Chapter 1

Summary: Uzumaki Namikaze Naruto comes to in a body that isn't his own, and a world he doesn't know.

This is a redone version of the first chapter of a new story called The Hidden. I feel like I didn't do it justice so I rewrote some parts. Hopefully it makes more sense now that last time.

Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, or anything outside my own body. I'm broke.

Fire. All he could remember when he first awoke was the fire searing his face; white-hot and merciless. He remembered screaming at the top of his lungs, unable to do anything else as he lay pinned under a collapsed burning support beam. It lay flat against the left side of his face, crushing his chest and arm.

He remembered pleading for his life at some point, for someone, anyone, to save him. He remembered swallowing fire for the first time, the way it burnt his mouth and throat and dug its cruel claws into his lungs, shredding them. He had prayed for death then, prayed for the fire to eat him whole, anything to stop the burning.

But the fire didn't eat him—it couldn't. Every time it ran its burning tongue along his skin, the burns would instantly heal. It could only suck at his skin with toothless lips, like a granny sucking at a Popsicle.

He wasn't sure how long he lay under the rubble, breathing in fire and screaming, but he did know that the smoke was almost as bad as the fire itself. In the blackened ruins of his old home, he had felt it snake down his throat and into his lungs, feeding him and choking him. Sometimes he dreamed about the smoke. He dreamed of the smoke as an old woman with grey skin, her thin arm pushing past his soft palate and down his throat. He dreamed of her long, crooked fingers wriggling into his lung. She would crone softly in his ear:

"That's right, dearie. Take your medicine. It's good for you."

The young blond threw himself out of bed, his mouth jammed open and his bulging from his sockets. He screamed but there was no sound. He winced at the sudden pain erupting inside his throat. It felt like he had swallowed a ball of razor wire. The familiar coppery tang of blood coated the back of his mouth.

He was in a bedroom, a child's bedroom judging from the size of the bed. And if it was a child's bedroom, then it was the weirdest one he had ever seen. The walls were covered with sheets of paper riddled with notes. They were plastered to the wall from the floor to the ceiling. A lot of them were old and mustard-yellow. The room stank of dust and old, stale paper.

He swung his legs out of bed and pushed off. Only he must have misjudged how far away the ground was because his legs crumpled beneath him as he hit the ground, and he landed flat on his face. The blond groaned into the tiles, then extracted his face from the floor. Something was wrong with his legs. He turned onto his back and gazed down at them. Instead of two long and well-muscled legs, they were tiny and spotless; a child's legs.

His alarm was only silenced by the fact that he had no voice. He took several small breaths interspersed long exhales, purposefully slowing his heartbeat to stop from panicking. His legs felt like sacks filled with beads and tingled excruciatingly. The blond cursed under his breath and then began the morbid and embarrassing crawl back towards his bed. When he had finished he took stock of himself. His upper body starting from his waist was wrapped in gauze that stank of aloe. Burn salves?

Despite the possible burns, the most worrying problem was that all he could see was a child's body. If he were any younger he would have been doing his best impression of a headless chicken, but years of war had steeled his will and sharpened his intellect. Instead he began to collect and compile as much information as he could gather.

He was somehow a child again, albeit one with what seemed like massive burns across his body. He was in a child's room, surrounded by hundreds of notes, some so old that he was sure they would disintegrate if he touched them. He also had someone else's memories. He almost dismissed his first assumption as impossible, then he remembered Raiya's words on the impossible:

"Remember kid, once you have eliminated all the possible solutions, then whatever is left, no matter how impossible or improbable, is the truth."

There was only the impossible left. He had somehow ended up in the past; or in some alternate reality; or this was some sort of illusion. But that was unlikely; a Genjutsu powerful enough to fool all of his senses simultaneously would require a constant supply of chakra being introduced into his system, something he would have noticed if it were happening.

So, he was either in the past or in another reality. You would think that he would be panicking or in denial, but ever since he had mastered the Hiraishin, his understanding of reality and its laws had become much more flexible. His father's technique was beyond jutsu. In fact, it was beyond all known laws of reality. The Hiraishin actually bent the laws of space and time, creating a miniature wormhole in the fabric of reality, allowing someone to move from one point in space to another instantaneously.

He sometimes felt like his father had left the jutsu to him as a sort of lesson. You couldn't master the Hiraishin without feeling the walls of your understanding being pulled down around you. Sometimes he felt like it had been his father's way of showing him that anything was possible. He wouldn't be surprised if that had been part of its original purpose.

Still, if he was somewhere in the past, then the real question was how did he get there? The last thing he remembered, of those memories that were truly his, was dying. He had been lying in the midst of a burning battlefield, all of his chakra completely gone, his body shutting down. It hadn't been especially painful but he supposed it was because he was too far gone to care at that point. He had just defeated the so called Goddess of Chakra, the woman who had taken a bite of the forbidden fruit of the gods and gained their power. Truth be told, defeating her had been easier than he thought it would be. She had been arrogant, believing she could defeat anyone because she was the progenitor of ninjutsu. But that had only meant she was not familiar with his true heritage, the greatest shinobi art: Fuuinjutsu.

He remembered the look on the all-mighty goddess's face as her power was locked away, taken back by the shinigami himself. She had lived past the extraction of her chakra, but it had left her a mortal woman. He had enjoyed jacking her in the jaw before he died. The look of shock and terrible realization on her face as she picked a tooth from her broken gum had been priceless. (The blond boy smiled at that particular memory. He loved taking people down a peg.)

He had been dying. His senses were leaving him. It was true death, like the smoke, slow and silent. Then there had been a sucking noise, as if his body was depressurizing, his consciousness being sucked out of its mortal shell. He had been sure it was death. Then he had awoken in a body that was not his.

The blond boy closed his eyes and began to feel for his chakra. He had no idea how old this body was, but he wanted to make sure that he could at least still do that. It came to him as easily and quietly as water flowing down a hill. He felt its warmth course through his tingling limbs, soothing him. The blond boy frowned. This was his chakra. The chakra he had before he ended up in this body. The chakra he had trained and refined his control over since he had been born. That wasn't supposed to be possible; chakra was native to your body. It was produced from a person's chakra core, as personal as a fingerprint. How had his chakra come with him?

Then he remembered when Hinata had died.

Pain—Nagato had killed her. The blond boy had been immobile, pinned to the ground by chakra disrupting rods through his hands and feet. She had appeared in front of him with her hands covered in blue fire and charged the self-proclaimed god with the greatest technique of her family, but it had been no use. Nagato had used his ability to repel matter to deflect all her attacks. As soon as Hinata came within range she was instantly blasted to the ground. It would have been fine if she had just stayed down, but Hinata had inherited his stubbornness. No matter how many times she was rebuffed she would get up again…and again…and again. He could still picture the way her body twisted limply in the air as she flew, as if she were filled with stuffing instead of flesh and bone. He could still hear her bones breaking upon the rocks and her muscles tearing under the strain. Both her arms had hung limp for her shoulders by the time Pain decided to end it.

He had begged her to stop, to just lie down, to just give up. She had just smiled, blood running down the crack of her mouth, and told him that she loved him. Pain had killed her with rod through the heart, quick and painless. She had slumped to the ground without a struggle. He remembered how she had looked at him, and the slowing thrum of her pierced heart. Then it had gone silent.

Sasuke had once told him that he wouldn't understand his loss until he had watched someone he loved being killed. The blond boy had scoffed at his words then. Hinata had been his epiphany. He had no idea what it meant to watch, to be completely helpless when someone needs you. Now he knew.

He remembered waking up underwater. He didn't bother holding his breath; he knew it wasn't real water, only despair. He thought about not standing up. He could just relax and float. That's what the dead do, isn't it? When they're in the water—they all float.

It was the thought of Pain's face that brought him to his feet. He hadn't even looked at her when he had killed her. It was like he had swatted a fly. Pain had killed the first person who had ever told him that she loved him, and it hadn't even been worth the effort to look at her. The thought that her death had been meaningless turned something black inside him. That had been the first time he had ever wanted to hurt someone.

He rose as if he were falling in reverse and broke the surface of the water without a sound. He was in what looked like a sewer. The walls were black with age and coated green with mold and scum, and water dripped from somewhere above. There were pipes built into the walls, each glowing blue as they pumped his chakra through his body. It was his room of his mind.

There was a huge gate in front of him. It was black and lined with bars that were almost as wide as he was. On the front of the gate, where the two sides met, was a large piece of paper with a seal on it. The seal looked like a six-year-olds drawing of the sun.

Two red eyes opened from behind the gates. They were both the size of manhole covers and glowed in the dark.

The thing behind the gates spoke, and the whole sewer trembled under its voice.

"So, you finally decided to visit? And during a flood no less."

The blond boy stared right into the thing's eyes. 'Shut up.'

A wave of crimson fire spewed out from the cage, turning the knee-high water into steam as it passed. The boy had merely held up his hand and the fire stopped in its tracks. He held it there for a second then closed his fist. The fire shrunk into a tiny ball of flame in his palm, and vanished without another sound. The sewer was now fogged with steam and a fine hissing noise like a tire deflating. He could barely see the cage anymore.

"I've been thinking about what you said. And you're right, I am too weak to defeat my enemies," he said, almost hearing the thing behind the gates smiling.

"But so are you."

Another wave of crimson fire came rushing towards him. He dismissed it without even blinking.

"Who do you think you're talking to, human!?" the thing behind the gates roared, shaking the entire sewer. "I am the Kyuubi-no-Kitsune! I am the most powerful entity that walks this earth!"

"Yeah, and all it takes is a pair of red and black eyes to turn you into a little puppy." He said.

The Kyuubi. How did the Human know his weakness?

"You forget this is MY mind. I see everything that happens here."

The Kyuubi was an all-powerful entity, capable of causing natural disasters with a flick of its tails, but it knew when to listen.

"I'm about to die.' The blond boy said without a hint of emotion. 'I can't beat this guy, and I won't let you take over, you would just destroy everything in your path."

"So you would rather die than release me?' The Kyuubi said. 'And you wonder why I despise humans."

"No. I would release you if I could trust you. But I can't. You tried to take my body once before."

The Kyuubi thrust the broad side of its body into the gates, shaking the whole room. "What would you do, Human?! What would you do if you were locked in the dark and forced to spend your life a prisoner in someone's mind because of human greed!? Wouldn't you try to escape? Wouldn't you give anything to be free from this fucking cage!?" The Kyuubi bellowed, thrashing its tails and howling at him.

The boy winced. It was true. Being locked in a cage for all of his life didn't sound fun. Anyone would try to escape.

He sighed. "You're right."

This stopped the Kyuubi's rant.

"What did you say?"

"I said you are right. Anyone would try to escape."

"And yet you would rather die than grant me my freedom?"

"No. I would rather die than let you destroy my home." The boy said. "But that wasn't the point of this conversation. I'm gonna die."

"So let me out! I could easily destroy this mortal who claims to be a god!"

"That's not going to happen though. Because I know after you're finished with him then you'll turn right around and start stomping on my village."

The great red eyes thinned. 'You think so little of me.' It was a statement rather than a question.

"You haven't given me any reason to trust you," the boy said.

The great fox got ready to respond then stopped. The boy was right. Neither of them had given the other a chance.

"So what will happen to us now?"

The boy looked inquisitively at the Kyuubi, still hidden behind the darkness of the cage and the dissipating steam, then smiled.

'There's only one way we'll be able to live together.'

The Kyuubi caught on before he could answer.

'Trust.'

Trust had been the thread that pulled them together. That first time had been like the first time he had sex (with whom he didn't say, not even to the Kyuubi). It had been exhilarating and frightening and somewhat awkward; they had to learn to share control of a single body, their consciousnesses fused together to form one entity. It had been difficult; they had to learn how to complement one another instead of trying to take control. They had almost died a number of times during that fight, but they had managed to come out on top without too much damage dealt to the surrounding area.

When it was done, and they discovered that the six they had thought were just puppets held together with chakra strings, they endeavored to confront the real Pain, who was hiding in a cave some miles away.

Pain was a disappointment. They had expected some sort of immortal being sitting on a throne made of human bone or something along that line. Instead they had beheld a shriveled root of a man with red hair and purple discs for eyes. His body was thin to the point that it was almost impossible to look at him without feeling guilty. He looked like the corpse of child that had starved to death. There was a bunch of black rods sticking out of his back.

There was a woman beside him. She had blue hair and yellow eyes. She was the one who used paper as her weapon.

Pain greeted the blond boy with a chakra rod through the stomach. The blond boy casually pulled the offending weapon from his guts and let it clank onto the floor.

Then Pain began to speak. His voice was ravaged, like he had spent most of his life screaming at the top of his lungs.

"So, now that you have experienced true pain, what is your answer?"

The blond boy, his pupil's split in two intersecting bars—one feral slit over a large horizontal bar of a frog's eye—forming the shape of a cross, resisted his other half's cries that told him to kill this piece of shit.

"I don't know the question. Kinda hard to answer a question without knowing what it is."

Pain took a moment to look at him. "You were Jiraiya's student once; he must have asked you the question. When he told you what it meant to be a shinobi."

Naruto remembered.

It had been just before they returned to Konoha at Tsunade's request. They had stopped at an inn on the way, mostly because Raiya needed a drink before the ribbing Tsunade was about to give him for not responding to her messages. The sky had been steel grey and lined with white clouds, the first sign of rain in almost a year.

The two sat side-by-side at the bar, sipping some sake. Raiya had introduced him to all the vices of the shinobi lifestyle except for whoring. Tsunade would break his back if she ever heard that he had taken her darling surrogate son to a whorehouse.

They had been sipping sake from their cups when Raiya had suddenly stopped drinking. He had turned to the blond boy and said his name. That caught the blond's attention. Raiya never called him by his name; he had always been "brat". He had once asked the older man when he would stop calling him a brat. Raiya had just smiled and said:

"Never."

The blond boy turned to him, the drinking cup and raised halfway to his face.

"What?" he asked.

"It's time for your final lesson, brat. It's something none of my previous students could answer, not even the Fourth." Raiya said, setting down his cup. The blond boy mirrored him. Raiya knew that would get its attention.

"By now you must know what it means to be a shinobi. And not that protecting-the-village or fighting-to-prove-the-glory-of-your-village bullshit they teach in the academy." Raiya smiled in a way that was almost painful to watch. "You know what I said when you made your first kill?"

The blond boy did remember. He had been facing a missing-nin, and that bastard had taken a small boy as a hostage. He had threatened to kill the boy if he didn't surrender. The blond boy had taken one look at the small boy's face and lowered his weapons. Then he quickly threw a kunai at the man's face. The kunai whistled through the air before it pierced his left eye.

He hadn't died immediately though. At first he just let the boy go. Then he had tried to pull the kunai from his eye. He had reached with both hands twitching violently as if he were a marionette controlled by a monkey. When that failed, he tried levering it out of his skull by weighing down on it with his arms. By then his knees were jerking with the force of it. He had collapsed like a puppet when its strings are cut.

That would have been fine, but then the really nightmare inducing thing happened. He did a dance as he died. His body jiggled and wiggled and jived on the floor, the backs of his feet batting against the ground and his head thumping up and down; he looked like a corpse with an electrical current running through it. Then his body went still—thankfully still—and didn't move again.

The blond boy hadn't been able to sleep for a week after that. His nights were spent laying completely still, trying not to twitch. It had gotten so bad that Raiya had banned him from training because he kept passing out. His sensei then said something that spelled it out for him, what it meant to be a shinobi, without any of the bullshit attached.

"Shinobi kill, brat. It's been that way since there was even a word for it. A shinobi kills, or is killed. There is no way around it. You say you want to be a shinobi, you want to the Hokage, well that means you need to kill."

Raiya had taken one look at stricken boy then sighed.

"And there's no excuse. No way you can take it back. You murdered that man. You did it because if you didn't then that boy would be dead right now. But that doesn't take away from the fact that you murdered him; you stole his life and killed any future he had. And you have to live with that."

He waited until he couldn't bare the look on the blond boy's face anymore.

"I'm sorry kid. We suckered you into this life. Us. Me, Tsunade, your teachers in the academy, Kakashi, even Sasuke, I think. We lied to you and fed you tales of heroism and bravery and all that bullshit. We did it because we needed you. We needed you to be strong."

Raiya pulled the blond boy into his arms.

"I'm sorry kid."

The blond boy didn't know whether to feel angry or betrayed or sad. So he just screamed instead. Screamed, and cried.

The blond boy nodded. "Yeah, I remember."

Raiya took a moment to look at the blond boy. He had grown well over the past three years. He had grown tall, almost tall enough for the top of his head to reach Raiya's chin. He hadn't bothered to cut his blond hair since they started, so now it hung loose and draped over his shoulders. He had taken to combing it daily, so it looked very smooth and glossy. His face was so much like his father's that it sometimes hurt to look at him. He hadn't grown any stubble; his father hadn't been able to grow any facial hair either. It was his eyes though, that got Raiya the most. They may have been the wrong color but they are his mother's eyes. And they had all loved his mother, maybe even more so than his father. And maybe that was why they loved the blond boy the most.

Raiya took another shot of sake as if it would make him brave.

"Shinobi kill. And death breeds pain. Pain breeds anger. Anger breeds Hatred. Hatred breeds death. So you could say that Shinobi are the main cause in a cycle of pain and anger and hatred and death that always ends in bloody war."

"You can't mean that—"

"It's exactly like that!" Raiya spat. "Now let me finish."

"If Shinobi are part of a long chain of hatred that ends in inevitable war, then what will you, a shinobi, do about it?"

The blond boy took a moment to look at his sensei. Raiya's brow was furrowed together. His eyes were filled with dreadfully hopeful light. The blond boy had a feeling that this was the culmination of his training with the old man. For whatever reason Raiya had decided to train him, his answer would determine whether or not the old man had been wasting his time.

"I don't know." He said truthfully. He said it because he felt that any other answer he could think, any of the introspective speeches or declarations of "breaking the cycle", would have been lies. They would have tasted foul as he said them.

Raiya had scrutinized him for a moment then smiled brilliantly, as if he were a man who had just proposed to by the love of his life.

"That may be the best answer I've ever heard," Raiya said.

The blond boy had smiled back just as brilliantly.

They both drank more sake, and said nothing else.

"How will you break the cycle of pain?" Pain asked.

The blond boy, now much older than when Raiya had asked him this question, felt his new partner go quiet; even he knew the significance of the question. He took several calming breaths as memories of Hinata's death erupted from the back of his mind; each one punctuated by the sound of Pain's voice.

"Honestly, I don't care. All I can think about is how much I want to kill you," he growled.

Pain sighed. "It is as I suspected. All succumb to pa—"

"I wasn't done speaking yet!" The blond boy snapped.

The self-proclaimed god stopped talking, but the boy could see from the slight widening of his eyes that he had been startled. He smirked.

"Raiya told me about you. Said that there were three orphans when they were first named the Sannin. I'm assuming one of the corpses was the third member of your party."

The woman with the blue hair stepped towards him but Pain raised a hand and she stopped moving. The look in her eye told the blond boy that she would very much like to shut him up. Pain signaled him to continue.

"I can imagine your story; I've heard it so many times that it's hard to feel sympathy for you. Everybody has their reasons, their justifications for what they do. That's the thing about pain. It makes people selfish. If you experience it for long enough then you lose the perspective. Your sense of the world shrinks to tunnel vision. It's all about your pain, your suffering. Nothing else and no one else matters. Kind of like you."

This time the blue-haired woman did attack him. Before Pain could stop her, the blond boy had her pinned against the cave wall with one hand around her throat. Red miasma had formed around his hand and it ate at her throat. Smoke hissed under his grip. The woman abandoned her attack and began clawing at his hand. She screamed but it came out as a thin wheeze of air with no actual strength.

"Let her go!" Pain yelled. The blond boy enjoyed the way Pain's voice cracked at the end of his sentence. His voice sounded like dry leaves being crushed under a heavy boot.

The blond boy watched the blue-haired woman writhe under his grip the way he might examine a fly writhe on the floor after ripping its wings off. The woman's face was turning reddish-purple now and tears streamed down the sides of her gaping mouth, her tongue flailing in the dark tunnel of her throat. She wheezed again in a long hard breath, a failure of a scream.

"LET HER GO NOW!" Pain screamed, thrashing in his place. The blond boy watched him. The Kyuubi snickered.

"It seems like even gods can bleed," he said.

"You remember that girl you killed?" the boy said to the god. Then he twisted his hand. The blue-haired woman's neck snapped with a sound like a twig being stepped on.

The blond boy watched as the man named God screamed. He screamed as loud as his tortured voice could hold on. His arms reached out to grab a hold of her, to cradle her, but he couldn't; he couldn't move. He suddenly seemed like how he looked, a broken old man with no way to do anything for himself.

The blond boy smiled cruelly. He had just gotten a wonderful, horrible idea.

"Now you know true pain."

Pain's eyes darted to the blond boy, and something seemed to light up behind his eyes. They were purple moons in the dark.

The blond boy stopped smiling. "You know what you're feeling right now? That's called perspective."

Pain looked at him the way Sasuke had looked at him that night they had fought. They both had murder in their eyes.

"I will kill you," he said flatly.

The blond boy tilted his head. He smiled thinly.

"Don't be so dramatic."

Then, before the man named God could react, the blond boy buried his thumbs in the man's eyes.

Pain screamed, his eyes turned to blazing coals and leaking boiling tears down his face. He only stopped when two hands grabbed his shoulders and shook him. When he opened the lids of his eyes the pain fell away like the dregs of a bad dream. He realized that he was on his back, staring at the black ceiling of the cave. Konan was shaking him awake. Had he fallen asleep?

The blond boy answered his question.

"So now that you've been reminded of what true pain is, how do you feel?"

Pain sat up abruptly and glared at the blond boy.

"You dare?!"

"I do," the boy said, "now to answer your question: I don't know."

Pain stumbled over his anger. He had not been expecting that. An insipid speech about breaking the cycle, or maybe something their sensei had told him, but not a simple 'I don't know'.

"What?" Pain asked, because he didn't have anything else to say.

"I don't know. I don't know how to break the cycle; I don't know how to make people let go of their hate; I don't know how to take away their pain. I just don't know."

Pain digested his answer in silence. When he was finished he began to laugh. At first it was loud and boisterous but grew feeble near the end, like an emergency siren's howl.

"It seems that Jiraiya has failed then.

"How so?"

"Our sensei was searching for what he called the child of destiny, someone who would end the cycle. He once believed that it was I who would do it, and I've obviously failed that title. He believed that the Fourth would do it, but he died. And then he found you. When I heard that he had another apprentice I thought that maybe he had finally found the one he had been looking for. But it seems he was wrong."

The blond boy frowned. "I don't know about finding the child of destiny, but I don't think he failed."

"And how do you assume that?" Pain asked.

"I don't think this child of destiny is a person. I don't think there could be anyone who could fit that role. It's just too big." He rolled a hand through his blond hair, trying to collect his thoughts. "I mean, you have the sage's eyes but you don't have his will."

The blue haired woman named Konan wanted to protest but Pain placed a hand on her shoulder, silencing her.

"And the Fourth had the will, but he was weak. He didn't have the strength to change the world."

"And you?" Pain asked.

"I don't know about me. I've never been a genius, I don't have a bloodline, and I don't know if I can leave this cave without killing you."

This time, Konan situated herself in front of Pain.

"But," here the red chakra flared again, coating the blond boy's body with red light, "I do have something neither of you did."

Pain stood up, taking a hold of Konan's shoulder for support. "And what is that?"

The blond boy looked at his hand. "I'm not alone."

"Maybe this child of prophecy isn't a single person but a group of people, each with their own parts to play. Maybe we were meant to meet. Maybe we were meant to have this conversation. And if that's true, then maybe all this was meant to show you something."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," the blond boy said, picking up the discarded chakra rod at his feet, "maybe I was meant to show you something. Something you taught me." Then he stabbed himself in the leg with it.

Pain prepared for another assault upon his mind but had no way of defending himself as the floor beneath him gave way. He fell for a few moments before landing in a pool of water. He resurfaced a second later, whirling around, his red hair whipping around his skull. His adversary was in the distance. The blond boy was standing in front of a gigantic cage. Behind the bars of the gates were two glowing red eyes. Pain knew it was the Kyuubi, could feel its power even in this illusion. He knew that this was one of the blond boy's memories. What he couldn't understand was why the blond had decided to show him this.

The blond boy then did something amazing. He stepped inside the cage. Pain almost warned the boy before he remembered that this had already happened.

"Why did you show me this?" Pain asked, posing his question to the open air.

The boy appeared behind him. "I wanted to show you my answer. This was the first moment I tried to actually talk to the Kyuubi without demanding something of him. This was the moment we decided to trust one another."

Pain looked at him quizzically.

"I mean maybe that's all we need. Maybe we just need to trust one another. And trust only comes when we learn to share our pain instead of holding on to it."

"So you plan on sharing your pain with me?" Pain asked.

The blond boy smiled bitterly. "I don't need to. You were there."

Pain remembered the girl he had killed, and then remembered the way he had felt when the blond had showed him Konan's death. He winced.

"So I assume it is my turn."

"Only if you want to."

The two looked at one another and felt the world slip out from underneath their feet, rushing past them with a sound like a train bellowing through a tunnel. When the world finally slowed down, it was raining. They were standing in a valley. In the distance were Pain and the orange haired man who would become Pain's first puppet. Above them, peering over the edge of one of the sides of the vallry, was the man who had defeated the Sannin, Hanzo the Salamander. He had Konan on her knees and had a kunai pressed against her throat.

"This was the moment I became Pain." Pain said. The boy could hear the slightest hitch in his throat.

Hanzo demanded that Pain kill the orange-haired man. He said he would kill Konan if he didn't. Pain hesitated and looked at the kunai in his hand. While he did that the orange-haired boy rammed himself onto the exposed blade.

The blond boy winced as the younger Pain screamed in grief and desolation.

The vision cut to black.

Both men awoke simultaneously. Konan's eyes darted between them. They both looked tired, as if they had gone through some great tragedy together.

"So what now?" Pain asked.

"Now comes the hard part." The blond boy said.

Konan moved to confront the boy but stopped when he turned around.

"You said that Raiya had failed. I said you were wrong. You're wrong because I choose to believe in what he believed. I choose to trust in him, the way he trusted in me, and in you." Pain looked at him. "I choose to not give in to my pain."

As he walked away, he said something that made the God weep: "I forgive you."

Two things happened that day that would forever confirm that he had made the right decision:

All the people who died or had been killed by Pain's attack were miraculously revived; and the blond boy never saw either of Jiraiya's students ever again.

Pain had manipulated his puppets with chakra. And maybe that was the key. Maybe chakra wasn't just made from the body. The more he learned, the more it seemed to be that chakra, at least in part, came from someone's very soul. And if his chakra was here, and if it came from his sould, then this wasn't a dream, or a genjutsu or even reincarnation.

This was real.

You'll notice, if you read my other work, that I had to take a completely different approach with this one. I'm trying to practice my novel writing, so if it reads like a novel then I've accomplished my goal. Also, please leave me a comment, I want to do better and you can help me by telling me how good (or bad) I'm doing.

Until later!