"You can't ignore me forever, you know," I said to the darkness beyond the bars. I sat a scant few feet away from them, water tainted by the negative feelings of myself and my prisoner sloshing around my waist. The sewer was the same I remembered it, as if the resolution Kurama and I had made to work together had never happened.

What had happened to the healthy white light that had punctuated our new friendship? Why wouldn't he talk to me?

I sighed, clenching my fists in my lap. I had prepared myself for the loss of my friends as I knew them. I had prepared myself for the loss of Sasuke. It had killed me to make that choice, to cast aside the bonds that had come to define me. But I'd done it, because I knew I could make their lives better, and I owed them that much at the very least.

But I had expected, for some reason, to have at least one companion on my migration. I looked searchingly into the cage that housed the Kyuubi, monster among monsters.

We had made a choice back then, in the midst of a fight that no one man or Bijuu could endure on their own. We had put faith in one another that had never been thought possible, let alone attempted. Our chakras, the very energies of our beings, had crashed into one another, memories, emotions, and strength bleeding into each other until there remained one shimmering pool of life far beyond either of our separate capabilities.

We hadn't just become friends at that moment. We had become a single entity. A true jinchuriki.

How, then, was it possible that he had been left behind?

"Say something!" I shouted, because it was all I could do. "Talk to me, you stupid fox!"

Nothing. The seal might as well have been holding back air with how absolute the Bijuu's silence was.

I groaned, burying my face in my hands, ignoring the vile water that clung to my cheeks. "I think... I get it," I said, so reluctant to admit it that I barely heard it myself. "That old sage's son, Asura. He didn't choose both of us to be his descendents. Just me.

"That's why you didn't say anything when I made my choice. Because even though it should have been ours, it was mine."

I peered up through the gaps in my fingers, and spoke more strongly. "I'm sorry I made my decision without considering what it meant for our bond. I'm sorry I left you behind." My hands dropped. "I'm sorry, Kurama."

That was what did it.

The water covering the floor crashed into my chest, forced out of the cage by an incredible force, and a split second later the sewer shook with the force of the Bijuu's collision against the bars. I slid back with the current, finding my feet and looking up at my best friend, refusing to be daunted.

He was furious. His eyes, intimidating even in kind moments, had been smothered by crimson fury, not even a hint of his slitted pupils to be found in their depths. His clawed hands trembled against the unyielding bars, leaving no doubt to their intentions. His tails, the cause of the intense currents, lashed behind him, each on its own strong enough to part oceans and rend mountains.

YOU, he snarled, actually snarled the word. You have no right to that name, human.

I grit my teeth against his wrath, ignoring the way the water suddenly boiled and hissed and tore at my clothing and unprotected skin. If this was how it had to be, then I'd just have to form our bond anew, same as everyone else. I'd have to beat sense into his big furry head, same as last time.

And there was no better time to start than now.

"I have the only right!" I roared over the reverberations of his impact with the seal. Kurama had never once appreciated meekness, in all the centuries of memories that he had shared with me.

"Because of this seal!" I gripped my shirt, partially eaten away by the waters that Kurama's emotions had made so corrosive, and tore it off in one sharp motion. I slapped my stomach and it came alive with the black ink of my father's seal. "This seal puts your life in my hands, and my life in yours. This seal makes us the same. My name is yours, and your name is mine."

Never let it be said that Jiraiya's flair for the dramatic had not lived on in his apprentice.

You are deranged, Kurama said contemptuously, but it was too late for him. I had already accepted the pain of losing another friend, and resolved myself in earning a new one. I grinned cheekily up at him.

"Which means you are deranged."

Enough! You will LEAVE. He punctuated his final word by slamming all nine of his tails into the bars with such force that I was thrown off my feet. Back into the waking world.

I blinked, and shut my eyes a moment later, waiting for the nausea brought upon by the transition to pass. When the barrier between us had been broken down, Kurama and I had been able to move back and forth between reality and the housings of my soul at will, using my body as our medium. But now we were back to square one there, too.

"Ain't this a bitch," I muttered, rubbing my aching eyelids and chancing another look around the sunlit clearing.

And found myself surrounded by over a dozen stone statues of the big man himself.

"What the hell?"

"Uh, hey boss," my own voice spoke up behind me, and I turned to see one lone, sheepish clone made of flesh instead of stone. "Some stuff happened while you were out."

"I just told you guys to test out a few techniques!" I said, incredulous.

"I know, I know! But the Naruto testing out sage mode managed to gather some nature chakra before he fucked up, and none of our other techniques were working, so we figured we'd all give it a shot, too."

Figured. What a bunch of idiots.

"So since you're still around, you pulled it off?" I asked, hardly allowing myself to hope. My last remaining clone shook his head.

"I figured you'd want someone around to explain, so you didn't try it yourself." He eyed the statues, an unsettled expression on his whiskered face. "We didn't get any feedback from the others turning to stone. I... don't think they're dead."

That raised a few questions. Questions that I wasted no time shoving into the furthest corner of my mind.

I had hoped that something would work, of all the various techniques I'd learned in my years as a shinobi. I still knew how to do them all, what made the Rasengan tick and the exact way to coax the world's chakra into my coils. But from what I'd seen and heard so far, that wasn't enough.

Yin and Yang. The energies of the mind and the body, the heart and the soul. Iruka-sensei's lectures on the balance between them had never made as much sense to me as they did right now.

My mind was willing, but my body wasn't ready. I knew what to do, but my body had yet to do it.

"Looks like I've got some training ahead of me," I said to myself, and he responded with a wild grin.

"Time to get wild?" he asked. I nodded, and formed the seal for the one technique that had not deserted me.

"Oh yeah."

I sat amidst a perfect storm of Uzumaki Naruto, glaring at a balloon that refused to to pop while dozens of me talked a lot about a little, and suddenly wondered if transmigration had been the right choice.

When it came down to it, there wasn't much I could do with Kakashi-sensei's shadow clone trick as I was now. At this point in my life I had barely known what chakra control was, let alone had any grasp on it. It narrowed my possibilities down from the Rasengan and its many variations to the exercises Kakashi-sensei had given me long ago.

So I had clones running up trees, balancing leaves on their noses, and smashing their chakra together in the hopes of producing some scant edges of wind.

Back to the basics, I told them. Back to the very, very basics.

Off to my right, a clone made it halfway up a tree and then, in his excitement, shoved too much chakra into his next step and blasted himself into the ground. He died in a burst of smoke, and I felt my eyes cross as yet another set of memories forced themselves into my head.

I was making good progress for only a few hours of work, definitely more than the first time around I had learned these things, which I guess made sense. My memories had to be worth something. Unfortunately, the longer we trained, the more we learned, and the more we learned, the more I had to acclimate when one of my clones killed themselves.

I was good at making clones. The best, maybe. But I didn't make them to last. A hundred memories of a few seconds of a fight I could handle- it all blended together, and made it easy to discard most of it. But a hundred memories of a hundred different training regimens, techniques, and results? Discarding those would defeat the purpose of training with the dumb bastards in the first place, and taking them all in left me with one hell of a headache.

I tossed my balloon aside in favor of rubbing my temples, nodding in assent when a clone grabbed it out of the air and looked to me for permission to work on it instead of his leaf.

At this rate, it looked like I wouldn't be getting the old man's hat anytime soon.

"What time is it?" I asked, unwilling to look up at the sun for the sake of my throbbing head. A clone somewhere in front of me answered.

"Little after noon, boss."

My fingers froze.

"Shit! I'm late for lunch!"

The Genin Exams came and went, and I passed them with about as much difficulty as the first time around. Iruka, a man I vaguely remembered as being one of Naruto's earliest friends, had heaped all sorts of praise on me while handing over my headband. I hadn't paid all that much attention to him.

I had been more concerned with watching the next student in line.

Naruto never told me the circumstances behind his failing the Genin Exam and then becoming a shinobi anyway, something that fairly infuriated me as I watched him dart from the examination room with a naked forehead. He'd fled from the Academy and his jeering classmates, and I had watched him go, tying my own headband around my neck and swallowing down the sour taste in my mouth.

I had no idea what it was he had to do, so for now, all I could do was wait and hope for the best.

Thankfully, he'd pulled through, and the next day I had found him smiling away in the seat beside mine, the same as I remembered. The teams had, likewise, been the same, something that left me with intensely mixed feelings.

I stood now in the Naka Shrine, looking down at the Sage of Six Paths' tablet but not really seeing it, for a couple reasons. One was that my eyes were once again not strong enough to decipher all of its text. The other was the third member of my team, who I would once again be forced to spend months of my life with.

I did not like Haruno Sakura when we were classmates. I did not like Haruno Sakura when we were teammates.

I hated Haruno Sakura after I left Konoha, and she hated me just the same.

Our relationship had always been strained. She had admired me in our early days as genin, and tried at every opportunity to be my friend. When I ignored her advances, she'd turn her attention to our other teammate, and delighted in rubbing my superiority in his face. At the time I hadn't cared much about either of them. In retrospection, it had made me hate her even more.

As Naruto and I had grown more and more interested in each other as rivals- though neither of us had been willing to admit it at the time- Sakura had been relegated to a third wheel. It was around this time that her admiration had turned to resentment, having believed for some reason that I would favor her over Naruto in solidarity.

My desertion only cemented this. It hadn't registered to me as being something worth thinking about at the time, for many reasons, and I'd happily have kept it that way.

But then after years apart, entirely against our collective wills, Naruto and I began to gravitate towards each other once again. Our rivalry roared back to life, and slowly, something else grew between us. Something I had never experienced before. Something I had never known that I desired up until I heard the way that blond moron's voice had changed, saw the way he'd grown, and felt the weight of his own desires in the looks he'd give me between blows.

And then Haruno fucking Sakura decided to stick her nose where no one wanted her, as usual.

I turned away from my clan's ancient tablet, a single tomoe spinning in each of my blood red eyes. Of all the skills I had acquired in my life, all that I had retained after my transmigration was a handful of low-level techniques and the very first stage of my kekkai genkai; and the latter only because I had already possessed it at this point in my life. I just hadn't known it.

I stalked out of the shrine, dismissing my sharingan as well as my thoughts on useless pink women. Tomorrow would be Kakashi's bell test, and for all that I could have crushed him with little effort before my migration, I was a very different shinobi now. I was going to need a hell of a strategy if I wanted to get a bell tomorrow.

Not that we wouldn't pass if I didn't, given that I knew the silly lesson he was trying to teach.

... But I still wanted to.

I walked through the Uchiha District, memories and emotions whirling around my head. I had learned many things about my clan and its massacre after I left Konoha, almost all of them conflicting with what I had previously thought to be fact.

At this point, I was confident I knew the truth, but I didn't want to confront it just yet. For now, I would focus on things that didn't hurt quite as much.

I found myself at my clan's armory, one of the only facets of the district that I had bothered to maintain after the massacre. I stepped inside, gazing around at the weapons, armor, and materials within. I would have to choose carefully. I was at my best when I supplemented my kenjutsu with ninjutsu, which my current level of elemental control would not allow. It was going to be a difficult fight, no matter how I looked at it.

However, if I could get Naruto to play along, with the right plan... We had a chance. A slim one, maybe. But I hadn't been given my flee-on-sight ranking for nothing, and with the right direction Naruto had the potential to become just as powerful. I had seen him realize that potential, after all.

I had been rather intimately close to him every step of the way.

My lips curled. "We'll just need need to get creative."

Ibu Kanko, Elite Jonin of Iwagakure, crouched in the shadow of a mountain with his hands held in the final seal for his signature reconnaissance technique, and waited for death.

"Senpai," whispered Rookie Jonin Iseya with a level of urgency that would have seemed out of place for a squad of Iwa's best and brightest, had it been any other situation. "They're coming this way. Should we-?"

"Quiet!" Kanko's second-in-command hissed, cuffing the smaller shinobi over the head. "We leave when Commander gives the order, and no sooner. Don't disrupt his concentration." Murmurs of agreement rippled through the rest of their squadron, and faced with such overwhelming opposition, the rookie did no more than glance uneasily to the sky.

A moment later an arc of shrieking blue light tore through the air above them, and the Iwa team collectively held their breath as an impact hundreds of feet up the mountain shook the ground beneath their feet.

They had been returning home, following a successful mission, and had tripped over their own feet right into the metaphorical frying pan. Now, the only thing keeping them from beating a hasty retreat was the risk of tripping again, this time into the metaphorical fire.

The two monsters clashing above them were not to be underestimated. This much, Kanko's squad knew well.

Konoha's Toad Sage, a shinobi of unprecedented strength, was said to perceive his surroundings by means of his surroundings, utilizing the perception of the world around him to achieve a near sensor-like ability of skill in tracking his enemies. The briefing had not made much sense to Kanko at the time- all he had gathered was that, for a short time, his favorite camouflage technique would hold against the all-seeing juggernaut.

His opponent, Konoha's last Uchiha, and their greatest defector to date, was a woman that could and had frequently dismantled scores of Iwa squads simply for being at what she considered to be the wrong place at the wrong time. Where the Toad Sage relied on the world to be his eyes, the Uchiha's coveted bloodline allowed her eyes to be her world. Genjutsu, stealth, and deception of any sort were stripped bare by her fully matured sharingan- whatever she saw, she saw truly.

Kanko's technique would not hold up beneath her scrutiny for any amount of time, which left him with little to do but hope the Toad Sage could maintain her full attention long enough for his squad to find an opening.

"Damn it!" A harsh voice roared above them. "I don't have time for you today! Leave me alone, Sasuke!"

An odd sound, like a hundred blades being sharpened on a hundred spinning stones, revved into life above them. Several members of their squad, including Kanko, shuddered reflexively. As if it wasn't bad enough that the Toad Sage held mastery over a bizarre and powerful form of alternative chakra, he had chosen the creation of Iwa's most hated shinobi as his signature attack.

The tell-tale sounds of the Yondaime Hokage's rasengan grated upon the Iwa shinobi, and a moment later were joined by the sound of thousands upon thousands of chirping birds.

"Not a chance!" The Uchiha taunted, her voice guttural with tension. "You're mine, Naruto!"

"Duck!" Kanko snapped, speaking for the first time since the start of his technique, and his shinobi instantly complied. Kanko clenched his eyes shut, and braced himself for the backlash.

A moment later the two legendary shinobi met above them, and a shockwave of chakra slammed into Kanko's technique, driving him forward from his crouch to his knees. A moment later, the muffled boom of the two techniques clashing shook the mountain above them, raining shards of rock upon the Iwa shinobi.

Then the rasengan detonated, and searing light tore through the darkness of Kanko's closed eyes, rendering him temporarily blind. Around him, he heard a handful of pained gasps as less prepared shinobi were hit with the full force of rasengan's final phase of attack.

Far too few had known back when the Yellow Flash had reigned, but you did not actually need to be hit by the rasengan to be crippled by it. It struck in phases, each with a greater range than the one before it.

Kanko looked up at the suddenly ravaged mountain, blinking away spots of light. It was a truly monstrous attack, for a truly monstrous shinobi.

His vision cleared fully a few precious seconds later, and Kanko dispelled his technique with a sharp hand motion.

"Now!" He grabbed the rookie, Iseya, who was still blinded, and blurred towards the border in a shunshin. The rest of his squad quickly followed suit.

Almost before he'd taken his first step, he felt the Toad Sage's notice fall upon him. Kanko felt the way the ground beneath his feet thrummed with the sage's influence, the way the area's sparse vegetation reported back to its master the sweat on his skin as he brushed past it. The very air he breathed felt inexplicably as if it were betraying him, whispering to the Toad Sage of his squad's panicked gasps.

No one had told him the sage controlled the wind, too.

"Wait!" The Toad Sage shouted, and Kanko felt the world shift around him ever so slightly as the Konoha shinobi drew from its energy. "You can't blow my cover yet! Kage bunshin no jutsu!"

"Senpai!" Iseya cried, horror in the young shinobi's eyes as he watched the Toad Sage's clones blot out the sun.

"Don't stop!" Kanko commanded, dragging Iseya along on another shunshin. "Die running, or don't die at all! MOVE!"

"Gaaah!" Naruto cried, gripping his hair and throwing his head back in frustration when the Iwa team disappeared into the range of mountains leading to Iwa. "You always do this!"

"I do," Sasuke agreed, leaning against a gouge she had carved in the mountain sometime earlier in their fight.

"I can never just have a nice, uneventful mission outside the Land of Fire where everything goes right and you mind your own business!" He kicked a rock with all his strength, sending it sailing off into the horizon.

She nodded along. "You can't."

"You won't even let me kiss you afterwards, half the time!"

Her blood red eyes shone with devious amusement. "I won't."

Konoha's second Toad Sage gave the mountain one last petulant kick, and then turned to lean back against it with a grunt. He closed his eyes, seemingly done with fighting, but Sasuke noticed with intense satisfaction the way the muscles shifting beneath his clothing tensed and relaxed sporadically, rendering him capable of moving in any direction at a moment's notice.

It was, in Sasuke's entirely unbiased eyes, an invitation for her to come at him whenever she desired.

It had taken a while, but her idiot lover was becoming a worthy rival.

"I spent so long planning for this," he said, drawing her attention from his musculature to the deepening tenor of his voice. "I had clones on every major border, decoy toads on the roads to Kumo and Kiri, and I even left all my ramen at home this time. Plus all the stuff I did for the mission!"

Sasuke smirked down at him, and she relished his vibrant blue glare. "Did you really think that would be enough to distract me?"

It had pleased her to see that he was getting more creative in his methods of avoiding her while on Konoha business, almost as much as it had pleased her to cut down every single one of his obstacles.

"Think's a strong word," he admitted. He hadn't hoped for much more than time to begin his mission, but it seemed even that had been too much. Man, but granny Tsunade was going to kill him. "Damn it, there's no way I can stealth this anymore."

Sasuke tilted her head, causing her wild bangs to fall across her face. "Why would anyone send you on a stealth mission in the first place?"

"A great Hokage has to be the best shinobi in the village, in all aspects," Naruto said firmly. He had probably rehearsed that line, Sasuke mused.

"What does that have to do with you?" she asked. He glared at her, and she flashed her teeth in a challenging smile.

"This is serious," he said, and there was real fire in his eyes as he gestured in the vague direction of Iwa. "I don't know when I'll get another chance at this kind of mission! Granny Tsunade didn't even want to give me this one!"

Sasuke dropped down in front of Naruto from her elevated perch, and he braced himself for another brawl while she threw her arm across his chest, letting her hand come to rest over one shoulder as she leaned in over the other.

It was a familiar position. One of her favorites.

"Well then, Na-ru-to," she murmured lowly, punctuating each syllable of his name by stealing another inch of space between them. "It seems we'll have to get..." Her breath was hot against his skin, her face still pleasantly flushed from their fight. "Creative."

Konoha's legendary Toad Sage swallowed hard.