Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or any related characters or properties.

.:04:.
Shared Sigils

The humidity on the western border was almost impossible to ignore; such a far cry from the dryness of the desert that it seemed impossible to go from one extreme climate to another. The deep jungle was stretched before them, thicker than even Hi no Kuni's forests. The wildlife was dangerous, filled with odd plants and poisonous insects that Shino would probably love to conscript into his army.

He wondered how far away he was from one of the outposts of Kusagakure, the only hidden village in the Elemental Nations to not have a static headquarters. Rather, they had several places where they called home, the leadership of the land rotating among the outposts and small towns. The place was a frequent battleground in conflicts between the Great Nations that bordered it, and he supposed their geography made it more difficult to stop the leadership of the village because no one knew where to find them.

Naruto found the thickest tree he could, jumping into its branches and finding a safe place for both of them to sit, already planning how to fortify their position in case the locals decided to stop them. He'd been running nonstop through the bare edge of Amegakure's territory, avoiding the rain, with an unconscious redheaded jinchuuriki on his back, and he couldn't imagine feeling any more winded than he was right then.

He placed Gaara on the branches in a position where he was unlikely to roll off in his deep slumber, and he was conflicted. On the one hand, waking him up now would be a good idea. On the other hand, he had no idea how the boy would react to being out of the village. It had dawned on him very early on, the moment that he silently dispatched the guards outside the gate, that he was kidnapping Gaara.

He stared at the boy's form as he absently twirled shinobi wire in his hand, already preparing to create a ring of kunai traps around their perimeter, far enough away he would be able to sense it, but not so close the enemy would immediately guess where he was.

The paper tag sticking the boy's arm was the only thing keeping him asleep, isolating the influence of the Ichibi's chakra. He'd had to replace the tag twice already along the way, before the sand could instinctively strangle him when the jinchuuriki finally regained consciousness.

Naruto brushed away the tiny, invisible layer of sand that had been trying to bore into his wrist for the last thirty minutes. The Ichibi is stirring...

He made an absent hand-sign, sending several clones to work his trap magic, while he ran through his supplies. He had a few more minutes before the seal would lose its effects, but now that they were out of the desert, Naruto was sure the boy would be a minimal threat awake, if it came to that.

The blonde was still hoping, perhaps naively, that he had gained Gaara's trust over the past several weeks, and that it would make a difference now. If the situations were reversed, and someone had kidnapped Naruto from the village when he was only a few weeks under seven years old, he was sure he would have wanted to gut them and then brag about it on the playground to Sasuke. The thought of it made him smirk, but he was so far removed from that life now that he didn't think it was possible.

But Naruto couldn't know that the redhead would react the same way, and he had to prepare for how he was going to handle the situation. If Gaara's trust was broken now, and he still felt allegiance to the village and to his father even after all of the horrible treatment he had receive, he had to figure out what to do next.

The boy calmly breathed back and forth, a minuscule cloud of dust swirling in and out with every breath. The redhead's pale neck was exposed, the jugular in reach of a kunai. The future couldn't happen; he wouldn't let it. If he had to end his mission prematurely, before he successfully gained even one of the jinchuuriki to his cause, then he would never forgive himself. The Akatsuki's plans would certainly be put off with the Ichibi's time for resurrection, but it wouldn't be enough for Naruto to feel satisfied.

Naruto swallowed once. Gaara would live and would join him. That was the only option he was going to put his perhaps naive hopes on.

Temari stared out the window at the tiny house down the street, in perfect view from her window in the mansion. Fresh tears flowed when she remembered her uncle, and the choking sobs were for her brother.

Kankuro tried not to say anything, drawing feverishly to alleviate his thoughts, but even he could feel it. Nausea, pain, and grief filled both of them, albeit in different degrees. He patted her on the back, but she shrugged him off.

"No. I won't sit here like this worrying about him." She went to grab her battle-fan, hoping to find Daichi and wondering if he could help her train to set her mind. Kankuro stepped in her path and gestured for the door.

The blonde girl with four pigtails whirled around to see her father standing there just inside the room, no sign of true emotion on his face. He looked solemn, but not remorseful or sad. "I don't want to talk to you, Tousan."

The man frowned. "This is important."

The tone threw both of the siblings off, and it was Kankuro who mustered his courage first. "Is there any news about Gaara?"

The Kazekage took a moment of hesitation before he nodded. "Yes. His body was found dead this morning in the Southern District of the desert. I sent Baki to collect the body for an autopsy."

Temari felt all of her tears and anger explode at once, and she slammed a fist against the door next to her. When the adrenaline faded, she would regret that, she was sure.

"So Yashamaru attacked him, committed suicide, and then Gaara fled the village?" asked Kankuro, trying to piece the puzzle together. "Then someone killed him?"

The Kazeakage nodded slightly. "Yes."

"What about Shukaku?" asked Kankuro, and Temari grit her teeth in anger.

"What the hell, Kankuro? Our brother is dead! Can't you see him as anything else but a jinchuuriki?!"

Their father calmly cleared his throat to stop the bickering, before looking at the two of them. "All of those questions will be handled later. Today is a day of mourning."

Temari looked at the man incredulously. "Really? You of all people?" Every single moment of neglect and torment that she had witnessed from her father to his youngest son bubbled to the surface of her mind. "You hated him! You never cared about him, and you would never mourn him!" The Kazekage just laughed calmly, confusing her completely. "I'll bet you planned that attack! You forced our uncle to attack our bother!"

Kankuro interjected. "Temari, stop thi-"

"No. She's right." Immediately, the room froze. Kankuro broke into a sweat in his shock, eyes red from hidden tears. Temari couldn't stand this. "I ordered Yashamaru to kill the boy."

Temari stared incredulously at her fath- no, the Kage of the village. That was all he had become, and she had figured out his motives without even trying. "He couldn't control it, so you told Yashamaru to wipe him out before he was a threat." She paused to wipe a tear away from her face, gritting her teeth and swallowing. "But you didn't expect it to work, did you? You wanted to turn him into a weapon by having everyone he cared about betray him, for the beast to use his hatred against our enemies!" She suddenly ran at her father, preparing her fist by gathering whatever meager amounts of chakra she could muster in her state.

The man did not move, but in the instant where she was about to hit him, the Kazekage latched onto her wrist and pulled her arm around her back, kicking her away. The blonde girl landed in a heap at Kankuro's feet, crying out in pain from the kick to her side, her elbow and wrist throbbing.

"The two of you are insolent fools. I don't expect you to understand the intricacies of shinobi politics, nor my motives. You're just kids after all. But you will see that what I did was good for the village."

Bullshit... Temari thought, hatred filling her.

"You're one to talk, Temari," the man said, confusing both of his children. "And you as well, Kankuro. It's easy to pretend you have moral superiority, that my actions are depraved and that you think you have a right to judge. But do you?" He walked into the room and gestured out the window at their younger sibling's isolated former home. "You hated Gaara as I did, treated him like he was nothing; there is no sense in arguing with me, because that was how he felt. He talked with Yashamaru at length about how the two of you acted around him and your other friends, pretending he didn't exist. He was more alone alive than he will be in death."

Temari didn't know how to react to that, but eventually Kankuro answered for her. "But Tousan, we didn't send an assassin after him!"

The redheaded man raised an eyebrow. "Of course not. You're just children without the means to do so. But in the past, both of you have essentially pretended that he doesn't exist... How can you even be angry at the fact that he's dead? Didn't you get what you wanted all along?"

Gaara shook himself awake and almost immediately sensed something was wrong, before he ever opened his eyes. His skin was sticky and open to the world, his thicker clothes wet with sweat. He opened his eyes and immediately realized he was sitting in a tree, surrounded by overgrown foliage. He was momentarily amazed by the different leaves; he'd never seen that much variety before.

Daichi waved lightly at him, a few feet separating them on the tall branches. "Hey. Good morning. Err.. afternoon."

All of it came rushing back to him at once. The festival, Yashamaru's attack, and Daichi... He stared at the boy before him completely confused, before something else hit him hard.

"How... how did I sleep?" The foreign feeling of what had to be restfulness spread throughout his body. "I never sleep."

The other boy raised a slip of paper gingerly, pointing to the intricate seals decorating it. Gaara couldn't even begin to describe the sigils and elements on the paper. "I put one of these on you when we fled the village. It separated your chakra from Shukaku's for a few hours at a time, and you almost instantaneously fell asleep. Your body made up for lost time, I guess."

"Right," Gaara nodded; although he still had no idea how the boy before him could do such a thing, there were other things to talk about. "Where are we?"

"Past the border, about twenty miles from one of Kusagakure's settlements," explained Daichi. Gaara stared at his face in absolute confusion.

"We... aren't in Kaze no Kuni anymore?"

The boy shook his head. "I've never been much of a fan of deserts, to be honest. If we had stayed any longer, shinobi would have potentially discovered us much sooner. And that would not have been a good idea."

After a few short moments, Daichi cleared his throat. "You must have a few questions, don't you? Now is as good a time as any to come clean, right?" Gaara nodded, ready to hear it and lessen the amount of mystery and confusion surrounding him.

"My name isn't really Daichi; Daichi was an alias that I created to get into the village," the blonde explained, instantly causing Gaara to back away, shocked. His fingers gripped the tree branch harder, wishing he had the comfort of his sand around him. As dangerous as the sand was for others, it had become one of the only stable things in his life.

"What? What's your real name?"

"My name is Naruto Uzumaki," explained the boy, a small grin spreading across his face. "I know you probably are thinking a lot of things, but I want you to know that I will never intentionally harm you. I might have lied to you about who I was, but I had to keep my identity a secret until I could get you out of there. I did it out of necessity, not because I wanted to deceive you."

A long moment passed where he considered this Naruto before him. The blonde had been good to him, better than perhaps any person he had ever known. A part of him, the trusting part, fully believed Naruto that he would never hurt him, but the other half of him was not convinced. Gaara continued to run through questions, deciding on the most important ones. "Why did you need to lie to get into the village? And how do I know you aren't lying right now?"

"I guess you don't." Naruto looked over him with a smile. "The answer to your other question is a bit more complicated, but the short version is that I wanted to get you out of Sunagakure."

Gaara raised an eyebrow. "Why? Why would you take me away from my home?"

Naruto frowned, unsure of how to proceed, before finally clearing his throat. "You and I share something, a special kind of status that only a few people in the world share. I am the jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi, Gaara." The Suna native's eyes widened. "I have a chakra beast sealed inside of me too." He pointed to the whisker marks on his cheek. "My mother had the Kyuubi when she was pregnant with me, and that's where these come from. Those markings around your eyes? Your mom was the same way."

Gaara pressed a finger to his face, tracing the black lines around his eyes. He had always attributed it to severe sleep deprivation; well, that's what Yashamaru always said. He wasn't sure whether to believe anything that his uncle had ever said to him now.

"Jinchuuriki are often treated horribly by the people of the village," Naruto explained. "They are viewed like monsters, like demons. People are too stupid to realize that we aren't just walking representations of the Bijuu inside us."

Everything Naruto was saying added up, Gaara realized. He had lost count of the number of times that someone had called him demonic, or a monster, or feared for their lives around him even when he was calm. More often that he cared to admit, in the few short years of his life, the sand had proven that status true in the eyes of the villagers and shinobi alike.

"I was ignored. I was isolated. I had no friends, no family; my clan's village was wiped out a long time ago," Naruto said, solemn. "I had no one who cared for me, because everyone treated me like I was less than human, like I didn't deserve to be loved. From the look on your face, you know the feeling too, don't you?"

It took a few moments for Gaara to finally nod. It was surreal, seeing someone who shared the same burden and understood what he was saying. Gaara wasn't one hundred percent sure whether or not to believe him, but he had no real reason to doubt the person who had cared for him when no one else did.

"So I had to rescue you from the village," Naruto finally said, cracking a smile. "Did you mean what you said that day we met? About how you didn't want to be lonely anymore?"

Gaara looked up at him, remembering the conversation easily. It was one of the only times that someone had been genuinely good to him, had paid him any attention. Compared to his family, those people who were supposed to be close to him, Daichi had proven to be closer than anyone else. Now Daichi was revealed to be a lie, and every survival instinct in his bones told him to run far from here, to run back to the village.

It hit him then, like a figurative slap to the face. His village wasn't home anymore. All of Sunagakure would be happy to be rid of him, even Temari and Kankuro. They were safer now without him, the monster that plagued their streets. Without Yashamaru, he was sad to admit that he didn't feel it.

He looked down at his hands, staring at them and watching as the sand slowly accumulated around him, trying to recreate his sand armor after losing access to the Shukaku. He thought about Naruto's words, and their conversation before.

Daichi might be gone, but Naruto was the same. He had the same look in his eyes, the same grin on his face, even if it felt different now, like some kind of mask had been removed. Gaara suddenly locked eyes with him, realizing that Naruto meant him no harm, that he was safe with him.

"Yes. I meant every word."

The blonde smirked. "You won't have to be lonely ever again."

Yura stared blankly at the corpse in front of him. A small redheaded boy, face marred like he had been attacked by some beast, was lying face-down, a crowd of small merchants having broken away from their caravan to watch the scene. Dried blood caked the sand, and he wanted to puke at the smell.

Baki must have had similar thoughts, Yura realized, but the other Jonin simply ignored them and prepared to pick up the body and carry it back to the village."They were right; this is him."

"Was there ever any doubt?" asked Yura.

Baki nodded. "The Kazekage wasn't sure it could be him. The autopsy will confirm it." He pressed his fingers to the boy's skin, watching as the remnants of the boy's sand armor fell away. "Yeah. It's him."

"Who killed him? Or what?"

Baki shook his head, sighing. "I don't know. It looks like he got into a fight with some animal. The Kazekage will want to just drop it, I think."

Yura frowned at the implications that the leader of their village would just forget about his son. "Really? How can the man be like that to his own son?"

Baki shared his glance. "He's always been like that. Cold and calculating; he's an excellent Kazekage, but not such a great father. He was the one who caused Gaara to flee the village after all."

Yura nodded. "Something just doesn't add up about all of this though."

"Just drop it," the man said. "Seriously, Yura, leave it alone. The boy is dead, the Ichibi lost. We'll catch it in a few years when it manages to regenerate. You know it doesn't take very long in the desert."

The man finally nodded, but the unease didn't go away. He looked over his shoulder at a nearby dune, staring and feeling like he was being watched. It proved to be just a feeling though, that faded away as quickly as it appeared.

"So where are we going?" asked Gaara after they rested for another thirty minutes, talking absently and trying to avoid the subject.

Naruto knew where he needed to go next, but he wasn't on a strict time table anymore. Gaara was the only strict time table he knew of, and based on the memories he could only barely access, the Gobi and the Nanabi were captured first, around four years from that point.

Ideally, tackling the Sanbi next would be the best option, because the Bloodline Rebellion hasn't started yet, and Yagura was at the center of all of that. But Yagura was a problem he didn't want to face yet, due to the Mizukage's much closer connection to Akatsuki. Even if he wanted to get it over with now, Mizu no Kuni was nearly on the opposite side of the world, and it would take far longer to get there than he really wanted to admit.

"We're going to stick here for a little while, I think," Naruto explained after another moment of thought. He still had clones that were on their last legs, spread throughout the map to hide their actual position from any Konoha ANBU trying to follow him. They'd lasted long enough already, without getting into skirmishes, unlike the clones he had had stationed in Konoha. If there was one thing his time in Suna had done, he had regained his reserves to nearly their full level. "I don't really know much about Kusa, and the jungle seems interesting."

Gaara brushed his sweaty hair out of his eyes. "I hate it here. It's too wet. I hope we aren't here for too much longer."

Naruto smiled. "I'm sure we won't be. My plan to save all of us is a little more flexible now, and we have several options. But we need to stay in one place for a little while, because I need to work on something."

"What?" Gaara asked, his face skewed with confusion. "And what do you mean by 'all of us'?"

"The plan is to find all of our fellow jinchuuriki." The blonde raised his shirt, channeling a small amount of chakra and displaying the black spiral on his stomach. "But we need to stay here to work on your seal."

Gaara studied his own belly. "I don't have one of those."

"Well, you do, your sealing matrix just isn't visible like mine," explained Naruto. "This thing is what keeps the Kyuubi inside. You've got one too for the Ichibi, but the difference is that your seal is not as compatible with your own chakra system as mine is. But I have a way to fix that, I think, I just need time."

Gaara didn't know what to say to that, so he sat in silence, looking around from their perch in the trees. But Naruto could see the agitation on his face, the quiver in his breathing.

"Don't worry. I know what I'm doing," he explained. "This won't be like the others when they tried it, I just haven't tested this kind of modification seal before."

It was true, unfortunately. There hadn't been any jinchuuriki around to test them on other than himself in his old time, and the seal that Maki had showed him was still fresh on his brain. He was fully prepared to have to meld the two to make the seals more stable when he integrated the new one into the old.

He remembered how painful it had been when Orochimaru had forced a mismatched seal on top of his former seal during the Chunin Exams, and he was not going to put Gaara through that. He knew that Suna had actively tried to change it over the years, but even though they were known for their Sealing Corps, they weren't particularly good at using their skills on the Bijuu.

Gaara eventually nodded, but he still looked scared.

"I promise this won't hurt you at all," Naruto assured him. "Actually, it'll probably help you. After it's over, you'll be able to sleep whenever you want."

The redhead looked at him with almost pleading eyes, like it was the best-sounding thing anyone had ever said to him. Naruto just laughed, but Gaara steeled himself. "It's not going to take long, is it?"

Naruto thought it over, and was honestly unsure. Fuuinjutsu was not his specialty, but he was probably currently the best at it aside from Jiraiya himself. And even then, he could probably teach the man a few things from his new perspective. Everything was essentially self-taught, and it probably would have gone over better in his old time if he had been able to preserve some of the Uzumaki techniques before Pain's invasion. Naruto knew he had some of that knowledge stored away in scrolls in his own pack now, and he needed to compile it all into his repertoire before attempting anything drastic like changing the formula of a jinchuuriki.

"I will give you a month," he explained finally. "We'll find a town here and settle down for a bit, and I'll work on this while we're there. If I can't get it done within the month, we'll leave this country behind and move on to somewhere else."

Gaara seemed relieved, trying to shake off the sweat and inadvertently spraying wet sand all over Naruto. The boy just laughed and tried to fight back, before remembering. "Oh, I have something for you, although it's probably impractical to give it to you now. I'm not sure if you're strong enough to carry it yet."

"Carry what?"

Naruto pulled a small storage scroll from his pack and opened it, almost immediately releasing something in a great puff of smoke. Naruto reached out to hold onto it, worried it would fall off the tree. The Konoha native couldn't help but snicker at Gaara's reaction to the brown gourd; there were so many memories flooding back to him. "I saved this for you back in Suna, weeks ago. I was going to wait until your birthday to show it to you, but the humidity is obviously bugging you."

"What is it?"

Naruto gestured for him to reach over and pop out the cork holding its contents inside. When the small boy opened it, sand started to rush in and slowly gathered around the boy's body, hugging him and forming a thicker layer than the one he had before. Instant relief seemed to flood his body after the sand color blended to match his skin tone.

"You needed better access to your sand, and this makes a good storage container for it," he explained. It wasn't the same gourd; this one had a thin blue stripe hugging the middle, and it was a little thinner than the one he carried before. But it was still much larger than a six, almost seven, year old could carry. "Although I suppose I should seal it away until we get you some strength training in."

Gaara shook his head, immediately slipping it onto his back and then standing up on the tree branch. "No, it's okay. I can hold it up by using my chakra."

Naruto nodded with realization that he could manipulate the sand to lessen the impact on his body to be stronger. "Okay, that sounds good. But you're still going to get some strength training in. You didn't have any formal training, right?"

"No." The boy hesitated, before looking at him in confusion. "Although you didn't either. How are you so skilled at your age?"

Naruto just grinned. "That's a bigger secret than I'm willing to share at the moment, but let's just say, I'm not as young as I seem."

"Are you a midget?"

Naruto frowned, face reddening. "No! Of course not!"

Gaara smirked. "Whatever you say, Naruto. You're pretty short for your age." Naruto wanted to feign anger, but he wasn't angry, really. Gaara only knew so much about his situation, and Naruto wasn't ready to spill the beans about time travel just yet. It sounded so ludicrous that he wasn't sure even a little kid would believe him.

The girl finally found what she was looking for, hoping to bring a whole batch to Aunt Kimiko to make her feel better. The red roses were the same shade as their shared hair color, and surely that was a good thing. She had to hope that the old woman wouldn't show discomfort when she remembered her own hair was now gray with age.

Careful to avoid the thorns, like she had always done, the girl reached down with expert hands and picked up several all at once, smiling brightly. She adjusted her glasses quickly to count them all, nine perfect flowers. She giggled at how awesome they were, before disappearing from the giant ventilated greenhouse.

"Hey, you can't steal th-"

"Sorry, I'll pay later!" the girl yelled, running around the corner and vanishing behind a crate outside a shop. There weren't many people around at this time of day, but she felt good about her small amount of Academy training on stealth. Trying to remember her lessons in an actual situation like this was difficult though, and she barely noticed a stray rose petal lying in the street beside her, in clear view of any pursuers.

A pretty man with long dark hair that reached the middle of his shoulders reached down and picked up the tiny rose petals, offering it to her. When she saw the man's face, the girl practically squealed with excitement.

She took them from him. "You're Mui! I can't believe it! I've always wanted to meet you!"

The man smiled at her, and she still couldn't believe she was talking to one of Kusagakure's top officials, in their town no less. "What are you hiding for, little one?"

"I'm bringing these to my aunt. She's sick, and the doctors say she's dying, but I don't believe them. I'm thinking these will make her feel better," she explained, gesturing to the roses. "Aren't they pretty?!"

Mui nodded, raising an arm to brush the hair out of his face and showing off the hitai-ate on his shoulder, showing the symbol of Kusagakure. The man's dark clothes betrayed his status as a shinobi, however, as the man looked to be dressed as a civilian. "Yes, they are very pretty. You run along, dear. Your aunt Kimiko's waiting."

The girl adjusted her glasses and watched him leave, a sense of his chakra running through her mind as she picked up and ran toward the hospital, watching the man leave and smirking over her shoulder. "I can't believe I just met Mui! He's so famous! His chakra is brighter than Keiko-sensei too! I bet Kimiko will be so jealous!"

As soon as she passed another corner, the girl barely registered another form of chakra on her peripheral that nearly made her stop, especially when she realized there were two of them. She turned to look toward the source, catching the glimpse of two boys walking in the opposite direction toward the outskirts of the village. One boy's hair was bright blonde, and the other was a darker shade of her own hair color. She wanted to call out to them, but there was something about their chakra that made her stop, too scared to keep looking.

Most chakra was varying shades of blue, but these two were different. They both had a red mixed into their blue, especially the redheaded boy with the strange gourd on his back. It didn't make any sense, but she made a mental note to ask someone about it. Although Kimiko acted like no one else would be able to understand how she mentally sensed chakra, not even her. It was a unique Uzumaki clan technique that no one else had, the Kagura Shingan (Mind's Eye of the Kagura).

Either way, she didn't like the feeling she got around that red chakra; she didn't know how to describe it, and didn't want to. The girl hurried toward the hospital even faster than before, hoping to get out of range of that ugly chakra.

The Kazekage stared at the autopsy table, where Gaara's naked dead body lay. A tiny seal, shaped like some odd ornate triangle, lay on the base of its foot, and the doctors were currently analyzing it. "No one knows what this is, Kazekage-sama, and no one can remove it."

"It looks like someone killed him, not an animal like we initially thought," another explained. "Who would want to kill him and then leave a complex seal behind? And why?"

The leader of Suna scoffed. "Complex? It's a damn triangle, a standard three elements seal. Get someone from the Sealing Corps to analyze it."

The head examiner shook his head. "I'm afraid we already did, Kazekage-sama. The head of the Sealing Corps could not understand how a deceptively simple seal wouldn't be removed by any normal means."

The man eventually balked and walked out of the room. Knowing from afar that he was dead was easy for the man to handle, but seeing his body on the table was hard. Some small amount of concern had weaseled its way into his heart, and he wanted to crush it by reminding him that it was this boy that led to the death of Karura. He was frustrated that he couldn't undo this seal nor did anyone in the village have the means to do so, but eventually, he just accepted it.

He walked back into the room. "I want him cremated immediately." When the examiner tried to argue, the man just shook his head and pulled the body out of the room himself, wheeling it away on the cart.

The cremation room was not far from there, but as soon as he found it, he dumped the body unceremoniously on the floor inside and yanked the table back outside. The technician came up to him, confused. "Kazekage-sama, what are you-"

"Do it. Start it. Burn him to ash. Now!" The technician finally nodded and placed his hand on the panel outside, generating chakra. A seal ignited before the flames inside the room ignited, burning the body away as the boy's father watched from the small window. The foot was the last to catch, and after several more minutes, the Kazekage watched the seal burn away, until all that was left of the body was smoke.

The man stared at the window as the technician and the others walked into the room to retrieve the ashes, and it took several seconds before they popped back outside. "There's nothing left! It's impossible!"

But the leader of the village waved it off and walked away, closing that chapter on his life.

When Naruto and Gaara finally found a hotel room that would be willing to host two traveling orphans, Naruto sat at the desk nearly absorbed into thought.

He knew it was a possibility, but he couldn't imagine that it would actually happen. Gaara seemed to notice something was on his mind. "What's wrong?"

Naruto frowned, unsure of how much to say or how to say it, or if he was even going to say it. Eventually, he decided on a partial truth, not sure if he would ever explain the other. "My clan, the Uzumaki, were wiped out years ago, and I'm one hundred percent positive that I just found a survivor of it. I'll have to find her later."

Gaara looked on him with concern. "Yeah, maybe she could come with us!"

Naruto wasn't sure about that. He always imagined that when he started this journey to the past, he would find the jinchuuriki and stick with them, and only them. They were the only ones who truly understood each other.

But Karin was an Uzumaki, one of the last three in the world. The girl would be a viable asset, as well as family to him. That was something he always wanted, and while he was essentially trying to build that family through the jinchuuriki, would it really be so wrong to add her?

Gaara watched absently as Naruto ran through his scrolls on fuuinjutsu theory, as well as practical versions of seals he was sure he'd find useful. He was so lost in thought that he barely noticed Gaara tracing some of them with his fingers.

"Are you interested in this stuff? It's difficult."

The boy shook his head. "No, I don't think so. I just like the shapes."

Naruto returned to his scrolls and went through some of the seals step by step, explaining them to the redhead as he went along. Gaara listened closely, despite not being interested; he knew from experience that Shukaku knew fuuinjutsu, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to get the boy interested in it. Learning how to use seals was an unorthodox battle strategy, but it could be the deal breaker against a particularly tough opponent.

Naruto's smile was growing wider, watching the boy working with them. He realized very quickly that this was the most relaxed and content he had felt in a long time. After securing one jinchuuriki, his plan was moving forward, and even though it would take years, he was certain that he would succeed.

I'm not gonna run away and I never go back on my word, because that is my nindou! My ninja way!

Naruto chuckled from his thoughts, surprising Gaara. "Did I do something wrong?" He stared at the seal that the boy was tracing, not realizing that it was a doodle on a slip of paper of the triangular Clone Stabilization seal he had seen in his memories not moments ago.

"Of course not," he said with a grin, but part of him wondered if Gaara would ever forgive him for faking his death.

That's it for now. I usually like for chapters to be at least more than 7000 words long, so this one falls a bit short for that and in comparison to the first three chapters. However, I wanted this to be a bit of a transition chapter to introduce the next "arc" of the story.

There's a databook out there that describes Karin's background, which is that Karin's small village was destroyed, and that Orochimaru found her as the lone survivor and took her in as a small child. But then she appears in the Chunin Exams (albeit in a flashback) with a Kusagakure headband on. It seems as though this is an odd plot hole, or maybe a retcon, because she doesn't actually appear during the Part I Exam Arc, and it seems like a huge waste of time for Orochimaru to bring Karin to the Exams in disguise as a Kusa shinobi, like he was during the Exams too.

So essentially, I'm disregarding that discrepancy and just assuming that in the original timeline, Orochimaru recruited her sometime after the Chunin Exam arc. Some of the information in the databooks contradicts the actual canon anyway, so I think I'm justified in just ignoring the idea that she was recruited as a small child.

Let me know what you thought of the chapter in a review!