"You can't even stand?" she asks, running a diagnostic palm down his body. He flinches at the feel of the jutsu, sliding through his own field. His chakra covers him, flowing through the seals tattooed into every inch of his skin, layered by seals over seals, keeping them invisible. It is mildly cold, and professionally distant, and yet he still shudders at the otherness of it.

His lips refuse to move. He remains staring up at the sky.

She slings an arm under his, drags him up with chakra running just under her skin, through her muscles. It hums against him, and he forces his internal chakra to accept her, let her through.

Her presence seems small against his, like the smallest slug holding up Gamabunta. The fine control she has over her muscles drags his dead weight, his sandals digging a new furrow into the ground.

She ducks her head down slightly, so that the detritus in the air will fly into her headband, rather than her eyes. She scans the ground, looking for a sign. The grass and ground here is wet throughout, soaked with a buoyancy and the algae-rich color of the seawater.

Some twenty to forty steps away, Haruno Sakura finds what she is looking for. The grass around this area is thickly grown with grass, but as she steps onto it, her feet sink down almost to the knee. The mud she is in feels cold but with no trace of the slightly coarse texture of salt. And ahead is a puddle of water, spilling out of a small hole in a gently rolling bank. The color of the water is but faintly blue-green, rather than the turquoise of the rest of the island.

"Here, Naruto," she says, and lays him to rest against the slope. "Give me earth chakra."

His eyelids barely flutter open, but he understands.

Naruto has no longer had a problem reaching inside himself. The cage which once held a demon fox is empty now of its inhabitant, but by no means useless. Instead, the bars themselves are inscribed with script, and the walls, the ceiling, and the substanceless floor are all the triggers to the seals tattooed onto his body.

Sakura places a hand on his right shoulder. Under her hand, the muscle bulges and flattens, and chakra surges up between her arms as a waterfall does. She holds the other hand out, and pictures in her mind what it will look like, this shelter from the elements.

She barely whispers the release phrase under her breath, not needing to speak to maintain her concentration.

Earth chakra surges out, with it the stability of the ancient rock and the potential for change, and rock walls rise out of the ground. The three rock walls merge with a slanted roof, just taller than Naruto stands at its highest point. The fourth wall rises, leaving only a boulder in front for the 'door', and closes off all else.

Inside the shelter, a stone bed has formed. Sakura wastes no time in manhandling a fellow member of the Konoha Nine onto the bed, and begins healing her friend, in order of triage.

Brain damage, internal organs, severe bleeding - cuts in several arteries, and major veins. Broken bones (ribs, pelvis, elbows, knees), The nerve damage she isolates but treats last because she does not want to cause Naruto pain, and the energy cost of giving him his nerves back and then sedating him again is too much for a whole-body healing such as this one. His chakra coils are irretrievably twisted up with his body seals, and so she can do little for his chakra flow. Knowing him, however, Naruto is probably already finding his way out of the mess. The best she can do is make him fit to walk, to eat, to fight.

With a burst of her chakra and concentration, Sakura soothes Naruto's torn muscles and reconnects the burst blood vessels with the heart. Face pale and breathing hard, Sakura slides to the grass beside the bed, leaning her head against Naruto.

"Naruto?"

Naruto swings his legs around the side of the bed. Opens his eyes once more, this time truly seeing.

Outside the light has faded; it is no longer day-summer, but a mid-summer night. The gentle patter of raindrops fall on the stone roof. Quickly that becomes a drizzle, a rainfall, a downpour.

It is sheeting outside, and the winds begin to howl around the shelter. Sakura stands, totters over to the boulder, and uses the last of her strength to seal them in.

Just in time, as the howling of the winds double, then triple, in volume. One of Uzu's winter maelstroms, ironically Naruto's namesake, has been born from the unnatural ripples in the water.

Sakura sits in the dark and waits for Naruto to speak.

Naruto stares at the boulder. He carves out the simplest seal, the kanji for fire, and breathes life into it.

A cheerful orange flame sits in the corner of the stone bed. It reveals Sakura's expression, pallid and worrying.

"Naruto?"

"...I'm fine."

His throat works as he stares off at the distance.

His last loop, he revealed his travelling to the Konoha Twelve. They ... took it in a multitude of differing reactions.

Sakura's reaction, un-surprisingly, hurt the most. He had arranged for it that Team 7 not reform, for a change of pace; he had not expected that that loop was to be the final one. So, Sakura's expression, on seeing him hurt, had been - distant, professional - and that hurt more than her Tsunade-controlled punches to the head.

"If you're sure," Sakura says. "Still, get some rest. The weather won't stop for a while yet."

"Yeah," Naruto says.

The transport seals outside are in no condition to be transported into.

On the path of a traveller, safe places are ports in a storm. And what better place to begin than here, amid the natural maelstrom? A port is a dock with facilities.

Looking at Sakura, and checking over himself, he remembers that he has a dock, and he has a medic.

That is more than enough to spite the gods of the multiverse, because he is Uzumaki Naruto...believe it.

He clenches his fists. Stands.

"-Naruto?"

Wavers a little. Is resolute.

His arms feel like lead. Still, they raise until he braces himself against the wall.

"Naruto?" Sakura tries to stand up, but shakily lowers herself back to her seat. "What are you doing?"

Naruto makes his fingers move, uses the chakra seal that ignites on his fingertips to carve line and curve and deed into the wall.

He taps it with his other hand and stands back.

The transport seal is made into large-print. It glows faintly on the wall, chakra blue.

Uzumaki Naruto, Fuuinjutsu Level III master, throbs as his seal activates unexpectedly. It makes him take a step back.

The air in front of his seal shimmers, begins to wave as though it were liquid glass.

Abruptly the air resolves into two bodies, clung together so tightly it looks as though they are one bloodied mess.

It makes the small shelter quite a lot smaller, and also much smellier.

Sakura gasps. She recognizes the hair, even by the dull orange light.

Naruto takes in a long, slow breath. He recognizes the presence, even in his weakened state.

"Forehead," one of the figures sways to her feet, bearing her weight and her partner's by clawing her hands up the wall. "Figures you would get here first."

"Ino," Sakura says, too worried to counter-insult. "What happened to the two of you?"

The other - a boy - looks upwards and meets Naruto's eyes. Naruto slings an arm under his shoulder, bears his weight so that Ino can concentrate more on standing. Sakura struggles to her feet to support Ino.

A fine foursome they look, blood spattered everywhere.

"Don't worry, Sakura," Ino says, trying to wipe her bloodstained hands on the remains of her clothing. "It's not all ours."

"You're hurt?" Sakura gasps, and starts a diagnostic. The green glow sputters and flickers out.

"-We'll survive," Ino says.

A loud crash sounds from outside, and both Ino and the too-thin boy flinch. Their hands grasp for weapons that lie on some other battlefield.

"Stay," Naruto says. He looks them each in the eye, lowers them to the bed. "Stay."

"We - can't -" Ino says. "It was a desperate measure, the scroll you gave us to activate. But we have to go back - otherwise...Shikamaru dies...Asuma-sensei dies..."

"What scroll?" Sakura asks. "I thought the transport seal could only be written in earth or water...?"

Ino looks at her, truly looks at her. Her gaze flickers to Naruto, whose eyes have become shrouded, unclear. "Sakura...when did I lend you my purple pumps? The ones with the senbon in its seams?"

Sakura looks confused. "February twenty-third, four years ago by my personal time."

Ino's eyes widen. She shrinks back against the wall. The boy sits up, and his face comes for the first time into the firelight.

"Chouji..." Sakura says, aghast. He is stick thin, his hair hacked off wildly, burned in patches, and twisted in others.

She screws her face up and the diagnostic flickers back to life for a moment, before dying.

She fixes Naruto with a pleading look.

"Look...Naruto...Uzumaki-san...whoever you are," Ino says, "Please just send us back the way we came. We'll come out from behind, surprise them, and get us out of your hair. Can we...can we make that deal?"

Naruto's arms unfold from where they have been through Ino's password, and he starts forward.

Ino shrinks back and begins to make handseals.

"Time moves slower here," Naruto begins. He takes a step toward Sakura. Ino shrinks back from him, closer to Chouji. She lets the handseals go. She has nothing left. There is a presence in this room which is stronger than anything she has ever felt from him before.

He places a hand on Sakura's stomach, and pours his chakra into her paths, the gentle sharing that Tsunade and Sakura had taught him, once upon a lifetime.

"Sakura."

"...Yes, Naruto?"

"Use my chakra. Heal them."

He made his decision, a long time ago. When he discovered there were first gods in the multiverse. When he discovered there were an infinite number of Madaras and Obitos, good and bad and every shade in between.

It is a long and lonely path to be a traveller. At some point, one needs to take a rest and enjoy the journey.

"Ino. Chouji."

Ino and Chouji look up at a man who looks like their Naruto, but without the air of desperation that all of Konoha's shinobi carry nowadays. Instead he looks like he has lost everything - like desperation, charisma, luck, was not enough.

"Yes, Uzumaki-san?"

"Welcome to Sekai no Owarigakure. The Village Hidden at the End of the World. We exist half-in and half-out of this world. Time does not flow at the same rate as your world. Stay. Heal. Become stronger. Then go and rescue your Shikamaru, your Asuma-sensei."

Ino looks at him. Sighs.

"Do we have a choice?"

It is a man's voice, with no hint of desperation.

"No."

Sakura approaches them, color on her cheeks and green in her hands. Another stone bed rises out of the ground at Naruto's gesture, and together Naruto and Sakura lay them on the beds, side by side.

As Sakura diagnoses and treats their wounds, Naruto places his palm on the ground and hums. The walls of the shelter shift apart, the roof spreading with them as they go, encompassing even the little water spring.

This Village is as yet, nothing more than a dock and a field medic, but it is a good place to start.