Sasuke Shippuden

Arc 1: Preventing the Uchiha Massacre

"Now should be the time I actually contact Uzumaki Naruto," Adult-Sasuke mused with innate frustration as he stared at the complex ink seal encompassing the abandoned battlefield before him.

Was someone trying to seal the remnants of the Great Chakra Tree?

Yeah…no.

By the time his messenger hawk reached Naruto and the dobe finally arrived, all this—powerful resource- would be gone, taken, claimed by an unknown factor.

World peace would be threatened again.

Itachi's sacrifice would be wasted.

Sasuke held back a chuckle. Who was he, to rely on Uzumaki Naruto?

It wasn't as though Naruto had been studying hard at seals—despite his currently pathetic attempt to emulate his father's Hiraishin no Jutsu.

Sasuke found that absurd—If Naruto wanted to learn the teleportion trick, he could have done so before the war. Why now during peacetime?

Sasuke also found himself a bit angry—his old rivalry rekindling. As of now, he could teleport by a mere glance of his new Rinnegan, the only one alive after Obito in fact—and now Naruto would soon be capable of doing the same with seals and kunai.

"..No."

I am not contacting Naruto over a mere seal.

"Uzumaki blood does not immediately make you a fuuinjutsu master." Sasuke felt the need to say aloud. "Uchiha Sharingan, on the other hand, can do just that." With that said, Sasuke pulled out an advanced guidebook on seals (written by the genius Orochimaru himself,) activated his copy-wheel-eye, and memorized every line of the book while flipping the pages with hand seal speed.

He completed a thousand pages within a matter of seconds.

Snapping the hardcover book shut and smirking smugly, Sasuke picked himself up from the shade of the oak tree, and approached the war-torn battlefield, reading over the millions of sealing patterns.

"Heh. It's quite simple, I have to deactivate the seal by retracing it," he smirked confidently with his newfound knowledge. He learned what would have taken Naruto and his shadow clones years (mainly due to the dobe's hatred for textbooks) in only a matter of seconds. Naruto will always be the dead last, Sasuke will always be at the top.

There were some formulas he'd never seen before—those were obviously custom, self-invented, or useless and designed to throw an onlooker off track.

Sasuke's Sharingan took in every chakra color floating around the seals, rainbows, lavender, green, red, orange…

It was as through the seal master sacrificed human chakra systems to create this—or it was made by a god, or it might have been due to the special tree parts lying around.

"Whatever," Sasuke proclaimed as he stepped into the center of the seal, weaving a few hundred hand seals in a blur of speed.

"Fuuinjutsu: shitsu katsu!"

The seal started retracting on itself and Sasuke's body movements stilled completely and he couldn't move a single muscle on his body- as if he'd become one with the seal, like stone, and the colorful chakra was fluctuating madly.

Damn, did I screw up the technique? "Tch!" My body is slowly becoming numb. I'm slowly loosing the feeling of my nerves from my toes to my legs. And I'm alone for miles.

At this rate...I'll die.

Sasuke swallowed. He'd lived a long life.

"I might have not set foot inside Konoha for a decade," Sasuke admitted, "but at least I reconciled with Sakura."

"Sure I haven't purged out the elders and political leaders or revolutionized the shinobi system as I wanted," Sasuke sighed, "but at least Naruto became the Hokage."

"I never avenged you, Itachi," Sasuke reminisced, "but at least your sacrifice wasn't wasted." Or was it?

With that piece of doubt in mind, Sasuke forced out his last words as the seal itself crawled up the skin of his body. "I've lived a long life, and loved every second of it; I regret nothing."

And then the body of Uchiha Sasuke vanished, along with any trace of the seal. What was left was a barren wasteland, no evidence of any fuuinjutsu or Sasuke's presence, except some belongings of his.

His black hair, red and purple eyes, skin, legs, bones, anything connected biologically to his chakra system disappeared. Whatever he was wearing; his cape, clothing, sword, and materials lost against gravity and fell to the floor.

Possessions left to rot in the middle of nowhere.

In the center of the lump of clothing was a picture frame.

A blonde boy at the right, a pinkette in the center, an Uchiha at the left, and a masked Sensei towering over them.

No one would believe it was them by the time someone found the picture frame.

Ironically, Sasuke was the only one who still carried the Team 7 photograph around, Sakura and Naruto had long lost, or put away, theirs.

Not that any of that matters anymore- Uchiha Sasuke was dead.

But at least he saved the world?

死亡之神

"Who am I kidding?! I never had the chance to see their faces a final time, for well over a decade!" Sasuke wrung his hands up from his bed. "I lost everything a second time! Just when I finally began to accept them as 'family,'" he started rambling, "YOU HAD TO TAKE ALL OF IT AWAY!"

Sasuke grit his teeth. "Just what the hell do you want from me?!" This time, there was nothing to get revenge on. "What do you expect me to do?!"

He clenched his fists in rage, before realizing his hands were as tiny and soft and weak as a toddler's, and that he was back in his old bedroom- of the same house he shared with his Uchiha family, before everyone of his clan died.

Impossible.

I died.

I should be in Hell. Not here.
...Or is this...Hell?

Sasuke sucked in a breath, his fear rising. There was no way Hell would be like this- This was exactly what he would dream of in an Infinite Tsukuyomi- But that technique was long unsealed, and his Sharingan can penetrate anything, he was certain.

This was reality.

"I'm seeing wrong. I was crying earlier. Now that I think about it, my eyes kind of hurt," he found his voice incredibly childish and squeaky. "I'm hearing wrong too."

Holding his palms into his eyes, he let out a choked gasp as a mass-production of tears leaked out of his throbbing eyes. Trembling, he blinked some more and dried his eyes with the sleeves of the same old dark blue shirt he had as a kid. His eyes started convulsing in pain, it hurt as much as when he first used his Mangekou Sharingan- in other words, he was long used to it, and didn't make a sound.

I have my Sharingan activated, so this is clearly not an illusion.

The last memory he had was of that damned seal he was too arrogant to ask for help in deactivating. And now here he was.

Could I possibly have time traveled?

Sasuke remembered some parts of that seal about space-time jutsu, which he had dismissed so casually at that time. He assumed it was a storage seal meant to seal the Giant Chakra Tree's remains, but it was actually a time-travel seal powered by those tree parts. And Sasuke just happened to stumble upon it! Now it all made sense!

Heh. It was a good thing that I did. If the seal's originator used it to return to the past, he could potentially destroy the world by murdering Naruto and I as infants during low security, or worse. In that case, I've probably saved the world by using all the resources up before he could.

Now that he had no guilt left over what just happened, he could fully enjoy seeing his old family again.

Before he died in his past life, his last words were that he had no regrets. But with this 'rebirth,' he knew he had too many regrets, it was countless.

He did not want his Uchiha family to die. He did not want Itachi to slaughter them and leave.

He didn't want to train everyday of his life and focus on only one goal, blinding himself from viewing the world with open eyes. He wanted detours.

And he wanted to Revolutionize the shinobi system. Naruto had stopped him, promised to work together- but he wasn't the one who became Hokage- It was Kakashi, and Kakashi didn't fire the Elders- he was just a placeholder for Naruto- who became a figurehead for advisers such as Shikamaru to manipulate. It was so infuriatingly annoying that Sasuke had plotted to kill Naruto himself.

An act that would no doubt destroy the world with their vast power scale- and he was certain Naruto wouldn't hold back this time- at least one of them would die a certain death in the process, while ninety nine percent of the world's life force would be wiped out. They were the world's demigod peacekeepers, but it was only a matter of time before the building tension between the two exploded into nuclear war...

In a way, this timing was incredible- ...He was just on the way home to murder Naruto after all- perhaps that act would have thrown the world into chaos and the Sage of Six Paths foresaw such an event, and created that seal specifically on the route Sasuke would take, knowing that Sasuke was too stubborn to listen to reason.

But...being sent back to the past- he could fix everything.

It all made sense.

...

...

Itachi.

A glimmer of pride swelled in his chest as he hopped off the bed, stumbling a bit. All the objects and furniture were higher than his head now. That felt weird.

Sasuke bit his lip as he felt his bladder about to explode. Right, this body probably didn't use the bathroom last night. Swallowing his excitement, Sasuke decided to get that part over with before going to the living room, where his mother and father should be waiting at-

He practically ran across the hall into the bathroom and once in front of the tub, he pulled down his pants, before trying to grasp at something that wasn't there.

?!

Reluctantly, Sasuke glanced down to find that he was missing his male genitalia.

"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

死神