The battlefield of Konoha was a ruin — debris, dismembered limbs, the acrid stink of blood mixing with pulverized stone. Somewhere under the silence a fallen shinobi groaned. In the middle of it stood Sasuke Uchiha, katana dripping, a dark shape that looked like vengeance given a body. ANBU, Jōnin — Konoha's best had come for him, and Konoha's best were the ones bleeding out on the ground.
He was fourteen, and he understood exactly what he was doing. Revenge wouldn't rebuild the Uchiha compound. It wouldn't undo the night that had gutted him. Cutting down every last enemy standing here would leave him with nothing but the cutting. He knew all of that, and none of it slowed his hand. His Sharingan swept the field, red bleeding into black, and the shinobi still on their feet flinched under it.
He raised his blade for the next kill. The air changed before he swung it — chakra rolling in thick and primal, a presence he knew. Naruto stepped out of the haze wreathed in the Nine-Tails' fire, his face set with the particular mix of guilt and stubbornness Sasuke remembered too well.
The surviving Leaf shinobi let out a ragged breath. Their savior had come.
Naruto's steps were heavy. "I wish you could let go of your hatred, Sasuke." His eyes glowed faint gold with Kurama's chakra, locked on Sasuke's. "This ends here."
"It doesn't have to end this way." Even as he said it, Sasuke's grip tightened on the katana. The Leaf shinobi were closing in around him, weapons raised, steadied by Naruto's arrival. They thought they had him boxed in.
He answered with lightning. A thunder jutsu tore outward in a single merciless wave, arcing through the closing shinobi and dropping them where they stood, the air gone thick with ozone and burnt flesh.
Naruto didn't flinch — the Nine-Tails' chakra shielded him — but his eyes went hard when he understood the scale of what Sasuke had just done. "Sasuke!" A Rasengan bloomed in his palm, spinning with Kurama's power behind it.
Sasuke met the charge head-on, Sharingan blazing, and summoned his Susanoo. The spectral warrior took the Rasengan's impact and shattered into chakra dust. He answered with fire; Naruto answered the fire with a Wind Style: Rasenshuriken, tearing straight through flames that should have eaten it whole. Chidori sparked against Naruto's guard and was turned aside. Kirin came down from the heavens and Naruto was already gone from where it landed. When Sasuke finally reached for Indra's Arrow, Naruto met it with a Six Paths: Ultra-Big Ball Rasenshuriken, and the collision shook the ruins of Konoha down to their foundations.
Sasuke's vision blurred. Blood ran freely from a dozen wounds, his chakra thinning to almost nothing. He went down on one knee, and the shinobi he'd cut through moments ago began closing in again from the shadows, patient now that he was slowing.
Naruto crossed the distance to him, voice low. "Let me end your pain and hatred, Sasuke."
Sasuke's breath came in gasps. He was bleeding out and he knew it, and even here he felt no regret for how far he'd strayed from the Sasuke this world was supposed to have. He hadn't been a stranger wearing this face — he'd carried memories of another life into this body since he was nine years old, and those memories had shown him exactly how large his war really was: not just Itachi, but the officials and clans propping up the Third Hokage's throne behind him.
Years of training, plotting, sacrifice — it all crashed through his mind at once, and something like a smile pulled at his mouth. One card left. He drove his remaining will into his Mangekyō Sharingan, and the world slowed as it flared to life, reality bending at the edges. He could rewrite this. Heal. Turn everything around.
A rod of black light punched through his back before he'd finished the thought, and his focus shattered with it. He looked down at the point driven through his chest, dark energy already crawling into him, his form starting to dissolve, his Mangekyō guttering out with nothing left to spend it on. Above him stood the one who'd thrown it — the Sage of the Six Paths, stepping into a fight that had never been his to lose.
The Black Rod's force outmatched anything Sasuke had left. His body crumbled apart, thought scattering into defiance and regret in equal measure. He had bent time itself and defied fate to get here, and it still hadn't been enough.
As the dark closed in, one thought remained, clear and stubborn to the last:
*I don't want this ending.*
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