One Last Chance

by Sefirax

The Fourth Shinobi War is going terribly for the Allied Nations. In one last-ditch attempt, they try to kill Madara. However, they didn't count on time to be on their side, and Sasuke was thrown back several years. Before it all began, and before SHE died to save them. Sasu/FemNaru

2. Chapter 1

One Last Chance, Chapter 1

I was THIS close to making Sasuke a different character in the new timeline, but I realised it won't be a SasuFemNaru fic then. It'll also be awkward to write, and awkward to read (more awkward than this, anyhow). I may go back to the prologue to fix some stuff over the next few weeks, so don't be surprised if it shows up as updated but it still doesn't have a single new chapter after this one.

Also, college acceptances are rolling in right now, everything looks good so far!
Why is college so expensive in the United States, why couldn't we be like Denmark or something :

Disclaimer: I don't own the Naruto franchise.

Thud

SQUAWK!

A crow flew away from the fallen object indignantly, feathers clearly ruffled. A squirrel scampered over to the impact sight, basic curiosity getting the better of its brain. Its beady black eyes peered through the thick green foliage, only to see the small body of a kid in a crater. It turned around, preparing to go back, until it realised something important.

Its acorn stash was under that human.

Dash

Scratch scratch

'Hnnn…'

Scratch scratch

'Stop it…'

Scratch scratch

'…'

Scratch

"I said, STOP IT!"

Sasuke's eyes snapped open, glancing around for the annoying pest that kept scratching his face. A bushy-tailed squirrel stood in fright for a split second before scampering away.

"Che, serves him right…"

He turned his neck around, trying to see where he was, only to have thousands of pain signals shoot through his neck. A distinct feeling of otherworldly pain slowly began numbing his senses, as it felt like he had ran his entire body through an inferno of flames. Everything hurt, from head to toe, and all he could do is involuntarily cry out in pain.

After a while, the pain began to subside as endorphins began releasing into his bloodstream. He could slowly tilt his head, and soon even regained the ability to move his limbs.

Sasuke moved his hands up to his eyes hoping to rub them profusely. It's a habitual instinct for him alongside grunting at unimportant stuff.

'Damn those hands are small…'

Unfortunately, while normally he would have immediately noticed something off about his hands, after time traveling and dimension hopping his body was still trying to make sense of what the hell happened. To be honest, it felt like the sensation of dispelling a shadow clone. Only, it's done with a thousand clones, not just one.

Sasuke tried to stand up, leaning on a tree for support. He immediately realised just what the hell made everything hurt so much. He had several deep lacerations along his entire body, including a particular deep gash on his abdomen.

He tried a single step forward. Succeeding despite a small spike in pain, he tried stepping forward with the other. Grinning slightly, he tried walking. The direction didn't matter; all that mattered was that he could MOVE.

His small grin turned into a full-blown smile as he realised that despite the small stabs of pain, he could indeed walk small distances. Fully satisfied, he began trying to decipher where the hell he dropped out of the sky (literally). A quick glance around confirmed his worst fears, there was nothing but trees around him. No city, no road, nothing, just trees that looked like they were taunting him with their nondescript features.

Growling at himself and his fuzzy brain for being unable to identify the tree species, he decided to get a higher vantage point. He charged chakra into his legs and leapt, aiming for the nearest branch.

Leap.

ZOOM.

The trees rapidly disappeared under him and he could feel his ears popping from the rapid depressurisation. The first thought that flitted through his head, apart from a long line of unspoken obscenities was,

'What the hell happened to my chakra control?'

After he reached the apex of his ascent and began coming down freefall, he tried to adjust his descent so he can land feet first. Unfortunately, it was pretty damn hard to do that when even the slightest adjustment in your posture resulted in being knocked into a never-ending spiral.

Sasuke closed his eyes when the ground neared. After a descent from several hundred feet in the sky, this was bound to hurt even if he were fully functional. He soon felt the familiar feeling of twigs and branches snapping underneath him. He tried charging chakra through all his pores in order to at least soften the blow and come out of it with a few bone injuries, not an entire skeletal reconstruction project.

…

Sasuke got the feeling that instead of impacting compacted dirt and rock, he fell onto some humongous beanbag. Slowly, he opened his eyes and looked down.

…maybe sandbag would've been the correct term for it.

Then, the concussion from the fall finally caught up to him. That, coupled with the information overload from the fall, caused him to pass out.

Mindscape

Sasuke opened his eyes and was shocked to see Konoha. More specifically, he was standing on a road in Konoha, looking straight up at the Hokage Monument.

'Didn't I just fall several hundred feet within a forest?'

Quickly, he realized that this place, despite having the physical appearance of his home village, did not have a single person in it. The stalls and shops were open, but no one was there to man the counters or collect orders from customers. No genin flitted through the rooftops on their way to another Capture-the-Tora mission.

He decided to walk inside a store to check it out. From what he remembered, this was a clothing store that was very popular back before the War started.

The store was exactly as he remembered it. Every aisle was filled with high quality casual clothing and in the right hand corner was the shinobi wear.

'Is this the past? Why is there nobody here?'

He picked up a simple silk kimono, coloured blue and red. As soon as his fingers touched the fabric, a nauseating feeling overtook his senses and his world began spinning in a very strange sense of déjà vu.

Memory

Sasuke held out his Kusanagi blade, pointing it at his former best friend. Naruko looked at Sasuke with dull blue eyes, no longer the eyes that once held such innocent mischief. They were now stormy pools that stared at Sasuke with a mixture of sadness, regret, and a tint of anger.

Naruko asked Sasuke with a sad tone, "Why, Sasuke?"

It was a simple question, really. Unfortunately, it's always the most ambiguous questions that warrant the longest answers. And the most painful.

"Why not?"

Naruko's eyes narrowed at that flippant answer. No one, even if it was her former teammate, tramples upon the memory of the dead by speaking in such a casual tone. For fuck's sake, Sasuke had just killed hundreds of Alliance troops without even batting an eyelash and now he's acting like he was some stupid meteorologist talking about the weather.

"Sasuke, how could you stoop so low? Can you not see that Madara is using you?"

Sasuke turned to glare at the new speaker. There was Kakashi along with the remnants of his division. Sasuke's bleeding Mangekyo activated once more and he immediately casted Susanoo once more, deflecting hundreds of projectile jutsu that magically came to him.

"Kakashi…did you know why we Uchiha were given our own compound on the outskirts of the village? We were given an entire section of the village to ourselves, a privilege that not even the Hyuga managed to get. Do you know what the reason was?"

Both of Kakashi's eyes narrowed at that question. He was not going to like the answer, that much he knew.

"No? Let me indulge you. After the Kyuubi attack, people were frantically trying to find out just how the Kyuubi managed to just appear in the middle of thin air. After all, if something the size of a mountain can just waltz into Konoha without being detected by our finest ANBU border patrols, what's to stop Iwa from trying the same tactic, right?

After a while, people couldn't find an answer. So, they turned to what they did know. Kakashi, who was reputed to be the only person in Konoha's history to turn the demon fox into his mere pet?"

The truth suddenly dawned on some of the more intelligent people in Kakashi's divison, Kakashi included. It was not an easy pill to swallow.

"By the looks of some of you, you already deduced what happened. For those that don't know, the only person to control the Kyuubi's mind was none other than the person you are fighting now, Uchiha Madara."

Memory End

Sasuke grimaced. This was one memory that he didn't want to remember.

'So this place is what holds my memories? How quaint, for my mind to be an empty Konoha.'

Sasuke left the clothing on the rack and carefully stepped back outside, making sure to not even graze anything in this world. His life didn't exactly have the best memories ever.

He left the store in a bit of a rush. No use staring at his memories any longer than necessary, anyhow. Hopefully, things will change this time around.

After a bit of aimless pacing around this fake Konoha, he got the uncomfortable idea that since he was in his mind, he was unconscious in the real world. Where he had just fallen several hundred feet. His eyebrows suddenly shot up into his hairline when his memories of the past few minutes suddenly came rushing back.

'Sand. I was caught by sand.'

He looked at the palms of his hands. Callous-free, tiny hands glared back at him. They were completely unblemished, save for the usual markings on the palms that fortune tellers often read to tell your fate.

"Sasuke."

Said person whirled around to face the source of the voice. His charcoal-black eyes widened.

In front of him stood the Fifth Kazekage, staring at him with amused teal eyes.

"Gaara."

Gaara studied Sasuke's new (or is it old?) form with slight interest and mirth. Sasuke stood there, shocked that a person that shouldn't even exist was now in his mind.

"I see that you are still acclimatising yourself to your younger body."

Sasuke nodded, but to be honest he only nodded as a reaction. He couldn't hear what Gaara said, since his mind was still reeling with the shock that someone from HIS timeline managed to make it through. After a few seconds of internal struggle, he managed to croak out,

"How?"

Gaara's calm demeanour shifted to a slightly more uncertain stance,

"I'm…not sure. I suppose it has something to do with my last jutsu being sucked in with you when the two Kamui's collided. One moment I was on a battlefield, breathing what I thought to be my last, then next moment I wake up in this place."

Sasuke opened his mouth to reply, but then noticed that something was…off about this Gaara. Yes, he was here physically, but Sasuke couldn't sense any LIFE from him. His teal eyes had no meaning behind them, despite them looking at him expectedly.

"You aren't Gaara, are you?"

Gaara gazed at Sasuke, as if he's looking for the answer on his face, but then replied, "Sasuke, yes, I am not necessarily Gaara completely. However, I do embody his last will. I am the manifestation of the last jutsu he sent, the chakra he expended in the jutsu somehow managed to travel with you through time. In turn, I was sent back also. So, while I do not have the capacity to think, I do embody everything that Gaara stood for except the basic capacity to have a brain. You need more than just chakra for that."

Sasuke looked thoroughly confused. He absentmindedly caught the sudden appearance of a ramen bowl that appeared in thin air, and then disappeared into Ichiraku's Ramen.

"Also, it appears that my chakra has been assimilated into your chakra system, to an extent."

THAT got Sasuke's attention. He replied, "So, that sand that caught me from my fall…"

Gaara had a slight upturn of his mouth, "Yes, that was all you."

Sasuke sported a gigantic grin/smirk combo. He asked, "Gaara, do you believe that I can control this with the same proficiency as you did?"

"Yes. Perhaps not to the fullest extent since I owe a portion of my prowess to being a jinchuriki of the Ichibi, but certainly enough that it is more than combat ready."

Sasuke nodded in understanding. Finally, there was something that he could comprehend from all this crazy time-traveling bullshit.

Gaara looked at the blue sky in Sasuke's mind, "Looks like my time is up, Sasuke-kun."

"What?"

Gaara made a motion around his body. He was becoming translucent.

"I believe my chakra is being assimilated into your chakra system as we speak. Unfortunately, most of the stories I've heard about unfiltered chakra entering another person's system say it can be pretty painful, if not deadly. Do watch yourself, Sasuke-kun.

Oh, and I believe that we're even now. I did save you, after all. Even if unintentionally."

Sasuke's puzzled look was the last thing that Gaara saw before disappearing.

Then Sasuke screamed.

Real World

"-I don't know, he just fell out of the sky, sir."

"Any major injuries to report?"

Sasuke stiffened slightly. He last heard that voice on the battlefield against Madara, a person that was supposed to be long dead. Sarutobi.

"All injuries were successfully amended by our squad medic. He had major lacerations that ran lateral to his forearms, a few superficial cuts on his abdomen, and a bruise on the occipital bone."

The Third asked in a neutral tone, "Any chance of memory or motor loss?"

The other shinobi (Sasuke guessed ANBU judging from his apathetic tone) replied, "Scans show that brain activity is normal the only abnormalities to his body are minor chakra fluctuations, which can easily be written off as a reflexive response to a drop several hundred feet."

Sarutobi hummed in thought. Sasuke inwardly snorted at the audible humming, writing it off as the first step of senility. Eventually Sarutobi responded, "So what you're saying is that a boy manages to disappear from a heavily patrolled village and drop on the border to Iwa, sustaining moderate injuries and is currently awake in this room listening to our conversation?"

Sasuke's eyes shot open at that. The Third looked at him with soft, yet calculating eyes. The ANBU in front of him had a raccoon mask on, and he was visibly stiff. Obviously he didn't detect Sasuke's irregular breathing patterns.

Sarutobi looked at the ANBU in front of him, "You can give me the rest of the report later. It appears our guest has finally awoke from his beauty sleep."

Raccoon bowed to the Hokage and he Shunshin'd away, leaves slowly falling to the floor.

Sasuke felt immensely embarassed at being caught, and despite his naturally cold demeanour he couldn't help but feel meek in front of the venerable Third. He had this aura that basically screamed 'I-know-what-I'm-doing-so-you-better-listen-to-me.'

"Hokage-sama."

The Third smiled disarmingly at him. Sasuke inadvertently recoiled slightly at the smile. It was the same smile that he gave when Madara resealed him into the Shinigami's stomache.

Sarutobi gave no sign that he saw Sasuke's reaction and greeted,

"Hello there, Sasuke-kun. How do you feel?"

Sasuke replied, "Fine, Hokage-sama."

The Third nodded and asked pleasantly, "Do you know what happened? I'm sure you heard us conversing so I hope I don't need to repeat myself."

Sasuke looked at the old shinobi in what he hoped to be a questioning gaze, going as far as tilting his head to the side. His first instinct was to lie and concoct some story about Iwa shinobi capturing him, but he managed to escape their clutches with only a few scratches.

However, he knew that even during the best of days he could not lie to someone with as much experience as Hiruzen. The only thing Sasuke could do was pretend to have no recollection of why he mysteriously disappeared (he didn't even know himself) and reappeared in the middle of a forest.

Hiruzen studied Sasuke's expression intently, his smile never wavering. He waited a while, and when Sasuke still gave no sign that he'll articulate words, Sarutobi sighed and said,

"If you don't want to talk, I won't force you to. However, I just want to know what happened so we can catch the bad guys for you."

Sasuke inwardly scoffed at the way Sarutobi said it. If he was actually a 7-year-old, then it may have worked. Unfortunately for the Hokage, he was anything but a normal child.

"I'm sorry, Hokage-sama, I don't remember anything."

Sarutobi pursed his lips slightly. A minute gesture, one that most kids won't be able to catch, or indeed people in general. However, Sasuke was instructed by Orochimaru, who's facial muscles only knew how to make two faces- condescending smirk or angry frown. He had to know what the slightest difference in the mouth meant, for survival.

Sarutobi was displeased right now.

Sasuke knew that Sarutobi didn't suspect a thing about his adult mind, however that didn't mean that the old Hokage wasn't above holding a grudge against a 7-year-old child.

People in politics know when a slight, seemingly innocent action is meant to insult or commend. Right now, Sasuke was worried that Sarutobi was treating him as an adult. After all, a kidnapping by a foreign village within Konoha's walls is a very serious breach of security and had to be treated as such.

Sarutobi sighed, then said, "Very well, Sasuke. I'll send for your brother to pick you up."

Sasuke's eyes widened, 'Shit, that's right. Everyone who was dead is now alive.'

'Itachi-niisan, I swear I won't screw up this time around. If I let the Massacre happen again.'

Sarutobi, thankfully, didn't notice Sasuke's reaction since he had just looked down to get some tobacco for his pipe. He breathed a small flame seallessly on the tobacco, catching them on fire, and proceeded to inhale the 'medicinal herbs'.

"Sasuke, make sure to take care of yourself. We don't want another of these events occurring again, do we?"

Sasuke replied, "Yes, Hokage-sama."

He slouched back on the couch, mind wandering aimlessly.

'Since I'm 7 years old, I think I should be attending the Academy right now. The Rookie 9 should be nothing more than kids that have nothing to do than to play. Everyone should be alive, right?'

Sasuke inwardly blanched, 'Crap, that means I have to go through Iruka's lessons all over again?'

His inward blanch slowly progressed to horror, 'Shit, that means I don't have any chakra capacity, and my chakra control is shit.'

'Does my Sharingan still work?'

It was then the door opened. Sasuke's train of thought abruptly broke when he saw the youthful face, framed with black hair of his elder brother, clad in his casual attire. Despite every ounce of self-control that he possessed, he couldn't help but jump off the couch and hug his brother, the person that sacrificed everything for him in the future.

"Nii-san!"

Itachi looked down at his little brother, slight shock subsiding to a soft smile.

"Otouto."

Sasuke looked up at his brother's face, whose eyes were still coal-black, not the red that his Sharingan was colored. Inwardly, he thought, 'I won't let you go again, I swear.'

Around 2k words shorter than I wanted to be, but I didn't want to include too much in this chapter. I'm saving the next chapter for the first interaction with Naruko, with possibly the Rookie 9 to boot. There MAY be intermittent flashback sections in subsequent chapters.

Oh and before anyone asks, no Sasuke will not have any ability that has to do with sand manipulation. However, Gaara's contribution may show up later in another form, I haven't decided if I wish to give Sasuke more abilities. He already seems plenty powerful in the manga.

One last thing, why doesn't page breaks carry over to Fanfiction anymore? :[