Here's my very first Naruto fanfic! And it's not even set in the actual Naruto world...I'm pretty sure that's a bit of a fail. Anyway, it's set in the world of Road to Ninja, where everything's made up and the points don't matter! Since I came up with the idea for this fic, more information regarding the plot of the movie and the character's involved has come out. I've incorporated what I thought made sense in regards to what I wanted the plot of my story to be about, but I've left quite a bit of it out. The main reason is that it would change the plot I had in mind too much and I liked what I had already written too much to just dump it all. The other reason is that if I tried to fit all of that into this little one shot then it would be way too long! Besides, I'm not trying to write the movie here, people!

Anyways, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Don't own it!

EDIT 7/12/12: Changed the name of the story and the summary to better fit the new, unplanned update. And changed this to the second chapter for chronological reasons.

Sakura wandered down the street in this strange world. She was in Konoha . . . but not. In terms of looks, this place was exactly the same as Konoha. The layout of the buildings were the same and even the trees seemed to be the same species and in the same location. It seemed everything down to the last pebble was a perfect copy. It wasn't the village itself that was different, but the people in the village.

She didn't think anything was wrong when she got up in the morning. It was when she had gone out into the main marketplace to pick up some things that she noticed people were acting differently. She witnessed a shopkeeper throw two boys out of his store for shoplifting with a loud, angry yell; not something that would normally warrant suspicion, but Sakura knew that shopkeeper to be mild-mannered and the two boys to be extremely kindhearted. Thinking the entire incident was bizarre, she had looked around to see if anyone else noticed the out of character behavior. No one had seemed to notice anything amiss, but two women who had walked by were saying something about that being the third time this week.

Sakura knew that was weird. What was even weirder was when she had gone into the Yamanaka Flower Shop to talk to Ino. Her blonde friend had acted extremely reserved around the cute boy who she was helping. Normally, she would have been all over the boy, flirting openly and shamelessly; this Ino was definitely not her Ino. Sakura knew something was wrong and had set off to find someone to help her.

After an hour of wandering, she still hadn't found anyone that was acting normally. She decided that Naruto was her best bet and would probably be the easiest to find. That being said, she made her way as quickly as possible to Ichiraku Ramen. Slowing down right outside the stand, she saw a pair of orange clad legs dangling from one of the stools. The pink-haired kunoichi smiled gratefully and moved aside one of the flaps to slide onto the stool to Naruto's right. He had a bowl a ramen in front of him, but his eyes were closed and he was completely still, something she knew that meant he was gathering natural energy in order to enter Sage Mode.

Knowing that the process would take several minutes, she ordered a bowl of miso ramen from a strangely grumpy Teuchi. Naruto didn't open his eyes until she had already started eating her ramen. They were colored orange from Sage Mode. He didn't even spare her a glance as he dug into his now cooled bowl of ramen. Sakura decided to give her teammate a second to eat some of his favorite food before she started questioning him. She knew that he must be the same because someone who was the opposite of Naruto would never eat ramen with that level of enthusiasm, especially as cold as it was.

It only took him about five seconds for him to finish shoveling his ramen into his mouth. Once he was finished, he belched loudly and turned to Sakura, still in Sage Mode. "So, you noticed things are weird here, too?"

"Yeah, everyone seems to be acting completely different. It's starting to freak me out." Sakura slurped some noodles while she waited for Naruto to answer.

"With Sage Mode I can check everyone's chakra signatures. So far, they seem to be nearly the exact same, but there are some slight differences. I have no ide–" Naruto suddenly stopped midsentence, his eyes widening and his mouth falling open.

Sakura stared at him, concerned. "What's wrong, Naruto?"

"No . . . way . . ." Just as suddenly, he stood up and sprinted out into the street.

Sakura, worried about what would make him act that way, ran out after him, ignoring Teuchi who yelled angrily after them about paying for their meals. She prepared herself for a fight, but she was certainly not prepared for what she actually saw.

Sasuke. Sasuke, in the village. Sasuke, in the village, smiling. Sasuke, in the village, smiling and greeting Naruto with as much vigor as the hyperactive ninja was greeting him with. She wasn't sure which aspect of this scene was the most outlandish. She simply stood there gaping at it. The only thing that surprised her more was when she was abruptly snapped out of her trance by her name being called.

"Saaaaakura? Earth to Sakura. Are you okay?"

She blinked a couple of times and finally focused in on a pair of black eyes staring mischievously at her, barely a foot from her face.

"There you are! We thought we lost you there for a second!" The grin that Sasuke gave her then was wide, slightly lopsided, and breathtakingly beautiful. Sakura thought her heart would stop from the emotions that were overwhelming her at that moment. The last time she had seen Sasuke he had been so cold, driven to the brink of sanity by the lies he had been fed and his lust for power. He had tried to kill her. Twice. Both times without a second thought. That Sasuke had scared her.

But this wasn't that Sasuke. Naruto had said there was something slightly different about everyone's chakras, meaning that the wielders of the chakra weren't the same, and not just in personality. A chakra signature was like a fingerprint, completely unique to every individual. Even when an individual made a clone using a jutsu, their clone's chakra signature and their fingerprints would be the exact same as the jutsu caster's. If the chakra of the people here was different than the chakra of their counterparts in hers and Naruto's world than that mean that their identity was different. Meaning that this Sasuke wasn't the Sasuke from her world, in terms of both personality and actual identity.

Speaking of being completely different in personality . . .

Sasuke had hooked his arm with hers and was in the process of dragging her back into Ichiraku's, talking to Naruto about all training together after they had some ramen. Naruto was boisterously agreeing as they all climbed onto the stools, her and Naruto in their original seats and Sasuke now sitting to her right.

"Hey, old man, another round for the three of us!" Naruto called out.

"Stop calling me old," Teuchi grumbled as he turned to make the ramen.

Sakura was quickly trying to overcome her shock in order to follow the conversation that Naruto and Sasuke were having. To do that, she had to push aside all of her negative emotions that seeing this Sasuke brought up. This Sasuke, with his warm personality, could never be capable of doing things like that. It was easier than she thought it would be to do that; he acted so differently it was easy to separate the two Sasukes in her mind. He reminded her of a side of Sasuke she occasionally got a glimpse of when they were genin. She recalled the playful grin on his face as they were trying to unmask Kakashi and the happy, self-satisfied look in his eyes as he gave Naruto the envelope containing Princess Koyuki's autograph.

Keeping those memories in mind, she slowly joined in on the conversation, testing the waters, and found that Sasuke was very easy to talk to. Well, not exactly easy; more like pleasant. It wasn't easy to talk to him while he was hitting on her every other sentence! If she had any thoughts about Sasuke being the same they had disappeared as soon as he started flirting – flirting! – with her. It was also terribly distracting and kept her blushing almost constantly. That only seemed to encourage him as he got bolder with his actions.

"This is great!" Naruto was saying through a mouthful of his fourth bowl of ramen. "It seems like forever since the three of us were together. Ya know, just hanging out, just the three of us."

Sakura thought he was being a little risky, making a specific statement like that. What did he know about what the three of them did in this world? The only thing she could do was play along. "I know. This is nice."

"Definitely! We should do this more often! Though I hope that next time it could be just the two of us." That last sentence was said directly to Sakura. Sasuke was staring right at her, his head propped up on one hand as he used the other to play with a strand of her hair.

Sakura paused with her chopsticks halfway to her mouth, too embarrassed and shocked and pleased to do anything but blush more deeply than she had before and smile delightedly.

"WHHAAAAAAT!" Naruto exclaimed in shock. He had shot out of his seat with his bowl of ramen, noodles dangling from his chopstick and was now standing behind them.

"What?" Sasuke asked innocently as he shifted slightly to look at Naruto, letting Sakura's hair slip from his fingers.

"Yo-you! Her! You–"

Sakura decided that Naruto was broken and the only way to fix him would be a nice, solid punch to the face. She was all too happy to oblige. Once he was sprawled out on the street in front of Ichiraku, a lovely bruise blossoming on his cheek, Sakura focused on Sasuke, who was chuckling at their antics. He eagerly turned back to her, a cocky smirk already forming on his face. The kunoichi decided that she should wipe that smirk off his face while she was at it. BAM! He was promptly dumped off his stool and onto the floor from the force of her blow. Sakura turned her nose up at him with a small, "humf."

From the corner of her eye, she could see him looking up at her, rubbing his face where she had hit him, but still smiling. Her blush deepened as she realized that was the only time she had ever hit Sasuke like that.

"Okay, so let me get this straight. We are trapped in a genjutsu."

"Yup."

"One that makes everyone act the opposite of how they normally act."

"Yes."

"And the reason that everyone's chakra isn't the same is because whoever cast the genjutsu had to alter everyone's personality."

"Uh-huh."

"And . . . why did they have to do that again?"

"If they hadn't, then our minds would have filled in everyone's personality as they usually are. Normally, when physical matter is targeted to change by a genjutsu, it's an inanimate object: something that doesn't have a recognizable chakra signature. Well, at least not one as easily recognizable as a human's and certainly not detectable to a non-sensor type nin. It's easier to cast, because the signature doesn't have to be copied exactly. Do you understand so far?"

"Yeeeesss?"

Sakura ignored that Naruto's answer was said in a questioning tone and forged on ahead. "Well, this genjutsu's target was clearly living physical matter, specifically people. Everything inanimate and simple living matter – like trees and plants – in Konoha remained unchanged."

"Wait, so everything that's not alive and anything alive that's not a person is the same?"

"Yes. Don't tell me you didn't notice?"

"What's to notice when everything is the same!"

It took great effort to resist punching the stupid idiot – how exactly did he become a ninja again? – but she needed to get everything through his thick skull before she bashed it in. "Anyways, like I was saying, the target was people. That most likely includes higher-intelligence animals as well, such as Akamaru or Kakashi-sensei's ninja dogs. It sounds pretty complex to cast a genjutsu that would alter people's chakra in the way that it appears to have happened now. The caster would have to know what each person's chakra signature is like, either from sensing it themselves or somehow getting an impression of their chakra from the mind of a sensor nin, which would be done using genjutsu. Then, they would have to tamper with the chakra signature in order for it to fit the way they wanted the person to act, while they were casting it on the person they wanted to trap."

"I don't really get genjutsu, but that sounds really complicated. But what I really don't understand is why? Why would someone go through all the trouble of creating this opposite world just to trap us in it? And who is that someone, anyways!" Naruto fell back onto the floor, his hands grabbing his hair in confusion.

"I don't know the answer to either of those questions, Naruto; I'm just telling you what I do know, or what I'm theorizing. I don't know that much about genjutsu either." Sakura sat on the floor across from where Naruto had collapsed. After spending several days wandering around Konoha, they had both decided that everyone was acting far too different for this to be their Konoha and that they were definitely not in their world anymore. This was far too strange to be some elaborate prank, which was Naruto's first theory. Sakura had thought about it some and quickly came to the conclusion that it had something to do with genjutsu. She did some research in the library, coming up with a reasonable theory of her own – well, one that was at least more reasonable than this being a giant prank.

Now, she and Naruto were sitting in her living room, some of the books on advanced genjutsu she had taken out from the library scattered on the floor around them. Explaining her theory to Naruto had taken just as long as she expected it would, but telling someone had helped her further develop her thoughts. "I think I can deduce several things about who might have cast it. There are two main of possibilities. The first is that there is a large number of people casting a collective genjutsu, where each member is altering the personality of one person. The other is one person cast the genjutsu on everybody and is maintaining it all by themself.

"I can discard the first theory because I find it hard to believe that there are that many skilled genjutsu users who we don't know about. Even if there was a smaller group of people, each having altered multiple chakra signatures . . . but even a single person casting it. That's crazy, too, because they would have to be extraordinarily skilled at genjutsu."

"Sakuraaaa, my brain hurts . . ."

"Oh, come on! You didn't even do any of the research!" Just thinking about the amount of research she had done made her brain hurt, as well. Sakura cursed herself for not bothering to learn much beyond basic genjutsu techniques; Kakashi had been telling her that she had a natural talent for genjutsu for years! Instead she had devoted all her time to studying medicine and, while not a waste of time in any way, she now wished that she had taken time to develop her genjutsu some more. All the time she expended researching could have been spent finding a way out of the genjutsu instead of trying to understand it.

Scrubbing her face with her hands, she sighed deeply. They really were in a mess. It appeared that she and Naruto were the only ones affected by the genjutsu. Not only did that mean that they were clearly the targets, but it meant that all she had for help was Naruto and he would be pretty useless in a situation like this.

"Okay! Then let's figure out a way to release this thing!"

While he was useless when it came to actually working with genjutsu, he was a great motivator. Sakura spent the next hour trying the various ways she knew to dispel genjutsu. She started with the simplest – weaving the hand sign and shouting "release!" – and moved onto the slightly more complicated ways that she knew of. After trying several different combinations of hand seals, she proved what she already knew: this genjutsu wouldn't be broken with methods as simple and regular as those. "Okay, so none of those worked, but I figured as much. Let's look at some of the advanced methods of dispelling complex genjutsu. Here, you look in this book and I'll take this one. Let me know when you find something that you think might be helpful and I'll try it out."

This took an extremely long time. Naruto wasn't much help since he couldn't completely comprehend all the explanations in the book she had given him. He would keep interrupting her reading to ask her what a word meant. She didn't blame him for not understanding because she was having a hard time herself. The tiny print and long paragraphs started to blur together until she just couldn't take it anymore. After several hours of that, she snapped. In false calm, she closed the book, picked it up, and hurled it furiously at the wall. "Arghhh! This is ridiculous! I don't understand what they're talking about and it doesn't make any sense and I just – can't – deal – with – it – any – more!" By the end of her rant, she had picked up books that were lying around her and throw those at the wall after every word. Naruto was huddled away from her, trying to avoid becoming an object that she could take out her wrath on. She froze for a couple moments, kneeling and breathing heavily, looking around at the books thrown haphazardly on the floor. Her frustration and feelings of hopelessness crashed over her and she broke down crying.

"Ah! Sakura, don't cry!" Naruto exclaimed as he went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "We'll figure this out. We'll get out of here I promise!"

"Naruto, wha-what's even so bad about this place? Yeah, everyone acts a little differently, but there's no war. No hostility around every corner." Sakura paused and took a shaky deep breath, wiping the tears from her eyes. "We could just stay here. Stay here and be safe and be a team with Sa-sasuke again . . ."

"But that's not our Sasuke, Sakura," Naruto said quietly.

Sakura turned her head up to look at him. There was a serious look on his face and in his eyes as he made eye contact with her.

"You said it yourself: the people here aren't the people from our Konoha. We don't belong here. And if we really are in a genjutsu, then our real bodies are trapped in it and we need to get back to them before something happens. The war is still happening and Sasuke is still out there. Who's going to bring Sasuke back to Konoha if we aren't there? We need to go back, to help Sasuke."

Sakura almost began crying again at the talk about Sasuke, but she needed to pull herself together. Naruto was right; they still needed to save Sasuke . . . Sasuke. She gasped and wrenched herself out of the grasp that Naruto had on her shoulder.

"Wait! Sakura, where are you going!" Naruto got up and followed her to where she had run to the front door.

She was pulling on her boots as she explained. "Sasuke's gotten pretty good at genjutsu, right? That means the Sasuke here would be too. I'm not sure if we could call him an expert, but he's better than us, at any rate."

"Wait, wouldn't that mean we would have to tell him? He can't help us get back home if he doesn't know that that home exists."

Naruto words caused the pink-haired medic to pause. "Yes, I suppose we'll have to tell him." She bit her lip. "There are other people who are skilled at genjutsu – more skilled than he is, too – but he's most likely to believe us. Other people will probably get suspicious, but Sasuke will believe us."

"Yeah! Let's go!"

The two Team Seven members hurriedly finished putting on their sandals and dashed out the door, in search of the third member of their team.

Sasuke stared at them, obviously still suspicious. Sakura didn't blame him; their story did sound absolutely ridiculous and unbelievable. Naruto's reputation as a prankster didn't help their situation much either. Sasuke was all up for going to the Third Training Ground under the guise of training together, but not so up to believing Naruto's declaration of, "Me and Sakura really aren't from this world and we need your help to get back to our home." The fact that wording he used wasn't accurate in the slightest just made it even worse; he made it sound like they were from another planet or something! Sakura had to convince Sasuke to listen to the real problem, and then actually explain the real problem to him. He understood a lot quicker than Naruto, but he still didn't totally believe them.

"Okay, so say I do believe you – what do you expect me to do? You said you already researched genjutsu and how to dispel them."

"If there's one thing I've learned from being a ninja it's that there's a huge difference between knowledge and experience. I may have researched genjutsu, but that doesn't mean that I have the same understanding as someone who actually uses them."

"A.k.a., me."

"Basically."

Sasuke appeared to be in thought for a while. "It may be possible that I'm going to regret this later, but I'll help you!" He smiled widely.

"Yes! I don't know what we would have done if you didn't help us because Sakura had no idea what to d–"

Sakura's first slamming into his face cut off his sentence. "I knew what we needed to do! I just didn't know how to do it!"

"Oww . . . " he merely groaned from the ground.

Sasuke laughed at them, but suddenly turned serious. "If you two are from this 'other world' or whatever, where am I? I mean, wouldn't I have been sent here with you. I'm just assuming, since it sounds like the three of us are a team there, too. But I know that I am myself."

Sakura was at a lost for what to say. She didn't have the heart to tell him the truth. He wouldn't believe it anyways.

Luckily, Naruto was right on top of it. "Well, he got separated from us a while ago and we really don't know where he is," he said as he got up from the ground, "but we are really worried about what might have happened to him. We need to get back as soon as possible, so that we can find him." He finished with his trademark blinding smile. Sakura found it extremely reassuring.

Fortunately, Sasuke seemed to buy it and suggested they might as well train together while they were there. And since training helped him clear his mind, he might be able to think up something to help their situation.

The next morning, Sakura was awoken by a tinking sound. She blearily dragged her eyes open as she heard it again, this time being able to tell that it was coming from her window. Figuring someone was throwing something at her window in an effort to get her attention, she got out of bed and pulled her bathrobe on. It was probably Naruto coming to annoy her about something and it wouldn't do any good to have him see her in her pajamas. She opened the door that led to her balcony, where she had a perfect view of the street, and stepped outside.

To say she was shocked to see Sasuke standing on the street in front of her house with a handful of pebbles and a wide smile on his face was an understatement. "Sas-Sasuke?" she stammered, pulling the bathrobe tighter around her. Somehow it was more embarrassing to have Sasuke see her in her bathrobe than Naruto.

"Yeah, who else were you expecting? One of your many suitors?" Sakura didn't know how to respond to that and merely blushed as Sasuke laughed. "Can I come up?"

"O-of course, let me just go unlock the . . . door." She barely got to finish her sentence before he was standing before her on the balcony. Butterflies erupted in her stomach at his sudden proximity.

"No need." There was that smile again. It broke Sakura's heart and healed it all at once every time she saw it. "I just have a question about something you guys said yesterday."

"Yeah, sure. Ask away!" He just wants to ask about the genjutsu thing, Sakura told herself. He's not here for anything else. Why would he be?

"Well, it was something Naruto said specifically. It's just . . . I can tell when he's lying and he was definitely lying when he said that you two got separated from, well, your Sasuke. Or at least not telling the whole truth. Something was off about that. If Naruto was willing to lie to my face about it then I know it's not something good. Something that he's not going to tell me the truth about. So I was hoping that you could give me a straight answer."

Sakura froze. What could she say? He called their bluff and it would be insulting to him if she tried to play it out. There wasn't anything she could do but tell him the truth. "You're right that it's not something good. This is really hard for me to tell you, b-but I'll tell you if you want to know. Wh-when we were genin, Sasuke le-left the village to go train with Orochimaru. Naruto went after him, but . . . he couldn't stop him. He spent the next two and half years training in order to get him back. The next time we saw Sasuke . . . he had changed so much; he was so cold and –" She broke off, unwilling to tell him more. She didn't want to go into details about Team Seven's first meeting in almost three years. And she certainly didn't want to tell him about the next time they met. Didn't want to tell him about how he tried to kill her twice, tried to kill Naruto and Kakashi-sensei. Most of all, she didn't want to admit to him that she had tried to kill him. This Sasuke wasn't that Sasuke and he didn't deserve to be burdened with that knowledge.

"There's something more than that. What did I do?" Sakura looked up into Sasuke's eyes. There was something behind his gaze, a seriousness that she hadn't seen in this Sasuke yet. He was determined to figure out what he had done and do something to fix it, even though it hadn't been him in the first place. "I can tell by the way you look at me. As if I'm not real. Well, I guess I'm not literally real to you, but that's not the point. Like I'm something you can't believe exists. And more than me just simply being different from your Sasuke."

"The next time we saw Sasuke after that . . . he was so much worse. He was so consumed by darkness and hatred. Nothing could get through to him and I couldn't stand seeing him like that. I didn't want Sasuke to spend the rest of his life like that. So, I found him and . . . and tried to . . ." Could she really tell him this? Was it fair to?

"Sakura, please. I want to know. Need to know."

She took a deep breath and took the plunge. "I tried to kill him. I didn't want to watch him sink further into the darkness because I know that wasn't who he really was." Her head was bowed as she said this; she couldn't bring herself to look at Sasuke. "But he tried to kill me before I had a chance to do anything. Kakashi saved me, but I tried again. I couldn't . . . couldn't do it. Sasuke went after me again, but Naruto saved me this time."

Sasuke was now the shocked one, looking at her in disbelief. "After I did that, you still trust me? You asked for my help to get back to a place like that?"

"But that wasn't you, okay! You have to understand that! That Sasuke is a different person and you are not responsible for his actions. Besides, I tried to kill him first –"

"To save me from myself!"

"That's no excuse! And stop referring to him as you! He's not you –"

"But it was still someone who looks like me, sounds like me! How can you not hate the very sight of me!"

"I could never hate you." Sakura whispered. She hung her head so her bangs covered her face and pulled on her bathrobe again, now even more self-conscious of her attire. After a couple moments, she finally worked up the courage to look up at Sasuke.

He was staring at her in awe, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open slightly. Suddenly, he seemed to pull himself together. "Thank you," he said simply.

Those two words brought back a rush of feelings for Sakura. Yes, they reminded her of the night that he left, but the emotions surrounding those words wasn't the desperation of trying to stop him or the emptiness she would feel without him in her life. It was hope that she felt when he said those words nearly three years ago. With those words she knew that he wasn't all gone. She smiled slightly at Sasuke.

And then he did something that totally surprised her. He whipped out a rose and held it out to her. Now it was her turn to stare wide eyed and mouth agape. Then he said something that threw her off. "I will always be your ally," he stated. There was a slight smile on his face, but his words held nothing but sincerity.

Sakura briefly wondered where the rose had come from before she gathered her thoughts and extended her hand to take it from him, wondering at the implications of his words. While she was preoccupied with that, he did something else that completely blew her away. One second, he was smiling at her as he held the rose out and the next his face was centimeters away from hers. They shared a brief, intense moment of eye contact before their lips met and both their eyes slid closed. The breath she was about to take got caught in her throat. Her brain stopped working. Her heart felt as if it was going to explode. The kiss was short . . . and chaste . . . but absolutely perfect. It was everything she had ever imagined kissing Sasuke would be like and then some. And it was over far too quickly for her liking.

Sasuke straightened up, the smile on his face softer than before. "He's a lucky guy – having someone like you love him." And suddenly he was down on the street below again, just as quickly as he had leapt up onto her balcony. He didn't look back as he wandered down the street, but he did lift his hand in a small wave goodbye.

Sakura lifted a hand to her still tingling lips as she stared after him. She held up the rose and stared at that, too. "A rose: the flower of love," Ino's voice echoed in her mind. Again, she wondered where it had come from. Maybe he did bring it after all.

Her gaze focused on Sasuke's retreating form again. He wasn't the Sasuke from her world, but he sure as hell gave her hope for him. Hope that she and Naruto would bring him back to Konoha and that he could be just as carefree and happy someday. Smiling, she lowered her face to the rose and inhaled. Smells like hope, she though.

Hope you liked it! Just some more information regarding things I left out that I didn't want to put at the top so I didn't give too much away. I got the idea for this fic when the picture of Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Kakashi, and Guy all eating ramen first came out. I decided to not put Kakashi and Guy in because they took away from the focus of the story. I was struggling with the ending to this fic when the 30 second trailer came out, the one where Sasuke gives Sakura a rose. That was the perfect solution and I built the last scene around that moment. I decided not to include anything about Naruto's parents because when I was first working on it I wasn't really sure of their involvement in the movie. And let's face if, if I wanted to write about what seeing them was like for Naruto that would be a fic all on it's own! If you have any more questions about what I left out and why then feel free to ask me in a review, because I KNOW you're going to review! Right?