New fic: In Their Love
This is my entry for
namikazeai's July contest. I'll be posting it there a bit later-- thought I'd run it by the f-list first.
So. Honestly? This fic terrifies me. It completely consumed my soul. It started out as a simple idea, and grew and grew... it's just around 3,500 words, but that's only because I'm running out of time. I feel I could have made this way longer. This started as a response to the simple prompt, "Sunshine"... and somehow turned into THIS. THIS basically = Lea's CRAPTASTIC take on The End of the Series.
I haven't really edited this at all since this was written incredibly, INCREDIBLY quickly, so I'm hoping you all could point out any technical problems you see to me. This is written in a sort of...experimental style. It's purposely choppy and shifts between perspectives. LIke I said, it's waaaaayyyy different from any of the fics I've written thus far. But, as usual, there's a general abuse of italics (though a lot of it is for FLASHBACKS. Yep, because what's Naruto without flashbackery?); all the stuff that's totally in italics is flashbacks. And there are dashes. Yeah, dashes LIKEWOAH.
Title: In Their Love
Fandom: Naruto
Genre: ANGST. (And romance!) BUT OH, ANGSTTT.
Rating: T (for swearing & semi-descriptive violence)
Pairing: NarutoxSasuke
Wordcount: 3,555
Warnings: NarutoxSasuke (not blatant, but heavily implied). See the above paragraph for warnings about the style this was written in. And SPOILERS. This fic is Post-Canon.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Thankfully, because if this is any indication, I'd butcher it.
Summary: In the middle of a secluded training field deep within the Uchiha complex, fire spirals upupup toward the endless, sundrenched sky. [Post-Canon, manga spoilers. Hinted NarutoxSasuke.]
Please don't kill me after reading the first sentence. e___________e;
In Their Love
It is sunny on the day they hold Uchiha Sasuke’s funeral.
The sunlight rains down upon them-unexpected bursts of warmth that flicker and wane, seeping in through the spaces between tree branches and buildings. It caresses the faces adorning the Hokage Monument, trickles down onto Konoha below like handfuls of gold bestowed upon the impoverished-onto the backs of its citizens as they patch up their roofs and repair their windows, onto the charred, scorched wounds left in the main gate as if a feeble attempt to soothe them.
Spring has arrived. And with it, life is moving forward.
Light even leaks into the Uchiha complex-a bitter irony?-and dissipates certain shadows as they cloak the barren atmosphere. (Yet some shadows, it appears, will linger infinitely.)
In the middle of a secluded training field deep within the complex, fire spirals upupup toward the endless, sundrenched sky.
The scent of smoke permeates the air; it sticks to clothes and skin and hair, invades nostrils, coats the roofs of mouths. It is the kind of smell that is in some way both oddly pleasant and sickeningly putrid; it is a scent of finality.
As she watches the swirling reds and oranges and yellows and blues of the funeral fire, Sakura feels her stomach churn. For a moment, she closes her eyes-feels both the heat radiating on the outside of her eyelids and the moisture threatening to collect behind them. When she opens them again, she looks to her right. She looks at Naruto.
With her eyes she traces the set of his jaw, the straightness of his shoulders as he stares into the flames. She wonders where the boy went, strains to imagine a goofy grin or the brazen lilt of his laughter. She cannot help but feel that this is truly one of the greatest casualties of the war, this loss of innocence.
Kakashi observes the funeral from a distance, little orange book nowhere in sight.
Naruto catches her look of uncertainty and gives a slight nod of encouragement. Sakura licks her lips in quiet contemplation, hesitating. She doesn’t know what to say, or when to say it. He was the one who wanted to do this.
She wonders what can possibly be said to eulogize a cremation of dreams.
“Sasuke-kun,” she murmurs, the sound nearly swallowed up by the sound of crackling embers. She sighs, and inflates her lungs with a deep breath-to suffocate the choked noise that threatens to burst from her chest and rise up her throat like bile. “I… will always regret that I spent so much time in your presence and yet learned so little about you. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if…if I’d been stronger,” her fists clench at her sides. Without her gloves, the feel of each callus is an affirmation of her strength-and the weakness of the girl she refuses to ever be again. “Sometimes I really wanted to give up on you,” she tells the fire sadly, “and in some ways, I did. I’m sorry. But I never, never stopped believing that he-that we-would bring you back home. And…and we did.”
A faint, fleeting smile pulls at the corners of her quivering lips, even as the tears break free and run in haphazard trails along her cheekbones. “For what it’s worth, I always loved you. Now I just know that it wasn’t in the way I was I meant to… it wasn’t the kind of love you always needed.”
Naruto resists the urge to cross the distance between them and pull her into his arms, to wipe her tears and say something stupid, anything to make her smile or laugh or smack him. But he cannot bring himself to look to look in that direction. Not yet.
The silence that envelops them, stifles them, makes it obvious his time to speak has come. There is so much to say, to be said, but the words needed to convey it seem not to exist; anything he had meant to say had left him at the sight of the fire. How to possibly explain the (bastardly) significance of Uchiha Sasuke in his life?
“Sasuke…” he begins, voice unnaturally soft.
Sakura watches the sunlight flitter across his face-illuminating the brightness of his hair, the radiance of his eyes-as the sun begins its descent in the sky. She wonders where the rain is-
-But life is nothing like the movies. There are no howling winds, no violent downpours, no blackened skies in the scenes of life that seem to call for such. The only storms are the ones within them.
Even so, she cannot help but think it cruel of Mother Nature that it had been sunny that day, too.
***
The dawn brings with it a cacophony of screams and the discord of frenzied orders-the roar of fire and the roar of Tsunade’s explosive rage. Frantic mothers scoop up all children they can carry, footfalls ominously thunderous upon the steps spiraling up into the mountainside.
A baby’s wail cuts clear across the bedlam like an echo of the sentiment ricocheting in Sakura’s chest as she runs to join the assembled jounin and chuunin at the gate.
The attackers stand in a line before them, patterned cloaks catching the morning breeze and unfurling like banners of war. There are several ornately-pierced figures, a familiar masked face, a rather… colorful trio. Slimy fingers of nausea grip her stomach as her disbelieving eyes catch sight of Sasuke-Sasuke, in that cloak-Sasuke, in the center of it all-
(Nonononono…)
-Is this the dawn to which their title refers?
(Nonononono…)
She watches with the rest of them as Sasuke stares straight back at Konoha, unblinking, before giving a quick, subtle nod.
And with that, the battle begins.
As his teammates (the nausea twists into a knife in her gut) spring forward in every direction, Sasuke is lost amid the chaos.
Time blurs. Sakura no longer knows what time it is, nor has any sense of how much time has passed since the onslaught of the invasion. She knows only the green glow of chakra humming in her palms and the scent of blood, and nothing else.
Until she hears-over the clash of kunai and explosive attacks from seemingly invincible opponents-Naruto screaming Sasuke’s name in perfect anguish.
Then she knows the sound of a heart breaking.
Sasuke, the masked figure, and the apparent leader of the pierced-nin are gone before any of their senses can comprehend it. Naruto wastes no time in bolting after them.
As more of Konoha's forces attempt to follow, the other Akatsuki members rise to prevent others from following, as if-
Horror claws its way up Sakura’s spine. They’re trying to get Naruto alone-
(NO!)
She finishes healing a chest wound on a fallen shinobi, signals to all the other medic nin that were patrolling the area, and then darts for the gate. She is nearly there when one of Sasuke's henchmen-the girl with the garishly red hair-aims a punch at her head.
Sakura only distantly registers the sound of a wrist snapping in her palm and a pained shriek before she runs like hell after her boys.
She follows the trails of their chakra for what feels like an eternity, over trees and hills and fields. Faintly, she recognizes Kakashi’s chakra from somewhere behind her, as well as that of a few others. She doesn’t give a damn that some of those others are enemies.
When the chase ends, it is at the Valley of the End.
She has only a moment to observe Sasuke, Naruto, and the other two where they stand atop the head of the Shodai Hokage before the enemy attacks. It is a few of the pierced ones ("Pain", Kakashi tells her, as they run dart across wet stone). The Pain-copies are unrelenting in their barrage; she has no choice but to stay and fight.
Once again, Sasuke and Naruto are just out of her reach.
***
“You were always such a bastard,” Naruto says, closing his eyes as he speaks (if they were open, they’d rival the blaze in their intensity). “But you were also my rival, my teammate, my best friend-”
***
“Why are you doing this?!” Naruto yells-and like the water rushing down over the rocks, the sound is carried over the falls.
Sasuke deigns not to reply, and another Chidori crackles to life.
Their attacks collide, over and over again. Naruto loses himself in the fight, forgets about the other two entirely-the only people in the world are him and Sasuke. He does not want to use the Kyuubi’s chakra-he loses control far too easily in Sasuke’s presence-but as the battle rages, his own chakra supply dwindles. The red, menacing chakra starts to churn, builds and stokes the fire thrumming through his veins, starts to break free-
-and suddenly, he can’t move. He thrashes from side to side, looks wildly to Sasuke-but-but-
The other two..!
“Madara, Pain…” Sasuke drawls, almost curiously.
-The Kyuubi is howling inside of him; something else howls inside of him too, upon hearing the latter name. Ero-sennin-
He can’t see what they are doing, but he knows it’s not good. He feels the Kyuubi’s chakra being drained away, siphoned from him bit by bit-
“I’m just taking what’s mine, Sasuke-kun,” Madara replies.
“Sas-!” Naruto starts to yell, but the sound is ripped out of him and replaced with a scream as blinding, nerve-melting pain surges throughout his body. He is dying, he’s dead, he’s…
(Did Gaara feel like this, too?)
Sasuke stands at a distance, silent and not even fully looking at him. Naruto cannot stand that impassive face, wants to punch and kick and break it. He struggles-he can't move but it doesn't matter, nothing matters anymore-he cranes his neck and screams at Sasuke-screams anything that comes to mind, everything he has ever felt about the bastard. The words start to lose their meaning to his ears-he doesn't know what he is saying anymore, if it's even words at all. He knows Sasuke probably isn't listening but he hopes he is anyway, hopes with that same irrational hope he's always wasted (no, no, never wasted; invested) on Sasuke. It doesn't matter; nothing matters. He just focuses on the feel of his vocal cords vibrating in his throat; it is the only sensation (aside from his heart slamming against his ribcage almost hard enough to break through it) still keeping him grounded as the world starts to get fuzzy around the edges and the tang of blood coats his mouth.
“Shut. Up.” Sasuke eventually hisses, and for that infinitesimal instant, Naruto can see a shade of the Sasuke he once knew.
He cannot resist the “Make me, bastard,” that bubbles up from his throat along with the blood.
He blinks and Sasuke is standing right in front of him. Sunlight glints off of his raised blade, and Naruto almost finds himself with the impulse to laugh at the bitter familiarity of it all.
“Sasuke,” one of them-Madara?-calls from somewhere behind him, a warning not to get too close.
Sasuke lowers his blade back down to his side-slowly. Naruto stares at him as Sasuke finally meets his eyes. And all he can think about is how broken Sasuke looks-like a ghost, a fragmentation-
He doesn't understand it, but he feels something…a new source of strength, like...a foreign chakra simmering within him...
“Why do keep chasing me?” Sasuke spits out. “You’re an even bigger fool than I always knew you were. What do you have to show for it? Right now your precious Konoha is falling, and I will finally have vengeance for my clan. You can’t stop me, Naruto. You never even had a chance.”
"Heh," Naruto rasps, "I don't know how, but I will get out of this... I will protect Konoha and bring you back home alive. Ero-sennin and your brother didn't believe me either, but like I told them-"
“My…brother..?” Sasuke whispers.
“-it’s my way of the ninja.” Naruto grins, even as the pain almost turns it into a grimace.
The foreign chakra grows stronger-is this their doing? No, no, it’s not, what is this?-and he feels it seeping through his chakra points.
Those redblack eyes in front of him widen, but he doesn’t know why.
“I will bring you home, Sasuke,” Naruto says again, quietly, “because I promised I would. I made a promise to Sakura. I made a promise to Kakashi-sensei, and to everyone else in Konoha. Hell, I even sort of made a promise to your brother…”
“Itachi…”
"...but most of all, I think I made a promise to myself." He coughs, chest seizing violently. "But it doesn't matter who I promised, really. All that matters is that I promised. And I think by now you should be aware, Sasuke," Naruto's eyes are losing their brightness, his eyelids starting to feel heavy, "that I always keep my promises." Even as his eyes are starting to cloud and blood dribbles down his chin, his gaze is defiant.
Madara is laughing, laughing as his ambitions are accomplished-and atop a mountain carved in his ancient rival’s likeness, no less!
Sasuke is as stiff and silent as death.
A heartbeat, two heartbeats later, and the Valley is filled with a new onslaught of screams.
[CONTINUED HERE!]
namikazeai's July contest. I'll be posting it there a bit later-- thought I'd run it by the f-list first.
So. Honestly? This fic terrifies me. It completely consumed my soul. It started out as a simple idea, and grew and grew... it's just around 3,500 words, but that's only because I'm running out of time. I feel I could have made this way longer. This started as a response to the simple prompt, "Sunshine"... and somehow turned into THIS. THIS basically = Lea's CRAPTASTIC take on The End of the Series.
I haven't really edited this at all since this was written incredibly, INCREDIBLY quickly, so I'm hoping you all could point out any technical problems you see to me. This is written in a sort of...experimental style. It's purposely choppy and shifts between perspectives. LIke I said, it's waaaaayyyy different from any of the fics I've written thus far. But, as usual, there's a general abuse of italics (though a lot of it is for FLASHBACKS. Yep, because what's Naruto without flashbackery?); all the stuff that's totally in italics is flashbacks. And there are dashes. Yeah, dashes LIKEWOAH.
Title: In Their Love
Fandom: Naruto
Genre: ANGST. (And romance!) BUT OH, ANGSTTT.
Rating: T (for swearing & semi-descriptive violence)
Pairing: NarutoxSasuke
Wordcount: 3,555
Warnings: NarutoxSasuke (not blatant, but heavily implied). See the above paragraph for warnings about the style this was written in. And SPOILERS. This fic is Post-Canon.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Thankfully, because if this is any indication, I'd butcher it.
Summary: In the middle of a secluded training field deep within the Uchiha complex, fire spirals upupup toward the endless, sundrenched sky. [Post-Canon, manga spoilers. Hinted NarutoxSasuke.]
Please don't kill me after reading the first sentence. e___________e;
In Their Love
It is sunny on the day they hold Uchiha Sasuke’s funeral.
The sunlight rains down upon them-unexpected bursts of warmth that flicker and wane, seeping in through the spaces between tree branches and buildings. It caresses the faces adorning the Hokage Monument, trickles down onto Konoha below like handfuls of gold bestowed upon the impoverished-onto the backs of its citizens as they patch up their roofs and repair their windows, onto the charred, scorched wounds left in the main gate as if a feeble attempt to soothe them.
Spring has arrived. And with it, life is moving forward.
Light even leaks into the Uchiha complex-a bitter irony?-and dissipates certain shadows as they cloak the barren atmosphere. (Yet some shadows, it appears, will linger infinitely.)
In the middle of a secluded training field deep within the complex, fire spirals upupup toward the endless, sundrenched sky.
The scent of smoke permeates the air; it sticks to clothes and skin and hair, invades nostrils, coats the roofs of mouths. It is the kind of smell that is in some way both oddly pleasant and sickeningly putrid; it is a scent of finality.
As she watches the swirling reds and oranges and yellows and blues of the funeral fire, Sakura feels her stomach churn. For a moment, she closes her eyes-feels both the heat radiating on the outside of her eyelids and the moisture threatening to collect behind them. When she opens them again, she looks to her right. She looks at Naruto.
With her eyes she traces the set of his jaw, the straightness of his shoulders as he stares into the flames. She wonders where the boy went, strains to imagine a goofy grin or the brazen lilt of his laughter. She cannot help but feel that this is truly one of the greatest casualties of the war, this loss of innocence.
Kakashi observes the funeral from a distance, little orange book nowhere in sight.
Naruto catches her look of uncertainty and gives a slight nod of encouragement. Sakura licks her lips in quiet contemplation, hesitating. She doesn’t know what to say, or when to say it. He was the one who wanted to do this.
She wonders what can possibly be said to eulogize a cremation of dreams.
“Sasuke-kun,” she murmurs, the sound nearly swallowed up by the sound of crackling embers. She sighs, and inflates her lungs with a deep breath-to suffocate the choked noise that threatens to burst from her chest and rise up her throat like bile. “I… will always regret that I spent so much time in your presence and yet learned so little about you. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if…if I’d been stronger,” her fists clench at her sides. Without her gloves, the feel of each callus is an affirmation of her strength-and the weakness of the girl she refuses to ever be again. “Sometimes I really wanted to give up on you,” she tells the fire sadly, “and in some ways, I did. I’m sorry. But I never, never stopped believing that he-that we-would bring you back home. And…and we did.”
A faint, fleeting smile pulls at the corners of her quivering lips, even as the tears break free and run in haphazard trails along her cheekbones. “For what it’s worth, I always loved you. Now I just know that it wasn’t in the way I was I meant to… it wasn’t the kind of love you always needed.”
Naruto resists the urge to cross the distance between them and pull her into his arms, to wipe her tears and say something stupid, anything to make her smile or laugh or smack him. But he cannot bring himself to look to look in that direction. Not yet.
The silence that envelops them, stifles them, makes it obvious his time to speak has come. There is so much to say, to be said, but the words needed to convey it seem not to exist; anything he had meant to say had left him at the sight of the fire. How to possibly explain the (bastardly) significance of Uchiha Sasuke in his life?
“Sasuke…” he begins, voice unnaturally soft.
Sakura watches the sunlight flitter across his face-illuminating the brightness of his hair, the radiance of his eyes-as the sun begins its descent in the sky. She wonders where the rain is-
-But life is nothing like the movies. There are no howling winds, no violent downpours, no blackened skies in the scenes of life that seem to call for such. The only storms are the ones within them.
Even so, she cannot help but think it cruel of Mother Nature that it had been sunny that day, too.
***
The dawn brings with it a cacophony of screams and the discord of frenzied orders-the roar of fire and the roar of Tsunade’s explosive rage. Frantic mothers scoop up all children they can carry, footfalls ominously thunderous upon the steps spiraling up into the mountainside.
A baby’s wail cuts clear across the bedlam like an echo of the sentiment ricocheting in Sakura’s chest as she runs to join the assembled jounin and chuunin at the gate.
The attackers stand in a line before them, patterned cloaks catching the morning breeze and unfurling like banners of war. There are several ornately-pierced figures, a familiar masked face, a rather… colorful trio. Slimy fingers of nausea grip her stomach as her disbelieving eyes catch sight of Sasuke-Sasuke, in that cloak-Sasuke, in the center of it all-
(Nonononono…)
-Is this the dawn to which their title refers?
(Nonononono…)
She watches with the rest of them as Sasuke stares straight back at Konoha, unblinking, before giving a quick, subtle nod.
And with that, the battle begins.
As his teammates (the nausea twists into a knife in her gut) spring forward in every direction, Sasuke is lost amid the chaos.
Time blurs. Sakura no longer knows what time it is, nor has any sense of how much time has passed since the onslaught of the invasion. She knows only the green glow of chakra humming in her palms and the scent of blood, and nothing else.
Until she hears-over the clash of kunai and explosive attacks from seemingly invincible opponents-Naruto screaming Sasuke’s name in perfect anguish.
Then she knows the sound of a heart breaking.
Sasuke, the masked figure, and the apparent leader of the pierced-nin are gone before any of their senses can comprehend it. Naruto wastes no time in bolting after them.
As more of Konoha's forces attempt to follow, the other Akatsuki members rise to prevent others from following, as if-
Horror claws its way up Sakura’s spine. They’re trying to get Naruto alone-
(NO!)
She finishes healing a chest wound on a fallen shinobi, signals to all the other medic nin that were patrolling the area, and then darts for the gate. She is nearly there when one of Sasuke's henchmen-the girl with the garishly red hair-aims a punch at her head.
Sakura only distantly registers the sound of a wrist snapping in her palm and a pained shriek before she runs like hell after her boys.
She follows the trails of their chakra for what feels like an eternity, over trees and hills and fields. Faintly, she recognizes Kakashi’s chakra from somewhere behind her, as well as that of a few others. She doesn’t give a damn that some of those others are enemies.
When the chase ends, it is at the Valley of the End.
She has only a moment to observe Sasuke, Naruto, and the other two where they stand atop the head of the Shodai Hokage before the enemy attacks. It is a few of the pierced ones ("Pain", Kakashi tells her, as they run dart across wet stone). The Pain-copies are unrelenting in their barrage; she has no choice but to stay and fight.
Once again, Sasuke and Naruto are just out of her reach.
***
“You were always such a bastard,” Naruto says, closing his eyes as he speaks (if they were open, they’d rival the blaze in their intensity). “But you were also my rival, my teammate, my best friend-”
***
“Why are you doing this?!” Naruto yells-and like the water rushing down over the rocks, the sound is carried over the falls.
Sasuke deigns not to reply, and another Chidori crackles to life.
Their attacks collide, over and over again. Naruto loses himself in the fight, forgets about the other two entirely-the only people in the world are him and Sasuke. He does not want to use the Kyuubi’s chakra-he loses control far too easily in Sasuke’s presence-but as the battle rages, his own chakra supply dwindles. The red, menacing chakra starts to churn, builds and stokes the fire thrumming through his veins, starts to break free-
-and suddenly, he can’t move. He thrashes from side to side, looks wildly to Sasuke-but-but-
The other two..!
“Madara, Pain…” Sasuke drawls, almost curiously.
-The Kyuubi is howling inside of him; something else howls inside of him too, upon hearing the latter name. Ero-sennin-
He can’t see what they are doing, but he knows it’s not good. He feels the Kyuubi’s chakra being drained away, siphoned from him bit by bit-
“I’m just taking what’s mine, Sasuke-kun,” Madara replies.
“Sas-!” Naruto starts to yell, but the sound is ripped out of him and replaced with a scream as blinding, nerve-melting pain surges throughout his body. He is dying, he’s dead, he’s…
(Did Gaara feel like this, too?)
Sasuke stands at a distance, silent and not even fully looking at him. Naruto cannot stand that impassive face, wants to punch and kick and break it. He struggles-he can't move but it doesn't matter, nothing matters anymore-he cranes his neck and screams at Sasuke-screams anything that comes to mind, everything he has ever felt about the bastard. The words start to lose their meaning to his ears-he doesn't know what he is saying anymore, if it's even words at all. He knows Sasuke probably isn't listening but he hopes he is anyway, hopes with that same irrational hope he's always wasted (no, no, never wasted; invested) on Sasuke. It doesn't matter; nothing matters. He just focuses on the feel of his vocal cords vibrating in his throat; it is the only sensation (aside from his heart slamming against his ribcage almost hard enough to break through it) still keeping him grounded as the world starts to get fuzzy around the edges and the tang of blood coats his mouth.
“Shut. Up.” Sasuke eventually hisses, and for that infinitesimal instant, Naruto can see a shade of the Sasuke he once knew.
He cannot resist the “Make me, bastard,” that bubbles up from his throat along with the blood.
He blinks and Sasuke is standing right in front of him. Sunlight glints off of his raised blade, and Naruto almost finds himself with the impulse to laugh at the bitter familiarity of it all.
“Sasuke,” one of them-Madara?-calls from somewhere behind him, a warning not to get too close.
Sasuke lowers his blade back down to his side-slowly. Naruto stares at him as Sasuke finally meets his eyes. And all he can think about is how broken Sasuke looks-like a ghost, a fragmentation-
He doesn't understand it, but he feels something…a new source of strength, like...a foreign chakra simmering within him...
“Why do keep chasing me?” Sasuke spits out. “You’re an even bigger fool than I always knew you were. What do you have to show for it? Right now your precious Konoha is falling, and I will finally have vengeance for my clan. You can’t stop me, Naruto. You never even had a chance.”
"Heh," Naruto rasps, "I don't know how, but I will get out of this... I will protect Konoha and bring you back home alive. Ero-sennin and your brother didn't believe me either, but like I told them-"
“My…brother..?” Sasuke whispers.
“-it’s my way of the ninja.” Naruto grins, even as the pain almost turns it into a grimace.
The foreign chakra grows stronger-is this their doing? No, no, it’s not, what is this?-and he feels it seeping through his chakra points.
Those redblack eyes in front of him widen, but he doesn’t know why.
“I will bring you home, Sasuke,” Naruto says again, quietly, “because I promised I would. I made a promise to Sakura. I made a promise to Kakashi-sensei, and to everyone else in Konoha. Hell, I even sort of made a promise to your brother…”
“Itachi…”
"...but most of all, I think I made a promise to myself." He coughs, chest seizing violently. "But it doesn't matter who I promised, really. All that matters is that I promised. And I think by now you should be aware, Sasuke," Naruto's eyes are losing their brightness, his eyelids starting to feel heavy, "that I always keep my promises." Even as his eyes are starting to cloud and blood dribbles down his chin, his gaze is defiant.
Madara is laughing, laughing as his ambitions are accomplished-and atop a mountain carved in his ancient rival’s likeness, no less!
Sasuke is as stiff and silent as death.
A heartbeat, two heartbeats later, and the Valley is filled with a new onslaught of screams.
[CONTINUED HERE!]