!!PLEASE READ!!
Um...hi. Anyways, this new story is a time travel one. I know, it's been done before, but I have yet to see one exactly like this one. This story will be mostly in Gaara POV, though we will get the occasional input from other people as well.
I should warn you all before I start of a couple things:
(1) Pairing of a few people are going to change from the ones that are shown at the begining of the story. So just look out, ok.
(2) There are going to be OCs. Lots of OCs. This is because this story takes place (for the most part) in Suna. Along with that, there are going to be arcs that are not showed in canon for a similer reason.
(3) Gaara is going to have an OC personality. This is because he's spent close to seven years in the company of Naruto and the crew.
If you do not like these things, the Back Button is on the top left corner of your screen. Please do not tell me about how much you hate OCs that play main rolls in stories and that many of the characters are out of character. I haven't gotten a review like that before, but I hear that some authors have. You've been warned.
Ok, I believe that I've been talking way to much and need to get on with the show. So here we are!
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. If I did, most likely, Naruto would be female.
I'll do anything
Just to hold you in my arms
Try to make you laugh
I just can't put you in the past
A Path to Destruction
People say that before you die your entire life flashes before your eyes. Every moment, every instance of loss and gain, of happiness and sorrow, is relieved in a few seconds. It gives people a time to reminisce, to see the wrongs that they have committed, to see their friends and family that are long-gone, once more, and to give them more reason to fight.
For the third time in his life, Sabaku no Gaara's life flashed before him.
He was three when he first saw his brother and sister, Kankuro and Temari (though at the time, they were Kankru and Temi). They smiled, played games, and laughed together. For a time, the three were a family. And then his father took them away. And once again, Gaara was alone.
He was six when he learned what love was. Yashamaru, his uncle, explained to him that it was a powerful source that drove people to protect each other and made them the strongest that they could be.
Gaara was six when his uncle tried to kill him, sending him over the edge, and spiraling into madness.
Not that he blamed Yashamaru, anyways. From the notes that he had read, written in his uncle's almost loopy kanji, the man really did love him at one point. It was his father, the Yondiame Kazekage, that drove him to do what he did that moonlit night, planting seeds of destruction until Yashamaru couldn't see left from right.
Gaara was twelve when his life flashed before him for the first time.
It wasn't how he had originally imagined it. The red head had imagined that if that day was to come, where he was defeated, he would have taken an attack full blast and destroyed, his image wiped off the earth in less than a second.
But it wasn't. Gaara life flashed as Uzumaki Naruto crawled towards him on the forest floor and told him that he was going to die.
And for once, Gaara believe him.
After that, the Shukaku jinchuuriki attempted to change his image. He tried to make bonds, tried to be good person, and tried to be human for once in his life.
And it paid of, for when he was fifteen, Sabaku no Gaara was offered the position as Kazekage.
He was sixteen when Deidara of Akatsuki kidnapped him. The extraction process was horrible, simply indescribably horrible, and it when on for three days. Luckily, Chiyo and the Konoha ninja that were sent to get him back arrived just in time to stop them from extracting Shukaku from his body. And he had to lie there, completely exhausted, as he watched Chiyo – the woman who was his curse, who stuck Shukaku inside him, who he had wanted to kill so badly all of his life – as she strengthened the seal with the last of he chakra, and die with a smile on her face.
It was after that that Gaara realized that the near extraction had not only weakened him, but Shukaku as well. When he saw the demon in his mind, his heart nearly broke. Even though the Ichibi was the bane of his existence, Gaara had always believed the bijuu to be strong and mighty. The thing before him was small and weak and barely able to hold it's form together. The kage knelt before Shukaku and gave him the remaining bit of his chakra, hoping that he could nurse the bijuu back to health.
He was sixteen when he enters a partnership with Shukaku.
Surprisingly enough, this was not the second time that his life flashed before his eyes, simply because he had excepted the fact that he was going to die.
He was sixteen when Pein of Akatsuki attacked Konoha. Though the young Kazekage was not there for the battle, the reports he had received said enough. Tsuande had battled Konan, the partner of the Red Dawn Leader. The blue haired woman had been killed, but the fight had left the Hokage with some very nasty wounds that even she couldn't recover from. Along with that, every single ninja he had known (along with a few others) had ganged up on Pein. God he may have been, the orange haired man was simply too out numbered to fight and had to retreat. He had already lost three of his six bodies.
Konoha was not without it's losses as well. On top of an injured Tsuande, there were several civilian causalities, along with the deaths of three very important people to the self-proclaimed Konoha 12. Sharingan no Kakashi, Maito Gai, and the ROOT ninja known only as Sai had had their names carved on the memorial stone by the end of the day.
Gaara had been nineteen when his brother and sister died.
They had not gone out in an epic battle between good and evil, nor in a small, damp dungeon after a failed undercover mission. They were killed by Kabuto, the second and last leader of Otogakure, because they were the brother and sister of the Kazekage. The medic-nin had hung their corpses on either side of his statue in the council chamber room and wrote a message in their blood.
"Welcome to Hell, Kazekage-sama."
He was nineteen when he declared war on Oto, and he was nineteen when the Godaime Hokage died, the wounds from her battle with Konan finally catching up to her.
She had called Naruto to her hospital room that day, weak and frail as – one by one – her organs shut down.
The blonde woman told his fellow jinchuuriki that he was going to be the next Hokage. She told him that she loves him, and will always love him.
When Tsuande calls Naruto her baby brother, he begins to cry, telling her that everything was going to be alright, that they could heal her, that they could-
But they couldn't, so Naruto spilled empty promises in a desperate attempt not to loose his baa-chan.
And then Tsuande told him about his parents. About the Yondaime Hokage, Namikaze Minato, and his wife, Princess Uzumaki Kushina of Whirlpool Country.
She tells Naruto that they would be so proud of him.
Tsuande's last words are not address to Naruto nor the village (unlike the former four Hokage's), but to someone that had been dead for close to three years.
"Jiraiya, you old pervert, I love you. And I am coming."
The Rokudaime Hokage, Namikaze Uzumaki Naruto, becomes the third and final person to see Tsuande without her genjutsu. Before telling the ANBU outside that the Godaime Hokage is dead, he reapplies it.
Gaara was nineteen when he watched as his best friend achieved his dream. And he was there when Naruto disappeared two weeks later.
To his surprise, Naruto had not been kidnapped by the Akatsuki or any organization. The blonde had left at his own accord, and came back five days later, carrying a blind, weak, and tired Uchiha Itachi on his back. The eldest Uchiha was to be reinstated as a ninja and the truth about the Uchiha Massacre be revealed.
No one asked the new Hokage where he found Itachi, but when asked why he brought him back, Naruto said, "That I feel a storm coming, and we are going to need all the help we can get."
Itachi became the first ninja in history to use a chakra pulses to see. He was given the position of right-hand man to Naruto, the to whom he swore to protect with the life that the blonde had given him.
Gaara was twenty when he avenged his siblings deaths.
It was a last gasp attempt made by Oto to finish the war that they had started. An all out attack on Suna, ever man armed to the teeth with weapons and mutated forms of the cursed seal. It was there that the Nidaime Otokage met his match, and it was one of the messiest that Gaara had caused in years.
After the death of Kabuto, the Oto nin where sent into disarray without a leader to guide them. Baki, Gaara's former sensei, adviser, and father-figure, told the Suna ninja to attack them, but Gaara held him back, telling them to retreat behind the walls. The older man looked ready to argue when he saw the look in the younger boy's eyes; a look that should have died after the red head fought Uzumaki Naruto of the Leaf in that failed invasion so long ago.
Gaara came back to Suna two days later covered in blood. He waved off medic-nins, mumbling about how it wasn't his, before turning to his sensei.
"Oto is no more."
No one asked about what had happened, but needless to say, his fan club lost about half of it's members that day.
Gaara was twenty when Akatsuki and Team Hawk perished in the streets of Konoha.
The battle was (according to the reports) short, swift, and bloody as the attacking force didn't stand a chance. The first to go was Hoshigaki Kisame, who was taken down by the combined forces to Shino, Gemna, Iruka, and Raido. After him were Karen and Suigetsu, who fell to Team 10's superior teamwork. It was supposed to have been something out of a cheesy romance movie, as Suigetsu had confessed his love to Karen right before they died. Jugo was brought down by Hinata and Kiba, a battle that gave the young Hyuuga her confidence and the Inuzuka some humility.
It was the battle between the members of Team 7, the Neo Sanin as they called them now, that was the most devastating. Everything from snake summons to insane strength to the occasional Futon: Rasengan was seen. But in the end, when the three were running low on chakra, Sasuke admitted defeat in an attempt to bring Naruto close enough to kill him. The blonde Hokage is able to embrace his best friend one last time before the younger Uchiha plunges Chidori into his heart.
At this point, Sakura looses it and blows off her former crushes head with her inhuman strength.
Gaara is twenty when the Kyuubi enters a partnership with Naruto, and in a desperate attempt to keep the blond boy alive, give him the power of instant regeneration.
Pein, on the other hand, fights Itachi who (after Katoning Zetsu out of existence) is able to trick the leader of Akatsuki into revealing his true body. The former missing-nin deals a lethal blow to the body of the one known as Nagato, and as the man lies dying, he called out to the masked man who was sitting in the tree branches watching. Pein asks Madara to help him, to finish off the village of Konoha, but the eldest Uchiha shakes his head. He spoke to Pein in the voice of a child who had died so long ago, telling the orange haired man that he was a peace loving fool, one who had served his purpose.
Pein, realizing he had been tricked, called Itachi to him. He gives the blind Uchiha a scroll, telling him to only use it as a last resort before dying.
The Akatsuki Leader's last words are, "Itachi…time travel…"
Gaara was twenty two when his life flashed before him a second time. He was twenty two when Suna – his village, his everything – was destroyed by the Nanabi no Kabutomushi, controlled by Uchiha Madara.
The attack came without warning of any kind, as a faint buzzing sound before a purple fog rolled over the cliffs that surrounded the village. Everyone was killed, everyone but him. Konoha teams found him three days later, lying next to the gravestones of his siblings, kept alive only by Shukaku's chakra.
It took Sakura four months to flush the toxins from his system.
Gaara was twenty two when he was instated as a Konoha ninja, though he kept his Kazekage title.
The first thing that he did was track down Rock Lee, now a jonin and a little quieter after the death of Gai, to teach him the basics of taijutsu. The red head took what he learned from the spandex wearing man and created his own still, something which combined inhuman flexibility and speed. On top of that, he developed a move based off of the Yondaime's and Rokudaime's Hiraishin no Jutsu. He called it Shunpo.
Gaara was twenty five when Naruto asked him to take over Jiraiya's position as Konoha's Spymaster. The red head agreed whole heartedly and almost immediately formed a spy network under the alias of Kage. The network was known about across the elemental nations, especially after a woman named Kaze began to show up. No ever expected that Kaze, a red headed flirt of a woman, was really Sabaku no Gaara in disguise.
He was twenty five Konoha entered an era of prosperity, as missions began to come in faster than before. Haruno Sakura became Namikaze Sakura after Naruto proposed to her, and within half a year there was news that the couple was expecting a child.
Gaara was twenty five when Sakura asked him to be the god father. The red head had never been so proud in his life.
But after a while, the Kazekage (as people still called him) began to notice something. A few things actually. The first thing that he noticed was that he was absolutely addicted to coffee and cookies. Along with that, he had developed a sense of humor, and began acting a lot like most of the people around him. But the third thing caught him off guard and made him feel almost disgusted with himself. He noticed it as Sakura was in labour, and her screams of pain echoed through the white washed, monotone hallways of the hospital.
He was in love with his best friend's wife and Head Medic, Namikaze Sakura.
Gaara was twenty nine when Madara began to systematically unleash bijuu on the Hidden Villages.
Iwagakure and Takigakure were burned to the ground by the blue and black flames of the Nibi no Bakeneko.
The citizens of Kirigakure and Yukigakure drowned as the Sanbi no Kyodaigame unleashed its fury upon them.
Kumogakure and Soragakure perished beneath the strength of the Hachibi no Kyogyu.
Amegakure and Hoshigakure were buried beneath molten lave and rock by the Yonbi no Saru.
The people of Yugakure and Getsugakure died from their blood boiling in their veins from the steam power of the Gobi no Irukauma.
The citizens of Kusagakure and Takumi Village chocked to death on the soap bubbles from the Rokubi no Namekuji.
Gaara was part of the rescue efforts made by Konoha to find survivors. All of the teams failed, as their were none.
Gaara was thirty when his life flashed before him for a third and final time. He along with Itachi, Naruto, Sakura, and behind her their daughter, stood on the Hokage tower gazing at the hell that was brought onto them by a mad Uchiha on a revenge streak.
Seven bijuu stood at the gates, infinitely high amounts of yokai pouring from them. Madara, his mask off, showing off the face of an Uchiha boy that should have died in the Third Ninja War, stood proudly on the top of the Hachibi no Kyogyu.
"Survive this, Konoha!"
Gaara summed up their predicament in two simple words:
"Holy shit…"
Ok, chapter over. Sorry to leave you on a cliffhagger but it was needed. No, we're not going ot see what happened during the bijuu fight of doom, merely the after effects. And their not pretty.
If you've got any questions about the time line, feel free to ask.
EDIT: This is the updated version with the cannon bijuu.