Disclaimer: Naruto is the property of Kishimoto Masashi.
It's All Relative
Prologue
The sun sets, the moon rises, the world spins, I walk. Gods above, or below; wherever they are—I doubt their realm of existence would be so prosaic as just to be looking down upon us—I walk, everywhere. I've walked so long I forgot more things than people can imagine knowing. It gets tedious sometimes, my travels before more akin to if-I-don't-run-the-world-is-going-to-end-(basically). A megalomaniac with a serious god delusion, who seems to have to have the skills to back it up, tends to make you run away really fast.
Long story short, Pein ended things, like Konoha even after they unwillingly gave up my presence at Myobokuzan, or Madara (only us jinchuuriki are truly immortal) when he tried to rein in 'his' tool. Naturally, Tsunade was too stubborn to die on anyone's terms but her own, forcing her way into our part of the astral plane from Katsuyu's, giving me one last command, "run, Naruto, run." Now, running wasn't really my style, but it was a great plan. Pein couldn't exactly bend the world to his will if he didn't have the Kyuubi. Many, many years later I found out that the Kyuubi, and its master, could actually subjugate the chakra of the other eight bijuu. So I guess Pein was left with a gigantic summoning statue with an ass-load of chakra and no way to leverage it (because I was running).
Somewhere along the way while I was running from Akatsuki, and sometimes Hebi, a couple Kages got together and rained holy hell down on Ame, wiping out the entire country. And somewhere along the way, soon after I found out that Akatsuki was finished, Konoha had become a husk, no one who remembered me left, or alive for that matter. I forget how long I was on the lam, small details like dates are super fuzzy now, but I was just hoping even after a couple, well maybe several decades someone might still be around. So then I downgraded from running for my life to wandering around for the rest of my life—what a joke that turned out to be. What else was I supposed to do?
The sun rose, the moon set, the world spun, I fucked. I spent a good amount of time fucking my way across the world but after a couple hundred years even that got old. So I went to just walking. Towards the end, I think I could justify calling it that, I didn't even remember half the things I saw, just vague feelings I might have hiked through this mountain pass, might have swum in this lake, might have fondled a pair of similarly shaped breasts.
Really, the only thing I always remember was my time in Konoha and when I was on the road with Jiraiya. I guess that might explain what's happening to me, but I never really did like those bullshit metaphysics and self-realization books. Hold those thoughts, back to walking. So I was walking—common theme for a couple thousand years—lucky enough to be living Orochimaru's dreams, walking and walking away my immortal life until it seems Kyuubi and I walked through the end of time.
Rather, I walked and the fox was there because it had no choice. I sorta remember it getting really hot, then cold, then black for a long long time, during which I think I just sat around with Kyuubi and some of her (Kyuubi is a kitsune after all) demon friends. It might have just been in my mind, but damn, they tell some funny stories. Then at one point, sometime during all the story telling, Kyuubi and I look at each other and screamed till our throats are raw.
I'm pretty sure we both felt the same thing, a sense of foreboding imminence, before we were literally eviscerated, reconstituted, and then quite suddenly left alone, just the two of us floating along to wherever we were supposed to end up.
And that's the rub. We were floating for a long time—surprise. Kyuubi had taken to composing rather violent collections of rondeaus, love children of her weird obsession with the number thirteen and dispensing doom and destruction. I alternated between laughing at her and entertaining myself with various bodily noises—always fascinating; then we were bright and blazing before being torn apart again, and with growing horror, watching ourselves become imprisoned. It may have been a little easier for Kyuubi to see it for the second time, but one tends to be stunned thinking about their origins (kids hate inadvertantly visualizing their parents fucking), so I was quiet and watched the Yondaime seal a rampaging demon into a squalling child.
Don't ask me how this all happened. How do you watch yourself in the past? How do you go back in fucking time? If we really did go back in time, and this wasn't just some hallucination, why wasn't Kyuubi, well Kyuubi and doing the entire attack!destroy! and why wasn't I being born or sucking my first tit or getting inked with my death-mark? Like I said, metaphysics aren't really my strong point. The last twelve years I just chalked it up to some reincarnation bullshit and lazed around in Kyuubi's cage. Not much else to do besides chill and talk shit to Kyuubi about her getting sealed again and being stuck with two Naruto's this time around—if this wasn't just some huge dream.
But it wasn't a huge dream, far from it. Jiraiya would have loved to use my situation as some sort of literary device illustrating god knows what—writing was his thing after all. Nutshell!; the moment our host Naruto realized that he was the Kyuubi's vessel, I realized I was alive again and something immense and terrifying crystallized in our minds, and then we were one; which is where it all began, again.
Author's Note: I was trying to work on Searing Tattoo when this popped right out of my mind onto paper. Just a one-shot thingy, needed to get it out of my brain. Don't hold your breath for more. The only real good time-travel fic was Second Chance and that's probably never going to be updated again.