Devil's Advocate

Chapter 1, (Un)Familiar Territory

I do not own a thing pertaining to the Naruto franchise.

I should be working on Paradise Lost. Instead, I'm stuck writing a story for a fandom I haven't thought about in years. There is a story titled 'Try not to F*** up the future', in which Naruto ends up being sent to an alternate dimension and meets a female Madara. It's a pretty decent read for what devolved into a crackfic, and it made me start doing the same thing I always do when hit with an amazing idea that I felt is under appreciated.

Take that idea, and run with it.

I'm completely out of touch with a lot of stuff from the series, so it might take me a while to get back into the swing of the characters and their abilities, but hopefully not too terribly long.

So here it is, a Fem!Madara story that I didn't know I wanted to write!

[DA]

If there was anything the figure currently descending from the sky at near terminal velocity knew at that moment, it was one thing.

Pain.

Pure, unadulterated pain.

It was hard to think, but one Naruto Uzumaki was of sound enough mind to register that he was currently on a crash course with the earth below. Trying to muster any form of strength was difficult when the wind slicing into his skin was strong enough to steal the breath from his lungs but he attempted to do so regardless. He could feel himself growing cold as he continued his descent, numb from the heavy loss of chakra and blood, but his desire to live proved too strong to completely snuff.

The ground continued to grow closer as he once more reached inwards for strength, dredging the absolute bottom of his once limitless pools of energy for whatever vital scraps he could muster. It wasn't enough to stop the pain, nor would it be enough for even the most simple of techniques, but it would do.

Reinforcing his body as best he could, he braced for impact and almost as soon as he wrapped the last of his energy around his body like a paper-thin cloak, the earth gave way beneath him.

Splintering from the velocity generated by the body and cratering as kinetic energy and chakra transferred outward, an explosive shock wave disturbed the once peaceful silence for miles surrounding the epicenter.

If it was possible to be even more miserable than he had been previously, the blond man currently covered in blood, dust and stones would have expired from the severe impact.

His life essence was rapidly vacating his body and spilling onto the rubble he attempted to push himself out of and he soon found the source of his leak. It was his lack of a right arm that greeted him as he attempted to use a limb that wasn't there, flopping onto his right side as his left arm carried out the task his brain had given both limbs.

Naruto's pupils shrunk to pinpricks as he stared at the ghastly wound, the now identified source of pain being something he knew Kurama couldn't just fix willy-nilly. Healing a punctured heart burned by thousands of volts of electricity while keeping his host body alive? Sure. Growing back something as complicated as an arm from scratch?

He doubted his furry friends ability to pull off that miracle.

The nature of his wound finally setting in is what finally kicked his mind back into gear enough to form a coherent string of thoughts.

'Kurama...' The blond intoned weakly, almost finding himself incapable of doing so as his vision started to fade around the edges, only for a burst of foreign but familiar chakra to revitalize him enough to remain conscious.

There was no verbal response, however.

'What the hell happened?'

It took him some few seconds of concentration for his recent memories to come rushing back to the forefront of his mind, and he felt his warm blood run cold after he did so.

He remembered the Fourth Shinobi War and all that it entailed, including the truth of Obito's identity, Madara Uchiha's revival and death, Kaguya and finally, his battle with Sasuke at the Valley of the End.

It was only when his scattered mind went over the final moments leading up to his impromptu skydive did Naruto understand.

He... had lost.

Despite the odds and the Devil's luck on his side, he had lost his final battle against Sasuke.

His opponent had used his faith, his trust, against him, and Naruto paid the price for thinking with his heart and not his mind.

Using his chakra siphoning ability once more, Sasuke had ripped the last bit of Kurama's purified chakra from Naruto's chest and used it to open a rift with his Rinne-Sharingan. Without a word, Sasuke had kicked his blond brother in all but blood through the rift and sealed it shut almost as quickly as it came, and with the rift closed, so too sealed was the fate of the entire world.

Gritting his teeth, the blond Jinchuuriki once more attempted to push himself to his feet, this time keeping his missing right arm in mind as he diverted his center of gravity towards his mostly unwounded left side. It took some time for his muscles to respond and after close to a minute of effort, the blond shinobi was finally able to stumble to his feet.

Panting heavily and once more on the brink of blacking out, the blond cast a weary gaze around him in an effort to get a grasp on his location. The sight of upended trees, stones and walls of earth surrounding the crater he created upon impact was all that greeted him, lacking any sort of marker to denote where he was.

He knew that the Valley of the End was where the Land of Fire ended and the Land of Rice began, but there was no telling where Sasuke's technique ended up sending him.

Sasuke had used the same technique as Kaguya, one capable of sending the user to different dimensions.

If there was one was to ensure that his opponent couldn't come back to fight him again, it was to leave him stranded somewhere he had no hopes of returning from.

Once more, the grim reality of his situation began to set in and the heavily wounded shinobi almost gave in to the anguish he felt then and there. Fighting to stay standing, the blond gave his immediate vicinity another blurred once-over in an attempt to identify even the most faintly familiar of sights.

The only thing he could tell for certain is that the trees looked sort of familiar, so he had a good feeling he may be somewhere in the Land of Fire, but other than the trees he had absolutely nothing to go on.

'Any idea on where we are, Kurama?' Naruto once more attempted to send his thoughts inward towards the Biju residing within his gut, but once more he received nothing but silence in return.

Naruto took a step forward and stumbled as the ground beneath him gave way enough to roll his ankle, forcing him to eat dirt for the umpteenth time in the past twenty minutes alone. He attempted to reach out to catch himself before he hit the ground and was once more reminded of his current lack of a right arm, leaving him to collapse on the still bleeding stump and scream into the dirt in agony.

His screams eventually fell silent and darkness overtook his mind completely, but not before he could faintly register two foreign chakra signatures touching down just outside of his crater.

Chakra signatures he swore he had felt just a few hours prior.

[DA]

It had been a rather dull day for Madara Uchiha.

It started off as her days usually did within the past year, with no small amount of irritation, yelling and brooding. After the death of her father, at her hands no less, Madara found herself thrust into the position of acting leader of the Uchiha clan and all that position entailed.

Paperwork, politics and planning espionage, the three P's of a good shinobi. Power, Prestige and a phenomenal lover would just have to come later, as those were the three she was expecting.

She had come to regret her decision of patricide almost as soon as she committed to the idea.

Despite her desire to lead her clan, it did not mean she enjoyed sitting in a stuffy room all day and thus she had found herself wandering the country side of the Land of Fire late in the afternoon with no real destination in mind. Negotiating a better price on steel imported from the Land of Iron had taken far more of her day than she had intended, and the merchant peddling the ingots had proven to be a pig in more ways than one during his brief visit.

She fought down the shiver that threatened to quake her spine in revulsion, instead focusing on anything and everything else on her mind to distract her.

In light of the current ceasefire between the Senju and Uchiha, Madara was taking advantage of the temporary lapse in bloodshed to try and curb her inner turmoil over the continued harassment she faced by her counterpart and rival, Hashirama Senju. Nothing vulgar in nature, but it was harassment none the less.

Her beloved little sister and only remaining sibling, Izumi Uchiha, fought tooth and nail to convince Madara otherwise, but the elder of the two was slowly starting to see that Hashirama was more right than wrong in his strong beliefs, especially when he went out of his way time and time again to prove himself and his ideals to her.

This most recent cease in conflict was evidence of such.

Why, indeed, did the Uchiha and Senju continue to war with one another when both sides had long forgotten what they fought for? As it stood, Madara found herself enjoying not having to see the young of her mighty clan brought low before another in battle, or having to rally dozens of fighters to secure a front that would only shift again in another month or so.

Madara could concentrate on issues not pertaining to their most hated enemy for once and make headway on implementing her own changes within her clan, much like Hashirama had done when he had succeeded his father in ruling the Senju.

She was hardly a capable public speaker, but her zeal and ferocious combat ability made her an ideal figure for the Uchiha to rally behind and even the most vitriolic members of her clan knew better than crossing her.

If she fought hard enough, she was sure she could convince enough of her clansmen of her and Hashirama's dream of peace to quell the rest of her violent relatives.

Madara was so wrapped up in her thoughts of how to even broach the subject with her clan members at large that the sound of what seemed to be an explosion in the distance hardly registered in her mind.

Eventually, however, she was forced to pay attention to the distant noise when a shock wave of displaced air washed over her seconds later, forcing her to grit her teeth and apply chakra to her feet to better stick to the earth. As soon as the shock wave passed, Madara changed her course from north to east and began to head directly towards what she assumed was the source of the explosion with great speed.

Her eyes bled crimson as the Sharingan sprang to life within her once coal black eyes, three tomoe spinning quickly around her pupil as she scanned the environment around her for signs of enemy combatants. The only chakra sources she could detect within her immediate vicinity during her quick travel were those of small animals and woodland creatures that roamed the forests below.

As did most shinobi within the densely forested Hi no Kuni, Madara traveled near the tree tops and leaped from one branch to another to give her a better vantage point to view the surrounding area.

Madara readied herself for a fight the closer she got to where she deduced the epicenter of the explosion originated from, her suspicion growing as she drew nearer to the source. The trees and area around her were familiar, vestiges of a past where she and Hashirama had gathered at the stream below her to skip rocks and swim.

She paused for a moment to regard the stream, fond memories rushing to the forefront of her mind before the young matriarch pushed them away and returned her focus to the present.

All thoughts of Hashirama and her past pushed aside, Madara found herself drawing a kunai and pooling her chakra behind her eyes to push her Sharingan to its next stage. With the Mangekyou flaring to life, it was far easier for her to pinpoint the location of the disturbance, as well as what appeared to be a fading chakra signature within a chakra laden crater.

Leaping forward one last time, the armor clad ninja came to a rest on one of the top branches of a tree standing at the very edge of the crater below. It wasn't quite close enough to the river to form a basin, but she was sure that nature would do her part.

Now that she was close enough to get a decent look, she determined that the figure laying near the center of the crater was indeed on the verge of death. A small flame of chakra remaining kindled within his reserves while a different blend of energy seemed to congregate heavily on his right sight, close to his shoulder and upper arm.

His chakra was unfamiliar to her, but something about it caught her attention. Perhaps it was the strange coloration, or perhaps the way that it started growing in both size and strength as she watched, but Madara soon found herself leaping down to the edge of the crater to get a better look.

Under closer scrutiny, the ebony haired Uchiha couldn't stop a frown from marring her usually neutral expression. The figure in the middle of the crater looked like hell had run him through, multiple times.

He was laying down face first in the dirt, but not quite directly in the center of the crater. From the looks of it, the heavily wounded blond, at least she assumed he was a blond beneath all of the blood and grime from the few patches of yellow she could spot, had not only caused the crater she now stood in with his body, but he had stood up and tried to walk away afterwards.

An impact capable of causing the crater she now found herself in would have killed any other shinobi she knew outside of maybe herself, Izumi, Hashirama and his white haired dick of a brother, Tobirama.

It was around that time that she spotted the garish stump that remained of what used to be his right arm, still slowly leaking blood unto the soil beneath him.

So not only did this man fall from the sky and hit the earth at terminal velocity, only to try and walk away from it, but he did so while heavily wounded and after recently losing a limb?

Madara was most likely better off killing the poor bastard before he could recover any further, not only to ensure one less potential enemy in the world, but to put him out of what was obviously misery.

Anyone who could survive a beating like what this man obviously took had to be a monster.

It was for that very reason that she stayed her hand, and instead of severing the spine of the wounded man with her kunai, she instead rolled him over to face the sky to get a better look at it and hopefully identify him.

The ebony haired warrior did her best to ignore the massive swelling taking over the left portion of his face, instead trying to recognize the blond by going over the notable shinobi of the many clans that called Hi no Kuni home. Despite her efforts, however, she couldn't really say for certain that she had ever seen him before in her life, and that bothered her.

If there was one thing Madara prided herself on, it was knowing her enemies almost better than she did her allies. This man did not look to be one of her enemies, and he obviously was no ally.

She would have remembered someone with such cute little whisker marks, Madara was sure of it.

Once more, the current leader of the Uchiha clan was torn on her decision.

Did she end the man before he could become a threat, leave him to die of natural causes, or... or did she risk it, and take him back to the Uchiha compound to heal?

Torn with indecision, Madara bit her lower lip and once more brought her gaze to the wounded but satisfyingly cute whiskers that were visible beneath flakes of dried mud and blood.

Her decision was made for her, however, when she sensed a chakra signature approaching her position from the west, a direction she knew would eventually take her near the Senju encampment should she travel that way far enough.

Biting her lower lip harder as a result of the sudden pressure she felt to make a decision, Madara once more weighed her options, this time with the Senju in mind.

If they, being the Senju clan, were the cause of this mans wounds, then that painted him in a slightly more opportunistic light for her.

The enemy of my enemy is still my enemies enemy, but that didn't mean the wounded man couldn't be a potential bargaining chip in the future. If he was enemies with the Senju, then she might be able to talk him into some form of alliance, should he survive his wounds. If he wasn't, then Madara taking him with her would keep the wounded man out of their hands, which might also end up working in her favor.

It was for that reason that Madara decided to scoop him up and hold him against her chest almost as she would have a child, mostly to prevent her movements from jostling his wounds too badly.

Ignoring the warm blood and grime soaking into her shirt sleeves, the Uchiha Matriarch pumped as much chakra into her body as it could handle and set off for her clans home at nearly record breaking speed, missing the group of Senju sent to investigate by a wide window as a result.

It was this decision, to spare a life to spite her enemies, that would forever change the course of the Shinobi world as they knew it, though she would never know it.