A/N: I have a new co-writer who helped IMMEASURABLY with this chapter, by the name of Dark. Be sure and thank him!
Alas, not much in the way of feedback for this chapter...T_T
Every review truly does help, large or small, any feedback is better than nothing at all.
Silence only hurts.
I had intended to wait and see if we'd get more RWBY stuff, but still nothing from Viz Media, barely even a peep. So be it.
As always, I own no references, quotes, themes, or memes. Time and feedback will determine if this becomes a story. In other words...its up to YOU, the reader. Do let me know~! As a side note, this is well before RWBY landed in Ever After.
Timeline ought to be obvious, but I'll let you guess~!
Story title is inspired by the RWBY song, the Edge.
"You broke your word, Naruto."
"You think I don't know that!? It haunts me, plagues me...
...if I could take back what I did, I would. But I can't. Someone is dead because of me...
~A Traveler.
Tilting/Tipping/Teetering
The Ever After was beautiful in the way a corpse is beautiful.
Not dead, not exactly. But still. Devoid of breath.
Devoid of meaning.
The trees here bore blossoms—lush crimsons and porcelain whites—but they had no scent, no pollinators, no hunger to reach the sun. They were decorations at a funeral no one remembered to mourn. In the Ever After, even time wandered, listless and unscheduled. The sky held no hour, only a dull ache of light. The wind, if it still existed, had forgotten how to scream.
Naruto walked.
His footsteps were not defiant, not desperate—just inevitable. One arm dangled lifelessly, a dead limb attached to a dying dream. His cloak was a ruin of scorched threads and bloodless holes. Orange, once the color of promise, now clung to him like dried scabs—unseemly, but familiar. He wore it not out of pride, but because stripping it away would mean admitting there was nothing left underneath.
Behind him, silent but for the whisper of grass underfoot, the Curious Cat followed.
"Mm," the Cat purred, hopping lightly onto a low branch above. "There's a word for the way you walk, you know."
Naruto didn't look up. Didn't speak.
The Cat's grin stretched, content to fill the silence on its own. "Funereal. Rather fitting, don't you think?"
The quiet that followed was not heavy. It was hollow. Like a church abandoned mid-prayer.
Naruto kept walking.
"Why do you insist on silence?" the Cat asked, head tilting, voice syrup-sweet with mock wonder. "Not that I mind, truly. But silence is the voice of regret. And you, my dear Naruto, carry yours like a bell that never stops tolling."
He stopped.
The way his neck turned—as if his very gaze were chained to grief—spoke more than his voice ever could. But still, he spoke.
"...I'm still deciding whether I deserve to live."
The Cat's grin stayed, but its tail froze mid-sway. "Oh?"
"I killed my best friend," Naruto said, voice low and rusted. "She asked me to stop him. Begged me. I gave her my word. I made a promise to myself."
Each sentence fell like stones into black water. No splash. Only depth.
"And in the end..." A pause. A breath sharp with the taste of ash. "I did what I had to. I killed him anyway." He looked down at his hand—scarred, trembling, empty. "It wasn't justice. Or mercy. It was just... the only path left."
The Cat hopped from the branch with a whisper of motion, landing beside him.
Its voice was softer now. No longer amused. Merely present.
"Did it hurt?"
Naruto's laugh was a dry, pitiful rasp. "I think I forgot how to feel pain. This? This is what's left after pain. When even agony runs out of things to say."
The Cat sat beside him, curling into the grass like a shadow folding inward.
"Then perhaps," it said, "you are not dead because you deserve to live. But because your story hasn't ended yet."
Naruto didn't answer.
He stood beneath a sky embalmed in stagnation—unchanging, uncaring.
Beside him, a cat too knowing to be innocent.
And within him, a question:
Did he even deserve to ask for the end?
"Did you mean to?" the Cat asked, softly, like a scalpel slipping between ribs.
"…I don't know."
That was the closest thing to honesty he could manage.
So they walked.
Every step was a hesitation. Every breath, a reluctant betrayal of death. He wasn't alive—not really. He was just a vessel sealed by regret, wandering a world that refused to kill him. He had landed here in fragments.
His body was whole. But the soul inside had been shattered so finely, even grief could no longer find its shape.
And the Cat—the Cat had found him.
Not out of kindness. Not even curiosity. But boredom. Observation. It didn't try to fix him. Didn't pretend to understand.
It merely watched.
And somehow, that was worse than being abandoned.
Because silence implied potential. But witnessing?
That made his ruin real.
"I thought this place was supposed to change people," Naruto muttered, voice scraping the bottom of a dried-up well.
"It does," the Cat replied. "But change is not always rebirth. Sometimes, it is...revelation."
Naruto clenched his jaw. "Then I guess I was always a failure."
"No."
The Cat sprang ahead, then pivoted, walking backward on two legs like a marionette of mockery. Its grin never faltered, but something older hid in its eyes.
"You were always a fool. There's a difference."
Naruto let out a sound—a half-choked thing that began as a laugh and died a cough.
"Same thing," he said.
"No," the Cat repeated, more gently this time. "A failure is someone who couldn't. A fool is someone who tried."
They fell into silence.
(.0.0.0.)
It was near the edge of a glade that they found her.
The sky above hung sick and swollen, a bruise that refused to heal. Clouds loomed like vultures over carrion, heavy and motionless, as if the heavens themselves had forgotten how to breathe. The scent in the air was that of scorched silence—dust, and lightning, and the aftermath of a scream.
She lay beneath a gnarled tree, its twisted limbs frozen mid-reach, as though even the forest mourned.
Her cloak was a ruin.
Her armor, cracked and blackened.
Her hair spilled out like bleeding moonlight, tangled with the soil as though she had fallen not from battle, but from a memory.
And her fingers twitched—grasping, blindly, for something that no longer existed.
Naruto approached without pause.
He no longer feared the illusions this world conjured.
Whether they came with fangs or sobs, claws or curses, he accepted them as natural as breath. If the Ever After sought to wound him—so be it.
But this was different.
This wasn't a wound.
It was a reflection.
The woman stirred as he knelt beside her. Her breathing was shallow, brittle. When her eyes opened, they were a bloodshot silver rimmed by red—not the red of rage or magic, but of blood diluted by despair. Her gaze found his, if only briefly, before drifting again into the fog of not-knowing.
"Raven…?" she whispered, a name that cut the air like a blade dulled by time.
Naruto blinked, baffled. "Who?"
"No… that's not right." Her brows creased. "I… I don't remember."
Her voice was dry parchment. Her confusion, a void swallowing what little was left of her.
"I don't…"
The Cat landed on Naruto's shoulder without sound, tail curling like a question mark. "Oh ho. Another fallen star. The Ever After does so love its tragedies."
"Can you move?" Naruto asked, ignoring him.
She tried. Her body shuddered, resisted, then failed her.
"No," she murmured, shaking. "No, I… I don't know where I am. Or who I am." Her breath trembled with panic. "I think… I was doing something important. I wasn't alone. There was fire. Someone was screaming. I was screaming."
Her hands clenched the earth like it could anchor her to a self she had already lost.
Naruto placed his only hand on her shoulder.
"It's alright."
Her body tensed.
"No, it's not!" she cried, surging upward. Pain exploded through her frame; he saw it when she clinched and collapsed again, curling in on herself. "It's not alright." Tears welled in her eyes, silent and without purpose. "I forgot, and the worst part is that I know I forgot, but can't remember what! I've lost everything...!"
Naruto looked to the Cat.
"She has aura," it mused. "But she doesn't belong to your world, either. Not entirely. The Ever After collects broken things. And she... is very broken."
Naruto turned back to the woman.
"Who are you?" he asked, gently.
She blinked.
Trembling, lost.
"…Rose," she said at last. "That's… that's all I can remember. My name is Rose."
The name landed in Naruto's chest like a dying star. It meant nothing. And yet it hurt. As if he'd once heard it spoken by someone he never had the chance to mourn.
"…Rose, then," he said, steadying her. "You're not alone."
She laughed. But there was no joy. Only the hollowness of someone who'd stared too long into an empty grave.
"Aren't I?" she whispered. "I don't even know what I've lost."
Naruto nodded.
"Neither do I," he said. "But I carry it anyway."
(.0.0.0.)
They made camp in the glade.
Not out of need, but Out of inevitability.
Rose couldn't walk far. And Naruto… to be honest, he no longer believed in the idea of forward.
The Cat sprawled lazily in a shaft of half-light, chasing its tail in idle spirals. Even its movements seemed subdued, as if mocking the stillness around them.
Rose sat near the fire, knees drawn to her chest, watching the flames consume wood as if it were atonement.
"What's this place called?" she asked at last.
Naruto didn't look at her. He didn't need to.
"The Ever After."
She let the words sit on her tongue like a foreign prayer. Then:
"…Is it heaven?"
His jaw clenched. "No."
She turned, her gaze searching. "Hell, then?"
He shrugged, the gesture slow, brittle. "Maybe it's both. Maybe it's just… what's left."
Silence fell again. Not awkward. Not heavy. Just true.
"You don't talk like a hero," she said eventually.
Naruto smiled. It wasn't warmth. It wasn't bitterness. It was the sound of glass cracking under pressure too long ignored.
"I'm not."
"You saved me."
He had. "I don't know why."
There was no modesty in the answer. No false humility. Just resignation.
"…Thank you anyway," she whispered.
He ignored her and stared into the fire. It didn't dance. It burned. Slow. Merciless.
"I think I was supposed to be a symbol once," he said. "Hope. Peace. The future, maybe."
His eyes darkened with memory—the kind that eats from the inside out.
"But when the time came to make peace… I chose war."
He drew in a breath that didn't ease anything.
"I told myself it was mercy." memories flashed through his broken mind, warped and shattered. "That killing him was the only way to save him. The only way to stop everything else from falling apart." He closed his eyes to shut them out, yet they only came on stronger. "But it wasn't mercy. It was fear. I was afraid he wouldn't stop. Afraid I couldn't stop him. Afraid of what I'd become if I let him go."
The fire crackled softly. Rose didn't interrupt.
She didn't try to mend something she couldn't name.
She just listened.
"I keep wondering," he said, voice thinner now, "what would've happened if I'd let him go. Maybe he'd be alive. Maybe the world would've burned."
He looked down at his hand, the one that still remained.
"I'll never know," he whispered. "That's the curse."
Rose glanced at her own hands. Pale. Trembling. They looked like they belonged to a stranger.
"I think I failed too," she said. "Someone… someone I cared about. I can feel it. I was trying to protect them. But I was too slow. Or too weak." She swallowed. "I don't even know what their face looked like. There's an outline in my mind, like a dark shadow...
Naruto looked at her. There was no judgment in his gaze. Just shared ruin.
"Do you want to remember?" he asked.
Her lips trembled. "No. But I need to."
That, more than anything, he understood.
When she inched forward, he didn't push her away. When she laid her head on his shoulder, he didn't resist. When she succumbed to sleep and began to snore, he almost smiled.
Within a matter of moments, he was fast asleep.
"...?"
From his high perch in the tree, the Curious Cat watched them—two flickers of broken light in a world that had forgotten the sun.
"A shinobi mourning the friend he killed," the Cat murmured. "A warrior mourning the memory she lost." His tone was light, but not necessarily cruel. "What a wretched pair of broken things."
And then, he began to smile.
A small, fleeting thing.
Hopeful.
"But the most curious thing about broken things… is how often they keep walking. And inevitably, they repair themselves.
What would they become, he wondered? Something wonderful? Something terrible? Something what was both? Neither? He was Curious.
Would they give up and spend the rest of their lives here? Settle down? Start a family?
Would they try to leave someday, perhaps?
Would they let him come with them?
So!
Many!
Questions!
Curiosity gnawed at him like so many teeth, biting, gnashing, grinding him down. He had to know the answers, needed them like the very air in his lungs; if only because he'd been born this way, cursed to constantly question. He was cured with curiosity. He needed to know everything. But more than anything, he needed to know why his makers had left him here.
Such was his wont; the nature bestowed upon him by the Brothers from the very moment of his creation. In that way, he was no different from them; he knew there was something wrong with him, that there was an inherent flaw in his nature, but he didn't know how to fix it. Perhaps he too, needed to break himself before he could become whole. After all, that which was broken rarely healed the same way.
And he...he was in desperate need of healing himself, wasn't he? He needed the Tree, needed to get out of this place -outoutOUT!- away from the Ever After before he went mad. Yet there was no one to guide him to the Tree now, was there? It was his duty to do the guiding, the fixing, the mending of broken hearts for the poor Afterans ever and always.
How did one guide oneself?
Answer! You didn't! You could not! It wasn't possible!
His claws bit into the bark as he hissed softly and shook his head, tamping down a sudden, spiteful surge of self-loathing.
He could not reach the Tree anymore; not by himself, not alone.
But these two...they might be the key to everything.
This "Naruto" and this "Rose" were badly broken in their own way, and he longed to fix them, as he fixed others. That meant taking them to the Tree. That, he could do. That was a part of his purpose. That was allowed by the Ever After. And perhaps while he was there, he could finally break his chains once and for all. Be free. Yet to do so, he needed these two, and possibly any other strays they might pick up along the way.
Should he trust them? Be honest? Did he dare? Gah! The questions gnawed at him once more!
With a long-suffering sigh, the Cat settled in to watch and wait.
He was, if nothing else, Curious.
A/N: Scene~!
Hope you enjoyed it.
Slowly but surely, our boy begins to recover...
Soooo? Should this be a story? Once again! This is an AU.
Hopefully someone, somewhere, enjoyed this. I just don't know anymore these days. Its terribly hard to tell...
So...in the Immortal Words of Atlas...Review...Would You Kindly? Let me know what you think!
Have some previews. They'll come to life if this ever becomes a story.
Hope you enjoy 'e~!
(Previews!)
Someone else fell into the Ever After soon thereafter.
"My, my!" a paw poked and prodded the prone, burnt body. "You humans are just cropping up all over the place, aren't you? You're the third one this month after Rose. Wherever did you come from-yeow!" those words became a yelp as a hand grabbed his tail. "Ouch! That's actually quite painful! Would you mind releasing me?!" They did not; in fact they tightened their grip and dragged him closer. "Naruto! Help, help! I think she's going to eat me!"
This close, he got a glimpse at the battered, burnt girl. Who was she? So many questions.
She was barely breathing, the poor thing. And those burns! "Where...am I...?"
The Cat blanched. Oh, dear. She couldn't die here. Dying would be so very boring. "Naruto! Quickly, please!"
"Don't rush me, ya damn cat, I'm coming...this one better not attack me...
x
"Who am I?"
"I...don't know?" The girl palmed her face, her voice growing higher, eyes wider with each passing moment. "I don't know. I don't know! WHO AM I?! Why can't I remember anything?!
Naruto knelt beside her. She latched onto him.
And bawled like a baby.
x
"Why is there a cat sitting on your shoulders?"
Naruto tilted his head. "Why isn't there one on yours?"
x
He growled at the Jabberwalker as it grappled with him. "You think you can eat me, bitch? I'll eat you! KURAMA!"
It screamed. "No!
"Yes."
x
"Its not death, its rebirth. The tree could help you. Restore you. Fix what's broken inside. You could have your arm back. You could be whole again. Leave your pain behind."
Naruto laid a hand on the bark..."will I still be me?"
The Cat frowned. "I supposed that depends."
Naruto tilted his head toward him. "On?"
"On what you define as...well, you."
x
The Blacksmith laughed; it was a faint, musical sound. "You're certainly new. I don't think I've seen anyone quite like you before...
"...?"
"I'm sorry, does this form frighten you?" the metal woman granted him a small, motherly smile and laid her hammer down on the anvil. "I could take on another one, if you prefer...
A rush of heat and flame had Naruto looking away.
...is that better?"
x
...so this is Remnant."
"Fascinating! I didn't think it would be so...big!"
R ~!