Hey hey hey! Back at it with a super fast upload (for me). I couldn't get a couple scenes out of my head after the last cliffy. So I went ahead and wrote this to incorporate them and set up for some more in the future. I hope you guys enjoy. This chapter marks the end of the first arc that I've designated "Tragedy". The next chapter will begin a new arc that will focus on his time in the academy and as a genin. Lemme know what you guys think! Feedback puts the pep in my step to create. I hope you enjoy!

Chapter 8: Rage like no other

Hiruzen stared in utter disbelief at the sight unfolding before him. He had authorized the procedure as a desperate measure to preserve Naruto's sense of loyalty. He just didn't see how the child could go through something like losing the only person he had close to him and not have a mental cascade of repressed memories. Like it or not Konoha was surrounded on all sides by enemies and the unknown whereabouts and suspicion that they had the Jinchūriki of the Kyuubi did much to keep their enemies at bay.

But nothing had prepared him for this. Shortly after enacting the mind dive Inoichi had grunted in a strange mix of pain and confusion. Then, he began bleeding from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Finally, before the Hokage could so much as call for medical assistance, he had slumped over and began seizing. Hiruzen blasted the door off of its hinges in his bid for medical assistance then turned to assist his downed shinobi.

Only, when he turned around, he met the piercing gaze of Naruto. Never before had he seen such animosity in a child's eyes. Naruto briefly looked down at Inoichi's seizing body before gently sliding off of the bed and returning his gaze to the hokage once more.

"Jiji…..I have a question for you." He spoke softly.

Hiruzen nervously stuttered out a reply.

"Naruto, something went very wrong and Inoichi is severely injured. I have to get him medical assistance immediately."

The Hokage stepped forward but was stopped when the boy made a sudden, but firm move. The young boy had placed his foot directly on the neck of the Yamanaka.

"I said. I have. A question." The boy ground out.

At this point, the medical staff arrived and immediately stared in confusion at the sight before them.

"Uhhh…..Hokage-sama? Orders?" One of the doctors called out.

Naruto applied pressure to the man's throat. A gurgle was heard throughout the room

"Naruto, please let us help him. I'll answer any questions you have. Just please, let's talk about this." The Hokage pleaded.

Naruto paused for a moment, staring deep into the eyes of the man he considered his grandfather. He reached up towards his neck and untied his hospital gown, letting it fall to the floor. A nurse immediately gasped and ran out, emptying the contents of her stomach into a trashcan.

Covering the body from neck to toe were scars. Scars from slashes, puncture wounds, burns, skin tears, and most recently the criss-crossing loops of thin white scars left from ninja wire covered the young boy's body like a full coat of tattoos. He then asked his question.

"How many times have you had Inoichi 'check me over' after an incident?"

Hiruzen was dumbfounded. He had no idea what to say. Thoughts raced in his mind a mile a minute as he considered his options.

"Did he somehow make the connection? Did something happen with the procedure that caused him to get his memory back? Is he testing me? What should I say?"

No matter how much he thought about it, there was no correct answer. There was nothing the Hokage could think to say that wouldn't result in a catastrophe. There were no words he could say that would de-escalate the situation. The Hokage opened his mouth to give a response, but when words failed him, he just closed his mouth.

"I see." Naruto broke the silence. He gently lifted his foot off of the man's neck and took a step back, gesturing to the medical staff to tend to Inoichi.

Reaching down, Naruto collected his gown from the floor before continuing his statement.

"I'm guessing that taking me to see Kiyu was a lie as well then wasn't it?"

At that moment, the boy's eyes lost their light and became filled with despair. As the medical team tended to the now free shinobi lying on the floor, Naruto began walking out of the hospital room. As he passed by Hiruzen he met his gaze one final time and muttered.

"I'll find her myself then."

The old, tired, professor closed his eyes…..and allowed the boy to pass.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Naruto had ended up walking to his apartment in his hospital gown. He unlocked his door, took a cold shower, and dressed in the best clothes he could find, he had been wearing the best clothes he could afford when Itachi had effectively turned him into strung up hamburger meat, and began walking towards the Uchiha district. Each step towards his desperation brought him a growing amount of dread.

The streets of konoha were bustling with activity. The small shower had parted some time in the night and the morning fire country sun had brought a muggy but warm midday sun. As Naruto slowly walked towards the last known location of his only friend he heard rumors fly by, whispered by the Konoha civilian populace.

"Did you hear? They say that one of the Uchiha went berserk yesterday and killed his entire clan!"

"They were Konoha's police force! What does this mean for our businesses? Is there going to be an uptake in crime?"

"I heard that it was Itachi and he killed them all in just two hours!"

"I heard he didn't actually kill them all though. There are people saying he actually left one alive to tell the story. What a psycho!"

Naruto suddenly stopped as he heard that final whisper. Did he dare hope? Was there a chance that Kiyu had made it out? He survived so was it possible that Itachi had decided to cut his losses and leave her?

He broke out into a full on sprint, knocking over several people as he practically blasted his way through the populace. Tears filled his eyes and obscured his vision as he ran through the village with a single goal in mind. Before he knew it, he had made it to the gates of the Uchiha compound. The guarded gates of the Uchiha compound

Two Konoha Anbu were stationed in front of the complex. They stood relaxed for the most part, weapons unsheathed leaning against the wall or gate leading into the complex. As Naruto approached them, he prepared himself to be rejected and find a secondary way in. Instead, once he approached he saw them whisper a couple short sentences among themselves, then step aside as he got closer.

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Naruto kept his head down and quickly moved to walk through the gate. As he passed the Anbu, the shinobi to his left grabbed onto his arm firmly, but surprisingly without malice. This caused Naruto to look up at the Anbu in confusion.

"We heard about what happened to you kid." The Anbu whispered.

"You threw your life in harm's way for the sake of a comrade and fought against impossible odds to save your friend. People respect that." The Anbu then gestured to his companion, then pointed off into the distance to a rooftop.

Squinting in an attempt to see what the Anbu was gesturing to. Naruto eventually saw another masked figure watching from above.

"We respect that." The Anbu finished.

Releasing Naruto's arm, the Anbu took up his post guarding the gate once more, gesturing Naruto in. Once Naruto had passed the gate and made it a decent distance away from the gate he thought to himself.

"What the hell was that?"

Shaking his head to recollect his composure, Naruto thought about what part of his plan was next.

"I guess I should just look around. Not like anyone is going to stop me." He grimly stated.

He spent the next few hours exploring the various Uchiha roads, getting a feel for the complex and finding directions in the form of street signs and maps intended for shipment deliveries. Not much had been cleaned up since he had left and the deeper he went into the complex the more worried and nauseous he became. Finally, he found himself at a marketplace square. The square was halfway filled with bodies lying side by side with each other, thankfully covered with appropriate, white body sheets.

"It looks like someone has already started burying the bodies."

Naruto peeled back the tarps one by one, checking the corpses for Kiyu when pulling back one of the sheets revealed someone he remembered as Kiyu's mother. Slowly, Naruto backed up and began to count. Three bodies laid side by side in a row, two adults…..one child. Naruto stared down at the smaller body still covered by the tarp. He began to shake. He spent nearly a half hour just staring down in disbelief before he finally, slowly moved his hand forward and grasped the sheet. He gently, almost reverently pulled back the covering. Lying underneath, to his utter despair, was the girl he had based his life around these past few years. As the realization set in, a violent sob racked his body as he collapsed to his knees, picking up and cradling her head to his chest.

"Kiyuuuuuuu"

As Naruto wailed, dark chakra responded to his misery, surrounding both him and the cold body of Kiyu in a blanket of caustic red chakra.

"Don't leave me! I can't do this without you!

With each wail the volume of his cries increased and took on a deeper echo.

"Please! You promised!"

Unknowingly, his despair was pulling inward, drawing mass amounts of demonic chakra to the point where the beginnings of a single tail were forming.

"We were going to do it together! I promised I would keep you safe!"

Teeth elongated, steam rose from his body, and fingernails sharpened into claws stronger than any kunai as the cloak's first tail finally manifested. Tears of blood fell from Naruto's eyes as the stress his psyche worked alongside the physical changes he was experiencing to raise his blood pressure to such a degree that his blood vessels began to rupture.

At this point Naruto felt the pain. The chakra he was drawing on was killing him. It felt like someone had dipped him into acid and was trying to claw open his skin and access the flesh that lies beneath. However, as he looked down at the young girl in his arms, the only thoughts he could think were painful and self-deprecating.

"If I was better she would have lived. If I was stronger I could have stopped him. She wouldn't have died. Why do I get to live? WHY DO I GET TO LIVE WHEN SHE DOESN'T!"

The pain the child was experiencing multiplied immediately as the beginnings of a second tail started forming. Conflicting emotion raged in his mind for dominance. Rage like no other struggled endlessly with bottomless despair for the spotlight of his mind. Finally, as the second tail finished forming behind him, something snapped in his mind and he threw back his head and howled.

"ITACHI! I SWEAR I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL HUNT YOU DOWN TO THE END OF THE EARTH! I'LL MAKE YOU FEEL EVERY SECOND OF MY SUFFERING! NOTHING WILL SAVE YOU FROM ME!"

The dark chakra amplified his voice to unnatural levels and rattled the foundations of the surrounding stalls. At the center of this vortex, completely untouched, was the lifeless body of Kiyu. The dark chakra bent around her with an almost living level of intelligence. It was as if it was showing its respect to the young girl and refused to disturb her rest. Meanwhile, it tore into its owner, rupturing flesh, reopening scars, and instantly re-healing the wounds a dozen times a second.

Finally, the chakra seemed to begin pulling back into the child. The cloak and the two tails took a solidified form, becoming a true cloak of second flesh as Naruto gently picked the young girl up in a bridal fashion and began walking in the direction of the gate. He looked down at her with desperation in his eyes.

"They didn't deserve you Kiyu. I…..I don't deserve you…..but I don't think I can keep going without you….."

He made to keep moving but before he could leave the market clearing, he was interrupted by a sickly looking boy in the distance. The boy was around his age, pale, covered in mud, and wore something similar to what Kiyu wore to represent her clan. The child drew a kunai and called out, his voice dripping with hatred.

"Put down my kinsman, monster. Now!"

Unfortunately for the last young Uchiha clansman, at this point Naruto was numb. Were Naruto in his right mind, he probably could have found a sort of kinship with the last Uchiha through their mutual hatred of Itachi. As he was, one of the tails fluttering behind Naruto stretched out and closed the distance near instantly, batting the child through the empty clan district in a random direction. The Uchiha heir was unconscious immediately upon impacting the stall he had been thrown into.

Naruto looked down at the girl in his arms and softly spoke, his voice full of compassion.

"I know you probably would have preferred being buried next to your parents Kiyu, so I'm going to ask you to forgive me for being selfish. I just…..I just don't want to be alone again. I'm sorry."

Naruto continued to walk out towards the compound gate placing one foot in front of the other until he reached his destination.

"I hadn't thought about the guards. I can't exactly just walk out of the complex with her can I?" Naruto thought to himself.

He thought for a moment, testing the strength of his limbs against the ground. Whatever was happening at this moment, he felt invincible. In this moment he felt like there was nothing he could think of doing that he wouldn't be able to do. So he squatted down and tightened his grip on Kiyu's body before addressing the girl.

"Hold on tight ok? I'm not really sure how this is going to work."

He then leapt, exerting so much force on the ground beneath him that by the time he had lifted off the ground he had left a crater behind. The wind tore at his eyes and he looked down at Kiyu with worry, only to see the chakra tails wrapping around her like a protective cocoon. Naruto smiled, even now as a cold, dead body she wore a smile on her face. There wasn't a trace of suffering to be found. She looked like she had lost her life knowing some big secret that she was going to tease him about later.

Naruto snapped back to reality at the zenith of his jump, approximately five hundred feet in the air and traveling forward at an insane speed.

"Oh…..I think I might overshoot the training grounds." He thought to himself.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Naruto sat in their…..his bunker staring down at the grave he had dug for Kiyu. He had decorated it with all their favorite things and had held a little service both celebrating the short portion of his life he got to experience with her and mourning the life she could have had being stolen from the both of them. The demonic red chakra had receded by now and he was now just contemplating what to do. For the first time in a very long time, Naruto was completely alone.

He had lost Kiyu, his grandfather had been authorizing…..whatever the hell had happened to him for what he could only guess was years, he had forgotten to lock his apartment when he left this morning so at this point he probably had gotten nearly everything that was there that was valuable stolen, admittedly that wasn't much though. Looking around, he began to really appreciate just how much time he had spent inside this bunker…..how much time they had spent in the bunker together.

He looked over to the corkboard they had put down here and the plans they had made and gave a wistful sigh. They were supposed to join the academy today…..wait…..no that was yesterday. Was…..was that still what he was going to do?

He understood his goal in life now: destroy Itachi and find a way to remember all the memories that had been taken from him, then make whoever had given him his scars pay for their crimes. It wasn't about revenge; it was about justice. There were people living in this place free or roaming out in the world now that we're capable of some of the worst acts of evil he had ever seen…..or experienced.

How then did he get to the point where he could accomplish that? He honestly couldn't say that he had any love for the village left. Kiyu was what had caused his love for the village to blossom and after losing her and coming to the understanding that his Ji…..that Hiruzen was bringing someone in to just take out huge important memories for who knows why, he was tempted to just leave right this moment. However, if he left now - he laid down on top of the slightly disturbed earth separating him from Kiyu - He couldn't take her with him.

Not to mention that he would have to figure out some way to procure a free-lance teacher because he doubted that someone became as strong as Itachi or Hiruzen without some level of formal training. So then leaving wasn't on the table just yet. Did he continue to the academy? He had the very minimal basics hammered into his head by Kiyu so it's not as if he couldn't do it. It just felt…..wrong…..to do it without her.

Naruto shook his head, he knew everything was going to be wrong without her. He couldn't let his loneliness keep him from making things right. Konoha was one of if not the strongest of the hidden villages, so it would stand to reason that their academy would be the best there is right?

After giving it a lot of consideration, he decided that there weren't enough reasons or options available to him to not at least make his way through the system until he was chunin. Once he had made it that far the freedom he would have would change everything.

Standing up, Naruto walked over to the corkboard and took down a piece of paper that had some semblance of a five year plan he and Kiyu had thrown together. Grabbing a pencil he wrote down his new goals and his thoughts about how to achieve them. Once he had finished he pinned it back up on the board and inspected his work.

"Tomorrow, I attend the academy. I'm going to become the strongest creature alive and I'm going to make things right."

Looking over at the clock they had, he noticed that there was still four to five hours before he needed to sleep. Giving one last longing look at the grave he had prepared, Naruto dropped prone in a plank position before beginning an endless series of push-ups.

"If I'm going to sleep tonight then I'm going to need to exhaust myself. If I start now then I can sleep and heal overnight and be ready to go in the morning."

By the time he was done with the impromptu workout, he had completed an inhuman amount of push ups, handstands, squats, wall sits, and crunches. Walking over to the cot Kiyu's had brought down here before they had met, he laid down in it. He could already feel his body healing the damage he had spent the hours accruing. He gave one last look over to the grave and softly called out to her.

"Goodnight Kiyu, tomorrow is day one of the plan. I'll tell you about school when I get back."

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Hiruzen sat in the hospital room that contained the now conscious and recovering Inoichi Yamanaka. He ran his hands through his hair as he asked the man a question, one that he had already asked twice this conversation.

"Alright Inoichi, run me through this again. You enacted the jutsu, rendering him unconscious."

"Correct Hokage-sama."

"You then projected your consciousness inside the mind of the child using your mindwalk technique."

"Correct Hokage-sama."

"You then enacted the jutsu allowing you access to Naruto's memories and began the process of combing through his mind for the point where he had first met this Kiyu Uchiha."

"Yes Hokage-sama."

"Excellent, that part I understand then."

The Hokage sat back in his chair and massaged his head, trying to relieve some of the tension that was building behind his brow.

"What then Inoichi?"

The blond shinobi who was walking the Hokage through this conversation from the relative discomfort of the hospital issued wheelchair sighed and looked up towards the ceiling.

"I located where the memories of the girl began in his mind and began the process of removal. This part is often the most stressful and requires an ungodly amount of concentration."

The Hokage leaned in once more.

"Right, that makes perfect sense. So what went wrong?"

Inoichi grunted, looking back at the Hokage with a terse look.

"My theory is that Naruto was called into the inner recesses of his mind by…..something…..and managed to see what I was doing. I was as close to oblivious as I could possibly be due to the jutsu and Naruto used this opportunity to attack me. I cut the connection once I tried to move my arm and found that I couldn't."

Inoichi gave a small shudder as he relived the experience again.

"Then the backlash of traveling back into awareness combined with the damage accrued from being halfway beaten to death and strangled underwater began traveling from my spirit to my body…..which put me here."

Hiruzen stared intensely at the recovering blonde for several minutes.

"So…..how much do you think he knows?"

Inoichi ran a shaky hand through his frazzled hair before chuckling.

"Enough to feel completely fine about strangling me to my metaphorical death and standing on my throat afterwards, Hokage-sama."

Slowly, the old Hokage lowered his face down into his hands and muttered out a curse.

"Fuck me….."