IMPORTANT: READ THIS
Okay, I got some (6) encouraging reviews and a whole lot of views on that chapter, so I decided to at least try to continue this story. That being said, upon writing this, I planned to do little more than copy and pasting the Naruto storyline, with a different backstory and slightly altered events.
You have UNTensaZangetsu to thank for changing my mind.
I am now working out a plot that, while it still sticks loosely to the canon Naruto, has several of my own twists, turns, and additions mixed in.
Unfortunately, I do not have enough originality to come up with a completely unique plot, unless you want to wait another couple years for me to do it, and there are some things about the canon universe that I like too much to throw away entirely.
That being said, now that I have some sort of plot in mind, there have been a few minor changes in this little prologue that are integral to the way the story will play out, so if you wanna reread it, that'd be great. If not, I will be adding a small summary in the next chapter on the changes I made.
That's all for now. Let me know what you think. (Especially you UNTensaZangetsu, it was mainly your response that inspired this, so I'd like to hear more)
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, that's Kishimoto-sama's burden.
Uchiha Madara was many things.
He was terribly cruel.
He was utterly merciless.
He was incredibly bloodthirsty.
He was extremely proud.
He was unbelievably powerful.
He was a strict, though not tyrannical, leader who expected the absolute best out of his clan.
He was a good brother, despite the fact that he'd taken his younger brother's, Izuna's, eyes. They had actually been offered to him after his younger sibling was fatally wounded by Senju Tobirama.
He was a brilliant tactician, unrivaled by all except maybe the famed members of the smaller Nara clan.
But right now, he was more one thing than any other.
He was angry. He was absolutely livid.
The source of his anger was obvious to anyone who had kept up with current events in the world.
In the past three months, the Uchiha and Senju, bitter rivals in many ways, had clashed on the upwards of twenty times. The Uchiha had won four of these confrontations.
Four.
Four!
It was unacceptable in the Uchiha patriarch's mind that his superior clan would lose to the Senju with such frequency. In truth, he'd been disappointed with the quality of the shinobi in his clan for quite some time now. Very few, if any, came anywhere close to measuring up to the strength wielded by him or his brother. Neither their skills nor their bloodline were strong enough.
Even if they were to never gain the level of skill he held, if they were to at least awaken the Mangekyō, they would at least have a greater chance at victory. A group of Uchiha all using the massively powerful techniques granted by the second, forbidden stage of the Sharingan would be tough for even him to combat, such was the nature of the techniques.
The problem was that, though everyone knew the method to awaken the powerful eye, no others were willing to go through with what it asked: to kill their closest friend. In truth, Madara doubted he or Izuna would have awakened the Mangekyō if it weren't for the fact that they had both been close friends with the same man and both had been there to deliver a mercy blow when he had been horribly injured in one of many past battles with the Senju. It still annoyed him, though.
He did, however, have to acknowledge that expecting every Uchiha to kill their closest friend was rather idiotic. If they were to do so, since most Uchiha only had friends in other Uchiha, it would cut their own clan's numbers effectively in half.
And then there was the detriment of Mangekyō, the steady descent to blindness that cursed its wielder. There was, of course, the Eternal Mangekyō, but not everyone had siblings to take eyes from. Then again, they were all of the same family, so perhaps it would work for anyone with relatively close blood-relation. Plus, rather than the bloody trade he and his brother had made on the battlefield, he could have a similar operation conducted in the safety of the clan's medical facilities and rather than one taking eyes from the other, the eyes could be traded, creating two warriors with the Eternal version of the Mangekyō.
There was, however, still the problem of the Mangekyō itself to address.
After several hours of pondering, rather enjoying the idea of where this errant thought could carry his clan, the answer hit him. It was so painfully obvious he couldn't believe he hadn't come up with it before. His Mangekyō could easily overpower the regular Sharingan wielded by his clan mates.
It was time to put his plan in action.
Uchiha Fuhi walked along happily through the forest towards the designated meeting point, wondering what his cousin and friend, Uchiha Shūgo, could want.
Knowing him, it was advice on what to do for his latest girlfriend. The poor fool had been trying to find himself a wife for years, but he had absolutely no skill with women.
Himself, on the other hand, had a fiancé and was to be married in another few months.
So, of course, his long-time friend had immediately begun coming to him for advice.
Smiling, he stepped through a particularly thick bit of brush into their usual hangout. They'd found it when they were just starting out on missions and had used it as a hideout and meeting point on many occasions whenever they were in the area. It was just a simple forest clearing with the only oddity being the large rock in the middle surrounded by an area of loose gravel, likely a remnant of some past battle no one remembered.
Sitting on the rock was his friend, a stereotypical Uchiha through-and-through, with black, spiky hair, sharp black eyes, and decked out in standard Uchiha shinobi-wear.
He had a rather uncharacteristic frown on his face as he looked up at him, though, and Fuhi was immediately on edge. When Shūgo looked that upset, it was likely he was going to 'ask' for a sparring session by throwing a punch at his face as soon as he got close.
Strangely enough, his friend slipped off the rock and gave him a bitter smile.
He tensed up even more, he'd never seen that kind of expression from his friend before and he didn't like it.
"Hey, Shūgo, what's up?" the unnerved Uchiha asked, hoping to diffuse whatever situation was about to go down. The other clan member's off-putting smile just widened and became even more bitter.
"Oh, nothing, Fuhi," he spat, sending uncomfortable shivers up said Uchiha's spine, "I just figured out what I need to do to get myself a girl."
A kunai slipped into the disturbed Uchiha's hand and he lunged forward and Fuhi only barely managed to draw one of his own to block, leaping backwards as he parried.
Before he could question his friend's actions, the crazed man had already leapt forward, bringing his kunai to bear, and his query was answered anyways as he yelled, "I need the Mangekyō!"
Fuhi froze for an instant, disbelieving that his friend would actually go so far as to kill him for the Mangekyō just to get a girl, but that was all Shūgo needed to get in close.
He cursed and backpedaled, trying to get his own weapon up in time to block…
And Shūgo's foot slipped in the loose gravel. The kunai in his hand swung wide as he pitched forward and impaled himself through the heart on Fuhi's raised kunai.
There was a moment of shocked, wide-eyed silence before a smile spread across the now dying ninja's face and he let out a laugh at the irony of his situation, splattering blood onto the ground from his flooding lungs. He fell limply to the ground.
Fuhi was frozen in place, staring straight ahead to where he'd been looking his friend in the eyes before he'd slipped. Slowly, painfully, he turned his head down to look at the bleeding corpse at his feet.
His eyes burned and the world dissolved. The corpse was gone.
"F-Fuhi?"
The Uchiha's eyes snapped up and, to his infinite surprise, found his friend on his back and propped up by an elbow, a kunai held in a similarly defensive gesture as his was.
But that's not what drew his attention the most. Shūgo's eyes were bleeding, and in those eyes spun a Mangekyō. Numbly, he realized that the wet feeling of blood running down his face and the burning that permeated his eyes likely meant he was in the same predicament.
And then there was applause. Clapping slowly, another man strode into the clearing, a man they both recognized as any in the Uchiha clan would.
"Very good you two," Madara praised, "I see stage one was a success."
It was working.
His plan was working.
Madara continued his work, starting with the shinobi who were of medium strength and removing them from the active list so that they could train their new abilities in secret.
He stopped his current queue at ten shinobi, now all with the Mangekyō and training under his supervision and all closely related.
The Elders complained that he was ignoring his duties as clan leader, but he ignored them in turn as he always did. They didn't know his plan, the plan that would bring the Uchiha to glory.
After a few weeks of intensive training, he called in his best medics.
In only a single hour, there were ten more Eternal Mangekyō wielders in his clan.
The next week, he placed them back on active duty, two each in separate squads of five, and sent their groups to fulfill a mission given to his clan by a lord who wanted to capture some land back from another who had, of course, hired the Senju to defend his land.
The squads returned a day later with only one injured among them, and then it was only a gash on the arm.
His plan was a success.
He took ten more middle-class warriors under his wing after awakening their eyes. Weeks and a plethora of successful missions later, ten more Eternal Mangekyō wielders joined the ranks.
And then ten more, and then more, and more, and more.
A little over a year later, every clan member with a fully awakened Sharingan had an Eternal Mangekyō.
Madara didn't even handle the Mangekyō awakening or training process any longer, he had other users for that.
Business had never been better and, to top it all off, the Senju were in a panic and their numbers were dwindling.
Deciding he may as well finish his rivals off, Madara launched a direct attack on the Senju.
Surprisingly, their initial assault was pushed back and Madara himself was severely injured in battle against his personal rival, Senju Hashirama, though his clan mates were there to cover his retreat.
It was then that something unexpected happened.
In the course of their many battles, he and Hashirama had spilled much of their own blood on each other and several times he had gotten sick from blood-poisoning where the Senju patriarch's blood had seeped in through his own injuries.
But this time was different.
This time, while in recovery, his eyes burned as they never had before and when he'd peered into a mirror to discover what was wrong, he was shocked beyond comprehension to see a pair of purple, concentrically-ringed eyes staring back at him.
The Rin'negan, dojutsu of the Rikudō Sennin himself. He had awakened the Rin'negan.
A vicious smile split his face as new ideas surfaced.
Their next confrontation ended in his favor and as he stood over the slain corpse of his rival, he watched in glee as his warriors captured any of the Senju bloodline they could.
If he had awakened the Rin'negan by simply being assaulted regularly by their blood and chakra, how powerful would the child of an Uchiha and Senju be?
Years later, Madara had successfully integrated not only the Senju into his family, even managing to propagate the Mokuton by using his now dead rivals cells, but several other clans had been pulled in as well. Sarutobi, Shimura, Inuzuka, Akimichi, Yamanaka, Nara, Aburame, Hyūga, and several smaller cliques had fallen into the fold, but the ones that interested him the most were the Uzumaki.
The Uzumaki were a powerful clan, distantly related to the Senju, and one he found could easily rival the strength the Uchiha and Senju had had when they were still separate entities. Their chakra was dense, potent, and unique, their very life forces bearing more vitality with greater regularity than any he'd ever seen. Their techniques, not to mention their talent at sealing, were incredible and even he was unable to copy many of them.
Not only that, but he found that they had the ability to, should any of his more powerful clanmates die, easily adapt to the Eternal Mangekyo and even – especially, one might say – the Rin'negan.
They were one of the few he had convinced to join him through diplomacy and negotiation rather than intimidation and force.
The Hyūga, on the other hand, were rather frustrating, at first anyways.
The fools actually thought their little x-ray eyes to be superior!
They learned their lesson quickly enough and he forced them under his thumb. His first action, of course, was to abolish and remove their idiotic curse seal and class separation the fools had imposed on themselves to 'prevent the degradation of their bloodline.' He then, of course, broke them of their reluctance to taint their bloodline with others, incest would get them nowhere and he was curious if the Sharingan and Byakugan, or perhaps even Rin'negan and Byakugan, could mix to create a more powerful eye.
The rest of the clans were no real cause for trouble, though he was slightly reluctant to allow the Aburame to mix with his clan. Even he found the nature of their techniques… somewhat disturbing.
Eventually, though, the numbers of people he'd gathered under him grew far too much for the mobile lifestyle of a small clan and Madara realized that they would have to settle somewhere.
So the patriarch made a deal with the Feudal Lord of Hi no Kuni and settled his group against a large cliff to begin constructing his village.
In an effort to make his new home more defensible, he used the abilities he'd inherited from absorbing the genetic material of his rival to sprout an enormous forest surrounding the area he'd selected.
Thus, once the village was complete, he christened it 'Konohagakure no Sato,' the Village Hidden in the Leaves and named himself its Shodaime Hokage, or First Fire Shadow.
His actions were quickly mimicked by others and soon there were many HiddenVillages, but only four others of any real strength.
Not long after, the ever-power-hungry Uchiha turned his eyes to the Bijū, the Tailed Beasts whose power was said to surpass that of any shinobi. So he set out on a mission, leaving Senju Tobirama, his trusted Second, in charge of the village, his eyes set on a particular Bijū.
The village was astounded when, but a few days later, he rode back into the village atop the head of a massive nine-tailed fox.
The Kyūbi was his.
When the other new villages heard of his feat, the scrambled to replicate it by trapping a Bijū of their own. Only the Cloud and Sand villages were successful, Kumogakure even managing to take two.
The rest, however, failed miserably until Madara himself appeared on their doorsteps and subdued their chosen beasts with but a glance and offered them up as gifts.
The villages grudgingly accepted, seeing the act for what it truly was: a show of force. And a threat.
After all, if he could do that, than even if they could harness the Bijū, what use would it be against him?
It wasn't long after that the first Jinchuriki was created in Sunagakure who had captured the Ichibi, which was fitting considering their geographical location.
They were quickly followed by the other villages and soon all but one Bijū had a container.
Madara was reluctant to part with the useful tool that was the Kyūbi, but in the end his curiosity for the potential in a Jinchuriki and his confidence in his own strength won out and he had the beast sealed in an Uzumaki woman whom he promptly impregnated.
Why not kill two birds with one stone when he needed an heir to his power anyways? True, he was no longer the clan head, having given that position up to become Hokage, but he knew he was still mortal and thought that there should at least be someone to continue his legacy.
Then came the first Shinobi World War.
No one was quite sure what exactly had caused the original spark, but the conflict quickly escalated to include every shinobi village currently in existence.
Immediately, the weaker villages, Suna and Kiri, allied themselves with Konoha, but Madara, though he accepted, didn't care. Even if the whole of the rest of the elemental nations descended upon them, he was confident that the military might he'd established would emerge victorious.
He paid dearly for his arrogance.
He had failed to notice that the rest of his clan, and even the village itself, had grown reliant on their Mangekyō and other bloodline abilities and fell back on them so often that the once legendary techniques had grown commonplace and foreign countries had long since developed strategies and techniques to deal with them.
More than seventy Mangekyō wielders were dead in the first week.
Madara was furious and launched himself onto the battlefield with a reckless abandon he'd not felt since his battles with the Senju.
While the other villages were prepared for the Mangekyō, they were not prepared for Madara whose abilities, with the dojutsu and otherwise, were far beyond that of any other shinobi in his village. Even his fellow Uchiha were amazed and terrified when he unleashed the might of his Perfect Susano'o upon the combined armies of Kumo and Iwa and their Jinchuriki.
After decimating the two forces, not to mention killing both the Hachibi and Gobi containers, Madara cooled his rage and retreated back to his village where he not only set up more conservative war strategies, but set up vicious training cycles for all those with dojutsu and other bloodlines so that nothing similar could ever happen again.
It was not long after that that the unthinkable happened.
Uchiha Madara, the most feared, respected, and revered man in the elemental nations, died a quiet death in his sleep, succumbing to a slow-moving heart disease. Apparently, in his never-ending quest for further power, the mighty warrior had neglected to monitor his own health.
The funeral was enormous, and as a final tribute to their founder and leader, it was decided that they would carve his visage into the cliff he settled them against.
The Nidaime Hokage, one Senju Tobirama, liked the idea and declared that all Hokage should have their faces carved in the mountain to immortalize their presence and so that they might, even after death, look over the village they loved.
Unfortunately, the Nidaime's reign was not long-lasting, sacrificing himself only weeks later to save his squad from an elite force of Kirigakure shinobi.
He named Sarutobi Hiruzen, a bloodlineless shinobi of the Sarutobi Clan, as his successor.
Within another two months, the war was over and Konoha stood victorious, though not without its casualties.
Not long after, Tobirama's and Hiruzen's faces joined Madara's as the village rebuilt from the struggle of the war and new warriors were born.
Time passed and brought about many events.
The Second Shinobi World War, which granted Hiruzen the title of God of Shinobi for his incredible prowess. His students, in battle against the mighty Hanzo the Salamander, were named the Sannin. Three children, all of whom would have great impact on the future, were trained by the Gama Sennin, Jiraiya.
The Third Shinobi World War brought about the birth of the mighty Kiiroi Senko Namikaze Minato and his student, the Copy Ninja Hatake Kakashi. This war also oversaw the formation of the Akatsuki.
Afterwards followed a period of 'peace' between the nations punctuated with many terrible events.
The Yondaime Mizukage went mad and began a purge of all bloodlines from Kirigakure.
Hanzo the Salamander teamed up with the treacherous Shimura Danzo and his Root Division from Konoha to strike a terrible blow to the three leaders of Akatsuki.
Namikaze Minato was chosen by the Sandaime to succeed him as the Yondaime Hokage.
Orochimaru, the Snake Sannin, defected from the village after being discovered conducting terribly inhumane experiments upon various citizens and shinobi of Konoha, most of whom had been previously assumed missing or dead.
However, the most important event occurred within Konoha itself.
For an unknown reason, the Kyūbi escaped its second Jinchuriki, one Uzumaki Kushina, granddaughter of the first Kyūbi Jinchuriki, Uzumaki Mito. Minato was forced to seal the beast into his and Kushina's son, Naruto.
People had long since forgotten that their Shodaime Hokage had tamed the beast, and its presence in their village had been kept a secret from all but its most important or oldest inhabitants, so when the beast attacked and caused horrendous damage to the village, killing many in the process, it drew an enormous hatred.
A hatred that was redirected at the easiest medium, the infant that now contained it.
Forced back into his office, the Sandaime made a law that no one could speak of the beast's sealing in hopes of preventing this hate from spreading to the next generation, at least in its entirety. Afterwards, he assigned an ANBU squad to watch over the infant and placed him in an orphanage.
The caretakers didn't dare mistreat little Naruto, at least not to a great degree, with four of Konoha's best breathing down their necks.
The protection was necessary, not only because of the fact that he was a Jinchuriki and that it was the least the Sandaime could do for the man he saw almost as a son. The boy's lineage, unknown to all but the Hokage, Jiraiya, and perhaps a few others, was incredible. Great grandson of Uchiha Madara. Great grandson of Senju Hashirama, whose son married Uzumaki Nezumi, Naruto's grandmother. The blood of the Uchiha, Senju, and Uzumaki flowed through his veins and if the boy were to awaken it, it was quite possible he could become even greater than the Shodaime ever was.
And this wasn't even taking into account the power of the Kyūbi that might eventually come under his command.
Unfortunately, there were a few who weren't supposed to know of this secret that did, and both had plans for the young blonde. Plans that, if they came to fruition, would ruin the Elemental Nations.
So, yeah, I came up with this, and, after ironing most of the kinks out, I decided I might as well post it.
This story is obviously pretty AU and just something I came up with one day off the top of my head.
Depending on the kind of reviews I get, if any, I may or may not continue it, so please give me some feedback.