There Will Come Soft Rains

. . .

"And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone."

-Sara Teasdale, 'There Will Come Soft Rains', Flame and Shadow

. . .

Chapter One

The End...

It was raining, still. A soft rain that coated everything in cold dew, collected on the branches, on the leaves, on the needles, and dripped off in great fat drops that soaked through Naruto's wet clothes and onto his wet skin. He squatted, still and silent, in the damp brush, water running down his face. He felt the great motion of the forest and heard all its thousand sounds. The countless crawling of the insects, the blind scuttling of the moles, the timid rustling of the deer.

He heard everything except the sounds he was most familiar with. The sounds he'd yearned to hear for the last three days. The sounds of humans. He needed a sign. If there was at least one of them still alive- at least one, he told himself- then it would have been worth it.

Naruto gave a short, bitter laugh, and shook his head in exasperation. Of course there wasn't.

Of course.

"Alone." he said out loud, running a hand through his damp hair absentmindedly. He stood with his back to a tree, a stillness in his body and a terrible silence clenched between his teeth. Dying by your own hand is not an easy thing to contemplate, especially for a man like Naruto. He thrust his hand into his pocket, taking out a rusty kunai. Its bright blade glistened with wet. He'd had three days to think about it.

He took the kunai into his right hand, brought his other hand forward, and moved to slash across his wrist. I'm sorry, thought Naruto even as the blade glistened red. It was just then when his stomach glowed brightly against the darkness of the night, and he saw no more.

I'm back here again, in the seal, he thought, as he inspected his surroundings.

The air was cold and wet, beads of water clinging to his eyelashes, the water around his knees sloshing with each pained step he took towards the heavy gates looming ahead, stretching up into the darkness.

The scene was the same as Naruto had experienced several times before- the location he found himself in looked to be something like a sewer, with pipes going up along the ceiling and water dripping with every step he took towards his destination.

The fox still lives.

Up ahead, red chakra drifted around the bars of the seal like a living flame. The bars were broken- turned inside themselves, which meant that they had been broken from the outside. Inside, was nothing.

Naruto's eyes narrowed as he turned around. He heard his name being whispered from the east. With one last, longing look at the broken seal, where some of Kyuubi's chakra still remained, he turned to the direction he'd heard the sound coming from.

Perhaps...some of its essence survived, during the breakage of the seal. Naruto tried to not let his hopes get too high as he plodded on to his destination. A cold breeze passed through his body, and he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Turning around, he stared into eyes as blue as the ocean as the person enveloped him into a hug.

Minato watched with somber eyes as Naruto narrated the series of events that had driven him to desperation. The boy was saying something about the Edo Tensei technique, about how it had all gone wrong when Minato took a hold of his son's shoulders and told him to take a deep breath.

It is hard to say what troubled Minato so much. Naruto didn't seem noticeably changed in any way. Except, perhaps, that he moved a little slower, and the spark- the fire he'd seen in Naruto's eyes when he'd met him previously- it was gone now.

"It's over now, isn't it?" Minato said.

Naruto stared downwards. "Yes...and it's all my fault. I couldn't save even one of them, father...not even one-" he said bitterly, before being cut off by Minato.

"You know why I chose the Shiki Fujin technique to seal the Kyuubi in you, and not any of the other, conventional ones, Naruto?" said Minato, staring out of the window nearby into the endless void.

Minato had told Naruto that the seal reflects what the owner thinks of it- Naruto had always thought of the seal as a jail, he had always thought it to be something you could never think of fondly- and so his mind had turned the seal into a sewer. It was only a matter of perception, in the end, but now that Naruto knew about the seal, he and Minato were sitting in a replica of the Hokage tower instead of a sewer.

"...I had always wondered..." Naruto mumbled in a small voice, shaking his head.

"If I were to summarise the reason behind my decision with one word, it would be Hope." Minato smiled, still staring out of the window. Turning his head to face Naruto fully, he spoke again. "But then again, one word doesn't explain everything now, does it? In truth, if I were to be honest with you, it was a mixture of desperation, hope, duty, and...preparation."

Naruto frowned. "Preparation for what?"

"You see, moments leading up to my death, I had put the pieces of the puzzle together and worked out the masked man's identity. His fighting style, his voice-everything had been familiar to me. But it was only in my last moments that I could fit the pieces- that I could tell that the masked man was infact, Obito. And in that moment, I made my decision. I knew I was going to die any way, I had interacted too much with the Kyuubi's malevolent chakra- it had already began its work, taking its toll on my body. I can see now that you can somehow purify that chakra, Naruto- but at that time it was poison, for all intents and purposes. My death was inevitable. Kushina had died. And so, I summoned the Death God."

Minato paused, as if remembering something. He then shook his head, and continued. "I made the contract. In exchange for my life, it sealed half the Kyuubi's chakra along with it's consciousness into you-" Minato was interrupted in between by Naruto.

"You keep calling him Kyuubi, father. He has a name. Kurama."

Minato smiled again, something in Naruto reminding him of himself when he was younger. "- it sealed half of Kurama's chakra into you. And half of it was to be sealed with me into the Death God's stomach, supposedly fighting for all of eternity."

"Wait, so you mean Kurama- when he was sealed in me, had only half of his chakra? What the fu-"

"Ah, no. Kurama probably recovered all of it in a matter of weeks at the most. He probably didn't even know."

"So why did you seal half of it with you, then?"

"Preparation."

"...Preparation for what?"

"For this." Minato took something out of his hand and put it on the ground. It exploded with a poof of smoke.

Coughing, Naruto saw through the haze that the ground which he had been standing on had been transformed into a seal. One heck of a large seal.

"My masterpiece. It took me sixteen years to make this, Naruto. Sixteen years of working tirelessly in your seal, hiding from Kurama. But it is useless without the yang chakra that is sealed into the Shinigami's stomach-"

"-uhh, I don't know if you know this, father, but Orochimaru and the others kinda split its stomach open or something so that they could resurrect you and the other Kage's with the Edo Tensei. So...about that chakra..."

"I know, I know. When you split open its stomach, Kurama's yang chakra went to the version of me that was resurrected. But after that version..." Minato seemed to be scrambling for words. "...died, it came back to me. I don't quite know why this happened, but it is what it is."

"...Okay. So, this seal."

"Amazing, isn't it?"

"Well, it is quite large."

Minato gasped. Could it be...that my son does not know the art of sealing? "Naruto...what did Jiraiya teach you?"

"Oh, a lot of things. The Rasengan, Sage-Mode. And uh, other things."

Minato palmed his head. "Sealing?"

"Nope."

Sighing, Minato started again. "Then I suppose I'll have to explain this to you. Simply put, this is a seal for...time-traveling."

To be continued in the next Chapter: ...Or a New Beginning?

Authors' Notes:

'Meh, another one of those cliche time-travel stories.'

I suppose that was your reaction when you read this.

I suppose you think this is gonna be like another one of those stories where Naruto gets to go back in time and is invincible and godlike.

I suppose you haven't read my other story, 'Atonement' yet.

I hope all of these misconceptions will be cleared by the next chapter.

Stay tuned!