Role Reversal

By BlackFeatherz29

This was part of a passing idea that I had. Recently, I had watched a Japanese drama called 3-nen B-gumi Kinpachi-sensei 6, and it touched me to the very bottom of my heart. I had originally wanted to write a fic based on the Sandaime (Sarutobi-sensei) having a class with the genin as the students, but I realized that this would take far, far too long. The roles that I was going to put the Naruto chars in were based on the drama, but although they were in the same spirit, the situations were vastly different. Then it got me thinking... if the gang grew up in directly opposite childhoods, what would they do?

Anyway, I was originally going to write a series of character introspectives, one chapter for each character. But as soon as I started to write, I thought, 'Nah.' I don't have the kind of patience to write nine quality oneshots. I'm really weak at them, see. I'm wordy and I can't get the timing right. So, I was lazy and just wrote one paragraph on each in third person.

The opening statements are kind of the beginning of my thought process. First comes the opposite situation. Then comes the brainstorming. Yes, I did tweak some major conflicts in the timeline; don't kill me! And especially don't kill me if you are spoiled by my twisted timeline; I put that spoiler warning in the summary for a reason. Yes, many of these will be sad. Sad, not tragic. I really like all the characters of the Rookie Nine, and it would be a shame for any one of them to be a faceless kill-able background character. At least all of them will survive to age twelve. At least.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, and I don't own the chars. But these situations are entirely of my own ideas, and however much you like or despise them, they'll still only belong to me. Feel free to criticize or speculate. Don't kill me for any mistakes in the background knowledge; my Naruto history is a little rusty since I'm only reading the most recent manga scans.

Theme song: This is Home, by Switchfoot. (heh. I was listening to it while writing this.)

1. Naruto was born Namikaze Naruto, esteemed son of the Namikaze Minato, the Yondaime Hokage of Konoha. On the night that he was born, he slept serenely within his blankets as his father became a hero by defeating the Nine-Tailed Fox, unaware that he was enjoying the last bit of peace that he would know in his life.

Growing up, he was a stubborn and naive child who aspired to do everything except what was expected of him and believed that the world revolved around him. His tutors, especially poor Ebisu, despaired of the boy, who had held enormous promise but was unwilling to spend it on anything except playing pranks and read Icha-Icha Paradise books.

Naruto didn't really hate studying. All he despised was the title of Hokage. The villagers idolized his father, the Hero of Konoha, and they all expected Naruto to become Hokage after his father. Fame became a deterrant for the young boy, who yearned to be known for who he was, not who his father was.

All Naruto realy wanted was to be a jounin sensei and spend time around the children, but nobody would let him. Nobody expected the bright young heir to go missing-nin soon after he graduated from the academy.

2. Uchiha Sasuke never really knew his clan. However, he still remembers faintly the proud red-and-white fan that emblazoned the buildings of the Uchiha compound before it decayed into a decrepit skeleton of its former self. He only partially remembers his older brother Itachi, who betrayed his clan and Uchiha Madara because of his loyalty to the Hokage and was promptly assassinated shortly after.

The only vestige of the once-proud clan, he was tormented due to his heritage for the rest of his life. Despite this, the boy could not figure out why he was hated so. He grew up bitter and jaded, abused and shunned by those around him. Enrolling in the ninja academy only due to the request of the Yondaime Hokage, he found a new purpose in his life that awakened his dormant inbred genius.

Though the friendly Hokage supported him, Sasuke constantly lived in a state of poverty. His growing body never quite recieved enough nourishment from his rationings, and instant noodles weren't enough. However, he would graduate and apprentice under the Hokage himself in the absence of his son, who had been the closest thing he had had to a friend.

He would only find out many years later the real reason that the Yondaime agreed to train him: the strange spiral-shaped tattoo on his stomach.

3. Haruno Sakura was born as the heir to the most esteemed ninja clan in Konoha after the Namikazes. The Haruno clan was famed for their extreme beauty and their talent with wind and water manipulation as well as their heavily guarded kekkei genkai.

A shy and studious girl by nature, Sakura was taught at a young age to always do what she was told, and she did just that. She grew into proud and fiercely beautiful kunoichi with a razor-sharp mind.

However talented she was, she had grown up in an sanitated environment. Sakura had no concept of life outside the clan mansion, and little understanding of friendship or love. It was only after she met Uchiha Sasuke and Yamanaka Ino that she finally discovered that she was as human as anybody else.

4. Hyuuga Hinata was still proud of her clan, even if no one else was. The Hyuuga clan fell out of power long before she had been born, though some still lived and tried to send their children to the ninja academy. However, the ones that didn't drop out never made it past genin, and even those were buried under the disgrace of the Hyuuga name and the crimes of the past.

Her father was officially the clan head, but he fell deep into depression her mother's death and never quite came to his senses, preferring to spend his days drunk. Her cousin Neji had recently been thrown in prison after trying to abandon the village.

However sorry their state, Hinata was an obedient daughter, always willing to do what was best for her family. She and her sister Hanabi spent their childhood working menial labor to pay for their tuition and their father's drinking.

Despite her situation, Hinata was an incorrigable dreamer. Knowing the powerlessness of being weak all her life, she vowed to become more than just a 'dirty Hyuuga'. She promised herself that she would cast off the disgrace that her family's name carried and build a new clan.

Hinata never got the chance to shrink back or be weak. A lifetime of dealing with life's harshnesses had honed her will into iron, and she would become a kunoichi that inspired generations to come.

5. Kiba was a sickly child. He had been diagnosed with a terminal illness not long after he was born. His family, though they were moderatly wealthy merchants, had no way of curing him. The doctor said that he would not live to be twenty.

His parents spoiled him badly, giving him everything they could possibly give. Kiba himself became very selfish, unable to obtain what he really wanted and unsatisfied with what he had. He constantly threw tantrums throughout his youth because he felt like that was the only way that he could express the fear and frustration in his heart.

Kiba's closest companion was a small white puppy that his sister, Tsume, had bought for him when he had gone through a particularly difficult stage in his illness. The boy had been delighted, and it was immensly comforting to his family how their sickly son had found at least a little bit of happiness in his short life.

Though he knew that it was an impossible dream, Kiba always wanted to be a ninja. He saw them proudly marching beside their respective Kage and his heart gave a jump every time he spotted them leaping from rooftop to rooftop from his bedroom window. Kiba wished that he were that strong and cool, and that he would be able to do all the things he had ever wanted to do.

Only after watching a poor chuunin die on the operating table on a chance visit to the hospital did Kiba begin to understand that a ninja's life was possibly even more doomed than his own.

6. Shino grew up as the number one village heartthrob. Girls swooned when they beheld his lustrous brown locks and alabaster skin, and his ever-present sunglasses were constantly a topic of local gossip. 'He was so dark and mysterious,' they thought, 'What kind of inhumanly beautiful eyes could he be hiding under those glasses?'

In truth, Shino's eyes were just incredibly sensitive to the light, and he was a very shy boy who always preferred to stay in the shadows. His clan traditionally signed summon contracts with insects and bats, and they kept to themselves and lived in the dark. That didn't stop the village from fantasizing about the Aburame clan and their vampiric complexions.

The Aburame clan were one of the founding clans of Konoha, and thus were very involved in village politics. They had extremely tight traditions and had high expectations for their children, and Shino was no exception. He was top genin of their year and was fully expected to make jounin by the time he was seventeen. Shino wisely kept his own secretly seething thoughts to himself.

Forming a curious friendship with Akimichi Chouji, who also had unwanted popularity, Shino learned that it was okay to come out of the dark and embrace the light sometimes.

7. Ino wanted to be more than was expected of her. Her parents were of middle-class origins, and they ran a flower shop that had been there ever since the founding of Konoha.

Ino herself, however, was disgusted with her parents' contentment at being merely average. She was a headstrong girl with too much stubborness and too much potential to even think to waste her life away managing a tiny flower shop.

Ino's parents despaired of their only daughter's fierce will. She wanted to be a ninja, the proud troops of Konoha and the most respected social class, higher even than some daimyos. They were terrified of what would happen to their baby; a ninja's life was short and brutal, and one was not usually expected to live to be more than thirty.

Ino, however, wanted to be strong more than anything in the world. She wanted it badly enough to chop off her long white-blond locks and run away from home to enroll in the academy, where she graduated after living by herself for several years, cut off from her parents.

Put into a three-man team with Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura, Ino was able to finally find the strength within her heart to forgive her parents and face them again.

8. Shikamaru never had a chance to be lazy. The oldest son of a family of middle-class merchants, his family enjoyed many years of prosperity before the invasion of the Nine-Tailed-Fox put a lockdown on Konoha and the economy took a turn for the worst. Shikamaru himself learned to count by using the abacus to calculate the living expenses of his family.

It quickly became obvious that the boy had talents that were destined for greater heights, but the struggling family could not spare the time or money to send him to school. Shikamaru became the glue holding the family together; he often substituted during business transactions in order to let his exhausted parents rest, and became the mother to his siblings.

Shikamaru was disgusted by the laud that the Yondaime Hokage's name beheld. He grew up hating the shinobi, blaming them for his family's financial troubles. He especially despised the lazy chuunin on watch, who had enough time to just sit back and watch the clouds while he never had a day's rest in his life.

His childhood friend Yamanaka Ino abandoned her family be a ninja, and he lost contact with her for many years. When he finally saw her again, she was a genin fresh out of the academy, lounging on the bridge with her two teammates. He doesn't want to admit it, but just for a moment, he wished he could be there with her.

9. Chouji was everybody's friend, and yet he wasn't. His mother was a noble from Snow Country, and his father was a very successful movie star from Lightning Country. By the time he turned three, he had been to most of the countries in the shinobi continent and met more celebrities than anybody was apt to meet in their lifetime.

When he was five, his parents divorced and he went with his father to go live in Konoha because of his connections to the late Sandaime Hokage. The boy grew up in the hands of numerous nannies until his father sent him to the ninja academy for formal schooling, not knowing how to take care of his own child.

Chouji was an adorable child. He did not yet have the rugged good looks of his father, but his open friendliness and fame attracted friends like bees to honey. His hidden talent, inherited from his mother's side of the family, boosted his already skyrocketting popularity. He was a sensitive boy, however, and the backlash of too much fame gradually had an impact on him.

At the time of his graduation, his fangirls numbered nearly as many as Aburame Shino's. Chouji didn't care, withdrawing into himself and wishing that he could have just one true-blue friend who would stand by him not because he was cute and popular but because they cared about him.

He was placed on the same genin team as Shino and the two became tentative friends, as both were very shy and hadn't wanted attention showered on them in the first place. However, the loyal quality of the shinobi became a hidden blessing to the boy who finally had somewhere to place his trust.

Author's notes: (yes, there are more of them)

- Just because Naruto went missing-nin doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. I imagine that he might very well go and build his own hidden village. He's a smart boy, after all. And it's not like he has a kekkei genkai, so I don't think Orochimaru would go after him. Hey, maybe he met Jiraiya out there!

- As to why the Yondaime is still alive after defeating the Nine-Tailed Fox, um... seeing as how the Sandaime is dead here, I image that somehow the two Hokages worked together and Yondaime survived. I think?

- I never really thought about the kekkei genkai of the Haruno clan, so I can't tell you what it is. Use your imaginations.

- For those who know what I'm talking about, I made it so that the Hyuuga clan was the one who was involved with the Shodaime at the time of the founding of Konoha. Something happened, the ploy was discovered, and they were disgraced. The Uchiha, who grasped the same concept, schemed to overthrow the Hokage (this is completely canon, by the way), but this time Itachi was aware of it much earlier and went to the council about it. Thus, why the Uchiha are disgraced also. As to why Itachi's dead... they got lucky? They are a family of prodigies, after all. Maybe Shusui was really mad. Or maybe Madara was.

Format based on the format of Aishuu's 'It Takes a Village', which was part of the inspiration for this fic. I love that fic to death.

Sorry if some of these seem a little bit pointless. I lost my inspiration on some and found it on others. I am hoping that you guys get more out of it than I am right now, because I have been working on this for a month and I am finally done with it. Sorry also about the messiness. I think I took too much liberty with the characters, so please don't kill me.

Please read and review! I know that this is crap-quality writing, but at least post your thoughts, be they good or bad!