(New Leaf) Apogee 4 (Patreon)

AN: I’m just gonna say, I do kinda dislike this chapter. the beginning drags on way too long IMO, and feels like nothing happens, it just felt like a mostly pointless slideshow that I could have just skipped over, despite the entire point of the chapter being to pull the Elemental Nations more into the fold. It’s just, like, how do I do that without either easing into it while characterizing The Guy who can actually travel back and forth who has had hinted-at character development in the background, versus randomly making a big event pop up to force the issue?

I only really like the latter half of the chapter. The beginning... It disappoints me.

Neighborly Heights Apartment Complex

“What the- what are you doing here Sasuke?” The blond idiot questioned.

Sasuke resisted the urge to roll his eyes. ‘Same dumbass as always. As if he really didn’t think I’d show up after sensing each other.’

“And what happened to your arm?!?!” Kid Naruto– the original Naruto– blurted out after spotting his wrapped-up arm. “It’s all… like, wood-y or whatever, like those Zetsus were.”

“I could ask you the same, idiot.” A glance at his teammate’s own furry appendage, the chakra-made flesh glowing like a beacon to his Sharingan, silenced the now sheepish-looking boy.

“I made a terrible mistake, and I’m paying for it,” Sasuke continued, looking down at his downsized teammate with an amused smirk he knew the boy found infuriating. “What happened to yours?”

His doujutsu burned the nostalgic sight into his mind. Naruto, his best friend, alive and unmaimed– by Sasuke’s own hand at least. This Naruto hadn’t been around to experience the last Uchiha’s final betrayal, not like his counterpart back in the Elemental Nations did. 

Which made it all the more interesting that this smaller blond had somehow managed to lose the same arm at the same cutoff point, and replaced it with a limb that was all but the opposite of Sasuke’s and the other Naruto’s transplanted prosthetics.

Sasuke didn’t have a lot of happy memories in his life. Needless to say, a lot of that wasn’t his fault– Itachi was the one who paved that road. But at the same time, it was him who decided to walk it, his path as a ninja…

It would be wrong to say he regretted it all, but frankly, most days he woke up feeling like he was drowning in a crushing emptiness as he went about his day. It was only his time spent with Team 7 and Taka that made him feel anything else.

“Got in a fight I wasn’t ready for, lost it, got a new one,” Naruto waved off with a chuckle. “Heheh, you know how it is, looks like.”

‘You have no idea how right you are…’ Sasuke thought with rueful amusement.

He shifted on his feet into a relaxed stance as his mangekyou sharingan took in the two smaller people, before fading to his natural black iris, a weight falling off his shoulders. “It’s been a while, huh Naruto?”

It had only been a long time for the blonde, really. Sasuke had seen his teammate not even half a day ago, while eating barbeque.

‘... But in a way though, it’s the same for me.’

Seeing Naruto looking so much younger brought his mind back to a more innocent time that he didn’t normally like thinking about. It usually just reminded him of all his mistakes; of the team that had become like family, just for him to push them away in his pursuit for the power to kill his brother, kicking off his descent into darkness.

This time, all he was reminded of were the good times, untainted by the shadows of his choices.

The Naruto in front of him wasn’t quite as short and babyfaced as he’d been when they were both genin of Konoha, but Sasuke still probably had a good head on him, by his estimate.

“Heheh, a bit over a year, yeah.” Naruto grinned up at him, sitting up so that the being on top of him– a concerningly young-looking girl, Sasuke noted of her appearance before dismissing– slid down until she was seated in his lap. “It took you long enough, ya bastard!”

This time Sasuke let his eyes roll. “Blame your body for not healing faster, I couldn’t sense you until a few hours ago.” He brushed his bangs to the size to reveal his other eye, the ringed, glowing purple orb of the Rinnegan fading back to a normal charcoal black iris. “I can literally see the outward damage patterns on your coils;” –That, and the near identically scarred fabric of his soul, as compared to the other Naruto– “You did it to yourself with that reckless stunt of yours, idiot.”

“He’s not an idiot.”

Sasuke’s eyes landed once more on the small inhuman girl after she spoke up, glaring up at him with her cat-like features at attention while she clutched at the blond possessively. She had at least as much chakra as a low-level jounin, and a second foreign energy much darker than her chakra’s pale light blue, with both of them suffusing her body in a way that was more similar to Suigetsu’s water form or a tailed-beast than a flesh-and-blood creature. Those facts, along the cat ears and tail, were all that he needed from his first glance earlier to know that she probably wasn’t as young as she appeared.

Well, that, and the fact that he couldn’t even imagine Naruto of all people being like… that.

“Naruto-kun’s not an idiot,” she repeated with narrow eyes. “So stop calling him that.”

“He’s not stupid,” Sasuke corrected her claim instantly with a flat tone. “An idiot is someone who does idiotic things. Naruto is, and always has been, an idiot.”

No rational person would have spent as much effort as the blond had, trying– and eventually succeeding– to bring Sasuke back to Konoha, after all the costs to their own well-being kept piling up.

“That’s…” The girl paused, posture and expression loosening. “Okay. Fair enough.”

“Oi,” Naruto deadpanned. “I’m right here ya know.”

“There, there.” The white-haired girl reached up her hand and patted his head like a child. “You may be an idiot, but he’s the biggest idiot for that waterfowl on his head.”

Silence.

Waterfowl on my…? What?

“BWAHAHAHAHA!”

Sasuke forced himself to maintain his composure, with his jaw locked in place when Naruto burst out laughing. 

“Heheh, You hear that you bastard? You’re a bigger idiot than me with that stupid hairstyle, duck butt! Heheheh-!”

Sasuke’s eye began twitching.

“-hahahahah-!”

In fact, his eye just so happened to ‘twitch’ in a way that his Sharingan activated, and shoved a genjutsu into Naruto’s head that showed him all of the most embarrassing moments of their childhood that Sasuke would reveal to the girl if blond idiot didn’t stop laughing at his hair.

Beating Kiba with a fart, Kakashi’s Thousand-Years-of-Death, his first kiss.

Interestingly, the girl reacted almost instantly, noticing the miniscule amount of chakra entering her living body-pillow and swiftly breaking the illusion in less than a second, her chakra flowing through Naruto’s body with a natural ease Sasuke hadn’t even seen from medic nin like Sakura and Tsunade.

She was too late though, he got his point across.

“... Ha…”

Naruto trailed off as he was snapped out of it, staring hard at Sasuke with sweat beading on his brow.

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ his eyes spoke with uncertain-certainty. ‘You’ll take us both down if you do.’

Sasuke’s dark smirk said two words, eyes flicking to the clinging girl and back to watch Naruto’s reaction.

‘Try me.’

Only one of the males had a real stake in keeping the forbidden memory forgotten in present company, and it certainly wasn’t Sasuke.

“Naruto-kun, what did he-?”

The girl’s narrowed-eyed stare at Sasuke and her suspicious tone were disrupted when Naruto stood up suddenly, pulling her up to her feet with him.

“Ahahah, I’m starting to get hungry, so how about Koneko-chan and I get dressed, and we can move this into the kitchen for breakfast and catching up, you know?” Naruto’s rushed words came with a forced chuckle as he ushered his female friend out of the room. “We’ll be right back!”

Sasuke looked around the simply furnished living room, listening for a moment as doors slammed open and closed in the floors above, before huffing out an amused breath.

The idiot forgot to even introduce his girlfriend in his hurry, only dropping her name as he pulled her away.

He sniffed once as the central air shut off, and the smell of the apartment became clearer as the air flow settled.

Unsurprisingly, it smelled like cat. There was even a water dish for a pet with the name ‘Kuro’ etched onto it.

One idle thought crossed his mind about the young girl as he waited.

‘... Who in their right mind names their kid “Kitten”?’

(Minutes later)

“You probably already realized, Koneko-chan, but this is Sasuke, one of my teammates I’ve told you about.”

The small kitchen was getting decently warm from the heat of the nearby stove, the smell and sound of food sizzling over the open flame.

Sasuke studied the white-haired, cat-eared girl from across the round, smallish wooden table that took up the central area. Koneko was wearing a white, collared, button-up shirt, with a black trim and thin vertical lines across its fabric that helped define the shape of whomever wore it, along with a black ribbon tied around the collar in a bow. If he were to glance to the right, Sasuke knew, he would see Naruto at the stove wearing a similarly designed shirt without an equivalent tie, as well as well-made gray slacks.

While Koneko was short enough that her chest barely came up over the edge of the table, Sasuke knew from an earlier look at the girl when they came back downstairs that she had on a sort of buttoned gray corset or vest-like thing that wrapped around her waist, trailing off into a pair of triangular tails that laid overtop of her short red-and-white skirt.

‘A uniform of sorts…?’ He thought, glancing between the two of them, before dismissing the thought. ‘Whatever. I’ll just ask directly.’

The real thing of note was actually her soul, as seen through his Rinnegan. 

“And Sasuke,” Naruto continued, ignorant to Sasuke’s thoughts. “This is Koneko-chan, my…”

Sasuke heard the gears turn in his teammate’s head as the blond paused in his scrambling of a pan of a dozen eggs.

“... My girlfriend. Huh.” Naruto’s tone was bewildered as he spoke, turning to look at the girl in question as if he couldn’t believe his own words. She blushed, but threw him a thumbs up and a nod while sipping orange juice through a straw, and he quickly shifted into an almost giddy happiness that let Sasuke literally hear the smile in his voice, as if it wasn’t already plain to see on his face. “Yeah, that’s right! As of last night, me and Koneko-chan are officially boyfriend and girlfriend!”

It was said with a kind of childish excitement that the Naruto he was more familiar with had already slowly but surely begun to grow out of. Both blonds were just as boisterous– the one back home still loud and unrestrained as ever, if a bit more mature with his time training to become Hokage– but the way it was spoken just drove home the visible youth in this Naruto’s features.

Whatever had happened in the time he’d been gone from the Elemental Nations, it had wound back the clock on more than just his appearance it seemed, letting the boy express himself in a less burdened way.

“I can see that,” Sasuke said plainly, before turning to Koneko. “Good luck managing this knucklehead. Trouble seems to find him like a magnet.”

She stared at him judgingly with a dull expression, golden eyes half-lidded as she set her drink down.

“Aren’t you the guy who shoved his hand through my boyfriend’s chest?” She ignored his well wishes. “You’re older than I expected.”

“Yes,” Sasuke agreed without batting an eye, noting her second comment internally. “And the idiot decided even then that he wouldn’t give up on trash like me.”

“Ahhhh, just shut the hell up, bastard.” Naruto stepped in, setting a trio of plates down for everyone and taking a seat between them, though noticeably closer to Koneko. “That stuff’s ancient history. I made a promise to myself and Sakura, and it looks like I kept it, so that’s that. You messed up a bunch, but turned it around and you’re better now. So everything’s fine in the end.”

Sasuke disagreed. He and the other Naruto had had the exact same argument dozens of times, almost word for word, and he knew from experience, both on and off the battlefield, that Naruto would always out-stubborn him when it came to things like this.

But being stubborn didn’t mean the blond was right this time. Sasuke hadn’t even waited for Kaguya to finish disappearing beneath the seal before betraying Naruto and cutting off his arm.

‘Still,’ he thought, ‘It can wait.’

Naruto and Koneko picked up their utensils and began to eat with quickly spoken itadakimasu’s, before the whiskered teen began excitedly asking rapid-fire questions about their friends back at the village, the Ichiraku ramen stand, who was aware that Sasuke had found him, anything that came to his mind really.

Naruto had been in a new world on his own for over a year, and wanted to know how the people and connections he held dear from his old life were holding up. Once in a while, Koneko would chime in to ask a clarifying question about something or someone, making connections between a topic being discussed and some of the stories about our birth village and friends that he’d had told her in the past.

There was just one thing that Sasuke noticed, that neither of the two in front of him seemed to, and even he himself barely caught due to his own hangups with the hidden village system.

It was something mundane. It was something understandable.

Naruto didn’t refer to Konoha as “home” a single time, always calling it by name or just saying “back at the village”.

Sasuke didn’t even blame him. He had a brand new girlfriend sitting contently next to him listening to the two boys talk and reminisce, he had a residence larger than the apartment he used to have back in the Elemental Nation, and he likely had either a job or joined a group that his girlfriend was also a part of, based on the similarly-designed formal clothes they wore. He surely had made other new friends in these places and groups too.

In Konoha’s vernacular, he had put down new roots. Had built a new life here in the absence of the old, whether he realized it yet, whether he intended to or not.

As he realized this, Sasuke contemplated how to begin the conversations that actually needed to happen, not really touching his own food much other than to push it around his plate, half-eaten just to be polite. He’d eaten calorie-dense rations just before coming to this dimension, having stayed up through night planning and preparing contingencies with the village leadership for his potentially extensive absence across dimensional boundaries.

The trip to this dimension was an expensive one energy-wise compared to traveling between Kaguya’s dimensions, and Sasuke was the only one who could currently facilitate it, so it wasn’t one to be made lightly.

He understood that chances were that Naruto was likely here to stay, even if he did wind up taking return trips back to the Nations in the future.

Sasuke would support whatever choice he made. That was the easy part. Supporting the person who pulled him from his darkness was the easiest thing he’d deal with in years.

Getting Naruto to realize a choice even needed to be made in the very near future? Less easy, especially if Sasuke wanted to make sure he didn’t pressure Naruto’s choice too much in one direction or the other. The idiot probably thought about it exactly once at some point when he started settling into this world, and then put it in the back of his mind to forget about for future-him to deal with.

The conversation died down a little as Naruto started running out of his most straightforward concerns and well-wishes to pass on, and it was clear to him that it was his turn to start asking questions.

A glance at the two, in which he found himself looking down at the top of Naruto’s head for once, gave him an easy starting point.

“Naruto.” Said blond looked at him mid chew. “You look younger than when I last saw you. What happened?”

Koneko’s head tilted while Naruto started swallowing his mouthful of food.

“Younger?” She questioned, studying her boyfriend’s features curiously. “You said he got shorter earlier, right? Is that it?”

“More than that,” Sasuke half-denied.

“Ehm-” Naruto cleared his throat. “Right. Koneko-chan, I was gonna try and find a time for a serious talk to tell you about this stuff at some point soon, especially after everything that went down the past couple days, but since Sasuke’s here and asking, I guess now is as good a time as ever. Koneko-chan, I’m technically supposed to be-” blue eyes flicked up in thought, “-uh, nineteen years, I think? Same age as this broody prick. I haven’t thought about it in a while.”

“Oh. Okay.” She blinked in curious interest, but that was the end of her reaction.

“... ‘Okay’? That’s it?” Naruto blinked in surprise, himself.

“Mm.” She nodded once. “You mentioned a couple months ago that some weird time stuff happened when you arrived in Kuoh. You said it’s why your records list your birthday as May 17th, even though it’s actually October 10th.”

Naruto scratched his head. “Did I say something like that…?” He shrugged. “Eh, I can’t remember. It sounds right enough. But nah, while that’s true, that’s not really why.” He shifted to look at Sasuke. “The reason I look younger, is because I am younger than before, biologically speaking. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s the case.”

Sasuke’s eyebrows lifted at the words, leaning forward in interest. ‘Since when does Naruto know a word  like ‘biologically’?’

Naruto turned back to Koneko with an awkward smile. “The last big secret, that I tried to tell everyone last night, is that Sasuke and I aren’t from here. I don’t mean, like, Japan or something, I mean-”

Koneko dropped a fist into her palm.

“Isekai protagonist!” She finished for him with slightly widened eyes. Then she gained a thoughtful look. “... A lot of the crazy weirdo stuff you say makes a lot more sense now, actually. The lack of common sense, too.”

“E-eheheh…” Naruto chuckled awkwardly, before clearing his throat, glancing between her and Sasuke. “Anyway, point is… the trip here messed me up bad. Sasuke, the people here call the space between worlds the Dimension Gap, and without a bunch of power or a technique like yours to move through it, it’s bad news for anything and anyone moving through it. Before Kaguya closed the portal behind me, Kurama sent a piece of himself with me, and used up all his energy keeping me alive while my body broke down. From what we can tell-”

Sasuke’s teammate gestured to his height with one hand. “-my body lost enough mass while I was out there that Kurama had to keep rebuilding me smaller-” The other hand pinched his youthful cheek, “-and his Yang energy revitalized my healthy cells’ DNA. I woke up in a hospital a year ago only a couple inches taller than when I left for my training trip with Pervy Sage, and the doctors telling me my bloodwork said I was around fourteen to fifteen years old. And I’m pretty sure my brain chemistry was affected too.”

He scratched the back of his head as he finished, his whiskers scrunching up in a grimace. “Going through puberty a second time has been super awkward.”

Koneko nodded. “I’m almost sixteen, and mine only just started. It feels weird.”

“Hnn,” Sasuke leaned back, silently glad that it wasn’t him dealing with anything as annoying as what these two had to deal with. He also checked off the ‘definitely older than she looks’ box in his mind, relieved he didn’t wind up having to make things awkward by asking her age, just to confirm his hypothesis.

He still had one question remaining though.

“... Who are you, and what have you done with Naruto?” He pinned Naruto with a deadpan stare, only half-messing with the boy. “The Naruto I remember barely understood how chakra worked even after he graduated, yet here you are using the words ‘DNA’ and ‘brain chemistry’ like you know what you’re talking about.”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean!”

Naruto wasn’t dumb. Sasuke knew that. But he also knew that Naruto and ‘higher learning’ went together worse than Orochimaru and ‘ethics’. The blond hated learning stuff unrelated to being a ninja. Even his training to be the Hokage was enough intellectual work to get the blond groaning while he put in the work.

“You know exactly what I mean, dobe.”

“Yeah, well, turns out splitting my damn soul had some side effects, ya know? I’ve been reading a lot of books, doing research on stuff, ya know!? So many books!! So many…”

“Hn, if you say so.” Sasuke mockingly rolled his eyes and lifted a glass of water to sip, ignoring Naruto’s

After watching the two argue, with Sasuke clearly just riling up his old friend, Koneko decided to stick up for her boyfriend by interjecting. “Actually, he’s at the top of our class in biology. He outscored all the upper years in the high school division of our school during the subject’s quarter-finals, too. Still sucks in math and history, though.”

Sasuke choked, spitting his water back into his cup as he coughed.

“Tuh-! T-top… of class?” He bit out with a rasp. ‘School?? Naruto?!’

To get top of his class in a book-learning subject, even if it was just in a single one…

‘Who the hell got him to sit still long enough for that?! Let alone convincing him to go to school again in the first place!’

(Later)

After being regaled with the details of the de-aged blond’s life choices up until this point– including his vow to his mother’s chakra ghost, which explained the school thing more than anything else– Sasuke left the new couple to their own devices, and spent a bit of time putting his two doujutsu to use doing some reconnaissance in the town, taking a look around after the attack he’d been told it had suffered.

The damage wasn’t extensive outside of a few notable hot zones, with most of those being away from the actual population centers, but it was clear to his eyes that there were many places where small, short, low powered fights had occurred outside the obvious. Plenty of chipped roads and sidewalks, small chunks carved out of building facades, and other minor rubble scattered across maybe one rooftop out of every few dozen. Remarkably few windows he’d seen were actually shattered, given the other structural damage visible.

The main thing that concerned him though was the spot in the center of the town that flickered with remnants of Kurama’s chakra.

From the brief rundown of the battle, and the basic details of this world’s factions that were involved, he knew that there were only five locations where that energy should be present. To the south, where multiple large craters and a damaged school property lay, was the strongest concentration by far.

Then even further south, all the way to the east, the north, the west, each cardinal direction should have some traces due to a barrier the local monk-equivalents had erected.

But his eyes saw none of it in those last four directions. Only traces at a roughly central area in the approximate center of town.

Sasuke glanced a few blocks away from the ten story building he stood atop for his surveying, seeing something from the corner of his eye that made him pause and double-take.

A seemingly average black bear of all things had the upper half of its body peeking out from behind an alleyway dumpster… clumsily aiming a hand-held video camera up at him with its paws.

‘What the…’ His lips involuntarily opened in bafflement at the sight, before he registered that the bear seemed to have more chakra than the average civilian he’d seen walking around. The black bear seemed to realize it’d been noticed, and looked up from the camera to wave directly at him. It froze a second later, and jumped into the dumpster just before a side door to one of the buildings opened up, and a man walked out with a trash bag.

The bear pretended to be startled out of digging through the trash, and ran away on all fours with the camera in its jaws when the human freaked out and stumbled away.

“Hn.” Sasuke dismissed the odd sight. ‘Must’ve been one of the local youkai.’

The veil of secrecy he’d been told this world operated under was almost understandable to him as a ninja himself, but at the same time completely incomprehensible. Shinobi and chakra were facts of life itself back home, even to the farmers and sailors and merchants who’d likely go their whole lives without knowingly encountering a ninja. He couldn’t imagine the lengths the hidden villages would have to take to actually remain hidden.

This world, on the flipside, seemed to have a lot more relevant factions and intelligent species than back home, yet they were all somehow handling it mostly fine. They also had a lot more varied abilities than the standard skillsets of the different shinobi villages or daimyo samurai, and a generally higher level and understanding of technology across the board, so it was for the best that he took the time to get the lay of the land and make note of any oddities that stood out.

Having successfully made the trip to this new world, and feeling where is sat dimensionally in relation to the Elemental Nations via his ability to sense both Naruto’s, it wasn’t unreasonable to think the worlds might make true contact some time down the line; Maybe someone would discover a method of travel between the worlds independent of him, or maybe some unknown party could potentially notice his coming and going, and reverse engineer his method.

Either way, If he wanted to prevent a self-inflicted Kaguya-situation, he would have to be proactive about it; preferably without giving away anything that he could keep hidden to any potential observers.

With that in mind, he decided to start with each of the four cardinal locations where the notably caustic energy wasn’t present. The first place someone might expect an interested party to look would be the places where things were most interesting. He would start outside instead, and work his way in.

(Hours later)

“Tch.” Sasuke clicked his tongue as he discretely made his way back into the center of town. ‘Annoying.’

The four shrines at the town’s cardinal points hadn’t given him anything special. He hadn’t expected much, but it was still a hassle.

The barrier technique inscribed across each location was entirely alien to him, and his Fuinjutsu talent capped at inking weapon storage seals on his wrists, so that was likely a dead end in the first place. Frustratingly, the workers at each site had seemed almost as confused in their inspections as they spoke to each other on radios, so he couldn’t gain much from them. They were largely at a loss to what happened, not knowing why their barrier had acted differently than expected.

The only potentially useful things he gained were his photographic memories of the inscriptions at each site, and the knowledge that, broadly speaking, the clans seemed as in the dark as anyone else would be. Whatever the unexpected thing that happened was, it wasn’t explicitly greenlit by the entire faction. That sort of knowledge could be useful; either to label them incompetent and disregard them, or to look elsewhere for those responsible if the whole thing wound up becoming his problem.

That wasn’t to say they couldn’t have their own Danzo-types in the background doing shady things outside of the spotlight, though.

Putting that thought to the side, as Sasuke closed in on his destination of the tall clocktower in the center of town, he made a quick detour. His Mangekyou spun up in his eye, and he disappeared.

He silently re-appeared in a crouch on top of a building for the second time that day, his arm already reaching for his target from behind.

His target somehow sensed his presence while he was concealing it, and jumped away in a show of fantastic instincts.

Unfortunately for them, Sasuke was a master at catching cats, and faster besides.

“Mra-aaow?!”

“I’ve been told it’s rude to spy on others,” he commented, ignoring his hypocrisy while holding the sleek, two-tailed black cat out in front of him by the scruff of the neck. “I’ll give you a chance to tell me why you’re following those two down there. If I don’t like the answer…” He let the threat hang.

Down the road many blocks away, Naruto and Koneko were walking down the street together, holding hands.

Naruto glanced behind him, meeting the cat and Sasuke’s eyes across all that distance for a split second each, before turning back away and tossing a hand up over his shoulder in a casual wave of acknowledgement.

Sasuke didn’t actually plan to do anything except let Naruto handle it if he wanted to. This wasn’t Konoha, he didn’t live here, and he certainly didn’t have the obligation or authority to actually do anything about peeping toms.

He just wanted his best friend to be able to relax undisturbed for a day after the mess that lost him his arm. He knew the feeling was irrational, but he felt like he was partially to blame for the injury, even though he had nothing to do with it. ‘This time.’

“What’s wrong with keeping an eye on my little sister, nya~?”

Shockingly, genuinely catching him off guard enough to reflexively re-activate his Rinnegan with wide eyes, the voice came from directly behind him.

The cat in his grip looked perfect to his Mangekyou. Not in the true sense of perfection, but in that it looked identical to a living, breathing, cat, down to every strand of fur and even deeper, to the deep but highly controlled well of chakra rolling through it.

It was only with his Rinnegan active, that he saw it didn’t have a soul.

It wasn’t even real.

It was an illusion, layered on top of enough chakra to outdo Naruto’s girlfriend a couple times over, controlled in a way to look perfectly alive.

The ‘cat’ dispersed into mist in his fingers.

The chakra mist smelled familiar. It smelled like cat. Like a pet.

He turned to look over his shoulder, calculating.

“You’re good at suppressing your power, as expected of one of Nyaruto-kun’s friends, but you’re nyot the only master of illusions and space techniques in town, mister duck-butt.” A smirking scantily dressed black-haired woman with black cat ears and two tails seemingly stood behind him, according to most of his senses, and had even more chakra than the fake cat he’d ‘held’. “It’s nyot a good idea to get cocky in this world just ‘cause you’re strong, ya knyow? We have a lot of interesting things on this side.”

Wrapped around her throat, a collar with a name-tag reading ‘Kuro’.

His Rinnegan told him she was actually five feet to the left, and more powerful even still than the new fake. He didn’t react to it, making sure to keep eye contact with the fake her while taking her words to heart, even if the advice was unnecessary.

‘Scent-based. Naruto’s apartment.’

That’s the conclusion he reached. That’s when she snared him.

The truth was, they both knew that the only reason her little trick even worked out, and didn’t end with a blade at her throat faster than she could react, was because she was a friend of Naruto’s. If she’d been an enemy, she wouldn’t have made it five steps into Naruto’s house before the sage noticed her, let alone getting close enough to Sasuke to sneak her smell-based genjutsu into his system.

The reason it worked was because Naruto treated her presence in his home as natural.

“Noted,” Sasuke said simply instead, turning fully and resting his hand on his hip with a half-lidded stare. The first thing she’d said came back to mind, and he compared it to what he’d been told about Naruto’s time here and Koneko’s place in the world.

For all that they talked about their friends in this Rias’s ‘peerage’ that Koneko had belonged to since she was a kid, neither of them ever mentioned Koneko having a sister.

Yet she’d been moonlighting as Naruto’s pet for who knows how long, watching them but never revealing herself.

“You’re hiding from her,” he stated in a low tone. “Why?”

“Hmm~? Well…” ‘She’ put a finger to her chin like she was thinking. “That’s because I don’t want to interrupt Shirone-chan’s first date, of course! Wasn’t it obvious nyaa~?”

His Rinnegan and Mangekyou faded.

The deflection was obvious. She understood exactly what he meant, and the use of an alternate name showed that whatever happened, it was bad enough to warrant a small child taking a new name to distance themselves. She expected him to leave it alone, as it wasn’t his business.

She was half right.

The issue was, Naruto’s happiness was his business, and Koneko’s was Naruto’s.

“When I was seven years old, my older brother murdered our entire clan of over a hundred members, including our mother and father. I was the only survivor.”

Sasuke said it calmly and clearly, while his dark eyes bore into the ‘empty’ space on the roof where she truly stood, not at the illusion of the woman.

“The older brother I had looked up to all my life then put me into an illusion, where he forced me to watch him do it over and over and over again, telling me to burn the memory into my mind, to hate him, to live for revenge and grow strong, so that when I finally sought him out to avenge our family, he could have a challenge that would test the limits of his abilities.”

He could still remember the night, his parent’s’ faces crystal clear in Itachi’s shared memory as they solemnly let him cut them down on the tatami.

She’d stopped maintaining the illusion, and the real Kuro, if that was even her name, was staring with wide open eyes at him, lips ever so slightly parted in surprise.

“When I finally killed him, I learned that he’d killed our family to stop them from performing a coup, preventing even more bloodshed. He’d spared me because I was the only one he couldn’t bring himself to kill, and tortured me so I would become strong enough to kill him, because that meant I’d be strong enough to survive what our enemies would throw at me.”

Half of him still loved Itachi, still saw him as his tortured older brother who gave up everything and more in order to protect the two things he loved the most; Konoha and Sasuke himself.

“When I killed him, I had already lost most of the things I cherished in my life. After I learned the truth, I was on the path to losing everything.”

The other half, the one that had been re-emerging as he was forced to confront his deepest thoughts through his therapy, hated the dead man for being the root of almost all the suffering he’d been through, for putting him on a path that would have had him killing his best friend if he’d been just a little bit stronger, or Naruto a little bit weaker.

The only thing that saved him in the end was the one real connection he’d had left, the bridge he’d tried the hardest to burn, that just refused to turn to ash.

“...” Kuro stared at him with a deep frown, eyes intense and posture shifting defensively like she was a moment away from bolting.

And Sasuke…

“...” The fingers on his prosthetic twitched minutely

… he had gotten a bit carried away with his little monologue.

He didn’t mean to say that much. Just say something shocking, tie in how good intentions didn’t mean anything if the things you cared about wind up self-destructing because of you, and be done with it. Plant the seed now, for Naruto to take over later on.

It was his damn cat after all.

“... Don’t ruin your sister’s life by trying to make it better. Naruto shouldn’t have to be the one to clean up our messes.”

‘There, point made,’ he thought as his Mangekyou swirled and space swallowed him up, suddenly leaving the woman alone on the roof as he retreated. ‘... How does Naruto do that so often? It’s exhausting.’

(Late at night)

One of the last things he wanted to check in on, and easily the most dangerous, were the half-a-dozen presences that individually outshone literally every other being in the town combined, excluding Naruto and arguably himself. At least two of them were more powerful than himself outright, though how well they used their power remained to be seen. He wouldn’t bet on them being anywhere near as bad as Kaguya had been, but you never know.

The fact that they were all gathered together and had been for the entire day was just one of the reasons he’d been putting it off.

Another was because he decided to take a quick power nap in Naruto’s guest bedroom. he didn’t need it to function, he could stay operate for another twenty-four hours if he truly needed to, but he’d already been awake for thirty-six hours at this point; he’d rather not risk getting sloppy when infiltrating a meeting between leaders of a foreign world. It would make future diplomatic relations infinitely harder if they discovered him listening in before he was ready to reveal himself.

“Tch,” he clicked his teeth in a similar manner to earlier in the day. ‘Politics are such a damn annoyance.’

As messed up as his head was before and during the war, he missed being able to just pick an objective for himself and go do it, no questions asked other than who and where.

The group of faction leaders were a few minutes away from getting back to their meeting room after a dinner break, which would be the single-best moment to infiltrate. The security for the room was at its highest while they were gone, likely to prevent exactly what he was going to do from occurring while no one was there to notice. The security was at its lowest right as they left, and right as they would enter, but they’d be the most personally on guard for such attempts.

The best time, then, was before the security barriers had finished raising, and after everyone had entered and taken their seats, when they were already unconsciously letting their guards down.

He stood on top of Garuda, his hawk summon, as they flew high in the air against the dark night sky, without even a wisp of chakra escaping them. Far enough away that even his Sharingan and Rinnegan both had trouble making out the academy building, Sasuke Flickered his chakra a couple times as a signal for his teammate. After waiting for a few moments, he was just about to open the smallest gap in the fabric of space he could, and let the tiniest thread of chakra slip through to poke Naruto, but he sensed a response just before doing so.

A blond shadow clone was careening in an arc through the air less than a minute later, his momentum bleeding to a slow, whisper-soft landing on Garuda’s back beside him in a crouch.

“What’s up?” Naruto stood, slipping his hands behind his head and peering down over the edge of the giant hawk summons' body. “Something going on in the factions’ meeting we need to talk about?”

Casual, but to the point. He was taking Sasuke’s call for him seriously, but not expecting another shoe to drop, like another attack or something.

Sasuke nodded.

“If travel between our worlds becomes normal, treaties and agreements will need to be made,” Sasuke explained. “I need to know as much as I can about these factions and their leaders before this happens, so that you, the other you, can be prepared to negotiate the best deals for Konoha and our world that we can.” Naruto nodded to show he was following along.

Sasuke glanced down at that monstrous presence that stood just above Naruto’s own still-recovering power, walking towards the meeting room.

“I need to get into that meeting in a few moments. I want your help getting me in, using-” -your sage mode to hide my techniques presence, is what he was going to say.

“Okay, done.” Naruto interrupted him.

“What-?”

“Come on, let’s go!”

“Wait, no, Naruto you-”

Naruto grabbed his shoulder, forcing him along for the ride as a golden cloak appeared around the two for a split second, and within the moment, they were standing beside a large oval table in a warmly lit and furnished lounge room.

‘-dumbass!’

He kept the last part in his mind, because he was already staring with exasperated eyes at the crimson-haired man in the doorway, who was looking at the two shinobi in surprise. The idiot next to him winced and clutched his stomach from the sudden strain he’d placed on his network, before looking up and grinning at the currently most powerful person in the town.

“Yo! You must be Rias’s brother! I’m Naruto and this is my teammate Sasuke, can we join you guys?”

Sasuke resisted the urge to palm his face as a short woman with black twintails and pink and frilly clothing poked her head out from behind the redhead excitedly. “You’re the ninja we’ve heard So-tan★ and Ria-tan★ talk so much about?! So cool~! Feel free!”

Sasuke sighed.

Apparently there were now three idiots in the room.

And he was one of them, for going to Naruto for help spying on people who he already had connections to.