Naruto - Dying Dream Series: Naruto Characters: Naruto, Lee, ensemble Pairing: nothing but canon implied Type: futurefic, angst Warnings: character death, bad writing Spoilers: Sasuke Retrieval Arc, Akatsuki Word Count: 250 Etc: The asterisk marks where I originally thought of ending it. I'm not sure how much I like this, it feels...bleh. Oh well. Kinda sorta part of the "What if ____ became the Hokage" series. Edit: I shortened this and like it a lot better now.
Akatsuki was dead, and Naruto was dying. Fighting the organization and Sasuke at the same time had pushed past his regenerative abilities. His peers didn’t know what to do. Sakura and Neji wished they’d learned Chiyo’s life exchange technique.
“What’ll happen to the Kyuubi?” asked Shikamaru, always practical.
Nobody knew, but Naruto wasn’t going to take any chances.
“Somebody else has to take him.”
Nobody wanted to…it was asking too much to willingly take a stigma, to take a destructive monster into your head. To be what their parents had tacitly warned them about.
“We don’t even know how to seal him!”
“I do,” answered Naruto, too close to death to care about secrets. “I stole the scroll. I know what they did, and I know how to alter it so you don’t need a baby.”
Sakura volunteered. Naruto refused, he cared about her too much to pass on such misfortune. “You’re scary enough as it is, Sakura-chan. And you’re the only one of team 7 left.”
They all shifted uncomfortably, and waited in silence. The technique might not even work, it could end with more than one dead.
Rock Lee saw it as the choice between his dream and his village, which was no choice at all. “I’ll do it.”
“Thanks, Thickbrows.”
Afterwards, it wasn’t hard to think of a new goal. Lee had promised Naruto to protect Sakura, even if she didn’t need it. He’d become Hokage and get everyone to acknowledge Naruto should’ve been in his place.