Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.

Author's Note: We're back a wee bit sooner than expected. Hello again! And this is the part where I salute everybody who read the first chapter, favourited, followed and left such lovely reviews. Ser Serendipity, kasinka613, Just-A-Dude and Rosebunse, thank you all so much. It's lovely to hear you speculate what you think is going on and being so encouraging.

I'm here with a second chapter and more strange goings on in Konoha. I said this story would be a little bit odd, a little be surreal. Anyhow, with this chapter, the story title ought to make sense, you get a first glimpse of our Koujins, and we've laid down all the stepping stones for carrying on. Yay! And Sai...oh, just to clarify, I like Sai. I really do. I just suspect that thirteen year old Sasuke wouldn't really take to him so well.

So without further ado, I hope you enjoy Chapter 2. Best, Zen :D

The second stage of the Curse Seal was dangerous.

That much was obvious from the very first transformation, when new bones had grated into place against Sasuke's shoulders and his back had strained to take the weight of his wings.

The Sound Ninjas in Konoha had told him that if he lost control the form could consume him, and when he let the Curse Seal's murky power sit in his veins that threat always felt very real.

Every time Sasuke accessed that form it was though he was opening a door, to a place that was dark and filled with whistling shadows, and inviting something inside him – something that sometimes whispered, sometimes purred, sometimes shrieked to be let through. It scrabbled with yellowy claws and bit at the bolts with glistening fangs, and it was always there.

So Sasuke trained because that's what he always did when there was an enemy to overcome. He trained to endure its beating on the doors, and then he trained some more, so that when he let the thing in, he could keep a hold on its blue grey mane and throw it back into the hissing dark where it came from.

Sasuke, sitting cross-legged in the dark of the training room, sometimes used a different analogy.

He thought of a tightrope stretched across a great black pit.

There were deep blue skies above and a living darkness below that roared shadows and screamed ghosts. The pit yawned power, blasted it up from its depths, at times as a wind colder and sharper than a frozen razor.

He was the tightrope walker, learning to balance against the dark and control his balance perfectly, even when the pit screeched to shake him off and the burning wind tried to claw him down from the thin white rope.

The rope was a focus. It was something to grip onto as his hair bristled past his shoulders and the wings stretched from his back and his lips turned black and blue like they had been bitten at by frost.

A cynical voice (that he had never been able to silence) noted that by training his body to cope with the second stage of the Curse Seal, Sasuke had been trying to train himself to stay sane. Another, the cynical voice's even more cynical mentor, would then note that Sasuke had been 'trying', and then say no more.

Practising his control of the Curse Mark's second stage was best done somewhere quiet and with as little disturbance as possible. The exercises he carried out to work with it were quiet too. Sometimes he would meditate in a training room. Mostly he focused on stretching those muscles he would never have a chance of stretching otherwise.

Those wings, for example - those ugly, fleshy, knobbly-knuckled wings. They had been ungainly and cumbersome to start with, but gradually as he stretched them they had strengthened and become better able to support his weight.

He stretched one now, keeping his focus (think of the rope), unfurled his left wing and listened to the skin creak like a canvas sail. Bones aligned and clicked against each other. Muscles pulled and tensed. He held the stretch for eight quiet beats, and then began to do the same for the right.

It was at this moment, when Sasuke was precariously balancing on that mental tightrope, between perfect mastery of the second stage of the Curse Seal and being consumed by it, relishing in its power but also doggedly keeping his head above it, that the door to the training room was flung open and a figure all but threw himself inside, closely chased by another.

The chaser was Kabuto, rearing over the first figure with chakra scalpels gleaming. The one that had slammed headfirst through the door wore robes with a pattern of clouds, and as he whirled to face the doorway, long dark hair whipping about his head, the white light threw up lines on either side of his nose...

A sizzling and a wet tearing.

A sharp cry. A whoop of air escaping an open throat.

Then a body was falling and a head was flying off shoulders. Blood was on the floor and running over Kabuto's hands, and the head, spinning through the air, smacked face first into great palm of Sasuke's right wing before bouncing into his arms.

From behind Kabuto came the sound of a million chattering scales, the dry scraping of a thousand snake bodies coiling about each other, and, over and above these sounds, raspy breaths being sucked up by a split-jawed mouth with a violet tongue.

Sasuke looked at the head in his arms.

Sasuke stopped looking at the rope beneath his feet.

He was no longer focusing on keeping his balance. He was focusing on the head in his hands that was warm, real, and still gushing heat over Sasuke's clothes.

Him.

That flash of a thought was a scream in his ears, and unleashed a barrage of questions and doubts that whirled through his mind, smacking, flapping and beating him down...

So when Orochimaru dived towards him with jaws wide, ready to trap him in a cage of fangs…

…Sasuke fell from the tightrope.

…He dropped into the pit.

And the pit howled and bared its teeth.

"Okay." Sasuke took a deep breath to steady his breathing. He looked this sixteen year old Naruto in the eye. "Let's say I am in the future, how did I get here?"

"Well, I don't know. You tell us maybe?"

Sasuke narrowed his eyes. "Weren't you the one shouting, 'It worked!' when I woke up?"

"I was talking about the stuff me and Sakura were doing to try and get you to wake up," said Naruto easily. He crossed his arms. "Why would either of us do a time-travel jutsu to bring you into the future anyway? If we did, wouldn't you think we'd have picked somebody else who was actually cool and awesome when they were thirteen, like me, or me?"

Sasuke gave Naruto a long, hard look that rated his level of 'awesome' somewhere around the fishcake that was the basis of his name.

Naruto sighed. "Maybe you tried out some crazy-stupid jutsu you dug up from a secret library from your old house before going to sleep?"

A vein in Sasuke's temple twitched. "No."

"Okay, but you can't say that for sure. Maybe you've just forgotten what happened. Maybe this is your second memory blank."

"Huh. Well, isn't that convenient?"

Sasuke lifted his eyes to look about the room. It was walled with stone, had a high domed ceiling and a single heavy door set with a grill to one side. At the top of the dome was circular window beyond which clouds, the grey of faded photographs, floated. The room was airy and dry, if a little cold. "Where am I?"

"Er…did you ever hear about that place on the other side of Konoha prison? Kind of a sanctuary?" Sasuke didn't think he had. "It's the place where they keep animals and things that have gone weird from being around ninjas. Like, there's this pig that's digested an explosive tag, and now it goes around farting fire, so they're keeping it around for studying, and then there's a sort of demon rat on the floor below – "

"Stop right there." Sasuke closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Why am I in a zoo for freak animals?"

"Well, we weren't sure if you really were, you know…you," Naruto explained with a vague wave of his hands that outlined something mushroom-like with a massive head and a stick thin body. "You might have been some crazy alien bat-winged thing from another dimension or something, pretending to look like you. And you did appear in this big flash of blue light."

"I…did?"

"Yeah," Naruto was getting into his stride, and he rushed on without pausing for breath, "in the middle of our old training grounds. Right, Sakura-chan? She spotted you first, by the way!"

Sakura closed her eyes. "Please believe us, Sasuke-kun. It'd make things a lot easier for everybody if you did."

Sure it would, including easier to kill him, or take his eyes, or whatever it was they wanted do with him.

He slipped into a thoughtful silence, which Naruto broke a moment later. "Cheer up, bastard, it's not as though everything in this place is scary. I think there's whole room of cats stuck in genjutsus, and Ino says that one of her uncles is here. He got drunk and tried to possess a budgie or something. Oh yeah! I should probably be warning you about those weights."

"What weights?"

Sasuke followed Naruto's gaze to his feet and found white cloth tags wrapped around his ankles. He gave his feet an experimental shake, but the tags didn't feel any heavier than the bandages wound along his arms.

"Now, the next thing I'm going to say sounds pretty creepy even in my head, but don't worry. You've just got to trust me and Sakura on this," Naruto began in a way that rang a thousand alarm bells and switched on a thousand red lights. "Sasuke, you're not a prisoner, or anything like a prisoner, or a freak zoo animal, but…er…you're not going to be leaving this room...for a bit...but only for a little bit! Maybe a couple of days. We're working on it."

"What!?"

"Those are the Hokage's orders, Sasuke-kun!" Sakura cut in quickly. "She…she says that you're not to be let out of this room until…until she's worked out what's going on, and how to send you back into the past."

Sasuke found himself staring at her hands. They were balled tight into trembling, determined fists.

"She doesn't want you to see future Konoha, you see." Sakura swallowed thickly and carried on. "That's the other reason why you're here. In this room. Because there's only the one window and the only thing you can see from it is the sky. She wants to make sure you see as little of the future as possible, so that when you go back to your own time you don't try to change the past to stop things happening as they did and destroy this future. That's…that's why you can't leave this room. Yet."

Before Sasuke could press her for questions, Naruto shouted: "Can you see this line?"

Naruto was standing around three metres from the door. He was pointing a finger at something by his feet in front of him.

A thin red line was etched into the floor, shaping a hemisphere about the doorway. There was also a line on the walls about eight feet off the ground all around the room. Sasuke nodded and waited for Naruto to go on, which never needed much encouragement before.

"If you try to step over this line those cloth tags will get ridiculously, ridiculously heavy, and they'll stop you moving," said Naruto as way of explanation, gesturing emphatically at the line again, "so when they start weighing you down, that's your cue to back off, otherwise…don't know…you might break your ankles if you try to jump over it, so…just don't try anything dramatic, okay?"

Sakura suddenly stood up and went to Naruto's side. Sasuke didn't see her face, but her shoulders were bunched and knotted like a twisted cloth wrung dry. She whispered something in Naruto's ear, which made the boy grimace, but he nodded, and she left the room.

Sasuke should have been tense and taut as a spool of ninja wire. He should have stolen a kunai off Sakura as she walked past him and tried to cut off these strange weight tags, which for all of Naruto's apparent concern were just a more humane form of shackles. He should've stopped talking and started planning. Gods, there were so many actions he could have taken, but nothing seemed completely right or seemed to fit. Jigsaw pieces to fit the puzzle failed to fall into place.

He shook his head furiously. What was wrong with him? He had to think, but it was like he was looking at a problem through a goddam kaleidoscope!

"Oi, bastard."

Naruto had come back to stand in front of him. Sasuke started and looked up from where he was still sitting on the floor. His knees smarted from where they'd hit the stone.

"What?"

Naruto stretched himself to his full height, and looked down his nose. "I'm tall, aren't I?"

Oh, Sasuke knew where this was going. "Shut up."

"When you were standing up, and failing to kick mine and Sakura's butts for a bit," Naruto pushed on, looking unhelpfully gleeful as Sasuke bristled in his shadow, "did I look about two heads taller than you, or four?"

Sasuke glowered at the older, taller, bigger Naruto and wondered if those two extra heads of height justified pounding the moron's head in three times over.

Then Sasuke snorted. "I get it."

Naruto frowned. "Get what?"

"I'm taller than you when I'm sixteen, aren't I?"

Sasuke hoped he would get some satisfaction seeing that infuriating smirk wiped off Naruto's face. It didn't happen. Naruto looked irritated only for a fraction of a second as his brain (or at least the percentage of it that wasn't dedicated to the body's basic functions or noodles) fought for a suitably good comeback, before bursting out laughing.

Naruto smiled even wider than before. This time with eighty-percent added nostalgia. Something about that smile made Sasuke feel less like a time-traveller and more like a man brought back from the dead.

All of a sudden, Sasuke realised that he was being rather enthusiastically patted (pounded, slapped, bounced?) on the top of his head. Sasuke was too stunned to move, because he was being goddam bloody patronised by NARUTO.

"Look, bastard, I'm guessing this is all pretty hard for you, but, just…just don't worry, okay. Me and Sakura, we've got everything covered. Don't worry. We'll get things back to normal. You can leave it to the grown-ups."

"Oh, that really fills me with such confidence!" Sasuke slapped Naruto's hand away.

"Naruto? Are you still in there?"

Sasuke knew that voice. He looked up. "Kakashi!"

Kakashi started and stopped in the doorway.

A heartbeat later he carried on into the room with his usual easy swinging strides, but that small hesitation had already stoked Sasuke's suspicions again. The Kakashi he knew walked in wherever and whenever he wanted. He always appeared at exactly the moment he wanted to appear and in exactly the places where he was meant to be.

It wasn't like Kakashi to hesitate on the threshold and start like he had seen an old ghost.

Then again, the thirteen year old Sasuke probably did qualify as a ghost – a ghost from Kakashi's past, but Sasuke wasn't prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt quite yet.

He couldn't help noticing that Kakashi came to a stop when his feet were toeing the red line in the floor.

Kakashi smiled with his eye. "Ah! So you recognised me!"

He hadn't changed much in three years – still the same hair, the same lazy eye and the same old pages of a dubious book tucked into his back-pocket.

"Why wouldn't I recognise you?"

"Well, with all the trouble and stress you three keep insisting on putting me through I would have thought I'd have gained some grey hairs in the past three years." Kakashi ran a hand over his head before frowning. "Oh wait, my hair is grey anyway. Haha."

Sakura stood in the doorway behind Kakashi. She must have whispered to Naruto that she would be going to fetch their teacher. She said, "Naruto was just filling Sasuke in on how he arrived here from the past, Kakashi-sensei. Right, Naruto?"

Naruto nodded. "You remember, Sensei? That big blue flash of light in our old training grounds?"

Kakashi blinked slowly. "Oh yes. Sorry. I see. Yes, that was quite something wasn't it? Sakura was shouting, and you were screaming and flapping about like a chicken with its backside on fire…"

"I was not!" Naruto objected.

"What about me?" Sasuke asked, intrigued despite himself. "Where was I?"

"Hospital," said Kakashi and Sakura together, at the same time Naruto said, "At home."

There was a moment of awkward silence and then Naruto turned to look furiously round at the other two. "What?"

Sakura sighed. "Naruto, you're such an idiot sometimes it actually hurts…"

"The medics ran some tests just before Sasuke was scheduled to be released and found some developments they hadn't predicted," Kakashi told Naruto, and Sasuke listened with a sudden stirring of dread. "They want to keep him under watch for the next few weeks and make sure his condition doesn't worsen. Sorry, Naruto, we should have told you earlier."

"Yeah, you should have."

"Is there something wrong with me?"

Naruto and Sakura both flinched at Sasuke's question.

Kakashi waved his hands in what he probably imagined was a soothing gesture, and said, "No, no, Sasuke, not at all. Nothing too serious."

"But, I'm in hospital?"

"You went away on a long solo mission and came back with a parasitic disease that's proving a bit difficult to get rid of, that's all."

"That's all?"

"Don't worry. Your future is still alive, stubborn and causing all sorts of worries and troubles for the rest of us."

A parasitic disease? The very idea of something invading Sasuke's body and twisting it into some kind of den for it own purposes made his skin crawl.

"Anyway, Naruto, Sakura – I want a word with the two of you about Hospital-Sasuke, so let's give this one some breathing space for a couple of hours," Kakashi said brightly, seizing Naruto and Sakura by the backs of their necks as he smiled down at Sasuke. "Sasuke, perhaps try and get some sleep. Time-travelling sounds very draining. I'm sure you could do with some. I could certainly do with some."

He could also do with a stiff drink, but Kakashi didn't mention that.

Sasuke was reluctant to see them go. He still hadn't had all the answers he wanted, and the more these three talked the more questions he wanted to ask, but for now, perhaps it wasn't so bad to have time to collect his thoughts and make sense of what little he had gleaned.

"Fine. But I'll ask more questions later."

"Good. Then this will be the perfect opportunity for us to prepare the appropriate answers." Kakashi turned away and half-dragged Naruto and Sakura along with him.

"Wait! Oi, wait! Kakashi-sensei! Come on, he's just woken up. We can't just leave him already – "Naruto was protesting as the door closed behind them.

The bolts scraped shut, and the future Naruto, Sakura and Kakashi were gone.

Once they were down the stairs at the end of the corridor, Kakashi stopped, let go of Naruto and Sakura's collars and spun them round to face him.

"Naruto, Sakura. I hope you two are proud of yourselves."

Sakura at least had the good grace to look guilty. Naruto, however, did not seem even remotely apologetic. "Kakashi-sensei, what else were we supposed to do? I mean, I know we were all hoping it would work, but none of us actually seriously thought it would! I had to improvise!"

"I know, Naruto, I know." Kakashi sighed and hung his head. He didn't know whether he wanted to strangle the boy, or praise him for what could be called a stroke genius. "But now we have to deal with the consequences, and you've potentially made things a lot more difficult for us than they otherwise would have been - not that they weren't difficult enough already. Sakura," he looked past Naruto to where Sakura was quietly staring down at her feet, "well done for coming to find me, and getting me up to speed with the situation so quickly."

"But that was him, Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto spluttered, following on his tail. "I talked to him. That was him. That really felt like the old bastard himself – from three years ago, before he got messed up by that Snake Git, and his brother. It's like he's really come back! The Sasuke we all knew! He's - "

"No, Naruto," said Kakashi firmly. "He hasn't come back. When we've found out everything that needs to be done to help him, thirteen-year old Sasuke will have to go back to where he came from. The problems of the present won't go away just because you're preoccupied by the past."

They had come to an office. It was usually the office of the sanctuary warden, but today the warden had taken the afternoon off and handed the keys to somebody else.

The door was opened by an ANBU officer with a plain white mask – plain and blank, round like the moon. Kakashi couldn't see who was behind those eye-holes and he didn't feel he wanted to. The officer was silent as it stepped aside to let them through.

"That was quicker than expected," said the man seated in the office. "Was there a problem?"

"None," Kakashi replied, and was about to continue when Naruto rushed forward, ducking round Kakashi in the doorway, and stormed up to the desk at which the man was sitting.

The ANBU officers positioned around the room tensed and put hands to hilts, but Naruto had no intention of launching an attack. He stopped and folded his arms, considered the man who had, until five days ago, not only been one of Naruto's worst enemies but a face in his worst and most overwhelming of nightmares.

"It worked," Naruto said stiffly. "Just like you said, Uchiha Itachi."

The corners of Itachi's lips twitched. He seemed amused, but he might just as easily have been disappointed, or annoyed. It was hard to tell with this man. "That is good to hear."

Kakashi narrowed his eyes. For a moment, he thought he had seen a ghost of emotion fly across Itachi's face – a shadow of disgust. No, it was deeper and uglier than that. It was self-disgust.

Itachi looked past Naruto at Kakashi."I have been ordered from now on to stay away from my brother upstairs."

"Well, that does seem sensible. At that age, mentioning your name was something like stamping on an exploding tag. Dare I ask whose orders?"

"Konoha's orders," replied Itachi, "and since that is the way of things, I will have to leave Sasuke in your care."

"You can leave him with us alright," Naruto lowered his voice, his eyes flashed, "and you can count on us to do a better job protecting him than you ever did as a brother!"

Itachi raised his eyebrows and snorted, and once again it was an absolute mystery to anybody what was going through his mind. Was he laughing at Naruto, or laughing at himself? Was he, in fact, even laughing at all? Had he even snorted? It had been that imperceptible.

The ANBU officer with the round white mask suddenly tapped his left wrist with a finger. Itachi saw the signal, and rose to his feet. He had been conveyed by the cluster of ANBU officers almost to the door before Itachi spoke up again.

"If there are any problems or developments concerning the state of my brother, make sure that I know."

A strange face had appeared in the grill of the door.

The young man was pale with glossy black hair, but despite those features he was not an Uchiha. That much Sasuke could tell just from his eyes. There was no spirit, no inborn sense of a divine right to burn all enemies and strive ever upwards for power. His expression was bland and plain, and a touch sour. A bit like yoghurt, Sasuke thought dryly.

Sasuke gave Yoghurt-face his best bemused stare. "What do you want?"

"Do you know who I am?"

"No."

Yoghurt-face looked down, as though checking a guide of some kind, which was exactly what he was doing judging by the sound of turning pages. "Then isn't the usual question to ask in introductions, 'Who are you?', or one of its many other abusive variants?"

This person was an idiot, Sasuke decided, as he heard another page turn. He might even be a moron beyond the level of Naruto, which he had thought was nigh impossible.

Then again, he was forced to remind himself, time-travel was supposed to be impossible as well.

"I think I am a friend of your team-mates," Yoghurt-face continued.

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "You think?"

"Yes. After all, I have nicknames for them and they let me use them, and they help me learn when to use them and when not to use them," Yoghurt-face said as way of explanation. "That level of tolerance suggests a degree of trust close to friendship, so…yes. I like to think I am their friend. But you, on the other hand, Uchiha Sasuke," a smile moulded itself onto that blank white face, "we are not friends."

Glad to hear it, Sasuke thought, but there was something disconcerting about those words when they came from a mouth pinned up into such an empty smile. "Kakashi said that I've been away on a long solo mission. Were you my replacement for whilst I was gone?"

Yoghurt-face considered the question.

"You could say that I was, and you could say that I wasn't. Naruto and Sakura never accepted me as your replacement. I think they accepted me as myself, which is a concept I still don't entirely understand, but, with their help, perhaps I will eventually. However, yes, I took your place on Team Seven in your absence."

"How long have I – ?"

"I've been asked to refuse any questions relating to said long solo mission, your sixteen year old self's current condition and his activities in the past three years," Yoghurt-face said and smiled blandly, "but I was also told to assure you that this is all for your own good."

Sasuke felt about as assured as a manhole cover fastened on a bubbling geyser. He was fuming. What else would he want to ask about?

Even if this was a genjutsu of the future, he had been presented with a Naruto and Sakura who had been teary-eyed just to see him wake up, now with this visitor with a semi-skimmed smile who Sasuke was almost certain had something against him, and, to top it all, his future self was currently stuck in hospital bedridden with a strange parasitic disease. Of course, he wanted to know what had happened to him!

"Is there anything you can tell me then?"

"I can tell you anything I make up, yes."

Sasuke shook his head to clear his thoughts, which had been quickly turning into dark mutters of I'm-going-to-find-this-guy-back-in-my-own-time-whoever-he-is-and-erase-him. "You still haven't told me why you're here."

"I was ordered to observe you with the impartiality of somebody who has less emotional investment in your predicament than others," Yoghurt-face replied with the clipped precision of a briefing committed to memory.

"By predicament, you mean, my time-travelling?" Sasuke prompted, not really expecting an answer, but it was always worth a try, and how ever his visitor reacted was something he could store away for later.

Yoghurt-face gave him another empty smile and vanished from the grill.

"Hey!" Sasuke yelled, leaping to his feet. "Wait."

He rushed forward and made to go to the door, but as the tips of his toes scraped against the thin red line, the cloth tags tightened about his ankles and he tripped and fell straight down on his knees.

He felt as though his legs had been turned to two thousand tonne blocks of iron, temple bells been strapped around his knees, and all the gravity of the world applied to the soles of his feet.

Sasuke tried to pull himself forwards with his arms. He quickly stopped. He wasn't sure he entirely liked the strained creaking noises coming from the bones in his ankles.

As he lay on his front and glared at the door, he heard returning footsteps.

"Observing again?" Sasuke growled up.

Yoghurt-face's yoghurt face was back in place in the grill with exactly the same expression as the moment he had left. "I've seen what I was sent to see."

"So why have you come back?"

"Just to warn you," replied Yoghurt-face with a smile that raised goosebumps on Sasuke's skin, "that I will be watching you, and if I find out that you've been lying to them in some way or other, I will deal with you in precisely the way I think you deserve."

Sasuke didn't need to ask who he was talking about when the young man said 'them'. He met Yoghurt-face's eyes and nodded shortly, enough to indicate that he understood the threat.

There was a sound of riffling pages as another book was consulted.

"'See you later, alligator'…." Yoghurt-face read off, then frowned in confusion. "I'm not sure I entirely understand the term. Why would I want to see an alligator again? Why does the speaker envisage an alligator in front of him as a substitute for the person he is speaking to? And why specifically an alligator? Is there something symbolic about this 'alligator' when saying goodbye?"

"It's an idiom!" Sasuke snapped as his patience unravelled. "And just who the hell are you anyway?"

Yoghurt-face once more offered that smile. It seemed as though his full repertoire of facial expression consisted of just these three expressions – smiling blank, blank and cold blank. "My name is Sai."

Yoghurt-face, now known to Sasuke as Sai, looked down at his book again. "Hmm, I will have to make a note to ask Sakura about this…idiom…later. In which case," Sai raised a hand to the grill and waved it stiffly. "See you later... Uchiha Sasuke…alligator."

Sasuke decided that he wasn't even going to deign to respond to that.

Once Sai was gone, Sasuke pulled away from the red line on the floor and flopped onto his back.

Grey stone walls around him, and grey clouds floating by the skylight above him – everything was grey.

They looked heavy those clouds, he noted absently. Perhaps they were bringing snow, although snow was a rare thing in the Land of Fire. Fire tended towards a temperate climate and was mild for most of the year, but if Sasuke was three years in the future, who was to say there hadn't been a dramatic change in climate during that period? Maybe the warmer currents in the Land of Water had shifted flow and the winds were different. Maybe more clouds were coming from the Land of Snow. Maybe they had even entered a new Ice Age…

That was, of course, if he really was three years in the future, which he still wasn't entirely convinced that he was, but whatever was happening he had a funny feeling that Sasuke wasn't very far from the heart of it.

Maybe he would wake up and it would all be a dream.

Yes, that was it. There were so many things that didn't make sense, so many things that jarred and felt inconsistent that this must be a dream of kind.

Maybe he had been getting nervous about the Chuunin Exams and those nerves had fed into this strange disjointed nightmare. He didn't want to admit feeling nervous, but given what the Chuunin Exams were known to be like it was hardly unjustified.

If that was the case, then it might just make sense that his current situation was a strange dream, spun together from whatever his subconscious dredged up, to mess with him on the night before the Chuunin Exams.

That explanation didn't sound so bad.

Sasuke closed his eyes.

Come on, wake up, he told himself. It's the Exams tomorrow! You don't have time for mucking about in a stupid dream. You need real sleep. Proper sleep. You need your head clear. You need to be able to think, because there's a certain orange jump-suited idiot who probably won't be doing any thinking at all…

Come on, wake up...

Please wake up.

Feet landed lightly on tree branches, kicked off, alighted on branches again in the dark depths of forest surrounding Konoha. They were high up in the pines, veiled in feathery shadows, and it was getting colder as the night drew on.

"There's a large group, around sixty people, due north five hundred metres away."

"Good work, Neji. Alright, team! We're going down!"

Four shapes wrapped in mottled cloaks dropped down from the trees. Their breaths steamed in the air.

"Sixty?" said Tenten, the moment she rose from her crouch. "Why so many people for a diplomatic delegation? Surely that's a borderline 'un-diplomatic delegation'?"

"It's the first time the Koujin clan has come down the Mountain in a century. It could be a display of strength," suggested Neji, although he didn't sound convinced. "Perhaps it's to ward off lowlanders from going up the Mountain, and challenging the clan for their land?"

Guy had already started walking down the forest path towards the yellow lights that they could see between the trees. He called to his team over his shoulder, "Keep your eyes bright and beady, and ears wide and wiggling!"

They warmed their fingers under their cloaks and made towards the encampment. As they neared they heard a buzz of voices, chattering in a language that sounded very little like what they were used to hearing. Lee sniffed. The cold night air was getting to his nose and it was red and running.

"What was the name of our contact?" Guy asked, as they approached and began to make out the shapes of tents and figures clustered around fires.

"Koujin Tahei," Neji told him.

Tenten closed her eyes. "And maybe, sensei, we could keep the entrances subtle this time – "

"LO and BEHOLD, the MIGHTY BLUE BEAST OF KONOHA!"

Tenten's jaw dropped. "How the heck did he get from here to the middle of the camp in two seconds!?"

"Guy-sensei! He has most wondrous energy. Even in the dark depths of winter, see him light the way ahead with his flaming torch of youthfulness! Sensei! We are coming!" Lee went flying in after their teacher into the camp before Tenten or Neji could stop him.

"So much for subtle," Neji sighed.

"Guess we'd better hurry before they cause a diplomatic incident," Tenten said, and they followed suite.

Guy was already striking a pose on a tree-stump in the middle of the encampment, flashing a twinkling smile at the Koujin clansmen gathering around him.

From his vantage point on the tree-stump, Guy spotted several clan distinctive features. Every head had a thick mane of coppery-red hair, and every face had amber eyes. In some faces those eyes appeared gentle and warm, but in others – many of the ones currently surrounding him, he noted and felt the hairs prickle along his arms – those amber eyes made Guy think overwhelmingly of predators.

Wrapped in furs and skins, the clansmen hung back from the tree-stump, forming a wide circle around the ninjas as though they were fencing off an arena for a spectacle.

Lee, Tenten and Neji reached Guy just as he cleared his throat.

"Hello!" he boomed brightly. There were amused titters from the clansmen. "We are ninjas, sent from Konoha. Do not be afraid!"

The clansmen watched Guy posturing and waving without a sound. Some seemed genuinely intrigued by this strange lanky male specimen in green making funny noises on the stump in front of them.

"Maybe they don't understand us?" Tenten whispered to Lee, as Guy continued talking and the clansmen continued to watch like he was some giant prancing asparagus.

"Perhaps that is so, but did you notice?" Lee looked around the circle of clansmen with his eyebrows knitted together. "They didn't have a watch set up for their camp."

"Maybe…maybe, it's because…they're not local, so they don't know how scary the forest can be at night?" Tenten said with a nervous laugh, crushing the voice that was saying, Maybe it's because nothing scares them.

"Will you two stop whispering?" Neji hissed irritably, and before Tenten could call him out as a hypocrite for whispering himself, three men stepped out from the crowd.

They stood in a line. All three had heads of flaming coppery hair and bright amber eyes, but there the resemblance ended. The man on the left was tall, solid and barrel-chested, with a build like an oak. He had a low forehead and a crumpled face. The man on the right was small and hunch-backed. His legs were short and, as though to make up for that fact, his arms were absurdly long and they trailed in front of him so that their knuckles scraped the ground.

They flanked a man of middling height in the centre, who had no distinguishing feature as such, except that his eyes were curiously bright. They were so bright they were almost luminous and they didn't so much as look at Guy on the tree-stump, but snap him up into their depths. He carried his head high. His back was straight, and, all in all, it spelled a man who thought he was entitled to not only own the world, but eat it.

"Konoha ninjas," spoke the man in the centre, with crisp, clean vowels. He bowed. The two on either side of him remained straight. "Welcome to our camp. Please let me introduce ourselves."

He indicated the huge man standing on his left. "This is my elder brother, Koujin Buhei, He Who Stands Tall."

Buhei remained silent and stony-faced and gave no sign that he understood what was being said.

The man in the middle then gestured down at the hunchback to his right. "This is my younger brother, Koujin Gonpei, He Who…Goes Fishing."

Tenten snorted loudly, earning her a glare from Neji that insisted she either shut up right then or die.

"And I am the middle brother, Koujin Tahei," the man finished pleasantly, dipping his head. "He Who Waits with his Palms Together. You may all call me Tahei. I appreciate that calling all of us by our surnames would be very strange, given that they all the same."

Guy stepped down from the tree-stump and went up to the bright-eyed young man. He handed Tahei a scroll. "We have been instructed by the Hokage to act as your escort and guide until you reach the village. She sent a letter in advance about the arrangements?"

"She did, and, on behalf of the Koujins, we thought that it was just the kind of gesture one would expect from a leader such as the Hokage of Konoha," Tahei replied. There was something in his voice with its dry, mocking lilt that set Tenten's teeth on edge.

She exchanged a look with Lee and Neji.

The real reason Team Guy had been sent out was to find out as much as they could about the Koujins before they reached Konoha's walls, and it seemed as though Koujin Tahei had worked that out.

Suddenly Buhei, the tall elder brother, spoke. His voice was deep and booming, and now that they heard the Koujins speaking, the Konoha ninjas realised that it wasn't a foreign language at all. It was still the common tongue, but it was so heavy and thick with dialect quirks and odd accenting they couldn't understand or follow it beyond a couple of words.

Whatever Buhei said made Tahei chuckle and look up to stare at Neji.

"My brother was just saying what lovely eyes you have."

Neji flinched and clenched his jaw but he knew better than to rise to bait.

Buhei then added something that made the Koujins standing in the circle laugh.

"Tahei-san," Guy said in a low voice, as the young man chuckled softly at Buhei's words. "There are some things in Konoha that tend to be thought of as sensitive topics. They don't make especially good jokes, if you get my drift of things - be that person burning at the prime of his youth, or glowing in the autumn of his years - so if your brother is making another comment about this boy's eyes, please tell him to stop."

"But he was paying him a compliment. Buhei was simply wondering what his eyes would taste like compared to other ninja eyes."

There was a cold, frigid silence that had nothing to do with the sharp winter chill.

"My apologies." Tahei bowed his head again to Guy, but very pointedly not to Neji, who was twitching and quivering with all sorts of ticks of barely suppressed rage. "Cultural differences. Jokes don't always translate so well between tongues. Now! I will take you to meet our Elders. They have been looking forward to meeting with Konoha ninjas very, very much. Please make yourselves feel at home. Until we reach Konoha, you are our guests."

Tahei turned, and the crowd of Koujins parted to form a path for him and his brothers. He beckoned over his shoulder for Guy, Neji, Tenten and Lee to follow. "Come. Come this way."

Oh, the irony, Sasuke thought pithily, as he opened his eyes.

He had tried desperately to wake up. All that seemed to have accomplished was that he had closed his eyes and gone promptly to sleep.

Now he was dreaming. He really was dreaming.

He was on the pier of the lake, standing and looking out over what was usually the water but in his dream it was ice. Shining like a mirror, the lake was completely frozen, iced over white with dark green bruises where the ice was thinner.

All the banks were white, covered in snow that was course and dense and crumbled into powder in Sasuke's fists, but didn't melt.

No. None of it would melt. He shoved his hand into a drift of snow piled against the side of the pier. It came away cold and raw, but never wet. The ice was the same. He broke off the tip of an icicle and rubbed it between his fingers and he gave up when his patience melted first.

It was still, in the way that winters tended to be on those white grey mornings, when snow covered tree branches and stuck to bark at impossible angles, so that everything always looked poised to fall, if it had not already frozen in freefall.

What else was there in the dream?

He could warm his hands with his breath. His legs were fine so long as he kept on moving. He thought, in a kind of dream daze, that he might try to explore the land beyond the banks around the lake and trudged through the snow up to the top of the ridge.

But every time Sasuke thought he had reached the top, he would suddenly find that he had done a U-turn, and that he was facing the wooden pier jutting over the lake again.

What did this dream want him to do? Jump off the pier? He'd done that as a child once, hadn't he?

He went back down to the pier, snow crunching under the soles of his feet and between his toes, then slippery wooden boards. The edge of the pier came sooner than he expected. It was as though the dream was pushing him forward, chasing him on, throwing him onto the ice in the same way it had turned him back from the top of the bank.

He landed solidly on both his feet. Held his breath.

Nothing. No cracks, no shattering ice, no sudden vaporisation of ice into a great big pit. He wouldn't put it past it in a dream world for that to happen.

He took a few more tentative steps, planting each foot gently into the lake surface and testing the strength of the ice before committing his weight to it. When he had grown more confident, he strode out into the lake centre and looked up at the sky.

Where the lake was all white and shades of palest blue, the sky was ablaze with colours.

Yellows, pinks, greens and reds clustered together like bunches of grapes and clouds of stars, forming a huge geometric pattern overhead. It reminded Sasuke of a stained glass bowl.

As Sasuke watched, the sky twisted. There was a rushing noise, of glass beads rattling in a metal drum, and Sasuke realised with a jolt just what he was looking at.

The sky above him was a kaleidoscope image.

He stared, and the sky twisted again. He heard the rush of beads once more and the pattern of colours changed.

Movement in the periphery of his vision.

He spun, heart racing, eyes wide, and looked down to find a patch of thin green ice, that had appeared out of nowhere and nearly crept up to his ankles.

The centre of the ice patch was thin enough to see straight through into the lake below.

Pitch black water swirled and boiled in a torrent so violent Sasuke wondered how the ice was holding up against it. The water was roaring. The water was frothing, and it lashed at the bottom of the ice like it wanted to scour it all away.

For a fleeting instant, a hand appeared in it.

A white hand with battered nails - it reached out, and scratched on the ice above it, scrabbled furiously for purchase, before it was tugged away by the waters.

And after the hand was a face – thin, white and angry. Sasuke didn't recognise it. It surfaced from the dark water and smacked its forehead into the bottom of the ice sheet. Locking tired eyes with Sasuke, it sunk away.

And after the face came thousands of snakes. They rushed past like a shoal of white, wriggling fish, flowing by in a writhing current that didn't seem to end, snake upon snake upon snake upon snake...

The sky twisted. Glass beads rattled.

That was the point where Sasuke woke up and found that he was still in the strange domed room, three years in his future.

If you're confused, if you smirked, if you enjoyed even a snippet of it, if the Koujins are creepy, drop me a review and let me know, because I always love to know. ;)

Thank you for reading!

Best, Zen :D