Rating: M

Warnings: Supreme angst, a slight emotional breakdown, body dysphoria that verges on body horror, etc.

Word Count: ~4600

Pairings: eventual Kakashi/Kurama, past and future Sasuke/Naruto

Disclaimer: I don't hold the copyrights, I didn't create them, and I make no profit from this.

Notes: So much angst here, I apologize, but I needed at least one breakdown to happen. This will be the last chapter that's purely grief. Um, probably.

(Also, oops my hand slipped and now there are chapter titles?)

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Chapter III: Succor

[succor / ˈsəkər/ , assistance and support in times of hardship and distress. Middle English via Old French from medieval Latin succursus, from Latin succurrere 'run to the help of,' from sub- 'from below' + currere 'run.'.]

Traveling as a human is stupid.

Likely Kurama should already be used to the tedium of having to walk everywhere when a single stride covers a yard, if that, but the thing about spending a good chunk of his existence in another's body is that it means he could tune out whenever things weren't interesting. A lot of his time was spent sleeping. Or, before Naruto got to him, seething. Plotting and planning, recovering, drowsing, remembering the Sage's final words—things like that.

None of it has prepared him for the fact that he now moves at the equivalent of a slug-crawl when compared to a bijuu's usual strides.

It's disconcerting, too, to see actual people everywhere. Well, not everywhere, because it's clearly winter, and most people are smart enough to stay indoors when faced with Earth Country's snow and Fire Country's biting cold, but there are still more of them than Kurama is used to. Kaguya never cared about collateral damage, and civilians were wiped out quickly. She couldn't use them the way she could shinobi corpses—no chakra systems, or systems that were severely underdeveloped, Sakura had theorized once—but she hadn't wanted to chance those capable of molding her chakra being born somewhere along the line.

It's strange enough to see movement on the roads that Kurama gives plenty of odd looks, in addition to those being directed at him. Those he ignores for the most part; it's easy enough to put down to the fact that Han is a huge man, easily the largest of the jinchuuriki, and Kurama feels rather like he's swimming in the borrowed uniform. It probably looks like he mugged a giant for his clothes or something. It's annoying, but so is practically everything about this situation.

He thinks of Naruto again, of what Naruto would say or do in this position. He'd probably be laughing, bright and amused, walking along with his arms crossed behind his head and no plan to speak of, but every assurance that things would work out. Kurama can almost see Naruto out of the corner of his eye, walking beside him, and has to shake his head sharply to banish the vision.

His Naruto is dead. The little boy he's going to see isn't anything close to his Naruto yet, and while Kurama will make every effort to be sure he becomes that person eventually, there are no guarantees.

To honor his Naruto's last wishes, there's every chance Kurama will have to destroy all likelihood of the man coming to be. Because he's here to stop Kaguya, and to do that he needs to cut off all her ways of coming back. Zetsu needs to die, to disappear, and that means Kurama will likely have to take the rest of Akatsuki out as well.

It's not exactly a hardship, given their aims and what they did the first time around. A threat to the jinchuuriki is a threat to Naruto, and Kurama's hardly about to let that stand.

Anger simmers just below the surface of his aggravation, a touch of rage twisted up with the iron control Kurama learned over decades of imprisonment. There's no jailor this time, no redheaded woman clinging to his chains, no blond boy determined never to hurt anyone with Kurama's power, but still. Kurama looks human. He's not the vast harbinger of disaster anymore—that's the creature still sealed and seething in Naruto's soul. Kurama as he is now can't afford to let his anger out, not until he's fully used to being human.

Kakuzu defeated him. If Han hadn't been fighting as well, it's possible Kurama would have died there in the snow, rendering Naruto's sacrifice absolutely meaningless. He doesn't know this body's healing capabilities, and doesn't want to test them. The wounds from Kaguya's chakra control rods vanished, but how much of that was Naruto's body and how much was it the seal? Does Kurama's chakra make any difference, even, when Naruto's system is so used to having both it and an Uzumaki's resilience?

The Uzumaki part is gone now. There's no trace of Naruto's chakra remaining, and Kurama has looked, searched every last cell of this new-familiar body looking for even a hint of the former occupant. It might as well be an empty vessel, though, a jar with every last ounce of its contents emptied out, wiped clean and left for Kurama alone.

Damn the brat for being so good at seals, anyway. Why, why couldn't he have turned that to finding a way for both of them to come back? Why couldn't their positions have been reversed? Kurama knows the limits of him empathy, his abilities, and Naruto had none. Naruto would have saved everyone, brought every last enemy crashing down to stand alone in victory. With or without Kurama, he's always been a hero.

Kurama is a natural disaster trapped in physical form and little else.

He remembers, again, the scene just before Naruto hurled them back in time: blood and darkness and matte-black metal, Sakura's body crumpled like a dropped doll. Remembers Naruto falling, the dull, flat sound as his body hit the earth, too late to stop the seal from working even as the light slid out of his eyes. Tries not to think about the mad rush of chakra, the snap of reality twisting and breaking around him as whatever specks of Naruto were left inside him burned away, the human soul too fragile for such a shift.

What does it mean for Kurama, that he survived intact?

Kurama knows he's not a demon, no matter what the fools living now would term him; he knows little of evil—little of good, either, of course, because he's a creature of malice and hatred, but what he is comes from the humans themselves. He is what the Sage made him, and if the humans want to call him evil, so be it. He's simply a reflection of their darkness, but Naruto has shown him time and again that being so doesn't mean he can't reflect their light as well. This world might mean little to him, all its souls passing by like ants, but Naruto was never like that. And for Naruto, he'll save them.

That it means he'll be able to take his revenge as well is simply a nice bonus, for all that Kurama relishes that fact.

The temperature is dropping rapidly as night falls, and Kurama grimaces, casting a glance up at the deep grey clouds sliding across the horizon. Snow is rare in Fire Country, as long as one stays out of the mountains, but with Kurama's truly magnificent luck it seems he's just in time for a storm. He has no money, so finding an inn is out of the question, and as generous as Han was providing him with un-ripped clothes, they're hardly thick enough to keep him warm in a blizzard. Given that he's passing through farmland right now, there aren't even any nice caves to hole up in. It's either sleep in the bushes at the edge of the road or break into someone's house, and Kurama doesn't want to deal with all the possible problems that could come with the latter.

Still, there are lights ahead of him, a small, tight cluster of them, and Kurama decides he might as well check the inn regardless, if there is one. As much as it irks his pride, the innkeeper may be willing to take pity on him, or let him do manual labor to make up for a night's stay. A little indignity is worth not freezing to death, Kurama decides reluctantly.

Besides, his feet are still bare. He's starting to lose the feeling in his toes, and as inexperienced as he is in listening to a human body's warning signs, he knows that can't be a good one.

At least moving is coming more easily now, Kurama thinks a touch sourly as he makes it to the outskirts of the tiny town. Getting into a fight was good for that at least, even if Kakuzu did almost fry him in the end. It's not like it's the first time he's been in control of Naruto's body, either, but…the emptiness is unnerving. For more than a hundred years, Kurama has shared a form with a human, kept to the back of their thoughts whenever he couldn't fight his way to the front, and being without the submerging hum is like gravity suddenly shifting so that things fall sideways rather than down. It knocks him off balance, and he finds himself so aware of the lack of noise that it's very close to maddening.

Naruto was always doing, even when he wasn't in control. Always thinking, always feeling, and now there's just—nothing.

The inn isn't hard to find, at least, and Kurama forces himself from his thoughts, lifting his eyes to study the sign. There's no notice that those who can't pay will be thrown out, so Kurama supposes that's a step in the right direction, though he doesn't have much hope of the owner being accommodating. Maybe he's been jaded by his own experiences, and Naruto's as a child, but he's seen a whole lot of the worst humanity has to offer, and most of the good has been inspired by Naruto alone.

In all likelihood, it's simply the world they live in. Hard to keep a positive outlook when you're little more than a mercenary for hire. Even Naruto could be pragmatic about it, to a degree; shinobi are shinobi, and people buying their services keeps the villages running. There's only so much room for ideology, and while Naruto managed to walk that line in the years he was Hokage, Kurama can't imagine many other people would be able to.

Sighing softly, Kurama rakes a hand through his hair to get it out of his face, then approaches the inn. The interior is brightly lit, and as he pushes open the door he can see a small bar and dining area off to the side. The smell of food makes his stomach rumble disconcertingly, and Kurama grimaces, pressing a hand over it. These reactions are…weird. He's still not used to having them, no matter how long he's spent as someone's ghostly passenger; having them happen to him firsthand is a lot different than distantly knowing they're occurring.

His entrance gets him a few sharp, wary looks, but otherwise nothing, and that's weird too. Kurama is still used to those who don't know him through Naruto running screaming at the sight of him, and for all that he's now a normal human size—slightly below average, even, thanks to the brat never quite managing to outgrow his shrimp phase—the lack of reaction to his presence just feels strange.

Shaking it off, Kurama glances around to get his bearings, then heads for the small desk at the bottom of the stairs. The older woman working there glances up as he approaches, looks back down, and then does a double-take. One brow arches skeptically, but she puts her pen down and asks politely, "Can I help you?"

Kurama hates this. The damned brat would be so much better at everything, he thinks, and it stings enough to make him twitch. Taking a breath, he forces himself not to growl the way he wants to and instead answers, "Yeah. Any chance you'd be willing to trade a night's stay and a meal for some work?"

The wariness changes to a considering expression, and the woman looks him over. "We have firewood that needs cutting and moving," she says after a moment. "My son would do it, but he was injured by bandits on the southern road."

Kurama tries not to grimace. From Nine-Tailed Demon Fox, Scourge of Humanity's Darkest Places, to woodcutter. Gyūki would laugh himself sick. Not to mention Shukaku would actually die laughing. "How 'bout I take care of those bandits instead?" he suggests, smiling. Not his fault if the expression has a few too many teeth in it.

That gets him another look, even sharper this time. "You're a shinobi?" the woman asks, clearly searching for a hitai-ate.

It makes things both easier and harder that Kurama doesn't have Naruto's, either the old one with Konoha's symbol or the Alliance one shinobi started defaulting to once Kaguya wiped out the first few villages. Either would raise questions, but they would answer them, too. As it is, both of them were lost years ago, so Kurama simply nods and says, "Unaffiliated."

"I probably should have guessed, the way you look," the innkeeper says shrewdly. "If I have your word you'll hunt them down tomorrow, you can stay. Room 5 is empty, and it comes with dinner."

It takes effort not to bristle a little at the remark, and it reminds Kurama of Naruto's parting comment that he should look in a mirror, which between the ache of grief and the bite of irritation just puts him in a foul mood all around. "Fine. Good," he manages. "I'll go after them as soon as I wake up."

A fight sounds like a good idea anyway, and he'd likely have gone after them whether she agreed to the trade or not. Bandits generally set up camp, so Kurama could have slept there after he killed them. Still, a warm meal beats scavenged scraps or stolen rations, and this way he's assured of a soft bed. There have been too few of those, the last five years. For the sake of all of Naruto's complaining about the lack, if nothing else, Kurama will take advantage.

"We have a deal," she agrees, and passes over a key. "Again, Room 5. I'll have one of the girls bring your dinner, if you want to find a seat."

Awkwardly, Kurama nods his thanks, then turns to look for an open table. There's one in the corner, tucked back against the wall, and he heads for it with some relief, instinct telling him to find somewhere dark and stay there. He's hurting, even if his physical wounds are already gone, and there's enough of a real fox in him to want to hide until the pain is gone, even if the more rational part of his brain knows it won't work.

He remembers Naruto's grief, after Kaguya killed Sasuke. It ebbed, sometimes, but it never fully eased, and even though Naruto was a best friend rather than a lover to Kurama, he doesn't expect his own pain to be any different.

Some things heal with time. Loss scabs over, but never seems to go away.

The nightmares come as a surprise.

Kurama gasps awake some time before dawn, sweat-soaked and shaking again, this time with the image of Naruto's slack, empty face before him, twisted with the corrupted grey lines that always marked Kaguya's controlled corpses. There's nothing else, no danger, no threat, but that alone is enough to make Kurama hunch forward, fisting his hands in his hair and ignoring the prickle of claws too close to his scalp. He takes a breath, lets it out in a rough, shaky cry, and clamps his eyes shut, fighting to hang on to that last smile Naruto gave him rather than that horrible creation of his subconscious.

It's not real. He knows that, logically, because what he saw was this body falling, and since Kurama is wearing it right now there's no way Kaguya in that time could have animated it like some macabre puppet.

But Kurama heard it, the sound of Naruto's body striking the ground, dropped, discarded, meaningless without the real Naruto inside it. And now Kurama will have to live with the reminder every day, every time his heart beats, every time he moves. Because this is Naruto's body, but Kurama's stolen it, taken it over. Maybe he wanted this once, but not for twenty years at least. He's the pretender here, the fake, and he hates himself as he never, ever has before. Always, always his loathing has turned outwards, been directed at others, but now—

Now he might as well have killed Naruto himself. For all that this wasn't his choice, he might as well have cut the jinchuuriki's throat with his own hand.

A sound tears out of him, rough and choking and as sharp as knives, and Kurama's body shakes with the force of it. Another, and then again, and there are tears on his cheeks and Kurama can't understand how, but he's crying. Crying for the loss of the first person since the Sage to bring light to his world, crying for the loss of his best friend, his partner, the one creature in all of creation who looked upon his soul and loved him regardless.

Naruto is gone, and Kurama is all that's left.

It hurts. The world feels empty and gaping and so terribly open, as if it's about to fall away beneath his feet and leave him spinning out into nothingness. The anger filled him up, before, the anger and the petty bits of irritation, but in the spill of cold moonlight falling through the window, all of that has been burned away. Grief rises in its place, too much for his tiny human body to contain, and Kurama feels like it should wash him away, drown him completely. But instead it builds and builds and there's no release, no deliverance. Just—grief. Just sorrow.

Just loss, and the burning, twisting knowledge seared right into the heart of him that nothing will ever be the same again.

For so long, they fought. For survival, for revenge, for protection of those left. There was always a thread of hope, though, that someday, somehow, they would get their world back. Naruto had so very much to do with that, pushed them all forward towards that vision of peace and home and family when they won. Only with that last, final strike did they lose it, and even then Naruto still clung to his hope that Kurama would make it back, would fix things and let everyone be happy.

But here and now, Kurama has none of that. His world will never, ever be what it was, and from now until this body crumbles away, he's going to have to live with this unfamiliar grief, these human emotions, and remember every second of every day just what it is he lost.

"Damn you," he whispers around the edges of a sob, pressing his forehead against his raised knees and wrapping his arms around his head. "Damn you!"

But it doesn't have the edge of anger to it that it did just hours before. There's only the ache, and even though Kurama knows himself well enough to realize the fury isn't gone forever, he hates this. Hates this weakness, hates the fact that he can't ride the hard edges the way he always did his malice and anger. Hates that he wishes he could have been the one to make the sacrifice instead of Naruto, because he shouldn't. For anyone else he wouldn't even dream of it, but a world without Naruto isn't one he wants to live in.

There's nothing romantic about the sentiment. Nothing of lust or desire or anything like that. But Naruto was his, was the first human to earn his name, to earn the free use of his power, to earn his trust and his friendship and his love. Naruto was the one person in existence for whom he would have done absolutely anything, and to be without that is like severing half his soul and trying to move on without it.

"Enough," he tells himself, tells this small, weak body, but it doesn't work. If anything the tears come faster, hot and uncontrollable, and Kurama lashes out in frustration and pain, slashing futilely at the air. "Enough!" he cries, but it breaks partway through, and he can't bring himself to say it again.

Surely he can't cry forever. Surely there's an end to this somewhere.

It's still hours until dawn, but Kurama can't stay here any longer, inactive, mired in unfamiliar emotion. He felt, as a bijuu, but…not like this. Not to these intensities, not with such pain. It's new and he loathes it, the shakiness of his limbs and the hollow emptiness in his chest, the dry sting of his eyes and the raw rasp of his throat. So vulnerable, with so many weaknesses, so many places where even a hard touch can kill.

But he doesn't hate humans blindly, not anymore. Maybe Naruto is the best of them, but through him Kurama has come to know others—lost now, maybe, but he called them friends once, would have fought to his last breath to protect them. Their weaknesses give them strengths he's never quite been able to understand, and he wonders if, like this, he'll someday learn.

Restlessness and the ache of the unfamiliar silence drives him up and out, still pulling the sash of his borrowed robe closed. The inn is deserted but echoing with snores, and the buzz of the noise against his ears makes Kurama grimace. Shinobi don't snore, as a rule, and he's not used to the sound. It's enough that he's surprised he remained asleep as long as he did, and he's quite happy to get away from it now as he moves quickly down the hall.

The innkeeper from the night before is just turning on the lights as he enters the main room, and she gives him a look of faint surprise. "You're up early, shinobi," she says, even as she turns away. "Meaning to get an early start?"

"Best to hit them while they're still half-asleep," Kurama says gruffly, eager to leave. The presence of other humans itches at him, like fur rubbed the wrong way. He doesn't want to look at them and remember the reason he's here, the reason Naruto is dead. Because Naruto died for them, even if they'll never know it. And maybe that's actually part of the reason—they don't know, can't know, will never be able to look at any version of Naruto and understand the lengths to which he'd go to save them. Kurama resents them for it, because he won't allow himself to envy them their ignorance.

Naruto is worth more than that.

For a long moment, the woman makes no acknowledgement. Then, slowly, she turns, and studies him with an unreadable expression. "You have no weapon," she points out.

Kurama shrugs, half-lifting one hand so the pointed tips of his nails catch the light. "Don't need them," he counters, and takes a step towards the door. "The southern road, you said?"

This time, the woman lets him go and doesn't call him back. "Yes," she agrees, and then, when Kurama is almost out the door, "Good luck."

He doesn't answer, pulling the door shut behind him. There's a thick layer of snow on the ground, a chill wind sending ice crystals dancing up through the air, and Kurama wishes futilely for paws and fur to withstand the cold. Still, he made a promise, and he'll keep it, so he grits his teeth and steps forward, ignoring the snow's bite. A breath, careful and steadying and slow, and he opens his senses as he starts south, seeking any feelings of malice or hatred.

There are some here and there, scattered bits from dreams or one or two people, but nothing beyond the ordinary. The malice it takes to prey on fellow humans is something deeper, more sinister, so Kurama keeps walking, passing out of the town and into a small wood. The shadows cast by the three-quarter moon are long and dark, but not oppressive to a bijuu's eyes, and he moves easily, silently through the darkness. Stealth, at least, comes easily after five years of hit-and-run fighting against a goddess, and Kurama is confident that he won't be seen unless he wants to be.

Naruto would like this, he thinks, and the faint bitterness of the painful thought is undercut with the stirrings of anger once more. Helping people, trading services, defeating enemies—it should be Naruto here, not Kurama. Not Kurama, who keeps his word because that was Naruto's way, who does good because any less would leave Naruto disappointed in him. Not Kurama, who is reeling from this first true loss of someone close to him.

His fellow bijuu were…regrets, because he couldn't save them, but the anger always overwhelmed the sorrow. Not so now, like this, because the absence of Naruto hurts worse than anything else he can imagine.

But he can drown it out, he thinks. He hopes. Fighting Kakuzu left no room for anything else, only action and reaction and bubbling, bright-edged fury at this little reminder of Kaguya.

Fury is better than grief. Anger is better than sorrow. Kurama can endure the former; he has no experience surviving the latter.

He takes a breath and lets it out in a white gust, then closes his eyes, coming to a halt. Up ahead is a knot of malevolence and petty cruelty, exactly what Kurama once spent centuries hunting. At the edge of his hearing, there are people stirring and talking, sharp bits of an argument, and Kurama smiles thinly.

"Found you," he murmurs, and ghosts forward, keeping crouched low to the ground. Firelight flickers through the trees, muted and shielded, but it's enough to see by. Kurama presses himself into the shadows of a gnarled oak and makes to slip around it to get a good look at the camp, but—

Someone's already there.

Kurama blinks, caught entirely off guard, and the shinobi in the painted mask blinks back.