Hello? Anybody still there? I'm so so so sorry that it took like forever for me to update! I lost my interest in this story and started another one in the meantime. But now the writer's block is gone (at least I hope so hehe).

I hope you haven't forsaken this story yet.

Chapter 12: Shattered hope

Soon after the cursing had started, Hidan stormed down the stairs. He was completely drenched; the water was still dropping down from his wet pants. In his hand he held his scythe with a tight grip. He looked absolutely pissed off, his eyes promised me a terrible, slow, painful death, and he was surrounded by an aura screaming bloody murder. He was followed by a grinning Kisame.

I hid only more behind Itachi.

"Come out you fucking bitch so that I can freaking bloody sacrifice you to Lord Jashin!" he yelled.

Asuma and Kurenai both stepped forward. "Leave her alone, it was only a prank" Asuma said calmly.

Hidan was about to open his mouth when Nagato interrupted him: "Hidan let it be and sit down. We have more important things to do."

Grumbling and cursing Hidan complied and slumped down on a chair, his scythe though still in his hand while he glared holes at me. I sat down as far away from him as possible.

"We have to make a plan of what to do next" Nagato started the early meeting.

"Is anyone else on the run from Madara?" Itachi asked, looking at me in question. I nodded frowning.

"Naruto is still out there; he must be hiding somewhere. But Tsunade also managed to escape and maybe Jiraya is free, I don't know."

"The problem is that we don't know where anyone of them could be" Sasori said, again with his usual bored expression. "If Madara hasn't found them yet it's unlikely that we can. And in doing so, the danger that we'll be caught will be higher."

"Tsk, we just slaughter everyone who gets in our way" Hidan said and his mood automatically lightened by imagining probably a nice bloody massacre.

"Don't you have already experience in chasing down Naruto?" Asuma asked, looking at Nagato while blowing the smoke of his cigarette into the room. I winced when the tension was rising immediately.

"It was mostly Zetsu who made out the position of the Jinchuriki" Nagato calmly answered. "He's not with us now though."

"What if we just kill Madara without the help of others?" Kisame asked, having his feet placed onto the table. "I mean until now we also managed to do everything alone."

"Yes but until now we hadn't have such an opponent" Itachi replied but Kisame only smirked.

"Oh come on 'Tachi, we have your Sharingan and the one of your brother as well as Leader's Rinnegan. I think we have a chance."

"We could also send Hidan forward, seeing as he is immortal" Kakuzu suggested, earning him an angry glare from Hidan which he ignored.

"In your case I wouldn't even try to kill Madara" a foreign voice suddenly said from the corner of the room. We all whirled around, tensed up, ready to attack. A figure stepped out of the shadows. I've never seen him before. He was around the middle thirties, short but well-built, had short chocolate brown hair and dark eyes. The stranger was completely dressed in black.

"Who the fuck are you?!" Hidan yelled.

The stranger bowed slightly. "My name is Rémy; I'm one of the Guardians of Destiny." He then looked directly at me. "Chloe was my partner and friend." My eyes widened and sadness washed over me by remembering that Chloe was dead now.

"Does this mean that you're on our side?" Nagato asked with narrowed eyes. Rémy nodded and the others relaxed slightly but were still on guard.

"Come and sit down Rémy" I offered him with a smile but he shook his head.

"I don't have much time. I am forbidden to talk to any creature. Now that Tsukuyomi happened, everything is once again normal, someone else took Eve's place and our existence and duty goes on. We once again are not allowed to actively intercept with the course of Destiny which is yet again normal. That's why no one has to find out that I speak with you and probably change the course of Destiny with it but I feel like I have to do it, for Chloe's sake." His dark eyes showed sadness.

"What is it you want to tell us?" Sasuke asked. "You said that we shouldn't kill Madara. Why?"

Rémy sighed. "First, let me explain something. As most of you probably already know, there are different universes. When Madara activated Tsukuyomi, the world you knew stopped existing and instead this world was created. Madara is now the core of it, and therefore he is immortal. So if you kill him, this world will end too but there is nothing else left you could go back to. Your world before Tsukuyomi doesn't exist anymore. If Madara dies, he dies along with this world and so will you."

There was a moment of silence as everyone progressed what he just said.

"So that means" Ino started, her blue eyes wide in disbelief, "that if we kill Madara, we will die too?" Rémy nodded.

With that our last hope of ever escaping this nightmare was crushed and shattered into million pieces. We couldn't escape it. Madara had truly won. It was over.

Madara stood in the cell, staring at the bloody ripped body hanging from the chains. Barely conscious, barely alive. Not long and it would be a corpse.

He couldn't help himself but to admire the torture skills Konoha possessed: The skill to continue the torture until the extreme but without killing the subject. He himself couldn't have done it better.

The screams were still echoing through the prison halls, ringing in his ears. He smirked.

The torture expert stood beside him, next to his set of bloody torture tools. He was strong and had once in a while managed to almost break free from Madara's influence. But before he could have killed himself with his own tools, Madara had taken him back under his influence once again.

"Shall I continue, Lord Madara?" his puppet asked. Madara though didn't answer but stepped closer to the prisoner, stepping into the sea of blood covering the ground.

The smells of blood, vomit, and sweat as well as a hint of death engulfed him. Stopping to stand in front of the bloody pulp he lifted the chin of the person. Half-lidded, empty eyes stared at him, with no light present in those dark orbs. This guy was completely broken. The so called Will of Fire was extinguished.

Madara smirked. He had accomplished what he wanted. Abruptly he pulled his hand away and the head of the youth fell back on his chest. Satisfied he walked to the door.

"This one is finished" he declared.

"Shall I kill him Lord Madara?"

He thought about it for a moment but then shook his head. "Death would be too generous. They shall see that I am able to take away their Will of Fire, their hope, their resistance, if they continue to fight me. Continue with the next one: the man bleeding to death." He was sick of listening to this constant ramble about youth, will of fire and you can never break us.

When he had seen the effectiveness of Konoha's torturer, he had decided to practice it with every one of his prisoners. So to preserve his next victim, he had made one of the medics heal the weirdo shortly before he would have bled to death.

In the end he would wish that Madara would have let him die…

But before, he would give the pink haired girl a short visit. For the last couple of hours he had tortured her with genjutsu, showing her every time how he slaughtered her loved ones and burned down her village. He would show them that there was no hope left for them.

"I know that you search for your friend. I can bring you to him, as well as to the one who broke away from Madara's surveillance and is now searching for you."

"Who do you mean?" I asked confused. Another one broke free?

"The Kazekage. He used your attack in which Madara lost shortly the control to escape."

"And he's heading this way?" Ino asked. Rémy nodded.

"I can open a portal for you, but not everybody can go or else the other Guardians will notice." I nodded. I knew that he already risked a lot in just talking to us.

"Sasuke, Ino, you as Naruto's friends should go with Rémy" Asuma said. Both of the youths nodded and stood up to walk to the Guardian. The air vibrated and a second later a portal opened. Without another word they stepped through it and were gone.

Silently we others waited for their return, each of us having their own thoughts. Even Hidan was for once quiet.

It was a disaster. Up until now we always had thought – hoped – that there was still a possibility to escape this nightmare, a way how to beat and defeat Madara, to get our control back.

But now…

I had accepted the fact that I would never return to my own world a long time ago. I would never see my parents again, my friends, my home. It still hurt when I thought about it, but most of the time I banned those thoughts out of my head – not that I came to think about it with everything going on.

This world was now my new home and these people who used to be nothing else but characters, were now my new friends. I had hoped that I would continue living in the Naruto world, dreamt about having fun with Konoha 12, settling down in Konoha…

But now I knew that this was also impossible, because this was now our world, forever trapped in this genjutsu controlled by a psycho Uchiha. I have accepted that I lost my world, but now the ninjas also couldn't return to theirs.

Well, it could have been worse. Just imagine crazy Sasuke or Obito pulling the strings…

I looked up by the sound of footsteps and just saw Ino and Sasuke entering the room with Naruto and Gaara following them.

Rémy stood there, already opening another portal. "I'm sorry that this is all I can do for you. Good luck with everything." With that he disappeared.

"Rachel! You're okay!" Naruto grinned at me relieved, though he looked tired and worn-out. Like every one of us.

"I told you I will be fine." I smiled at him. Ino sat down at her place next to Asuma and Sasuke leaned against the wall, close to Itachi's chair. Naruto who didn't let Sasuke out of his eyes as in to make sure that he wouldn't run away once again, and Gaara who carefully watched the Akatsuki members and me – with narrowed eyes – stayed on their spot.

"Were you already informed about the situation?" Nagato asked them.

"Well…" Naruto said and is blue eyes quickly flickered over the Akatsuki warily. "Ino said that this bastard Madara is in full control and that you guys work with us now…" He sounded disbelieving but I couldn't blame him.

"And who are you?" I looked to my right to see Gaara's blue orbs staring directly into mine. Oh yes we never met before.

"I originally come from another world and know pretty much about this one. I once appeared in Suna to warn you that you were about to be kidnapped by Akatsuki but your shinobi locked me away or else we would have met already."

"You tried to warn him about us?" Sasori asked narrowing his eyes at me.

"Of course I did! I never was a fan of the Capture-all-the-biju-and-kill-the-Jinchuriki plan after all" I snapped back. Sasori glared at me. I understood. If I would have warned Suna about Akatsuki's approach and Yura's betrayal, then this whole incident could have ended completely different – and the art duo could have died that time.

"That's not important anymore. We have more urgent things to discuss right now" Nagato interrupted us. He quickly briefed the two newcomers about what we just learned from Rémy.

Gaara was as emotionless as I imagined him to be but Naruto gritted his teeth in anger and balled his fists. For a moment his pupils changed into slits and his blue orbs had a red hint.

"Damn him!" he hissed.

"We have to decide what we should do now" Itachi said. He should have said: what we can do now.

For the next hours we sat together in the cramped room, discussing about every possible way we still had left, about what had happened so far, about Madara's abilities, about all possible outcomes. The longer we discussed, the more frustrated we became. Frustrated, hopeless, desperate.

The more possibilities we crossed out, the more it became clearer and clearer that there was actually only one way left to go, one way if we all wanted to survive this mess. No one of us liked it, no one wanted to admit that this was really our last way out, and so we continued to discuss, searched frantically after something we missed, after a way we all knew didn't exist.

It was sometime in the afternoon. We were all tired and exhausted. Dirty glasses and plates with leftover food piled up on the small table in between us.

It was Itachi who spoke it out loud first. "Time is running out. We have to stop Madara before more people get killed by him. Even if it's just to buy us some time, but we can't wait any longer."

He was right. Who knew what was happening in Konoha right now. The others probably still fought against Madara, especially after our break-out. They still had the hope that the genjutsu would shatter once Madara would be defeated.

"Who should do it?" Kisame asked and his round small eyes wandered over the group.

"I will." Naruto had already opened his mouth but now stared at me surprised.

"No, Rachel!" he started to object but I interrupted him.

"As soon as one of you appears, as soon as he senses your presence, Madara will attack you as he sees you as a threat and probably wants to kill you. I am just the civilian girl; I'm not dangerous to him. He won't kill me right away." At least I hoped so.

"He will try to get our location out of you" Kakuzu said, mustering me with his bi-colored eyes. "And I highly doubt you can resist him."

"She won't be able to tell him because she won't remember" Itachi threw in. "I will put a genjutsu on her so that she won't remember where we are. Also I will be able to cover her so that she can make it several kilometers away from here before Madara discovers her."

"Are you really sure you can do it?" Kurenai asked me softly. No, I wasn't. I was nervous as hell. I didn't want to face that madman again.

I nodded.

"Rachel, you were in Konoha right? And you were conscious the whole time…" Naruto suddenly asked me slowly. When I nodded he licked his lips nervously and continued: "How are the others doing? Are Sakura, Kakashi-sensei and everyone else okay?" The fear was clearly visible in his voice. Of course he didn't know yet…

I glanced at the others from Konoha. They all knew it, knew that the legendary copy ninja was no more, but all three of them looked away, sadness clouding their own eyes.

"What?" Naruto saw it and now expected the worse. "What happened?"

He asked me, not Ino, Asuma or Kurenai, so it was me who had to answer. "Naruto… Sakura is fine I think and Tsunade managed to escape but…" I gulped. Saw once again the ripped bloody mask hanging from the stake. "Kakashi is dead." My voice was only a whisper but it echoed through the room as if I had screamed. I didn't dare to look him in the eyes and thus only heard him gasp in shock.

"No…"

"I'm sorry Naruto."

I should manage to update the next chapter during the next week as I already started to write on it.

Review please?