I have a question of moderate importance for you: should I give Sasuke his own little mini-arc? I realize that the story is about Naruto/Kitsune, but I still feel like I've made Sasuke important enough that he deserves a little more screentime. I have his pairing in mind, and I've already written it out, but feedback is important.
Let's get this trainwreck moving.
"Ah, so the demon reveals itself. How nice." Orochimaru smiled wickedly. "It's a shame that I don't have your uncle here, since he could destroy you easily in this state, but I suppose that I'll just have to go through with getting you to rampage throughout Konoha."
His next words were nearly unthinkable: "Drop the barrier! We're leaving!"
As the purple blaze fell, both layers disentigrating, the Otoshi and their master started to flee..."started" being the key word. The maroon claws of the Kyubi-in-miniature struck them down, the tails binding Orochimaru in place.
"You shall not escape." The demon's words emanated throughout the village. "You shall not live to fight another day. I will eat the flesh from the corpses of your people, and I will drink the marrow from their bones. I am the Dark Lord of ancient times, Kurama the All-Powerful, and for your crimes against my descendants and their brethren you will pay with your life. I have waged war for thousands of years. With my father and my mother, my sisters and my brothers and the bastard child we nine all swore to kill, I aided in the shaping of the world and the granting of the magics that run through land and sea and sky. After the death of my father, the fleeing of my mother with her precious youngest child, I was left to care for my siblings...and as each of them turned to vice, I became violent. I am Zen no Kurama, the beast of creation who is the incarnation of death and hatred and hell and fire. From nothingness I was wrought, and to nothingness you will go."
"Well, shit, someone's pissed." Naruto dropped the line, syncing up a strike with the sword.
"Naruto, wait." Menma said. "I think someone else has a better claim, and wants to beat you to the punch. We should help E and Mei, since that sword can break the Edo Tensei."
And, as they left, Menma's words were proven true: Anko Mitarashi had arived. "Oh, I just knew that it was a good idea for you to be around!" She practically cooed the words at Kitsune's demonic form. "I could almost fuck you right here!"
Ah.
Well.
That was more than a little disturbing.
"And as for you, Orochimaru-sensei," her tone took a turn for the deeper, darker, far more violent side of sanity, "I think I'm going to have fun making you scream."
His tongue was the first thing that got taken, ripped out with Anko's bare hand with a fountain of blood that followed. Next went each of his fingers, joint by joint and section by section, with all the precision that was allowed by cutting through something with barbed wire. Though Orochimaru considered himself a strong man, with a great pain tolerance, he was neither a masochist nor invincible. By the time Anko finished with his right hand, he was crying tears of pain and agony. When she cut it off, using her dullest and rustiest kunai (reserved for special occasions such as this), he gave a wordless scream of rage. The process was repeated with his left hand, though instead of barbed wire she chose to split the fingers in half with a rotary saw before cutting through them with a chakram that had been specifically designed for the purpose of removing extremities. His hand was, again, eliminated by the dull and rusty kunai.
"And now for the eyes...do you want me to burn them out with this lighter, or freeze them with dry ice?"
Orochimaru had, clearly, made a mistake in twisting Anko's mind when she was a child; she knew, as well as he did, that he couldn't respond.
"Oh, you want one of each? Okay! I can do that! It's the apprentice's job to look out for their master, since the master is the one who teaches them everything that they know! So don't worry, Orochimaru-sensei, I'm going to take care of you just like I should!"
Yes. Very clearly, he had made a mistake in leaving Anko behind. She had been devoted to him, had loved him and been in love with him...though for what reason, he couldn't fathom. He had branded her with the cursed seal, a prototype from when he hadn't truly understood the dark magic of the East and its spellcasters, and yet she had survived. She had been warped and shattered, but she had survived; it had been enough to mark her as an experiment and attempt to observe her from afar.
As he lost his sight to flames and ice, he couldn't help but inwardly laugh at the irony that she was the only experiment that had ever managed to succeed.
All around the village, the battle was ending. The Hyuga, the Inuzuka, the Aburame, the Yamanaka, the Nara, the Akimichi, the Anbu and Kurojutsu and Ne...each and every one of them had banded together to fight off the enemy that had encroached upon them.
There were still those, however, who fought on despite the hopelessness of the situation. As their cursed seals overtook them, tainted magic and chakra flowing through their bodies, they lost their comprehension of defeat or death and fought on. They did not know pain, they did not know fear, they could not understand the concept of mortality, and they fought like the demons of an ancient and yet future time...which was where Gaara, Yugito, Yagura, Utakata, and Kirabi came in. Five Jinchuriki who stood under one banner, fighting side by side with one another and laying waste to the outskirts of Konoha's forests as they battled against hordes of warriors who'd been affected by the cursed seals.
Waves of sand buried them, sucked them down into the earth. blasts of flame and lightning shot through them, moving them down. Rain fell from the sky in thick sheets and cannonball bubbles, smacking into the ground and the enemy with concussive and lethal force. Whoever they were, they had chosen to stand against five people who were each an army in their own right; while none of them was truly in their opportune territory, with the possible exception of Yugito, they could still fight without hindrance along the southern part of Konoha's round wall. Gaara had taken the southwestern portion, a giant sand-trap that had its farthest portion turned into quicksand by its proximity to the two Jinchuriki from Kirigakure.
Yagura and Utakata had taken to defending the part of the wall that faced due south, and instead of making their enemies die by sinking into the ground, as Gaara had chosen to do...death came from above. Meter-thick sheets of water were ripped from the sky and sent crashing down like hammers, bubbles flew from Utakata's pipe and slammed into the opposing forces with all the power of a bullet train from Yuki no Kuni.
Yugito and Kirabi were killing their enemies with every trick in the arsenal, defending the southeastern section of the wall with flame and lightning and water.
And then, from nowhere, they heard the words that made their inner beasts tremble.
"You shall not escape. You shall not live to fight another day. I will eat the flesh from the corpses of your people, and I will drink the marrow from their bones. I am the Dark Lord of ancient times, Kurama the All-Powerful, and for your crimes against my descendants and their brethren you will pay with your life. I have waged war for thousands of years. With my father and my mother, my sisters and my brothers and the bastard child we nine all swore to kill, I aided in the shaping of the world and the granting of the magics that run through land and sea and sky. After the death of my father, the fleeing of my mother with her precious youngest child, I was left to care for my siblings...and as each of them turned to vice, I became violent. I am Zen no Kurama, the beast of creation who is the incarnation of death and hatred and hell and fire. From nothingness I was wrought, and to nothingness you will go."
Their brother was awake. Their brother was angry.
Their brother was a killer of man and beast, a warrior of pride and glory. He was one of the four Dark Lords, the first since their long-dead uncle Rahkal and the last before the descendant of the child that neither of them counted as a sibling. Though he had relinquished his title and its powers when he had taken the form of a fox, become the embodiment of hatred that was the world's curse and that cursed the world, there was no way of knowing that he wouldn't kill his vessel and take his powers back.
Their brother had returned.
"Now you see, Mangetami-chan," Sai moved as though he were only dancing with her, since he was fighting and flirting with her, holding her close and keeping a tanto in their clasped hands, "there are some things that can't be avoided. Death is one of them."
He dipped her, and she spewed lava at the woman who'd been charging at them. As she came up, he spun their bodies around and stabbed a man in the throat. "Be it death of yourself, a friend, an enemy, or the mask of your emotions."
She was blushing from the close contact, though they'd done much more intimate things already, and his smile was wide. "Shut up, you bastard."
"Just because I don't know my parents doesn't mean that I'm a bastard. I'm sure they would've hated me very much."
"Shut up!"
He kissed her forehead, twirling her around so that she stabbed another oncoming enemy in the heart. "Ah, but that would mean that you wouldn't be blushing any more. The real thing to say is the question, 'why do my words have such an effect on you?'"
"Baka!" She shouted, halfheatedly attempting to stab him and instead cutting through another enemy's head.
"I'm not a fool." He said, jumping out of the way of a falling tree. "I'm just a weapon, a sword-breaker, a Sai. And you seem to have decided that you'll be my sheath."
Though he likely didn't understand his own innuendo, given his lack of verbal comprehension, Mangetami's face flushed to the glowing color of magma. "I haven't done anything like that! Stop messing with my head!"
"Oh, really? Then what about every night for the past two weeks?"
Damn, he'd gotten her. She really, really, needed to start doing something about her addiction to Sai. It was disturbing to her, how a two-toned black-and-white boy could draw this much fascination. She didn't understand what it was that drew her to him, and she knew that she needed to find out how to get herself away from him...but she didn't want to. That wasn't how a shinobi was supposed to be! There weren't supposed to be any attachments, because that was what had ended up hurting her mother so badly!
That was when the self-same woman passed over them, fighting against two dead-looking people with the Raikage and near-identical twins.
"Sai, can you and your girlfriend give us a little help here?" Naruto shouted. "Hold one of them down so I can stab him!"
"I'm not his girlfriend!" Mangetami raged.
"Mangetami, you and your boyfriend need to get up here!" Mei called out, knowing that it would irritate her daughter and possibly fluster the young man who held her so closely. Had they been...dancing? How romantic. She'd need to tease the girl later.
"I'm not his girlfriend!" She said, red-faced from anger and embarrassment as she moved to strike the Kazekage down. Sai stayed behind, looking at Mei unabashedly.
"Despite what she says, you and the clone of my leader are correct. I hope you find me to be a suitable choice."
"Can you fight well?"
"Yes."
"Are you able to deal with an emotionally unstable girl with a penchant for homicide?"
"Yes."
"How many grandchildren can I expect?"
"As many as she wants to give you. Probably three or four."
"Alright, you're in. Don't expect me to call you my son until you're actually married, though."
"That's alright. I wasn't under any impression that you would."
As Kitsune's falx drank the chakra from the Kazekage's body, and speared the Sandaime Hokage's reanimated corpse as well, their part in the battle had ended. The fight of the Kage was over, with the water and the lightning proving to best the dead flames and winds.
It was time to clean up.
"Ah, how disappointing." The voice startled them. "Itachi, I was sure that you'd keep my secret just a little bit longer. Shall we fight, and have your death on my hands?"
The masked man had arrived on the battlefield, his singular black eye staring out at them in its challenge to the world. He stood tall, kunai in his hands and a smug smirk on his face; though Sasuke couldn't see it, being on Kitsune's team had been enough to teach him about when and how a specific emotion might show...and it was incredibly clear that this man was self-assured of his power. He wouldn't have revealed himself otherwise, or at least not so brazenly as he had.
"No...not you, Itachi. I think it's time for someone else to learn to hate me. That's what makes the world go round, what makes my life fun! The more people that hate me, the more people that want to fight me. The more people who want to fight me, the more I fight. The more I fight, the stronger I get. The stronger I get, the more people hate me!"
Haruno Sakura stood beside Sasuke, wide-eyed and fearful. He was talking about her. He was going to kill her. She was going to die without having caught up to Sasuke or Kitsune, without having proven to herself that she could be far more than just a kunoichi or a normal girl. She'd come so close...but in the end, nothing had managed to come of it. She closed her eyes as tears began to form and fall, and knew herself for a person that was too weak to carry on.
She heard, but did not feel, the sound of a kunai sinking into flesh. She opened her eyes to find Sasuke in front of her, and Itachi's blade blocking one of the kunai from stabbing into his heart...and she saw no knife inside of Sasuke's older brother.
"See you later! Oh, and make sure you get strong enough to be able to fight me on even ground!"
He vanished, making Itachi relax. Sasuke slumped to the ground, revealing what he'd watched happen with his Sharingan...and it was a memory that would haunt him forever, to his death: Haruno Sozetsu had been stabbed in the heart, where the offending kunai remained.
Sakura's scream was painful to listen to, and it lasted until her lungs ran out of air. She couldn't tear her eyes away from her father's body, his head tilting up to look at the sky, his eyes still only starting to glaze over in death.
She would kill that man. Come hell or high water, come death or destruction, even if Kitsune himself stood in her way, she would kill him. For the first time in her life, for the first time ever, Haruno Sakura knew what it meant to truly hate someone.
Believe it.