come out of the ashes by SilverStudios5140 ( Naruto )
Summary:
As a final stand in a war they never stood a chance of winning, Uzumaki Naruto chooses to use a forbidden blood seal to rip through the fabric of space and time itself rather than admit defeat. He has never been good at accepting his fate, and if bending reality with his own two hands is what it takes, then that's just what Naruto will do.
The rest of the world is just going to have to suck it up and deal with it.
[OR]
"A time travel seal," Sakura says numbly, staring at him with wide eyes and a slack jaw once she finally comprehends the excited tirade he has just finished throwing at her.
"A time travel seal," Naruto confirms, grinning with a mouth full of teeth, eyes manic.
Sasuke sighs, immediately giving up on trying to make sense of anything that comes out of Naruto's mouth. "Of-fucking-course."
Notes:
(See the end of the work for notes.)
Chapter 1: waking up at the start of the end of the worldChapter Text
They've reached the end of the line.
There's no getting around the reality of things. The sun rises from the east, Naruto's first love will always be ramen, and the shinobi alliance lost the war well over a year ago. These are simply the facts of life.
By this point, when they've spent the better part of a year constantly on the run from Kaguya's forces, most of them are really just waiting for all of this to end. It has been three weeks since the remaining hundred-or-so of what used to be the alliance have found themselves hiding out in the ruins of Uzushio, the barrier around the entire island shielding them for now thanks to Naruto and Karin's Uzu blood. These three weeks have been the most rest any of them have gotten since probably the start of the war, and the general consensus seems to be that this would not be such a bad place to be laid to rest when the alternative is to leave and likely be turned into one of Kaguya's mindless Zetsu soldiers.
Everyone here—from the eldest at age fifty-seven to the youngest at eight—knows that they're just biding time until the inevitable. They've lost their strategists and most of their heavy hitters. There's nowhere else they could go where the Rabbit Goddess would not immediately find them. At long last, they've exhausted every contingency, every trick, every surprise. Short of a suicide stand, there frankly isn't anything anyone can do anymore.
To die on the shores of the island of Uzushio, amidst the most peace and quiet they will likely ever have again, would be a kindness indeed.
Naruto is perfectly sick of it.
The stench of hopelessness in the air tastes rancid on his tongue and he turns away from the stillness of it all with distaste. People look at him with sympathetic eyes, telling him it's okay—it was always going to happen, and he should make his peace with it while he still has the facade of a choice.
Well, call him a troublemaker till the end, but Naruto has never been good at doing what he's told, and he certainly isn't about to start now.
If he's going to go down (and regardless of how bitter he is about it, he can at least admit that he will be going down), then he's going to go kicking and screaming, fighting until his last fucking breath.
As it turns out, Uzushiogakure is an excellent resource to aid him with this particular ambition.
Initially, they stayed away from a good portion of the island because what happened here was essentially a bloodbath and no one ever really did anything about it. This was mostly because of the fact that only descendants of Uzu or those keyed in by them could even breach the insane barrier that protects Uzushio. However, the few survivors that remained had been scattered all over the continent and were in no hurry to come back to the ruins where they might get picked off by any enemies keeping an eye on what used to be their home.
As soon as his resolve is hardened, however, Naruto enters the city of Uzushio proper to discover that the Uzumaki were absolute hardasses and that fuuinjutsu really is just madness given a written form. Under what presumably used to be a city hall of sorts is a cavern that only allows entry via a blood seal to those descended from the Uzumaki main line, and in that cavern is a library of sorts, containing piles upon piles of scrolls preserved under stasis, depicting seals that make his head spin from just looking at them.
But Naruto is nothing if not too stubborn for his own good and he buckles down to really put his all into tearing through the information the library has to offer with all the delicacy of a hurricane.
Admittedly, Naruto has never attempted to incorporate sealing into his fighting style like the Uzushio shinobi or even Tenten and Sai did. He'd only begun learning because Jiraiya had insisted that he needed to know how to alter his own seal in case anything ever happened. At the time, he'd enjoyed discovering how many different ways there are to blow something up if one isn't afraid of a bit of creativity, but he never bothered to pursue it further because he is enough of a powerhouse by himself that he just didn't need the edge of fuuinjutsu in his already explosive arsenal.
That he doesn't he ever forgot or neglected the art though. If he has the time, he still enjoys playing around with altering seals just to see what will happen. Some of his versions of explosive tags and barrier seals have been downright nasty. In a way, it's a common legacy from his clan, his parents and his teachers. Naruto tries to honour that.
And good thing he does because the veritable treasure trove in the cavern would have been completely lost on him otherwise, and they would have missed out on what Naruto fondly calls his final fuck you to Kaguya.
"A time travel seal," Sakura says numbly, staring at him with wide eyes and a slack jaw once she finally comprehends the excited tirade he has just finished throwing at her.
"A time travel seal," Naruto confirms, grinning with a mouth full of teeth, eyes manic.
Sasuke sighs, immediately giving up on trying to make sense of anything that comes out of Naruto's mouth. "Of-fucking-course."
Recovering with the remarkable speed and composure of someone who has been exposed to Naruto's particular brand of bullshit for far too long, Sakura blinks and clears her throat. "You said this is a kinjutsu?"
Naruto bobs his head in confirmation. "Yeah, because it requires too much chakra for it to work unless like a whole bunch of people power it, and even then, it might just end up killing them all."
"And you want us to attempt this?" Sasuke asks dryly, eyeing the monstrosity on the scroll like it might come alive and challenge him to a death match at any given moment. Given Sasuke's track record with seals, Naruto doesn't really blame him for being wary.
"Well," Sakura says, eyes narrowed in thought, "between the three of us, it's not that implausible."
See, this is why he thought he was in love with Sakura when he was a kid. She gets it.
Naruto's grin widens. "Exactly!" he crows. "We might be the only people who could ever pull it off. Forbidden jutsu don't exactly account for jinchuuriki, the byakugo seal, or whatever the fuck is up with Sasuke's naturally freakish chakra reserves."
Rolling his eyes, Sasuke aims a swift kick to Naruto's shin. "I can't believe we're having a genuine conversation about time travel," he mutters, shaking his head.
"I mean, it's basically the only thing we haven't tried at this point," Naruto points out.
Sasuke purses his lips, the pinched weariness of a long battle on his face. "True."
Sakura hums, eyeing the seal intently. "If we're going to attempt to send anyone, it will have to be Naruto."
"Wait, for real?"
"Probably for the best." Sasuke shrugs. "You'd be the most motivated to save the world in a way that might actually work. My moral compass is too skewed and Sakura's is even more questionable."
For a long moment of potent silence, Sakura stares at Sasuke contemplatively, like she's calculating exactly how much force and chakra she'd need to try and punt him into outer space right now. She blinks slowly, visibly decides to choose peace today, and clinically turns back to the task at hand. "You said this is a blood seal that works by linking a bloodline through time."
Naruto nods. "Yeah, so it'd send you back to a time when your closest biological relative is around your current age."
Sakura taps at the table. "Exactly. Which would be our parents' youth for all of us, around the Third Great Shinobi War. Mine were civilians, so I wouldn't have the right political leverage to bully the shinobi world into peace, and it would be too complicated for Sasuke-kun to pose as a missing Uchiha returning the the village with all this power in hand as a nineteen-year-old."
She doesn't say that they stand the additional risk of only being able to send Sasuke to a time when he'd be the same age as Itachi, which would not only be too make any useful changes, but also incredibly cruel to Sasuke who hasn't even had the time to really stop and grieve his older brother's death.
"No one personally knew either of your parents' families, so it wouldn't be hard to convince everyone you're the Yondaime's long-lost twin or something," Sasuke muses. "He wouldn't be Yondaime Hokage yet, but he'd still have the renown of being Konoha's Yellow Flash and he'd be a popular Hokage candidate already."
Nodding in agreement, Sakura adds, "And you could use Uzushio as a home base if you ever need to. You're our best choice."
They're silent for a moment as they look from the seal to each other, the reality of it finally sinking in now that they have the beginnings of a plan starting to take form.
"Are we really doing this?" Sakura asks quietly, her shoulders slumping ever so slightly like the exhaustion of everything has caught up to her once again. These days, they can only put their burdens down for so long.
Naruto winds his arm around her, letting her rest her head on his shoulder wordlessly. Sasuke watches them, solemn and sad. Suddenly, Naruto feels like he's twelve years old again.
"We're not exactly swimming in options," Sasuke points out.
Sakura sighs. "And if it doesn't work?"
"It's going to work," Naruto states decisively. He pauses. "But, just in case, let's keep this between the three of us. I don't want to give anyone false hope."
"But he's okay with breaking our hearts," Sasuke comments dryly to Sakura who huffs out a tired laugh.
Naruto scoffs. "I don't know what you're complaining about, teme. It's not like you have a heart to begin with."
"You wanna go, dobe?" Sasuke challenges, but there's a smile twitching on his lips and Sakura is rolling her eyes at them, already starting to threaten them into behaving with judicious use of violence, and Naruto grins past the weight in his chest.
It's the last moment of lightness they're going to have before they rip through the seams of reality itself. He settles down to enjoy the warmth of his most precious people for all he's worth.