Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or Highschool DxD, and I make no profit writing fanfics about them.

(AN): Oh Nardo.


In the end, it was all very anti-climactic.

Naruto held the Kage down, brushing off the poisonous glares they gave him while Sasuke took their mingled blood and used it as ink to sear curse seals into the backs of their necks.

Queerly, Sakura kept giving Sasuke outraged looks the entire time. Like she thought that he would be the one to step up and complain about people being made to stop killing each other. But Sasuke had never been in love with the Will of Fire in the first place, and once Naruto stopped defending it the only option left to her was to put up and shut up.

Part of Naruto was relieved, because while submission was a rational act considering he could destroy them all and just make the same offer to their successors, he'd been worried they'd fight anyway.

Naruto didn't want to actually kill them. Smack them around a bit for their stubborn blindness maybe, but not murder them. Since his rebirth he'd gotten more than enough blood on his hands.

The other part of him, the deeper and darker part; was disappointed. Naruto wanted to unleash the beast in his chest that was rattling in its cage. He wanted to break, he wanted to burn…

Inhaling the acrid scent of cooked meat and blood, Naruto jerked his chin towards the door in a silent command. It only took a moment for the bruised and aching Kage to file out of the room, their faces twisted into expressions of shared misery. None of them spared a word for him, which was probably for the best.

If one of them started complaining again Naruto was going to start breaking things.

"Well that went well."

"Oh fuck off." Naruto sighed, pressing his hand to his forehead before turning to face Sasuke. Without having to actually look at Sakura and Gaara he found his anger slowly draining away and a spring of regret bubbling up inside. "Do you think I went too far?"

Maybe it was a bit childish to want some kind of reassurance, but Naruto knew that Jiraiya would have been disappointed in him. It's wasn't that Jiraiya wasn't able to be pragmatic on the battlefield and understand that sometimes fighting was necessary, but proposing a bona-fide dictatorship stood against everything his mentor had believed in.

Then again, maybe it was time for Naruto to lay that ghost to rest. He'd loved Jiraiya and fought for his godfather's ideals, but that didn't mean that Jiraiya spoke some absolute truth. It didn't mean that Jiraiya couldn't have been wrong.

Sasuke was silent for a moment before shrugging one shoulder and clapping a hand to Naruto's back to push the blond from the meeting room. "No. And you do remember that I was the one advocating peace through force in the first place? We gave your method a chance. It's only fair that we try it my way now."

A bitter laugh escaped Naruto's throat as the pair of resurrected shinobi moved back through the halls. "Well, it looks like you won in the end then." That wry concession made Naruto feel oddly light and unburdened for the first time in weeks. "Fucking bastard."

It also made Naruto feel unaccountably lost.

If hot tears trailed down Naruto's cheeks, Sasuke didn't mention them.


The Naruto that came back looked even more brittle than the one who left, and Valerie almost expected his next step to shatter him into a hundred shaking shards. It was disconcerting, because even after waking in the ruins of Konoha he'd still managed to hold himself together with sheer willpower.

"Welcome back." The dhampir greeted, wincing at the low wounded growl Naruto gave in reply.

Sasuke only stayed long enough to give Valerie a considering look, nodding once sharply before ushering Koneko out of the lounge. The quiet click of the door shutting behind him seemed to echo in the stillness, punctuated by the rattle of Naruto throwing himself into the nearest armchair.

Naruto cursed sharply, clenching his fist in red-faced frustration before going limp with a sigh. He didn't make any move to break the silence after that, seemingly content to muse over his rage and despair.

The sight tugged at Valerie's heartstrings, and before she could even properly think about it she'd already abandoned her knitting and curled up in the seat nearest to her King. "Are you okay?"

Obviously he wasn't, but Valerie didn't want to make him feel backed into a corner.

Naruto's fist clenched so tightly that tiny rivulets of blood began to seep up through the cracks between his fingers. But he didn't speak, instead just choosing to loosen his hand and watch with hazy eyes as the torn open flesh of his palm hissed and steamed with regeneration.

It was only when the last of the smoke curled away that he murmured, low and broken. "No."

Valerie's King sounded so bewildered and lost that her heart broke all over again for him, and she took his hand between hers without any squeamishness despite the sticky blood slicked between their palms. "Will you tell me about it?"

In the end Naruto's sorrow couldn't be contained, and words spilled from his lips, sharp-edged and coated with pain. "Everything is just twisted and wrong here. It's all fucked up and I don't even know how to begin fixing it. It's like a puzzle with half the pieces missing, except it wasn't me that lost them – just some asshole came in one day and stole them when I wasn't looking."

Smiling faintly at the rough metaphor, Valerie ran a soothing thumb across the scarred back of Naruto's hand but stayed silent. Naruto didn't need someone to speak to him, he needed someone to listen to him, and she wondered if he'd ever really had that. She wondered if he'd ever been allowed to ramble his heart out without challenges and interruptions. The mutual silence Naruto and Sasuke had helped, but Valerie knew it wasn't the same as a captive audience.

"It's like, fuck, everything used to be so bright and so clear and now it's just a complete shit-show. Sure it wasn't perfect and sometimes it hurt but we'd all decided to bury the hatchet and move forward. My friends believed in me, and I believed in them, and we believed in what we were doing. We believed in the future and in people's hearts and that we weren't trapped by the shadows of the past. But then I died and it apparently went to fucking shit without me."

The bags under Naruto's eyes seemed to hang heavier as he stared into the distance, thinning his lips until they turned pale and bloodless. "We wanted a world without violence, you know? It's like, we thought that if people just understood each other we could come to love each other, and that way we could have peace. Real peace, not just everyone being too afraid to fight. I knew that Sakura and Gaara were bitter, but I didn't know they'd given up on everything they believed in. I didn't know I'd given up on everything I believed in."

Naruto huffed a vicious chuckle. "You see, it's kind of a fucking joke. There I was, roaming about and telling people that nothing is unforgiveable. That everything could be solved with words if you just were willing to try hard enough. But then I got in that room and I told them that they could either put down their swords or I'd kill them all. I'm such a goddamn hypocrite. Jiraiya-sensei would be ashamed of me."

Valerie never felt the distance between them as keenly as she did now. Naruto was a man whose hands built and toppled kingdoms while she was just a girl that grew up in a cage. But maybe that gulf didn't have to define them. "I don't know much about him, but I can say this. Blind idealism is not a victory march."

Bleary blue eyes snapped to stare at her face, bloodshot and almost desperately focused, and it gave Valerie the strength to go on. "I don't know what your godfather would have thought, but there's a difference between a theory and the real world. The real world is messy, it demands compromises and sometimes a realization that the ends can justify the means."

Pausing to take a breath, Valerie faintly flushed when she realized that Naruto was staring at her with an utterly enthralled face. He watched her like she was in the process of hanging the moon, and it made the blonde realize this was a make or break moment for her King. "So yes, your godfather taught you that love is the key to real peace – but love can only be born with understanding and without conflict. Maybe that kind of peace can only grow under the peace of the sword, because people need to stop fighting long enough to let that love grow."

Blood and ashes, she was embarrassed and rambling, but even spouting half-baked philosophy seemed better than letting the queer charge in the air hang around unchallenged. "And even if your godfather disagreed with you, that doesn't mean he was ashamed of you. He loved you. And we'd forgive the people we love pretty much anything."

Naruto quirked up the corner of his mouth, and then threw back his head and laughed. He laughed long and hard until his voice went hoarse and gleaming tears crowned his eyelashes. He laughed until Valerie flushed with shame. He laughed until his Bishop tried to pull her hands away.

Cutting off mid-chortle, Naruto let the hysteria slip away like early morning dew under the sun, leaving only his unsettling focus on the dhampir.

A pair of azure eyes burned like the hottest part of a flame, pale and bright and imbued with some kind of fey glitter. It consumed her to the point Valerie barely noticed when her King gently took her by the chin, prodding at her bottom lip with a calloused thumb.

"The sun rises in your eyes." Naruto whispered, the words falling like a last judgement from his mouth.

Then he kissed her.


"Are we going anywhere in particular or are you just wandering aimlessly?"

Sasuke snorted at the sarcastic barb, throwing a vile glare over his shoulder at Koneko. "I had the thought that maybe we could get some milk and tuna for you."

The cool expression on Koneko's face didn't waver a hair. Instead she just very deliberately shifted her gimlet gaze towards the tapestries that lined the corridor. The silent insult would have infuriated someone else, but it just made Sasuke smirk with amusement.

Cheeky brat.

A quiet minute passed as Sasuke waited for the nekomata to try and dig more information out of him, but eventually he caved with a shrug. "I just need to speak to Sakura for a couple of minutes."

Koneko's mouth pursed at that, but she didn't vocalize any disagreement. Which was ideal because even if Sasuke himself didn't particularly want to speak to his former teammate, he had to. Naruto might forget about the minutiae because at heart Naruto was a dreamer. He was a visionary that dealt almost solely with larger concepts.

Sasuke was the one that had to handle the nitty gritty details. Sasuke was the one that had to take Naruto's off the cuff expectations and refine them into an actual workable system before the Kages decided to try and pull a fast one on them.

Turning the corner, Sasuke settled his Sharingan stare on the pair of jounin guarding Sakura's room. The malice in his crimson eyes was so potent that both men went pale and stepped out of his way with a stammer.

For a moment Sasuke considered warning Koneko to stay quiet and let him deal with his former comrades, but then thought better of it. She was a clever enough woman to not need that kind of direction. So instead he just squared his shoulders and slammed open the doors with an echoing bang. "Evening Sakura."

Dark shadows circled under her venomous verdant gaze, and the pale pallor of the Hokage's skin only made the color even bolder. "Sasuke." She allowed, her voice quiet and stately despite the her ill appearance. "Is there some kind of emergency? Or is it just that you couldn't contain yourself until my husband got back?"

The perverse implication could have started a scandal if they were anyone else. But no one would believe that a dead man could be controlled by such bizarre lust, and as a leader Sakura's reputation was spotless. So Sasuke just brushed it off with nary a blink before stepping fully into the room and standing with tireless stiffness. "I think we should clarify a few things about Naruto's… treaty."

Sakura's lip curled with disgust that bordered on hatred, but she didn't look surprised. "Well go on then." She prodded, voice thick with rage and a touch of desolated betrayal. "Wow me with the mastery of statescraft you attained during those years of being an insane traitor and dead. I'm just on the edge of my seat here."

Then, despite the still aching branded seal on her back, the Hokage lounged indolently in her armchair.

If Sasuke was still alive he imagined that his heart would have lurched at that insult. After decades apart and new bonds in an entirely different world, he hadn't thought that Sakura would have had the capacity to hurt him. But having such a blatant reminder of the failure and ruin that was his first life thrown in his face so suddenly made him rock back on his heels.

"You shut your fucking mouth." Koneko shot back, her tone level and chilled with the fury of an arctic thunderstorm. It wasn't a loud declaration by any means, but it was sharp and biting enough to make Sasuke's eyebrows twitch.

"Koneko." He warned softly, surprised but warmed by her sudden move to profane poison on his behalf.

Even if Sasuke didn't enjoy it, Sakura had a right to her anger, and Koneko was a stranger in this world. She wasn't aware of the exact circumstance that led them to such a contentious conversation in the first place. Her cursing out Sakura wasn't strictly fair.

With a small grumble of protest Koneko subsided, Sakura watching the short exchange with hawk-like focus. "I didn't know you'd made a new friend, Sasuke." She prodded, cracking an idle knuckle as she tried to peer around the Uchiha's bulk and fully take in the white-haired nekomata.

Any traces of regret and geniality vanished from Sasuke's countenance, the Rinnegan swirling to life in his left eye as he bore down on the Hokage with the promise of blood and steel on his tongue. "And you're going to continue to live in ignorance." He declared darkly, the 'or else' passing through the air unspoken.

Sakura drew back with a huff, lifting her open palms in a surrender gesture. "Fine, fine. Whatever. But what are you here for, Sasuke?" The shift from bitter teasing to a brisk businesslike candor was swift enough to give whiplash as Sakura realized the Uchiha's store of patience had run out.

Gravedirt and porcelain crinkled faintly as Sasuke sighed, the frustrated exhale reminiscent of when he'd actually been alive. "Like I said, Naruto's proposal needs a little more detail. We already made sure you and the other Kage couldn't kill each other. But you need to select your successors now, and even a few spares so we can bind them together too. That way there will be peace for at least a couple of generations."

The five Kage had no idea that Sasuke and Naruto intended to suicide and exit the shinobi world as soon as they got a functioning system in place, but sooner or later they would realize their overseers were gone. Simply binding their lives together wasn't enough when they could just abdicate to their successors and head to the battlefield for suicide missions. All potential leaders needed to be controlled, and since there were only ever a handful of potential Kage in a village at any time, binding all potential successors would actually work.

Every village would have to hold back their strongest soldiers out of the knowledge that the death of their enemies would trigger the death of their comrades and the destruction of their military potential. The Kage were war-hardened, but not suicidal enough to weaken their villages to the point that they could be overthrown by the minor countries.

For a few heartbeats Sakura seemed fit to explode, a pink flush staining her cheekbones as she took in Sasuke's new ultimatum. Then her shoulders slumped, and she gave a rueful chuckle that was surprisingly good-natured. "Well I guess between the two of you that all angles will get covered, hmm? Alright, what else?"

Backed into a corner and stripped of all her options as she was, Sasuke expected Sakura to become even more spiteful and twisted. Instead it seemed like the premise of peace by all means had engendered a personal surrender, and for the first time since he'd been resurrected Sasuke saw hints of the girl he'd once known.

"To clarify, when Naruto said he expected one government for the continent he wasn't just talking about shinobi. It extends to the civilian level as well, so you can consider the feudal lords abolished and their countries annexed. It'll be one nation for everyone, shinobi and samurai and civilian alike."

"I'd thought that was a given, but go on…"

"Also, about the bijuu. Yes, we're going to put them in a new dimension but we don't expect you to just kill off all the new jinchuuriki. We'll use Edo Tensei on Killer B and that crazy Nibi one before extracting the bijuu from everyone, including Naruto. They'll all be dead at that point, but I'll still be walking around to make sure that they all get brought back properly with Rinne Tensei. So don't think you can trick us there."

"I suppose I can admit that I thought about doing that, but you win."

The conversation ran long into the night, with the two former comrades eventually joined by Gaara.

Over it all presided Koneko, her vigilant amber stare unyielding despite the apparent reduction in tension and Sakura's resignation to the new order. The nekomata hoped that everything would work out neatly, but if it didn't, she was ready.

Koneko had already grown to hate the world of shinobi and its insistence on bleeding Naruto and Sasuke dry. Murdering a few uppity humans for their sake wouldn't even make her cold heart skip a beat.


(AN): 3100 words. Rolling the ball on and on here. Want to end this on chapter 20.

In regards to Sakura and the other Kage, I imagine a few of you might feel underwhelmed at the lack of pure hate and murder. But this isn't a bashing fic. I don't see them as evil or irrational people. They're bitter and patriotic, but they know when they're beaten and can swallow their pride when they have to (and in this instance, they have to). Being boxed in irritates them, but not to the point where they're all screaming banshees or whatever. Their resentment boils up from time to time, but it doesn't define literally everything about them.