This is a fanfiction story set in the Naruto universe. Naruto is a Japanese manga series written, illustrated, and owned by Masashi Kishimoto. I do not own rights to Naruto, nor to any of the characters. This story was written for my own pleasure (and, well, because I lost a bet); I make no profit.

Summary: Bad things happen on moonless nights. Naruto embarks on a final mission, one that brings duty, betrayal, and his feelings for a pink-haired kunoichi to the fore. Naruto/Sakura. AU after timeskip.

Many thanks to beta readers Vylos and Iztiak for reading an early version of this story and pointing out all the mistakes I made. If you enjoy this story, you have them to thank. Take a bow, guys. Also, thanks to Japanese Jew and the Alpha Fight Club for their help.

Moonless Night

By Perspicacity

Bad things happen on moonless nights.

Naruto's eyes glint at a tangled copse where moments before he'd detected a lingering presence of chakra. The gnarled mass of trunks and textured shadows close in on him and the air, chill with the promise of winter, is dry and still. There is a whisper of steel and a pair of kunai appear in the shinobi's left hand. His right flashes a series of one-handed signs and he has a jutsu on his lips. He lowers into a crouch, muscles taut, ready.

Wings flutter and a midge flaps toward him. Naruto blinks and before him is a slender ninja, slightly taller than he, dressed in dark hues and bearing a Sound headband. Beneath his right eye is a triangular scar, a long-forgotten kunai wound.

"Leaf nin?" he asks, his voice rasping with disuse. He raises his hand sideways before his face, two fingers pointing up, his ring and pinky fingers bent down. His left hand grasps a ninja-to, held behind him prepared to strike. About the blade is a faint halo of green light.

Naruto nods his head slightly, answering in the affirmative, and makes a subtle hand gesture, the tip of his ring finger touching base of thumb, then palm. The other ninja relaxes somewhat, lowering his weapon. Naruto follows suit, stowing one kunai in his weapon pouch and palming the other.

"I've the information you need," the taller ninja says. He reaches into the folds of his vest and retrieves a slender scroll tied with a purple ribbon. The ninja drops it upon the ground and turns to leave.

"Wait! Is she still alive?" Naruto hopes he didn't sound too eager.

The nin pauses for a pregnant moment. "Yes." He disappears in a rustle of wind.

Naruto releases the breath he didn't realize he was holding. He steps forward into the clearing and kneels near the fallen scroll. Something about the situation feels a bit off; he's learned to trust these instincts, especially deep within enemy territory. Sharp eyes scan the forest, seeing nothing, and he listens against the haunted dark.

Reaching down, he feels for the scroll. A fingertip brushes the parchment and it sizzles. A half-second later, the scroll explodes in a magnesium flash and a powerful shock wave levels the forest.

Sakura stood in the sun beside her sensei at the village entrance, the two enduring oppressive heat in a site that inspired uncomfortable memories for both.

How weak she was, she reflected, blurting out her love in this spot for Sasuke—as if she understood love at that age—and begging him to let her tag along as he betrayed village and his fellow shinobi alike. It was a small mercy that he had abandoned her, leaving her shattered. Naruto, idiotic and ramen-obsessed, had departed from this place as well. His childish yet earnest oath, to return with Sasuke in tow, still rang fresh in her mind. That same boy had returned, battered, and had left the village again soon afterward.

She tried not to think of it as another abandonment, but her brain and heart didn't often cooperate.

Sakura fidgeted with her hair and the hem of her short blouse. She didn't know why her sensei, the Hokage, insisted that they stand before the village entrance, nor why her presence was required, taking her away from her rounds in the hospital.

"Relax, Sakura-chan," Tsunade said, a smirk on her face. The Godaime folded, then unfolded her arms. Sakura could tell that the older woman was also a bit anxious, though she hid it well.

"Sensei?" Sakura asked, seeing a beaming smile on the woman's face. She followed her woman's gaze to a point in the distance, where two figures appeared just over the hill, approaching slowly. The taller, a large man with tattoos on his face and a bone headpiece, walked with a tired grace. Jiraiya, the toad hermit, smiled, crinkling his eyes, upon seeing Tsunade. Beside him was a shorter ninja, blonde, dressed in a suit of charcoal with black wrappings about his arms and legs. A short ninja sword was slung across his shoulders and he carried himself with the subtle predaciousness of a feline.

"Naruto!" Sakura cried upon catching sight of the nin. He had grown in the three years they had been apart and was now taller than she, his wiry frame even taller than Sasuke when the Uchiha had left.

Naruto, now a young man, gave her a faint smile and a nod that evoked secrets. Subtlety? From Naruto? He had changed.

"Pervert." The Hokage sniffed as Jiraiya came close, a lascivious gleam in his eyes. "I do hope you haven't corrupted him."

"Not at all," he said, stepping back out of swatting distance from the woman. "Have I, brat."

"Not for want of trying, honorable sensei," Naruto said, bowing to the man. Sakura thought she noticed the hint of a cheeky grin on his lips, but it was gone before she could tell. He turned to Tsunade. "Hokage-sama." Another bow.

"Who are you and what have you done to Naruto?" she asked, eyeing the necklace about the boy's neck.

Jiraiya said, "About that, part of his training was in manners."

Tsunade sniffed. "As if you could teach him, old hermit."

Jiraiya mock glared at his former teammate, the slug summoner of the sannin. "I'll have you know that I am welcomed in courts and houses of royalty." He followed by muttering, "It's not all bath houses, you know."

Naruto, in the meantime had moved to face Sakura.

"Sakura-san. I had dreamed of seeing you again," he said, bowing to her as well.

"Naruto?" she asked, taken aback by the formality. Then she surprised them both by stepping forward and embracing him. "I missed you."

Naruto's face reddened and he returned the embrace, if clumsily. "I missed you too, Sakura-san."

"Chan," she said, pulling back and peering into his eyes.

"As you wish," he said, his eyes lowered. Where was the brash boy she knew, the one who had announced to the world that he'd be the next Hokage?

"Ah, young love," Jiraiya said, looking on with a smirk. "We were like that once."

Tsunade scoffed. "Perhaps, but it was you chasing me, if I recall." The corners of her mouth quirked upward.

"And why wouldn't I? A body like yours deserves appreciat..." Tsunade's slap knocked him to his knees.

He coughed. "Always had a thing for strong women."

"For any women," she said acidly.

"But especially for you, Tsunade-chan."

"San." She lowered her voice to just above a whisper. "So what of the Akatsuki?"

"Troublesome, but manageable. What you really have to worry about is the Uchiha."

"Itachi?" she asked, surprised. "He's left their ranks?"

"Sasuke," Jiraiya said, standing up and dusting himself off.

"Not Orochimaru?"

"Considering that Uchiha Sasuke is calling himself Otokage, I'd say not. From what I hear, the old snake's been caught by one of his experiments. The kid's powerful, amazingly so. I don't think you and I together could defeat him now. He's getting stronger at an alarming rate."

Tsunade sighed at the news. "Naruto. Report to my office. We need to discuss your duties now that you've returned."

"Hai, Godaime-sama," he said, then turned to Sakura, his cheeks pink at noticing her hands in his. "Gomen, Sakura-chan. I have to go."

Sakura took a deep breath, then steadied herself to do something she never thought she'd do. "Naruto, could we... go out sometime? For ramen maybe?"

Naruto watched the Hokage disappear and tuned out his sensei's chuckling. "I'd like that very much." He winked at her and disappeared in a flash of yellow.

"Bastard was just here," Takizuka, a Sound jonin with a triangular scar beneath one of his black eyes, swears under his breath. Thirteen other ninja stand near the epicenter of the blast.

"He shouldn't have been able to detect the note in time to use kawarimi no jutsu. The chakra in the seal was masked."

"He didn't. It was a shadow clone," a female voice says. "Fan out. He's near."

A faint whistle sounds and a kunai handle sprouts from the throat of one of the men. With a gurgle, his legs become limp and he crumples to the mulch.

Takizuka draws his ninja-to and hurls several shuriken in the direction of the foreign chakra he senses. A cry rings out and a Sound ninja's lifeless body flies forward, his throat sliced open and his chest bleeding from several shuriken wounds.

Takizuka's lieutenant hurls three orange fireballs in that direction while a second makes the seals for an earth jutsu, turning the ground black and tarry.

A muffled 'splut' punctuates the silence off to the left and a rain of kunai fly. They reach their target, a blonde ninja adorned in black, and he disappears in a puff of smoke.

"Another shadow clone?" one asks before his eyes roll back and his head slides downward and at an angle from his neck, a clean battojutsu strike having drawn the blade and cleaved head from body in a crimson swath. A golden flash swallows the Leaf nin and another Sound ninja screams, the point of a sword piercing his body, its blade entering the spine beneath the ribcage and cutting a clean, vertical slice beneath his Adam's apple.

"Ai!" Abe, Takizuka's younger brother, drops from the tree above and rams a kunai into the blonde ninja's brainpan. He disappears in a puff of smoke, while a doppleganger of the Leaf nin steps forward, eyes red.

Abe's catches sight of the ninja's eyes and his own widen in terror as he falls to his knees, stammering. His brother hurls a kunai at him to try to dispel the genjutsu, but before it arrives, scythes of wind chakra separate Abe's limbs from his body by with surgical precision. A flash of gold and the enemy ninja is gone.

He hears a cry off to the right—a comrade has been gutted. There is a crunch behind him, then a crumple; a broken neck fells another. Two screams sound in the distance and Takizuka fumes—only he remains of the initial party. He and the bitch, that is.

"Where are you, Blondie?" he mutters, straining his senses in an effort to locate the blonde.

His pulse quickens when his trolling comes up empty. He spins, flailing and stretching his senses to the utmost, then raises his short, straight-bladed weapon instinctively. A clang of steel rings as a kunai edge meets the side of Takizuke's ninja-to blade an inch from his cheek. Naruto nods respectfully at the man, then leaps backward in a flip.

"Gotcha!" the older ninja says and spins, conjuring a knife edge of chakra-infused wind that flies from the tip of his blade in a terrible, whirling ribbon. The writhing tape hums and twists, expanding outward, a death spiral that carves through trees and dying comrades alike. The blonde ninja's eyebrows rise and he holds his hand out, palm forward.

"Rasengan!" A blue sphere of whirling chakra appears before his hand. He thrusts it into the advancing fury and it consumes the wind attack with a crackling burst of light and the stink of ozone. Naruto hurls two kunai at the Sound ninja, who hurls two of his own back at Naruto. The four kunai meet between them in two short bursts of sparks and deflect off course. Takizuka rushes forward to swipe at Naruto, but a pair of hands reach up out of the tarry ground and snag his legs. He falls forward and Naruto hurls a cluster of senbon at the ninja's right shoulder, disabling the nerves—no power on the planet would allow the ninja to grasp the ninja-to now. Inert, it falls to the forest floor and Takizuka disappears in a kawarimi no jutsu before a brace of shuriken bury in his chest.

Naruto concentrates for a split second and flicks his wrist, sending a kunai backward over his right shoulder and into the shadow. He hears a grunt and the wet crumple of a man falling to the sticky ground. The ninja's other arm is impaled by the kunai and his legs are held fast by yet another pair of hands from beneath the tarry depths.

Naruto steps toward the man, his feet levitated above the tar by an application of chakra, and his eyes glow red and swirl. Senbon needles appear in his hand, as if by magic. Two heel strikes and two ligament pops later, and the ninja's legs bend forward at the knees.

"I am not someone to be trifled with..." Naruto says as he jams the needles into the sides of the man's head, perforating the nerve clusters that control his eyes, rendering them unable to close. "And your clumsy ambush qualifies as one. You will tell me what I wish to know," Naruto says menacingly.

Quivering and disabled, the man falls into inky depths of Naruto's demon-infused doujutsu.

He screams again and again.

"Clear!"

Sakura watched as Tsunade pressed her palms onto the chest of a kunoichi, whose body was badly injured and covered in blood. Green healing chakra flowed out from the palms and through the girl's chest. Her body heaved and the ECG trace jolted off-scale, then flatlined again with an electronic whine.

"Dammit. Come on, girl." Tsunade said, pressing her patient's chest to stimulate her heart. Shizune grasped the girl's limp left wrist and plunged a needle into her arm, then squeezed a bellow of air into the girl's chest.

"Come on, come on..." Tsunade said, watching the instruments. "Clear!"

Another powerful bolt discharged and the girl's body was flung into the air. It slammed back onto the table, inert. Another flatline, then a flicker of life.

"There's so much damage," Shizune muttered, her voice quavering. "Her spine's severed near the sixth vertebrae and her pelvis is shattered. Her lungs—one's collapsed entirely. The other's filling with fluid.

Tsunade checked the dying girl's fingertips, which were turning blue, and prodded open her eyes. The irises were dull green and one pupil was dilated.

"Soldier pill infusion. And another pint of blood, stat!"

"Can't take the strain," Shizune muttered as she grabbed the blood. "Chakra coils are shredded."

"No choice then," the Hokage said, her face grim. Tsunade's teeth tore at the plastic wrapping of a thumb-sized hypodermic needle and she concentrated, causing it to glow azure in her palm. Steeling herself, she pushed a slowly pulsing ball of chakra into her palm. She placed the needle tip into it and pulled the plunger back, filling the tube with viscous, ethereal fluid.

"Direct chakra infusion. Never tried it before, but who knows? It might work."

"Kami!" Shizune exclaimed as she watched the healer inject the needle into the chakra pathway on Sakura's neck. The patient's color went from pale to flush in a second, but then started to fade slowly. Tsunade screamed in frustration.

The doors to the operating room banged open and Naruto, dressed in a hospital gown, pushed his way in. "How is she?" he asked, his face scrunched up in worry. Sakura sees he's been through hell. Despite his miraculous healing ability, he had horrible wounds and his face was barely recognizable.

"Dammit, brat, get back to bed!" Tsunade shouted.

He ignored her and asked Shizune, "How is she?"

The nurse rolled her eyes. "She's dying, now go!" She handed Tsunade a clamp, then squeezed a bellow of air into the girl's lung.

Naruto moved to the kunoichi's side and took her hand in his, then brushed some hair out of the girl's eyes. Sakura was intrigued. He must care about the girl a great deal. She felt a little sad, seeing him lose someone precious. Tsunade too, she also looked sad. She always felt the healer needed to smile more.

Sakura smiled. She felt warm and content.

She blinked. Naruto and Tsunade were screaming at each other. They looked a little alike, each a blonde with a red face, a loud mouth, and a stubborn streak wider than the village. They might laugh at hearing that they are so much alike, but then maybe not. Someone they loved was about to die.

Dying isn't so bad, she thought. It's peaceful, like sleep. And so very warm...

Pink. The kunoichi's hair was pink. That was her on the table and she was dying.

She didn't want to die. Or did she?

Another blink.

Voices.

"I'm so sorry, Naruto. There's nothing more we can do." Shizune put her arm on the boy's shoulder.

"I won't give up! She can't die!"

Tsunade and Shizune exchanged a worried look over the boy's head.

"Naruto, I order you to stand down. You can't do anything more," Tsunade said, her eyes moist.

Naruto glared at her. Gnashing his teeth, he gathered thick, unrefined balls of chakra into his hands and pushed them gently onto the girl's abdomen, willing it to heal. Two tendrils of smoke rose from her wound and it closed somewhat. Sakura recognized it as a clumsy sort of repair, horribly wasteful of chakra and stamina, the kind of technique that one learns in the Academy and then unlearns once more efficient jutsus are known.

The academy. Naruto.

Sakura's memories flooded back. She recalled her capture from the hospital and her abuse. She remembered how she'd been so cold, forced to lie naked upon sharp rocks, bound in chakra-suppression manacles that chafed her skin. The jumbled haze of struggle and captivity crystallized into acute despair—Itachi's ungentle touch, Kisame's depravity, what he did with that sword...

And the lonely, icy cold. She thought she'd never again be warm.

After an eternity, something had descended upon her captors like a force of nature. Rage, feral and unfettered, reddened the sky and sucked vitality from the world. Her heart nearly stopped when Naruto, cerise eyes ablaze, appeared in a whirlwind of demonic chakra, inhuman and unrepentant.

Her captors never stood a chance as he shredded their ranks. One foolishly sought to snatch her and flee, but dropped her into a chasm while making his escape. Starving and bound, she couldn't arrest her fall and her body broke upon the stones. Some time later, hot droplets fell. Blood rained as above, Naruto ripped the man's heart from his chest.

She knew she was no longer beautiful to him and that hurt her more deeply than their abuses. Hot tears fell as he wept over her injured body. He gathered her to his chest, his touch gentle.

And so warm.

"Naruto," she whispered. "You came."

"Shh, Sakura-chan." He brushed a lock of hair from her eyes and his face hardened. The air rippled in liquid fire and she had the sensation of traveling at impossible speed...

She blinked.

"Baka!" Tsunade slapped Naruto behind the head, causing him to fall forward. "Even you can't heal her that way."

"I have to do something. She's my most precious person." His eyes pleaded with the woman. "This happened because of me... because of the Bijuu, anyway."

"She is, isn't she," Tsunade said sadly. "She's precious to me too. Unfortunately, my chakra is spent, as is my assistant's. And you lack the skill, so I don't know what more we can do. If I had twenty times the chakra, then maybe..."

Naruto thought for a moment, then closed his eyes, whispering, "Boushi suisou no jutsu," spinning cistern jutsu. He held his hand out and a swirling ball of chakra appeared that flattened into a torus of white gold. Shizune's eyes went wide.

"You won't be able to hold it for long enough," Tsunade lamented even as she reached her hand toward the spinning apparition. "But I'll do what I can."

"I'll make it hold," he said through clenched teeth.

Sakura watched, entranced, as over the next twenty minutes her body was stitched back together by minute fibrils of healing chakra. Naruto's face became drawn as exhaustion set in. It matched the haggard look on her sensei, whose hands were a blur. After a time, he leaned heavily onto the edge of the table, yet his focus stayed entirely on his outstretched hand that was draining his vitality. His control started to waver.

Somehow, she could sense something deep within him. The demon that she'd known about since she'd read Naruto's secret files in the Hokage's office raged inside, furious at the risk its container was taking. Insane from frustration, it hurled itself at its prison, causing the seals about Naruto's navel to glow and sizzle. His hospital gown blackened about his abdomen. Naruto hissed, then traced a seal with his left hand and seared it into his abdomen. Tsunade paused for a moment.

"Keep going," he grunted.

Tsunade did. Like a carpet weaver, she drew threads of chakra from his source and knit bones, sinew, and organs back together. In a few minutes, Naruto's body skin burst with perspiration and he started to shake uncontrollably, his reserves all but spent, yet still he fed more to the healer. Sakura saw his heart skip once, then again. It began to beat arhythmically and he started to lose consciousness, having wrung everything of himself. She begged impotently for him to stop, but he held fast, biting through his lip with his lengthening fangs as the strain of maintaining the jutsu and holding back the demon overtook him.

"Done!" Tsunade shouted, leaping back, as Naruto dropped his control. The white torus lost its shape and flowed downward, a mass of gleaming mercury that swallowed his hand and shredded the flesh before it dissipated into gossamer memory.

He looked at his wounded hand curiously. "Tell..." He collapsed. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.

Sakura felt herself drawn back into her now whole body. She caught only Tsunade's wry words, completing Naruto's thought. "Tell her that you're in love with her? I think she already knows, kid."

The kunoichi stops, exhausted from her flight. Her clothing has small tears in it and her lungs burn from the long, frantic chase across the Sound. They had taken the long route through the forest instead of cutting through the rice patties—she dared not allow him an open space with which to use his more powerful wind jutsu. Having finally lost sight and sense of her pursuer, she calms and leans against the trunk of a tree. "Damn, he's fast," she says, eying the hidden passage that would take her into the Sound village.

"Why thank you," Naruto says, dropping from the branches above and landing before her in a silent crouch. He holds two kunai in reverse grips and he adopts a taijutsu stance with a casual, vulpine grace that quickens her pulse. She's still attracted to him, despite herself.

Sakura backflips, kunai in each hand. "Naruto," she says, her expression guarded.

"Care to explain what just happened?" He eyes her warily.

"I didn't have a choice. I had to take part in the ambush." She feels strangely exposed before her former lover.

"To keep your cover?" he asks.

"Yes."

He is quiet for a moment, as if weighing her words, then puts his kunai away. "Your mission is compromised. Come home, Sakura-san. Come back to Konoha." His voice loses some of its steadiness at the end.

The pink-haired kunoichi deflates before him. "I can't."

"What do you mean you can't?" he says in a loud whisper. "Your mission's over—I have site authority to end it. Recovering you was my secondary objective."

"Is that all I am to you? A mission objective?" she asks bitterly.

He steps nearer. "You know better than that. Our time together—didn't it mean something to you?"

She looks at him for a moment, then turns quickly, tears in her eyes. "Don't, Naruto. Just don't. It wasn't meant to be."

"Why not?" he replies hotly. "Tell me that it isn't what you want."

She doesn't meet his eyes. "It is—you know that—but I can't... We can't."

Naruto shakes his head and steps back, giving her space. "I was expecting you to make the trade, you know. When I saw the other nin, I used a bunshin substitution right away."

"I know. I saw it. You're pretty predictable for someone who knows you."

"I know. I saw you watching me," he says, smirking. "You're predictable too for someone who knows you like I do." He winks at her. "And nobody knows you better than I do. I could pick you out a mile away, you know... I've memorized the feel of your chakra—and everything else about you. I can close my eyes and sense you nearby."

She looks down, blushing slightly.

"Come home, Sakura-chan. For me?"

She closes her eyes, contented, as if considering it, but then the corners of her mouth turn down. "No. I have to complete this mission," she says hesitantly, as if trying to convince herself.

Naruto sighs and jumps into the treetops.

Sakura follows, landing silently beside him on a branch. "This mission is important and I'm so close... I'm the only one who can do it."

"Not as important as you," he said. "We'll find another way."

"And if we don't? Are you going to risk Kohona? What gives you the right to make that decision? You're not the Hokage. Not yet, anyway." She wipes at one of her eyes with the back of her wrist. "We're just tools, Naruto. Of the village, the Hokage..."

"You don't believe that any more than I do," he says hotly.

"I don't know what I believe anymore." She continues to dab at the stubborn tears. "But I do know what I am—a kunoichi of the Hidden Leaf."

He swallows and is silent for awhile. "A ninja must forget his emotions," he intones quietly. "Sasuke. You always did love him more." He ghosts to the forest floor.

She drops in front of him and pulls him into a tight, almost desperate embrace. "I did once," she whispers. "But I love you, Naruto. No matter what happens, know that I love you so..."

He grunts, then relaxes into her touch, holding her close. They share a hungry kiss, one filled with desperation, that evokes memories of steamy passion and promises in the moonlight. "I know, Sakura-chan," he whispers, his breath caressing her lips. He breathes in her scent—cherry blossoms and the sweaty tang of exertion. And the faintest hint of sex... And of Sasuke, the serpent. His stomach clenches.

"No matter what it takes," she whispers to herself, as if repeating an order given long ago. Or a promise to herself.

A sharp pain pierces Naruto's chest and another lances his neck. He gasps as his legs stop working and he falls upon his side with a kunai handle poking from between his ribs and a senbon in his spinal cord. Tears stream down Sakura's face and her hands shake. "I--I love you, Naruto-kun, but I still have my mission."

"Dobe." A black shadow steps forward, a smirk on his lips.

"Sasuke," Naruto tries to spit, but blood wells in his mouth and he coughs instead. Pitiful. He can feel that Sakura's kunai severed the arteries in his heart and he can't access the demon's chakra or healing abilities. She's done her homework. She always did, top of her class.

He closes his eyes at the image of his beloved slipping her arms around his eternal rival.

Answering the summons, Sakura arrived outside the Hokage's door and listened for a moment. Loud shouts indicated that she shouldn't have bothered—Naruto and her sensei were having another argument.

"Send me, dammit. Give me thirty minutes and I'll tear that village to the ground!"

"I can't let you do that. You know as well as I do that his Sharingan can stop the Kyuubi. And I probably shouldn't tell you this, but if the reports we've received are correct, he's learned a technique to absorb the chakra and possibly abilities of those he defeats. He's been hunting the Bijuu and the remaining Akatsuki."

"Who? You wouldn't move unless he'd captured one."

"Nii Yugito is missing from the Cloud, presumed captured by Sasuke."

"So he's got the power of the two-tailed cat."

"And maybe more. Deidara is also said to be missing."

Sakura heard Naruto sigh. "There has to be another way. How about me, Kakashi, and Yamato go and..."

"Baka! When did you think this was negotiable? Look, I know how you feel about her, but we need information on what the Uchiha's done, what steps he's taken to get so strong, and how far down the snake's path he's gone toward immortality. This isn't the time to just to raze the place and destroy any evidence pointing to the source of his power or the nature of his immortality technique. We'd give him a chance to rise again, stronger than before. No, I'm sorry Naruto, but it's my final word."

She heard a chair slide backward on the floor, as if someone had stood up too quickly.

"I swear to you, if anything happens to her..." Naruto's voice was colder than Sakura had ever heard. She tapped tentatively on the door with the knuckle of her index finger.

"Come!" Naruto and Tsunade shouted in unison, neither ready to concede.

Sakura stepped inside and caught her lover's eye, then bowed to the Hokage. "You sent for me, sensei-sama?"

Before Tsunade could speak, Naruto interrupted, "Sakura-chan, don't take this mission. Refuse it, please... for me?"

"She can't," Tsunade said. "Not and stay a kunoichi. It's S-ranked." Naruto glared at the woman, his face taut with suppressed anger.

Sakura swallowed, knowing that her choice would place her in danger, both to herself and of breaking his heart. "I am a ninja, Naruto. I must do this."

The man she loved turned on his heel and disappeared in a swirling breeze. It would be years before she saw him again.

Within the seal, Naruto walks to the rusted cage door. Behind, Kyuubi rages, its bass roar shaking the ground as it berates its container for his stupidity and naivety.

"Are you quite finished?"

The Kyuubi glares at him in silence. Malefic, swirling pools of red meet bright blue.

"Good."

Naruto places a finger on the paper seal over the cage door. He can sense Sakura's chakra nearby—she's clinging to Sasuke, hopefully distracting him from what he is about to do. Only a moment is needed.

"You will destroy the Uchiha and then the Sound village. You will leave Kohona alone, but aside from that, I really don't care what you do. Those are my terms. Do you accept?"

Kyuubi pauses for a moment, then thunders, "Yes."

A finger tears through the paper. Outside, the skin over Naruto's abdomen rips open.

Sakura's chakra fades to oblivion.

A snap of steel, a demon is free.

"Feast well, my friend."

Fin.