I couldn't sleep.

I've been on the move ever since my transmigration, building upon my strengths and whittling away at my weaknesses, clawing for each and every hour with the concentrated mania of a man who intended to save the world. The Uzumaki have always possessed a certain vitality beyond the average shinobi, and I may as well be Uzumaki incarnate, but that doesn't mean I don't sleep. I need time to rest and recharge just like anyone else.

I've been subsisting on meditation up until now, determined to make my brief stints of relaxation at least somewhat productive. Meditation, and more chakra than a twelve year old has any right to. These factors combined have gotten me through weeks of exertion the likes of which my current body had never seen before, but they were not enough. Fatigue had rooted itself into my thoughts and actions, and it gained more ground on me with every passing day.

In hindsight, it might have been a better idea to sleep a little every day, rather than wait for my first mission to finally let myself go. A saner idea, anyway.

I had made my bed, though, so all I could really do was sleep in it for as long as Kakashi would let me before it was time to head out. Thankfully, a few hours would be enough to recover from the worst of the damage. It wasn't going to be fun, but I would manage.

Or rather, I would have managed if I had been able to actually fall asleep.

Sasuke was cool and soft and unbearably comfortable in my arms. Her slightly upturned nose twitched against my neck, where my naked skin met my hair, breathing in the scent of me. She exhaled it in a contented sigh. Or maybe she was just breathing. Between the exhaustion and crippling self-loathing, it was becoming sort of hard to tell.

I couldn't remember how long I had laid in the explicitly single sleeping bag, trying and failing to surrender myself to the fatigue, before I decided to roll over and see if my other side would have any luck. All I knew was that as soon as I did, Sasuke was suddenly burrowing into my arms. I had frozen, damn me for a fool, and by the time I came back to my senses she was already curled up against me.

And now... Now she was asleep, and I was not, and I couldn't bring myself to let go of her. My arms, if anything, had wrapped her up even tighter in the hours since she'd drifted off. Sasuke had a good few inches on me at this age, but curled up as she was, her legs tangled in mine and her face buried in my neck, she felt so small. I couldn't keep holding on to her, I had to let her go, she was thirteen and I wasn't and this was wrong-

I clenched my teeth, biting back a snarl as furious, poisonous despair threatened to overwhelm me. My vision flashed a dark, bloody red as Kurama responded to my negative emotions, urging yet tainted chakra through my seal. A ridiculous sense of betrayal hit me in the same spot the fatigue and hopeless longing had been digging at for weeks, and I found myself hiding away in Sasuke's hair from the pain of it all.

I exhaled shakily into a sea of silken midnight strands, blocking out everything else and throwing my will against that of the bloody chakra frothing out from my seal. It was harder than I remembered, so much harder, because I no longer had nature on my side. And it hurt so much worse, because I no longer hated the entity behind it- I knew that Kurama wasn't the evil that I had thought him to be for so many years. Likewise, I knew that what he was doing now wasn't evil, nor was it a betrayal, as we had never been friends in this timeline.

It was just spiteful. And it hurt like a bitch.

Several excruciating seconds later, the last dregs of Kurama's chakra retreated behind my seal and I slumped back, having arched up when the first wave of chakra hit me. I passed a good long while laying there and feeling sorry for myself before I realized that I had taken Sasuke with me when I flopped back down. She was now sprawled across my chest, her hair pooling around the both of us, blissfully asleep.

I found my lips twitching into a fond little smile, my hand carefully moving from around her back to brush along the jagged black strands jutting out at the crown of her head. I've always loved Sasuke's hair.

It was unkempt, frenzied in a way that fit her perfectly. I firmly believed there was nothing softer in this world, but if you were to look at it you'd think it could cut glass. There were so many jagged spikes and edges, flaring up at the crown of her head and then cascading down her back in unruly black waves. In time, it would only become more unrestrained. She certainly wasn't going to waste time on something as trivial as maintaining her hair. I chuckled softly, threading a few strands through my fingers.

And then I realized what I was doing. I froze, hardly daring to breathe, and slowly pulled my hand away from her hair. Now I just had to remove the other arm from around her waist and get out of the tent, and maybe I'd finally get some sleep-

I wrapped my arm back around my teammate, and despaired. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't let go of the ghost of the woman I loved. And in this quiet, solitary moment, with nothing left to distract me, I couldn't convince myself that I wanted anything more than I wanted Uchiha Sasuke.

"You were wrong, Madara," I whispered, blinking rapidly against the burning in my eyes as memories of brokenhearted Uchiha women resurfaced in the darkness of the tent. It wasn't a chakra burn, this time. Just a few frustrated tears. "I don't deserve her."

So I held on to Sasuke for dear life. I resolved to rest, knowing as I did that I wouldn't sleep a wink. I wouldn't let myself, in the end- not when these precious few hours could be the last that I had to hold her like this, close, comfortable, right.

I didn't regret coming back, not really. But god help me if it wasn't lonely.

esreveR nI nettirW

Kawa no Kuni, the Land of Rivers, was an odd nation. As one of the Land of Fire's direct neighbors, Konoha got a respectable amount of work from their people on a fairly regular basis. I've been there more than once, for all sorts of reasons. Courier missions, escorts, and so on. I usually don't mind, either. It's a beautiful country.

It's not really the country's fault that my first two visits to it were such unmitigated clusterfucks.

The Land of Rivers was odd because it shared sizable borders with two nations home to Great Hidden Villages, Konoha and Suna respectively, but it dealt far more often with its third neighbor: Ame. This hadn't always been the case, and there were all kinds of theories as to why it had suddenly become so over a decade ago. I couldn't tell you what those theories were, because who cares, but I did know who the man behind the abrupt shift was.

Uzumaki Nagato. Or, as the rest of the world knew him, Pain. Ame's god king, Akatsuki's ruthless leader, and my cousin. Or my uncle, maybe. I never got the chance to ask.

Point being, after Pain brutally murdered Ame's previous leader and claimed the place as his own, he'd decided that he didn't like Ame's current allies and channels. So he made his own. I never found out exactly how deep his influence ran in the Land of Rivers, it hadn't seemed important at the time, but if nothing else he'd singlehandedly secured them as a primary trader as well as a host nation for at least half a dozen Akatsuki hideouts- I destroyed six. There could have been more, though.

I would have been impressed, if it weren't for the countless lives he'd taken in the process of forging the unofficial alliance. The Land of Rivers used to have a hidden village of its own- Tanigakure. It vanished around the same time its host country started favoring Ame, coincidentally diverting the bulk of its business to Pain's village in the process.

That wasn't all. There was more to Kawa no Kuzie's oddness than its unofficial puppet nation status, though maybe not quite so disturbing.

"Sensei," Sakura said, her voice wondering as she gazed out over the cliffside. "What are those?"

There were the caverns.

Surprisingly, the Land of Rivers had a lot of rivers. These rivers flowed, and unlike most of the channels we had in the Land of Fire, they flowed fierce. The end result of this, after countless centuries, was cliff faces worn away by water and time. Nature, both above and below ground, washed away by relentless currents. Caves hollowed out by the sea's prying freshwater fingers.

The Land of Rivers' most defining feature was its underground caverns, which was why I could never really like the place. The caverns were a symbol of nature overcome by the elements, and they were everywhere. They ran deeper than some of the rivers themselves, which ebbed and flowed with time.

Inevitably, Sasuke loved it for that very same reason.

Said kunoichi scoffed at Sakura's question. "They're caves," she said. Thankfully, the atmosphere of the place was already getting to her, so it didn't come out too venomous.

Sakura flushed a bit, anyway. "Well, I know that! But aren't they bigger than most caves?"

"They're pretty huge," I agreed. Sasuke paused in her retort, turning ever so slightly hooded eyes on me. Right, no talking. Damn it.

"They're one of the more famous natural phenomena around," Kakashi said, gesturing with his porn down below at a strong current of water rushing into the caverns. "The rivers here are strong, and over time they've carved out more than a few of those caverns. If you were to go down and follow that stream, you'd get a lot further than you might think."

Man, but I hoped that was the case.

We had reached something of a critical point after the last three days of travel. We hadn't been going particularly fast, since our client was a civilian not at all in his prime, but we'd covered ground nonetheless. The Land of Fire's borders had come and gone a few hours ago, giving way to rising landscapes with a more reasonable amount of trees. We'd been on an incline for a while now, which I guess was why the caves were so far below us.

"They're spectacular, aren't they?" Miura asked. "I know more than one adventurous soul whose travels have taken them beneath the surface of this country, and you wouldn't believe some of their stories!" The diminutive civilian gestured excitedly as he went off on a tangent that I vaguely remembered from before my transmigration. I tuned him out, scratching at an itch that had refused to go away for the past hour or so- a sign of conflicts to come, or maybe just Sasuke's eyes on the back of my head.

I wasn't sure how to treat our surprise client, given what little I knew of him. Really, my knowledge of who he was paled in comparison to my knowledge of what he would cause, which did not at all paint a good picture of him. So for now I've fallen back on neutrality, which for me boiled down to ignoring him like overdue rent.

He was taking it a lot better than Sasuke, who I'd decided to give myself some space from after my panic attack in her tent. This had led to more than a few uncomfortable moments as I did my best to be the silently disdainful presence to her that she always used to be to me, something which she clearly wasn't used to, and clearly didn't enjoy. At this point I was honestly counting the minutes before she lashed out and tried to kill me.

Fortunately for my nerves, if not my health, that was going to be a moot point soon enough.

"Hey Tatsuno," I said, an echo from six years past rolling off my tongue before I had time to really think about it. "We almost there?"

The seasoned chunin hummed, shifting a bit of his shoulder-length hair out of his eyes and peering down at the rivers below us in search of a familiar landmark. He found it a few seconds later. "At this pace, we have one more night before we reach the coast. From there, it should only take us a day of steady sailing to reach the capital."

I shivered, a thrill fluttering through my stomach at the familiar words. Almost there. Almost game time. "Are we going with you guys?"

"If possible," Tatsuno said, smiling ruefully to me. "I'll do my level best to have you credited for a B-rank mission as soon as we return home. We owe you a lot."

"Mah, there's no need for that much flattery," Kakashi said before I could wave the man off myself. "I'm sure my cute little students are more than happy with the C-rank pay they were promised. Isn't that right, you three?" He quirked his eye in a happy crescent, challenging any of us to disagree. I got halfway through a snappy retort, and then I froze.

A change had come over our sensei, a subtle but unmistakeable tension in his bearing that had my blood pumping furiously as adrenaline surged through me. Sasuke noticed it, too, her stance shifting just so, putting the hilt of her chokuto within easy reach.

"Formation," he said simply. I shifted a step to the right at the same moment that Sasuke shifted to the left, bringing us closer together in front of Miura, who came to a startled halt a step behind us. Sakura blinked, looking between us and our sensei, before the sudden tension in the air hit her and she hurried behind us, taking her place behind the client.

"Hatake-san," Tatsuno said lowly, stepping up beside the deceptively relaxed jonin. "I don't sense anything."

"Give it a moment."

I felt it a scant handful of seconds before the chunin did, and the intensity of it sent another little shiver through me. It had been so long, I'd forgotten what it felt like. That relentless, suffocating pressure, assuring me that my seconds were numbered, and that the hour glass of my life would be running out of sand very, very soon.

Gaara's killing intent washed over us like a physical thing, throwing Miura to the ground as his legs gave out beneath him and even forcing our chunin companion a startled step back. Sakura gasped, tremors wracking her slim frame as Gaara's desire to utterly destroy us washed over her again and again.

I snapped two clones into being, each of which took up vigil on either side of Sakura. She flinched as they grabbed her hands, but they held firm, and after a moment the worst of the tremors faded. She sighed shakily, wresting control from the murderous assault.

She looked to me, relief and confusion and maybe even gratitude warring for dominance in her eyes. I flashed her a smile while my clones squeezed her hands in reassurance. "We'll be fine, Sakura."

"They're here," Sasuke said, eyes narrowed.

The siblings were the first to appear from the forest laid out just under a mile in front of us. Temari burst out into the open air atop her fan, flying across the open plain between us and the forest on a gale of controlled wind. Kankuro came next, darting out of the trees and rushing behind his sister.

And then something within the forest lurched, and sand came gushing out of the trees as plentiful and furious as the rivers at the bottom of the cliff side. I winced, watching it tear some of the smaller trees from their roots entirely. It swarmed across the field, contorting and lashing out at random intervals towards Temari and Kankuro, who remained a few precious steps ahead of it until they came to an abrupt stop a scant ten yards from us.

The waves of sand consumed them, and then parted as quickly as they had appeared, shaking with Gaara's restrained urge to kill as they flowed back to their master.

In their wake stood the Kazekage's children and sensei, regarding us with varying degrees of professional detachment. Temari dashed a few stray grains of sand from her person with a deft flip of her dark blonde hair, crossing her arms over her light lavender battle dress and surveying us coolly. Kankuro hunkered down into a crouch, sneering at us from beneath the hood of his black cat suit. Their sensei, a man I vaguely remembered to be called Baki, grimly met Kakashi's one-eyed stare with his own beneath the cloth half-veil that seemed to round out most traditional Suna uniforms.

And Gaara- well. He sort of stood there killing us with his eyes, being generally insane.

"Here we go," I muttered, clenching and unclenching my fists sporadically. My fellow jinchuriki's murderous jade gaze snapped to me, and I felt my lips part in a wild grin. Just you wait, Gaara. Things are about to change.

"Hatake Kakashi," Baki said, breaking the tense silence that had heralded their arrival. "You are in possession of an enemy of the state. As friends of Suna, we ask that you surrender Miura Akira immediately."

Tatsuno jerked, outrage coloring his features, but Kakashi stilled him with a raised hand. "Greetings, Baki," he said lightly, and the jonin from Suna inclined his head in solemn greeting. "May we see some proof of Miura-san's guilt?"

"H-hatake-san!" Miura gasped from his place on the ground, looking fearfully between Gaara and our sensei. Kakashi politely ignored him.

"We have only our orders from the Kazekage," Baki said, pulling a small scroll from his flak jacket, ringed with a vibrant blue band and emblazoned with the Kazekage's seal. He tossed it to Kakashi, who caught and unfurled it with one smooth snap of his wrist. His lone eye flitted over the contents, and he sighed.

"Well, this is awkward," he said, gesturing for Tatsuno to hand over his own mission scroll. He tossed both of them back to Baki, who read through the scarlet-ringed Konoha scroll with similar haste. "We're duty-bound to deliver Miura-san to the capital, alive if possible."

"The terms of our alliance-"

"Were never officially agreed upon," Kakashi smoothly interjected. "I don't suppose you'd like to accompany us to the capital, and proceed from there?"

"Unacceptable," was Baki's immediate reply.

"We've reached an impasse, then," I said gravely, a bare second before Kakashi could. He raised an eyebrow at me, but I was too hyped up to respond. I found myself bouncing from foot to foot. "So, which one of you is getting it first?"

There was really no point in asking. I knew damn well who was getting it first, and he was currently shaking with the urge to splatter me across the plains.

"Can I kill him?" Gaara asked, though it wasn't clear who or what he was asking. Baki scowled.

"I won't ask a third time," the jonin from Suna said, a subtle note of urgency in his tone. "Give us the noble, Hatake."

"Mah, mah, let's not get hasty," Kakashi said. "I'm sure we can come to some sort of agreement here-"

"I'm going to kill him," Gaara whispered, flashing his teeth at me in a chilling smile. I returned it happily.

Sasuke hissed and darted sideways, crashing into my side and sending us both sprawling as a tendril of sand Gaara had been slowly feeding through the grass whipped out at my heart. I wrapped her up in my arms and turned our rolling tumble into a backwards somersault, coming to my feet with a flourish and letting her go to cross my fingers in a simple little seal.

"Taijuu Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"

And I flooded the plains with more clones than Gaara had grains of sand.

Kakashi shook his head exasperatedly. "You children." He blurred across the plains in the next moment, clashing with Baki in a ferocious round of steel against steel. I dove into the roiling mass of clones, my heart pounding a furious beat against my chest as I darted between bright orange cloth and grasping sand. This was it. Finally, finally, I could set the first stage of my plan into motion. Starting right now, I was going to save the world.

Eat your heart out, Pain. This one was going to work.

It was finally time. Finally, finally, I could let go.

My chokuto came free of its sheath with a crackling scream, lightning surging frenziedly down the blade's edge. I sighed, a long, satisfied motion. I blinked, and in the split second of darkness my vision sharpened into sudden clarity, my immature sharingan pooling to crimson life in my eyes. I surveyed the orgy of orange shinobi that Naruto had dropped on the field, picking out my first target amidst the chaos- the eldest daughter with the ridiculous quadruple ponytail. My lips curled.

"Sasuke!" Sakura cried. "We're supposed to defend the client!"

I flicked my empty hand at the chunin tagalong, who seemed conflicted as to whether he should join the fray or hang back with the client.

"It's his client. He can guard with you," I said, making the decision for him. Then I leapt up onto the nearest clone's shoulders, crouching and pushing off before it could acclimate itself to my weight, dispelling it in a flash.

Naruto had made far too many clones, really. There were hundreds of them, and after a certain number in a condensed area they stopped being useful fighters and started being obnoxious distractions. A decent tactic in its own right, which Naruto had infuriated me with more than once before I got good enough at navigating through their ranks that it didn't matter. Something told me this Naruto wasn't quite on that level of thinking yet, though.

It made for good traction, if nothing else. I flew up the literal mountains of clones piled one atop the other, dispelling over a dozen that I used as stepping stones on my way to the sky. My chokuto chirped wildly all the while- it wasn't on the level of my chidorigatana, not yet, but it would do.

I burst into open air directly below the eldest daughter- Temari, I think it was- and lashed out with a simple cut at the paper of the fan she had taken flight with. It was the chirruping of my blade that gave me away, allowing the other kunoichi a precious moment to jerk the heavy metal of the fan into my path.

My blade sheared through the thickly plated steel as easily as I would have cut through the paper, cutting a furrow clean through the metal. Temari hissed something poisonous at me and glided out of my range, gripping the base of her battle fan tightly.

I was just beginning to fall when she pulled the fan out from under her, twisted in mid air, and swiped it down at me with a shout of effort. Gale force winds came howling from its edges straight at me, and I flashed through six quick seals.

Katon: Hosenka no Jutsu!

I spat out seven balls of fire as wide around as I was tall, one after the other, and as each of them crashed into the nameless wind jutsu it lost more and more of its momentum. The final fireball crashed into the thrashing mass of fire and tore control from the wind, sailing back at the Suna kunoichi under my careful guidance. Temari quickly swung her fan beneath her again and propelled herself sharply away from the flames.

I fell back into the mass of clones, which had grown noticeably smaller since my ascent. Gaara was making quick work of things, then. I twisted at the waist as a whipping lance of sand came tearing through the clones towards me, severing it and dashing the severed pieces to the wind with a lash of my lightning-covered blade. I righted myself atop the shoulders of another clone and took off towards the outskirts of the fight, where I had seen the middle sibling skulking around while in open air.

Gaara snarled somewhere down below in mounting frustration, to my amusement. It seemed Naruto's clones were driving his opponent over the edge faster than they were being destroyed.

The middle sibling with the makeup, Kankuro, was hanging back at the edge of the fight. The fingers of his right hand weaved in complex motions, directing his puppet with shining strings of chakra in an effort to get it through the chaos of Naruto and Gaara's fight and make a play on the client. So engrossed was he in the delicate chakra technique, he noticed the chirping of my blade a moment later than his sister had, and in that moment was cost a clean retreat.

I struck out strong and true, and my chokuto cut from the base of the Suna nin's palm to the tip of his middle finger, parting flesh to the bone and numbing muscles with lightning. His hand went limp as my chakra worked its way down his arm, and in the same moment his puppet clattered to the ground in a pile of metal weaponry and wooden parts halfway across the field. He bellowed a curse, shaking his arm wildly in a vain attempt to dispel my lingering chakra.

I smirked, reversing my grip on my blade and rushing in to capitalize on the distraction.

A scant few seconds later I turned away, flicking scarlet blood from my crackling blade and assessing the field. Kankuro lay crumpled and bloody behind me, his chest shuddering with the effort to breathe past the paralysis I had driven into his each of his limbs and various non-lethal points on his torso.

Time would tell if he could overcome the paralysis and bleeding, but I wouldn't be the one to do the final deed. Gaara had been one of Naruto's closest friends, and would be again of the blond fool had anything to say about it, and I wouldn't complicate that by murdering one of the littlest jinchuriki's siblings. Not directly, anyway.

I formed the seal for the body flicker around the hilt of my chokuto and sped back into the mass of clone and sand that was rapidly becoming more sand than clone, ascending the destabilizing tiers of clones and questing for another glimpse of Temari. I caught a flash of her fan as it swept by and adjusted my pace accordingly. A furious scream from down below caught my attention just before I kicked off into open air, and I paused precariously on the shoulders of an indignant clone as a thundering impact of sand against earth shook the tower of orange beneath me.

"Why won't you bleed!?" Gaara raged, throwing his arms to and fro like a psychotic maestro directing a bloody concerto. His sand leapt to his beck and call, ripping through clones with increasingly creative forms. Snapping jaws, wickedly sharp claws, and clones of his own that somehow looked even more insane than he did- though who was I to talk, really?- tore through Naruto's clones at a breakneck pace, making my footing even more treacherous.

Not a single one, however, turned up anything but chakra smoke. That same breathy sound from weeks ago bubbled up to my lips, and I launched myself into the sky. My chokuto went silent for a single frozen moment, and I cast a lazy glance around to make sure everything was as it should be. Sakura, Tatsuno, and the client were in the same place they had been a minute ago, and Kakashi and Baki were flashing in and out of view some distance away, bouts of lightning and wind and vicious hand to hand tearing up the area around them and tearing through any clones that happened to get too close.

I nodded to myself, satisfied with the state of the field. Then I slammed into Temari's blind spot with punishing force.

The physically older kunoichi gasped and reached for the base of her fan, sending chakra spiralling along its edges that shimmered a vibrant teal to the tomoe spinning in my eyes. Too little too late. I lashed an arm around her throat, jerking her hand from the fan, and urged lightning to flow along my blade again as I stabbed down at the sail bearing us up.

I swung cleanly, parting a razor thin line in the fan's paper, which the winds that had been keeping us afloat promptly blew wide open. Temari's fan lurched beneath us, plummeting towards the open maw of clones and sand waiting below us. Temari struggled desperately against my grip on her neck, arching her back in a vain effort to get away.

With nothing left to do, she yanked a kunai from the thick red sash wrapped around her waist and stabbed it at my arm. I struck it from her hand with a contemptuous swipe of my chokuto, clucking in her ear. "Now, now, I don't like you quite like that." She sputtered something incredibly insulting against my chokehold, and I frowned, offended.

"That wasn't very nice."

"Fuck you," Temari hissed through clenched teeth.

I threw her off the fan.

The Suna kunoichi took a deep breath and screamed all sorts of sulfuric things at me while I carefully piloted her mangled fan away. The sand swallowed her up, cutting her off mid-insult to my cup size, and I woefully turned away from her plight. It was out of my hands now. If her murderous younger brother just so happened to wring the blood from her still beating heart in the confusion of the fight, there wasn't exactly anything I could do about it, was there?

I urged Temari's tattered fan past the writhing mass of sand with an application of wind chakra that took far more concentration than I'd like to admit- indeed, it would have been utterly impossible for me just a few weeks ago. Still, I managed, steering well clear of the deceptively quiet war being waged between the two teams' jonin sensei, who were about as close to an even match as the last time. Kakashi had the advantage, from what I could see, but it wasn't nearly definitive enough to put Baki down.

"Yes!" Gaara's voice sounded down below, followed by a panicked shout as he drove a single orange-clad shinobi to his knees with a wickedly barbed tendril of sand.

"Naruto!" Sakura shouted from across the plains, and I threw Temari's fan into a dive. It was time for the second stage of the fight. Time for the real challenge.

I leapt from the fan a good two dozen at eye level with the distant treetops, throwing myself into a spin and forcing as much vibrant blue lightning through my chokuto as my coils could manage. The sand I struck parted like warm butter beneath my blade, and the resulting shockwave of condensed lightning blasted the severed half of the strand away from my blond fool. A chidori nagashi without the chidori.

"Sasuke?" Naruto said, baffled. "When did you learn lightning transformation?"

I smirked. "When did you learn what lightning transformation was, dead last?"

"What are you doing? He's mine!" Gaara snarled, swinging his arm as if to backhand me from a dozen yards away. His sand was only too happy to oblige, but I dashed it to useless grains with another short discharge. I forced my excitement down, steadying my breathing, and shored up what little chakra I had left.

My chakra reserves were truly pitiful at this age, even more so than I remembered. As I was now I would only be able to manage two, maybe three uses of the chidori, which was why I had stuck to basic lightning manipulation thus far. It would have to be enough, for now.

"No," I said. "No, littlest jinchuriki, he is mine."

Always and forever mine, and I wouldn't let anyone else have him. Not again. Never again.

"Oh," Naruto breathed. "Oh."

"Don't move," I told him. "I can't afford to keep track of you." This next part would take all the concentration and chakra I had left, no doubt. I needed to incapacitate him without killing him or knocking him unconscious and unleashing the Ichibi. I also needed to avoid the worst of his sand, lest it ruin me like it did before.

"Enough," Gaara snapped, clutching his head with one hand and waving the other sharply. "Mother wants blood. She'll have you both." I tensed, tomoe spinning fiercely in my eyes, and brought my hands together in the seal for the body flicker-

And stilled as a firm hand clamped down on my wrist. I looked down at lightly tanned fingers with some confusion, struggling to reconcile this interruption with my memories and failing. I lashed out with my chokuto and threw back another wave of sand almost as an afterthought, looking back at Naruto incredulously.

"What are you doing?"

He didn't respond for a moment, just staring back at me in shock. "You've already got the sharingan," he said. "How did I not see-?" He cut himself off, letting go of my wrist and hiding his face in his hand, laughing helplessly.

"Naruto. Why did you stop me?"

He shook his head, still laughing, and pointed past me, over Gaara's shoulder.

"Step one."

I opened my mouth to snap at him, but the words died in my throat as the familiar sound of chakra grinding against chakra hit me. I spun, following the clone's pointed finger to the roiling wall of sand sitting in Gaara's blind spot. That wasn't possible. He didn't know that yet. He couldn't know that yet. And yet, the wall of sand trembled and gave way to a sphere of chakra light that glowed like the sun to my eyes.

Rasengan.

Gaara twisted around, eye's flying wide open as his ultimate defense broke beneath the might of the Yondaime Hokage's ultimate creation. Naruto hurtled through the gap, rasengan drawn back like a javelin in his hand. The tomoe in my eyes spun frenziedly, searching his face, his bearing, his everything for a sign to suggest that he was the twelve year old he appeared to be, searching for an explanation as to how he knew a jutsu that he couldn't possibly know-

"Be my friend, motherfucker!" Naruto howled, slamming the rasengan into Gaara's face. My heart skipped a beat.

That was my Naruto.

The littlest jinchuriki screamed in sudden, bloodcurdling agony as the rasengan tore through his final layer of armor and into the side of his head. He clenched his fist desperately, his sand belatedly surging up to meet the first shinobi to ever hurt him- twice, now- and crush him. But before it could, the rasengan detonated with a thunderclap of sound and light.

"Gaara!" Temari cried out from somewhere behind me, having apparently made it out of her brother's sand unscathed. She tried to run past me, towards her brother, but faltered and fell to her knees. Perhaps not entirely unscathed.

Said brother, the cause of her distress, was thrown into and through his absolute defense by the rasengan's final discharge. He tumbled bonelessly across the grassy plain, his face a bloody mess, and my eyes widened as I realized exactly where Naruto had sent him sprawling- towards the edge of the cliff.

Gaara's sand surged across the field in pursuit of him, and when it became clear that wouldn't be enough his armor detached itself from his body and dug into the ground. The speed of his tumble slowed, but not enough to save him. The littlest jinchuriki went over the edge with momentum to spare. The last thing I saw of him was a single murderous jade eye, the other obscured by a bloody hand, and then he was gone.

Naruto straightened up from the crouch he'd fallen into, and my heart skipped another beat. This was- This couldn't be what I thought it was. The Sage never said he'd come back with me. He couldn't have come back with me. He died. I saw it.

Naruto ran a hand through his hair, turning to meet my eyes with a wry little smile. I shivered, my chokuto falling from suddenly numb fingers.

"So," he said, his voice clear and steady in the following silence, and why couldn't I remember him talking like that the first time around? "How was th-"

He grunted, legs suddenly flying out from underneath him, lashed together by a single cord of sand. I sprinted forward, my heart flying into my throat.

The lone, near invisible strand whipped him across the ground, pulling him unerringly to the same edge its master had just gone over. Naruto flipped onto his stomach, digging his hands into the dirt and kicking frantically at the sand around his legs. It only looped tighter around him in response, and why was he so far away?

I blurred forward in a body flicker, but he was already over the edge, out of my sight. I blinked and the world shifted around me, sharpening into a clarity beyond what it had been a moment ago. Everything moved a fraction slower than it had before, giving me an excruciatingly detailed view of everything except Naruto.

I skidded to a stop at the edge of the cliff, my blood roaring in my ears, and cried out desperately to the love of my life.

"ASURA!"

Somewhere behind me the decoy clone burst into chakra smoke, and Naruto twisted around in mid air as he fell, disbelief and jubilation in his wonderful, beautiful blue eyes as my voice and his clone's memories hit him. Then his lips parted in a fierce smile, and the world blurred as tears sprang to my eyes.

"Indra!" He shouted, whipping his middle and index fingers up to his headband in a salute. "I'll meet you there!"

And then from down below came a monstrous hand as tall and wide around as the Hokage Tower, made entirely of sand, reaching up to him. Naruto shot me a wink, his eyes alive in a way they hadn't been for years. That same breathless sound came rushing up my throat, but different, stronger. I laughed for the first time in I don't know how long, falling to my knees as the relief shook the world out from under me.

Then the titanic hand closed around him, swallowing him up and dragging him down to the caverns with the Ichibi.