Nocturns III

Midnight (pt. 3-3)

True Ending


An answer at the tip of his tongue, the Boy opens his mouth to answer the Voice. But before he can make a sound, the other boy hanging off his shoulder lets out another groan, and in that instant, the answer slips away. If he reached out for it, he thinks he could have found it again, but as he does not know what it means to do so, he dismisses it.

The black-haired boy's eyes crack open, and for a second, looking completely lost, he looks back at the Boy in confusion. When realization flashes across his face, he leans away from the Boy and rakes his eyes around the demolished scene.

"What happened?" the black-haired boy mutters. He grips his forehead with his hands. "Where's Sakura?"

"He got her too," says the Boy.

The black-haired boy freezes. He turns disbelievingly toward the Boy, who points upward. His arms falling to his sides, the black-haired boy takes a hesitant step forward – and then in a burst of motion, bounds up the tree.

A few minutes later, he comes down holding the mangled body in shaking hands.

They return to the village. On the way back, they run into the masked jōnin. He gives them only a very weary look, and closes the girl's eyes.


"So you're back," says the white-haired man. "What happened?"

The Boy immediately begins his delivery of the recent events regarding the sand boy, and the white-haired man's face grows graver by the minute.

"…I couldn't save her," he finishes, "but thanks to her, I was able to finish Gaara."

The white-haired man nods, and then – to the Boy's surprise – without any further questions, he motions for the Boy to follow him.

Leaving the village behind, they travel a long way away, moving without pause in silence for several hours. When they finally come to a stop, they are in landlocked wilderness. It is cold.

The white-haired man finally begins to speak: "Before Minato died, he inscribed the key to your trigram seal on the stomach of a scroll toad, which is now in my possession. It has the power to both release or reinforce the seal." The white-haired man pauses. "You should know that over the years, it has been gradually weakening by itself. If left alone, the Kyūbi will one day break completely free, and gain complete control over your body."

"A biased fool," the Voice says dismissively. "What need would I have of a human's body?"

"Are you ready?" the white-haired man asks. "I'm going to restore the seal to its original strength now. It will try to escape, but you must fight it. Do you understand, Naruto?"

"Yes," the Boy says.

A deep blue flame flickers into existence on each finger. A complicated pronged seal appears on his palm, followed by a long tail-like seal that extends fully along the underside of his arm. The white-haired man thrusts his glowing hand toward the Boy's exposed abdomen, and the eight trigrams seal appears. His mouth drawn back in his concentration, the white-haired man rotates his hand.

The wasteland fades away, and the Boy finds himself in front of an immense cage, suspended in nothingness. It is the same cage he found himself in when the Voice took over his body, but this time, he is outside of it. There is a white tag with the character for 'seal' where the cage has been padlocked closed.

"Rip this seal off," says the Voice, resounding out from the deep darkness within the cage.

The Boy automatically begins to raise his hand – and then hesitates. "What will happen?"

"I will regain much of my power, and will finally be able to do whatever we want," the Voice answers.

"What will happen to me?"

"Are you doubting me?" the Voice says. "After how I have guided and taught you all these years?"

The Boy doesn't know what to say. For the first time in many years, he is not two, but one, in that empty space, and it bewilders him.

So he asks, "You are my friend, aren't you?"

"What else would I be, idiot boy?" the Voice snarls back.

And so, as he has done so for the entirety of his short life, the Boy listens. The Boy takes a step forward – for a split moment, he thinks he hears someone other than the Voice call out to him, but that is impossible of course – and pulls it off.


Once more, the Boy sits alone in a cage that floats above nothing. There is something different, however, which he notices almost immediately – that is, the space between the bars have drastically narrowed. Whereas he could have easily walked in and out through the space before, now, he can barely fit his arm through.

Coming from somewhere far in the distance, the Boy can hear the white-haired man and a voice that sounds like his own talking. Except of course, he isn't the one controlling his mouth. The Voice is controlling it, using him like a mouthpiece.

"Where is Naruto?" the white-haired man asks furiously, his jaw set and a hard glint in his eyes.

"We've switched spots," says his voice, floating out tauntingly. "Permanently."

"That won't be happening," says the white-haired man grimly. "Not while I'm alive."

"That can be easily remedied," says his voice.

Without any warning, the dark chakra that had been oozing out of his body in waves, detonates. Tails burst out, and his body, straining at its very seams, shoots forward.

A gigantic toad rises out of a cloud of smoke. The white-haired man stands on its back with two smaller robed toads sit on each shoulder. Half of his face has turned red and warts swell out from his nose.

Then, with a single breath, the two entities throw themselves at each other in a battle of proportions that the Boy has never seen or experienced before. What he and the sand boy did in their fight is nothing but a sandlot's skirmish in comparison. With every exchanged blow, sandstorms erupt and craters scorch the earth. If there had been mountains in the vicinity, they would have razed them all to dust. If the moon had been a bit closer, it would have been shattered to pebbles.

But even the white-haired man is ultimately no match for the Voice. He is growing visibly ragged and has started to pant. There is no fear in his eyes, but he will die soon. That is what the Boy feels.

"What will we do next?" he ponders.

After a while, the Voice responds, "Whatever we want."

When the battle is over, his body stretches his hands, pulling the fingers of one hand back with the other. Whatever wounds the white-haired man might have been able to inflict are already all healed, leaving no trace behind.

"What do we want to do now?"

The Voice doesn't bother responding. Instead, his body leaps into the air.


Time passes.

The Boy waits in the nothingness. He stopped paying attention to what his body is doing a long time ago. Sometimes, he thinks he can hear people from far away calling out to him, but the only voice he has needed to hear has always been beside him, so he pays them no mind.

He continues to wait.

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And then all of a sudden, one day, everything fades away into white.


Indeterminate time, realm of the gods

He Who Is and the Creator of All Things peers critically down at the world.

"What has happened here?" He thunders largely to himself.

The beast He had taken pity on has taken over its host and razed one of the mortals' biggest villages to the ground. Looking into the future, He sees that the sudden vacuum in the balance of powers will throw the mortal world into a long era of war and darkness.

Frankly speaking, He quickly tired of the uninspired, insipid fights between the mortals in the time before they had villages. No doubt, the Gods' Board of Literature would reject such a work.

With a great sigh, the Supreme Being reaches out with a hand into the infinite emptiness of space and peels back the dimension. It is an impossibly thin layer composed of an immeasurable number of strands that He will now have to painstakingly go through so as to undo the changes wrought by the beast.

Heaving another sigh, He gets to work.


Indeterminate time

The Boy looks around, and realizes he appears to be floating in midair. In fact, he does not seem to be in any defined space, and there appear to be no limits in this place. It is different from the cage of his mind in which his feet were firmly planted on a surface, and his hands felt walls. Here, there is nothing.

The Boy wonders at how he can still be breathing and seeing when there is no air and light, when he suddenly realizes that he is not there. He has no eyes. He has no body. He is just there.

He is alone, and when he realizes this, he starts to feel afraid.

But as soon as he realizes it, he also realizes that he is not alone. There is something beside him – if such a thing is possible in nothingness – and if the Boy squints his nonexistent eyes, he can just barely start to make out the outline of something vaguely humanoid in shape.

"Who are you?" he asks.

"I am what humans would call a god...the creator if you will," the thing says.

It isn't the Voice, as he'd momentarily suspected. In fact, it doesn't have a voice. The words simply exist soundlessly in his nonexistent mind.

"Oh," he says, for lack of anything better to say. For a moment, it is silent. And then he asks, "What is this place?"

"This is the last strand of your dimension," says the creator. "I have unraveled every other strand, and this is the last one left. Once I have unraveled it, this dimension will fall apart and it will be as if it never existed."

"So what is this place?" The Boy repeats his question.

"It is you."

"Oh." The Boy does not know what else to say. After a few moments, he opens his nonexistent mouth once more. "Why haven't you unraveled it yet?"

"I am unraveling it as we speak," says the creator.

"What will happen to me?"

"You will disappear."

"Disappear? Permanently?"

"In a sense, yes."

"Why are you unraveling this place?"

"There were complications I had not foreseen in this dimension. I am unraveling it apart to weave it anew."

"I thought gods knew everything."

"No one knows everything," says the creator in an almost kind voice. "But we watch, and we learn. And we build anew."

"If you're weaving it back together, does that mean I'll exist again?" the Boy asks.

"No," is the reply, and the Boy can almost see the creator shaking his head. "You were a failure, so to speak. One of countless many before, and likely countless more ahead. And every time I weave anew, the resultant work is always different, even if just slightly. For instance, some prior versions of you didn't break the seal, while other versions of you never got the key. But though I refer to them as 'you' they are not the same 'you' as 'you,' and they too are all gone now." The creator pauses, and seems to look down at something in his hands. "I am almost done. Once this last segment is unraveled, you will no longer exist."

The Boy thinks that he does not like the sound of that, but he is alone. He does not know how to react, how he should react, so he waits instead.

Some time passes, and then finally, the creator appears to stand up. He seems to stretch his arms, as if he has had a long, hard day of working.

"This is it," the creator says. "Are you ready?"

"No," the Boy says, but he is not sure.

"You will not exist, but thanks to your failure, I will be able to remake the world just a bit better. Does that make you feel better?"

"Not really."

"It never does," the creator says with a sigh. "Well, I will give you some time to prepare yourself."


"This is it," the Boy repeats to himself.

There is no reply back.

What will it be like to disappear?

He wishes he could ask the Voice, but the Voice is not there.

The Voice probably wouldn't know the answer, anyways.

I still don't exactly know how ramen is made either, he thinks wistfully to himself.

The Boy thinks back on his short life.

There isn't much to think back on.

Even the events of the recent past have become nothing but a blur.

The only consistency in his memories is the Voice, whispering in his ear at every step.

He wishes his friend were there with him.

But even so...

It sure has been fun.

Fun.

And what do we do?

What do I do?

When I have fun…?

Hahaha…

HAHAHAHA…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA –


A/N: I wanted to write the bad ending before this but I've lost steam for that. Sorry! So I decided to just put up the true ending, which is this (disclaimer: I'm not religious. Do NOT take anything religious away from this. Re-read chapter 1 and refresh your memory if you must). If I ever feel like it I may finally write out the bad ending but for now, I'm leaving this as completed.

From reading the reviews, there are readers who don't like the way this story has gone. To be honest, while I'd had this 'true' ending planned from the start, the middle was changed along the way. I initially planned on really making this a parody with Naruto getting a harem and everything, buuut dropped the idea.

Anyways, this is it. Love it, hate it, don't care about it - regardless, thanks for reading.