We were friends once – before all of this happened. Which of us in our youth could have dreamed that your paths would separate so abruptly and with such finality; that they would cross countless times later on, just with the words friend and family replaced by bastard and enemy.

Just so you know, I forgave you for everything – for betraying Konoha, for killing countless people… for taking her away from me… It wasn't your fault that the cursed seal shattered your mind…

Even so, there is one thing I just can't forgive – you cut our broken team down from four to two… She loved you, you bastard!

…

You're already dead aren't you? Never could let me finish…

.

World I ~ Brothers

.

"- alive there kit?

Naruto groaned as the thought needled its way through his head, sending waves of pain from every overstrained nerve it had to travel through.

"Well that's good to know. Now the second question – are you still sane?"

… If glares could kill (and he could muster up the energy needed to do so), the annoying voice in his head would be little more than dust in the wind. As it was, Naruto didn't even bother trying to open his eyes and instead attempted to will himself into unconsciousness.

Sleep was number one on his list of priorities – along with numbers two through nine inclusive; and not even a spontaneous appearance of Madara was going to stop him from getting it.

Perhaps the voice in his head decided it has had enough, or his body chose that moment to let go of its tedious grasp on reality, but the darkness closed in on him again and he knew no more.

Kurama just twitched his tails in annoyance and lay back down to rest, watching as his partner slept without a care in the world in the middle of their combined mindscape… on the wrong side of the bars separating them.

He understood the pain his partner / jailer was probably going through after having his body destroyed and his mind dragged through the chaos between worlds only to be thrust into another body – if only in the same abstract way of one glancing at a bird with a broken wing and thinking how sad it was that it couldn't fly. Being made of pure chakra certainly had its perks.

For a moment Kurama toyed with the idea of spearing his jailer through with one of his tails and relishing in the freedom that would provide, before discarding it. There wasn't any point to it – no matter how much it galled him, he knew that he would just be easy pickings for Madara…

Besides, a couple decades worth of living with Naruto had… grown on him.

…

Sometimes he wondered if the only reason that Madara was still after them was that the bastard's confrontations with Naruto had never lasted longer than ten minutes – anyone else who had passed that point had inadvertently joined Naruto's side.

.

The next morning dawned on a much less homicidal Naruto – over sixteen hours of sleep combined with his super-bordering-on-regeneration healing had done their job, and it was time for him to do his.

Contrary to what he expected, there was no moment of disorientation followed by slow realization that his and Kurama's desperate sealing array had done what it had been designed to do and thrown their combined souls back into the past. In fact it was the exact opposite. Even before he opened his eyes he knew that he had succeeded, mostly from the way his body did not feel quite like his own – years of training had made him an expert on every single bundle of muscles in his body, and this was most definitely not it.

Besides, the… experience (for the lack of a better term) of traveling across worlds was all too fresh in his mind.

Ok, enough about that, he thought firmly to himself and pushed all the recent memories off into the specific corner of his mind that all veteran shinobi had, wedging it firmly between his memories of Orochimaru's labs that he had raided during his career, and Sakura's death at The Bastard's lightning covered hand.

His eyes narrowed into slits as that particular memory lashed out at him... Sure Sasuke was still innocent at the moment – at least if the time focusing runes weren't off – still…

Naruto shook his head and climbed out of bed. There really wasn't any point in agonizing about it any longer – every other plan that he had made was thought out to exhaustion: Madara would die (but not quickly – the bastard didn't deserve that);Nagato would either join him or his current master – he did revive the villagers that he massacred before, so he deserved a chance; Danzo, the Akatsuki, Orochimaru (oh yes – Naruto was going to have fun with that particular one)…

And then there was Sasuke – the betrayer of konoha (taking the title away from Orochimaru and managing to even beat Madara for top place), the snake of team 7, the avenger, and last but not least – Naruto's brother in all but blood.

Stumbling his way to the washroom, his instincts working against him as they overextended his legs and overcompensated every time he lost his balance, Naruto decided to just wait and see. Even though life had taught him the value of planning things out, he was still a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy.

He would go to the academy, look at Sasuke… and then he would know what to do.

.

. . .

.

Sasuke's eyes opened and stared unblinkingly at the ceiling of his room in the Uchiha compound. Slowly shifting to the side he brought out his hand and held it loosely above him, staring at it. Small. It was small – a child's hand, weak and hardly nimble enough to go through seals. It wasn't a civilian's hand though – scars crossed it here and there, a harsh reminder of training that he had forced himself to do.

… It wasn't his hand – uncountable amount of scars were missing from it, the calluses of constant training only beginning to form, and even the unique branchlike marks spreading outwards from his palm were gone. Unfortunate really, he was slightly fond of those. He was the last one in the world who had them – marks of intensive training in pure lightning manipulation. No, not the only one – at least not anymore.

A grin spread across his face as he chuckled before breaking out in full laughter. His hand dropped down over his face, even as tears streamed down his eyes.

No, he wasn't the only one left alive with those markings across his palms – Kakashi was still alive (and would be for years and years to come, he promised himself), and Naruto-

Sasuke's laughter cut off so abruptly one might have wondered if it was there in the first place. Naruto – it always came back to Naruto…

Kill him – that's what you need to do – for all the pain he caused us

"Shut up"

You know that you want to – wasn't that the reason you came back? To take revenge just one more time? To pay him back for taking her away from us – for betraying everything the four of you-

"Shut up!"

The ceiling caught fire, the black flames spreading at an almost alarming rate before they vanished, leaving behind only charred wood and ashes floating down.

Trying to calm his pounding heart down, Sasuke got up and pulled on a shirt. Even after ten years the broken seal still tried to exert its influence over him – his hope that being thrown back through time would get rid of it for good turning out to be little more than ashes to the wind. Still, even with a homicidal voice in his head he had come out of the encounter with Orochimaru with surprisingly little mental damage.

Heck, his mind was a picture of perfection in comparison to Naruto.

Then again, so was Madara.

With a weary sigh that should have never come out of a child's mouth, Sasuke closed the door and left for the academy. This time, he would stop Orochimaru from placing a seal on his brother, even if he had to knock out the misguided fool before the snake bastard found them.

And if he failed?

Sasuke's eyes flashed red for a moment, the spiral like design within them going unnoticed by all the civilians passing by him. Before Jiraya left for his final mission to try and put down the beast that his apprentice had become, the last Sannin explained just what happened to Naruto – as Orochimaru found out in his last minutes of life, the cursed seal and the kyuubi's cage were never meant to mix.

Once the seal touched him, it was over. It may have taken over a year for Naruto's mind to shatter, but the end result was as irreversible at the end as it was when Orochimaru attempted to withdraw his head after placing the seal.

If he failed to stop Orochimaru, there was but one thing to do – even if it broke his heart, he would slit the throat of his brother to stop the beast from taking over and virtually collapsing the world.

Heck, it wasn't as if he hadn't done it once before.

.

A/N

Well, there you go. The next chapter will end this story, and I already have several other ideas to run with. Hope you guys like it so far!

If it wasnt obvious, yes - both Naruto and Sasuke returned back, and they both came from different worlds. Naruto's is similar to what happened in canon, while Sasuke came from a world where Naruto got marked by Orochimaru at the same time as he did (for disastrous consequences; more on that later)