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On his hands and knees, his head down, he tried to make sense of the last twenty-four hours. He was slow to piece everything together, but he eventually remembered the messy seal Naruto had hurriedly thrown together, hoping, praying, that they could master time travel and fix everything they’d done wrong, to correct every mistake they’d made throughout their lives. He heard a cough come from somewhere to his left, so he forced himself to lift his head and peer at the man sprawled out next to him on the grass. He saw blood running from Naruto’s nose; otherwise, the man seemed perfectly fine. Sasuke gave up on getting to his feet and simply fell onto the grass, face buried in the greenery. He was exhausted, both of them were exhausted, and he didn’t think an extra ten minutes trying to gather themselves made much of a difference to their mission. Naruto covered his face with his hands, smearing dirt and blood across his tanned skin. Sasuke turned his head to watch the man groan into his hands. The seal had worked, but the move had cost them quite a lot of chakra, when they’d had little to spare. He felt like sleeping, but they’d already been there for too long. Out in the open, they were sitting ducks. Naruto moved his hands from over his face and buried his fingers in the grass, clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Dobe?”
“Did we die?”
“We’re not dead, moron. I’d guess we made it, even with your terrible seal. Next time you want to do something reckless and stupid, just count me out,” Sasuke managed, his voice hoarse. Naruto laughed, but the laughter quickly turned into coughing, and Sasuke saw the blood slip from the corner of Naruto’s mouth and slide down his cheek. “Don’t die on me yet. I’m not doing all of this on my own,” he managed, still feeling the exhaustion. His limbs were stiff, but he didn’t think there was any lasting damage. Beside him, Naruto stretched, looking like a content cat in the sunshine. Sasuke looked away from him and sighed. “I thought you said we’d come back where we were. We were outside of Konoha.”
“I said we might reappear outside of Konoha. Isn’t that where we are?” Naruto hissed as he sat up, his hands immediately going to cradle his aching head. With Naruto sitting up, Sasuke forced himself into a seated position and examined the empty field around them. “Where’s the village? I don’t get it,” Naruto frowned, eyes scanning the collection of wildflowers that fanned out across the greenery. “Sasuke?”
“Don’t ‘Sasuke’ me. You’re the one who made the seal. How far back were we supposed to go?” Sasuke scrubbed his hands over his face, clearing the dried blood that had run from his eyes. He tried to use his sharingan, but he felt dizzy just trying to activate it, so he gave up. He didn’t have enough chakra. They were stranded, and he didn’t have enough chakra. He felt around for his sword and his right hand touched the sheath. He released a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He had his sword. That had to be enough. “Naruto?”
“Be quiet. Let me think,” Naruto gruffly replied. Around them, on the grass, a perfect replica of their seal had been burnt into the ground. He began to examine the seal itself and pointed to a part that was still smoking. “Five years. See? Five years,” he said, patting at the grass to stop the smoking. Sasuke leaned over to examine the part he’d pointed at and his eyes narrowed. “It’s five. Don’t give me that look, teme.”
“That’s not five.”
“Fine then. Since you’re so smart and you trained with a fuinjutsu master, what does it say, huh?”
“It says ‘founding,’ don’t you know how to read?”
“Of course I know how to read! It says,” Naruto began, trailing off. He squinted at the markings, then moved so he could examine the bigger picture. It said founding, clear as day. He dropped his head into his hands and let out a whispered string of curses and insults. Sasuke didn’t have the energy to kick his ass, so he settled for leaning back on his hands and examining the clear sky. “I didn’t mean to,” Naruto began again.
“Fuck up and get us lost in the past?” Sasuke didn’t look at him. He didn’t want to see Naruto’s red face, whether it was from anger or embarrassment. He didn’t know where to begin, except to sigh and try to plan some way to correct the error. A flock of birds exploded from one of the trees, taking flight into the blue sky. The birds had Naruto shouting, throwing up his hands to try and ward off an imaginary foe. “They’re just birds,” Sasuke said, shaking his head from side to side.
“I knew that,” Naruto replied, acting childish. Maybe they were childish, but they were only eighteen, and they were on their own. They’d left behind two divisions to set things straight, both of them planning to return once they’d succeeded. As it was, the whole plan had been set on fire. “What are we going to do?”
“Fix the seal. We can’t stay here.”
“Right! Just let me. Maybe if I, no. Oh! This can, no.”
Sasuke watched him try to correct his mistake. When Naruto told him to get off of the seal, he forced himself to his feet. He swayed on his feet and reached out a hand to lean against a tree trunk. Eyes closed, he focused on not throwing up, knowing he had nothing on his stomach. Naruto crawled around on the grass, examining every symbol comprising the large seal. Tongue sticking out a little bit, he bit down on it and tried to concentrate, searching for an answer to their problems. Minutes passed, then minutes turned to an hour. Sasuke had slowly lost his patience with the blond. He mumbled that he had to piss and walked into the bushes to relieve himself. He returned to find Naruto tugging at his blond locks, muttering about not knowing what to do. Sasuke knew then that Naruto’s stupid mistake had gotten them lost, and the blond had no idea how to correct the mistake. Temper rising, Sasuke focused on channeling his anger into trying to produce the answer to their problems.
“Kurama says we shouldn’t have played with time.”
“Kurama can shut up, unless he’s going to contribute to the situation.”
“He says ‘fuck you, Uchiha scum’ and he insulted me.”
Sighing, Sasuke stood up straight and looked in either direction. They had the choice of continuing into the woods or trampling wildflowers as they crossed the field. Without waiting for Naruto’s input, Sasuke turned and began walking into the forest. He heard Naruto call out his name, then he heard someone running up behind him. Naruto slowed his pace and walked alongside Sasuke until they came to a fork in the road. One path led deeper into the forest, while one curved downward, a slope toward what sounded like a stream. Looking at Naruto’s dry lips, he took the right path and they began walking down the slope.
They’d been fighting together for eleven months; they were partners in crime. They needed one another to fight Kaguya; they needed one another to mourn the lost. Losing Sakura had been the hardest. After they lost her, the names and faces seemed to blur together, as awful as it sounded. They’d left two divisions behind to try and finish what they’d discovered they weren’t able to finish, namely Kaguya and the ever growing number of White Zetsu. The seal hadn’t been Naruto’s idea. Before the dead returned to the pure land, Minato suggested that they work together on a space-time jutsu that would get Kaguya to a point in space that would prevent her from escaping and causing more damage. And somehow, that space-time jutsu went further and further from space, becoming all about time travel. They’d been rushed, and Sasuke understood that their hastiness cost them testing time. They were extremely lucky they weren’t dead, and he knew that. He had a feeling that Naruto knew that too.
While he understood that they’d survived based on luck and Naruto’s large chakra reserves, he still blamed Naruto for almost getting them killed, even if he had been the one to volunteer himself. Naruto coming along had been a surprise. At the last minute, Naruto had thrown himself onto the seal and joined their sun and moon hands. Naruto always seemed to chase after him, so he shouldn’t have expected anything less from the knucklehead. He’d volunteered because he’d wanted Naruto to stay and fight, because he was the one with the rinnegan, because he still hated himself for his brother’s death. He hated Konoha. Near the end, he’d fought for his bond with Naruto, with every intention of killing him and taking on his dream of being Hokage. He’d almost made a terrible mistake, and it was another reason to hate himself. He’d almost killed the most important person in his life, and Naruto had no idea.
“Hey, uh, do you know where we’re going?”
“Does it look like I’m familiar with this area?”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
Naruto was unusually quiet. He had to remind himself that Naruto had been just as hopeful, full with nothing but good intentions. Naruto was likely beating himself up over the mistake. Sasuke did want to reassure him that everything would work out, but he didn’t, because he didn’t know what the future would bring. Naruto slipped on some loose rocks and nearly tumbled down the slope into the cold stream, but Sasuke grabbed the back of Naruto’s jacket. Naruto flashed him a brilliant grin and Sasuke smirked at him. It would have been easy to argue with Naruto, to say the cruelest of things to him, but they needed one another, and maybe his feelings got in the way of things. At the bottom of the hill, Naruto dropped to his knees next to the stream and splashed water onto his face, while Sasuke waited for him to get his fill.
“This stream splits off from the Naka River,” Sasuke noted, walking around the water to stare upstream. Overhanging branches and trees leaning over the water prevented him from seeing too far upstream, and then the stream took a turn. The only way he could check his theory would be to follow the stream, but that raised their chances of seeing people, and they were outsiders. “Take your headband off. Konoha doesn’t exist yet. We don’t want people noticing.”
“Do I have to? It means a lot to me,” Naruto frowned, reaching up with his wet right hand to touch the cool metal plate. Sasuke went behind him and untied the headband, then he handed it to Naruto. Naruto squeezed it in his hands and closed his eyes. Sasuke knew he was reluctant, understood that he was reluctant, but the headband was a risk. “I’ll hang onto it, just in case.” Naruto tucked the headband into his pants pocket. “You should grab a drink. Who knows when we’ll get another chance.”
“Hn. Smartest thing you’ve said in a while,” Sasuke remarked, amused by the shocked expression on Naruto’s face. Sasuke bent down next to the stream and drank a few mouthfuls of the clean water, while Naruto got to his feet and stretched.
He still wondered about the way they’d left things, if they should have spent more time talking about their feelings. That was a Naruto thing to do, to talk about how he felt, how he thought Sasuke felt. But the months had stretched on, and neither of them had broached the subject. There was a clear difference between an accidental kiss and the kisses they shared at night. Sasuke didn’t want to talk about it when it meant facing the fact that he cared about Naruto more than he ever thought possible. He’d been an annoying kid, loud and headstrong, and he had grown, but he’d never really changed. The way Sasuke viewed him had changed. When everyone else had given up on Sasuke, Naruto hadn’t, Naruto never wavered. It wasn’t his responsibility to save Sasuke, but somehow, he saved him anyway.
“I don’t want to scare you, but there’s someone coming this way,” Naruto said, staring off into the trees at the top of the slope. Sasuke looked over at the woods on the other side of the stream, his sharingan and rinnegan focused on the chakra signature making its way toward the river.
“Hn. Another person too,” Sasuke replied, pointing into the trees. Sasuke hid his rinnegan with his hair and his red eye turned black again, the sharingan gone. “We should move.”
Naruto opened his mouth to tell him that it wasn’t possible when a very familiar face came into view. A young Madara stood there, his eyes wide as he took them in, clearly caught off guard with their presence. Naruto chuckled and rubbed the back of his head, while Sasuke let out a loud sigh and turned to face the kid. Madara squinted at him, eyes roaming over his face. Sasuke heard a twig snap at his back, so he glanced over his shoulder to find another child on the other side of the stream. Naruto looked between the two, then he took a step closer to Sasuke, standing so that he blocked Sasuke from Madara’s view. It was hard not to see the man Madara would grow into, a psychotic ancestor drunk with power. Sasuke didn’t like that Naruto stepped in front of him, but he didn’t argue. His chakra was low. He wasn’t in the shape to fight, but he would, if he had to, if they had no choice. The kid across the stream walked across the water, using rocks that stuck out of the water. He stopped in the center of the stream and leaned over so he could see around Sasuke and Naruto to the suspicious Madara still inspecting the two.
“Brother?” Madara directed the question at Sasuke, but Sasuke shook his head. “Is this some kind of joke? Hashirama, do you know these two?”
“No way! This is our spot,” Hashirama declared, pointing at the two. Naruto frowned, looking between the two until realization dawned on him. Hashirama. Their Shodaime. The smile that blossomed on Naruto’s face made Sasuke feel some kind of way. “Who’re you?”
“My name’s Naruto U—uh, Naruto. And this is Sasuke,” Naruto introduced them. Sasuke closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d wanted to keep their identities a secret, but he praised Naruto for not blurting out their family names, even if Naruto had been close to ruining that for them. “We’re looking for,” Naruto began, turning his head so he could get Sasuke’s input.
“We were just leaving,” Sasuke stated, taking one of Naruto’s hands and tugging the teen away. Before they cleared the area, the kids let out startled shouts and four people stormed out of the trees. Sasuke saw two Uchiha clan members, and he assumed the two with Hashirama were from the Senju clan. “Just what we needed,” Sasuke muttered, words shared between Naruto and himself. Sasuke tried to pull Naruto away, but Naruto planted his feet, stopping him. “We need to stay out of this,” Sasuke informed him, tugging on both of Naruto’s hands. Naruto, a frown on his face, shook his head. The kids struggled to keep their parents and siblings out of a fight, and Naruto had a tendency to stick his nose where it didn’t belong. Sasuke hated it, but he wasn’t surprised.
“Hey!” Naruto shouted over the adults shouting at one another. His voice carried through the trees, startling a flock of birds. They flew from the trees, sending leaves raining down on them. Naruto looked between the two sides and crossed his arms over his chest, trying to appear more intimidating. “Knock it off. Do you even know why you’re fighting? You’re setting a bad example for your kids. What about what they want, huh? They’re young and they don’t need to see this.”
“Let’s go,” Tajima said, grabbing the youngest boy’s hand. Madara stood there, his eyes on the ground, while Hashirama looked at him with pleading eyes. “Madara,” Tajima demanded, voice firm.
“Wait! Don’t go!” Hashirama tried to cross the stream to get to his friend, but Butsuma grabbed him by the arm and shoved him back onto their side of the river. Hashirama looked on, crushed. Tobirama appeared unapologetic, and Sasuke knew that the boy had something to do with the ambush. The man had a poor record of dealing with the Uchiha, even after Konoha’s founding. “Madara,” Hashirama whispered.
“We can’t just let them do this,” Naruto hissed, looking Sasuke in the eyes. Sasuke pursed his lips, trying to decide if he should do something to interfere. Things had worked out. The clans had united. There was no reason for them to interfere with something that was inevitable, with something that needed to happen. “Sasuke?”
“Fine. Let’s get this over with,” Sasuke frowned. He turned to face the Uchiha, while Naruto stood at his back, eyes on the Senju. Sasuke knew he wanted to fight to kill, but he had a sinking feeling that Naruto wouldn’t do the same.
For a moment, there was no sound in the forest. Sasuke heard the sound coming from the grip he had on his sword, while he felt the familiar warmth of Naruto’s chakra at his back. What they hoped to accomplish was beyond Sasuke. They needed to injure the adults, possibly the other children. Madara and Hashirama looked horrified by the turning events. It took Sasuke too long to realize the tears streaming down Madara’s face, the tears that fell from crimson eyes. The loss of Hashirama did that to him. Their clan knew pain, even then. It was a cycle. It was a curse. Naruto moved first, going for disarming the adult and the young Tobirama, while Sasuke took his movement as a signal to move. Sharingan against Sharingan. Tajima looked surprised to see Sasuke’s red eyes, his reaction time slowed. Sasuke easily fought him, though he knew he had to make the fight quick. He heard someone grunt and heard the clash of metal against metal, then the ground exploded with tree roots.
“A little help here!” Naruto fought to get out of the hold the roots had on him. It was comical, seeing the supposed savior of the world squirming like a little kid. Eventually, he stopped squirming and just laughed at himself. Sasuke took one look at Tajima and then turned his back on the Uchiha. He cut through the roots with swift movements and Naruto fell onto his backside. “Hey! I’m not done with you!” Naruto shouted at the retreating Senju, shaking a fist at them. When Sasuke glanced over his shoulder, he saw the Uchiha were retreating as well. “Damn. I almost had them too,” Naruto huffed.
“Yeah, you really did. Can we get out of here now?”
“I think we should follow them,” Naruto declared. When he turned to look at Sasuke, he saw Sasuke walking upstream, leaving him behind. “Teme! Where are you going? You’re going the wrong way!” Naruto growled, then he took off after Sasuke. Though he complained, he walked alongside Sasuke, leaving the confrontation that had happened behind him.
“Why did you step in front of me?” Sasuke didn’t look at Naruto when he asked. Naruto had a way of showing everything in his blue eyes, the blue eyes that Sasuke seemed to see every night in his dreams. Naruto fumbled for words, until he eventually blurted out what he clearly meant to keep to himself.
“I didn’t want them to hurt you.”
“You’re a fool.”
“What? Hey! I was trying to protect you! You’re precious to me! Protecting my precious people is kind of my thing.”
“Find a new thing.”
Though that had Naruto ranting at him, he turned his head away to hide his smile. He was precious to Naruto, and the knucklehead didn’t know how that made Sasuke feel. He never thought he’d hear the words from anyone, not after the loss of his parents, not after the loss of his brother. Naruto casually tried to take his hand, fingers reaching for Sasuke’s right hand. He had a moment to consider what he would do, just a moment, so he slapped Naruto’s hand away and glared at the blond. Instead of being put off, Naruto smirked at him and grabbed his hand anyway.
“We’re really intimidating right now. Do you want to skip too?” Sasuke rolled his eyes and Naruto seemed to contemplate the offer. Eventually, he shook his head, seemingly content with their joined hands.
“Nah. Maybe later,” Naruto grinned, giving Sasuke’s hand a squeeze. It was different. It had him wrinkling his nose in disgust. But he didn’t pull his hand away, and Naruto never pulled back. They had a lot they needed to talk about, but thanks to Naruto, they had a lifetime to talk about it. “Man, I’m hungry,” Naruto sighed, rubbing his stomach. Sasuke’s brow twitched, knowing it was only the beginning of Naruto’s complaints. They had a lifetime, and the thought suddenly irritated him. “Are you hungry? Sasuke? Teme? Hello?” Sasuke squeezed his hand until he hissed in pain, then dragged him along.