"We can never be gods, after all-but we can become something less than human with frightening ease."
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

-ooo-

He has always known there were other worlds than his own, other realities, and the knowing was both a gift and a curse. He's felt them always, trembling at the edge of his perception, like a mirage on the horizon. Always just a tantalizing glimpse of a place barely imagined, sometimes passing familiar, but never quite the same.

When he was a young, flush with his power and finally able to peer through the veil into these other worlds to see these places and lives in truth, he took a sort of twisted pleasure from looking in on them. From watching the fear and hate and joy of those lives play out again and again. It wasn't until he was older, much older, with an eternity at his back and and an endless future sprawled at his feet, that he truly understood the danger those lives represented. The madness of allowing those flickering, fleeting glimpses to survive and thrive in such ways that that boy might grow to become something like him: a threat, a danger to his plans, to his world.

Certainly it wasn't ever likely to come to pass, he had thought in the beginning, when the idea first occurred to him long before any evidence of such a possibility was presented. The few incidental demonstrations of such abilities were surely anomalies more than indicators of a problem or a true reason for concern. After all, the boy was almost always soft, distracted, too caught up in the tiny dramas of his daily life to perceive of a drama unfolding on an infinitely larger scale around him. He almost always grew up kind or good or in devotion to some cause or other. He was never born with immense or a threatening degree of raw talent and power, never born with an innate sense of purpose that drove him towards a life beyond the petty concerns of the flesh. No, this boy was always born with only the barest glimmer of potential and though it was often augmented by the power of the Kyuubi, that power was most often sealed off within him, dormant and inaccessible within him. No, he was most often just a boy. Just a helpless child with a curse planted in his heart and a seal written across his skin. Nothing to worry over.

As the boy grew older, his purpose, his drive, always came from something outside of himself. Sometimes that cause was the village in which he was born. Often that cause was a boy. Most often the last scion of the Uchiha clan, a child who was just as alone and hurt as he, with a few crucial differences. The Uchiha was a destiny that boy couldn't ever seem to escape in those lives where that child featured prominently. Tragedy followed him like a loyal pet and always became a snare to catch and hold him fast. A snare that he was never able to escape on his own, that only pulled him deeper the more he struggled against it. Uzumaki Naruto spent lifetime after lifetime trying to free him of it and, sometimes, he even succeeded. More often though they went down together, unable to escape the hell the Uchiha had made for himself, but unwilling, unable to abandon each other, so they never traveled alone into the dark.

Occasionally it was another boy who earned the full measure his devotion. After all, there were so many mistreated, haunted, dangerous boys around him: the caged bird, the lonely monster, the expressionless assassin. All were boys he helped in some way more often than not and sometimes, after, they would became more than something so simple as friends or allies. Sometimes they became his strong right arm or the guard at his back or lovers or partners and sometimes those relationships helped put the world to rights and, just as frequently it seemed, they led only to wrack and ruin. The perils of those boys came as often from without as they did from the boys themselves as powerful men did so resent the loss of a useful tool.

There were girls as well, of course, as he was only consistent in his inconsistency from world to world and life to life. But his lives with them were often simpler. Less fraught with peril and despair and sudden and immediate death. The girls always seemed as complicated as the boys, but they carried less tragedy in their bones and greater joy. They could make him happy, and often did, but they could never quite understand the core of him, the experiences that had formed him in his earliest years. What it was to be hated, to be so desperately lonely, to want things so badly it gnawed a hole to the very heart of you and how that emptiness was something almost impossible to fill. They could love him and he could love them, adore them, worship them in his way, but they would never know what it was like to be as he had been. It didn't mean he couldn't be happy with them, but happy doesn't always been content. Love can't heal all wounds, after all, sometimes it just plasters over them, concealing them from view, but leaving the hollow, aching empty space beneath.

In some lives he grew old and older still with a woman at his side. Sometimes they were married, more often not. Sometimes they had children and grandchildren, but not in every life and rarely by his choosing though always with his consent. He was good with other people's children, brilliant in some cases, but rarely seemed to know what to do with his own. Sometimes he found happiness and satisfaction in these lives. When he didn't, he typically smiled and shoved any hint of discontent down deep, choosing to lose it amidst the shuffle and bustle of paperwork and bureaucracy. Too afraid of breaking his word to seek solace elsewhere or break things off even when that might have been the kinder and more decent decision for them both.

And maybe that said all that needed to be said about the boy right there.

Always, beneath the circumstances of his life, he was driven by an obsession with keeping his word, with living his life by a standard of working hard and never giving up and always fighting for what he believed in. That was the one constant in every version of him, whether it was loving parents, a doting irresponsible godfather, his father's student or no one at all that had raised the boy from baby to man. Whether he was the village pariah or the village savior or lived out his formative years on the road between inns and taverns and nights spent lying out under the stars. Whether he had friends who needed him, someone who loved him, a family, a home, he was always guided by the same principles and it certainly seemed as if this boy would always be too distracted to allow him to make much of himself in terms of power. Yet, still, more often than not, he found that the boy would grow in strength by leaps and bounds when he least expected it. When those he loved were threatened or when they died and left him alone with a desire for vengeance or just an empty hole left longing for that lost connection, for that which might make him whole again.

In those circumstances, he would become a force to be reckoned with, blossoming in the face of adversity, training as a sage, piercing worlds and slipping through by accident or at will. There were, of course, others who could slip through the worlds as well, but they were not truly a danger and certainly not worthy of lingering concern. He did not fear the Kaguya or the Uchiha on their own. They were simply old powers, unable to stand against him and too frequently lost within their own madness, unable or unwilling to care about worlds outside their own except as they might serve their own purposes. They cared nothing about the injustices or structure of the worlds through which they traipsed. He could destroy them as easily as he could draw breath, crushing them beneath the force of their own arrogance and never give it a second thought.

The boy was a more difficult prospect. He could be selfish, all men could, but more often he saw to the heart, to the truth of things. And, against all odds, versions of that boy had begun to pass into his world and almost always identified him as a threat immediately and always went straight for his throat. Because even that boy was capable of understanding that there are some enemies you reason with and some you must simply hope you're able to destroy before they have the opportunity to destroy you. They were the most violent, feral versions of the boy. The versions ruled by passion and hate, dangerous and violent and free and rarely alone. The Uchiha boy and the lonely monster were frequent companions of these invaders, these interlopers who slid into his world, into his paradise as if it could belong to them, as if they could own it for themselves if only they could wrest it from the grasp of its sole occupant. Those boys, compelled by the demons that dwelled within them, had come perilously close to succeeding in these endeavors more than once. But they were mostly instinct with little reason left to them and while that made them dangerous, it rarely made them clever. He had not lost a battle to them and he did not intend to, but they still had done more damage than he was comfortable with and he still bore scars he owed to that boy and his companions.

It was those scars that caused him to reflect upon his situation at length. If these dangerous, feral versions could come so close to victory with little to depend upon besides power and viciousness, what did this say about what versions with a little more finesse and a reason might be capable of? He didn't care for the possibilities such thoughts brought to mind. So he turned his attention back to those other worlds this time with deadly intent. Those worlds seemed so nearly infinite in number, but still he put thought to how he might eliminate them. Snuff the problem out at its root rather than wait for the day some version of that boy would part the veil and decimate everything that made this world perfect and bright and his.

It didn't take long to discover that he could crush the paths that led that boy to him. Destroy them one by one until all that was left of him were weak, happy, doddering old men who lacked the will and passion to seek other worlds. Men who would be satisfied with their lot and never seek to question how or why it had taken the shape it had. He didn't have to banish every world, he just needed to keep the boy from continuing down troublesome paths unfettered. It would take time, so much time, to sort through those lives and find those that might threaten him. But if there was one thing he had in abundance, it was time.

For that's what his world, his brilliant, pristine world was: an existence beyond the reach of time, beyond the touch of men, beyond the reach of mere mortals. No one could be allowed to rob him of this perfect, peaceful place alone at the center of the universe.

No one.

Not even some cheap imitation with his face and form.