Disclaimer: Hi, guys! Naruto is not my character! Neither are his friends!
Whispers flew in Naruto's ears when he felt himself become aware once more. The sensation of falling enveloped him. He opened his eyes to a darkness deeper than he had ever imagined, dotted with unpredictable flashes of colored light. His spirit was overwhelmed, but fought itself desperately.
The temperature fluctuated constantly while he tried to move, only to realize that there was nothing to move in. He was flying through a substance with thinner than air with the fluency of water. Sounds traveled through it, caressing his ears. The whispers flew with music, something so beautiful that he couldn't move. It frightened him.
Fear rendered him helpless, and he felt he might die again in the incomprehensible abyss. Try as he would, he could make no sound himself. For a moment, he thought he saw a face, but it vanished as quickly as it appeared.
He felt a set of hands gently grasp him in the darkness. He was still falling, he knew, but he was no longer afraid. The arms held him with such intense love that he was enveloped in it. His fear dissipated, and he listened.
"Naruto…"
"My son…" Naruto felt the words from the entity cradling him and so wished to see her. Tears stung his face.
"Momma?" he choked out, aware of the ethereal sound his own voice carried.The arms were now accompanied by the feeling of lips to his forehead. He was crying freely now. His arms returned her embrace.
No sooner had he done so, the darkness fell away to reveal a great caged door. Naruto struggled to keep hold of his invisible mother, but found she evaporated in his grasp long before he hit the ground of his mind's chamber with a 'thud'. He called for her, but she couldn't return.
Two blindingly red eyes bore into his naked form from behind bars. He heard paws pace behind the sealed doorway, and saw the occasional flash of teeth. The fear that his mother had relieved him of returned in full force, but he stood firm.
No words were exchanged, but Naruto was compelled to step forward until he was directly in front of one of the bars. Low growls emitted from the entity inside, and soon the red eyes locked onto his completely. A burst of hot breath blew the boy's hair backwards like a gust, and the next thing he knew, the reality he had just obtained flew away like pieces of broken glass.
Naruto Uzumaki's head flew up with a scream. His nightcap flew to the far reaches of the room when the disturbed youth threw himself onto the ground of his apartment. A brief inspection proved that he was still alive. There were no wounds; no proof of anything.
A dream? No! It couldn't have been! Short spurts of past events played in his head. He had felt the claw, he had heard everything leave him behind. He remembered the darkness, and someone reaching out to him He remembered the sensation of the fox's gaze, and the ephemeral world shattering around him.
"Naruto!" he ordered himself aloud. "Pull yourself together. Nothing you can do about it now, anyway."
The face in the mirror looked haunted, tired, and as young as it had earlier. No part of this was a dream. It had happened for real. Naruto Uzumaki had died. So how was he sitting in front of his mirror in the middle of the night before his fatal choice?
Thinking about it made his head spin. He wished he remembered everything that had just occurred, but the memory of his descent was fading, taking his mother with it. The knowledge remained, however. Naruto had died and returned to the night before, unscathed. Bittersweet emotion wracked him for a few more seconds before leaving him numb and exhausted. His body demanded sleep, and it would be damned if it didn't get it soon. Meaning, of course, that it would collapse no matter how much the brain was in use. As of right then, that was quite a bit. It slowed considerably, though.
"Think about it in the morning…" he muttered to himself before wandering back to his still-warm bedding and dropping there, almost as dead as he had felt an hour prior. Slumber took with it his cares, his worries, and any remaining memory of his post-death experience. No mortal was to remember such a thing. It would drive them to madness.
The Uzumaki boy would awake the next day with recollections of nothing but his death. He would wake as if he had a nightmare, and retry the day armed with new knowledge. The mortal coil could not hold him, and time lost her sway where the young man tread. He could choose what controlled him, be it morals or madness.
Time in the confusion would test the strength of his heart, but it had yet to weaken.
The Kyuubi had the powers of a god, but that was nothing compared to the hands that wielded them. If the child was to be bound to such an entity, was it so mad to think he would no longer be a prisoner to the laws of order? In a world held together by so many factors, was it so strange to think of the dire consequences of cutting but a few?
The answer was not in the hands of mortals. No matter the problem, the solution was always simpler than it seemed. Phenomenon would go unexplained, and the orphan jinchuurki would probably never understand the reasons for his chronological exemption. Heaven hadn't chosen him for his wisdom, but for his soul. The spirit unbroken was more powerful than the gods themselves.
Ultimately, the ideals spoke of in his dreams would all amount to one thing: Respawn, bitches.
Author's note: Sorry about all the big words. If you are confused, see the last line. By the way, that's some of the last complex stuff you'll be forced to bear with for a while.