Title: As Above So Below
Fandom: Naruto
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: SasuNaru, Alt/SasuAlt/NaruNaru
Warnings: Yaoi, Femme/Naruto, alternate Naruto, alternate Sasuke, alternate universe, some angst, I think.
Note: AU
Summary: Naruto is lost to another world through a freak jutsu, and when Sasuke finally tracks him down, he finds time has moved differently there, and years have passed for Naruto.
AN: Forgive me, I know I should be working on Summer Heat, but this particular plot bunny bit me hard, and my muse is being obstinate.
As Above So Below
Chapter 1
Sasuke dodged first right and then left, the enemy's katana whistling harmlessly to one side. Smirking, fingers flew, he drew in a deep breath, and then blew fire over the big scarred man that currently had the audacity to attack a party with Uchiha Sasuke in it. Screaming, the man fell to his knees, thrashed about a bit, then fell over. The flames soon flickered out, but the man did not move.
Drawing a wrist across his sweaty brow, Sasuke looked up to find the battle had almost wound down. Kakashi was far down at the end of the clearing, just finishing off his opponent. Sakura was beset by two rather aquiline characters. Naruto had just kicked his right into the upper branches of a great oak, and Sasuke paused a moment to admire the strong masculine lines of the blonde's body, leg still extended from his mighty kick.
Naruto always did favor the head on, brute force sort of attacks. Briskly trotting up, Sasuke smirked at his companion. "Hn. Always with so little finesse, Dobe."
With predictable emotions, Naruto scowled. "Always with so much arrogance, Teme. You want to see finesse? I'll show you finesse!"
Rolling his eyes, knowing Naruto was about to do something extremely stupid, Sasuke followed the blonde that suddenly darted the few feet that separated them from the beleaguered pink haired kunoichi.
Naruto shouted the words Sasuke absolutely despised.
"Sexy no Jutsu!" There was a flash and a puff, and an extremely buxom, very naked blonde girl, bewiskered as always, stood where the handsome ninja had been a second before. "Hey, fellows…" He taunted in a sexy voice.
One of Sakura's opponents turned, eyes widening to see such a voluptuous and bare woman, and his jaw dropped.
"You call that finesse, moron?" Sasuke bawled, furiously. God, he hated it when Naruto did that. With the slice of a kunai, the other man fell, never to rise again.
The first man recovered his wits, never took his eyes off the naked girl, and his face burned with embarrassed fury to have fallen for such a boneheaded trick. His hands moved rapidly, but Naruto simply stood there, and blew him a kiss.
"Naruto, look out!" Sakura screamed, kicked out and just clipping the enemy's elbow and his signs faltered for just a moment.
The ground shook as the enemy's jutsu misfired, and then ground shook, and a green light flashed just to the side of Naruto.
To Sasuke, everything suddenly began to crawl in slow motion. He would never make it to his stupid if precious blonde in time. He felt like he was struggling against tar, as the green flash grew and broadened, becoming a tall emerald oval a foot off the ground.
In the slowed tempo Sasuke's world had become, the raven haired male watched Naruto's head turn in shock to look at the green light beside him, long pig tails swinging as he did so.
Then time abruptly sped up. Wind rushed past them all, sucking leaves, dirt, and a single panicked bird into the green light. The light pulsed, and Naruto's body… bent… he, or rather she, began to elongate freakishly, and then was sucked right in with everything else.
The green light abruptly vanished, and the clearing fell into a stunned silence.
The man was staring stupefied at where the male nin turned female had once stood, now gone as if he/she had never existed. A second later, Sasuke's razor sharp kunai was at his neck.
"Bring him back," the Uchiha hissed, voice deadly cold.
Sasuke was leaning against the wall, hands shoved in his pockets, and stared at the man who'd turned his world upside over a year ago. His heart had become a cold lump of ice without the sunshine he needed to survive. Though Naruto had only been gone a year and a half now, it seemed to him as if more than a decade had passed since he'd last seen that bright smile, seen those flashing blue eyes, tasted that warm tanned skin.
"You should have let me do this a long time ago, when this first started," he hissed venomously at the Godaime.
Tsunade stared at him with weary bloodshot eyes. "You know how I feel about forbidden jutsu, Sasuke," she said softly.
But in truth, there was nothing left to try. In the last eighteen months, they'd interrogated the man, even tortured him. They'd tried mind control jutsu, everything they could. The problem was, the jutsu used that fateful day had been a fluke, the hand signs jarred at the last crucial second by Sakura. He couldn't even begin to tell them what he'd done. Or where Naruto had gone.
Sasuke was tired of waiting. He wanted his blonde back, and he wanted him now. Against his judgment, against his wishes, against the darkening hole his soul was once more becoming, he'd been forced to let the council and the Sannins to try everything else first. He would wait no longer. He'd told the Hokage just this morning that he was going to do things his way, whether she liked it or not.
And Tsunade had finally acceded. There was nothing left to try. If they wanted a chance to have Naruto back among them, provided it was even possible, that the blonde wasn't dead, they'd have to let Sasuke try the forbidden skills he'd learned under Orochimaru. But things would go her way, or no way.
Hence, the hapless enemy nin was strapped to a wooden table, practically brain dead from everything done to him. And this last thing would kill him. Sasuke had been blunt about that. What the Uchiha was about to do would suck the very life force from the man's body to power this particular jutsu. Not that Sasuke gave a shit about that. This man had cost him the only thing in life that he wanted, and if it took this man's life to bring Naruto back, well, so much the better.
Other than the man, the table, and the ninja, there was nothing else in the room save small cameras to record the even from all angles. As witnesses, and as damage control should things turn bad, several nin were stationed all along the curved walls of the research chamber. Neji and Hinata were there, byakuugan already activated. Kakashi and his sharingan as well. Tsunade and Jiraiya were there, as well as Shizune and Sakura, should medics be needed. The others were masked ANBU, remote and watchful.
Shizune checked the man's vitals one last time, frowning softly. She nodded to Tsunade signaling that nothing had changed in the vegetative state the enemy nin had been in for almost a year.
"Ready when you are, Uchiha," Tsunade finally said forbiddingly. "Just remember this… Whatever you learn, it will be thoroughly discussed before any action is taken. Do you understand?"
"I hear you," Sasuke said enigmatically.
Tsunade paused a moment longer, then nodded and stepped back into place with Shizune, falling into line against the wall with the others. Sasuke had been adamant about that.
Taking a moment to calm his mind, to prepare himself to once more use such a devastating forbidden skill, Sasuke took a deep breath, standing utterly still. Though he was silent and motionless, he was already drawing chakra, so quickly and fiercely, the others could feel gentle tugs on their own reserves. Having been warned about this, the others opened themselves, allowing their chakras to escape, to flow towards the Uchiha. At first nothing was visible, but then the man on the table began to quiver unceasingly, as if suffering from a gentle seizure. The chakra continued to flow towards and over the victim, until a black mist could be seen, spinning like a small whirlpool just over the table, the tiny cyclonic tail twisting downwards until it vanished into the hapless nin's chest, where his heart was. The darker the mist became and the faster it spun, the harder the man seized. Just when the others were beginning to feel the pain of the remorseless pull, Sasuke suddenly went through a long series of hand signs, his own sharingan activated, tomoes spinning wildly. Kakashi watched carefully. It wasn't ever day a forbidden jutsu of this caliber would come along.
The pull stabilized, and the nebulous surface of the whirlpool solidified, and took on a mirror like sheen. And like mushrooms spawning from the murk, small figures rose up, and the others saw the fight from so long ago. They saw Sakura become overwhelmed, saw Naruto shift into a woman, saw the man begin his own jutsu, interrupted by Sakura's kick. The miniaturized green portal opened and they saw Naruto get sucked in. Just as the small Sasuke leapt forward to capture the nin, the jutsu abruptly ended, leaving everyone rather dazed, and the man finally still, face and body frozen in mid paroxysm, quite dead.
Stunned, the others were panting softly, eyes round with awe. Suddenly, without warning, Sasuke stepped back, eyes still red and whirling, and moving so quickly they could barely follow, repeated the flawed signs the man had used.
"Sasuke-kun, no!" Sakura screamed, even as Tsunade lunged forward. But already the portal was opening once more, and before anyone could take any further action, Sasuke threw himself through, and the green light winked out of existence. The room was ominously quiet, filled with shocked onlookers, and a dead man. Sasuke Uchiha, like Naruto before him, was gone as if he'd never existed.
Sasuke found himself stumbling forward in a world seemingly filled with chaos, and his sharingan shut down so fast and hard his eyes ached fiercely. Blinking furiously, filled with vertigo to the point of nausea, he fell face first from the shock of his arrival, banging his arm against a hard surface, grimy bricks swimming in and out of focus. Completely drained, he slid slowly down the wall, amid the deafening sounds of horns and shouting and mechanical whirring and grinding.
Despite his dazed condition, he knew he was vulnerable, and struggled to collect himself. Swallowing back bitter bile, he finally rolled over and sat up, placing his back against the hard surface he'd just slipped down, his nausea made all the worse by the stench of smoke and oil and rotting vegetation and human waste.
Utterly spent, unable to draw on any chakra, he felt himself slipping away. Numbly, he took faint note of the fact he seemed to be in an alley, near the mouth of a street the likes of which he'd never seen before. Vague figures moved back and forth past, taking no notice of him. His head fell back as he began to slide even further onto the ground, half behind a massive metal container which was apparently the source of the terrible smells, and saw a sunset burnished sky far above the towering brick walls overhead, and then darkness swallowed him whole.
Half a city away, Naruto stood in his room, so inured to the sounds of the city of this industrialized and technological world that he barely noticed it, stared into his reflection in the mirror, the setting sun over his shoulder.
He'd been napping, and had dreamt such a vivid dream about Sasuke, from so long ago, and from so far away. He'd woken shaking, filled with distant memories and grief so strong, he'd almost wept. Now, staring at his cursed and hated reflection, he took note of the face that stared back at him from the highly polished mirror; saw the gently rounded, beautifully feminine face, filled with the lines of maturity, his youth, his masculinity so long gone. Having long ago given up hope of ever going home, such fits of pain and sorrow were now few and far between. But the dream had been so vivid, and Sasuke so… so much the Sasuke he knew and loved so fiercely, it was like the beginning all over again. He gave one last venomous look at the face he hated so much, and with a choked sob, slammed a fist into the mirror, shattering it into a million jangling shards.
There was a moment of silence, then a voice, so hatefully familiar once more, called out to him from the other side of the closed bedroom door.
"Naruto? Are you alright? Naruto? Open the door, honey, or I'm coming in!"
Unable to answer, to move, Naruto just stood there, staring dully down at the broken silvery pieces littering his vanity, tears in his eyes.
The door opened slowly, and a head poked in, one that once more filled Naruto with resentment, something he'd not felt in a very long time.
Shaggy blonde hair, bright blue eyes; the mirror image of what Naruto had once looked like, minus the whisker scars, as mature as his own now was. "Naruto, what happened?"
The man, his long ago twin, looked concerned. "Sweetheart, why are you crying?" He came in, and gently took Naruto into his arms, making the feminine version cry even harder. This is what he was supposed to look like; this is what he would still look like if he were home. Not this hellish, accursed place that had been his personal heaven and hell for so terribly long.
"Nathan…" Naruto moaned, feeling greater sorrow than ever before. He would never escape, never become himself again, never see his Sasuke again. Why did he have to have that so wonderful, but hell spawned dream? He hadn't dreamed of his Sasuke in so long. Why now?
"Mommy?" A forlorn voice finally shook Naruto from his tearful grief. "What's wrong, Mommy?" A small child, no more than ten, stared meekly at the couple from the doorway. Small, deliciously slim, with shaggy black hair and black eyes. Naruto swallowed the lump in his throat to look at his eldest son, the image of what a child between himself and his Sasuke would look like, had he not fallen into a hole in space and time.
He would not cry anymore.
Pasting a faded smile on his face, Naruto pulled from Nathan's arms, and hunched down, holding his arms out. "Mommy's fine, sweetheart," he said softly. "Come here and give me a hug, okay?"
The child gave a bright smile, and ran into his arms, snuggling into Naruto's generous bosom.
Once the child was assured that all was well, Naruto took him downstairs to the kitchen for a snack before bedtime, and Nathan swept up the broken glass frowning.
Another man, looking like an exact duplicate of a matured Sasuke stepped into the room. "What happened, Nathan?" He asked softly, eyes worried. Naruto hadn't had such a fit in some time.
"I don't know, Stefan," Nathan answered quietly, dumping the shards into the trash bin. "She didn't say. Please tell me Narue is already asleep and didn't hear anything. Sasuke did."
Stefan sighed. "I see. No, Narue's asleep, thankfully. I wonder what brought this on? She hasn't behaved like this in what… three or four years?"
"I have no idea. The medicine maybe? She's had such a bad cold. Stefan… you don't think… you don't think Naruto needs to see a shrink again, do you? She's been doing so well. I'd hate to think she's slipping back into her delusions again."
Nathan looked so miserable that Stefan was shaken, as well as afraid of all this himself. Naruto had been such an integral part of their lives for so long, that it scared them. Naruto was their wife, their lover, the mother of their children. She couldn't be getting sick, not again. Stefan held his husband tightly, sinking slim fingers in wild blonde hair so like Naruto's.
"I don't want her to have to see a psychiatrist again," Nathan mumbled against Stefan's shirtfront. "She was so unhappy then, and looked at us like we were betraying her. I don't want to go through that again."
"No more shrinks," Stefan said firmly, in agreement. Those few years were terrible. Naruto had been so hurt by them then. "We will deal with this on our own. Naruto is ours. We will heal her again."