Black Light (Naruto)

Prologue

Hi! I hope you guys enjoy this chapter! For the newer readers, the next chapters are unedited (the ones before November, aka 11/01/2020) but I'm slowly getting them done! Enjoy! 

(08/16/2021 update: Getting used to a new laptop. Edits might be odd, so if you see any mistakes feel free to become a grammar nazi!) 

(TW: Swearing; talk of death; talk of abuse, malnourishment, toxic relationships, starvation, etc; author doesn't know how to write some characters but that's okay)

Kurama's Words

Thinking/Flashbacks

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Rubble surrounded Naruto as he painfully collapsed onto his knees, falling onto his back with a soft thud. His pale yellow hair, which had faded due to stress and lack of nutrients, brushed over his eyes. It blocked the grey clouds above his head that had blocked the sun for so long.

He was out of ideas. 

Sure, Madara was dead, but so was everyone else. Naruto knew this because he'd watched most of them die. Unless if it was Orochimaru, because with that creepy snake bastard, one could never be too sure.

Naruto's lungs burned as he took a soft sigh as that familiar, idiotic determination filled him. It was stupid, stupid, stupid. Why couldn't he ever just give up?? Despite all of his best efforts, everybody had died. 

But their deaths wouldn't be in vain. Now that Madara was dead, although he and Kurama were the only ones left, he refused to go down without at least struggling a little bit. 

Still. Their sacrifices would waste away with him. 

Time drifted by. Night eventually fell, the rubble casting barely-there shadows with the extremely thin influence of the moon. Nature chakra hummed around him, noticeable with the lack of chakra signatures. He supposed it was a beautiful sight.

After all, plants still grew through the rubble. Flowers bloomed in the fields far away from here, not scarred with battle. The trees were seemingly taking in all of the excess chakra from his long-dead friends and running with it: the branches spread further and weaved a poorly made basket. 

"What the hell are you doing?" Kurama's voice was loud in his mind, making him jump and open his sapphire eyes. Ah. He hadn't even realised they had closed, much too busy remembering the earth as he had known it. Not this wildfire-filled, crater-savaged nightmare.

He didn't want to move. His limbs were heavy and his eyelids were heavily drooping. Midnight black was at the edge of his vision, clouding out the sight of the earth. He barely knew up from down. 

"Dying." He replied in a raspy voice, almost like a whisper but not quite. He chuckled humorlessly afterwards, vaguely hearing it echo over meters of broken stone.

"Not on my watch." Kurama snarled roughly, his nine tails lashing. Obviously weary from the stupid war he suddenly wished he'd given in to, simply so he could see his friends again. 

A perfect world with no sorrow and pain. Another world where everyone was alive, where no deaths and no gruesome memories had blossomed. Where nobody went hungry and where nobody was beaten by the people they wished to protect. 

What a pleasant thing to think of. 

But he knew that such a world would never exist. His love, unlike Obito's and Madara's, hadn't been blind. Hadn't been a toxic, bastardized mess.

Naruto held up a weak hand, watching as blood dripped down the pale skin. He was chakra exhausted and dead tired, and could practically eat ten mountains of food at the moment. He hadn't eaten except for the last few soldier pills, which had been scarfed down yesterday. Or was it the day before that?