Once Again (A Naruto Fanfiction) (Sequel to Another Take) (Complete)

Prologue: Dust In The Wind

~I close my eyes only for a moment, and the moment's gone, all my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity~

Little by little, everything crumbles. Cause that's life, isn't it? Ever changing, never constant...

I used to think that wouldn't apply to me. That everything that might ever have crumbled already had. I thought I was at the lowest, and life wouldn't let me go any lower.

Course, that's when everything changed. I actually found people who cared, people who saw me when I was invisible to everyone else. I thought those things that were crumbled were slowly coming back together, and that they wouldn't crumble again.

Oh how wrong I was.

It started off small, the crumbling. It all seemed to happen after the Chunin Exams. My team, which though dysfunctional and strange, had before been tight. We knew things about each other that most people didn't, saw sides of each other hidden from the rest of the world. But it was those hidden sides that destroyed us all.

When the crumbling reached it's peak, that's when our dreams clashed. One for revenge, one for recognition, one for love, and then me. The one with no dream, the one that probably destroyed everything.

Sasuke left, following his dream to a place none of us could follow. Naruto cared too much, and tried to stop him, putting his own dream on hold. Sakura wasn't strong enough to stop him, and her dream then changed slightly. And I, the one with no dream, could have stopped it all, but couldn't, simply because of that lack of care.

Because of my apathy, my lack of care, our team had fallen apart. I could have stopped Sasuke when he left, could have joined Naruto to retrieve him, could have helped Sakura become stronger so she could have stopped him. But no. I didn't care, and I caused this thing we had to crumble.

Now Team Seven was gone. Naruto was solely focused on Sasuke because of a promise, and hated me. Sakura probably thought similarly. And Sasuke was now like me, a lack of care for everything but his dream.

But I suppose this is life. You think it's going great, when it hits you hard when you're not ready. And then you've got two options. Collapse under the weight of your new burden, or carry it and move on.

I'd originally done the first. I fled. Running away from this problem I wasn't ready for, nor wished to face. But over time, I'd learned to move on. That's what I had to do, anyway. Move onward.

Once again.

~All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see. Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind~