Author's Notes: This is the last chapter. I went into this thing wanting to write an OC-Insert that hadn't been seen before, an OC-Insert given unbelievable amounts of power with the hubris of I can change everything and it will be better, and I kinda like what I came up with. I hope you all do too. (If you have any other ideas for OC-Inserts, let me know, no matter how weird or out there they are!)

Warnings for: canon pairings, not so canon pairings, implied and explicit manipulation/coercion, etc.

Chapter Ten:

Wandering

XC.

Uzumaki Naruto winds up marrying Hyūga Hinata, and it is a happy, loving marriage, one that becomes only stronger given time. He becomes the Nanadaime Hokage, widely beloved by his people and admired throughout the Elemental Countries, though everyone agrees that he wears just a bit too much orange. Kurama is one of his best friends, though he's usually asleep, like most of the bijū are these days.

He has a son, named after his father, and a daughter, named after his wife's mother. He loves them both, and unabashedly abuses his clones to spend time with them. His clones can do the paperwork after all. He wants to be there to see his kids grow up.

(love your children love your children love your children they are more important than all the hats in the world)

His friends are happy and healthy. Some have children, some do not. Some are married, some are not.

His brothers and sisters wander the world, but occasionally they stop by, and Naruto gets the chance to truly let loose. Sometimes his Mother comes by, and he has a moment to truly rest.

Uzumaki Naruto is a hero, and so are his brothers and sisters. He has a family.

That is all he has ever wanted.

XCI.

There is something that looks like a woman wandering on the very fringes of civilization, shrouded in a shadow that may be alive. She hums to herself, she with her white hair and clear eyes and curving horns.

She never stays for long, in the villages she visits.

But occasionally, she goes and visits her family.

Mother, they will say to her, and she will call them her children, and she will hold her grandchildren on her lap and smile and smile and smile.

(three or four people will always vanish after she and the shadow in her sleeve have left, but her children don't mind, because they love her)

XCII.

Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura are married as well. It's a decent marriage, and Sasuke is devoted to their children, if nothing else. He works in the Intelligence Department, but like his Hokage, he always manages to spend time with his children. Sakura works in the Hospital, and has well surpassed even her mentor's reputation.

They have three daughters, only one with their mother's pink hair, and two with his, and sometimes he wonders if he can see his brother's face in his eldest's calm, steady eyes.

(treasure your family treasure the ones you love never let them go never let the world take them from you ever again)

He slits the throat of the man who tries to come for his daughters, then follows the trail back and kills them all.

Uchiha Sasuke doesn't know if he's happy.

But he has his children, and he has a village that is strong and secure, and he makes damn sure what happened to him - what happened to Naruto and so many others - will never happen to anyone else.

XCIII.

She steps out of the tree and looks to the sky and calls herself a new name, because Rin doesn't cut it and neither does Kaguya or that other name she once had, and drains a thousand souls so that her children – the broken abused jinchūriki who've been hated since birth and beyond – can walk again, walk with smiles and freedom. She promised them, after all.

Gedō, she whispers her name to the sky, the sound like a thousand suns dying.

Heretical doctrine, because isn't that what her very existence is? Heresy against the gods, something that shouldn't exist yet is writ into the very fabric of the universe itself, whispered in shallow gasps by the shadows of the world-

(occasionally she gives herself a last name, because it isn't right, to forget everything-)

I made a promise, she whispers again, and she writes the world anew, cradling the body of the boy she hates and loves in her arms, her eyes clear glass, her horns curving.

The Sharingan spins.

The war ends.

There is happiness, happiness that is not the delusion that others hoped for.

(But there are also people who die, and many because of her, but in the grand scheme of things, they are nothing, not her children nor the boys who broke because of her nor the hero who saved the world – cannon fodder, nameless, she doesn't care, and drinks their energy in with a smile because it's going to save her children)

XCIV.

Nii Yugito never marries, and spends most of her time wandering. She takes an apprentice, and introduces the child to Mother with a smile, and feels so foolishly, foolishly validated when the strange woman who loves her holds out her arms and Yugito's apprentice goes willingly into them.

Mother is always good with children.

Yugito never spends a day longer in any village than she needs to, and the world is hers, the world is entirely hers, and that freedom is drugging.

Yagura spends his all of his time on lakes and waters and rivers, Rōshi with his mad-brained crush on the lava-slinging maniacal Mizukage, Han often right beside him, while Utakata wanders like a ghost more hermit than anyone, and Fū spends her time badgering Gaara and Naruto both, and Bee goes wandering with Utakata sometimes and has somehow managed to become a singer in the meantime.

(I promised, didn't I? To give my children the world, and it's all yours, my darlings, all yours)

They could go anywhere, do anything, but most of them stay near Mother, or Naruto.

Yugito only needs her loyalty to her brothers and sisters and to her Mother, and to no one else, and that's even more drugging than the freedom.

She rips a Kumo-nin in half when he crosses her path and wonders if she should have done that, while Mother smiles behind her in tacit approval, even as Matatabi whispers inside her, but muted.

Nii Yugito washes the blood of the men she once used to know, but who always called her monster, off her hands and feels nothing but disgust for the blood under her nails.

They never came for her, and she never, ever forgives them-

-and Mother says that's just fine.

XCV.

People try to take the jinchūriki back, because that's how humans work, even so soon after the war, even so soon after she promised to make everything better for her children.

But it takes only one demonstration for the world to understand just what she will do to protect her babies.

She walks into the Raikage's office, past his guards who see nothing, hear nothing, and walks back out with his head, and tells Darui that he is now the Raikage, and she smiles at him, very politely.

I trust this will not happen ever again, Raikage-sama, she says, even more politely, and drops the former Raikage's head at his feet.

The Sharingan spins.

No it won't, Ōtsutsuki-sama, he replies, and the words taste like ashes and sadness and ancient regrets.

Later, Kurotsuchi tells him this: they're not worth it. No weapon is worth what that woman will do to us all if you get in her way. There is fear in her eyes, and he very carefully doesn't ask how she became the Tsuchikage when last he heard her grandfather was still in perfect health.

(But most of all, he agrees)

XCVI.

Hatake Kakashi retires after Naruto becomes the Hokage, because he's played his part and done his time and now he just wants to rest. He lives in a spacious house that he rarely stays in, because nine times out of ten he's usually over at Gai's, and it takes a long time for him to tell Gai that he should probably just move into his house because it's more convenient.

He has wounds that are old but healing, and the memories no longer make him wonder if he should have ever gotten out of bed, and he no longer thinks that he is a murderer simply by existing.

And he has a daughter, one with white hair and brown eyes and a softly polite smile, and she has the Sharingan in both eyes, and they don't speak of her mother.

(She'll be a Hatake, treat her well, call her Tomone, that was your mother's name, right?)

There are days when he stays inside and does not come out, when Naruto's Mother comes to visit and Tomone goes out and says hello Zetsu how are you to the shadows on the walls and the shadows smile back and a woman with white hair croons lullabies in a voice he hears in the few nightmares he still has.

Hatake Kakashi has a good life.

He knows not to question it.

XCVIII.

The white eyed not-a-woman visits a house on the edge of a lonely village. She wears a black tunic and pants and a purple apron style skirt, and she wears her white hair shorter than she normally does.

The shadow in her sleeve hums along with her.

There's a caretaker who bows, trembling, when she sees the not-a-woman coming from her place in the garden.

She walks past the woman – who knows better than most what exactly glides by her and shakes in the wake of that knowledge – and enters the house.

It's a simple house, delicately and prettily decorated. It suits.

She walks down the hall, and into a room ornately decorated. Moons and fans cover the walls, with spiraling purple symbols that burn with chakra.

There is a boy resting in the middle of the room, on a bed that is draped in silks and jewels, gold and silver. He wears black robes. His sleeping face is scarred, eyelids drooping over empty sockets.

She sits beside him and begins to tell her prisoner about her week.

(because this is cage, a cage where a man no one remembers lays within, and she is his warden, but she loves him used to love him there's no difference so she does it, to spare Kakashi-kun the pain make the cut clean and fast)

Because there's no place for dead men in new beginnings, darling Obito.

XCIX.

Ōtsutsuki Gedō wanders endlessly, watching the stars and eating whatever she likes, traveling across the mountains and mapping them all with her eyes and mind. Occasionally she stops and whispers silently to people that aren't there about the things she's done, and occasionally she visits her children.

She doesn't have a husband, she says, but she does have several loves.

(a boy in a cage and a boy she finally let free, be happy Kakashi-kun I'll watch over him isn't this what you wanted Obito to be with me forever)

She smiles very politely to the people she meets.

The man who serves her a drink in a bar tells her that he thinks he's seen a spiral and a horned demon in his dreams and that it's giving him headaches. She offers to take away the pain – I'm something of a medic-nin, she tells him, blushing even with bits of the former Raikage's spine under her nails.

Later, people will wonder what happened to the bartender who lived in the tiny village for years, and maybe someone will say that he had been talking with a woman with white hair before he vanished – if they remember. It's more than likely he'll be forgotten to time and fickle minds and the lure of other, better bars.

Humans are wonderfully predictable.

Ōtsutsuki Gedō keeps walking and wandering, and there's a man who is not a man at her side, and he thanks her for the meal while he wipes blood from his face.

She pats his cheek, and thinks about going to visit Rōshi and his darling Mizukage.

C.

You made a promise, and you kept it. Your children are happy, they roam free if they wish, or they settle down and raise families, and they always, always, always call you Mother. Your friends are happy and healthy and loving and being loved, and that makes your heart sing.

You have the ones you love, and you will never let them go, never ever again.

The world is good and you made it good and it will stay that way.

You cradle the boy you love and hate all at once in your arms as he twitches in a nightmare you placed him in to punish him, and you think this:

Step three.

I did it.

I made it better than it was in the story.

I made it right.

(because it's only a horror story if you're on the wrong side of it, after all)