a/n: and it's naruto time! happy new year, everyone!
dedication: to being found.
disclaimer: i don't own anything.
summary: A lone traveler struggles against the sands of time. – Kyuubi.
journey
All she can see is flat, formless desert, no matter what direction she looks. There is no sun, no moon, no stars, only a gray half-light that stretches along the horizon.
The air is still. It is not the still that exists in the absence of wind, it is the still that exists in the absence of being, the cold stagnancy of abandonment and loneliness.
Kyuubi wraps her arms around herself and stubbornly tells herself that she doesn't care.
Absently, she wonders if this is eternal purgatory but immediately dismisses that theory. This looks nothing like a Shinigami's stomach.
Of course, one thought leads to another and she finds herself musing about the bright, blue-eyed shinobi that sacrificed himself to hell to rid the world of her destruction. It wasn't willing destruction either – all she had seen was a pair of red, red eyes before she was cruelly ripped from her precious jinchuuriki and thrust into battle.
She mourns Kushina, on better days, and curses her on worse. How dare the redheaded bitch decide to die and leave her to the cruelty of humans much more ruthless than her?
Kyuubi realizes the direction her thoughts have taken and inwardly curses herself, but it is too late. She started thinking about the Uzumaki and her train of thought would not be derailed.
When she found herself sealed into a newborn child, Kyuubi was furious. She railed against everyone and everything for the better part of a decade, before she finally decided to calm down and assess the situation.
Luckily for Uzumaki Naruto, Kyuubi loved Kushina too much to do anything to her precious son.
She sighs and leans back against the sand, hoping at least to be comfortable in this train wreck through her past. The sand is neither hot, nor cold, but simply there and Kyuubi does not feel comforted at all.
The flashes start coming – the first time he drew on her chakra, in the Land of Waves, as he avenged a fallen comrade. The battles he fought, amongst others of her kind, as the demons sought to wreck havoc on the world.
Kyuubi puts up no resistance under the onslaught of memories as she remembers the bright little boy grow up into an old man, hardened by a lifetime of pain. Her chakra had kept him alive – natural immunity and accelerated healing but Naruto was a human, and was still a mortal.
She could not do anything but watch as Naruto was gutted in battle, having fallen at the hands of an army, dying an honorable death on the battlefield. She is glad he wasn't able to see the destruction that followed his death.
She misses him. He was her liveliest jinchuuriki, and also her last.
Kyuubi sits and waits and thinks for this is the end of the world and she cannot do anything else.
le fin
a/n: this was kinda rambling…