost in this unfamiliar forest, and sniffling because he’s hungry and by now he’d rather be home being yelled at by the matrons than lost here. Wherever here is.
It’s at this point that he meets a wolf.
~
Naruto has seen dogs before. Inuzuka people run around with dogs, and some of them are quite big. But this dog is really big and looks pretty startled to see him.
“A little human alpha?” It asks. “What are you doing here? Where are your parents?”
His lip juts out in a pout. “Don’t have any. Jiji says that, but I ‘unno. The other kids say I’m a ‘mega and don’t like playin’ wit’ me, so I can’t be, right? An’ Sho was mean again an’ took my shirt an’ hit me, an’ den I fell in the water an’ it was cold an’ I couln’t breave, an’ I ‘unno where here is. So I ‘unno. Am I in trouble?”
The really big dog sighs. “No, little human. What’s your name?”
“Naruto Uzumaki!” He’s proud of himself for saying it without stumbling this time.
“I’m Maki. How about you get on my back and I’ll take you to meet my pack alpha?”
“Yatta!” Naruto cheers, and scrambles over and up before the dog, Maki, can change her mind.
~
It doesn’t take long for Naruto to learn that the really big dogs are actually wolves. He figures it just means that they’re bigger and smarter, and don’t like being compared to smaller dogs, but he’s not stupid, so he doesn’t tell them that. Besides, they’re a lot nicer than most humans and they like him. They even adopt him into their pack after learning that he’s called a ‘mega lots, along with a lot of muttering about humans being stupid and foolish for ‘treating an alpha cub as an omega’ and ‘don’t they know better? who deliberately tries to make an alpha feral?’
Needless to say, he isn’t going back to the orphanage. Wolves aren’t very good at making human food and they don’t wear clothes or have showers, but that’s okay, because they want him. Plus, they have really warm fur that he can snuggle into when he’s cold. And they find him clothes somewhere. And even if the water where they take him to bathe is cold, they fish him out if they think he’s been in too long, and they teach him how to swim and even how to catch fishies to eat. And they’re teaching him to use chakra, which is cool cuz he thought only ninjas could do that, but they tell him that’s not true and he can use it to help protect or heal people or wolves that he cares for.
He misses Jiji a little, and a couple of the mask ninjas who were extra nice, but he’s much, much happier living with his new pack.
(Meanwhile, a tiny civilian village miles south of the wolves’ territory, and further south of Konoha, suddenly has tales of a peculiar sort of werewolf. Giant talking wolves, who occasionally have pups born in human form instead, and are quite polite about trading freshly hunted deer for clothes or other items for those rare pups. Some think they’re a type of summons, others think they’re spirits. All agree that dealing dishonestly with the rarely seen creatures is more than one’s life is worth.
It’s a fairly remote village, though, and the tales don’t make it far past their borders. The rumors are picked up by a couple ninjas passing through, but quickly dismissed as superstition and forgotten. The tales never make it to Konoha or any of the other hidden villages.)
~
It is a couple years later, the day an eddy of the Naka River briefly pushes Shisui ashore along the stretch of woods that the wolves claim as their territory. Quite honestly, it is a very large territory, but the area around Konoha isn’t densely settled, and hardly settled at all in this direction, so humans rarely come through their territory, and far less often actually encounter them. Shisui is…well, not dead, but heading there rather rapidly, all told. Losing both eyes probably wouldn’t end him on his own, though he knows the medics would rant about shock, but the lethal, untreatable poison in his system certainly will. And if not that, well, he has no doubt that internal bleeding, a number of broken bones and shock from the impact of throwing himself off a cliff into the river and then going over a waterfall and being in chilly water for an extended period of time will kill him soon enough. Ironically, the shock itself is probably why he’s still alive in the first place, slowing his system down enough that the poison’s encroachment has been also slowed.
Not that it will matter soon. The river will reclaim his body. And, well. He trusts Itachi to use his eye to properly counteract his stolen eye that bandaged, backstabbing fossil had gotten his hands on.
He doesn’t really pay much attention to the rustling of brush until there’s a sharp intake of breath above him, and then tiny human hands determinedly dragging him further onto the shore, and the scent of juvenile alpha. Oh dear.
“Hey, kid. Do me a favor and don’t try to save me, okay? I’m pretty close to dead already and I’ve been poisoned. You won’t be able to do anything about that, and I’d rather you not watch me die.”
The little alpha startles at the sound of his voice, but recovers quickly, quiet as he manages to tug Shisui further onto the mucky bank with a strength that he probably shouldn’t have at his age.
“No. My beta!” The little guy proclaims, then Shisui feels small hands against his chest and bites through his tongue with a pained shriek as a raging torrent of chakra is forced through his system. Not quite healing chakra, he parses as the pain ebbs as his pain receptors shut down in self-defense, but close enough that his body can absorb it and forcibly heal itself. The poison in his system is literally halted in its tracks and then more or less fried out of existence by the scarily undisciplined but thoroughly intentioned tsunami of chakra.
“Well, shit.” He says succinctly, resignedly as the little alpha’s chakra recedes, leaving him healed enough that he most certainly will survive unless he does something entirely stupid.
There is a mild crashing in the brush nearby and a slightly growly voice calls out, “Naruto! Who’s hurt? What-? Oh. Well then. Congratulations on your first human beta, I guess. Please don’t make a habit of adopting every stray human the river coughs up, though. Sometimes river trash is just trash and dangerous as well, pup.”
“Well, ouch.” Shisui says mildly, not really offended at the implication that’s exactly what he is. Then jolts as a canine nose thrusts under his neck, teeth grab the back of his clothing with startling dexterity, then hauls him upright, ignoring his reflexive flailing and squawking. “Hey, hey, hey! I can stand on my own.”
He staggers when he’s released abruptly, but manages to stay on his feet. “Ugh. How is this my life?”
“No dying.” The little alpha states belligerently.
“Uh.” Well, he’s far enough from Konoha by now that surely no search parties will get this far and everyone will think him dead anyway, so… Besides, he trusts Itachi to take care of the rest of that fiasco. Kid’s way too responsible for his own good, that way. “Okay. I didn’t know any Inuzuka lived out this far away from Konoha.”
There is a distinct snort of derision mere inches from his ear. “They don’t, blind beta. This is the Wolf Wood, claimed by our wolf pack. Naruto is the only human among us until now.”
“Wait.” Something finally clicks in his memory. “Naruto? Naruto…Uzumaki? But your shirt was found in the Forest of Death… Uh.”
Naruto shoves him in the direction away from the river and answers in a slightly sulky tone. “I knew that meanie Sho wouldn’t take care of it after he stole it. An’ my shoes too. I hope he got spanked. ‘Cept, I know he didn’t, cuz the matrons always thought I was lying.”
Shisui winces and decides not to tell him that whoever this ‘Sho’ was had met definitively with existential negation via encountering an oversized tiger. “So, how did you end up here?”
“Fell in the river an’ couldn’t swim.”
“The river spit him out and he had enough sense to get as far from it as he could, and then Maki happened across him.” The wolf clarifies, nosing at him to guide him around what he assumes is a tree or shrub. “Your villagers were treating him as an omega and he didn’t want to go back, which is a silly waste of an alpha cub, so we adopted him. Frankly, I’m surprised anyone bothered looking for the cub, given how he was treated.”
“Uh.”
“You know why.” The wolf observes cannily. “I assume it has to do with that seal on his belly?”
He’s really not supposed to talk about this, but… “He’s the Kyuubi jinchuuriki.”
“The Kyu-?” Then the wolf grasps what he just blurted, and growls in a way that makes his hair stand on end. Which is something of a feat, given how soaked it is at the moment. “Of course, because it takes the intelligence of a concussed rabbit to seal an eons old harbinger of disaster that hates humans into an alpha pup and then proceed to make sure the pup is treated like an omega. Because obviously it sounds like a good idea, creating a feral alpha with the power of the most powerful bijuu in existence at his disposal in the middle of one’s village. There’s no way that can turn out wrong. Humans.”
“If you’re expecting me to defend the decision, you’ll be disappointed.” Shisui replies. “So many idiots were convinced that he was the Kyuubi that a law had to be passed making it treason for the adults to talk about it to the children or to harm him. It didn’t help that his father had so many enemies that it was unsafe to clarify who he really was. Is. Sorry, kid, we all thought you were dead for the last two years.”
A small hand slips into his. “You know who my parents were? Jiji said he didn’t.”
So maybe Shisui curses vividly for a bit before he sighs. “Yeah, kid. Your mom was Kushina Uzumaki, that’s where you got your clan name, and your dad was Minato Namikaze, who pretty much ended the last ninja war by way of slaughtering several thousand enemy ninjas single-handedly. He was the Fourth Hokage for a bit before he died sealing the Kyuubi into you after it went on a rampage that destroyed a good portion of Konoha the night you were born. A lot of foreign ninjas would want you dead if they knew he’d left a kid behind.”
~
Shisui quickly tires of being blind and improves his chakra sensing to the point that he can navigate on his own, then slowly improves it further until he can navigate at high speed and well enough to engage Naruto in mock fights besides teaching him katas and various other things that wolves don’t utilize much but are generally somewhat important for humans to know. Such as how to handle kunai, basic food preparation (including how to not almost chop off your fingers because you can’t see what you’re looking at), how to write (clumsily, he’s blind, okay? And the wolves make disparaging comments about Naruto’s copying skills.), handsigns (these help Naruto’s control far less than expected, the kid is clumsy but determinedly practices to get them right, but apparently his chakra is so massive that intent works better for focusing it than handsigns, for the most part), drinking (he may or may not have gotten bitten smartly for trying that one), chakra control exercises (human style), how to disguise one’s chakra and scent signatures (in multiple ways), shunshin (properly, okay? No one is better at shunshin than Shisui and he’s determined that his student/alpha will be just as good at it), stealth (Naruto picks it up with frightening glee), the academy three (Naruto’s pretty terrible at all of them) and other basics Shisui can remember, how to handle money, gambling (Naruto has scarily good luck), and all the history and political and social information he can dredge out of his memory and stuff into the kid’s disinterested brain.
(Meanwhile, Itachi proves to Konoha why, exactly, one should not leave specifics and subtext out of parting instructions to literalists.
And not long after that, Akatsuki learns that their plans are ruined, because without the Kyuubi they can’t complete Tsukuyomi. Or so they gather from the absolute shitfit ‘Madara’ throws after speaking in private with Black Zetsu.)