Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
/And the World Stops/
He almost laughed, a silent, dry chuckle, when he realized the utter futility of his maneuver. He stopped abruptly, flinging his arms out to the side to wait for his inevitable death in a flash of glory.
He ignored that voice at the back of his head. Coward, it said, Death is but an excuse to stop living.
He felt nothing.
His eyes were closed and a smile tugged at the end of his lips. But even with eyes closed, he could see the endless abyss stretching out before him.
He just needed to take one more step - one more step - and then, he was at peace.
Death came in a burst of painpainexcruciatingpain, but it didn't matter. Not anymore.
He was finally escaping. Finally. And as he faded away not even the distant cries of pain and anguish at his death could dampen his spirits.
"Naruto!"
And he died.
Dark chuckles resounded from the depths of his mind.
He first noticed that something was completely, irreversibly wrong when he realized that he was alive.
He stared at hard, weathered hands and the thought swirled around his head over and over, round and round.
I am alive.
The entire thing felt entirely too surreal.
Did I dream of my death?
He truly wouldn't be surprised. It hadn't been the first time.
But he could remember the pain, burning through his veins. It had cut through him, ingrained itself deeply into his soul.
And then there had been nothing.
I am dead.
An indisputable fact.
So is this hell?
The summer sun shining in the midday sky was shrouded by the thinning clouds, casting the slightest shadow upon the trees below.
He recognized this forest. He recognized the trees; the bark, the leaves, the smell.
He recognized the barely worn paths surrounding and encircling them.
He had walked them innumerable times himself.
This was the battlefield where he had died. Before it had become a battlefield in the first place.
This couldn't be hell. Hell was supposed to be torture, and this wasn't torture in any sense of the word. This was rejuvenation and renewal and a fresh start.
Is this a dream after all?
Dreams were conjured by the subconscious mind, he remembered Sakura once say. And the man knew, deep within his heart, that the only person he had ever hated was himself.
So this couldn't be a dream, any dream that would bring him joy would be impossible.
Is this heaven?
But, he remembered, he had once heard that heaven was for those that had done good deeds. For people who had saved lives.
And no matter how hard he tried, how much he sacrificed, all he had ever done was bring death.
No, this couldn't be heaven.
So where was he?
It was only when he heard a strangely familiar voice drifting through the trees that he realized his first guess had been correct.
Uzumaki Naruto leapt through the trees, an ear-splitting grin splattered across his face.
I'm a genin!
A nicked and chipped and altogether weathered hitai-ate decorated his forehead.
It bore the mark of a veteran, a mark that Naruto himself did not yet bear.
He cheered loudly, standing on the crown of one of the numerous trees around him.
"I'm Uzumaki Naruto!" he yelled into the stillness, "Konoha's future Hokage!"
His gaze swiveled to the faces chiseled in rock on the Hokage mountain, and his grin only widened.
"Just you wait, Hokage-jiji! I'm gonna surpass you someday!"
And he continued on his way, never noticing the startled, dull, sapphire eyes following his path.
The shinigami knew him well. There was nothing worse than reliving your own mistakes. This was his own personal hell.
The man's feet carried him by themselves, as if in a trance, to his first mistake, his first precious person.
And the first deaths that he had caused.
The sight that greeted him was one of pure white.
Fog obscured his vision, his vision of all but one section of the unfinished bridge.
A dome of ice sat innocuously, muffled screams of pain echoing from within.
His feet carried him incessantly forward.
Kakashi's single blood-red eye snapped to the side in surprise and suspicion.
Through the fog and mist, he could barely make out a second large chakra signature, right next to the first. Right next to Naruto, his brain interpreted.
But as the Kubikiri Houcho came crashing out of nowhere and Kakashi barely got a kunai in front of his heart in time to save his life, he decided that he had more immediate problems.
It wasn't like the chakra signature was hostile, anyhow.
That would have been an entirely different story.
He watched the man die - the man with the delicate frame and feminine features - stabbed through the heart by his teacher's chidori.
And the ground swallowed him whole.
This is my first death.
His feet were glued to the spot, his legs refused to move, and all he could do was stare as the Demon of the Mist, Momochi Zabuza killed the magnate Gatou with his last breath.
This is my second death.
When the mercenaries began jumping into the water to avoid the flood of clones, he tried to close his eyes, only to find that his eyelids would not move.
And this is my hundredth.
His heart writhed madly in his chest at the guilt and the only thought that comforted him was the fact that he deserved it. He deserved every second of this torture, every second that he relived his life.
This was hell.
All souls who came here deserved their torture.
The next place he roused himself to see was the Forest of Death.
He walked to a little clearing, where he could clearly feel the ghost of a poisonous purple chakra and the faint outline of long snake's teeth lodging themselves in a too pale neck.
And he waited.
Even in the flurry of activity and panic that was Orochimaru's attack on them in the Forest of Death, Sasuke's undeveloped Sharingan picked out all of the details and memorized them, making them into images that would never leave him.
Weeks later, secluded on a lonely precipice, training, he would suddenly remember tortured sapphire eyes, barely visible in the undergrowth.
He would remember pale lips mouthing the same words, over and over again.
Sorry, Sasuke.
He could not bear to watch the end of the Chuunin Exams.
It had been a triumph, he knew, a triumph of immeasurable proportions.
His legs stood, frozen, and he chuckled in self-loathing.
It was then that he realized that the roiling of his stomach wasn't entirely guilt, but also the pang of hunger.
It was then that he first began to doubt that this was truly hell, for what kind of hell would allow man the pleasure of taste?
As he unconsciously waited for blood-red chakra to seep out and sustain him, to keep him up and alive and not at all healthy, the absence of the ever-present voice in the back of his mind suddenly became apparent.
This time, his laugh was one of madness.
His last companion had finally left him.
For the first time in years, he pulled the chakra of the Kyuubi out with his own will. And that, in and of itself, brought him unfathomable pain.
He sat upon the head of Uchiha Madara, idly tapping his brittle fingers against the firm stone as he waited.
The sounds of faraway battle echoed in the distance; of kunai flying flesh pounding bodies smashing against the tree branches.
The man closed his eyes and remembered broken fingers and forbidding dark marks and genin bleeding out on the unforgiving forest floor.
But then the sound of fleshsandbone reached him, and he stiffened. It was almost time.
Almost of their own accord, his legs flexed, and he leapt and concealed himself within the pitifully far away forest to the side of the Valley of the End.
And they arrived.
The boy with the wings made of hands and the boy with the burning red fox cloak clashed in a cacophony of reds and purples and blues and oranges.
Chakra flared and dissipated and blood red eyes spun in and out of focus as manic, slitted, red stared back at them.
It was the demon versus the curse.
As they met in the air for one final clash of blue on blue on blue, a red, red claw reached out and slashed a long line across the forehead of the curse.
The curse won.
The curse was missing-nin.
And the man sitting in the trees felt the first wash of tears come over him as he slipped away, silent as a shadow.
This was the beginning of the end.
But the man had always known that.
The man's chakra was painted in blues and golds and reds.
He ignored his thinning fingers, his increasingly prominent ribs, his exponentially weakening figure as gold surged through his veins.
He struggled up, every bone, every ligament connected to delicate lines of blue that moved and corresponded to his every step.
The red cloaked him like a shadow, holding him up, supporting him.
He was getting old. And his refusal to eat food did nothing but speed it up.
His hair was lightening and greying and it grew out past his shoulders.
He gave a short bark of laughter.
If this wasn't hell, he didn't know what was.
He had always been afraid of growing old, of becoming useless.
And that was just what had happened.
The next years passed in a blur of death after death after death.
Chiyo and Jiraiya and Nagato and Konan and Neji and...
And...
He had failed them, had failed them all.
He had promised that they would win, that they would fight on and on and end that circle of hatred.
But he supposed that even the Great Toad Sage could be wrong every once in a while.
Perhaps he had cried the day of Jiraiya's death. He did not know. If so, the rain had hidden his tears.
This was his last stand, he knew.
This was his final error and final mistake and final breath.
And he watched the embittered man of blond blond hair and blue blue eyes fling his arms open and wait for death.
The attack connected and the man crumpled and- "Naruto!"
The dead man living was smiling and the life left his eyes and the world didn't shift.
There was no rift no change no relive your past again and again and again and the battle simply continued.
The battle continued and Madara was dead and- what?
Madara was dead and they had won.
What kind of hell is this?
And that was when he realized the truth. It hadn't been hell at all. It had been real. And he hadn't done a thing - not a single fucking thing.
And he stepped out into the light.
They turned and they hesitated at the sight of the old old man with the grey grey hair and protruding skeleton.
His sapphire eyes - they were the only things he could still recognize about himself - glinted dangerously and they readied their weapons and the world stopped.
Coward, his mind reminded him of its own accord. Death is but an excuse to stop living.
This time, he didn't smile when he died.
AN:
Well then.
This is rather... different. Not quite what I had in mind when I thought of making a time travel story in which Naruto didn't actually change anything. Rather strange too, as I've read absolutely no Naruto fanfiction for more than a month.
It's also unrealistic, as its impossible that no one would notice the superpowered jinchuuriki living off of chakra, yet when the aforementioned superpowered jinchuuriki steps into the light they all kill him.
Eh.
The plot holes (yes, plural) are gaping and huge but I'm still pretty proud of this. Most of my oneshots are written such that they can convey the death and despair in a coherent manner while this one has managed to slip to semi-coherent halfway through. I like it.
Anyways... there's random snippet that I couldn't find anywhere to put. It's rather stilted and awkward compared to the rest of it, so if it had gone in, it would've been heavily edited, but here you go anyways:
Jiraiya had entered Sage Mode on the stage of his death, and his eyes had widened.
There was a large amount of chakra simply sitting at the edge of his senses.
For a split second, it had reminded him of Minato.
But Minato had never had chakra quite as large or as wild as that of the stranger.
No, it was more like Kushina's, really, or Naruto's; the chakra of a jinchuuriki.
And then he realized why it had borne such an eerie resemblance to Minato.
It was almost identical to Naruto's chakra.
But Naruto, he knew, couldn't be here. He wasn't subtle enough to even think of infiltrating Ame.
And if it was Naruto, he would have jumped into the battle already anyways.
When he sank into the water, death consuming him, he was startled to see a middle aged man with long sunny blond hair and sapphire blue eyes staring down at him.
Minato?
He never noticed how frail the man was, never noticed the way the eyes reflected only guilt and madness, never noticed the faint whisker marks running down the sides of his face.
Perhaps the man had cried that night. He did not know. If so, the rain had hidden his tears.
Constructive criticism is always welcome, though I'll understand if you don't leave a review. I never do either.
Thank you for reading!
~Anivla01