I've been posting stories out my ass lately and like not finishing others (oops), but someone shoved me over the edge with this one and I couldn't help myself. I've always wanted more Shisui content and I can never find good stories with him that aren't weird kink stuff, so here we go. A no weird pairings, normal, lets save Shisui fic 

Cross posted on ao3 if you prefer to read there!

Notable tags, but Wattpad's tagging system sucks:
-Medic Naruto
-Shisui Uchiha lives
-Smart Naruto
-Uzumaki Naruto & Uchiha Shisui friendship
-Uchiha Itachi needs a hug

Third person pov

The river below Konoha's highest passes is always quiet, save for the roar of the water itself. The slopes there are steep and high— almost a cliff face but not quite jagged enough for it, though most fear the possibility of loose rocks falling too much to hang around.

Naruto has never had such caution. At seven years old, maybe that's because he's had no one to teach him about the latent dangers of the world around him. His experience has served him a somewhat screwed outlook, where the unforgiving laws of nature are somehow kinder than his own home and the people in it.

He finds himself out here a lot. It's one of the few isolated places within the village, and he knows he won't be bothered so long as he doesn't let any of the angrier villagers follow him out here.

Naruto has learned to be careful. He's had to be since he was kicked out of the orphanage, lest the worst happen. There's no place for a monster like him amongst the people of the village, and in many ways it's simply easier to linger out here, sleeping in the nearby cave he's outfitted and catching whatever fish he can to cook and eat.

He's not the best at survival, but he's not the worst either. He has no money for food or a real home, and the villagers look at him with too much disdain for him to think they'd show him pity enough to help. He goes into town for the academy— for the hope of a brighter future where people smile at him instead of scowl— and that's about it.

He learns out of necessity. The library is a shocking resource when he can sneak his way in, and though he's never been all that good of a reader, he absorbs what he can as best he can. He jots it down on whatever scraps of paper he can pillage from the trash, with old pencils worn down to a nub.

It's shocking what some people will throw out. Even more shocking is how Naruto somehow manages to drag it all back to the home he's made for himself, away from the odd masked ninja that follow him when they think he can't see, and away from the civilians who snarl and spit at his feet.

The couch cushions that make up his bed are old and smell like cat fur, but they're fairly clean, and just two is enough for Naruto to curl up on. He finds moth bitten blankets, and discarded books and toys. He finds half-used scrolls and dull kunai, and boxes of food not completely used to empty.

Naruto makes himself some shaky semblance of a home. He finds things that don't belong to anyone and he makes them his. He plants seeds in cracked pots and scoops water into them from the river with scuffed plastic bowls and discarded styrofoam cups. It's not much, but it's his.

He doesn't belong anywhere if not here, he supposes. They don't want him there with them, but the trees have never seemed to mind his presence. He feels the teeming power in them thrum with life. Aware, but an impartial witness to what tiny domain he's built.

He learns what bugs make the fish bite the most. He sits in the morning atop a building across the way and watches avidly as the market owner skins his own catches, watches how he cleans and prepares them before he throws them on the grill. Naruto is not taught, but he finds ways to learn all the same.

In his greater observations of the world around him, he grows a new awareness for the pulse of life all things seem to carry. That energy within the trees and their every leaf. The faint whisper in the grass beneath his feet. The watery resonance within the very fish he catches and eats, and the way it gently washes away when he ends their lives.

Chakra, the academy tells him later. And Naruto has it too.

Even civilians have chakra, he finds. It's not as stark as a Shinobi's, but it's there. It's easy for Naruto to pick up on it. Humans have different signatures than the fauna and wildlife the Earth's given them, a little bigger, a little more solid and aware, and he gradually learns to use this to his advantage.

He's always been quick and slippery, and that was before he knew who was coming and who was already there. Naruto hones the skill to a point. He has to, as the villagers grow more and more bold in their willingness to come after him.

Naruto has never understood why. He's examined himself from top to bottom, has assessed every portion of his personality. He's bright and he's loud and he's far from the smartest, but he doesn't think he's all that different than the other children in his class.

Maybe it's his hair, bright and unusual. Maybe its his eyes, an uncommon shade he tries to find around him but can't. Perhaps it's his tanned skin, or the whisker marks that slash his cheeks. Is it his voice? The way he walks, the way he talks? Is it what he says and does?

Naruto wishes he knew so he could fix the problem. But mostly he wishes there was nothing wrong with him at all.

It's not so bad, really. Naruto stays in his lane and for the most part, it's all fine. His journeys between home and the academy are brief if he's fast. A few odd pranks here and there to throw people off his trail, and a bit of scavenging when he spies an overflowing dumpster, and he's fine.

(Alone. But there's surely a good reason for that.)

The woods are isolated. But Naruto has been isolated all his life, and he finds more company in his blooming tomato plants than he ever did at the orphanage. Konoha is his home, and he memorizes the outline of his sequestered cave and its surroundings down to his bones.

It's peaceful here. Naruto finds a calm he didn't know existed, present in every windy rustle of the leaves overhead, in every splash of the fish that leap above the water as they're rushed along in its flow. Konoha is its people, yes, but it's this too. And for all the village has hurt him, Naruto doesn't think he'd trade this side of it for anything.

He knows the area like he knows the back of his hand. It's served him too well for him not to commit it to heart by now. That's why he immediately notices when he gets home late one night and something is off.

Things have been so constant since his coming here. Nature has its twists and its turns, but it is overall predictable. It isn't often that Naruto finds anything out of place, and never has it been something like this. Trust Naruto's life to bring changes only in extremes.

The presence is so dim he almost doesn't feel it at first. It is the barest of beats, so low he'd almost mistake it as nothing more than a sprouting dandelion or prickly fern. It was only the slight and strange containment of it, all of it focused at a few core points, that alerted him to the fact that this was no plant or woodland creature.

This was a person. Right outside his home. And from what Naruto could tell, their chakra was dangerously low.

He almost doesn't want to go look. Fear spikes through him fast and hot. Immediately, he's overcome with images of his home being ripped from him. Of his secret being exposed, and the villagers storming down the peak to tear it all down.

What was scariest was the fact that it was a real possibility. Some of the civilians in the village went out of their way just to hurt him. Naruto didn't understand why, nor did he know how to stop it. He wasn't very big and he admittedly wasn't very strong either, and with no idea what he was doing to cause them to react in such a way, it meant he was left with only one choice if he was to survive.

He would have to run. And he'd have to leave everything he'd painstakingly claimed as his own behind.

It would be easy to slip past and hunker down in his cave to wait and see what happened. Naruto very nearly does, but something nags at him. The chakra signature— it feels like it's dimming more and more with every passing second. He's felt babies with more of a presence than this.

The only time Naruto's felt something like this, waning and light, was in the brief times he's passed the hospital. Where chakra signatures snuff out and don't come back. Sometimes a swift plummet, other times a slow crawl just like this one. And that can mean only one thing.

This person, whoever they are— they didn't come here to destroy anything or to find him. They're dying. And dammit, Naruto can't sit down and do nothing. He just can't.

Cursing, Naruto forces himself forward despite his nerves. The signature isn't moving. It flickers like a weak flame, and for a moment Naruto swears it reaches out to him and calls for help. A sensation he's sure is in his head, but that somehow still spurs him faster on anyway.

It's dark out. Out in the woods this is even more true, but Naruto has never had much trouble seeing. From the hard lines of the tree trunks around him to the finest lines of the bark on them, he sees it all in muted tone. Perhaps he was born that way and it's just one of the many reasons he's a freak, or maybe his body has adapted to its surroundings as a means of better survival. It's hard to say.

Naruto smells him before he sees him. Blood holds such a pungent and sharp scent, hard iron and something sickly. He swallows hard enough to hurt and forces himself to drop his haul of the day on the ground at the mouth of his cave, eyes drawn almost magnetically to that frail, fading spark.

There. Half in the water, out cold, is a teenager. Soaked to the bone and tinted blue all over, he doesn't even have a shirt on. There are remnants of one, ripped and tattered by the harsh rocks he had likely been dragged across by the river's current. The bloody scrapes left behind support the theory.

Naruto approaches cautiously, heart racing. He sees now that he's closer that the only thing keeping him from washing further downstream is Naruto's ramshackle fish basket, which rests full of trout waiting for their turn to be eaten. He's gotten caught on it, the metal digging into his bleeding torso in a way that looks excruciatingly painful.

He's not moving. He doesn't even look like he's breathing. The older boy looks like a corpse, and Naruto would almost think he was one of not for the last whispers of his chakra clinging on determinedly.

Chakra can't feel. Not really. But it can echo, Naruto has found. There is a reflection of intent within it. It's another thing that sets people apart from other chakra-holding life. This boy wasn't awake enough to feel anything now, but his sorrow and fear, his unwillingness to die, must've been vast to still linger in his last dredges this way.

Naruto is immediately torn. Torn because he's so close to dead and Naruto isn't strong enough to drag him to get help. Torn because if he goes for help himself, nobody is going to listen to him. Torn because he can't just leave him here, but he can't push him into the river and let the last of him wash away either.

Torn because when he gets closer and finally gets a better look at the boy's face, he realizes that his eyes aren't closed like Naruto thought they were. In fact, he doesn't have eyes at all.

It's a nauseating, gruesome sight. The removal was not surgical in any way Naruto can discern. It's all jagged and torn flesh, barely visible behind blood that's already beginning to grow tacky and clotted. Naruto figures the only reason his cheeks aren't utterly coated in it is because of his time spent in the water.

It strikes him then that someone must've done this to him. They had to have. He was probably attacked, and now his chakra is crying out for help where there's nobody but Naruto Uzumaki to hear it. The pariah of the village.

He's a monster. He's never done anything good, anything meaningful, in his life. And maybe that's normal. He's young-- he can't say many of his classmates have done anything of notable worth either, but at least they're not messed up in the same way he seems to be.

Naruto can't. He shouldn't. Nobody has ever held out a hand to Naruto before, and it's such a risk to hold one of his own out now. Naruto is young and doesn't know what he's doing. The wounds are too grievous. This boy probably won't even live through the next hour, let alone the rest of the night.

But he might, a tiny voice in his head whispers. Slim as the chances are, he might.

He might. The chances are narrow and practically none, but never, ever zero. And Naruto would be no better than those who beat him down, would be no one worthy of being future Hokage, if he didn't try.

~~~

His eyes are gone, and Naruto's been kicked enough to know what broken ribs feel like when you press on them. He's bloody all over and his skin is torn, but it's somehow not as bad as Naruto expected it to be.

Naruto's far from the best at— anything, really. First aid falls under the small umbrella of things he's actually forced himself to read about. He gets hurt too often not to know how to take care of himself. He's no expert, but it's one of the few higher subjects he has some level of knowledge on.

The real issue here comes from Naruto's lack of supplies. People are always throwing stuff out, a roll of bandages almost through but not quite. A half empty first aid kit. Medication that says it's expired but can still be used, if you just read about it. Maybe it won't be as effective, and maybe your stomach will twist a little once its down, but it'll still do something all the same.

His odd collection of bits and bobs isn't enough for something of this caliber. Naruto bandages the teen's eyes (only sockets, now, technically) as best he can, gentle has he presses the gauze down. He disinfects what he can with his four almost-empty bottles of hydrogen peroxide— with a focus on the major wounds— and he rinses the more minor injuries gently with soap and boiled clean water.

The teen doesn't even flinch at the sting. That says a lot, Naruto thinks.

There's a lot of other factors, Naruto realizes the harder and longer he things. He doesn't know if any water got in the stranger's lungs, or how he's supposed to get it out if there is. He doesn't know if there's internal bleeding, and if he could fix it if there was. This guy needs a hospital. And the police, probably.

Naruto can imagine it now. He could go to town screaming bloody murder and they'd scorn him for it. They'd think he was trying to lure them into the woods for who knows what reason. He's never cried wolf before, but he'd be the boy that did the first time he ever tried.

It's terrible that he's all this stranger has. Naruto doesn't recognize him. He doesn't have any forms of identification on him. His shirt has hints of a red symbol, but it's too shredded and picked apart for Naruto to tell much else. His pants are only in slightly better shape, half the leg missing off of one side.

A good two thirds of his body is purpled with bruises. His hair, as it begins to dry, is dark and curling wildly. Naruto wonders if someone is looking for him.

He wonders if it would be a good thing if someone were.

This must've happened in the village. It had to have. That points to the real possibility of this teen being a Shinobi of some kind. Maybe he did something he wasn't supposed to, but... No. This brutality is too much for that, surely.

There's cruelty, and then there's duty. Naruto knows duty. Every academy kid learns it in their first days of class. It is central to being a shinobi, to serving a village and being a working cog in its machine. Duty is sharp, precise, and quick. It is what's necessary.

It is not torn out eyes and a hole in someone's side. It isn't broken bones and blooming bruises. It isn't a body cold in the water, only alive because an outcast orphan's shitty fish trap stopped it from washing any further down. That--

Naruto knows cruelty, too. Perhaps even better than he knows duty.

If whoever did this is still looking for him to finish the job, it seems even more pertinent that Naruto tread lightly with the boys existence at all. If he'd wake up, if he'd give a name of some kind, perhaps Naruto could go get help from someone who knew him. Someone who'd care about where he went enough not to call Naruto a liar for it.

It's a waiting game. Naruto pours over his vague notes on wound care and curses himself for not writing more. He's never needed stitches himself, but he can tell the wound in this guy's side is in desperate need. Just bandaging it up tight won't cut it, he doesn't think.

The night feels like it passes impossibly slow. Naruto doesn't sleep a wink. Partially because having a stranger in his home sets off every alarm bell in his head known to mankind, but also because the Stranger is on his couch cushion bed, which will no doubt be unusable after this. He mourns it idly.

Largely, Naruto is afraid he may miss something if he doesn't pay close enough attention. That the teen's heart will give up and that'll be it, and he'll have passed Naruto by just like that. He hated to get invested in someone who would probably hate him if they had eyes to see, but Naruto has always been a little too quick with his kindness.

If Naruto was on the edge of going beyond, he thinks he'd want someone next to him. Anyone would do so long as he wasn't alone when it happened. It's something he's morbidly dwelled on time and time again, most in the nights after the drunks have chased him with broken bottles, or the shopkeepers have kicked him so hard in the side his breaths come out short wheezes.

The thought of passing on with nobody to acknowledge he at least existed is an aching thing to consider. No matter how loud anyone's death, to die alone would make it quiet in every sense all the same. Nobody there to know what happened to you. Nobody there to see, or to care. If the Stranger goes tonight, Naruto promises himself he will be here-- will be awake-- to feel him leave.

Naruto fully expects him to die. Naruto expects to be left with a corpse, clueless as to what to do with it. He expects to mourn someone he does not know, to have to dig a grave, because he knows he'd be blamed for his missing eyes and gouged out side if he tried to inform someone.

But astonishingly, the Stranger doesn't. The night passes achingly, and the chakra still flickers warningly, but by morning it's still there. It's still there, and even more than that, it feels just the slightest bit brighter.

He could still die. But Naruto saved him— actually helped another human being— and so, he might live.

Naruto's determination rises with the sun. It's like a roaring flame. He doesn't know who did this to this Stranger or what they'll do if they know they didn't succeed, but he has no plans of finding out. Naruto is resourceful. He's not smart in any traditional sense, but he's not stupid either.

He's tenacious. Weird and freakish and a monster, but he knows how to go after something and not stop until he gets it. Alone, in the woods, Naruto has survived.

If he tries hard enough, maybe he can help someone else survive too.

~~~

He misses the academy that day, and the next. There's no time to copy things down at the library with such a fragile patient at home. He snatches the books entirely, scurrying away before he can be seen.

It's strange to have a reason to go home. There is someone expecting him there in a roundabout sense, and despite the Stranger's state, Naruto can't help but feel a little warm all the same. He hates that there's someone hurt enough to need to rely on him, but there's a sense of fulfillment that comes with being needed as well. In knowing that he has a purpose-- in knowing there is something he has to do.

This is meaningful. A person's life could never not be. Life is valuable and precious, and Naruto had known this even before the academy gave solemn lessons to drill it into their heads. These are people's souls they're releasing when they kill, and it's important such a thing is done with honor and clear judgment.

The ninja with the masks try to give chase when Naruto runs. There is one in particular that smells like dogs and rain, and he's been around the longest that Naruto can recall. He's also the one that manages to follow him the furthest on these races.

Naruto has learned Konoha's back alleys so closely that it's almost reflex to make twists and turns and to duck through holes in broken fences. A cat and a mouse— or perhaps a wolf and a hare is a better comparison.

Naruto is particularly determined to get away, and to do so quickly, and somehow he just barely manages to slip away. He's never had any idea why these ninja follow him, nor does he care to dwell on it too hard now. Maybe later he'll consider just how odd it is, but for now he rolls through the mud on purpose before springing back up and taking off at a sprint, because he knows the dogs and rain shinobi won't be able to smell him as well that way.

The teen doesn't stir. He doesn't seem like he's moved when Naruto gets back, either. His chest rises and falls shallowly, and the wheezing makes Naruto think he was probably right about water being in his lungs.

His breathing had sounded the same that time he was thrown in the icy lake on the northern side of Konoha. He'd thrown up water for a near hour afterwards.

The Stranger will get sick if it stays there, if he's not already. Naruto doesn't know how to tell if someone has a fever or not, but he presses a careful hand to his forehead all the same. Naruto's hardly ever touched another person before, especially like this. The Stranger's drenched in sweat, but there's a clammy quality to skin despite it.

Naruto has no idea what all that means. He checks the bandages to look for signs of infection but he finds none of the ones listed in the book he's cracked open to his left. It's a relief, if not a surprise. It's not like a cave and two old couch cushions are the definition of sanitary.

He could still get one if Naruto isn't cautious. Shinobi tend to be more resistant to things like that, but the Stranger is weak, and Naruto still doesn't know for sure if he's a ninja or not. Better not to assume.

He rips into his newly pilfered books with sharp ferocity. When the daylight starts to fade, he waits for his eyes to adjust and then pours over them some more. Naruto has never had a long attention span. He finds it hard to focus most of the time, and he has to force himself to keep reading for more than a few lines.

Sometimes the words jumble. He'll read the same line over and over again and not even realize. He'll read a whole page and none of it will process. This is a grown up book and maybe that plays some part in it, or maybe he's as dumb as they call him at the academy.

(He looks at the Stranger, listening to his breaths, and doesn't give up. Naruto Uzumaki never quits.)

It's incredibly slow going. Some words are big and he has to sound them out, and even then who knows if he's saying them right. There are many he doesn't know at all, and he has to look for them in the ratty dictionary he'd stolen from the academy back when he first started and realized how few words he actually knew compared to his classmates.

He writes the words he doesn't know down. Medical terms, he realizes as he goes along. If he doesn't take notes, he'll forget the words he looked up to begin with and have to find them all over again. Writing it down helps cement it in his brain, even if it takes extra time for him to carefully, legibly write his notes out.

He moves through the books slowly. From sun up to sun down, with hardly any breaks, he sits and makes himself read until his brain feels like it's going to melt. He misses the academy again, and then the weekend hits.

Naruto dribbles water and sugar water into the teen's mouth often, critically watching for signs he's swallowing it and it's not just sitting in the back of his throat, drowning him. Naruto tilts the Stranger's head back slightly to hopefully help the process.

Does he have a back injury? Naruto's already dragged him through the muck, and he'd been tossed down the river by its unforgiving flow, so perhaps it's too late to bother.

The books are a strange sort of company. It gets a little easier to sit in front of them as his resolve continues to harden. As he picks up more words the things flow smoother, and oh, this isn't so bad once you know how to do it, is it?

He finds out that the Stranger needs things like an IV, and probably painkillers and antibiotics-- three new words he'd had to look up in the book's glossary. Naruto wouldn't know where to start with any of that. He needs something he can do. There must be something, somewhere in the book. He knows there must.

Naruto hardly sleeps. He eats very little. He changes the Stranger's bandages and when he runs out, he runs into town and doesn't come back until he finds more. The masked ninja don't seem as likely to notice him if he comes in at night, so he uses the darkness as cover to get what he needs.

It's strange, the way Naruto finds company and solace in someone who can't even talk. They aren't friends. You can't really be friends with someone who's unconscious, can you?

Maybe it's because Naruto's taking care of him that he starts to grow closer. He feels a level of fondness for his tomato plants too, because he watched them sprout and grow into what they are now. He knows it's a poor, bordering on offensive, comparison to make. It's just the only one he knows is all.

Naruto talks to the Stranger to set him apart from the plants, feeling perhaps a little guilty. He jabbers about how he found him, and about what he's reading about to try and help. He tells him about the academy and the village. He admits that the villagers don't like him much, but he promises he's never done anything bad, and that he'll do his best to save him.

It feels like he's not going to catch a break. He goes through the books and he learns, but it's not what he needs and he knows it. He takes them back and collects as big a stack from the medical section as he can handle carrying as soon as he's sure he's scoured the others well enough, not bothering to check the titles for fear he may be caught in the process.

He goes through them systematically. He reads every relevant page. He takes notes where he can and jots down the long, complicated names of medications he can't even pronounce. He writes down what they treat. He writes down what other medications they cannot be taken with.

He doesn't remember them all, but at least they're written. On the back of old, thrown out order forms that've been stained by fish oil, but they're there, written in a simplistic way he better understands. He keeps them somewhere safe and dry for fear of something happening to them.

The weekend flies by. The Stranger's chakra gets stronger and stronger, though not by much. His heartbeat, when Naruto feels it, does not feel even like the book says it should. His breaths are steady but still strained. The wounds are not contaminated, but the one in his side isn't closing, and his eyes—

Naruto shifts to the second to last book in the stack, and there it is. Something he's never heard of before, but knows immediately without having to look further that it's going to be the key to getting through this.

Medical ninjutsu.

(That night, the Uchiha clan is slaughtered, leaving only one alive. Naruto reads about the finest points of chakra control and is none the wiser.)