Kishi Kaisei (Various!Naruto x Reader)

New Leaf: The Weak are Meat; The Strong Eat

The White Fang of Konoha.

Hatake Sakumo, who died through seppuku, for prioritizing his teammates more than the furtive mission; for being a good captain rather than a good soldier; for being human rather than a tool.

(You cannot be a good person while being a good shinobi.)

He's been dead for three years now.

And yet, his name and his 'disgrace' have resurfaced because no one wants to claim responsibility for what's about to happen, because no one wants to be guilty; because being guilty means you have to pay for repercussions for all sides involved if you were to lose this war. Typically, Kages are prideful, self-righteous assholes, so if someone were to point out that it was your fault, they won't hesitate to agree because surely, it's not their fault.

And if all warring hidden villages are assured that they will be compensated if you were to lose, they will band together because they would want you to lose. They want those compensations that come with your loss, and you can never survive a full-scale war from four out of five Great Hidden Villages. So, unless you want your village destroyed, you will have to submit to everyone's demands, and you have no power to deny them whatever they ask of you.

Then you, the guilty village, will run with debts and IOUs, until you have nothing left to offer. Your Great Hidden Village's wealth and resources will be stretched thin, and eventually, your village will no longer be a Great Hidden Village.

That's one competition down, and only three more to go, is what each Great Hidden Village Kage would think.

(Then, they would wait for the cycle to start all over again; wait for another village to slip. An endless loop of war and hostility and hatred.)

Konoha was so close to being that 'guilty village'; so close to being erased from the map. Fortunately and unfortunately, they shedded that responsibility through Hatake Sakumo's disgrace; washed their hands of their association with the Hatake patriarch to not hold accountability for his failure. According to official reports, Sakumo moved outside of Konoha's jurisdiction as a radical loyalist, and killed himself out of shame for his crime of 'insubordination'. Of course, Iwa doesn't believe that shit, but they have no proof.

(And isn't it poetic that the White Fang's story is somewhat reflective of Kakuzu's history with Takigakure? You wonder how different Sakumo's story could've ended if only he didn't have a son.)

(It would also seem that the Raikage, A, took notes and will use the White Fang's tragedy as a strategy with Kumo's delegates for the Hyuuga Affair in the future.)

Even from his grave, Hatake Sakumo served Konoha one last time through the desecration of his memory.

And his legacy is striving hard to redeem their name.

This was the story tou-chan concluded after hearing all rumors regarding the White Fang, creating the most probable scenario with his own personal knowledge of Sakumo, and gathering the needed information from the Land of Grass-- where the White Fang's supposed self-appointed mission and failure took place.

So far, you have a lot of supporting evidence that you were born years before the canon timeline. Actually, at first, you didn't think Naruto's story existed. Sure, this world worked the same way as it did in the anime, but you had no reassurances that canon 'characters' with their past-present-future exist. Who knows? Maybe Kishimoto was once from here and was reincarnated to Before and used his experience as inspiration for his manga.