Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or any of its characters, merchandise, TV rights, ect… (I think you get the point.)

Summery

Sometimes in life you have to see things right through to the bitter end, even if you wish you didn't. (Sasuke/Ino)

Like all of my work this is just something that happened to float through the empty void inside my head. Like it or hate it please R and R as honest opinions are always welcomed, as are random acts of worship.

Lamb: Well here it is at last, there were times when I thought this would never be more than a poll on my profile page. (There's another one up there so please vote)

Muse: You and chapters equals an even worse idea than you and the rest of the dross you insist on infesting this section with.

Dedi: Sad thing is he's probably right. This story is dedicated to Iluvbeyblade, because without her nagging and prodding this project would never have got off the ground. So, Iluvbeyblade, this is for you.

Lamb: Also I would like to say a big thank you to my beta reader, Iluvbeyblade.

Muse: On with the fic!

Give me time to reason, give me time to think it through,
Passing through the season, where I cheated you,
I will always have a cross to wear,
But the bolt reminds me I was there,
So give me strength, to face this test of mine,
If only I could turn back time,
If only I had saved what I still had,

From Start to Finish

What had gone before.

Against the orders of the Third Hokage, at the age of fourteen Uchiha Itachi was secretly ordered by the Konohagakure Council to wipe out the rest of his clan. The Uchiha clan were planning to overthrow The Hidden Leaf Village and many saw this drastic step as the only way to avert another war. Reluctantly he agreed, seeking out a third party to help him complete his task before fleeing to a group known as the Akatsuki. Here he acted as a spy, hoping, even though distanced from it to protect the village that he continued to love. For years he waited, hoping that in the end he would die at the hands of his beloved baby brother, the only family member who had been allowed to live.

Four years later, at the age of twelve, Uchiha Sasuke turned traitor and left the hidden ninja village of Konohagakure no Sato to seek out one Lord Orochimaru; the man who had given him the curse seal of heaven during the chuunin exam. He left looking for the power that would enable him to kill his older brother and avenge the slaughter of his clan. For three years he worked tirelessly towards achieving this goal, yet always remaining aware of the hidden agenda of his mentor.

Lord Orochimaru was one of the three legendary Sannin, but a lust and desire for power ran through his blood like a black plague. He cared nothing for any person save himself, believing in the sanctity of no life except for his own. He had only two aims in his life, to collect knowledge of all jutsu and to gain immortality.

To this end he trained the younger Uchiha, intending that when the time was right to take the boy's body and use it as a vessel for his soul. And in doing so he planed to gain access to the Kekkei Genkai of the Uchiha clan. The blood line limit of the Sharingan.

When he considered the time right, Orochimaru began preparations to take over the body of the Uchiha, unaware that his student had been aware of his intentions from the very beginning. A confrontation ensued but it would turn out that the student had far surpassed the master.

The Village Hidden in the Sound was left devastated and beyond repair. It had been created by the Sannin and failed to function after his death. Swiftly it fell apart, its shinobi scattering to the four concerns of the earth, seeking to carve out knew lives and forget past ones. Accompanied by a chosen few and armed with the knowledge and power of three years of training, Uchiha Sasuke once again set off in search of the brother he had vowed to kill.

For almost a year the small band travelled, following up any lead they found. Endlessly searching for the older brother of their leader. They discovered much in that time; news even reached Sasuke of the home he had long since abandoned. For weeks after these crumbs of information came to him, he would be tormented by half-formed dreams of the people he had left behind.

Also in this time, he and his group, Team Snake, would have several run-ins with various members of the Akatsuki, the organisation with which Itachi had aligned himself. One of these encounters resulted in the death of the Akatsuki member Deidara, a missing-nin from Iwagakure. He also learned of the deaths of several other members of the organisation, all at the hands of shinobi from The Leaf.

It was not long after this that Sasuke finally found and confronted his brother. The fight the followed was long and drawn out and bitterly hard fought. During the battle Itachi revealed some of the truth of what had happened the night of the Uchiha massacre. He told his younger brother of his accomplice, revealing his identity as that of Uchiha Madara, though he continued to act as if he had murdered their family for his own reasons.

During the fight Itachi removed the curse seal from Sasuke, leaving him defenceless, yet he survived, as before his brother could take his life Itachi himself collapsed, finally falling to a secret illness that had been slowly killing him for many years. The elder Uchiha died with a smile upon his lips.

Any sense of satisfaction that may have come with his brother's passing was quickly dispelled when Uchiha Madara, the uncle who had helped Itachi complete his mission on that fateful night, revealed the whole truth to Sasuke.

He spoke of how the massacre had been ordered by the then counsel of Konoha and how Itachi had come to him looking for help. It was revealed that Itachi had told his uncle that he would allow him to help him take the lives of their family if in return he swore never to attack The Hidden Leaf Village which was what he had been planning to do before he was approached by his nephew. Further still, he said how Itachi had deliberately drawn out their fight hoping to get a chance to remove the curse seal and there by remove the last hold that Orochimaru had on him.

Almost cruelly Madara revealed that everything Itachi had done was because of the love he bore for his village and for his baby brother.

Distraught and confused, Sasuke left to meet up once more with Team Snake who during this time had been engaged in combat with Hoshigaki Kisame the partner of his now dead brother. The missing-nin from Kirigakure, who was also one of the Seven Ninja Swordmen of the Mist, died at the hands of Team Snake before the team and its returned leader disappeared.

In the aftermath of the hollow revenge of Uchiha Sasuke, the Akatsuki was left in disarray and disorder. With their ranks heavily depleted and the village in which the dwelt in chaos, they were an easy target for their many enemies. Amegakure no Sato, The Village Hidden in the Rain was poised on the brink of civil war, threatening to rip itself apart even as the Akatsuki tried to remain in control.

In a last ditch attempt to forestall an attack, Pein, once known as Nagato, the leader of the Akatsuki as well as that of the Hidden Rain Village sought to align himself with the younger Uchiha. Seeking to use his power to bolster his own and once more set himself and his organisation up as a force to be reckoned with. But still racked with grief and guilt, Sasuke refused the invitation and, accompanied by his faithful followers, vanished, leaving the Akatsuki to await their fate.

Within twelve months a war raged between the Akatsuki and the combined forces of two ninja villages, The Sand and The Leaf. Though backed by the Rain Village they were still greatly out numbered and if it had come down to an all out battle they would have been easily overwhelmed. But many a shinobi was lost in small confrontations.

The Akatsuki though reduced in number were still all highly skilled ninja in their own right, they had attained the states of S-ranked criminals for a reason and took the lives of many from Sunagakure and Konohagakure before they were brought to an end.

It took close on two years and many hundreds of lives before the last surviving member, Tobi aka Uchiha Madara, was finally eliminated. In the wake of the war two villages were left almost on the brink of destruction, but under the guidance of their young but determined leaders slowly began to rebuild. Peace, a dream that had long seemed out of reach was suddenly a very real possibility and no one was prepared to let it slip away yet again.

Yet the road to peace was not an easy one. Though the Akatsuki had fallen, like The Sound years before, there remained those who believed in the defunct organisation and what it had represented. These subversive groups sort to undermine the alliance that had formed between the two hidden villages. More lives were forfeited, more lives ripped apart, before these seekers after destruction were wiped from the face of the earth. Only then could an attempt at peace really be made.

It was at this point, after a silence of almost four years that rumours began to surface here and there that Uchiha Sasuke had once again been sighted. There was never anything to back up these claims and for nearly a year tales were spouted that he had been seen here or there, always alone and never staying in one place more than a day or so. For close on twelve months these stories made the rounds and then something began to change. The sightings stopped being random and instead seemed to start to make a pattern or possibly a path.

A path that was leading back to where everything had started; a path to Konohagakure.

XXXXXXXXXX

They were close now; all three members of the team could sense it. It was nothing tangible, nothing they could put a name to, but it hung in the air like a scent that had almost completely faded. You couldn't be sure if it had ever really been there but somehow you just knew that it had.

"You can come out, I know you're there." The voice sounded bored and as if it was coming from some distance, but it was easy to locate the direction and it was obvious the speaker was making no move to flee.

Looks were exchanged, hand signals made. A male, whose long dark hair fell down his back like a mane indicated that as far as he could see their query was alone. The prominent veins around his opalescent eyes were a testament to just how much he could see; you didn't live long if you doubted what the Byakugan could see. The second male, his golden eyes like those of a predator hidden behind shades, signed that as far as he too could sense the speaker was alone.

The team leader, a dark haired female several years older than her team-mates, let her eyes travel over the faces of her team before coming to rest on the trio of nin-dogs that flanked her. They were posed, every muscle tensed in preparation for fight or flight, their eyes were glowing like embers in a fire. They were tense and alert, and due to the strong bond between the dogs and their mistress were also edgy, but none of them seemed to sense the preciseness of anyone apart from her team and the speaker.

With a slight nod of her head as the only indication Inuzuka Hana began slowly to make her way towards the place that the voice had originated from. Her team, both human and canine, was following swiftly behind her. They moved with all the noise of shadows though the forest, the sliver of moon their only illumination.

At the edge of a clearing they halted, for, standing in the centre of that clearing, looking for all the world as if he had simply stopped to enjoy the view, was the missing-nin Uchiha Sasuke.

He knew they were there, just out of his sight, and even though every instinct in him screamed out for him to use the Sharingan so that he might see where they were he resisted. He hadn't come to fight, not even to talk, but to just give himself up so that he might go home. But he knew that with even the slightest gesture on his part that could be read as hostile they would take him down. And probably enjoy doing so.

"I'm alone and I haven't come to fight." His eyes flicked from shadow to shadow, trying in vain to spot the slightest movement in the dark.

"If you haven't come to fight," a female voice that could only be described as a growl asked, "then what have you come for, traitor?"

And suddenly there they were. What he had thought part of a bush became a head, a tree branch was an arm. From the darkness, they seemed to materialise before his eyes. The two males he could name as Aburame Shino and Hyuuga Neji. The female was unknown to him, but her elongated canines and the distinctive fang like crimson tattoos on her checks marked her as one of the Inuzuka clan. But if she was a dog-nin then...

The low growl behind him answered the question before he could even finish thinking it and the slow, lazy smile that spread over the woman's face only confirmed his assumption. The Uchiha chanced a glance over his shoulder and saw three large dogs, all heavily muscled and sharp fanged, arrayed behind him. They quivered with anticipation, a feral light gleaming in their eyes and he could see how much they wanted to leap at him.

"They won't attack you... yet." Again the same smile twisted her lips. "And so I ask you again, traitor, why are you here?"

It was as he had suspected it was only the control she had over the three large dogs that was keeping them rooted to the ground. And there was no telling how long her control would last, or more accurately, how long she would let her control last.

"Surrender." He said it quickly, far more quickly than he had intended, for he had felt a soft prickle on the back of his right hand and looked down to find several Kikai beetles crawling over his skin. "I've come to surrender. I want to turn myself over to the Hokage and the Konoha Council."

In his mind he had gone over many times the reaction his words would cause. He had imagined just about everything possible depending on who he pictured making the statement to, but in all his time of thinking and wondering he had never once pictured the reaction that the Inuzuka had. She threw beck her head and howled with laughter. It was a cold, harsh sound a counterpoint to the growls from behind his back which only intensified with the actions of the dogs' mistress.

"Did you really think it would be that easy?" The new voice, though deeper, was just as it had been all those years before and turning his head Sasuke's eyes locked with the pulsing pearl like gaze. "That you could just say you were sorry and that you would be welcomed back with open arms? You're not the golden boy you once were; now you're a traitor and a missing-nin which means..."

He left the end of the sentence hanging unsaid in the air only to have his team leader complete it for him. "Which means surrender or not, we could kill you here and now and no one would so much as bat an eyelid."

"But you won't." He had meant it as a statement, but the looks on the faces of the three shinobi that stood before him as well as the continued growling from his back made doubts surface in his mind.

"Are you sure?" And in spite of how far he had come, all the things he had seen and done, there was still something in the very harmonics of the voice of Aburame Shino that made him feel as if someone had just walked over his grave.

He wasn't sure, the one thing he had left out of his calculations was just how much he had hurt the ninja of The Leaf when he had left. Like ripples in a pond the pain he had caused had spread throughout the village. Through his friends, through the Rookie Nine, or the Konoha Twelve as they had become, it had spread but had moved beyond them into their families and clans. Like a poison it had moved through the very life blood of the village.

The other thing he had not counted on was just how long his one time friends would be able to hold a grudge. Instinct won out, his eyes switched from onyx to crimson and in that instant his world exploded. Punches and kicks, bites and scratches, as the three leaf shinobi and the canine companions attacked.

XXXXXXXXXX

Three weeks later the dark haired male awoke in a secured room in Konohagakure's hospital. A blurred image of black, gold and orange resolved itself into one Uzumaki Naruto, the Sixth Hokage, who promptly hit him hard around the head before storming out of the room calling loudly for a medic.

Almost ten years since he had left, Uchiha Sasuke had finally returned to the village of his birth.

Lamb: So prologues go this one sort of got away from me and yes, I know there was not a hint of Ino, but this was just to fill in the back ground, the story so far as it were. But I promise she'll be playing a main roll from now on.

Muse: Promises, promises. And another promise is that we will try and update on the first of the month. The thinking being if we set a deadline Lamb will having to get her ass in gear and write.

Dedi: We can but live in hope and, also, if the need arises prod Lamb with a sharp stick. Or try appealing to her ego by offering up reviews, a shameless plug but at least we know that.

Please R and R I'd love to know what you thought.

Big love and inspiration

Lamanth