Abandoned

As an orphan, he was familiar with the feeling of being ignored, of being walked past as if he wasn't there at all. It was a feeling that was somehow worse than the glares, the scowls, the muttering, because it didn't acknowledge his existence.

While his classmates walked away from the Academy with a parent or sibling, Naruto was left staring after them from the lone swing on the playground and felt the big, hollow space inside of him open up just a bit more.

He ignored the feeling as best he could and scrunched up his eyes, stretching his face into a grin that hid the pain away deep in his blue, crinkled eyes. One day he would be Hokage, he told himself, just like Jiji, and everyone would acknowledge him. He held onto that dream with all the strength he had and his grin didn't waver.

And in the meantime he pulled the most awesome pranks and afterwards, when he ran down the streets of Konoha with an angry shopkeeper or even a group of ninja on his tail, the villagers' eyes would be on him and it didn't even matter that they were filled with annoyance or anger because at least they noticed he was there.

Besides, Naruto was good at pranks. And no-one but Iruka-sensei ever caught him. Sometimes he even spent his time in class planning the next big prank because, even if he didn't want to disappoint Iruka-sensei, the lessons were just really boring when sensei droned on about things that weren't important. He was right here in Konoha, so why did he need to know what all the other countries were called? It wasn't like he was planning on leaving – he had to become Hokage first!

And his future awesome missions couldn't possibly take place in a country that sounded as dull as the Land of Tea. He was certain that nothing ever happened in a place called that.

But then his sensei talked about missing-nin from other countries – criminals who had abandoned their village – and Naruto frowned and wondered vaguely what it was like, to be the one who walked away.

At night, in the silent, sleepless darkness, he sometimes thought that perhaps he really was the monster that everyone called him. When the weight of hatred was too hard to shake off even under the covers in his own bed, Naruto thought that maybe his parents hadn't died at all. Maybe they'd just left.

Those were the worst nights and on nights like that he would get up from his bed and leave his small, empty apartment behind.

He'd go to a place he had discovered during one of his pranks when he'd needed a place to hide out. It wasn't hard to sneak into the library, to get into that locked room all the way in the back and down the stairs.

No one ever noticed him going where he wasn't allowed.

His pranking wasn't just fun, believe it, it was also good for learning how to get in and out of places unnoticed. A valuable ninja skill!

And despite his bright hair and orange jumpsuit, Naruto could disappear into the shadows far more easily than he'd ever really wanted to.

Late at night, his hide-out felt even more empty than usual - like a place that had been left behind by time. Naruto didn't like reading at all but he liked it there because, surrounded by all of those forgotten books, he felt like he wasn't the only one left alone. Sometimes he even picked one of the abandoned books up and looked through them – out of boredom, or perhaps a sense of companionship. Other times he just sat there and thought, or brought his notebook and planned out some more masterful pranks.

It was right there, in that dusty, abandoned corner of the library, where he discovered something more precious than anything he'd ever owned - even his jumpsuit or his sleeping cap.

Naruto had been hiding, just thumbing through a book looking for pictures, when a name jumped out at him from the pages and demanded his full attention. Because right there in front of him was his name. Uzumaki.

Naruto wasn't a great reader. He wasn't someone who loved books like Sakura-chan did. They were too boring, too dry and too slow. But this wasn't just a book, this was the only trace he'd ever found of anything that was his. This book had his name – this book belonged to him.

With shaking hands he turned the pages back to the beginning and started reading. Some of it was hard to understand, some of it was boring, but when there was something he wanted badly, Naruto didn't give up.

So whenever the pranks were not enough and the determined grin that masked his face started to feel strained, he went back to his book to read about a history that wasn't taught at the Academy and traced his fingers over the name of a village, Uzushio, where a clan with the same name as him lived.

Naruto wanted, no needed to know more. Who were these Uzumaki? Were they his family? Is the place in the book where they lived?

One day, at the Academy, he'd almost asked Iruka-sensei about it. Because his sensei had talked and talked about all the countries and villages, but he couldn't remember the man ever talking about a place that was called Whirlpool.

He'd opened his mouth and then closed it again.

While he liked Iruka-sensei, a part of him didn't want to share something that was just his. And, though he never wanted to admit it, he was almost afraid that saying anything about it to anyone would have it suddenly taken away.

Besides, Naruto was a super cool ninja, he could figure this out himself! And since he couldn't ask anyone he'd have to, his nose wrinkled a little, look into books – just like the one about his family.

So he looked. At first he picked up just about every book that he got his hands on, but after a while he realised that there was no way he could read that many books, ever. So he'd put his head in his hands and thought it through.

It was just like a prank - when he needed something he'd go the place he thought it was most likely to find it in. The same was true for this, so he picked up books about countries and looked through those, and when that didn't give him what he needed he looked through books about history and so on.

But in the end, all Naruto could find was a single piece in a single book that wasn't even about countries, but about merchants and trading.

That book said that said Uzushio was gone – destroyed in the Third Shinobi war.

He'd felt cold, when he read those words, hard, uncaring letters on white paper that wouldn't change no matter how long Naruto stared at them. There was a bit in the book about what sort of stuff Konoha had traded with Whirlpool and how things changed after that trading had stopped, but nothing about how or why.

Only that word, destroyed. Which meant gone – completely.

No matter how long Naruto looked or how determined he was, that, along with his own book about Uzushio, was all he could find.

He was an orphan, he'd known that all of his life, so it wasn't surprising or it really shouldn't be but somehow it still hurt to know that this place he read so much about – a place he was starting to picture in his head as somewhere with smiling people, boats and colourful shops – that all of that was gone as if it hadn't ever existed in the first place.

Like his family.

Naruto swallowed, hid his book under his jumpsuit and went to ask his Jiji, because Jiji was smart and old and the leader of the village. He probably knew everything. But when he asked about his parents, the old man just said that they had died.

"But who were they?" Naruto pushed, enthusiastically, "Were they shinobi too?"

"I don't know that exactly, Naruto-kun. There were a lot of orphans, unfortunately. Your parents must have been Konoha ninja who died in that attack," the Hokage told him in a deep, slow voice.

"But you know my name," he pointed out with a frown, because shouldn't the Hokage know all of his ninja? Shouldn't he know at least the names of all of the people who fought for him? If he knew Naruto's name, then didn't that mean he knew his dad's name too? "You have to know something about my family, ne?"

"I'm sorry, Naruto-kun, but I don't," the man gave him a comforting smile, "But I'm sure your parents loved you very much."

His shoulders slumped and his face folded into a deep frown, but then his Jiji offered to buy him a bowl of Ramen and he cheered as enthusiastically as he always did.

At the Ramen stand, Naruto sat down beside the Hokage and emptied his bowl as quickly as he usually did, but for some reason his stomach felt strangely queasy afterwards.

When he walked home, he was wearing his customary grin, an automatic twist of his lips that folded his face into a lie.

And he started to wonder if the few faces that did smile at him were just as fake.

Because his Jiji had lied to him from behind that warmly wrinkled face.

He failed his graduation exam. Sitting forgotten on his swing, he was surprised when someone came up to him – when someone even noticed him.

Mizuki-sensei told him about a secret way to graduate and Naruto leapt at the chance – he still needed to become Hokage after all.

But it turned out his sensei was a liar too.

And it turned out his Jiji was an even bigger liar, because Naruto wasn't just an orphan – he was a demon too.

He was the one to blame for everyone who died when the Kyuubi attacked. But no, that wasn't true. Iruka-sensei yelled at Mizuki-sensei that it wasn't true. That Naruto wasn't the demon, but just a boy with a demon stuck in his belly.

A seal.

Naruto had read about those in his book – they could do a bunch of things and one of those was putting something inside of something else. Seals were something the Uzumaki had been good at, something they had been proud off just like Naruto was proud of his pranks.

He wasn't a demon but a prison guard.

But to the darkened eyes that followed him with hate or to the eyes that slipped away from him completely, to people like Mizuki-sensei, that didn't matter.

And Jiji had lied about it, had kept it a secret - a secret that Naruto was clearly the last to know about.

Then Mizuki hurt Iruka-sensei and Naruto felt a storm well up inside of him – something angry and fierce and he used his new jutsu to take the man down.

Then he looked at his sensei – a man who'd gotten hurt because of Naruto – and felt the fiery storm melt down into something cold and scared and alone. He stared at his hurt sensei from a distance, afraid to come closer because this was his fault.

Then the other ninja came, jumping down in the gap between him and Iruka-sensei.

They took his wounded teacher away. They took Mizuki away.

And he was left behind with just this; the knowledge that no matter how hard he tried, the villagers would never smile at him like they did at his Jiji, because they saw a demon instead of Uzumaki Naruto.

The only person who maybe wanted to see him become Hokage was Iruka-sensei – but how could Naruto ever become Hokage if he couldn't even graduate from the Academy? If he couldn't even stop his one precious person from getting hurt because of him?

He'd failed at stuff before, but he'd never felt like this much of a failure. It was a heavier weight than the hate of other people and an emptier feeling than loneliness. It was too big for him to hide away.

There was no grin on his face as he silently left the forest.

In that moment Naruto gave up on his dream completely. And that dream was just about all he had.

An abandoned dream and a forgotten book about a long-lost village.

He left in the night, the only things he took with him aside from food supplies were his sleeping cap, his book and his name.

Slipping through the darkness and silence of the sleeping village, Naruto Uzumaki didn't let himself look back even once.

It wasn't easy, to find the forgotten village with nothing to go on but what was written in his book.

His new favourite jutsu helped – he'd found out that he could send his kage bunshin out as scouts in every direction and when they popped he'd remember what they saw, so he didn't need to keep running back and forth all the time.

And since it was just him instead of the team he'd always been told Konoha ninja were all about, that was really helpful. Naruto felt a pang of regret at the thought, if he'd been smarter, better, he would have graduated like everyone else and Iruka-sensei wouldn't have gotten hurt and he'd be a real Konoha ninja by now.

But thoughts like that didn't help, they never made anything better, so he just made more kage bunshin instead to run with him and that jutsu was so awesome that it was almost as good.

When he finally reached Uzushio it was just rubble, like something that had been taken and broken into pieces. It didn't look like a painful sort of broken, though, not like a hurt that had just torn open.

This village had been wounded deeply but it was already scabbing over, with moss and even trees growing where once people would have walked.

This place had been left behind just like he had been and Naruto immediately felt a warm kinship for its faded paint and cracked fountains.

He roamed the wobbly streets, uncovered bits and pieces of what this village would have been like and even though he was alone it was somehow better to have no eyes on him at all than eyes that purposefully darted away from him, as if looking at him was a terrible thing.

There was no-one left here, but the village still acknowledged him – welcomed him even. With a few drops of blood on an intricate seal, doors opened for Naruto that he hadn't been able to break into with all of his pranking, ninja skills.

Behind those doors were places that were less broken, places that held books that were like his own book and Naruto still didn't like reading, but he did want to know more about Uzushio and there was no-one to ask.

So he read and, when he got too bored of that, he made a couple of kage bunshins to read for him while he tried some things out himself.

This resulted in blowing a lot of stuff up while he figured out that writing a seal wasn't easy and that just one little blot could mean an accidental explosion.

But what was one more hole in a place already torn apart?

At least it was a sign that an Uzumaki was here – an acknowledgement that not everyone had forgotten about this village.

So Naruto learned everything he could, with his determination settling back beneath his breastbone, once again a force to be reckoned with.

Because if he couldn't be a Hokage, couldn't be a Konoha ninja like Iruka-sensei and Jiji wanted him to be, then maybe he could become a seal master like his family would have wanted him to be.

A true Uzumaki.

If it had been anyone else, any Academy student but Naruto, this search would have been called off already and Kakashi ordered home.

There was no sign of foul play and no crimes linked to the boy. He hadn't even graduated yet, so he was technically still a civilian.

But this was a boy that Sarutobi was personally fond of, not to mention their jinchuuriki, and that changed the situation.

So Kakashi had free reign to keep going, to keep searching despite the fact that the trail he was on consisted of little more than traces by now.

He glanced down, scented the air and sighed.

He arbitrarily decided to follow the left trail, knowing that if this one turned out to have been left by another kage bunshin he'd have to backtrack yet again.

With a scent trail that was eleven days old, he and Pakkun had to slow down more often than he liked to ascertain which way the scent trail was going – their speed wasn't what it should have been and he cursed the fact that he'd been out on a mission when this happened.

Then he cursed the Inuzuka that had initially been tasked with finding and retrieving Naruto even if he knew it was unfair. No-one could expect a chuunin to make sense of this tangled web of different trails and why would they have sent out anything more than a team of chuunin for an Academy student who left on his own accord?

Reason didn't make him feel any more forgiving with regards to the situation, though, because it had already been eleven days and with so much time passed the boy could literally be anywhere by now.

And if Kakashi was anyone else he might have accepted that the little boy – sensei's legacy who he'd never let himself get close to, instead retreating into the sheltering anonymity and uncaring darkness of ANBU – was lost to him.

Lost, just as Kakashi was supposed to get him, leaving ANBU behind to finally step up and repay his debt to Minato – to become a jounin-sensei of all things (even if it wasn't entirely willingly).

He'd known that he would fail terribly at it, but he'd never suspected that he would fail so spectacularly before even getting started.

"Trail ends here boss," Pakkun informed him and on instinct he twitched his own nose in the air and sighed at what he found – or didn't find. Another dead end. Another false trail.

For one helpless moment he stared in the distance, in the direction that Naruto wasn't in.

Then he gathered himself, regained his sharp mission focus and turned back, racing swiftly towards the point where the path had split.

He'd left the boy behind once, abandoned his duty to his sensei, and now, as usual, he was late.

The scent trails were already fading.

So Kakashi ran even faster, cutting through the foliage like a sharpened blade, leaving a brush of wind and disturbed leaves in his wake, determined not to be too late. Not this time.

There were more trails to follow and one of them would lead to the missing jinchuuriki – to a lonely boy with a loud voice and a wide smile and eyes that burned with the same blue fire as Minato.

Time cheated him.

Scents faded and Kakashi dragged himself back to Konoha with a low burning desperation and without any concrete leads left to go on.

The Sandaime looked steadily back at him, appearing old behind his desk and as tired as Kakashi felt.

"There's no more we can do then, just keep an ear to the ground and an eye out," the Hokage concluded.

"I can still find him," Kakashi protested, determined to keep going despite his utter exhaustion.

The Hokage shook his head and said, too kindly, "Kakashi…"

It was rude to interrupt your commander. Luckily Kakashi had never much cared – and was also the sort of person who could get away with it. "I just need a little more time. Look into some possibilities. I'll find him."

And Sarutobi cared about the Yondaime's legacy – about Naruto and even Kakashi.

"Get some rest first," the man finally said.

That was all the permission he needed. He nodded agreeably without promising anything and left through the window. Then he got dinner at the Ramen stand that Naruto loved so much and interrogated the owner and his daughter.

Afterwards he did get some sleep – a few hours at least, before he visited Naruto's apartment and carefully examined every inch of the boy's life, trying not to take the lack of things – of proper food, of inexpertly fixed clothing and unfinished homework riddled with atrocious handwriting – as a slap in the face.

It didn't quite work, but Kakashi was nothing if not good at pretending.

He kept looking.

He talked to Iruka.

He talked to Mizuki, in prison, and didn't even murder the man.

He searched everywhere within the village for any hint.

He talked to the Memorial Stone.

He left the confines of the village behind, arguably with the Hokage's permission.

And he kept looking.

And in the end, surprising even himself - because he didn't ever not fail in a truly irreparable way - he found him.

Hatake Kakashi stared at the bright-haired boy, so very alive in the midst of all of that destruction, and his breath was stolen by an almost desperate wave of hope - that this time he could still fix things in a way that you could never fix death.

In the formerly abandoned village of Uzushio, Naruto tried his hardest.

He succeeded in some things and failed in others, but it wasn't failure, not really, because the only one who could get hurt around here was him - and he just tried again and again.

And then, one day, a seal in one of the few large rooms that hadn't been touched by war or time glowed.

Naruto and his kage bunshins looked up from the books they'd been reading and stared at the seal, each other and right back at the seal again – the one that was supposed to light up when a stranger entered the village.

For a moment he just sat there, because this village was a dusty, empty place – it was filled with nothing but ruins and forgotten memories. Who would come here?

Hesitantly, Naruto went outside and found the tall, fit form of a shinobi balanced on top of a pile of rubble, a small dog at his feet.

The ninja immediately turned to face him, a cloth mask covering most of his face. All that was visible was weird white hair and a single dark eye that was completely focused on Naruto – an eye that didn't look away.

The man slowly walked up to him and when he came closer Naruto recognized the familiar sign on the man's headband. A symbol that, despite everything, still made a part inside of him sit up straighter with something like pride.

It was a symbol he had wanted to carry more than anything and even now that hope, that dream hadn't been abandoned as completely as he had meant to because just the sight of it made his heart beat with something deep and important.

"Naruto-kun," the ninja greeted, his voice a steady weight in the silence of the empty village.

He tilted his head, quiet in the face of this acknowledgement. His previous loudness had fallen away bit by bit over the past two months.

First to go was the wide, fake grin that couldn't hide anything away when it was from himself.

The loud exclamations had lessened too, because there was no-one here who would look up and take notice.

The only things that were still loud were the explosions - some of them successful explosion tags, others more of a work in progress - and his blue eyes that blazed with determination when he refused to let himself give up.

"Did the old man send you?" he asked, frowning slightly at the thought. He liked Jiji, but the man had also lied to him – about important stuff, like his parents and the demon sealed in his belly. He wasn't sure what he thought about the Hokage sending one of his ninja to bring him back.

The man looked steadily at him for a long moment and then knelt down in front of him, as if Naruto was someone important.

"No," the shinobi said, "Iruka did. He said he'd forgotten to do something very important and asked me to find you and give you something for him."

Naruto's breath caught in his throat. The thing with the old man was a bit messy in his head - he wasn't sure what he felt about any of it. But there was nothing messy about Iruka and the way his heart filled with warm things when he thought about his sensei – a man who lectured him and fed him and smiled at him in such a way that his eyes were sparkling with something happy too.

"Iruka did?" Naruto asked softly, unconsciously leaning forward a bit.

The white-haired ninja nodded solemnly. "He did. You see, you protected him from an enemy and did so using the one technique that caused you to fail your exams. So he wanted me to give you this."

The man took out a Konoha hia-ate, holding it out carefully in front of him.

It wasn't a new one – there were a few scratches on the metal plate and the blue fabric, while well looked after, had certainly seen a few washes.

With a shaking hand, Naruto took it.

His abandoned dream filled his heart, making it surge and feel so much bigger than it could possibly be and still fill his chest.

"You're a ninja of the leaf, Naruto-kun," the ninja told him, "And more than that, you are my student now. I'll help you become the best damn Hokage our village has ever seen."

And that calm dark eye looked straight at him – at Uzumaki Naruto and there was no hate, no anger and no empty, meaningless things in there.

While the rest of the man's face was hidden away, that one unmasked piece of it was open and without pretence.

Naruto read warmth in there and a will to never give up and his own lips twitched up in response – not a grin, not a mask, but a smile filled with every ounce of his determination.

A.N. Written for the Writers Anonymous One-Word Prompt Challenge.

My prompt and therefore the title of this story was 'abandoned'. I'm usually more for the fluffy friendship stuff, so it was, well, a challenge, to get this story going.

I can't help but end it on a hopeful note anyway…