Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Hazō's dejection only grew as he trudged across the featureless rust-red plain or possibly plane, the soil underfoot resisting his steps as feebly as if he was walking on a particularly supportive cloud–or as if the creator kami had simply neglected to give it physical properties, figuring nobody would stay here long enough to care.

Screw the kami, Hazō thought for the thousandth time in his life, except that for the first time he didn't get to complete the thought with "I have explosives". How long was he going to be stuck here?

He had to plan. He wasn't going to take his death lying down (at least not while Leaf still preferred cremation). He was the world's only master of the Thing, the inexplicable power to come up with a detailed plan within a handful of seconds, and with it, he'd be out of here before you could say "diegetic".

(Many shinobi could not in fact say "diegetic", much less define it. Here, too, Hazō was just that good.)

It didn't come.

He strained the metaphysical muscles built over years of wrestling with the Out within the confines of his own head. He poured in all he had until they were bulging like Maito Gai's biceps at Leaf's Annual Bodybuilding Competition. (Hazō had gone only once and never again, after Mari accidentally neglected to warn him it was less of an athletic event and more of an extension of Leaf's dating scene for those seeking only the best living mountain of pig bladders in a skimpy loincloth.)

The Thing didn't come. Perhaps it was a privilege reserved for the Hazō currently alive. He was going to have to do this the hard way.

"Um, excuse me?"

Hazō was shaken out of his concentration by a squeaky, hesitant voice, rising in the middle rather than the end as if questioning its own right to distract him. He turned around to see a short, mousy girl, unknown to him but wearing an unmistakable Mist genin uniform.

"Who are you?" he asked, taking in the long hair and delicate features. "Don't tell me that after enough time with nothing to do but think, a Hazō starts to reconsider certain… fundamentals?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," she said, tilting her head slightly in puzzlement. "I'm just Kurosawa Hazuki. I, um, have a question for you. I know we make it to Leaf eventually. Do you happen to know Uchiha Sasuke?"

"I suppose I do," Hazō said, feeling an inexplicable touch of wariness. "We're not close or anything."

"Do you know if he's dead?" Hazuki asked more urgently. "Or when he's going to die and turn up in the afterlife? Only it's the purpose of my existence to seduce–"

Hazō clamped his hand over her mouth with the speed and urgency of a sealmaster who'd just heard his dimensional seal prototype begin to chant ominously in the ancient tongue.

"Don't say it," he hissed. "Never say it. Do you want to get us all frozen in time forever?"

She bit his hand, less as a prelude to combat and more on general principles. In the shinobi world, nothing good ever started with somebody gagging you. (He and Mari had agreed to disagree).

He yanked his hand away, noting the lack of blood. Apparently, injuries didn't work properly in Purgatory either.

"What are you talking about?" Hazuki demanded, arms crossed petulantly.

Hazō glanced around warily, as if to check that the fundamental forces of the universe weren't eavesdropping from around a corner.

"We do not ever suggest anything that might sound remotely like"–he dropped his voice–"an Uchiha Breeding Programme. Ever."

Hazuki frowned. "But aren't the Uchiha going to go extinct if no one is allowed to, you know? Again, I mean."

For a moment, Hazō was forced to consider whether the whole thing might be a vast, diabolical conspiracy by Uchiha Itachi. He wouldn't even have anything to lose, considering his only love was another man and also dead.

But no. If there was one thing you could praise the Uchiha for, it was that despite their powers, they never crafted conspiracies or master plans. He couldn't imagine one being stable enough.

"It's a small price to pay," Hazō concluded. "Also, you're what, thirteen? Don't even think about the abstract concept of seduction for the next five years, at least onscreen. For all our sakes."

"But time doesn't pass here!" she objected.

"Not my problem," Hazō said decisively, and walked away from the weirdest conversation he'd had in minutes.

He had to get out of here before this place drove him insane. But he still didn't have any ideas. Maybe if he went over to talk to somebody else, they might inspire him to think of a cunning plan (or at least knock him out so he stopped thinking about the fact that in an alternate timeline, he'd quite possibly borne Sasuke's child).

The next Hazō was out of the question. Not only was he wearing a youthsuit (never a good sign–at least unless it indicated Akane, at which point it paradoxically became the best sign ever), but he was also weirdly glitchy, pinned to one spot and constantly fading in and out of existence like one of the luckier sealing failure victims from Kagome-sensei's campfire stories.

The Hazō after that was apparently catatonic, rocking back and forth on the ground, arms wrapped around his knees, muttering, "Please, Captain Zabuza, at least wear some boxers…"

Also not a candidate, Hazō decided.

The Hazō next to that one took a break from doing kata and walked over to them. His hair and uniform were a charred mess.

"He had a fight with Keiko," the other Hazō explained.

Hazō stared. "She did this to him?"

He found himself briefly reevaluating quite how much he wanted to claw his way back to the Human Path.

The charred Hazō shook his head with an amused glint in his eye.

"He had a fight with Keiko and she got herself reassigned, meaning she wasn't there when he ran across Inoue-sensei faking her death."

"Oh."

Hazō did his best to tune out the catatonic boy's muttering, and the awareness that, just as with the hundreds of others, that could have been his fate.

This Hazō, though, seemed sane enough. Could he provide a clue for solving Hazō's purgatorial predicament?

"What about you?" he asked. "What got you?"

The other Hazō gave a wry grin.

"Are you any good at calculating exponents?"

Hazō gave him a blank look.

"Turned out Velorien wasn't either," the other Hazō said, his eyes narrowing briefly in a glare at the heavens–a dark, featureless expanse that offered no light and left it unclear how they could all see each other–before he relaxed again. "I've spent so many years wondering what would have happened if Eaglejarl hadn't been at a pottery class when it was time to write Let the Bodies Hit the Floor."

Hazō was pretty sure he'd never sparred with Akane before that fight, so he didn't see how she could have become an exponent, but he opened his mouth anyway, looking for words of sympathy.

Then his mouth slammed shut again as he saw it out of the corner of his eye.

Every Hazō (and one Hazuki) turned their heads to the source of the radiant emerald glow.

The Obsidian Gate was opening, the welcoming light of the afterlife beginning to shine through the gap between the doors, brightening and dimming like a fire.

Hazō didn't think. He ran.

The Hazō next to him reacted nearly as fast.

"Stop him! It's not his turn!"

Hazō didn't regret his impulse. Unlike the others, he still had some chakra, and if they had the same skill priorities, then he was axiomatically stronger by virtue of having more experience. With chakra boost, he might just make it through before the gate closed again.

In his mind, he apologised to the other Hazōs, who'd have to wait that much longer for their rightful turn to come.

But he was Gōketsu Hazō. When it came to saving his loved ones and uplifting the world, he was prepared to sacrifice anything–even himselves.

He ran like he'd never run before.

But so did they. Countless Hazōs chased him with the determination of Kurosawa or Gōketsu Hazō himself, their wills bolstered by the need to protect the established sequence of Purgatory departure–in other words, to protect a list. Those ahead of him, whose turns would come soonest, were even more resolved to protect their places, and spread out in a spider web interception pattern. Hazōs converged on him from every angle.

He wasn't going to make it. The spongy ground was hard to sprint on, and the other Hazōs were drawing near. There was no way he'd make it past them before the gate finished opening, the next Hazō went through, and it closed again. It was going to be the reprise of a lesson he'd defiantly refused to learn time and again when he was alive: even if you were the best, you'd slow to a crawl once enough people got in your way.

Here and now, he needed the Thing like he needed air.

It didn't come.

Was he really going to be trapped in this queue for centuries to come, together with the other victims of a universe that seemed to have a monthly quota of dead Hazōs?

It's not his turn!

The idea hit him like a hammer to the face.

It was insane. It violated every law of reality. It would probably get him erased from existence for his hubris.

It was also his only choice.

As the nearest Hazōs came within arm's reach, grasping hands already reaching out, he looked up at the darkness of the heavens and yelled.

"You haven't done Initiative!"

For a moment, the world stood still. It was as if its heart had stopped, waiting to see if it had permission to beat again.

"A thousand Initiatives!" Hazō screamed with the desperation of a man being listened to by somebody actually important for the first and likely the last time in his life. "A thousand Athletics rolls! Thousands of Taijutsu rolls! Keeping track of a fight where everybody has the same name! Having to figure out what to do with somebody who dies in Purgatory!"

And then, he let rip with a final roar, a challenge to destiny itself.

"Do you even still have the character sheets?"

Everything was frozen. Nothing moved. There was an intangible, almost spiritual sense of growing pain vibrating through everything, as of a world that might simply die if its heart went without beating for any longer.

Then, with a metaphysical snap like a breaking twig, the sensation disappeared. A celestial symphony of three grumpy voices, speaking in overlapping unison, rang through all of Purgatory.

"SCREW IT. GO."

The Obsidian Gate opened wide like a yawning maw.

Hazō dove in without hesitation, his heart singing, for he had triumphed over the ineffable and he'd get chucked in an R-rated Hidan hurt/comfort slashfic if he ever tried to pull this crap again, the little punk.