After falling unconscious that day, all Hiroshi felt was darkness, he was surrounded by a scary darkness that was filled with loneliness, he couldn't remember how long he had been in that darkness, but one day he suddenly felt a new sensation.
The sensation was warmth – not the stifling heat of Room 207, but a gentle, soothing kind that seemed to flow through his entire body. Consciousness returned slowly, like traversing through a thick fog. There was a constant beeping sound nearby, reminiscent of hospital equipment, yet somehow different from the machines he'd known for thirty years.
His head throbbed with a dull ache. The ceiling above him was unfamiliar – no wobbling fan, no water stains he'd memorized over decades. Instead, clean white panels stretched overhead, illuminated by soft lighting that didn't hurt his eyes.
"...vital signs stabilizing..." A woman's voice drifted through his haze. "It's incredible... The cerebral activity is..."
Something felt wrong. Different. His body... it felt *light*. The perpetual weight of immobility that had pressed him into his mattress for thirty years was absent. He tried moving his fingers, expecting the usual tremor.
His hand moved.
Not with the weak, shaking motion he'd known all his adult life, but with a smooth, instant response. The sight of small, childish fingers wiggling at his command sent a jolt of shock through his system. The beeping nearby accelerated.
"He's moving!" Another voice called out. "Quick, get Haruno-san!"
'Haruno?'
He tried to turn his head – and it moved. The simple action, impossible for so long, nearly overwhelmed him. The room came into better focus: medical equipment with strange glowing symbols, charts with unfamiliar writing, and a window showing rooftops unlike any he'd seen before.
"Kaede! Oh, thank the gods!" A man with light pink hair and weathered hands burst through the door, followed by a woman with flowing black hair streaked with subtle traces of pink. Behind them came a lanky teenager with distinctive pink hair – His nose red as a tomato and his eyes moist from all the crying.
"Hic, li-little brother! Can you see me? It's me Kizashi" The pink-haired boy cried while trying to jump into Hiroshi's arms but the black-haired woman stopped him from approaching too near. She too had a relieved look on her face. All these things confused Hiroshi a lot.
'Kaede? Kizashi? Brother?... Haruno?'
He tried to speak, but his throat felt raw. A small sound escaped, and the effort sent him into a coughing fit. Yet even this was different – his chest moved freely, muscles responding with strength he'd never known.
"Careful, Haruno-san," one of the medical staff stepped forward, her hands glowing with a soft green light. "He's been through severe trauma. The fact that he's conscious at all is miraculous."
'Green glowing hands. The Haruno family. This can't be...'
"Water," he managed to croak out, and the word came in a child's voice – high and clear despite the roughness.
As his mother – his mother in this impossible reality– carefully helped him sip from a cup, his eyes darted around the room, taking in more details. The medical staff wore headbands with a familiar spiral leaf symbol. Through the window, he could see a massive cliff face with three stern faces carved into its surface, watching over the village.
'Impossible. Those three faces... It's the Hokage monument… I am in Naruto world!?...'
"Kaede," his father spoke gently, calloused hand resting on his shoulder. "Do you remember what happened? You were playing near the hill with Shin and Kenji..."
The memories weren't there. Instead, his mind filled with images of a ceiling fan's endless rotation, of manga volumes read until their spines cracked, of thirty years spent dreaming of a world he'd thought was pure fiction.
"I..." he started to speak, then stopped, overwhelmed by the simple act of his chest and throat working in concert to produce sound. "Where...?"
"You're in Konoha Hospital, sweetheart," his mother brushed his hair back with trembling fingers. "You fell and hit your head. The medical-nin... they almost..." her voice cracked.
Looking at them all, Hiroshi's mind managed to recall one specific detail. 'Kizashi Haruno? Isn't that the name of Sakura's father!?'
'Konoha. Medical-nin. Chakra healing. It's all real. And I'm... I'm Kizashi's younger brother?'
As if triggered by that thought, he became aware of something else – a warm current flowing through his body, like a gentle river beneath his skin. 'Chakra.' The energy he'd read about for decades, illustrated in thousands of black and white panels, was now coursing through his own body.
The sensation, combined with the ability to move, to speak, to simply breathe freely, proved too much. Darkness crept at the edges of his vision, but not the familiar darkness of his old life's final moments. This was different – a temporary reprieve as his mind struggled to process the impossible.
The last thing he saw before consciousness faded was the Third Hokage's stern face on the monument through the window, and a single thought echoed through his mind:
'I'm not just walking again. I'm living in the world I've dreamed of for thirty years... in the era of legends.'
The beeping of the monitor slowed as he drifted off, but this time, he knew he would wake again – in a body that moved, in a world of chakra and ninja, in a story he'd only ever experienced through pages of manga.
In the world of Naruto, as Kaede Haruno, the younger brother to the future father of a legendary kunoichi.