Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto! It sucks to be me. If I owned Naruto all the characters except Sakura would be gay! Viva la Yaoi! I would also kill Sakura.

Warning: There will be yaoi in later chapters! That means guys who love other guys! Deal with it! You don't love yaoi I don't want you reading my story anyway!

Enjoy

Naruto saw a flash of light hit the kunai just before it was plunged into his chest. There was a moment of horrible searing pain and then nothing. He never even felt his body hit the ground.

He couldn't hear anything except the sound of his erratic heartbeat that was slowing down. It was getting quieter and slower with each passing second that felt to Naruto like hours, every breath was so hard and keeping his eyes open was nearly impossible.

The pain was picking up again with excruciating speed, seizing all the air in his lungs and pushing it out in a violent cough of blood. Through his blurry vision he was able to make out a figure above him.

The figure had blood splattered on his pale face, dark blue shirt, and in his jet-black hair. The figure's lips were moving; he seemed to be trying to make Naruto hear him, but there was no sound…. Only pain. 'Sasuke…?' was his last thought before succumbing to the darkness of death.

Suddenly there was no pain. In fact it felt like he was floating with out a care in the world. But something wasn't right. Naruto's eyes blinked open as he was disoriented for a moment before realizing that he was floating!

Naruto panicked and flailed his arms around desperately trying to find something to keep him from falling. However he did not fall. Naruto may not have been the brightest crayon in the box, but he knew that gravity should have kicked in by now and that he should be a smudge on the ground some thirty feet below. Because even for ninja, an unexpected thirty-foot drop with nothing to grab onto would be a bad thing.

"What the hell is going on?" he screamed, very confused. Naruto began to, what looked like, swim through the air. And having as small of an attention span as he did promptly forgot about his confusion and panic from moments before.

'Who cares! This is fun!' He looked down again, but this time since he wasn't worried about falling he could figure out where he was. He recognized the place; it was a forest but he didn't really register where.

He also recognized the people on the ground. There was Kakashi-sensei, Sakura-chan, Sasuke-teme, and…himself! Sakura was kneeling on the ground with her face in her hands, sobbing. Next to her was Kakashi who was leaning over his body checking it for a pulse. He then leaned back and shook his head; Sakura cried louder.

Naruto could see himself clearly now and it scared him. His jumpsuit was no longer orange but red with blood; he had at least twenty kunai sticking out of his body in various places, and his eyes were closed. Sasuke was standing a little ways from the other two and staring at a tree just behind Sakura. He had a soulless look in his eyes, like his mind wasn't really there at all.

'Okay so what happened?' Naruto was pretty sure this wasn't normal. Naruto swam/floated towards his team. "Guys, what happened!" Konoha's loudest ninja asked. His team ignored him and Uzumaki Naruto hated to be ignored. Kakashi picked up Naruto's body with great care and began to carry it away bridal style.

"Hey! What's going on?" he yelled louder. No answer. Sasuke finally blinked away from the spot he had been boring a hole into and began to follow Kakashi.

"Asshole! Listen to me!" Naruto yelled and punched Sasuke. Or at least he tried to punch Sasuke but his fist just went right through him and he found himself floating again. Definitely not normal. Sasuke just kept walking, with that damn soulless look in his eyes, as if nothing had happened. Sakura then got up and followed moments later, still crying.

"What the fuck!" Naruto had never been so confused in his life. 'Come on, think Naruto,' he said to himself as he scrunched his brow up in thought. 'It's not like weird things haven't happened to you before. Today did start out different. We actually got a hard mission today.'

Flashback.

It was a beautiful day in Konoha. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ramen was cooking to perfection, and everything was just fine in Naruto's book if he got to have ramen for breakfast at his favorite place.

He finished his meal, paid, and was off to the red bridge where team seven always waited hours for their perverted sensei. He was in a pretty good mood this morning and barely noticed the glare of the villagers as he passed. Sakura-chan and Sasuke-teme were already at the meeting place.

"Good morning, Sakura-chan!" he greeted happily waving at her. "Sasuke," he said, nodding to his rival in greeting. Sasuke nodded back.

"You're late Naruto!" she scolded him.

"It not as if it matters. Kakashi-sensei wouldn't be here for at least another hour," the Uchiha heir said calmly, not bothering to look at them. Sakura immediately shut-up, looking as though his words had been physical blows, then down at the ground sadly.

A few minutes later though she perked right back up and attached herself to his arm and began to gush about how great he was. "Sasuke-kun? Do you want to go out for lunch with me today after our mission?" she asked hopefully. "No," was the stoic boys reply. She looked horribly crest fallen and it was Naruto to the rescue!

"Hey Sakura-chan! Forget him! I'll go out with you!" Naruto said, smiling at her. "Eww, baka! No way!" she said glaring at him as if it was all his fault Sasuke had turned her down.

"Hn. No one would ever go out with you, Dobe," Sasuke said, looking at Naruto with a smirk. "What did you say Teme!" Naruto glared at the Sharigan user. Sasuke, who had been leaning against the railing, pushed himself off of it and walked over to Naruto and repeated himself as if trying to make a very small child understand.

"No one would ever go out with you. Dobe." Putting extra emphasis on dobe.

"I could so get a date if I really wanted to! You asshole!" Naruto countered and was promptly hit over the head by Sakura's fist.

"What did you call Sasuke-kun!"

"N-Nothing." he said and shut-up. Sakura was really scary when she wanted to be. They stayed in silence for an hour or so before Kakashi appeared in his usual manner.

"Sorry for being late. There was an angry elephant blocking the road this morning so I had to take the long way," he tried lamely.

"LIAR!" Naruto and Sakura shouted at the same time. "Well anyway. We have a B-rank mission today." Kakashi stated, his one visible eye crinkling into what one could only guess was a smile.

"Woohoo! What are we doing!" Naruto asked excitedly.

"We are going to go recapture, not kill, a criminal who escaped into the woods from the Konoha prison last night," Kakashi said, pulling out Icha Icha Paradise.

"Yay!" Naruto exclaimed.

"Ursuatonkachi, that's not supposed to be a good thing." Naruto stopped the celebratory dance he had been doing and glared at the Uchiha. "Kakashi-sensei, who is this guy and what did he do to put in jail?" Sakura questioned before a fight could break out.

"He was a ninja who got really drunk one night and killed his wife, who was also a ninja and drunk," he said, smiling. Naruto really didn't think that was a reason to smile. Getting a high ranked mission was though.

"Well then let's get going!" A half an hour later they were searching through the woods around Konoha knowing he could not have gone that far, especially since the break out must have took a lot out of him. They landed in a small clearing.

"Why can't we find him? This is stupid," Naruto pouted. "Like you? This was a B-rank mission. Did you really expect it to be that easy?" Sasuke said in his usual bored monotone.

Naruto opened his mouth to retort when a kunai flew out from behind him, over his ear, cutting his cheek, and embedding itself in a tree. Team seven swung around to see a man about Kakashi's height, with a matted black beard and a shaved head with a tattoo on it that said 'ninja'. He was wearing a horizontally striped, black and white prison uniform, and had over each shoulder a piece of wire with at least forty kunai on it. He had a crazed look in his eyes.

"I won't go back!" he screamed and began to throw the kunai at them. Naruto dodged, but just barely. This had obviously been a good ninja and prison didn't seem to get rid of his aim. The guy's first throw had obviously been to break up the team and now he was going after Kakashi, being as how he was their leader and the strongest, all the while remembering to keep them distracted by making copies of himself.

Well Naruto was not just going to sit back and let that happen. He used the Shadow divided art to create more copies of himself. Unfortunately the guy was a lot stronger than Naruto and all the copies were destroyed in under a minute. Naruto saw out of the corner of his eye that fifteen of the guy's copies were ganging up on Kakashi on the other side of the clearing. Sakura was trying to help him, but seemed to have her hands full as well. Naruto took care of the copy he was battling and heard a cry ten feet off to his right.

Sasuke was now pulling out several kunai from his legs. But before he could get them out one of the guy's copies kicked him the head and he hit a tree and coughed up blood. Naruto watched the man pull the entire string of twenty kunai off his shoulder in slow motion and he knew Sasuke didn't have time to get up.

Without thinking about what he was doing or why, he dashed over to Sasuke as fast as his legs would carry him. The madman pulled all the kunai off the string in one movement, so fast that Naruto couldn't see it, and flung them all at the kneeling Sasuke.

'Almost there!' Naruto flung himself in front of Sasuke, blocking all the kunai with his own body and splattering blood all over him; Sasuke was frozen with shock and fear. The first kunai to impact went straight through Naruto's heart; he never felt the others.

End Flashback.

"So that's it. I'm dead? Well this sucks!" Naruto exclaimed at the forest around him. "So if that was me, dead and being carried away, then who am I?" Naruto floated there in thought for a while.

"Wait a second. Then I must be a ghost!" Naruto said triumphantly. "Oh shit! I'm a ghost!" His discovery didn't seem very good anymore.

"Bingo! Bingo, you win the prize," said a cheerful female with bright blue hair and a pink kimono, only looking a little older than himself, and floating on an oar only a few feet above him.

"Aaaahhhhh! Who the hell are you!" Naruto exclaimed, having been totally caught off guard by this pretty girl. "I didn't expect you to figure it out so quickly!" she said, smiling at him.

Yes Konoha has a prison because I say so. I have no idea if it really does or not. Review! You know you want to.