You are the strength

That keeps me walking

You are the hope

That keeps me trusting

You are the life

To my soul

You are my purpose

You're everything.

- Everything by Lifehouse, the song that started it all

"I don't think I've told you this before, but I really wish you were alive," Naruto told Minato.

Minato blinked in surprise at the unexpected statement. Naruto sat down on the floor, staring up at the ceiling and Minato sat down beside him, their thighs touching. Minato leaned back on his hands, staring at the pale yellow as it swirled around in his mind's eye.

"Yeah, I do too," Minato agreed and a smile pulled at the corners of Naruto's lips.

"I mean, you can be annoying sometimes but I guess that's what parents do, right?" Naruto asked.

"Hey, you be quiet. I might just disappear one day and you'll regret all the nasty things you're saying about me now," the Fourth said in a mock serious tone.

Oh the irony. "Yeah, yeah, dad."

"See, this is what I get for not being able to talk to you for seventeen years. No respect at all."

"Hey, I was just wondering…" Naruto ventured, sitting up. "Do you want to know what happened to mom?"

Silence fell.

It looked as though Minato's entire world had frozen, his eyes glazed over with shock and he had stopped breathing. When he started moving again, he found it hard to swallow and was sure he had heard wrongly.

"What?" he asked in a whisper, scared that if he spoke any louder the truth would be ripped away from him before he heard it.

"Mom. I found out what happened to her," Naruto explained.

Minato nodded slowly. He was terrified of the answer that would come, but was even more terrified of not knowing.

"They forced her back to Whirlpool after the Kyuubi was defeated. The council made her leave me here because technically, since I had been born in Konoha, I belonged in Konoha. Mist attacked Whirlpool soon afterwards and she fought against them, killing one hundred and sixty four ninjas. She died during the attack," Naruto said quietly.

Minato said nothing, taking in the information.

A smile finally twitched at the corners of his lips as he said, "That's my Kushina, alright. Your mother never would have accepted it if she didn't go down with a fight."

Naruto nodded, watching Minato. As he did, he saw Minato's eyes tinge pink and his eyelids flutter open and close a bit more quickly than was necessary. Minato's Adams apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed painfully and avoided Naruto's gaze.

When Naruto hesitantly embraced his father, Minato's body shuddered. He pulled Naruto close and shut his sapphire eyes tightly.

"Thank you Naruto. Thank you."

There were only a few people who could wake up one morning and could truthfully say they were going to die that day. Naruto had just been added to this small handful of people and he wondered if all of them had felt just as insecure as he did right then. Hours had never passed so quickly, and he swore that somebody had pressed the fast forward button on his life's remote control. Everything was moving too quickly.

The sky was a dreary grey and swollen with rain clouds, a prelude to sorrow that would inevitably come. His glassy sapphire eyes stared out of a window without really taking anything in, his mind whirring with thoughts and regrets and all the things he wouldn't be able to do after this.

After this…Naruto mused.

What would come next? A tunnel of light that led to heaven? Reincarnation? Or would everything just end and he'd cease to exist at all?

And, what would happen to Minato? Would he take Minato with him, wherever he was going? Or would Minato be left behind, trapped in a golden room with no doors and a dead demon?

"Naruto, I'm going now," a voice called.

It took him a while to process Sakura's words, but the moment he did, a blinding fear raced through him. This was the last time he'd see her, the very last time, and when she walked out the door, he'd be letting go of her forever. He ran to her, a sense of urgency about him and reached her as she put on her shoes.

She looked so beautiful, he thought, even though her pastel pink hair was mussed and she still had morning dust in one eye. She smiled one of her breathtaking Sakura smiles, the ones that softened her face and made her beryl eyes shine with a captivating light, a smile that was so beautiful that you always smiled back. As Naruto smiled back this time, her smile broke his heart in two because he knew that she would be crying soon.

He kissed her forehead, a forehead that was a bit too wide but had always looked fine to him. He reached for her small hands and his large ones dwarfed hers. She squeezed his hands gently.

"Stay safe on the mission, okay?" She said it like a question, waiting for his reassurance that he'd stay alive and come back to her.

He couldn't bring himself to force a verbal reply and managed something that wasn't quite a nod and not quite a shake of the head either. It seemed to satisfy her though, because her Sakura smile grew and she kissed him chastely on the cheek.

He hesitated, tensing as she kissed him. She began to pull away in confusion but he suddenly grabbed at her, pulling her close.

He kissed her like a drowning man struggling for air that only she could give, desperate and terrified. His fingers threaded through her hair, memorizing its length and its texture, trying to burn the feel of it to his fingertips. There were so many things he wanted to remember about her, the way her right eye would twitch whenever she was angry, the way she lowered her chin and tried to hide behind her hair when she was about to cry and the way she would say she loved him, in a whisper that rang so honest and true in his ears.

They broke apart for breath, but Naruto was still clinging onto her. He pressed his forehead to hers and their eyelashes fluttered open and close in blonde-pastel synchronization. His hands cupped the sides of her neck and he tried to fight the familiar heavy burn in his eyes.

He whispered against her lips, "Don't forget."

She smiled a confused smile that knitted her eyebrows together and laughed nervously, "Don't forget what?"

Me.

And he kissed her again, feeling every millimetre of her lips pressed against his own, and it was so soft. Her hands rose to stroke the whiskers across his face and he felt her smile against his mouth. Every part of their bodies melded together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and he knew he'd never feel more whole than he did right now.

It ended too quickly.

She grinned at him, her lips bruised from their kisses and eyes shining with a light he had never been able to place. Her hands slipped down from his cheeks to hold his hands as she walked towards to the door, keeping her eyes fixed on him as she went. When they reached it, she turned the knob and pulled the door open. A rush of cold air entered the room, chilling Naruto to the bone.

"I'd better go now, I'm going to be late for work," she said lightly.

Rising to her tiptoes, she kissed him on the cheek and pulled her hands away. Naruto held on a moment too long and his gaze burned intensely as he stared into her jade green eyes.

He finally let go and she left him, alone.

He was barely aware of where he was going when he stumbled outside of the house half an hour later, anything to get out of that house too full of memories of her. His feet dragged across the cement that became dirt, that then became grass. The gate he passed through was already open and there were slabs of stone all around him, inscribed with hundreds of names but he only wanted to see one.

"You're a real bastard, you know that?"

Maybe he was going insane. Naruto must have been, to be talking to a gravestone. He sat down and leaned against its side, staring up at the grim sky. Glancing at the gravestone again, he was a little disappointed that it hadn't reared up and snapped back at him.

"You're probably sitting there in your grave thinking, what the hell's the dobe on about? Or something like that. I don't know, I never could tell what was going in your stupid head," he continued.

Naruto lowered his head and managed a small laugh, "Right about now, you'd probably agree and say that I'm too stupid to understand a genius brain like yours. I'm kind of glad you can't really hear this because this must seem really pathetic."

"Yeah, you're a real bastard," Naruto repeated, with more conviction this time.

He swore loudly. "I would have asked you to look after Sakura for me. I mean…after I'm gone and all. But you just had to go kick the bucket, didn't you? Damn it, Sasuke, you really suck."

"Oh yeah, forgot to fill you in. I'm going to die today. The seal screwed up or something stupid like that and I couldn't find a way to fix it. Well, I did actually, but the only way to fix it is to kill myself. Nobody else except me and Ero-sennin know about it, and he only knows because he's the one who's going to kill me," he explained. Naruto imagined Sasuke before him, stoic and uninterested, but listening nevertheless.

"I couldn't tell Sakura. I don't know, every time I decided to tell her my throat would freeze up and I'd switch the topic. You really missed out on a great woman, bastard. People say all this really sappy stuff about love and how it's the best thing that's ever going to happen to you. It kind of sucks, but it's true."

"I'm going to ask Sai and Kakashi to look after her. I hope she isn't too sad. I mean, there are other fish out there in the sea right?"

Naruto let out a long sigh. "Alright, fine. I'll be absolutely honest with you, since you're the only person I can tell who isn't going to really make a difference right now. Sorry, but it's true."

"I'm being really selfish saying this but…I don't want Sakura to ever love anyone else but me. I know nobody else will ever be able to love her or make her happy like I do, and she knows that too. It hurts, even thinking about her being with somebody else but at the same time-"

"I want her to be happy."

"If I wasn't going to die, I'd probably be buying her a diamond ring right now and asking her to marry me. Yeah, yeah, she could be used as a weakness against me, but I'd protect her. I'd protect her no matter what."

A humourless smile stretched across Naruto's face as he pulled his knees to his chest. "Oh yeah, I didn't get Hokage like I said I would. You're probably laughing your head off right now since I used to rub it in your face all the time. I've been working hard for seventeen years to get Hokage and well…looks like it wasn't meant to be, huh?"

The rain began to fall suddenly and torrentially, like stones upon Naruto's back. He lowered his head as the water plastered the blonde hair to his forehead. The water on his face was hot as it streamed down his cheeks.

"You know what, Sasuke?"

"I don't really want to die."

Life was something so many people took for granted.

Naruto knew, because he had once shared the same mindset. He had once been so willing to throw it all away, but now all he wanted to do was hold on. Was it possible to want to live and die at the same time? Possible or not, that was exactly what Naruto wanted.

He wanted to turn around and go to Minato. Maybe he'd have another plan, a plan that would actually work, a plan that would let him live and stay with Sakura so he could give her that two karat diamond engagement ring and a beautiful white wedding. He didn't speak at all and swallowing was difficult now, because it nearly always brought hot liquid to his eyes.

Was he selfish for wanting to live?

Yes, he was. He knew he was. He wanted to live, but that meant that hundreds of thousands of people would die because of him. He wanted to put his life above everyone else's. A true Hokage would die for his country. Naruto would die for his country.

"You ready to go?" a quiet voice beside him asked.

Naruto looked up, his eyes took a while to focus on the man who had spoken. The white of his hair registered first and Naruto nodded with a weak smile. They stood up from their seats in Ichiraku and Naruto stared down at the bowl of ramen in front of him.

How many times had he sat at this ramen stand with Team 7? How many memories did he have here? Iruka had taken him here before his graduation and paid for every single bowl of ramen he ate when nobody else would, Sasuke, Sai and Sakura came here with him after every mission when their wallets were fat with their rewards, they would take Kakashi here to try and see his mask and-

"Naruto," Jiraiya murmured.

He jolted to life, barely aware that he had been staring at the bowl of ramen for a full five minutes. The white haired sannin turned and began to walk through Konoha and Naruto followed him, as if in a daze. He began to look at everything as he walked, trying to burn the images into his mind. He wished he had taken a camera with him, he would take pictures of everything even if it was just the random tree on the road if it meant he could remember being alive. He felt dead and he hated it.

Then they reached the gates.

He went through silently, but then he started trembling.

He was out of Konoha and he was going to die. He was out of Konoha and he wasn't the Hokage, he was never going to be the Hokage and he'd never get to change all the stupid rules, Neji would still be branch family, ninja would always be emotionless tools and the children would always always be abused, he'd never see his face on the Hokage mountain and all those people would never acknowledge him-

Naruto's voice was a mere whisper, "Do you think…"

"Do you think I would've been a good Hokage?" he asked.

The gravel crunched underfoot for a while. Jiraiya finally said truthfully, "You would have been the best."

A silence fell.

Naruto tilted his head upwards to the sky, swallowing painfully again. With closed eyes, a grin blossomed on his face and he yelled loudly, "I was going to be Hokage!"

"I was going to be the best! The best ever!" he continued at the top of his voice.

"My face was going to be on the mountain, next to baa-chan's and everybody would accept me-"

"Rokudaime Uzumaki Naruto! Believe it!" he screamed and his voice broke at the end of his sentence.

His grin trembled as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Sakura, can you please pass this on to Naruto when he gets back tonight?" Tsunade asked without looking at her apprentice, a manila envelope in hand as she scribbled away.

Stopping, Sakura stared at her teacher. She began, "Shishou, Naruto left yesterday morning on that A ranked mission you sent him on. He said he wouldn't be back for three days."

Tsunade stopped what she was doing and frowned, putting her papers and the envelope down on the tabletop. She said, "I didn't send Naruto on an A ranked mission. Jiraiya told me that he would be accompanying Naruto to Suna to visit Gaara."

"That's impossible, Naruto told me he was on a solo mission to Wave," Sakura argued and Tsunade sighed, leaning back in her chair.

"Are you absolutely certain he told you he was headed to Wave?" Tsunade pressed Sakura and she nodded firmly.

"Did Naruto say or do anything strange before that?" she questioned again.

- Sakura, what would you do if I died? and his eyes were burning sapphires as they gazed at her seriously -

- not you – never you, you're meant to be invincible and I'd never let you die first and his breath was heavy in the dark as he gasped beside her in the darkness, hands scrabbling to hold onto her as if she'd slip through his fingertips –

- don't forget and he kissed her like it was the last time -

"I think…I think he's in danger," Sakura whispered, her wide eyes meeting Tsunade's narrow ones.

Tsunade said, "You don't have much time if you want to help him. You need to leave immediately."

"Wait for me, Naruto," Jiraiya ordered his student and Naruto stopped where he stood.

Naruto could smell the sea spray now and see the white sand of the beach through the trees as the waves lapped at its edge, beckoning seductively. As he turned around to try and better see his place of death, Jiraiya quietly summoned Gamakichi and handed a letter to him.

"You know what you have to do. Show Sakura where to go," he murmured and the orange frog stared at Jiraiya for a long time before his gaze travelled to the forlorn looking Naruto a few metres off.

"He was a nice kid, y'know. Dad actually did quite like him, said that he's definitely Minato's kid," Gamakichi commented.

"He is, isn't he?" Jiraiya agreed and Gamakichi frowned up at Jiraiya.

"You know, you don't have to do this. You could just walk away and the kid probably wouldn't think any the less of you," he said.

The white haired sannin grinned at the small frog, tapping its head with two fingers fondly as he explained, "I'm being given a chance to make things right for once. I'm not giving that up for anything. And anyways, Naruto's my student, I might as well see him to the end."

Gamakichi continued frowning. He finally tapped his webbed foot against the ground in frustration before jumping onto Jiraiya's crimson shoulder. In an uncharacteristic show of affection, he closed his eyes and rubbed his rough head against Jiraiya's neck.

"See you later, big guy," Gamakichi murmured before disappearing in an orange flash.

Jiraiya turned back to Naruto. Their eyes met, but neither said anything.

"Thanks-" and Naruto's voice broke again as a thick lump formed in his throat.

The sannin sighed loudly and embraced Naruto tightly. He said quietly, "Your dad would be proud."

Naruto remembered Minato didn't know what he was doing, that he was betraying his own father. The thought stabbed through him like a needle of pain and he nodded aimlessly, up and down, simply because he was unable to do anything else.

"I'm proud of you, Naruto."

When Jiraiya finally released Naruto, he looked across the endless ocean and handed Naruto an exploding tag. Naruto stared at it dumbly for a moment before taking it and looking up at Jiraiya again.

He managed a weak smile and tried lightly, "So, I guess this is goodbye, hm?"

"Oh, just go on and get going before you make me cry too," Jiraiya muttered, glancing away from his pupil.

And it was true, his amber eyes were glazed over with something Naruto could never have imagined on the silver elite. He paused, trying to find something to say but found that all the words had been drained clean out of his head like a sink with a pulled plug. Naruto turned and ran across the ocean, moulding chakra to his feet. He kept running and running, until Jiraiya was a tiny red pinprick on the pale beach and swallowed as he came to a stop. He attached the explosive tag to the front of his shirt with trembling hands, right above his heart for a painless death.

The chakra below him rippled as it kept him standing. When had he learned to do this exercise? With Jiraiya, he was sure, some few years ago when he had thought he was invincible and had only thought of Sasuke. Invincibility was something so easily snatched away, like Sasuke had been, and then the numbing, cold wind blew.

He took a deep breath in.

Sakura, Sakura, I love you, I'm so sorry but this is something I have to do. Everyone, don't forget, don't forget I was the best Hokage that never was and I'm going to miss you all so damn much-

And he raised his hand, a signal to let Jiraiya know that he was ready.

He waited for the sizzling of the explosive tag and waited for the flames that would consume him like a starved animal, waited for the agonized screams of Kyuubi and Minato's pleading. But none of that ever came.

Instead, Jiraiya appeared in front of him. He was wielding a kunai.

"No, don't, you'll die-" Naruto screamed-

But the kunai had already pierced his heart and he could suddenly speak no more. He stumbled forwards, clinging to Jiraiya's shirt as the lifeblood seeped out of him and felt a pair of arms enclose around him. He wanted to struggle, move away because Jiraiya was going to die if he stayed like this-

And Jiraiya kept on holding onto Naruto even as the life faded from his cerulean eyes. The crimson red chakra began to burn him, but he kept holding on even as the skin melted away from his bones and he threw his head back to scream in pain, because Naruto had always been the son he had never had.

"Why won't you tell me what's going on?" Sakura demanded angrily as Gamakichi ran ahead of her.

Suddenly Gamakichi stopped and turned his head to the sky, silently.

"It's finished," he said quietly.

An explosion ripped through the forest, the force throwing the two of them back at least twenty feet. It was crimson, crimson chakra and suddenly, Sakura knew exactly what was finished.

Sakura was running and screaming, screaming and crying as she ran, ran even though her entire body was telling her to stop, ran harder even though she was nearly out of chakra. No, no, no, it wasn't finished, it was never finished-

It was as though Naruto was calling her and she knew exactly where to go. He was still alive, he had to be, he was invincible and he was all she had and it would kill her if he was dead. Her feet slapped against the water in the stony silence of the world around her and out on the ocean it felt as though time had stopped forever.

She came to a halt. There was nothing, nothing but dark water, but there had to be something, he had to be there-

A flash of orange, a flash of yellow and suddenly she grabbed at it blindly. She pulled it out of the water and it was deadweight – not dead, not dead – and held it to her tightly.

A whiskered face stared back at her through sightless blue eyes.

This was a joke. It had to be a joke. She shook Naruto's shoulders, waiting for him to wake up and laugh at her. He didn't move at all and his head lolled sickeningly to the left. She shook him again, harder and when he didn't move, she shook him again, and again, and again as small frustrated whimpers escaped from her mouth.

"Wake up, Naruto," she choked, "No, no, stop, this isn't funny."

The blood continued pouring out of him regardless and he still hadn't moved. Her vision was blurred from the tears and it was getting harder to breathe as she pleaded, "Please, Naruto…Naruto, don't go, please…"

She kissed him once, and then twice, and then three times more as the tears streamed down her face. She kept kissing him, touching his face, waiting for him to move but damn it, why wasn't he breathing-

A ragged sob escaped from her mouth, "I love you."

Her hands clenched around his shirt and she buried her head in his chest. There was no heartbeat. He was too cold. He would never move again.

She screamed.