"It's you, isn't it?"
Naruto looked hazily up at Madara. Her legendary eyes, products of decades of systematic Uzumaki genocide, were locked on his own with unnerving intensity. Straddling him as she was, her unreasonably long hair pooled around his head and cut off everything but her own shadowed features and vibrant purple eyes. It was an eerie effect.
"Who's me?" he asked. He pursed his lips. That hadn't made much sense. Why did everything feel so fuzzy?
"Don't play dumb," she hissed, leaning in closer. Naruto idly considered leaning up and bumping their noses. She had a cute nose, he thought, especially when it wasn't all crinkled up by a sneer.
"I can see it," she said, flickering from his eyes to his lips to the curve of his jaw, drinking it all in ravenously. "With these eyes, I can finally see. That chakra, the way it clings to you. I see."
"Chakra," Naruto whispered. That was right. He needed chakra. Kurama?
"We're out," Kurama rumbled, the words reverberating in his head and clearing up a bit of the fog. "You blew it all protecting the weaklings. It'll take me a minute to gather more. Stall." The words came out short, clipped. Kurama was nervous. Naruto bit his lip sharply, focusing on the pain and gathering his wits about it.
"Whose chakra?" he asked.
"His chakra." Madara quivered, and Naruto let loose a strangled gasp at the sudden agony the motion elicited. He looked down, away from her eyes, and found her war fan sticking out of his chest.
Ah, right. That's why he was on his back.
"That will also take time." Thank you, Kurama.
"I should have realized it sooner," She said, reaching out and brushing a few locks of hair from his forehead, revealing the symbol beneath. "It was right in front of me for years, but I never realized. I didn't want to realize." She laughed, and its bitterness made it no less pleasant a sound. She was a lot like Sasuke in that way.
"To think you'd be an Uzumaki..." She shook her head, hair brushing lightly against his cheeks. "It's just too cruel."
"I don't understand," Naruto admitted. Madara blinked, looking back at him as if registering his presence for the first time. The concentric circles surrounding her pupils spun hypnotically, luring him back into the fog.
"It's you, isn't it?" She whispered again, tracing a finger against the scars on his cheek. He shivered. "Hashirama..."
"What?" Naruto asked, wide eyed. "No. That's not-"
"Liar. I can see it. The same chakra that connected me to him, now it connects you to her." The last word was spit like a foul curse, and Naruto grunted as the Uchiha matriarch leaned further into him, forcing her fan an inch deeper in his chest.
"My descendant, Uchiha Sasuke," Madara said, her full red lips twisting in a scowl. "The most infamous nukenin Konoha has ever seen since myself. And you, Uzumaki Naruto, the most celebrated hero of Konoha since Hashirama. Her eyes have the same power mine did, and you know just how similar you are to him. We were almost the same, the four of us.
"But he chose Konoha, and you chose her." She blinked once, twice, and Naruto forgot how to breathe. She was holding back tears. She was about to cry. "Why did you choose her, when he didn't choose me?"
"Madara..." The woman shivered at his voice, sending another lance of pain through his chest, but he pushed it aside. "I didn't- you're wrong. I didn't choose her over Konoha," he said, softly. "I chose both."
"Why!?" she demanded, her low, smoky voice cracking around the word. "Why her, and not me? What does she have that I don't? I'm stronger, faster, better in every way. I'm-" Her voice broke, and Naruto inhaled sharply as a tear hit his cheek. "I'm more of a woman, aren't I?"
"Madara," he said again, struggling for words. He hadn't expected this. He hadn't expected these kinds of fears, these insecurities.
She saved him the effort by leaning down and mashing her lips against his.
Naruto jerked, flinching away from the pain of the movement and the lips of the woman who was doing her level best to end the world. She forced her tongue past his lips, warm and eager, but he avoided its touch. He pulled away as far as he could, which wasn't very far, making protesting noises all the while. She finally relented, her crimson breast plate heaving as she leaned back.
"You kiss like him, too." She whispered. God, why did she look so much like Sasuke?
"I'm not Hashirama, and Sasuke isn't you," he said. "We made different choices, led different lives. It's in the past now. This whole thing, this plan, isn't going to change that." Naruto forced his body to move, to reach up and cup a porcelain white cheek in his hand. She leaned into his palm, gripping it tightly in her own.
"Move on, Madara," he implored.
Her hand tightened around his, breaking it with a sharp crack. He winced.
"Never," Madara hissed, the ground trembling beneath them with the force of her rage. "First I lost him to that woman, and now I've lost you to myself? I won't allow it. I'll never allow it!"
Someone screamed in fury, far away, and Madara leapt off of him just in time to avoid a bolt of ravenous black flames. The arrow speared a hole in the earth over a foot around in diameter, and was followed a moment later by another.
"Get away from him!" Sasuke shrieked, hurtling from the sky on susanoo's flaming wings.
Madara snarled, swiping the tears from her cheeks and tearing the fan from his chest with one sharp jerk.
"What!? No! No!" Kurama howled, and Naruto arched up as a sensation he'd only ever felt once before ripped through him in the fan's wake. "Naruto! You have to hang on! DON'T LET-"
Kurama's voice vanished from his mind, and everything became very, very quiet.
Naruto blinked slowly, staring up at the midnight sky. A silhouette came and went above him, a towering figure that he knew was familiar but couldn't quite place. He breathed, chest rising, falling, rising... falling...
A tremor in the earth alerted him to someone else joining him on the ground, followed soon after by a frantic young woman's face appearing above him. She screamed something at him, the stars in her blood red eyes spinning wildly, but all he could hear was the quiet beat of his own heart. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba... dum...
She was beautiful. Even as she screamed and shook him and started to cry, she was nothing short of stunning- and that meant she had to be Sasuke. The name pierced the haze that Kurama had left in his head, and with it came a rush of fierce affection. Naruto smiled, reaching up and covering one of her hands with his own, leaden fingers struggling to intertwine themselves with hers.
"Sa..." he rasped, throat faltering at the first syllable for some incomprehensible reason. Why did he feel so tired? Where was Kurama?
Sasuke threaded her fingers through his- the broken ones, though they didn't hurt all that much anymore- and kept screaming at him, as if his sudden deafness was a wall she could break down with enough effort. Naruto shook his head, hoping she'd stop before she wore her voice out.
"Love... you." She never talked about her feelings, especially regarding "them", and he knew she hated it when he talked about his own, but it felt right to say. He squeezed her hand as best he could with his numb, broken fingers, and closed his eyes.
And so, Uzumaki Naruto quietly died.
"Ah, you're awake."
Naruto blinked, propping himself up on his elbows and looking at his unmarred torso. That was fast. Then he looked up at the old man floating placidly in front of him, the only other presence in the vast expanse of pure white energies he'd been taken to.
"... Kurama?"
He smiled, all three eyes crinkling. "Not as such. I'd be closer to his father."
Naruto's brow furrowed. "Bijuu have parents?" The answer hit him a moment later, information gathered from gloating, meditation, and harried mid-battle briefings coalescing into the form of the man who had split the nine bijuu with the eyes of a god. He jabbed a finger at the three-eyed man floating in mid-air.
"You're the sage!"
The Rikudou Sennin nodded, his silvery white hair swaying above his head, brushing against a short pair of horns. "And you are Uzumaki Naruto."
Naruto pushed himself to his feet, scrubbing his eyes. When he opened them again, the sage was still there. "Aren't you dead?"
"Aren't you?"
"I-" He paused, touching his chest. He'd recovered from worse before, hadn't he? But why couldn't he remember what had brought him here? Everything was so fuzzy... "I don't know."
"Allow me to refresh your memory," the sage said, not unkindly. "Uchiha Madara pinned you to the earth with her war fan while you were distracted by the Gedo Mazo, and when Uchiha Sasuke drove her away she took Kurama with her. The shock of losing his chakra after joining it so completely with your own, coupled with your injury, stopped your heart."
Naruto stared.
"What?"
"Sasuke is engaging her now," the sage informed him. "Without you to assist her, she won't last long. A minute, perhaps two. Then she will join us in death."
No. No. "Help me," Naruto blurted. The sage raised an eyebrow. "She can't die, not now. We have too much to lose if Madara wins, and she- she can't die. Please!"
The sage considered him, six orbs of chakra so dense that they screamed to Naruto's senses rotating slowly behind him. Finally, he asked, "What do you know of my children, Naruto?"
"Your children?" Naruto bit his lip, thinking hard. "There were... two. They were strong. They..." He trailed off, clenching his eyes shut and willing himself to remember. Sasuke was dying, and he couldn't remember-
"Their names were Indra and Asura," the sage said, snapping him from his rising panic. "My daughter and son, respectively, and both very strong, yes." His wrinkled lips quirked wryly.
"Indra was like your Sasuke in many ways. Deeply emotional beneath the surface, and more selfish than she had any right to be. She inherited my spiritual energies, including a variation of my eyes that you're no doubt familiar with."
"Sharingan," Naruto muttered with something like disgust. The sage chuckled.
"Indeed. She was a natural born genius, exceeding even the lofty expectations the world had of her as my eldest child. She outgrew my teachings before she was your age and struck out for greater power, power that I possessed but could not grant her." He sighed, ruefully continuing, "People worshiped her every bit as faithfully as they worshiped myself.
"Asura was... different. A fool, in every sense of the word. He inherited my physical energies, an incredible vitality of chakra, but he had no control over them. He was brash, headstrong, and regularly outperformed by the people I taught. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't match his sister. A dead last."
Naruto frowned, connecting the dots, and the sage inclined his head in confirmation.
"He was much like you, when you were a child. And just like you, he grew in a way nobody expected, least of all his older sister." The sage flicked a hand, and the orbs of chakra surrounding him whirled between the two of them, five orbs dancing around one.
"While Indra wholeheartedly embraced her role as my heir apparent, conducting herself as a clear superior to those who followed her, Asura refused to lord his parentage over even the lowliest man. He befriended men, women, and children through sheer force of personality, working diligently all the while to realize the full potential of the chakra I'd given him."
The sage chuckled softly. "I think even he was surprised when he did."
"Sir," Naruto said, voice strained. "I appreciate you telling me about your kids." And he did. "But is this going to save Sasuke?"
The sage crossed his arms, regarding him thoughtfully. "You know, I would have expected you to ask about saving yourself first."
"I'm already dead," Naruto pointed out. "And even if I had to choose, well." He sighed, rubbing his neck. "I'd rather she make it than me."
The Rikudou Sennin blinked, honestly surprised. "So that's why."
"Huh?"
The sage flicked his hand again, and this time the thin staff that had been floating behind him whirled around into his grasp. "Uzumaki Naruto," he said, gravity weighing the words down. His rinnegan bore into Naruto.
"With my eyes, I can clearly see... Asura's chakra clinging tightly to you."
"His..." Naruto's eyes widened. "How?"
"Exactly how I have come to you hear, now." The sage gestured to the expanse of pure white energies. "A process that sent his chakra, body and soul, journeying through time and space in search of a worthy heir. Transmigration."
The surface Naruto was standing on rippled like water, and in its reflection he found a man staring back up at him.
"Asura," he murmured, and the reflection bowed its head. "But why come back? And why me?"
"As I was saying," The sage said, amused. "Asura came into his own when he was a bit older than you, and when he did he had an even more devoted following than Indra, because every one of his followers had been a friend before he rose to power. He was powerful in his own way, and fiercely devoted to peace. Not because I desired peace, but because he desired it for himself and all of his precious friends.
"So when the time came for me to pass on my waning energies and dreams of peace, I passed them not to Indra, as the world had expected, but to Asura." He sighed. "She did not take it well.
"Indra, who had looked down upon her brother her whole life, could not accept that I had chosen him as my heir instead of her. She challenged his right to be the heir to my peace, discarding my peace in the same motion by waging war against her own brother. She had never felt failure before then, and her pride could not accept the blow. And then... there were her feelings for him."
"Wait, you mean feelings?" Naruto asked, baffled. The Rikudou Sennin nodded gravely.
"Indra had very high standards, in all aspects of her life. Looking back on it now, I believe part of the reason she was so disappointed in Asura's inadequacy was that she wanted him to be her partner." Noticing Naruto's horrified look, he shrugged. "It was difficult for both of them. Aside from each other, there was no one they could truly relate to. It was impossible to escape the awe and care they were handled with as my children, except with each other.
"When Asura finally reached his full potential, Indra realized that he'd been everything she'd wanted all along- she simply hadn't been patient enough to let him show it. Asura had harbored similar feelings for his sister, for similar reasons, but by the time they might have been able to share them I had already passed, and they were forced to choose between their love and my dream."
The sage spun his staff slowly, the wrinkles in his face deepening to match his sorrow. "They chose my dream, and it haunts them to this day."
"Then Asura is doing this because he's..." Naruto trailed off, taking in the sorrowful expression of his reflection as it watched its father. "Guilty?"
"Guilty," the sage acknowledged. "My children's war broke the fragile peace that my own sibling and I built before our deaths, and it hasn't recovered since. That kind of failure burns even the dead. Asura hasn't rested a single day since then, restlessly traversing time and space in search of a better heir to my will than himself.
"Indra is much the same."
Naruto inhaled sharply. "Her too?" His reflection, Asura's reflection, nodded once. "Then where is she?"
"Uchiha Sasuke," the sage said. Naruto jerked back from the words, struggling to fit this new world-shaking bit of information in with the rest. "And before her, Uchiha Madara."
"Great," Naruto said. And then the Uchiha Matriarch's final words to him finally came together. "Oh, great! It was the Shodai before me, wasn't it?"
Father and son nodded in solemn reply.
"Great! Perfect! So not only is it incest, but she's a double nukenin, too! No wonder Sasuke's out of her mind with that kind of legacy!" Naruto threw his hands up to the not-sky, entreating anyone for a bit of sanity in this fever dream he was no doubt having when he should be up and fighting to save the world. Unfortunately, there was only one deific being around, and he didn't seem all that inclined to help.
"So then what's the point of all this?" Naruto continued, pacing back and forth to work off some energy, until he noticed Asura's reflection following him step for step and stopped in his tracks. "The Shodai and Madara didn't do any better than your children, even with their souls along for the ride, whatever that even does-"
"They created your village."
"And then Madara wiped my family out!" Naruto snapped. "Is that really an improvement?"
"Perhaps not," the sage murmured.
"Right! They didn't work, whoever Asura and Indra transmigrated to before that obviously didn't work, and now they've chosen me and Sasuke. But what is the difference? What has Asura given me that I wouldn't have gotten myself?"
"Nothing," the sage said. "Yet."
"Exactly-" The last Uzumaki's teeth snapped together with sharp click. "... Yet?"
"Yes." The sage spun his staff in one hand, skimming the surface that Naruto was standing on and dispersing Asura's reflection. Naruto was a bit relieved to see the man go. "There is incredible power in the souls of my children. Power beyond modern ninjutsu, forged by years of toil and war. True ninshu. Yet they have not once shared their power with another. Not even their chosen hosts. Do you know why?"
Naruto shook his head.
"All this time, through all these centuries, they have been looking for better heirs than themselves." The Rikudou Sennin locked eyes with Naruto, and the full weight of his presence struck Naruto nearly off his feet, a true heavenly subjugation of what could only be an omnipresent god.
"My children could not handle their own power. They did not have the strength, the absolute confidence in themselves necessary to control it. They inherited my body and soul without truly earning them, and so they were overwhelmed. They chose the wrong goals to throw their lives away pursuing, and only in death did they understand this.
"They could not complete their journeys, and so they died fools." He smiled, and the third eye in his forehead glowed with expertly restrained strength. "But you're different. Unlike the previous predecessors, you've got this strange bit of foolishness to you... And that has given birth to this different possibility."
The Rikudou Sennin held a thin, weathered hand out, and above his palm the six spheres of chakra gathered. They whirled and danced around each other, growing closer and closer until they all struck each other at once, shivering and melting into a single mass of hyper dense chakra.
In the shape of a... deck of cards?
"Tell me, Uzumaki Naruto. What do you know of the arcana?"
"Nobody makes me bleed my own blood," Gaara snarled, somewhere deep within the sands. "Nobody!"
"You've got the wrong nobody!" I called back, grinning wildly as I raced through thrashing tendrils and waves of chakra-laden sand. "My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and you're gonna remember it for the rest of your life!"
I broke through the latest rush, appearing squarely in my fellow jinchuriki's blind spot, and slammed a handful of spiral energy into the wall that his automatic defense threw up at the last second. Two clones dove through the gap and tackled Gaara clear off his feet while another two did the same to me, saving me from a vengeful spear of sand that lurched up from the veritable sea of grains beneath me.
I landed within spitting distance of my opponent, turning my assisted dodge into a somersault and hopping up to avoid another flurry of sand-based projectiles.
"Nice!" Clone on the left whooped, smacking clone on the right's raised hand. I ducked a stray whip and continued forward, but Naruto left and right were caught mid high five and neatly decapitated. I rolled my eyes and created another four.
"Stay focused, guys," I ordered, but it was difficult to get too mad at them for the goofy little grins on their faces as they rushed off to hassle Gaara. I was sure I looked giddier than all of them put together.
She was alive! My Sasuke was alive, and she was here! With me!
Another pair of clones rushed past me to join the brawl, giving me friendly punches on each shoulder as they passed, and I laughed. This was a serious mission, and my team was going to be in serious danger in very short order, but I couldn't help it. Taking the Rikudou Sennin's offer to come back had lifted the burden of countless deaths and hardships from my shoulders and immediately replaced them with the loss of my relationships as I knew them.
But now, now I had one of them back. I had her back. I felt like singing, dancing, and hugging the nearest living thing half to death.
"Get off me!" Gaara wheezed, thrashing against the clone currently bear-hugging the life out of him. Huh.
The Kazekage's youngest son jerked forward, a layer of his body tearing itself grotesquely from his frame to pry the clone from him. It died a second later, dragged into the seas of sand by a hand that was only about the size of a fully grown man rather than the Hokage Tower. The rest of the clones dancing around him died in short order, plainly overwhelmed.
Gaara sucked in a trembling breath, clutching the bloodied side of his face with white-knuckled fingers. "How do you keep touching me?" he asked. "How can you get past mother? How!?"
I smiled wickedly, crouching and shooting up into the air to avoid a crowd of murderous sand clones. I reached up and just barely managed to touch the tips of my fingers to a low-hanging stalactite, latching onto it with chakra and swinging up into a vertical crouch.
"It's real simple, Gaara!" I shouted, voice echoing over the constant scrape of sand against stone. "I've got people to protect, and a plan that everything is going according to!"
I wasn't just talking tough, either. Save for one small snafu in the form of Gaara dragging me off the cliff before I could deliver my cool one-liner, and Sasuke shouting the name of my spiritual predecessor at the top of her lungs, my plan was going swimmingly. I had Gaara right where I wanted him, and since this was my Sasuke- I stamped down another silly laugh- I wouldn't have to worry about my team not showing up in the right place for the last phase of this disastrous mission.
She'd steer Kakashi and Sakura exactly where they needed to go, which meant all I had to do was get there. Simple. Easy. Cake.
"People to protect?" Gaara bit out, looking up at me with more offense than when I had almost blown a hole in his head. "Liar! What could other people give you that you haven't already given yourself?"
Here came the tricky part. I took a deep breath.
"Friendship, Gaara." The bloodied jinchuriki scoffed. "It's true! Every fight I've won has been for someone else. Every step I've taken past my limits, every drop of blood, sweat, and tears, it's all been for my friends! By myself I was nothing but a waste."
"You're a fool," Gaara growled, pointing at me and sending a torrent of sand rushing up to the ceiling.
Well. He wasn't wrong.
The caverns were even larger on the inside than they seemed from the cliffside, which was saying something considering how stupidly huge they looked. The air tasted salty and damp, a product of the rivers still coursing ceaselessly in from the sea. The walls were made up of slick, dark stone that resisted all but the surest of grips, rising in smooth waves that tapered off into jagged teeth at the roof of the cavern's mouth.
I could fit the Hokage Mountain between the highest and lowest points of the cavern with a few inches to spare. Maybe even a bijuu. And Gaara was flooding the place with sand.
All part of my master plan.
"You could be better than this!" I insisted, launching myself across the cavern's ceiling and bouncing between the stalactites, never giving the sands more than a second to track me. "You will be better than this! But not on your own, not without people. All the blood in the world isn't enough for the life you're living, and it never will be!"
"What do you know!?" Gaara shouted, removing his left hand from his wound long enough to drop another wave of sand onto the ceiling, surrounding me on all sides. "Nothing! I'll take all the world's blood if that's what it takes to validate my existence, starting with you. Sabaku Sousou!"
The sand converged on me in the blink of an eye, imploding with a noise like thunder.
Gaara's lips twitched in the beginnings of a maniacal smile as he watched the sand pour down from the ceiling. Then he realized there wasn't any blood mingling with the sand, and spun around just in time to catch two of my clones. His automatic defense crushed them without a second's mercy, and then exploded as the two clones following behind hit it with their joint rasengan, leaving him wide open for another sucker punch.
"Killing isn't the answer!" I smashed another rasengan in his face.
The shriek that tore through my fellow jinchuriki's throat made my stomach turn and my heart clench, but I forced myself to turn away from his pain and accept the rising tackle another clone hit me with, sending me back into the air. It hurt, but he'd be better off for it in the long run.
It was either now, in these caverns, or later, in the middle of Konoha. My home. And when I thought about it that way, it really wasn't a hard choice.
My clone's tackle didn't throw me nearly high enough to reach another stalactite, but it did save me from the titanic clawed hand that erupted from beneath Gaara and clenched around him. The hybrid appendage shook agitatedly, ebony claws of hyper-condensed sand grinding against one another until the whole thing collapsed in on itself.
I hit the ground in a hopping, skidding crouch, and tilted my head back to watch the writhing fountain of half formed hands, eyes, and clones that hoisted Gaara up into the air. It rose ten feet, twenty, and higher still, reverberating in time with the steady, agonized groan drifting past his lips. His face was covered up entirely by his trembling hands, the bloody grains of his second skin leaking between his fingers. Over a dozen eyes of various sizes bobbed above him, each and every one fixated on me.
I stomped down on another spike of sympathetic pain, turning and running for the nearest vertical surface. Couldn't back down now.
"Listen to me, Gaara!" I hollered. He didn't respond at all, just kept on groaning. I called up a crowd of clones to take the edge off the sand still pursuing me, leaping up onto the ceiling and sprinting across its jagged surface.
"This isn't what you want, not really. You know it's not! You want people who will accept you for who you are, not the weapon you were made to be. You want your brother and sister to treat you like their little brother. You want love. It's written all over your face!"
"You don't know me," Gaara rasped behind his fingers, sinking to his knees in the pillar of still rising sand. "You don't know anything."
I flipped over a stray lash of sand, the world spinning around me before I managed to halt my fall with a stalactite. I grit my teeth and drove every last drop of my emotion up to my throat, willing him to understand, willing him to see.
"I know you, Gaara. I know you need someone to pull you from the darkness your village left you to rot in. You need a friend. You need me." I slapped a hand to my chest, blanketing the ceiling of the cavern with my chakra and covering it with clones.
"Well, I'm here now," I continued, holding my hand out towards him, reaching desperately. "And I'm ready to pull you out of this life. Believe it."
"I don't know you," Gaara said, his voice growing stronger with each word, and the sands more agitated. "I don't need your friendship. I don't need love! I'm strong on my own! I don't need anyone!" He tore his hands from his face and jabbed them up at me, palms flat, revealing the hateful, bloody snarl on his face.
I sighed.
"Taijuu: Rasengan." Every single clone pushed off from the ceiling at once, spheres of spiraling chakra screaming in their hands, and fell upon my first best friend.
I closed my eyes and waited for the technique to run its course.
Almost a full minute later I felt a new presence slam into my senses, similar to Gaara in many ways, but more vile and hateful than my fellow jinchuriki could ever have managed. Which I guessed made sense. After all, Shukaku had had centuries to hate humanity.
"FREE AT LAST!" the weakest of the nine bijuu bellowed, and when I opened my eyes I found that the pillar of sand had doubled, tripled in size to accommodate Gaara's demonic ward. Shukaku was nearly at eye level with me, though I might as well have already been dead for all the attention he paid me. Head thrown back, arms spread wide, Shukaku was the picture of ecstasy.
I dropped down from the ceiling, landing silently some hundreds of feet below, my fall cushioned by the sand literally rolling off Shukaku in waves. He didn't even notice the impact, so wrapped up in his abrupt freedom.
"TWELVE YEARS. TWELVE LONG, TORTUROUS YEARS, AND YOUR FOOL SON DIDN'T EVEN GET THE CHANCE TO USE ME IN YOUR PETTY WAR." He roared with laughter, the sheer volume shattering a few stalactites that happened to be hanging too close.
Surprisingly enough, this was also part of the plan. Just not the part that I had wanted to resort to. Ever.
As much as I wanted to beat the sense back into Gaara as soon as physically possible, there was only so much I could do now. I didn't have the tools that I had grown so used to, that I had taken for granted as a sage. I had nothing that could stop Shukaku, let alone suppress him, except for Gaara himself. And he clearly wasn't up to the task as he was.
As much as I hated to admit it, even to myself, this mission was about more than Gaara. This was about saving an innocent civilian's life, regardless of how completely fucking stupid he was. It was about protecting Sakura from the horrors that had nearly broken her after Kakashi's death. It was about getting to know Kakashi this time around.
And now, god help me, it was about getting back to my Sasuke and hugging the everloving hn out of her.
I couldn't die here. Not yet. But I couldn't beat Gaara either, not without the toads, not without Kurama. Not without nature. That left me with nothing left to do but rile jinchuriki and bijuu both up and leave them to rage themselves dry as far from civilization as physically possible.
Finally, after a good long laugh, Shukaku deigned to look down his snout at the Konoha nin responsible for freeing him.
"YOU, BRAT," he rumbled. "YOU'RE THE ONE WHO HURT MY PITIFUL HOST?"
"That's me," I said, gathering chakra in preparation for the largest batch of shadow clones I've made since my transmigration. Every one will count if I want the slightest chance of making it out of here in one piece.
The caverns had been the ideal venue for this fight. They had taken the rest of Gaara's team out of the picture, they were large enough to accommodate anything up to and including his full transformation, and they provided me an alternative path to the last stage of my mission. They were the best choice all around.
But even so, I was still trapped in a cave with the Ichibi.
If only there was something I could do to it. If only I wasn't a scrawny little genin. If only, if only, if only. Shukaku was just too much, too soon, and I'd known that going into this. I don't know why I'd expected Gaara to be as reasonable as I was used to him being, but I had. Now, all I could do was leave him to his grief and Shukaku's wrath and hope he made it back to Suna after he finally burned out.
"Some friend I am," I muttered, good mood well and truly drained.
"INDEED," Shukaku said, amusement making his poisonous yellow eyes shine in the darkness. "I APPRECIATE THE GESTURE. YOUR DEATH WILL BE THE FIRST, AND THE MOST PAINLESS."
The caverns shuddered ominously as the vast tanuki shifted its weight, a single tail rising from the pool of sand gathered beneath it. It jerked from side to side, stretching out after years trapped behind bars. It brushed the roof of the cavern and snapped the stalactites off one by one, some of them wider around than the trunk of a tree, like they were nothing more than slivers of ice.
"ONE SWIFT SMACK, LIKE SWATTING AN INSECT," Shukaku explained. I closed my eyes, chakra rippling beneath the surface of my skin in preparation for my mad dash, and simply felt the bijuu for a moment.
In terms of raw destructive power, the Ichibi was the weakest of the nine bijuu by far. The Kyuubi could crush him with minimal effort, if confronted one on one, bijuu against bijuu. Or two on one. Three on one, as well. Point being, the Ichibi couldn't hold a candle to the Kyuubi, which I'd grown up with, fought with, and melded my chakra with.
He was the weakest of the nine without a doubt, and he still burned like the sun to my senses. So much natural energy gathered in one place, trapped in this one cavern, and tainted by so much negativity. Such hatred and rage, and beneath that, hurt, that it turned what should have been one of the world's most beautiful tenketsu into a throbbing sore that hurt just to look at.
This was wrong. I had seen it before, I could feel it in my bones. Such a negative existence could only wreak destruction with its natural energies. If I left now, countless living things would die. Animals, trees, and plants of all kinds. Organisms that trusted nothing more than Mother Nature's soothing energies would be wiped out by those same tender hands, warped and perverted by the negative emotions of a bitter bijuu.
Shukaku couldn't leave this cavern, I realized. He was too great a threat. Too great an imbalance. Something needed to balance his natural energies out.
Or someone.
"Oh, I'm an idiot-"
I felt her touch upon my brow a split second before it hit me, a teasing poke to the middle of my forehead. Wake up, Mother Nature whispered in my ear, and after three agonizing weeks of blindness, I finally opened my eyes.
"WHAT THE-" Shukaku grunted, shifting back in surprise as natural energy came pouring into the cavern, lapping against the walls and washing past sand as it came careening towards me.
I threw my head back and laughed. All this time, all these weeks spent bitching and moaning about the state of my body, and it had been my mind holding me back all along. I had grown so confident in my grasp of the world's chakra that I had completely forgotten why I was a sage. I had forgotten what a sage was, how they were made, why they existed.
Balance.
I felt Shukaku swing his tail around to crush me, and in the same moment, the same way, I felt a bird tending to its chicks in a nest hundreds of feet above me, felt Gaara's siblings and their sensei cowering at the mouth of the cavern, felt a colony of insects flee deeper into the caves, felt my team racing through the forests above towards an ambush.
Most importantly, though, I felt the trees. Above me, below me, all around me, I sensed bark and roots and countless leaves. Shukaku's tail crossed the full length of the cavern in the blink of an eye, and in the same moment I called upon all of the trees Mother Nature could give me.
"DIE!"
I clenched my fist, and a titanic hand made of dozens upon dozens of interwoven branches tore itself free of the earth and caught the Ichibi's tail at its widest point, stopping it in its tracks. Shukaku's eyes went wide, and then he howled in pain as the hand crushed his tail to sandy pulp.
"Saaa," I breathed, planting my feet and calling upon the rest.
The hand slammed itself flat against the earth, the groan of shifting wood mingling with Shukaku's pained wails as the massive construct strained to leverage the rest of itself from the earth. A moment later another hand burst up into open air on the other side of me, long, spindly fingers spreading themselves open wide. Roots and thicker branches soon followed, winding up its wrist and enveloping its fingers, making them thicker, firmer.
Then the second hand pressed itself to the ground alongside the first, and the cavern rocked as my creation dragged itself into the light.
The Fool broke through the earth beneath me, and I fell back into the bed of frenzied leaves and branches that made up its hair as it rose. I crossed my legs, slipping into slow, steady breaths, and focused on the Ichibi as my awareness and Mother Nature's ink continued to expand from that same, singular point on my brow where Konoha's symbol sat.
After the head and torso came the arms, rippling with muscles born of tree trunks and thick roots taken from the forests above. Then the legs, each even more thickly layered with wooden bulk than the arms. Finally, The Fool tore its feet from the earth, left, then right, and stood for the first time, once again.
Shukaku shrunk back another step, hiding his rapidly reforming tail behind him as he stared at my wooden colossus. "WHAT IS THIS? WHO ARE YOU!?"
I held out my hands and asked, "Could I get a hand?"
Being the generous lady she was, Mother Nature gave me two.
The thick branches of The Fool's hair closest to me twisted and bent, latching onto my wrists and winding up my hands. The gauntlets that Sasuke had given me were pried from my hands in short order, tumbling over the edge of The Fool's head and into the streams below. I made a quick note to apologize for that the next time I saw her.
It had been incredibly thoughtful of her to give me those gauntlets, especially now that I knew she knew the significance of them, and I appreciated it more than I could put into words. They were nice gauntlets, too, not too thin, not too thick. They were just how I liked them. Expertly crafted with the finest materials the Uchiha clan could buy, any shinobi would have been happy to have them.
But at the end of the day, they just couldn't match up to my wood.
Heh.
The ends of my new - old - gauntlets snapped off halfway down my forearms, leaving my hands covered fingertip to fingertip by the best chakra conductor known to man. I clenched and unclenched them, teeth flashing in a smile.
"Ahh. That's much better."
Um.
"You're not Kurama," I told the voice in my head.
"Not as such," they replied, the words deep, smooth, and tinged with unmistakable amusement. "I'd be closer to his brother."
"... Asura?" I asked. He hummed in confirmation, and I leaned back into The Fool, crossing my arms. "You took your sweet time."
"Just as my father could speak to you only after your death, so too was I restricted by my transmigration."
"I'm more alive than dead," I pointed out, noting that the Shukaku's tail had finished reforming, and his temper along with it.
"And I am more dead than alive. Time and space don't seem to mind," Asura said, followed by what might have been the strangest sensation I've ever felt. My ancestor's soul leaned over my shoulder, though I wasn't sure how I knew he was standing behind me, and placed his hands on my shoulders. "Now, don't mind me. We have work to do."
I considered disagreeing for a moment.
Only a moment.
The Fool slammed its clenched fists together, mouth yawning open to reveal countless jagged lengths of sharpened bark as it looked up at the Ichibi. It roared, knocking Gaara's siblings off their feet with the force of it, and the tangle of branches and bark and leaves that composed its chest lit up with a vibrant green light.
The Fool's heart beat in time with mine, and in turn, mine beat in time with the world's.
"Who am I? Who am I!?" I shouted, leaping to my feet and brandishing my own fists. "I'm the last man standing. I'm the one who's going to end the chain of hatred, unite the world, and bring back old man Rikudou's peace. I'm the heir to everyone that matters, Mother Nature's favorite tenketsu, and the ninth wonder of the world-"
I pumped my fists, and The Fool mirrored the gesture. I grinned wide and howled at the top of my lungs.
"Motherfucker, I'm Uzumaki Naruto!"
It happened without any warning. One moment I was running through the forest like a woman possessed, Hatake and Sakura hot on my heels with the client slung over Hatake's back, making a beeline for the fight that had taken the jonin's life once before. Running, and very pointedly not thinking about my Naruto, my Naruto, and the danger he was in, and the worry that he might have lost too much of his strength to finish what he'd started.
Then, in the next moment, the world changed.
I blinked, immediately calling upon my sharingan to confirm my frenzied hopes, and was just in time to see the change.
Chakra surged past us, a dizzying cacophony of every color under Amaterasu's sun, every bit of it rushing back to the caverns that he'd been dragged down to. And then, then, chakra came rushing back.
His chakra. Just like before, just like the first time, nature gave its chakra to Naruto, and in return Naruto gave his chakra to nature.
"Oh my," Hatake murmured, moving up beside me and glancing around with his uncovered sharingan.
The world's chakra was changing. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, but changing all the same. Yet another weight fell from my shoulders as I realized that it was beginning to look how I remembered it. Faintly orange. Faintly Naruto.
"I suppose you have an explanation for this as well?" Hatake asked, every bit as enraptured I was.
I smiled. "He's back."