Alright, time to lay it straight.

I don't read Naruto anymore. I'm not going to finish this story. And after thinking dark self-deprecating thoughts to myself after a long day of uncomfortably burping at the airport (damn that bison steak), I've decided that I'm going to lay down what I wasn't capable of communicating to you all.

We're calling the timeline where Minato lives Line A and the one that starts canon and branches off when Minato enters it Line B. Got it? Cool.

A!Naruto was kidnapped by Danzou at the time of his birth and kept hidden, because he wanted to keep the jinchuuriki as a secret weapon. Kakashi found out about the Uchiha coup which had fastforwarded because of Danzou's new plans about three years after that, and killed the majority. Jiraiya helped him relocate the civilians and several women to a town outside the city, and he kept Sasuke and Itachi as his students. When Danzou's coup was discovered and destroyed, Jiraiya took over Naruto, but instead of informing Minato of what he found, he took over Danzou's plans and handed Naruto and the boy who in Line B is known as Sai over to Kakashi to be trained with Sasuke and Itachi.

A few years later, when the younger children were about eight, the small group dismantled Akatsuki, killing everyone. Sasuke and Naruto took down Kakuzu, Kakashi took Pein and Konan, and Itachi took Orochimaru and Zetsu. An interesting byproduct of the battle brought Anko to their ranks, along with the children who would have formed Line B's Sound Five.

The group acted as Jiraiya's personal mercenary force for several years, keeping very secret and very low-key. Naruto's seal had so been tampered with that he was more open to the different wavelengths of the different universes, and when Jiraiya realized this he trained the half-wild child in space/time techniques. Sasuke hated this because it made Naruto even more inhuman, when they'd grown up together as brothers. Sasuke had always acted as Naruto's keeper, and when Jiraiya started training him, it divided the two.

This was all leading up to the battle with Cloud, which took place at the same time as Line B's battle at the Valley of the End. A!Naruto used the techniques Jiraiya taught him to phase Minato out of this world and into the next, and then proceeded to attack the Cloud army alongside Sasuke.

There was a line in the fic uttered by Hizashi, something about "the dead standing up and fighting." That was back when I thought that fan-made list of tailed beasts was legitimate. Under the fan-made list of beasts, the two-tailed cat had the ability to raise the dead. Since Cloud had the two-tailed cat, I thought it would be cool to have Naruto fighting against the other jinchuuriki and only reference the fight by the powers being used, but that doesn't work so well when those powers are only fanon.

Jiraiya pretended that Naruto and Sasuke were mysterious heroes come to help lead Konoha in the war against Cloud, and I'm still not really sure what was going through his head. That's the biggest reason why I quit writing, because I couldn't justify making one of my favorite characters a villain. It was a cool concept, but I couldn't find the reasoning to back it up. SO. At this point, Jiraiya is pretty much leading Konoha by the nose. He is in control of the troops, so long as he makes a show of searching for Minato, and he is in control of the public because all eyes are on Naruto and Sasuke and he holds their strings. When Hizashi confronts him about all this, he decides to 'abandon' Minato and install Hizashi as a puppet Hokage, using Neji as leverage. In all honesty, however, the group treats Neji quite well, and the boys learn quite a bit from each other.

About a year later, they help Neji 'escape', thus letting Hizashi retire himself and holding Jiraiya's secret. Jiraiya decides it's time to take Minato out of stasis, and asks Naruto to bring him back. He does so, but what Jiraiya was counting on was a confused, weak man who doesn't know what's going on. What he gets is a razor sharp man who's been spending the past year learning to be a father and all that entails, including becoming fiercely protective.

Blah blah blah, Minato fixes Naruto's seal with some highly indulgent synasthesia prose, and that's where we got stuck. The next chapter was supposed to be Naruto describing his childhood which I've just outlined above. There's this cute little nonsensical comic I did a few years back of what I wanted to write here, but the words never came to me. I've got one and a half pages colored in Flash... I should probably finish those. Not in color, though, that takes too long.

Anyway, after they share EXPOSITION, the daddy son team goes and tracks down Sasuke because he is Naruto's BESTEST BRO(there's another little comic I made of this scene where Sasuke threatens Minato into letting him join the family because Sauce Gay was a greater part of Naruto's life than Minato ever was and because being one big happy family would make Naruto so happy), and then together they seek out the leader of the third power in the war next to Konoha and Cloud, which is Rain. The three of them seek an appointment with the leader, and are heavily surprised when it turns out to be DA-DA-DA-DAAAAA, one Miss Uzumaki Kushina! WOO, GO TOMATO HEAD! She slaps Minato around a bit, dotes on Naruto, and then squeezes the entire group plus Sasuke into one big family hug.

One ending for this ends with the Uzumaki family plus Sasuke forgetting about the war and just living where no one will ever find them, content with the company of themselves and whatever members of the new Akatsuki manage to wander in. But that's kind of depressing, so let's pretend that they destroy Jiraiya's web of lies, ally Rain with Konoha, beat out a ratified peace treaty with Cloud, and live happily ever after.

Does that satisfy your curiosity?