Perfect symmetry

Ch. 1 – Hello chase. Hello rescue.

If he concentrates, he could later on recall a great amount of unnecessary detail about the past twenty-four hours.

The smell of the battlefield oddly enough is the first that strikes him; and he finds himself wondering grimly if, even in the brightest moments of his life, the bitter tang of unsettled dust, rotting flesh, and dried blood will ever completely leave him. It's an unnatural smell, he tells himself darkly, ignoring the little voice in the back of his mind that insists on reminding him just how familiar this particular smell had become to him over the years. He notes darkly that he is a bit young to be so accustomed with the smell of Death.

A sigh - because he feels like his worlds is ending, because he feels hopeless, - but mostly because it feels like the right moment for a god damn sigh – leaves his lungs.

The faint aroma of death is usually followed by Despair. It creeps on him gently, almost unknowingly. The memories of realizing they were facing a potential losing battle grip tightly and coil with a stuttering coldness around his chest – and just before the fear knocks the breath out of him his hand grips angrily over that one spot on his ribcage that suddenly feels hollower and colder than the rest of his body – and he realizes with a faint sense of scornful humor that it's his heart. A deep rooted sense of fear settles there; a residue from that faithful moment in which realization hit home that no matter how hard they would try the end game might be just that, the end.

His eyes are shut this time around, and he doesn't sigh because a part of him feels it would be repetitive to meet each shard of memory with a stuttered breath like some love sick teenager. Instead he frowns, because this next one is a bit bittersweet.

Determination - because he was not alone, because they were together, and mostly because nobody threaded to take away his family without a fight. The cocky smiles and defying glares from each and every one of the people that had his back, that trusted everything they had in him, beamed with a faint pang of guilt in the very outskirts of his thoughts for a gloriously agonizing second, because what usually followed their faces makes him wish he could afford the luxury of forgetting.

Destruction.

It goes so very wrong. Only two enemies, and an entire army is made to feel like flies being slapped away by an irate hand; aiming for the sugar cube, but it's always out of reach, flying so close to the target yet swatted away with so little ease. It happens to fast – somewhere in the middle the tables turn, and their perfect little plan has them on the defensive before they could even blink. 'Humiliating.' He remembers thinking angrily, while his eyes follow a handful of men being tossed unceremoniously to their death to his far right. Their backup is decimated, lying limp and breathless over the scattered remains of what was left of the scenery. And he is left for dead somewhere in the front of it all, with a gash in his gut and a faint sense of drowning in his own blood. Broken ribs if he's lucky, maybe a collapsed lung if he's not – he thinks absentmindedly, willing himself to heal only to choke on his own laughter when it doesn't work. Air comes scarcely - he's dying, and a part of him maybe even welcomes it. He's tiered; he thinks he needs to sleep, to just close his eyes for one minute and rest. To regain some strength, he lies to himself. And just before his lids fold over to give in to an eternal slumber his mind freezes to a halt. Because you see, amongst the chaos, the ruin, and the dead, far off into the distance … Naruto sees pink.

And this is where his memory gets blurry.

He remembers just dashing towards her; maybe the mess of pink hair and lightning over a mound of dead was enough to make him dive hungrily into some inner well of strength, because it was enough to get him to stand and push back the sharp pain that shot through his entire body. He allows himself to wince once through a blood filled cough fit before his brows knit and his head shakes angrily; he could lick his wounds after she was safe. And he runs, runs like a madman forwards with no regard for a plan or the inevitable consequences.

He remembers thinking that he would sacrifice anything, everything but not her, never her. The one thing he would not stand to lose. So rushing head first into an obvious trap was the most natural and honest thing his body could do.

Everything after that is more of a blur than an actual recollection, really. More a collection of motion sickness and flashing images – some standing out more than others – while his body refused to move faster towards that sickeningly blood soaked pink hair.

Madara smiling with his hands around her throat stands out above all else, Kakashi charging with a handful of Chidori towards Obito, the giant statue opening its mouth to strike the death blow, and in the back of his mind Kurama - charging forward with a desperate seal forming from his hands. He was so fucking slow. And amid the defending chaos, just before the lights got switched off in Narutos' little world, one distinct sound stood above all: she screamed. It was the kind of scream that carried through the atmosphere with a burning shriek of despair and agony - the kind of scream that stays with you, etched over your brain … begging you to remember -The kind of scream that tore his heart apart just from the simple notion that she was screaming for him, at him.

And just before his world went dark he hoped that God had a sense of poetic justice, so that his soundless whisper would find its way to her through the rumble of the battlefield, just this once.

"Please don't cry for me, Sakura ."

The sound is deafening. It hums with low murmurs in his chest, settling with a vague sense of pressure into the very core of his being. Light is the very next thing that fallows; it spirals around him fast enough to whiten the edges of his vision, and before he can voice a protest the light had engulfed everything in existence. He is left with nothing, surrounded by nothing, staring into nothing. Everything is gone, and he finds that he is surprisingly at peace with that. Every ounce of fear and anxiety seemed to have simply …washed away, and the young man can't help but wonder if this is perhaps the afterlife and the aftereffects he'd heard the elderly dot poetically on about.

A few sparks of light materialize around him, a blue hue perfectly contrasted by the blindingly white backdrop and he smiles when he thinks that they almost look like fireflies. The sparks hum and swirl around him, circling and hovering but never touching. There is an almost playful side to this particular dance, a give and take of anticipation. He suddenly feels like they are anxiously waiting for him to give in, waiting for his approval to proceed further. So when Naruto reaches out and taps one it almost feels like it was the next natural step in the process. He doesn't however expect for the fireflies to touch back.

The sensation makes his skin tingle, almost like a passing current took enough care to ghost over his flesh just enough to get his attention, holding back almost protectively from doing him any harm. It's oddly comforting, nearly familiar. Whatever this was, it made him feel safe. His hand opened just as one of the little lights hovered over; landing gently in the dip of his palm allowing Naruto to close his hand around it.

And then he screamed.

He had no idea how long the pain had been searing through him. It felt white hot and liquid – like his very insides were melting from the intensity. His throat felt raw and spent and felt like he'd been screaming for hours, but he couldn't stop himself; and even to his own ears the sound of his own voice sounded inhuman. His hand gripped the light so tightly his knuckles turned white, his head thrown back, while the long, pale column of his throat lit up by the bluish lights from the surrounding beacons. His shoulders hunch up just as cables of light sprung from his chest in a shapeless, yellow haze. He gasped, his breathing hitching as the lights start to intensify, cocooning around him, sheltering him. And little by little his world goes dark again.

The next time he feels solid ground Naruto notes with a small groan that he was dropped from a fair amount of height onto it. He can't quite open his eyes yet – he has no will to do it either.

The world around him makes itself known only by a cluster of gut-wrenching screams and deafening mechanical sounds. It sounds unreal, unnatural - and he wonders if all of his good intentions had earned him a paved road to hell for all his worth. But the familiar aroma of fresh blood and gunpowder tells him otherwise.

He is still alive - hanging by a thread, but still alive.

A cluster of footsteps halt by his head and he groans in response. Hands clutch around his jacket and he is yanked forward while a string of unintelligible words are screamed his way, and he finds that coughing blood is enough of a response to get the man to stop shaking him so violently. Good, he has enough on his plate to deal with already without a newly earned case of whiplash. Hands go to his neck; one for support and the other ghosting for a pulse before a low voice murmurs something above him, and Naruto finds that even language borders could not hide concern from one's voice. He knew it already though, without the man's worried tone as confirmation – he isn't doing well.

A loud pang rumbles in the background, the sound of debris and rubble coloring the air like an unceremonious crushing cluster falling from the heavens, and the hand under his neck jerks rapidly, startled in response, letting the young boy's head bounce off the pavement with a groan. "For fuck's sakes …" he murmurs automatically, yanking a blood soaked hand to his pounding head - the sudden dull pain in the back of his head being enough of a deterrent to yank him awake from his previous semi lucid, borderline comatose state. He groans again, apparently becoming semi-pro at it, and wills his eyes open. It takes a good minute for the world around him to come into a somewhat visible state, and it takes even more than that for him to remember how to focus properly. His blue eyes blink dumbfounded when he sees the man towering over him; hand back behind his neck, he is screaming over his shoulder and Naruto barely registers that a few hazy people shaped blurs were rushing and scrambling at his bellowing voice. He looks a lot like Bee, he thinks dumbly, with a lot of edge off and a few years of maturity. Heh, Bee and maturity. His eyes then land on the man's attire, it looks like a uniform but none like he'd ever seen before. Only then does Naruto figure that looking at his surroundings perhaps might be a common next step.

It would be cliché at this juncture to point out the startling differences between one battlefield and another, nor would it bode well on the writer to further belittle his readers' intellect with unnecessary adjectives while we wax on poetically on the hero's reaction when being confronted with said startling differences. But let's do that anyway.

To say that he is panicking would be a severe understatement. The world he is met with is as different and as mechanical as it sounded when he was barely holding on to lucidity – and a far cry of frightening contrast to the one he now feels he left behind. The tall disheveled buildings, the flying machines, the uniforms, and the darkened sky. He feels his breath picking up momentum just as his grasp on self-control cracks a bit further. His pulse deafening in his ears, he reaches for the older man above him and clutches the fabric of his navy-blue uniform in a shaking fist. He demands answers, cries for them, stutters over questions and from the look in the older man's eyes Naruto knows. He knows immediately the man can't understand him, but he can't control himself at this point and bellows with as much command a raspy, raw, voice can power that the old man answer him. At this point he imagines he must looks wild to the group of strangers that have gathered around him; eyes wide and panicked, crying and fisting a man's shirt for answers in a tongue they can't comprehend while blood gushes from just about every corner of his body. But fuck it all, he's scared.

The man's hands pin his shoulders to the ground, yelling what Naruto would like to think were reassuring shouts. He says something, it ends on a higher note than the rest of the unintelligible drabble, and Naruto wonders if that was a question or a threat. He goes with instinct and moves to shove against the grip ignoring the increasingly sharp pain in his lower abdomen – bad idea.

Something blunt and hard smacks the side of his head. He hears the man yelling, perhaps reprimanding whoever sledgehammered his noggin and then … fade to black.

Most people when they are knocked unconscious don't particularly dream. In fact for most it's almost like they've checked out of existence for the duration of time it takes their brain to reboot – but not Naruto. No, Naruto dreams, and his dreams are wonderful. In a sick and twisted interpretation one would pertinently argue that considering the amount of carnage the kid had seen lately, when he finally does manage to clock out for a few hours (be it to rest or because he'd been knocked head first into a brick wall - or back of a gun as the case may be ) his mind simply refuses to let him slip back into the same shapeless darkness that surrounds his worries. So it blocks out the bad, protecting what's left of the teen's innocence with a rampant ferocity that shapes his subconscious into his very own perfect world.

So he dreams.

He dreams of his village, of the smiling faces of everyone that he'd ever saved or protected, of his teachers and of his hokage. He dreams of his friends, and their own happy ever after with each other – and he is happy for them. He dreams of Sasuke who in Naruto's mind comes home willingly, with a smile on his face and with his arms outspread towards him. And then finally … he dreams of her. Dreams about her are always a little masochistic, even in the comfort of his own dream bubble. He never dared picture himself by her side before, and even unconscious he always steers clear of it as well. Her heart belongs to another, he would never taint her memory by imagining her by his side – she deserved more respect than that. But these dreams were always more vivid than the rest; while the others may have been colored and animated on their own accord, dreams about this one girl always seemed … downright alive: The perfect color of skin, the perfect shape of lips, the perfect green in her eyes, and just the right amount of pink in her hair. She looks real, too real. And for a second he finds himself wondering if she would feel real as well, just as dream Sakura stretches an arm towards him - perhaps his subconscious responding to this deeply buried wishes. But he's a gluten for punishment, so instead of walking up to that outstretched arm and finding his own answer, he pictures his former best friend walking towards her. The raven takes her in his arms and she sighs with a smile against his chest. She looks happy.

Naruto tells himself that he is happy as well.

Waking up is slow-coming and it takes him a while to realize that the slow murmur above him was very much a voice, and very much female. He winces when she dabs something cold and moist over his brow, and it takes a second for him to register that the familiar sting is some sort of disinfectant. She keeps talking, murmuring – and it vaguely sounds like she might be addressing somebody else, but since no response comes his assumption is left hanging.

A quick self-check of his body is in order, he tells himself before mentally going over every extremity and body region he can think of, or remember. He finds that he's feeling a lot stronger - dare he say …better. The sharp blinding pain in his lower region has been almost completely subdued, leaving behind it a faint and almost dull remnant of pain. That along with a few minor echoes of pain coming from his right shoulder is all that remains. Its fine, he thinks, he'd had worst; hell, he'd dealt worst. He tells himself to relax; after all if they wanted to kill him they wouldn't have patched him up on a nice plush gurney now would they? Unless they wanted him alive for the interrogation - No, that is absurd (and isn't that a word Naruto is surprised of knowing) he didn't sense no ill aura, no evil intent. Just,fucking,relax. You're safe, you're being patched up - they're friendly.

Relax.

He breathes in slowly, allowing his eyes to open so he can take in the image of his healer and …

Screw relaxing.

'She is blue! She is blue! Holly shit she is so fucking blue!' The thought repeats itself like a breath stealing mantra that derails any ounce of rationality Naruto possesses down a gaping pit of panic where he is convinced all of his logic and reason promptly went to die. He's stunned to silence, paralyzed with fear and left with nothing noteworthy to speak of his intellect save from an owlish stare – and that, he thinks, must be one hell of a sight. Because she is blue, a hue that's almost alien looking to him; darker than Kisame, but at the same time more intense. Her lips are a dark shade of purple and her … hair – was that even hair ?- looks like it's almost sparkling. 'Maybe she's from the shark's clan.? Maybe she's here to finish the job? But why heal me?' His mind is steering as far off the track as possible, and he finds that control over his thoughts is nearly impossible; but it's the eyes that make his mind halt and his bones chill. The blue in them is bordering on inhuman, sharp and deep like nothing Naruto had ever seen. He struggles for a second to find an appropriate adjective for the pair of eyes cautiously taking him in. But he has no benchmark for this, and somehow he suspects that nothing in heaven and earth could ever come close to describing this woman's eyes.

He settles for the word 'sapphire' – mainly because being a poor kid from a poor background he'd never seen one, but also because he remembers the people in his village talking fondly about how deep and surreal the blue stone looked in sunlight. He frowns; locking his own measly blues with the woman's and she smiles in recognition – sapphire it is.

A nervous smile tugs at his lips, and by the sudden worried look in the woman's eyes he realizes he must looks like a complete idiot staring into the abyssal maw of eternity itself to her. Maybe a vocal intervention was necessary?

"Um … Hi ?" and he almost winces at how pathetic that sounded, tough judging by the way her brows knit in confusion he is left to conclude with a mixed amount of both disappointment and relief that, just like the people before, she does not speak his tongue. He signs, feeling his patience dangle on a trapeze swing with no net and hell-bent on taking out his irritation by rubbing viciously at the small hairs on the back of his neck. It was an old habit, one he picked up during childhood, and for the most part it came out only when he was nervous or embarrassed. But recently he'd been doing this familiar preset gesture more and more when he was frustrated or even angry. A smarter man would have stopped to analyze the subconscious implications of a shifting trigger for an established idiosyncrasy, but then again he wasn't particularly smart and not very keen on self-study. So he moves to lift his hand, frowning slightly when he finds it doesn't quite happen as smoothly as he'd hopped – in fact, it doesn't happen at all. His frown deepens, something is holding his wrists in place – and when he looks towards the offending captor his browns go from confused to angry and then to offended in the blink of an eye.

They are thin, small, and pathetic; metal by the looks and feel of it, with a frail looking chain holding two loops together. It's downright insulting to think something like this could hold him, and he jerks his hand at it ironically while looking at the woman for any sign of an answer. He receives only a forced smile and what sounds like an apologetic excuse, while her eyes make a discrete gesture towards a far off corner of the room. His eyes slowly follow hers and they finally land on a wide shouldered individual, that is slowly patting, what Naruto thinks is a weapon, by his side. He's sporting a cocky smirk, and if he didn't know any better he could almost swear the man was daring him to make a move.

Well then, enemies it is.

It takes very little chakra to weaken the chains just enough to make breaking his restrains look both easy and dramatic; for which Naruto is grateful – he might be in less pain but his energy reserves are bordering on depletion. It's fine though, he thinks confidently, one shot is all he really needs make it out of the room. After that? Well let's just say he was planning on making it up as he went along (and wasn't that just perfectly ironic). It happens too fast for either of the two strangers to react properly. Before either of them can register it he's out of his handcuffs and glaring intently at the dumbfounded guard. The man's hand twitches by his side, hovering over his weapon, while his eyes lock viciously onto Narutos. The weapon is raised and the man bellows what sounds like threats.

An alarms shrieks somewhere in the background and Naruto realizes that his "make it up as you go along " plan just got up and went flying out the window. Wherever he is, if the intensity of that alarm would be any indication, he has about 30 seconds before the room would be filled with backup – and if patterns transcend culture borders, then that backup would be heavily armed and trigger-happy. Fuck. No other choice.

He has to get out, that's his priority, he thinks sharply while his right hand slowly clenches around the swirling blue ball of his rasengan. The full-fledged energy sphere is corporeal in a matter of seconds, and against his better judgement he decides to ignore the horrified stares that he gets from the Sapphire eyed lady and the broad shouldered man whose weapons seems oddly shaky all of the sudden. But like all good shoot-from-the-hip plans this one goes sower too. He blames it on a sting.

It feels like a mosquito bite in the back of his neck- you know, if mosquito bites would in fact leave behind a spreading numbness that slowly takes over your body. But hey, stranger things have happened; and he decides to fight through it no matter how hard it is all of the sudden to maintain chakra control. The world wobbles, and he chuckles once at how he'd never actually seen it do that before. His legs give out, and he'd figured that crushing your entire dead weight against your kneecaps would hurt a lot more than it does. In fact, it doesn't hurt at all. To be honest he can't feel a thing. He frowns at this before the room spins once, twice and he falls face first onto the cold metal floor.

For the third time in less than twenty-four hours Naruto Uzumaki passes out.

A/N: I understand it is customary to place the authors note at the beginning of the story, however nothing's messing up that formatting so . As for the story, as much as I wish it were self explanatory I feel I may owe a few clarifications. So on that note I am here to remind folks that all the fog of uncertainty will be lifted in the next chapter. Hopefully, maybe. If I figure out how to work the chapter upload system. Seriously, what the hell happened to this place?