Memories of the Future

A/N: a new year, spring break, and a revitalized muse has brought you the next chapter of this long ignored - but never abandoned - fic. it's the second to last and features multiple POVs. i'm almost not satisfied with it, but it's ok enough to upload, i think.

thank you to everyone who has reviewed and supported this fic. i know i haven't done anything with it in so long, but i've never forgotten about it or those who love it. the next chapter shouldn't be too far behind, as it's really just a conclusion, a wrap up, and a happily ever after.

angelboy: I’m so glad you read my story so closely, but I am never one for details, and a lot of my writing is implication heavy, so many things may not be easy to recognize. First off, the female ANBU guard may be a rabid fangirl that needs looking after (when around other females who are around the Hokage), but she is still a trained ANBU and knows her duty. Second, the Hokage knows nothing about this attack yet, so when the female ANBU goes off to inform him, Neji takes it upon himself to send people home until such time that the Hokage instructs them as to what to do; he does not think the Hokage will call a meeting on the subject, but later, when everyone is gathered in the Hokage’s office, it is implied that Sasuke went against Neji’s expectations and called a meeting. Third, no, Sakura does not know that Yuki is Naruto. It is her character to be harsh with people she likes when she thinks they are being idiots, and Yuki taking off without them is good cause for Sakura to think Yuki is an idiot, thus hitting her on the head to express her displeasure. Now, I am not trying to say here that I do not appreciate your input, but I do not take your confusion as my mistake… just my laziness. But thank you for pointing these things out; if one person didn’t get them, some others might not have as well, and when I revise this entire story, I will take your comments into consideration and add or subtract as I see fit. Again, thanks for reading!

same tags and all that jazz

enjoy!!


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Memories of the Future: Chapter 16 - It's time
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“Naruto.”

Naruto tossed onto his back, sweat dripping down his temple to saturate his pillow.

“Come to me, Naruto.”

His heart and breaths accelerated.

“Naruto!”

Before he could open his eyes, his consciousness was tugged downward, through the twists and turns of Yuki’s mind, before he landed in the damp cavern he’d first encountered.

Naruto blinked and shook his head, trying to shove the sleep from him. Kyuubi stood before him, her face solemn and serious, her red eyes almost sad. He took in her shining armor, gold breastplate glinting in the dull light, swords strapped to her fragile-seeming back. Her long red hair was up in an elegant warrior’s knot atop her head. Her armor skirt was blood red, and her boots were of the same gold as her breastplate.

It went without saying that Naruto was very worried.

“Kyuubi?”

“It’s time, Naruto. They’re coming. I need you to step back so I can use this body.”

“They? The chi masters? But, it’s too soon! I… I haven’t talked to everybody! I haven’t seen everybody! There’s… there’s a lot of… of…”

“This isn’t a vacation! I brought you here to keep this body alive while I gathered the chakra, not to reconnect with these people! This is still my body, and it is time that I took it back!”

She was almost roaring through the deep corridors, her voice reverberating through Naruto’s ethereal body.

Naruto closed his eyes in pain. This was too soon! He wanted to stay here! He still needed to talk with Sasuke about what happened between them!

“Naruto. I am going to make it so none of this ever happens. You will not be taken from your family and they will not be taken from you. You will become Hokage. Everything that comes with happily ever after, Naruto. Now step aside.”

He nodded. It was all he could do. Kyuubi had a jutsu to do that would hopefully set this all to rights.

“Will you warn them? This may all go away, but they still don’t need to suffer.”

“They are needed to fight alongside me. I may have the chakra, but I need to concentrate to wield it. I don’t need those bastards distracting me.”

“Ok.” Naruto took a deep breath. “Ok. Go on. I’ll be right here when it’s time.”

Kyuubi smiled at him – well, smirked; she was still a demon fox, after all – and walked past him.

“Give ‘em hell, vixen.” She turned and winked at him.

~*~

Kakashi couldn’t sense anything physical, but there was still a presence, an ominous air of oppressing evil. He kept his breathing even, and he felt it when Iruka’s breath spiked before evening out as well. He was awake and waiting, too.

“I would suggest both of you getting dressed right now.” The voice was female, but it was dark and sensuous, rippling over his skin like liquid desire. But there was nothing sexual or even teasing about the tone.

He and Iruka sat up together, their eyes widening simultaneously at the sight of their visitor.

“Yuki-chan?” Iruka whispered, but Kakashi knew it wasn’t the girl. It wasn’t even Naruto.

“Kyuubi,” he whispered. Iruka gasped, because, of course, he had heard that Yuki was ‘Kyuubi reincarnated.’

“I need both of you to round up every able bodied shinobi in this village. The men who attacked and killed Naruto sixteen years ago are coming back. An advance party was here recently, hoping to catch one of the Uchiha children off guard. Fortunately, the Ichibi-host killed them. Scarecrow, you know the story, and as much as it galls me to say it, I need all the help I can get.”

“Kakashi?” Iruka asked uncertainly. He grasped Iruka’s hand without looking at him, all his attention trained on the very powerful creature in their bedroom.

“And what are you going to do while we do that?”

“I will rouse the Hokage and make sure he knows who the real enemy is.”

Kakashi met the red, slit eyes head on, trying to find some element of foul play within them. And what he found astounded him; they were dead, tired, almost as if Kyuubi had almost reached the end of his rope, or her rope, and the only thing left to do was hang herself with the rest.

That, and the fact that Naruto trusted the fox, had Kakashi moving from his position on the bed and reaching into the closet for his uniform. He heard Iruka try to call his name before he was grasped and twirled around by a delicate, clawed hand. Fiery lips landed on his briefly – he marveled that she could be so precise with his mask on – and then she backed off, her tongue flicking out to lick her lips quickly.

“Another lifetime, and I might have claimed you as my own, human. For now, accept my gratitude. It’ll be the last time you ever receive it.”

And then she was gone, leaving him blinking at nothing. Iruka came to his side, concern evident on his face.

“I almost want to be jealous, except for the fact that it was Kyuubi, and I have a feeling that whether you were willing or not, I’d lose to her.”

“Let’s just forget any of that ever happened and get on with our chore.”

Iruka agreed, and they quickly changed and left their apartment. Kakashi just hoped the fox knew what she was doing, because he really didn’t want to die today.

~*~

Sasuke was ready for the sun to come up. He’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, but even he didn’t believe in starting the day before the sun did. But sitting on his ass on his bed wasn’t doing him any good, not when the thought of Yuki and his shame kept pushing against the walls of his mind. He needed to do something to keep his mind engaged.

He heard the soft slink of silk against the floor outside his door, but he felt no presence. The air seemed colder, and the hairs on the back of his neck began to stand on end. His door creaked open, and his hand went to his pillow for a kunai he’d always hidden there.

The Sharingan activated and took in the form entering his room, and he knew it wasn’t Yuki. Then eyes as red as his own found him against the wall, and all Sasuke could do was try to keep himself from flying into a rage. There had to be a reason for this unexpected and unwanted visit.

“Pull out all the kunai you wish; they will do no good against me.”

“What do you want, fox? You know, as well as I, that my Sharingan can control you.”

“The Uchiha Sharingan could control me when I was sealed behind Yondaime’s jutsu. All it can do now is entice me to rampage, destroying this village yet again.”

“Demon.”

“Human. I wonder which is more the insult.”

Sasuke bared his teeth. “It would seem obvious.”

“And yet, had I taken a mate in my long years prior to my destruction of Konoha, mine would still be alive.”

Sasuke tensed. His heart ached at the not-so-subtle jab, and he wanted nothing more than to attack the demon before him.

“Do not try my patience. I came here to warn you of an attack on your village.”

Sasuke glared, not believing a word.

“The bastards that attacked and killed Naruto sixteen years ago are nearly upon us, and I have tasked the scarecrow and his lover to round up the shinobi. You need to start the evacuation process and then join our fight.”

“Why the hell should I believe anything you say?”

“Because it is the only way to get Naruto back!”

Sasuke’s breath caught in his throat. When he could no longer go without oxygen, he forced his lungs to work, inhaling and exhaling in rapid succession.

“Get out,” he finally managed.

“No.” Sasuke was surprised by the refusal, though he knew he shouldn’t be. “I need you help to fix this mess that those bastards created. I will make sure that Naruto does not die again!”

“What the hell are you going on about?”

Before he could do or say anything else, Yuki slammed back against the wall, shaking her head as she righted herself. When her eyes opened again, a blue so deep, a blue he hadn’t seen in sixteen years, except for the slightest of shades off in that of his daughter, stared back at him.

“Sasuke, I know what you are thinking, what you are feeling, but you have to trust Kyuubi.”

“What’s going on here? How dare you try to trick me in this hurtful way!” His hand tightened on the kunai, ready to throw himself at the creature.

“Teme!” He stilled, stunned for a moment. “This is not the time to think of yourself! Konoha is in trouble, and the only way for it to never happen is for Kyuubi to do her thing, and for you to step aside and let her.”

“Why are you doing this to me? Where’s Yuki?”

“Argh!” The girl before him pulled at her hair. “There never was a Yuki! It was Kyuubi the whole time. You’ve lived and worked with her for the past sixteen years, and she’s never once sought to do any of you harm. Now it’s time for her to do what she set out to do, to go back and stop me from ever dying, and you’re denying our happiness because you’re too full of pain and self-loathing to have a little faith!”

“How dare you belittle my feelings? I have lived in pain and darkness for sixteen years, missing my gods damned soul! And you stand there and tell me to get the fuck over it, to trust the thing that betrayed me and Naruto and let him die?!”

“Yes!” There was silence. “No. I ask that you set it all aside for now, forget past transgressions, and work with her to save this village, both now and in the past.” When Sasuke said nothing, those blue eyes narrowed in anger, and her hands came up before her breast, moving her fingers fluidly through the motions for a henge. When the smoke cleared, a heartbreaking replica of Naruto stood before him, and his rage snapped.

He streaked from the bed, kunai ready to plunge deep into the monster’s heart. The creature twisted but otherwise made no move to avoid it, and his kunai pierced deep within the flesh presented, blood leaking over his hand. His eyes were locked on the blue ones still staring at him in calm anger, but he could still feel the liquid hot chakra leak from the wound and try to heal it.

“For a genius, you are utterly retarded. This body will do nothing but heal itself, and much more quickly and efficiently than it ever did me, for this body is truly Kyuubi. But while I’ve got your undivided attention, I want you to fucking think!”

Sasuke tried to pull away, but the Naruto imposter grabbed his arm, keeping him flush against the hard body.

“It’s me, Sasuke. Think back to when Yuki first fainted, her strange change in behavior, her knowledge of high level or restricted jutsu, the way she would do things that made your heart ache in remembrance of me. Because it was me, Sasuke; it was me, your dobe.”

“No,” he hissed coldly. But those blue eyes held a power, and he found himself looking back on the past few weeks. Yuki had seemed very different; the way her eyes sparkled for the first time ever, her strange and yet very familiar behavior toward Kakashi, her behavior so much like Naruto’s toward his children, the food she cooked, the pranks she played – because he’d had every idea that Kei was behind them, and it didn’t take much for him to get his accomplice out of the boy – and the sheer intimate knowledge of the individuals involved that had to have been known to pull them off, the strange sense of safety and familiar intimacy the night of their indiscretion, and any other of the odd occurrences since her collapse. And if he thought hard enough, there had been the one incident when Yuki had not woken despite Ayame and the boys’ best efforts, only to snap out of some sort of meditation with the very same blue eyes that he was now gazing into before turning their normal purple.

“No,” he said again, a little more pleadingly, unwilling to even think that his Naruto had been with him and he’d not known nor taken advantage of something he wished for so desperately.

“Otou-sama,” he heard called softly, and he turned wide, Sharingan colored eyes to his open door, taking in his three children with solemn faces, not one of them showing a hint of fear or surprise.

“Please believe him, Otou-sama,” Ayame begged.

“There are things at work here which we could not possibly comprehend, Otou-sama, but there is more evidence than not that this is our Otou-san, and if Kyuubi-san can do anything to change our past so that our future might be happy, why can we not give that a chance?”

That had been the most he had heard from Touya recently, and it shocked Sasuke. His children had indeed known about Kyuubi long before he did. And Kakashi had always been making strange remarks regarding Yuki when they were alone. Something was indeed going on here far beyond his understanding, but did they honestly expect him to believe that his dead husband was in the body of this girl, who happened to be the actual Kyuubi, and not some reincarnation bullshit that the girl had made up… a strange story, almost undeniably impossible.

And yet, Sasuke had bought it, hadn’t he? He’d watched as his son, who looked so much like him in his youth, had stepped before a trembling and shocked Yuki to defend that she was not the monster that she was accused of being, the same way Sasuke’d always done for Naruto, though the blonde had never once been grateful. And then she’d fed him that story that was just slightly off from the truth, but not an outright lie… just like Naruto used to do, though he’d always seen through it, and sometimes he’d let it slide, and sometimes he’d extract some kind of revenge, always pleasurable, in his search for the truth.

He took a deep breath. “Why should I believe you?” he asked quietly.

“There’s no time not to,” was the reply in that husky voice that he’d longed to hear for an eternity. “This village is under attack again, Kyuubi wants to fix everything she and those chi masters messed up, and you have to fight and help us. Besides,” he said, a smirk forming over those familiar lips, stretching those whisker-like scars into that memorable fox mask, “I went through too much trouble to keep your ass alive for you to die doubting me.”

“No, you’ll live, teme. You’ll live because I went through too much trouble to keep your ass alive.”

“Wherever he is, he loves you, and he’s waiting for you, but he wants you to live first, doesn’t he? You have to live because he went through too much trouble to keep your ass alive.”

Sasuke’s eyes closed, and his grip loosened on the kunai, but the Naruto didn’t let him go. “How do I know which memories are the fox’s, and which are ours?” he asked quietly.

“You don’t, because he was with me every step of the way. But it’s something you feel in your heart, Sasuke,” the Naruto returned just as quietly, near his ear, as if it were just the two of them in the entire world. The way Naruto had always made him feel.

And suddenly, he felt like the dobe when he remembered that he could enter into this man’s mind and find out for sure what was going on. He locked his eyes with that of the Naruto before him and then found himself deep within the recesses of Yuki’s mind.

Two sets of eyes turned to him, stunned. Naruto stared at him, mouth agape, while a redheaded woman with nine tails fanned out behind her narrowed her eyes in a glare.

“Oh, great. First, you take over my body when I have something to do, and now red eyes joins us as if we have all the time in the world!”

“Sasuke! What the hell! I was trying to have a conversation with you! You don’t just go and zap yourself into someone’s brain while he’s trying to talk some sense into your pale and stubborn ass!”

The same likeness as the henge ranted at him, but Sasuke took in the subtle differences as well as the very big ones. This Naruto was rounded with child, but it was well covered by the fine fabric of Sasuke’s clan kimono, the one Naruto had been wearing sixteen years ago when he’d died. But most importantly, this Naruto was a spirit, unaffected by jutsu of any kind that he knew of; his Sharingan would see through them all. He walked calmly toward the still raving blonde.

“Naruto,” he breathed, leaning into the man before him, knowing the truth of it all finally, happy to see the man again, but saddened that he hadn’t known before.

Naruto was tense before he wrapped his arms around Sasuke. “That’s a good Hokage,” Naruto crooned, bringing his hand up to pet Sasuke’s hair, and it pissed him off, especially because of the patronizing tone the dobe had used. But he didn’t react. Then the hand moved to his cheek and moved his head into the best position for a kiss. Sasuke hesitated at first, but those familiar lips moving over his own in all the right ways nearly had him in tears as he began to kiss back ardently.

“Gross! Man, I’m almost glad we weren’t subjected to Otou-sama and Otou-san making out throughout our lives.”

Sasuke snapped back to reality and backed off to glare at Kei, wanting to smile after a while when faced with Ayame’s musical laughter and Touya’s amused smirk.

“Yeah, well, if things go according to plan, you’ll get that opportunity, you damn brat,” Naruto growled good-naturedly. Then his smile slipped, and he turned serious eyes upon all of them. “Now, I have to go. Kyuubi’s about to bite my head off for wasting so much time…”

“Never a waste of time, dobe,” he said warningly, more for the fox than the blonde.

“I’ll see you sixteen years ago, koi. And you three, as well.” Sasuke watched as the blue eyes bled to the red, slit eyes of Kyuubi, and he finally stepped back from the figure, taking the embedded kunai with him. The fox form of Naruto winced before glaring at him.

“Now that I’ve lost so much blood and chakra, I guess we can go,” he snarled sarcastically. “I wish I could keep this form, but it would get too much attention from our enemies.” The henge melted away to show Yuki once again. The petit woman sighed quietly.

“Now, let’s go trounce some mortal ass.”

~*~

The Hokage had evacuated the village in record time, with help from the scarecrow and his lover, who had been rounding up the shinobi and warning people to leave simultaneously.

Kyuubi stood before the assembled crowd, her hair tied back but her kimono still caught in the wind. She took a deep breath before addressing them all.

“Our enemies are chi masters from a distant land,” her voice boomed and echoed over the rooftops. “Chi is just as powerful as chakra, so do not, under any circumstances, underestimate your opponents. Their targets will be the Uchiha children, for their chakra has remnants of Uzumaki Naruto’s. The village can be rebuilt, but they can not be brought back: Protect them with your lives, if need be.”

A few shinobi nodded, and Kyuubi looked over the familiar faces of both her and Naruto’s pasts: the Inuzuka, Nara, and Hyuuga clans; Haruno and her boyfriend – the Uchiha wannabe; the Suna shinobi and their Kazekage; the Academy teachers and jounin instructors that had taught both Naruto and Kyuubi; and many others that even she now called friends. And of course Naruto’s family, that had, after all those years together, become a dear family to her as well. That Uchiha Touya was another one she would have claimed as her own, in another life; Kyuubi just hoped he could be happy with whatever future her jutsu created.

Long ago the sounds of the forest had died in the early morning, testimony to the approaching danger. But she was ready, and so was Konoha. Kyuubi turned from the shinobi and stared down the huge entrance gate. The Uchiha stepped up next to her and gave her a cocky smirk.

There was utter stillness, and then all hell broke loose. Animal spirits made of chi surrounded them, and the elemental jutsu were brought to bear. The shinobi crowd dispersed, and the chi masters entered the gates.

It was chaos all around her, and Kyuubi would have given anything to take part in it. But she had a job to do. Bringing her fingers up in cross before her body, calling forth several clones to circle around her. As they fought off anything that came near, she went deep within herself to call up the gargantuan reserve of chakra that she had spent weeks getting together.

Her fingers flew through the signs of her jutsu, never once faltering as her clones popped one by one around her. Then the chakra released, enveloping her body and anything close by in its fiery red light. Her consciousness wandered quickly through the corridors of her mind, finding Naruto waiting, face pale and breathing erratic.

“Here we go, kit. It’s time.”

He nodded, and she grabbed his hand as a dark void appeared in her mind over the seal replica on the far wall. They were sucked inside, and it felt as if she were pulled inside out before it all went blank.


TBC


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how was that? was it ok? is it utter crap? i should hope not. but i've been out of this story for a while, so i might have lost my touch.

sorry for the cliff hanger, but it shall be finished satisfactorily, never fear!

in the meantime, thanks for reading!!