Every Demon Bleeds Black

WARNING Chapter in excess of sixty pages. Excuse any and all editing, clumping, and please do send me an email if anything is wrong. (Namely, the author number notes in the story. I think I may have numbered them wrong.)

- Pride-Fall

- Note to Prasad: Message well received. Tell me if I did this right, okay?

Note 1: The fight scene is here, and I think I may have gotten it right.

Note 2: Those who read into the names of my villains do so at your own risk.

Note 3: Check out the following one-shots: Flowery, Kitsune, and Second Place, they are in the same universe as Meridian and are my attempts at characterizing people therein.

Note 4: Changed the title of the fic again, sorry. The Demon Project sounded...bleh… And the name sorta hanged. Yeah!

Questions

From: MV (glowing praise omitted because my ego is big enough as is.)

I have only a couple of questions, (rather than hundreds)?

1. Will Naruto remember Kyuubi/Circe's rejection later? It seems to me at least, that the kind of flat out rejection after so long would definitely damage Naruto's psyche.

2. Is Jiraiya really related to Naruto, because I'm pretty sure in the cannon, he isn't.

3. Why is Naruto so apologetic towards Sakura? I know that he did like her for a while, but to do nothing while she insults him again and again after all of the crap he's gone through with the ANBU seem kinda "not right," at least to me. I know Sakura's got her problems, but that might be a little much.

From: Gozen V Review unedited cuz I’m lazy.

this is a sick story i just don't understand the part where everyone fears demons but all of a sudden anbu are killin demons everywhere. How come gai and kakashi don't seem powerful even though they thrashed the anbu training program? What happened to Circe(Kyuubi), is she healing him or is she free? and what happened to Wester; did he leave?

So naruto does not know who he is, right? This is a good story but i think it should be a bit more fast paced and that you could make the paragraphs shorter so that it is easier to read. Can't wait for the next chapter

Answers

To: MV

1. Oh yes/In spades.

2. On his Mother’s side (Non-canon, though if he was it would explain a few things they so very have in common) This will be further evaluated upon further in the storyline. (I think?)

3. Naruto reverts from being overly-sarcastic to kicked-puppy whenever Sakura’s near. More often than not though, it’s because A) Sakura is, to put it mildly, a bitch; and could very likely hurt the shit out of him if he used any kind of sarcasm on her, or B) See the one-shot kitsune for details on how scared Sakura is for and of Naruto himself.

To: Gozen

Oh. God. I almost didn’t understand that review. But it’s alight. I love all of my reviewers.

1: Everyone fears daemons because they e, uh, DAEMONS. Hello? They’re almost like…personified EVIL.

2: ANBU haven’t been killing demons at any point in the present storyline. The only time I make a reference to this is the first couple of chapters, where Naruto thinks about the ANBU daemon corps. (This is not a cannon organization, btw.)

3: Gai… have I mentioned him? In the manga he’s pretty fuckin’ strong and Kakashi is powerful (both in my story and Naruto itself) but, as with most ninja, he won’t be some DBZ clone who acts all arrogant because he’s strong (That, my friends, is OC). You haven’t seen either of them do anything in battle yet, so wait.

4: Flat-Out; Circe (Kyuubi) is still attached to Naruto in some way. You’ll learn more about it and what she’s been/will be doing this chapter and next.

5: Wester left. He will be making a return. He is evil, therefore, he will return. Yes. :shifty eyes:

6. Naruto went through a period of self-induced amnesia/mental rebooting. This is what kept him in a self-healing sort of cycle. Right now, he’s about to wake up. And, yes. I pulled half of that entire explanation out from where the sun don’t shine.

And, finally, my little bitchfit.

7: Frankly, I don’t care about how you read, or if you find my story hard to read/boring. Skim through the chapters if you want or if you find them too slow-paced; but, I pace the story how I feel like it and I write as descriptive as I please. You don’t like it, you are more than welcomed to check out some other author who updates as soon, writes as well or as much, or dedicates as much as I do into writing semi-good (read: a little bit above shitty) Naruto fanfiction.

/end bitchfit

Once there was boy who had vibrant glow -
But; as it goes,
Someone took it from him.
One day through the rain, I heard him meekly moan,
He said:
"Will you wrap your arms around me as I'm falling?"
Remember when,
Remember when,
Remember when we were all so beautiful?
Never Again,
Never Again,
But; since then, we've lost our glow.

- Davy Havoc, A Fire Inside. All’s Hollow EP ‘The Boy Who Destroyed the World’

Tournament of Shinobi
Elder Draconian
Or
‘In which bargains are made, certain things are revealed, and an Uzumaki deals out and receives much ass-kickery.’

There was a feeling in his stomach that felt like someone had scrambled or blown apart his insides with a books worth of both explosive and lightning tags and the teenager woke up screaming -- sweat, blood, and something dark and viscous that smelt strongly of both dried blood and wet ink sticking to his skin.There was a feeling in his stomach that felt like someone had scrambled or blown apart his insides with a books worth of both explosive lightning tags and the teenager woke up screaming -- sweat, blood, and something dark and viscous that smelt strongly of both dried blood and wet ink sticking to his skin.

The smell overcame his every sense. His mind was a haze of half-thoughts and mind-numbing pain and he followed the body reaction that told him to jolt up out of his nightmares (because nothing in the world could hurt this much) more out of instinct than needing to wake up.

It was the biggest mistake he had made so far. He wasn’t dreaming about the pain.

Every single part of his being screamed in pain as if he were reinventing or redefining the concept of the word; his entire body feeling broken and bruised and like he was more of an amalgamation of splintered, jagged-edged bones grinding and shifting against each other from head to toe instead of a complete set of flawlessly working human ones.

Waking up, Naruto realized he hurt everywhere.

There was no other word for the intense pain that physically rendered him a screaming, convulsing mess on whatever he was laying on and tore ragged after ragged scream out from his vocal cords in wordless, noiseless, pain-incoherency that welled up in his chest, filled out the inside of his ribcage and made his chest tight and hard and crushed together in such a way so that; when he ran out of breath, almost choked by his own emotions, he doubled over in pain and coughed blood onto the off-white sheets around him.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” the screaming went on and echoed throughout his mind like the dying words of a jaded comrade said too long ago to remember; almost unending until a hand that smelt of cyanide and violet orchids softly clamped over his mouth and stopped them for him.

The voice her heard was sanguine and sparked low, barely felt fires in the pit of his stomach. "You would think that a punk shinobi who had almost had his trachea crushed to messy bits of organelle wouldn't be able to scream so damn loud."

Naruto opened his eyes (not realizing when he had closed them) and followed a pale, forearm-guarded arm up to Mitarashi Anko's smiling, serpentine, so-utterly-not-supposed-to-be-here, face.

For a moment, she looked thoughtfully into his bright blue eyes. "...Though seeing as ya were screaming loud enough to wake the fuckin’ dead, and we’re in a hospital which would make that not entirely cool, I suppose my point is moot."

Naruto’s mind boggled at what he saw, not understanding anything.

Mitarashi Anko...? Of all the Kunoichi I know she’s the one I wake up to? What the...?

Not believing it was really the infamous Jounin, Naruto took a good look at Anko. She was smiling at him and saying words he wasn’t paying attention to. Everything about her seemed in place and she acted...well, nicely, to put it bluntly.

Naruto blinked at the realization, not quite hating the idea of someone he didn’t know caring about his well-being but thinking that the thought was, in and of itself, strange. Naruto hadn't had someone care if he genuinely lived or died after a battle since before he joined the ANBU.

“Something wrong...?” she asked, and for a moment Naruto had to blink and reorient himself and make sure it really was Anko. (That he did so with scent alone didn't quite register in the forefront of his mind because seeing a supposedly homicidal/insane Mitarashi Anko standing over him with that freakishly peppy smile of hers that almost screamed ‘everything is just so peachy-keen!’ made him both flat-out stare and become mildly horrified.)

"Whaf...? Anhfko?" , he asked and knew that the fact that her skin tasted slightly of clovers was a moot point that he wouldn’t be sharing anytime soon.

She, apparently; either trusted him not to scream and let her hand drop or thought Naruto would lick the inside of her palm to try and both freak her out and regain control of his mouth.

"...In the flesh." she answered, even doing a little twirl that sent her trenchcoat swishing.

"What –" Naruto mumbled, stopped, and felt a small headache coming on. He knew by the headache that he was about to have a bout of ‘thinking about quite a lot of things I don’t want to think about’ in the span of almost seconds.

"How in the–," he managed to whisper, put his head in his hands, not disturb his I.V. while he did it (giving himself a few brownie points for that particular feat) and find out that, yes, having one’s spine broken does, in fact, tend to hurt like a bitch.

"How about you just lie down and not move for awhile?" Anko almost-crooned when she saw the look of pain on Naruto’s face.

"I'm fine..." when he said it he winced as electrical shocks of pain shot up his side and told both Anko and him that he was, in fact, not fine. "Just tell me what happened."

Anko smirked and put a finger to her chin. The little punk actually did have a brain. "Well, let's see. Leaf shinobi has a match, leaves for said match and possibly gets ambushed on the way and left for dead. Soon enough a sexier, smarter, infinitely more-," Naruto shot her a ‘Look’ and Anko got the hint. "– kunoichi saves his ass from paying the Death God a visit before his twentieth birthday."

Naruto closed his eyes and let it all sink in, disregarding the fact that Anko knew his age and not correcting her on her assumption that he had a match because, through the now dull pain he still felt that something was wrong.

...Alright... I’m in the hospital and...Anko is here. Where’s everyone else? What the hell happened to me

Naruto laid back onto the cold, steel headboard of an old hospital bed and tried to remember the events of the past twenty four hours -- letting the images and the memories pass behind his eyelids like a backwards moving movie reel that began, strangely enough, at the point in which he had reached orgasm grinding into Winter. ‘Mmmm...Wait. No. Wrong. Bad Naruto. She tried to kill you, so no fantasizing..

A sense of wrongness overcame him. Something seemed...out of place in the memory. How, if he had had some amazing not-sex, had he gotten so banged up?

Okay.. Analyze. What do I remember?

He remembered meeting Winter and talking her, though the same sense of wrongness came back when he tried to remember how they had gotten from the arena to the hallway. He remembered them having not-sex and then...blackness.

“You alright?” Anko asked, breaking the semi-trance Naruto was in. Naruto only nodded at her and rubbed his eyes, not knowing what there was to be worried about.

“…alright is sort of a hypothetical term, don’tcha think?”

She smirked. “Sarcasm really doesn’t suite you. Are you sure you okay?” Anko asked again, leaning against the wall nearest to the doorway and seemingly making glances towards Naruto’s bare chest or stomach out of the corners of her eyes.

“Am I sure? Hell no. I just need some time to…” he drifted off, feeling the pulse and beat of his headache settle right between his eyes.

“Time to what?”, she arched an eyebrow towards him, incredulous. Was he thinking about escaping?

“To get myself together.”, he answered much to her relief.

Anko laughed, and her laugh was almost condescending. “Damn straight you do, kid. You look like something the viper dragged in.” Naruto raised an eyebrow as he both thought that the analogy didn’t make sense and...

“Bad jokes aside, what am I, or, better yet; what are you doing here?” he asked, thinking that Anko didn’t exactly fit in too well into what had happened to him.

Her jaw dropped a little, and then she sneered. “Gee, well, thanks. I expected a ‘thank you’ or something, but hostility is much more appreciated.”

Naruto just rolled his eyes.

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

The sneer didn’t drop, but the acid in her tone rose.

“I’m your guard.”

Naruto eyebrows went up in surprise.

“Guard?”

“Just in case.” Anko stated with a vagueness to her voice that worried Naruto.

“In case what?” and Naruto remembered that Winter had said something about the Akatsuki and...Oh. Hell. Fuck. No. He did not need anyone thinking he was Akatsuki. Or that they were after him.

“Nothing, hopefully.” and her tone told him to stop asking and that they did think the Akatsuki wanted him for something.

Naruto hated tones like that. “Whatever.”

She pouted to herself when he stopped thinking that their verbal tag was fun and tried to edge him on again. “Just because you feel and look like you got your ass handed to you three-ways till Sunday don’t get all pissy at me, Naruto.”

“Hn...” Seeing the ploy for what it was, Naruto didn’t deign it necessary to answer her with words and closed his eyes to see if she would get the hint.

Anko harrumphed, crossing her arms underneath her breasts.

“Fine, be that way you little brat.”

“I will.” and he had another thought. Would Akatsuki want Kyuubi?

As if manifested from the question, she answered. Why in the world would they want little old me?

Naruto felt as if he should choose his next words carefully, or as if Kyuubi were lying to him right off the bat. Do you remember what happened to us?

There was silence, then her answer came like a soft flicker-flame in the darkness of his mind. Yes...

He waited for an explanation. She was oddly silent. When nothing else seemed forthcoming, he asked Care to fill me in?

The flicker-flame danced, almost as if she were laughing at something he didn’t understand. No, not really.

He tried not to be frustrated. Why in the hell not?

There was silence, then the image of a woman with blazing red hair examining her fingernails passively that disappeared as soon as it came. Don’t really feel like it.

He almost mentally went ‘What the hell?’, but knew she would hear.

I don’t really care if you feel like it, Kyuubi! You need to tell me what the hell happened to us! We kinda almost died if you haven’t noticed!

The flicker-flame sentience that was Kyuubi blazed high and ineffable and Naruto suddenly couldn’t breathe.

We! WE! We didn’t do ANYTHING, child! YOU went and stuck your fucking prick inside the first female that offered! I tried to WARN you that she smelt wrong and what happens! YOU ALMOST GET ME KILLED! I don’t need to tell you ANYTHING, brat!

In his mind, Naruto fought for air as he weakly clutched and tugged at ephemeral jaws that he could not see but could feel tighten around his neck like a noose or a pair of wolf jaws crushing his trachea. Kyu...! Kyuubi! I can’t... I can’t breathe!

In the instant he thought the words the vice grip of invisible jaws loosened around his neck and he felt Kyuubi begin to slink back away... “Now that we’ve learned our lesson, I bid you adieu...”

“What...In...The...Fuck...?”

“Excuse me?”, Anko asked – bringing Naruto into reality and out of his mind.

Naruto rubbed his neck and didn’t bother to look, or even acknowledge her. What in the world had just happened...? “Nothing, nevermind. You can go back to whatever you were doing.”

Anko’s eyes narrowed at him and she angrily stormed out of the room as if Naruto had told her something differently. He heard, almost distinctively before she left, her say “Fuck off.”

“You first, sweetheart.”, he said to the closing door. As the sound of the locked clicking reached his ears and without any prior warning, his headache worsened incredibly and mental images and flashes of things he didn’t understand flew by his mind’s eye so fast they left him dizzy, confused, and wondering who in the hell was Circe when they were gone.

What...the hell...?Did they give me too much morphine...? No, it’s not the morphine... I...I think I really need to stop fucking random people...

Thinking that the thought was blasphemy, Naruto laughed and asked Anko out loud: “Is it okay if I get dressed?”

Anko twitched when he asked that and didn’t find an appropriate answer or reason to look at him because... well... he was insane if he thought he could move in the state he was...

Then she heard the word “Crap...!”followed by a loud metallic clang

...Or so she thought.

When she looked at him through the little square window in the door, her jaw dropped. He was already getting out of bed! That wasn’t natural nor healthy (insane fox-daemon or no) and there was a brief moment in which she had to remember there was no way he should be moving with a semi-healed-but-still-broken spinal column. It wasn’t physically possible! The wound should’ve left him hospitalized for years, maybe even paralyzed and unable to even move for the rest of his life...!

“Dammit!” followed by another loud metallic sound.

...Yet here he was, moving as if his spine hadn’t been shattered in several different places and acting as if he were going to...

Oh hell no.

She waltzed back into the room, talking as she opened the door. “Okay, Uzumaki there’s this little window here, right? Right here in the door. I can look through it, right? And I can see what you’re doing... And...yasse…I have this little problem with it.” when she talked, she kept her voice low, flowing, pacifying. There was no way an insane child like this was going to get past her.

Naruto didn’t pay any attention to her and chose instead to test if he could walk decently. On the first step he found that he could, though his right leg wobbled a bit. Standing up, he grabbed the nearest clothing he could find that wasn’t covered with blood and started pulling it on.

“Oh, no. You’re not going anywhere.” Anko said in her best impression of a commanding voice.

Naruto just glared at her while he tied together the laces of a studded pair of black ankle- length heavy terrain boots the he liked and that the ANBU used. (Read: he liked them so much he ‘borrowed’ them when he left.)

“You gonna stop me?”, he dared.

When Anko took a look at him, she noticed that he was already half dressed, a pair of loose black-orange pants flecked with red hanging around his waist, his really neat boots on, and his shuriken holster tied around his left thigh.

“Are you insane! Don’t move! You could paralyze yourself ya nitwit!”

He only shrugged and made for the door.

As he moved Anko made a mental note that Naruto was favoring a leg, that he didn’t have a shirt or any sort of armor on, that this made her horny of all things, and that he wasn’t moving as quickly as a newly-healed ANBU member or Jounin should have. This gave her a glimmer of hope, and a small idea.

“I can walk just fine...Get out of my…What are you doing...?” his defiant little mien broke into an almost girly scream as one of Anko’s shadow snakes slithered down from out of the confines of the sleeve of her trench-coat, shot towards Naruto and nailed him to the bed with its spade shaped head.

“AH!”

She winced when he yelped, but kept the pressure down on his chest as he struggled. It just wouldn’t look good if the brat walked out of the infirmary until Tsunade got a look at him. (Read: The Village was in a state of shock, the Council was demanding the head of the Jounin who didn’t check the list of the applicants for the exam before turning it in, and people were generally just acting like the world was coming to an end because Gaara and Naruto were in the Village at the same time.)

“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” they asked each other at the same time. Anko glared daggers at Naruto, who returned them adamantly and had Anko thinking that the Haruno girl was a saint for having to put up with so much shit from a teammate for so long.

The snake wouldn’t budge and had Naruto wondering that he could either kill the snake and make a break for it or just sit tight and take it like a man until he could slip by Anko and go find Tsunade.

Thinking like a man never suited him because he was too much a teenager. Naruto struggled against the cold scales of the serpent, and to his chagrin the thing bean flicking its tongue across his skin. This made him squirm more and realize that it was all futile in the end. The thing was made out of pure, coiling snake muscle and wouldn’t be bothered to move.

Damned snakes and their stupid-ass snake-muscled bodies...

The thing seemed to read his thoughts and gave off a low hiss directed at him He growled back at it and possibly at Anko as well.

“Get this-”, he began.

“...You’re not calling the shots here, Uzumaki. I am...” she interrupted with something like fire in her eyes. “...and I am ordering your beat-down Chuunin-ass back into the bed to stay there until the Med-Nin come.” At the end of this the serpent began to dissipate into shadow-smoke. “Now, you can either be a good little shithead and lay down, or I can tie you to the bed and do very naughty things to tire out your body until you either pass out or the Med-nin arrive.”

“Like hell you are!” he screamed, trying to force himself into a crouching position on the bed and wincing in pain as something in his spinal column was jarred in a way it did not like or want to be.

Anko saw this and thrust out her hands. “See, ya idiot! Don’t move! Even the Ninetails couldn’t heal you perfectly, so lie the fuck down and wait for your body to heal!”

Naruto froze at the word Ninetails like he had been slapped in the face. No one in the Village had ever directly acknowledged that he was the Kyuubi vessel, ever, except for Jiraiya, and Jiraiya only ever called the thing ‘furball’. Hearing it from Anko, even though she knew about it because she was a Jounin, was vaguely disconcerting.

When Anko saw the look on his face, she smiled. “That’s right, brat. Now sit down and stop aggravating your wounds or else all that work Tsunade and everyone else went through won’t count for shit!”

He did as he was told, though mumbled one last ‘fuck-you’ towards her because she was right, and he should at least let Kyuubi set everything in place before he tried to break out of the hospital.

Who says I’ll do it?

If I can’t move you’re not going anywhere

So? That means you won’t run the gambit of being killed when you get horny again

Look around us. Do you really want to stay in this room forever?

Well?

I’m weighing my options.

Minutes dragged on, and on, and he waited, and waited, and waiting gave Naruto time enough to think about his overall situation as Kyuubi pondered whether or not the wallpaper in his new medical room should be bright orange or bright red...

I left the ANBU...I pulled a Dimension hop by myself...I’ve been flashing off Rasengans whenever I felt like it...I didn’t use a henge when I entered the exam...I told everyone I was back...and I expected no one to...? I’m so...stupid. I’ve just been asking for something to happen. I was so careless...It’s like I painted a giant target on myself...

“...Why am I still alive?” he asked more himself than Anko, thinking that his plans and actions, thus far, had not been those of a proper, secretive, long-living ANBU and ignoring the little voice in the back of his head that disagreed with his points and told him he had nothing, aside from the Kazekage and his racism (demonism?) to be afraid of.

Anko, who chose to sit on one of the chairs nearest the blonde, raised an eyebrow.

“Excuse me?

“I was talking to myself, but since you heard me. Why am I still alive?”

Anko was amazed. Literally, butt-fucking amazed. How could the Fourth’s son be retarded and ungrateful? “...Are you dense or something?...Tsunade tries her best to heal you and get rid of that chakra eating...” she seemed to search for a word. “...virus that had infected you...”

Naruto’s eyes widened. Chakra virus? That didn’t make sense whatsoever. However, Kyuubi trying to steal other people’s chakra and feed herself while he couldn’t stop her, did. “...What do you mean by...Virus?”, he asked her, his words seeming graver than they should have been.

Anko sighed, leaning the chair she sat in back onto two legs and placed her own on the bar of Naruto’s hospital bed. “Jiraiya and Tsunade gave it a title and I have no idea what it means either, so don’t ask. All I know is that you looked like a bunch of those evil black hentai-tentacles you see on late-night t.v. were comin’ outta your stomach and that they were like evil, man. You could see it in the way they wiggled.”

She shuddered, obviously not liking the idea of tentacles. “Aside from being just gross They fucked up all the seals in the room and almost killed every single one of us before Jiraiya took out this nifty little scroll of his that sucked it all in.”

Naruto felt his mouth open. None of that made sense, especially when he thought of Kyuubi manifesting herself in a bunch of horny hentai-tentacles trying to grope granny-Tsunade. “What did that...Why did you...How did you find me?”

Anko had prepared herself for this, but that didn’t make it any easier to talk about. “I was looking for the entrance to the arena, got lost, and found you bleeding in a dark hallway. Being the responsible kunoichi I am, I called in a Med-nin team and we got you here…” she blushed at this and scratched her nose. “But really, it is kinda just by luck that you’re still alive.”

Naruto lifted his head up long enough to make a face. “You know exactly what it is I want to hear.” he mumbled sarcastically. When she gave him a look that would melt stone, he sighed. “Listen, I know that much, I’m not stupid.”

“I would argue that fact, but more importantly why are you asking me why you’re still alive?”

It was Naruto’s turn to scratch his nose. “Most people would’ve left me for dead, is all.”

Anko looked at him, then burst out laughing. “Well then I guess since none of us are most people you’re right...!” Anko put a finger to her chin as her laughter subsided. “...Though, from the reports I’ve read on you and what you’ve done as an ANBU, I really wouldn’t see why anyone, shinobi or not, would want you dead, Uzumaki. It doesn’t make sense, for one thing.”

“You don’t know, do you?” Naruto looked to the ground, his facade thoughtful.

“’bout the nine-tails? Yeah, I do. Didn’t you get the fox remark earlier, or did you suffer some head trauma too?”

“No, I mean...You really don’t know, do you?”

Anko scowled angrily and Naruto had a very, very bad bout of ‘doom-sense’. “The next man to say that to me is going to die, I swear...!”

When the scowl died, she continued. “What don’t I know, Uzumaki? That you’ve got an age old tailed-daemon sealed in you and everyone in the Village isn’t allowed to talk about it? That you had Kakashi as your sensei and that he’s quite bat-shit-I-know-he’s-going-to-end-up-killing-all-the-other-jounin-insane and by proxy you might be? That you brought the Uchiha back with both of his legs broken and the Council had you tried for ‘damaging’ the success of the Uchiha bloodline?” Naruto flinched at the name Uchiha, but Anko kept going. She almost had his entire file memorized.

“That your only Chuunin mission was classified as a failure?”

That was something he had heard far too many times and, by instinct, he snapped at her. “Goddamit, it wasn’t a failure!”

Anko stopped mid-rant. “Huh?”

Naruto deflated, remembering that talking about the Kyuubi in any sense aside from jokingly was still forbidden. “..Well...Uh...Okay. Yes, it was a failure. Kind of. Sort of. That’s what the council made it out to be, I guess?”

Anko slowly shook her head ‘yes’ and went along with whatever Naruto said because quiet obviously his drugs were kicking in.

“Okay...ayways...The mission report states in big red letters at the top, ‘faillure’ and it goes on to say, and I quote, ‘Team Seven, underneath Hatake Kakashi did not eliminate their intended target: A missing-nin of unknown origins nicknamed ‘Crowelery’ hiding out on the outskirts of the Fire Country, near the Hellpeak mountains. Uchiha, Haruno, and Hatake were retrieved by a squad of ANBU upon the Village receiving Hatake’s distress signal near the Village of Hazumi; but, Uzumaki was nowhere to be found and was later, upon Kakashi giving his report of the events, presumed dead...’”

“’Presumed’ dead?”

Anko didn’t stop reciting the report.

“...One and a half months later, Uzumaki Naruto arrives at the gates of Konoha and kills several ANBU members in a bout of genjutsu-induced rage…” Naruto’s eyes closed, momentarily, and he whispered something underneath his breath. Anko barely caught either ‘Bullshit’ or ‘Sorry’ before continuing.

“...Upon capture, it was found that Uzumaki had sustained near-mortal wounds and had been tortured to the point of near insanity. During the process of examining him, it is hypothesized that ‘Crowelery’ managed to somehow induce a hyper-reaction within the limits of his bloodline... “

“Huh? I don’t have a bloodline...” Anko gave him a look that either said ‘You’re an idiot’ or ‘You don’t what?’

“Yeah...Uh, my bad. But I don’t. Keep going?”

Anko stared at him as if he had sprouted two heads, slightly disturbed at the fact that he admitted to not having an all-healing bloodline. ‘How could he possibly? Did the Kyuubi heal him back then? Bring him back then? Is that why he can walk now? …No, no… that couldn’t be right… A daemon would never willingly help its container...It has to be something else....’ Anko shook her head. Things didn’t make quite enough sense once he took out that piece of the puzzle “You’ll have to explain that to me later, kid. Tsunade didn’t exactly put to many details as to why you were sent into the ANBU when she announced it to the entire Village.”

“Wait, WHAT?”

She looked surprised that he didn’t know, or even expect something like this to happen.

“She had to, eventually. You came back to us, from what I’ve heard, in not-so-literal pieces. That scared the shit out of people. There were too many ‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’ going around in the Village as to what the hell actually happened to you, so I guess Tsunade kind of had to tell everyone eventually…Though, in retrospect, what she told the villagers didn’t exactly go over so well.”

“Whaddaya mean?

“You think a shinobi can just vanish from society like that? Can just come back to us partly-insane and kill fourteen ANBU without getting tried or executed? Without people wondering what the fuck happened?”

Naruto fought the urge to say “Yes”.

Anko went on. “...When you were in the hospital for the first month or so after you came back rumors started flying around the Village as to what really happened to you. Some said you were possessed by a daemon, or you had fought something like a daemon - though they were probably talking about the Kyuubi on both accounts - and others said that that Gaara kid attacked you on your way back to Konoha to finish what he started all those years ago. No one else could come up with anything even mildly credible, though some people thought you had either fought Orochimaru or joined him looking the way you looked because, and I’m not kidding Naruto, all the Jounin saw what was left of the ANBU and it looked like you came back to us with both the strength of a level three curse-seal and a fucking will to use it. ”

Naruto flinched at the name Orochimaru and didn’t pay attention to anything else as he remembered an elongated, skeletal jaw awkwardly gripped between his fingertips and a smile that drove sane men to the depths or insanity, depravity, or absolute fanatical servitude.

“…It must have been really nerve-wracking hearing so much crap spring up about you in less than three days, I suppose. Some of the Chuunin from your class were beginning to have breakdowns.”

Naruto chose to not say anything, shuddering at demons and serpents he did not want to confront and still not hearing what Anko was saying.

“...What really troubled people, though, was that the word Akatsuki was being whispered around where people could actually hear it.” Naruto’s ears perked up immediately, though Anko simply shrugged and put a finger to her chin. It seemed to be a habit of hers to touch her face when she thought, Naruto noted.

“I, personally, have no idea what Orochimaru’s old organization would want with the Leaf. But I’d rather they not come here, ever again.”

Naruto didn’t hold it against her when she shuddered. Itachi’s eyes haunted his nightmares along with Orochimaru’s more often than not. What he didn’t get is that she said they’d been in the Leaf before.

“They’ve been in the Leaf before?” he asked, remembering his first meeting with Itachi occurring somewhere in the border of the Fire/Wave Country.

“Yeah. They showed up just as you left the first time with Jiraiya, come to think about it. They didn’t look like they had a reason to come here, either. They just showed up out of the blue, wreaked some havoc and then left as quickly as they came. Gai and Kakashi wouldn’t talk about them, even though they fought the monsters, but Asuma told Tsunade about it within the first month she was Hokage. We still don’t know why they came and Kurenai won’t stop coming to my house at night when she has those goddamned nightmares about Itachi...”

Naruto’s eyes boggled. Kakashi and Gai weren’t enough to take down at least one of them?

Anko didn’t even seem mildly surprised. “...But as I was saying. Jiraiya showed up in the village and those particular rumors gave way to new ones about what they were going to do with you. ‘Why had they called in a Seals specialist?’ ‘Why were both the Sannin in the Village at the same time because of you?’ ‘Were they going to kill you?’ ‘Tamper with your seal?’ The rumors kept going like that for awhile and Tsunade wasn’t telling anyone anything so they didn’t stop until someone felt like putting an end to them.”

At this, she laughed. It was not a nice, feminine laugh either.

“...Usually, it was just someone just telling someone else to shut the hell up; but, now that I think about it I do remember that that Hyuuga kid almost killed one of the new Jounin because he wouldn’t stop talking about you.”

“What happened next?” Naruto asked, already knowing where the story was going but wanting to hear Anko’s version. The spunky kunoichi sighed, not liking having to tell the rest of the story.

“...Then you just up and disappeared from the Village.”

Naruto only nodded and looked at her expectantly. Anko knew he was hiding something, and tried a diversionary tactic both to gain information and not have to tell the end of the report.

“…Say, Naruto” her tone was honeyed and inquisitive. Naruto almost didn’t like it.

“If the rumors were true about the Akatsuki, what do you think they would want with you?”

Correction, he really didn’t like her tone, and played the appropriate fool; proving that he was just a bit smart than he looked. “I have no idea, really. I mean, I’m not looking to defect, or anything...But forget about it. That doesn’t matter anyway. You said Tsunade didn’t tell anyone what had happened to me? What made her change her mind?”

Anko pretended to not care, or know, or even suspect that Naruto somehow knew that Akatsuki, his daemon, and his apparent disappearance had something in common. Naruto seemed to know this, and also looked like he vowed to look into it later.

“No one really knows, though I bet Kakashi must’ve known something because A) he was the only one who didn’t ask what happened to you and B) he is one manipulative bastard and if he didn’t know anything about it, I’d be disappointed.”

Naruto laughed and Anko smiled, thinking that Naruto really did have a nice laugh...

“...Everyone else you knew except him made a big deal about what had happened to you. Once word got out that no one could find you anywhere in the Village or the entire Fire country, the rumors started again. It finally came down to Tsunade actually having to almost put a death penalty on anyone caught talking about your ‘fate’ in public.

A death penalty? What the hell? That doesn’t make sense...

It almost, disturbingly, came to him then.

They came here five years ago, for seemingly no reason at all...They attacked Jiraiya and me when we were traveling and Itachi said something to Sasuke like...‘You’re not the one I cam to see little brother...they sent Winter after me to...

Then the pieces came back into place. Akatsuki, the feared criminal organization, wanted him dead.

Oh. Kakashi’s. Left. Tomoe. I. Am. So. Dead.

Anko had been talking about Tsunade’s actions when he had this epiphany and he kept his face carefully neutral as to not spark her interest. “...Really though, it was the only way to keep you alive, or rather to give you a hope of living because the Council-” Naruto’s head perked up at this, his train of thought and any thought he had of the Akatsuki vanishing from his mind.

“What…?” he asked, his voice only a little shallow.

Anko didn’t look happy to continue, seeing his face. “Tsunade stated in her speech that the rigors of the ANBU training would kill you; that you were sent there to die, Naruto, and that you would die because you had no rightful place being in the ANBU.”

Naruto felt something like a lead ball develop in his throat.

“Everyone who knew Tsunade knew she didn’t believe it, but it placated the Village and the council at the same time, so she made it a public decree that, if you were ever to escape the ANBU or come back to the Village that...Er...Um...Nice day isn’t it?”

Naruto blinked. “What was her decree?”

Anko didn’t seem to hear him. “I mean, look at it! It’s beautiful!”

The wall was only painted to look like an open field. There were no windows here and Naruto knew what she was doing. “Anko.”

“Don’t ya just love it? So calm, so peaceful...”

”Anko what was the Hokage’s decree?”

“Yep. I think this is going to be a beautiful-“

“ANKO WHAT DID TSUNADE TELL THE VILLAGE TO DO IF I CAME BACK!”

She looked at him while chewing on her bottom lip and seemed hesitant to say anything. “...She told them you were to be captured and sent back to the ANBU. If they couldn’t do that, you were to be killed.”

Naruto felt the lead ball in his throat begin to crack and splinter. Anko tried not to see the soul-hurt in his eyes. “...I...I hate to say this to ya kid, but now that everyone knows your back Tsunade has to try and calm the council down before they have you executed on the count of needless endangerment of the entire Village and disobeying the direct orders of the Hokage.”

The ball shattered and Naruto’s eyes went wide and horrified.

Anko tried to grab one of his hands but he took it away. Slightly hurt, she continued. “Look, kid, I’m sorry, but even I would’ve done the same thing in her position. The Council wanted your head for killing those ANBU when we were entering the war with the Sound and quite a few of the older, non-shinobi clan heads were willingly to hire assassins to do their dirty work for them and get rid of you.”

“I…don’t…I don’t remember any of this. You’re lying, right? This is just one of Mitarashi Anko famous underappreciated jokes, right? There’s no way Tsunade would say any of those things.” Naruto lied more to himself than he spoke to Anko.

Anko didn’t care to try and correct him.“…Tsunade’s fighting for your life right now so I think it would be nice if you didn’t break apart on her or try to run away, okay? ”

Naruto nodded almost numbly and didn’t want to talk anymore. The lead ball in his throat wouldn’t have let him, anyway.

Assembled inside of one of the smaller of the assembly halls of Konoha’s main council chamber were, perhaps, five of the most powerful shinobi in the Hidden Village and the current Hokage.

“...You all know why I’ve called you here to testify.”

Four nods. One blink. One loud bark.

“I trust you have all heard the details on the situation regarding Uzumaki Naruto’s return from the ANBU corps and the attempt on his life?”

Again, four nods, a blink, and a bark.

“Then, I don’t have to tell you that this may or may not be the work of the Akatsuki organization and that they may or may have infiltrated our Village seeking the daemon-containers participating in the Jounin exam?”

All five clan heads nodded, or blinked. Tsunade knew at least three of the five didn’t know what she was about to say next.

“This trial will only decide the fate of Naruto. The Subaku child is not out problem.”

All five gave hints of outright relief and began to proceed inside the council room until Tsunade stopped them. “The last thing I have to tell you is this. You are all to be entirely objective on the matter we are about to discuss. I do not want any petty hatreds nor do I want any plans of revenge. If you have a problem with my brother, leave it at the door. This meeting is based on the safety of the Village, not your petty little emotions. Do you all understand me?”

Five nods, and they proceeded inside.

The assembly hall of the Council of Elders was an egg-shaped room wrought from water-blasted stone that could, and often did, fit more than four hundred people. It was devoid of light save for the candles which sat on the stone tables in front of the council members and around the Hokage’s throne and a pair of two large blazers which sat in the absolute center of the room and which were shaped to look like young, leafless trees with small motes of fire decorating each end of every branch.

Tsunade sat on the Hokage’s throne, the flickering candles at her feet casting dancing shadows across her frame. The throne next to her, reserved for only the Fire Lord himself, was absent because the man had thought this petty squabbling beneath himself.

Smart bastard. I guess having Divine Right gives one perks...

Around her the heads and the entourages of the bloodline clans sat and murmured to themselves -- the most prominent and powerful (Hyuuga, Inuzaka, and Aburame, in this case) seated closest to her. Below the fifth row of seats sat the daimyo of the Fire Lord and the clan heads of all the clans that worked and traded with Konoha in the Fire Country.

After seating themselves, Tsunade listened to what the most powerful man on the council, Xiao Wong the XII, had to say. It was nothing she wanted to hear.

“We have stood by and done nothing for too long...”

His words carried power and sway. Xiao Wong was a gifted public speaker and had a mind on par with some of the brightest members of the Nara clan. Adding in the fact that he was a fairly handsome man in his mid-thirties with battle-worn features and a ruggedness to his every move and word, a samurai of great skill, and that it was whispered that he was a direct descendant of the Nobunaga clan, helped his cause greatly.

“...The containment of the Kyuubi was overseen by the Fourth Hokage of the Hidden Village of Konoha. He used his own child to contain the beast, hoping that one day the boy would absorb the entity’s chakra and be forever destroyed...”

Xiao Wong spoke with a calm, even fluidity that literally ensnared the council by their heartstrings. He could, in their eyes, do no wrong and was loved by the people and the upper class alike because he worked hard at what he did and did it fairly. He was both an outspoken advocate for the rights of the lower class and a staunch supporter of the Fire Lord’s current semi-feudal governmental system and, by and large, he was one of the people outside of the Kage that helped shape the Fire Country into much of the political and national power it was, and still is.

“...Our largest mistake, and I call it a mistake and not a catastrophe only on principal, is that, though none of us would have killed the child as he grew because he showed no signs of daemonic contamination, was believing that we could trust that the daemon inside of him, once caged and sealed, would not lie in wait for however many years until it could find a way to escape and control its host.”

Xiao Wong also hated the Kyuubi, and by proxy, Naruto, with a passion; thinking both daemon and boy were one in the same.

“...I think We all remember when Uzumaki Naruto came back to the Fire Country five years ago and slaughtered the two ANBU teams commissioned to find him. At the time, we were at war with the Sound Nation and the loss of shinobi manpower was...regrettable. Entirely too regrettable. What was worse than this was that the child was not tried, nor was he held responsible for his actions! He should have been killed then and there when the daemon had fused with his body and may have died with him...”

The council went to chaos, too many voices shouting their opinions at once.

“May have is never good enough! If we had killed the child at the time the beast might have escaped!”

“But by letting him live we bring the doom of the Akatsuki upon us all!”

“The Akatsuki do not exist! The child is obviously lying! He is a prankster at heart, as is his daemon! He seeks to create chaos and nothing more!”

“Are you daft, man! Do you not remember the Uchiha Massacre! Of course the Akatsuki is real!”

“His daemon has possessed him! I would put my life down that he is, as we speak, plotting the downfall of the village!”

“That is absurd!”

“It is a daemon! Nothing is absurd once it comes down to their infernal logic!”

“We must do away with him now, when both he and the beast are weak!”

“We cannot let him die!”

Tsunade had had enough. “ORDER! I call this council to order!”

They still kept arguing. When her fist came down hard enough to shake the entire chamber, everyone stopped shouting and all eyes were on her, expectant. Would she cut Xiao short, or let him continue now that there had been such an outburst?

“...I would remind all those present to keep their mouths and opinions to themselves until the testimonies of both the higher council and the bloodline clans have been presented. Please, continue Xiao Wong.”

The man bowed graciously. “Thank you Hokage-sama...As I was saying...We cannot let this child bring ruin down upon our village as his daemon had nineteen years ago. We also cannot draw the attention of the Red Heaven organization. If he cannot be killed in fear of his daemon escaping and he cannot be kept inside of Konoha because of the threat of the Akatsuki, I propose we banish him to the Sunless Lands (1) that lay to the far west of the Sand Country and be done with him.”

The silence was overwhelming. None since the Shidame’s time had been banished so far west.

“That is all I have to say. The High Council also agrees with me, and will be offering no other testimony.”

Tsunade felt something twist in the pit of her stomach as Xiao Wong sat down. It was unprecedented that the entire High Council agreed on one decision. One very painless, very good decision at that. If she couldn’t get four of the five bloodline clans to testify for Naruto there would be no way she could try and overturn their decision.

Problem was, out of the five clans, every single one had reason to hate Naruto for the Kyuubi’s actions.

Oh shit. Naruto is doomed.

She didn’t let her terror show, and proceeded. “Then it is now time for the first of the five great bloodline clans to testify. Would Hyuuga Hiashi please stand and give his clan’s decision?”

Hyuuga Hiashi stood, the candlelight flickering across his pale, stern features, and bowed His voice was strong. Unflinching. Tsunade already knew the words that would come out of his mouth and tried to think who else would testify against Naruto...

“We live in an era with little war and without famine or plague. Our country prospers as it should and trade routes with the West and the island countries grows exponentially. Every major threat to our continued peace and survival with the world has either died or been killed. These are all extraordinary things but even the most extraordinary things can be warped, and skewed, and blacked. Where there once was peace between many of the bloodline clans in the entirety of the Fire County, has been replaced by hatred. This genocidal hatred is not only seen in the Fire country, but in the Mist and the Wind countries as well. Blood-feuds run rampant across the entire continent and House exterminations and Bloodline massacres have taken the place of families taking care of one another and Villagers supporting their own. We live in an era of peace, but we are tearing ourselves apart on the inside...”

Eloquent words, Tsunade thought. But not the issue at hand.

“The greatest example of one these hatreds lives and hails from our Village. His name is not Uchiha. Nor is it Orochimaru. It is Uzumaki Naruto, who has been treated unjustly and unfairly...”

Tsunade raised an eyebrow at this. What was Hiashi getting at?

“...We may treat him as such, but the child is not the kitsune.”

All eyes present went wide.

“It is regrettable that my fellow kinsmen and villagers think this way and that by proxy many of the children in our village shun Uzumaki for reasons they do not even comprehend. He is...a marvel amongst us. He has been hated his entire life and still has the strength to persevere through every challenge and every petty hatred sent his way.”

Woah. Unexpected much. Tsunade was at a loss for words.

“...While the child is...destructive on a scale I have not seen since Jiraiya in his hayday, he is an asset to the Village and to the Fire Nation itself. Having him banished for something so petty as the Akatsuki nine would be both idiotic and would quite possibly be giving them exactly what they want.”

Murmurs in the darkness. No one liked being called idiotic.

“I have discussed this at length with my kinsmen. They do not agree with me. They are afraid of the Kyuubi child. He has vowed to change the Hyuuga when he becomes the Rokudaime, as he will no doubt do should he live to see the age, and they abhor change...Though many will hate me for doing so, I realize that this is wrong and that Uzumaki should live. If not for the continued protection of the Village in the future, than just for the sake of my daughter and my nephew. That is all”

He sat down and Tsunade’s eyes were ready to fall out of their sockets. When she asked the next clan head to stand, she couldn’t stop smiling.

“Aburame Shibi, you may now stand and deliver the decision of your clan.”

The trench-coat wearing shinobi did not bow when he stood, though he did give her the barest of nods.

“...I am of the Aburame Clan of the village of Konoha and, though I may not be able to put it as eloquently as the Hyuuga, the Aburame believe that the Uzumaki child is an asset to the Village. He may be sought after by the Akatsuki, but the Akatsuki pose no threat to the Village. They are nine, and we are many, and the many always overcome the few. That is all we have to say.”

So very...hive mentality of you. Tsunade thought as Shibi sat down.

“Inuzaka Tsume, you may now stand and deliver the decision of your clan.”

The woman stood, bowed, and proceeded to release a laugh close to a bark. “Let me start off by saying that you are all bastards. Every single last one of you. And that you should be ashamed of yourselves”

Okay... That’s...an interesting way to win favor.

“You’re all afraid of what a child may or may not be capable of doing and of an organization composed of NINE people. Please, have a small amount of faith in the shinobi you hire. If the Akatsuki come, we’ll take care of them. If the brat poses a problem in the future, we’ll take care of him. In the meantime, I say let the brat live. We could use his strength and the village needs some more bouncy people anyway.”

Then she sat and put her feet up on the stone counter in front of her, smiling a two-hundred gig-watt smile. Tsunade sighed. Tsume really was too brash for her own good.

When see realized only two more clan heads need to speak and who they were, she couldn’t stop smiling. Three out of the five clans had agreed with her and now Akimichi Chouza, one of the friendliest clan members in Konoha, was coming up.

“If Akimichi Chouza, if you would please stand and give his clan’s decision.”

When he stood, he was scowling. Her smile fell by centimeters. Tsunade found it mildly disquieting to see a normally happy man so...angry.

“...What I hear, I cannot believe.”

Oh oh. He even sounded ready to kill someone.

“The Kyuubi ravaged our country when it was alive. It raped the land and destroyed anything that got in its way. Now dead, it threatens to have our entire way of life eradicated by bringing the wrath of the Akatsuki down on us all...”

Someone, she didn’t know who, yelled that they were only nine people. Tsunade had a vague thought that it was more of an Aburame that said it instead of an Inuzaka.

“How can you even say that an organization that powerful can only have nine members! Have you even given any serious thought to the fact! Have you! The truth is that we know next to nothing of the Akatsuki aside from rumor and theory. And even, if, in fact, there are only nine, how can we say we can defeat them without being destroyed in the process?”

This met with some incredulity. Tsunade saw it on everyone’s face. Chouza was openly admitting that the entirety of the Fire Country was weaker than nine people...

Oh you sly bastard.... thus making them believe, and think, that maybe there were more.

“...I can see your faces and your eyes. None of you want to believe it; but, I ask you this: Have you heard the tales behind the members of the Akatsuki? Have you heard the rumor of their goal? The Bingo Book doesn’t list background information outside of the shinobi’s strengths and weaknesses but if you look into history, you can find where each member comes from.”

Not many knew of these things. Those that did, did not admit them.

“An entire bloodline clan of six hundred, massacred down to the last. Every man, every woman, every child, annihilated except for one. This is the tale of Uchiha Massacre and of Uchiha Itachi. Thirty Daimyo lay dead in their sleep, their providences wiped off the face of the map and their bodies lacerated and torn by a weapon seemingly made of sharp edges. The first Nine of Heaven lay with them, dead. This is the tale of Hoshigake Kisame. The Earth country is brought down to its knees by one man during the First Secret War. That is the tale of the man named Saosori the Red...These are all only three men out of nine, or three out of a thousand, who are just as, if not more, powerful than Orochimaru himself.”

The council looked all the more resolute to have Naruto banished, then and there.

“They are called an organization for a reason and should be treated as having hundreds of members who are all, at least, of Jounin level. Every missing nin we cannot find and have yet to capture or kill should be labeled as a possible member of Akatsuki. We do not have the manpower, nor the number of allies capable to combat such a threat and thus, the proposal of our clan is to have Uzumaki Naruto banished.”

At the end of the speech Tsunade was visibly shaken. There was no way the Nara clan would disagree with the Akimichi clan. Her brother was slipping through her fingers yet again.

But she went on. She had to be strong. “...Nara Shikaku, if you would please stand and give the final verdict so that we may conclude this council meeting?”

Shikaku stood up, and though he did it slowly he made it all the more unbearable to watch.

“...You’re are the most insufferable gods-be-thrice-damned-mother-fucking-idiot-I-have-ever-seen Uzumaki Naruto!” Anko finally said after having to hear the blonde say something to the effect of “There is no way I’m going to start dating again after what happened.’

Naruto raised an eyebrow. That was almost funny.

“Excuse me?”

She glared at him with her arms crossed underneath her breasts. “You heard me, Uzumaki. You. Are. An. Idiot.”

He rolled his eyes. Anko was alright to talk with, but was just a little bit to insane for his tastes. “M’kay, I’ll bite. Tell me why, oh great snake goddess Mitarashi Anko, am I an idiot?

“I think I’d like it better if I showed you.” She said, her voice low and vaguely tempting

Naruto’s eyes just went wide.

“You are an idiot.”, she said, annunciating every syllable and making the words seem heavier or darker as they were spoken. “…if you think …” she reached his bed and began to bend forward, her eyes capturing his and holding them in their auburn depths..“…I’m going...”, her breath smelt like something the color purple. “…to let…” every new word was visceral, sanguine, aimed to stab him through the heart. “Uzumaki...” his give name slid past her lips and seemed to hang in the air like a sexual benediction. “...Naruto” and his first name whispered like pliant velvet caressing against skin in the dark of night.

“Not have…” Anko slinked over the side of the bed in a movement almost too graceful to be human and straddled him. “…a girlfriend..”, the tone of her voice and the flash of her eyes said other things and Anko, her almost perfectly laid (pardon the pun) plan coming to fruition, smirked as Naruto’s eyes went wider than really was healthy and his body (though she wanted something else) went stiff as he almost resembled one of the Nara deer caught in the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler.

“...You are dead wrong and need to seriously get off your fucking high horse. No way no one in Konoha is not going to want to bang the crap out of you after they see...” one of her fingertips ran down his abdominals and stopped at his hip.

“This...” and Naruto knew she meant something else that, but by no rights could she mean that because he was trying to think of ice, cold, negative one-hundred degree weather.

“Uh…” when he spoke, his voice didn’t completely sound right.

“‘Uh’ sounds a lot like ‘Yes Anko, dig your hand into my pants.’” Anko sung in an almost sarcastic voice that made Naruto’s lower half tingle in a way he didn’t want it to while a female straddled him. (Read: He didn’t want Anko to feel him poke her without his hands)

“Uh… I mean, uh…Yes?” he stammered.

“Yes? You mean yes, you do want my hand in your pants? ‘cuz yanno that would be done most gladly.” she whispered next to his ear, now most definitively invading his personal space.

“Stop...”, he whispered to the crook of her neck as the memories of Winter and her touch came unbidden into his mind.

“Stop, what? I’m not doing anything you haven’t asked.”

Naruto tried to glare, failed, and tried to look as you-just-kicked-my-puppy-dog-sad as he could. “…Anko.”

The quivering lip almost had her, but Anko dodged the dreaded puppy-dog eyes no jutsu with a finesse that would have left Tsunade herself proud.

“Fine, fine. I would’ve taken, No, mistress Anko I don’t want your hands in my pants because I don’t swing that way but what you said is just fine.”

Naruto just rolled his eyes, expecting Anko to get off of him now that she knew he wasn’t interested in sex. She didn’t and he gave her a ‘look’ telling her to and that she only answered with her all-too bright nine-hundred gigawatt smile; still refusing to move off of him

“Could you…Like get off me?” he asked when thinking of ice proved to be useless.

“Uh, No...” Anko said, absolutely and sadistically excited.

“No?”, he yelled. “Whaddaya mean ‘no’?”

Anko just kept smirking. “I mean…Uh, no.”

“’Uh no’ what?” Anko smirked again, Naruto got the joke almost belatedly.

“That was stupid.”

“I know.”

“Know what?”, he asked obnoxiously. Anko just smacked the top of his head.

“Brat.”

“Snake.”

“Why thank you.”

He stuck his tongue out at her.

“Feel better now?” Anko asked, still straddling Naruto.

Naruto tried not to look at her and was reminded of the fact that she was very, very close to him and was wearing a very, very low cut fish-net top when he felt her breath on the side of his neck.

“A-alittle.” he stammered.

He didn’t see Anko’s slow nod but still felt a pressure on his waist and a hot breath getting closer to his neck. The feelings didn’t bother him. In fact they excited him but they might’ve given Anko the wrong ideas and that was the last thing Naruto wanted to do. (Giving a semi-psychopathic Jounin ideas that he was too weak to move her off of him when he had been in the ANBU for so long just didn’t seem right, in his mind. (2))

After four seconds of letting her be so close to him and breathe all over his neck, he deigned it right to ask “What are you doing?”

He was answered by two hands on his chest and a tongue tracing its way up to his earlobe. The moist organ and the press of hands on his abdomen made Naruto forget that his wrists were free, and instead, make a small sound in the back of his throat.

“…I think you should know…”she whispered again in that slow, seductive voice that sent flashes of electricity up and down his spine. “...That I like you…” she cooed, her voice almost like a gentle whisper of fire or satin in his ear. “...You’re different…”, she said, her hands moving all across his waist. “…You know what its like to be driven by a demon…or a snake in my case…so I can see why you’re so messed up...” her breath was hot, erotic; cascading against the inside of his ear as he made small, whimpering noises that translated to. “What are you doing?” or “What do you mean?”

She only answered the latter. “…Exactly what I’ve felt like doing ever since your angst-ridden ass waltzed into the Jounin exam.” She bit down on his earlobe and Naruto felt the something he didn’t want to exist right now grow tight and stiff and press against the length of his pants.

When Anko wiggled her rear in response, he was barely still coherent enough to say. “This isn’t...”

“...Right?”, she laughed. “Fuck no it isn’t.”

Her fingertips danced across his bare chest and her lips made their way down his neck. He cringed with every faint, feathery touch; the memory of Winter doing those same things still too fresh in his mind for him to enjoy it but his body begging him to.

“Do you ever care that I’m hurting right now?”, and he didn’t mean physically.

“Hurt translates to pleasure, if you didn’t know.”, she purred.

Naruto growled to answer her and didn’t realize the sound he made did not sound right coming from human vocal cords. Anko didn’t let herself be surprised by it.

“…I know snakes just as well as I know daemons. You’re all traitors, or liars. I know you want something else than sex, so talk to me before you rape me.”

Anko didn’t let the sound of his voice scare her. She just reacted with sarcasm, as was her modus operandi “Oh, a smart one here...” and her fingertips traced the curve of his jaw and the bulge in his pants simultaneously. When he made a small, pleased sound, she said: “If you make that sound again for me, I’ll pretend you never called me a traitor right to my face…”

Naruto nodded, imagining he didn’t feel a knife dig into his side when Anko said that. When he spoke again, he wasn’t bothered by the feeling that his words were not his own.

“Foxes are nothing if not nature’s most deviant tricksters, so tell me what you want to know... Tell me what you want to hear…Tell me, Anko. Is it Lust? Is it sex? Is it just because I’m here? I know you want something and that that want is like lust and lust can be chemical or it can be a wildfire storm, baby.”

“Eloquent, for someone your age. I like that..”, and her waist moved in an oddly fluid motion and Naruto bit down on the bottom of his lip to keep from making a sound he did not want to make but Anko had told him to.

“Why are you doing this...?” he asked through a slight intake of breath because no one could say that Uzumaki Naruto didn’t keep his priorities straight.

“Why…?” Anko smirked, nibbling on the corner of his lips because no one could say she didn’t always get what she wanted. “Because if lust is like a wildfire then I’m fuckin’ blazing for you, Uzumaki.”

“Why?”, cut off by a forceful tongue, and lips, and Anko’s hips literally crushing down on his erection.

When she broke away she was smiling ever wider. “I don’t need a why. I’ve wanted you ever since you walked back into this Village and I usually get the things I want.”

“This still isn’t right...I was just...I was just...This is like rape, Anko. I can barely even stop you.”

She laughed. “You’re a real bad liar Naruto.”

“I still don’t...I’m not the type of guy for a long-term relationship. Really...Anko…”

“And I’m not a double-crossing snake trying to rape you. Now shut the fuck up and kiss me.”

Naruto never thought he would wake up from a near-death coma like this -- Anko was unbridled passion; was wild, pulsating, animalistic shifts of hips and soft, clothed thighs sitting and moving and grinding down on top of his waist. Her hands roamed wherever they pleased; dancing, and walking, and kneading and scratching trails of painful, pleasurable, primal red. Her lips bit down on his lifepulse; taking it between her teeth and worshipping it with her wiggling tongue and every tug and pull of her lips was wanting, and needing, and demanding him to give her the Alpha position because she had never been anything else.

Naruto gave her the top because he didn’t see what was wrong with it and let her do what she pleased as he tried to forget Winter’s touch, Winter’s caress, Winter’s skin and scent and everything because Anko, right now, was everything he had ever wanted in a woman except for pink hair and the analogy didn’t make sense, and he just wanted to let go and he just needed...

...Anko acted like mad, psychotic, animal-lust; like a bitch in heat sating the desire to copulate and fuck until her body could handle nothing more. She was uncontrollable; like the energies of the Rasengan forming and shimmering and spiraling out in every direction in the palm of his hand and she was animalistic; like he was trying to bed a wild, furious hurricane of sex, and skin, and liquid, rolling hips

When she kissed him, soft lips crushing against his own, he reciprocated; tasting blood and sweat and clovers; tasting violet orchids and disgustingly, drippingly-sticky-sweet dango fruit and sating, sour-sweet-aged grape-wine that he drank every drop of as if he were a drowning or dehydrated man in a monsoon.

Something slipped past his lips and his tongue flicked over, underneath, around, against hers when it explored and marked and tasted him. She shoved herself into his mouth like she owned it; going far enough into his mouth to probably touch his tonsils.

He arched his hips and she moved her hips down against his in that delicious, liquid-roll of stomach, waist, and muscles that made his every nerve ending scream for more and he didn’t care if he choked on her tongue or if she was trying to spell her name on it with hers.

His body complained but begged for more as not-quite healed bones shifted against each other and muscles began to cramp in the strange position they were in. What they did next almost-flashed by his eyes in rapid, ephemeral fever-visions.

Naruto felt her hips moving against his hips to the beating of some incandescent, tribal war-dance rhythm; felt her ride him and his hips and the pulse of sex as if it were a rising, molten wave-like thing that arched up when she crashed down and broke around her in an echo of lust when he let her name out between his lips; between her lips; between her teeth; between her hands as her lips moved down across his chest and stomach and waist and as her tongue traced a downward spiral that led her to...

Oh.

Naruto didn’t feel the cold, sterile air of the hospital room, didn’t feel her hair brushing his stomach, didn’t feel her free his sex from the confines of his pants; but, he did feel himself slip inside of her mouth, stretched and hard and tight as the feel of her tongue and the cascade of her hot breath down against his skin drove him off-the-fucking-walls-insane.

As she made Naruto make the most arousing little noises, Mitarashi Anko felt...well... she felt incredibly aroused for one thing. Naruto was no slouch in the whole ‘give and take’ of making out and Anko knew that she’d have a hickie on her neck and her on one of her breasts (she didn’t know which one. The kid was good.) by the time she walked out of the hospital. Aside from being attending to a girl’s needs Naruto was also...shall we say, filing, and his skin tasted, vaguely, like something hot and orange. Anko loved every moment of it; loved the smoothness of his skin against her tongue, loved how he squirmed as her teeth ran against him, loved the power she got from controlling his pain and his pleasure so easily and...

Naruto tasted bittersweet.

She found this out to her delight as he reached orgasm trying to say something that ended up turning into him biting down his bottom lip and throwing his head back as came inside of her mouth.

To find that he wasn’t dead afterwards, surprised Naruto. When he had enough courage to look down, Anko wasn’t surprised that his eyes were slightly unfocused and wide.

“You...You swallowed it?” not exactly the most bright thing to say in these sorts of situations but it didn’t kill the afterglow.

“Meh. You taste good.” She smirked, and it was an evil, tempting little smirk that had Naruto thinking she was going to kill him now.

Then there was a knock on the door.

Rephrase. Then there was a knock on the door that shattered the afterglow and replaced it with adrenaline and scrambling bodies and Tsunade screamed “Why is no one at this door!”

Anko whispered ‘Shit’ as she scrambled to open the door and Naruto, presumably and hopefully, tried to make himself decent. When she reached for the knob, Tsunade was already pulling open the door and walking through. She looked none to pleased. “Hokage-sama! I’m sorry! I heard him talking in his sleep and I came in and I nodded off and-“

Her smile was entirely too easy. “It’s alright Mitarashi... Is my brother awake yet? He has some visitors who are very worried about him.”

Naruto answered ‘Yes’ for Anko and Sakura, Neji, Shikamaru, Chouji, Lee, Ino and Umino Iruka walked in through the door. At the last man, Naruto froze and there was a moment of poignant silence where Sakura looked at him, hiding tears, and fear, and the nightmare that five years ago had happened all over again as Iruka looked at his godson and actually broke out into tears.

“Naruto!”

Everyone was quiet as they both ran towards the blonde and hugged him

“Naruto! You idiot! I thought you were dead!”

When she spoke, her words were hiccupy and Naruto was speechless, for once in his life, as both his teammate and his godfather (in title, and name) embraced him.

Sakura spoke too rapidly for him to understand so he didn’t pay attention but got the message of the either apologetic or angry girl. Iruka was saying the words he needed to hear, reassuring him that things were okay and that he was so glad to see him again and that, when this was all over, the Ichiraku would be richer than it ever was.

“I can’t believe you’re back. I can’t believe it, Naruto, you're back! I was so worried about you! And now, you’re back!”

“Iruka-sensei...” Naruto whispered, thinking that he smelt too much like sex and lust and should not have one of his godfathers touching him right now.

Iruka didn’t notice, or seem to care. “But you’re here now! And, Gods! I can’t believe you came back! And entered the Jounin exam to boot!”

Tsunade coughed into her hand at this, and Iruka either chose not to listen or didn’t hear her as he handed a small bundle to Naruto. “Here, there’s some clothes and equipment inside. I don’t know if they’ll fit, but when Kakashi said that you had walked into the Village with little more than a cloak around your neck I had to make sure you actually had something without holes and dirt all over it!”

Naruto muttered ‘thank-you’ and Tsunade coughed into her hand again. Everyone looked at her, this time.

“While it’s all well and good that you care about Naruto, I think he and I may need a few minutes alone...Could everyone please excuse us?”

Everyone got the hint and left without another word. Iruka gave him a thumbs up when he left, Sakura gave him a smile, Ino blew him a kiss and Chouji and Lee tried to give him their versions of Gai’s good-guy pose. Neji didn’t say a word throughout.

Already knowing what she was going to ask, Naruto busied himself with opening the bundle Iruka had handed him. Inside was a Konoha Chuunin-corps vest, a black-tshirt with the words ‘foxfire’ on the front (Iruka, you so crazy.), a black fish-net undershirt with only one long sleeve, some extra projectiles, and a hooked ring-shaped apparatus he could wear around his arm that held kunai and throwing knives. He put on the shirt and the undershirt, put the knife-holder on the arm with the long sleeve and felt Tsunade sit down on the edge of the bed.

“Now that I’ve finally seen you...” Tsunade started before she smacked him on the top of the head.

“Ow!” she still had that unholy strength. “What the hell was that for ya old hag!”

Tsunade smiled and hugged Naruto. “For not coming to me when you got the Village, you idiot.”

Naruto awkwardly patted her back. It hadn’t occurred to him that, had he gone to the Hokage first, he wouldn’t be in so much trouble.

“I...I feel that I should say a few things to you, Naruto." She started the speech either rehearsed or heartfelt and Naruto put a hand up to stop her.

“Am I going to have to go back to the ANBU?”

Tsunade look at him quizzically. “What?”

“Are you sending me back to the ANBU because I deliberately planned and timed an escape while my superior officer was drunk?”

Tsunade froze, then burst out laughing.

“Oh heavens no, Naruto! You resigned from your duties! Kenji convinced me that I...er...shouldn’t send you back and now I can’t send you back there until you earn the rank now. I don’t think he would take you, anyway!”

He gave a sigh of relief as Tsunade started to speak again.

“Now, as you know-“

“Sorry to interrupt you again, Hokage-sama, but I need to give my report first. Then you can drill me for any other information regarding my attacker.”, taken aback by the utter...calmness of his voice, Tsunade openly gaped at her little brother.

“As you already know...”, he started and again, surprised Tsunade by actually sounding like a shinobi and not a child. “...I was attacked and left for dead by an assassin sent by the Akatsuki organization.”

Tsunade’s eyes kept a careful neutrality so that Naruto couldn’t guess if she knew or was just finding out. “Are you sure of this, Naruto-kun?”

Naruto frowned, realizing she hadn’t known, or needed proof of it before organizing a hunt, and massaged his temples. “Not entirely...But I do remember her saying something to that effect, yes.”

Tsunade’s eyes grew distant, thoughtful. “The council was right, dammit. Jiraiya thought something like this was beyond normal shinobi...”

Naruto almost felt like smiling, but didn’t. Especially after he heard the council comment. “He was right and wrong, sort of.”

Tsunade looked surprised. “What? I thought you said Akatsuki did this?”

“It was a med-level succubi daemon that did this to me. The Akatsuki possibly contracted the thing to hunt me down.”

Tsunade froze. “Naruto that...That is very, very bad. I did not want to hear that.”

He slumped. There went his freedom.

“I know.”

Tsunade gave him a sideways glance as she stood up.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am, and I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry just...” Shikaku’s words, so utterly calm and rational, floated into the forefront of her mind.

We speak of a child who has done things we so-called ‘powerful shinob’i cannot. We speak of a child who tamed the One-tailed Shukaku, a child who brought us our current Hokage and laid waste to Orochimaru’s keep almost single-handedly during the Sound-Leaf war.

...Many of you speak in the past-tense, but I see it as this: Naruto is our future. He. Killed. Orochimaru. Killed him. He did not wound the serpent, he did not make it bite its tail as it fled – he wiped him clean off the face of the planet.

...And you have the gall to say that, with that strength we cannot stop the Akatsuki? That they would want to battle and try to murder the Kyuubi-container?

You are all mad.

There is no possible way the Akatsuki could want Uzumaki Naruto. If that were the case, and they were after his life, they would have taken him long ago. Yet, if they are looking for him to join their organization...Ah. I can see your faces. You never though about that, did you?

Disenfranchising the teen by banishing him to the Sunless Lands would not only be an idiotic move on the Council’s part but would be playing right into the Akatsuki’s hands by either delivering his body to them or giving them their greatest weapon.

...Our decision, should he not draw any more attention to himself and prove he is as strong as the rumors say, is to let the blonde idiot stay on the grounds that he would be a better weapon against the Akatsuki than in their hands.

“Do not tell anyone they tried to kill you.” and with that, she left, leaving a very bewildered Naruto in her wake as his friends poured back in.

You know what to do, correct?

Yes, Sire.

The Kyuubi has been taken care of, Dragonling. Do not disappoint us.

I will do as you command, Wester.

As it should be, Jormungand.

Since the scene with Tsunade, time had passed by fairly quickly. The Genin Eight had entered, minus Iruka, and crowded around Naruto; talking, chatting, and generally asking him how he was. It was so like it old times again that Naruto began to realize there wasn’t a five-year gap between them, just a five-year’s worth backup of gossip, deeds, and stories.

From his friends, Naruto quickly found out that Tsunade had postponed all further matches in the tournament until his apparent ‘killer’ was caught and that Jiraiya himself had led the team that scoured Konoha for a too-beautiful girl with the name of a season.

When they asked, he told them what had happened to him (though he kept what he remembered of a frantic voice, darkness, fire, and the name Circe, to himself.).

Their reactions were mixed.

Ino stared with her wide, blue eyes. Chouji smirked, thinking Naruto was fuckin’ sly. Lee looked positively aghast (proving that, even with a makeover, he was still Lee.) and Shikamaru just made a sound somewhere between ‘Idiot’ and ‘Bloody brilliant’

Sakura gave him a wry look and smile. “How did I know you and your bone-headedness would get you laid, and killed at the same time?” she said, laughing the first laugh Naruto had seen that reached her eyes.

Naruto just shrugged, saying. “I wouldn’t suggest predicting my future anymore Sakura-chan...Its kinda risky to my health!”

They laughed, and continued to laugh as they spoke to each other and felt, and knew, and realized that what had made their shinobi lives actually bearable might’ve been Naruto and his easy smiles.

An hour later when they heard his name on the intercom, time seemed to freeze.

Uzumaki Naruto, report to the ring for your match. Uzumaki Naruto, report to the ring for your match.

Naruto checked his ears for what seemed like the ninth time since the silence had overtaken them all. Had he heard that right? Had they just said his name? Said is name and attached it to a match-up?

Oh hell.

The door burst open but no one jumped for weaponry, everyone too much in a state of shock to notice. When the intercom again said his name Tsunade, Kakashi, Anko, and a Jounin that smoked and that Naruto didn’t know walked into the room.

“What’s going on?” Shikamaru calmly asked and broke the silence

Kakashi answered him, his voice dead and his features looking far too tired to care about anything right now. “One of the Kage convinced the Council to begin the tournament again without Tsunade’s approval. They overturned her decision on the grounds that the Village should not be afraid if one of it’s Chuunin was attacked but managed to stay alive.”

Naruto looked from person to person. Tsunade looked as if she would kill someone, Neji gave him an impassive frown, Sakura was standing next to Lee, her hand wrapped around his, Jiraiya didn’t say a word because the vein throbbing in the middle of his head said everything words did and more.

“Why would...?” Chouji asked, his features contorted in confusion.

“The damn bastards want him dead, that’s why. The council was furious when Tsunade-sama overturned their decision to banish Naruto.”, Jiraiya answered fairly angrily.

Naruto boggled. Is that what Tsunade had tried to tell him?

“I’m afraid it’s true Naruto. They wanted you gone because of...Well, you know why.”

He nodded, though most people in the room had no idea why. Sakura thought she knew, but she, really, only had half the puzzle.

“But why a Kage? Why would one of them care? I mean...it’s just Naruto.” Ino said, trying to dodge Naruto’s pointy-dagger-glare-of-doom.

“I think I know why.” Shikamaru offered from the wall he was leaning on.

Tsunade didn’t have the time or the patience to argue with the brunette.

“What is it, Nara?”

“Well, because it’s one of the Kage I think, firstly, we should let Naruto fight the in the match despite his injuries.”

All eyes were on him. Naruto had no idea what Shikamaru was getting at.

“You what?”

Tsunade asked, looking ready to kill Shikamaru.

“Hear me out: if one of the other Kage is doing this, it’s almost a direct challenge to your authority. Whoever did this is trying to undermine what you said about postponing the match until this...” when he said this, he both chose his next words carefully and gestured to Naruto with his hands. “...Problem is taken care of.”

Tsunade eyed him warily. “Just what exactly are you getting at, Nara?”

Kakashi deigned it necessary to speak on Nara’s behalf; picking up on where Shikamaru was going with his thoughts and wanting to get to them without so many fancy words. “War. Or a power-struggle. Someone maybe even planning a terrorist strike on Konoha and is using the tournament for over.” when he said this, his voice was flat. As if he were telling the time of day.

Their reactions were mixed. Naruto only glared at his sensei, thinking Kakashi, you magnificently manipulative bastard. Scare everyone some more, why don’t you?

Neji’s eye twitched, momentarily, then was still. Anko snorted, whispering that Kakashi was an idiot underneath her breath. Everyone else just stared at him, mouth agape.

Shikamaru was the first to recover. “I wouldn’t go as far as to say war Kakashi-sensei, but someone outside of Konoha seems to want to keep everyone on their toes today. What, with the daemon-containers causing this much trouble and all...”

Naruto noticed the plural, but kept his mouth shut. Gaara was a big enough boy to take care of himself and the seals would keep Shukaku at bay.

Jiraiya chose to speak next, though his every word dripped with sarcasm. “...I’m confused here. So your saying we send out a shinobi who has just been in surgery to fight an opponent that may or may not be either an assassin or an explosion waiting to happen? Or are you saying that we should cancel the tournament and search the Village for something or someone who may or may not exist?”

Shikamaru tried to think of what to say and wilted as both Jiraiya and Tsunade gave him a hard look.

“Naruto is not going. End of story.” Tsunade said, breaking eye contact with Shikamaru much to his relief.

Naruto laughed out loud after he heard the words. Everyone looked at him. Tsunade looked like she was threatening to throttle him. He just scratched the back of his head.

“Woah... uh...Sorry it’s just, yanno, I never thought people would make my decisions for me?”

Naruto saw Kakashi make a small eye-twitch and Neji move a fraction to his left, nearer to the door. They knew where he was going with this. All the others were still staring at him when he swung his legs over the side of the bed and proved her could walk. Only a few stared.

“Naruto...” Neji started, obviously trying to warn the blonde of his condition or to stay still.

Tsunade looked at her little brother as if he had grown an extra head.

“Naruto, I’m not making your decisions for you. I’m telling you you’re not going.”

“But Tsunade-sama! If he doesn’t go it could be seen as an affront towards the tournament itself. No shinobi has ever not made it to the arena.”, Shikamaru supplied.

Sakura had had enough. “He could die!”, she yelled, getting everyone’s attention “Again!”, Sakura yelled at Shikamaru, throwing out her arms in his direction.

Ino was right beside her. “Yeah! Doesn’t that mean anything to you, ya pineapple headed idiot?”

Shikamaru faltered. Lee chose to say him.

“Sakura, he has a point.”, Lee said from where he was leaning against the wall.

“Oh no, don’t you start to get on the bandwagon! There is no way anyone is letting Naruto go to that ring!” several of the shinobi agreed with her, though the Jounin, Tsunade, Chouji and Neji chose to stay silent.

“...I don’t care about the politics right now! Naruto’s life is more important to me than politics!”, Sakura yelled. (Naruto almost blushed when he heard that.)

“He has to go or the Kage will know we’re onto them and go through with whatever their planning!”, Shikamaru tried to explain.

“Would you give it a rest already! Nothing is going to happen you paranoid-son-of-a-bitch! So would you shut up about it alr- Naruto sit back down, dammit! ”

Out of the corner of his eye, Shikamaru saw Naruto give Neji a look that spoke volumes between the two and proceed to make his way to the door fully clothed and ready to fight if need be. Neji didn’t look like he was going to stop him from getting close, at least.

Strangely, everyone went quiet when he approached the door, as if expecting something. Tsunade only huffed when he started walking. “You’re not going anywhere.”, she said as his spiky yellow head passed by.

Naruto smiled. “If you just let me go and stop bitching about it, we wouldn’t have this problem, would we?

“But Naruto...” Sakura asked, Ino close behind with something to the same effect.

He was already walking towards the door, moving around Tsunade and talking more to himself than anyone else. Tsunade didn’t try to stop him, knowing someone else would.

“...Screw it. I can walk, I can run, I have my weapons and I have Kyuubi...” the elder-nin present and Sakura, looked horrified. The other shinobi around him looked at Naruto quizzically. What the hell did a myth-daemon had to do with...?

He stopped at the door, feeling Kakashi, Anko, Neji, Lee, and Chouji tense behind him and ready to stop him at Tsunade’s word He only smirked an entirely too vulpine smirk to himself and looked into dark and dank place inside of himself that stank of shit and forest fires. “..And anyways...” as if on command, his eyes turned what he thought was Kyuubi-red.

When he turned around someone screamed. Malice dwelt within those eyes.

“Most of you couldn’t stop me if you tried, so get the fuck out of my way, and let me do my damn job.”

When he made for the door no one moved to stop him except for Sakura. She put out her arms and blocked his way and Naruto stopped in front of her, hands in his pockets. Sakura took his silence as contemplating escape and not edging her on like he was doing.

“I won’t let you die out there because you’re fucking bored!”

“...Sakura, move.” he said, his voice two shades darker than it was supposed to be.

“Fuck off Naruto! Did you come back to Konoha for your friends, or so that you could kill yourself, dammit?”

They didn’t see the small serrated throwing-knife perfectly fall in-between his middle and pointer fingers from the hidden ring of knives he was wearing around the fishnet sleeve on his left side. They didn’t move to stop him, even though Naruto knew that the silver blade should’ve glinted in the fluorescent light of the room. Maybe he was too fast for them, maybe Kakashi or Neji weren’t paying attention. It didn’t matter. Sakura was in the way, and he would make her get out of the way, because his kunai promise to himself had changed from ‘Never run away’ to ‘I’ll do whatever is in my power to protect everyone’ and his hand was throbbing to make him remember it.

“N-Naruto!” Neji stammered, seeing the blade just a tad bit too late as the serrated thing flew through the air and slammed into the door hard enough to slice through the metal.

There wasn’t a sound aside from hearing the metal door reverberate from the strike before everyone’s mind accepted what happened. When Naruto took his first step to move around Sakura everyone took notice.

“Move. Now.” Sakura’s eyes went wide. Naruto made to throw another knife and felt Kakashi tense at his left, chakra pulsing off of his skin and a kunai in his hand.

“Don’t do it, kid.”

He smiled. Kakashi did care about his students, after all.

“Sensei, I’m touched. Really. But I have to go fight a match now.”

He took a step and heard a snake hiss at Naruto as it dropped from out of Anko’s sleeve and onto the floor. “Naruto...Do not move. This is a water moccasin, and if it bites you you’re going to have a very, very hard time relearning how to breathe.”

Damn. He might fall in love with that woman. If I crash through the wall the thing won’t be able to see me through all the dust...

He took a hesitant step forward. The snake hissed. Everyone was on edge. If Lee hadn’t diffused the situation by physically pulling Sakura aside, Naruto honestly didn’t know what he would have done to get his way. Going through walls hurts.

“Thanks.” He muttered to Lee.

“If we ever spar again, I’m going to beat the shit out of you for threatening Sakura.”

Now that unnerved him. When he grabbed the doorknob, no one else tried to say anything and he began walking towards the arena; not quite sure whether his hands were shaking because the doorknob was cold, because he had just used an ANBU tactic on a comrade to get his way or because, at the time he had looked inside of himself, expecting to find Kyuubi saying something chidingly-eloquent and hurtful, all he found was emptiness, and coldness, and the echo of the name Circe before his eyes changed what he thought but was not Kyuubi scarlet red.

Do we act now? Eh? Eh? Eh! I wanna act now! I wanna! Lets do eeeeet!

How ‘bout you shut the fuck up already, yeah?

Iwannaactnow!NOW!Letskillthemaaaaaaaall!

...You keep acting like this, and I’ll tell your other half to stop letting you have so much free-time, yeah?

Meany

...yeah.

Without a sound, he walked through the dark hallways as if he were part of the shadows themselves -- as if he were silent, deathless, ephemeral; was everything a shinobi should be in that which was shadow and which was his most trust comrade as he gracefully slipped into ink hazes of nothingness and came out again into half-lit patches of lantern light.

Thoughts whirled in his mind but his body moved of its own accord, almost as if he were on instinctual autopilot. I could’ve...What am I doing? I could’ve hurt someone back their...What in the fuck is wrong with me? That was Sakura! I was threatening my own teammate just to get what I wanted! What the hell! That isn’t me! I would never do that! I have to tell her I’m sorry...Fuck... That was stupid. Really, really stupid. Now Tsunade is probably gonna think I am insane...! Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. This is not good.

When he neared the exit, he stopped thinking about the past as something in the back of his mind said ‘This is not right’. He sniffed the air, sorting through the pungent smell of tree bark and moist, wet places where the sun did not shine and he realized that shadows did not have outlines. (though he didn’t realize that he, again, had used his nose to sort through scents.)

...Very...Very...Slowly...

His hand moved of its own accord, chakra flaring like cool, dead summer heat in his veins. He snapped his fingers and produced a spark, a spell, and a flame to banish the night and illuminate a small area around him with a ball of foxfire.

You're welcome.

The small orb of flame was a trick he had learned from Kyuubi. It was useful, to a point, and Naruto had no qualms about using it freely.

Thank you, sweetie.

Don’t call me that.

He sent chakra into the flame and split it into a dozen or so smaller wisps of orange-red ghost-fire that found lanterns, and wicks, and fuel to help each to blaze to fiery life.

When the shadows cleared, he saw the outline turn into a human body and the triangular blade of his shaver was already drawn and pointed at where the neck of a human should’ve been in the gleaming half-lights of the hallway. The man did not move, though a small bead of blood ran down his neck.

When instinct receded, Naruto took in what he saw. The man stood taller than he was, possibly five-foot-nine or six-foot-one, and he wore a tight, sleeveless black muscle-armor and baggy cargo shorts that reached his knees. He had no kunai or scroll pouches anywhere on him, instead having a trio of belts around his left thigh and right arm, and Naruto almost thought the man unarmed until he saw the hilt of a blade poking up behind his shoulder.

Naruto had no time to wonder if he was fighting a taijutsu specialist that could only use a sword, so he got to his point quickly. "Why the hell are you here?

The man opened his eyes and... that was it. No pretenses, no grandstanding. The full force of the man’s chakra slammed into Naruto like a tidal wave that crashed into his chest and left him breathless; that enveloped him like an insane, berserker tempest energy crackling during a maelstrom; that drowned and choked and burned him like a wildfire storm of flame, and force, and chaos.

When it passed, he fell back four steps, counting each one in the back of his mind, but did not left his shaver fall. "What are you...?” he snarled, fangs he did not remember having bared and glinting ivory in the false-light.

It, because nothing that powerful could be called completely human anymore, smiled at him. The smile was not much in itself, only a twitch upwards at the corner of its lips, but the face behind it was serpentine, was oddly beautiful like a knife edge in the sunset.

Looking at the thing, Naruto instinctually thought that if Orochimaru had had any bastard sons that this would probably be one of them. (Albeit, with different shades of make-up.)

"The question is what am I not?" Its smile did not falter. The lights that danced across its skin and made it obvious that it no was no child of Orochimaru’s because no child of the serpent would ever have the ability to gain a semi-tan even if their life depended on it.

“Riddles aren’t as funny as books make them out to be.” Naruto whispered, the blade he held quivering in his hand and making him realize that his body had just gotten out of surgery and that what he was doing was a very, very dumb thing to be doing.

The thing that was not a man only shrugged. “Riddles are a lost art, I suppose.” Its eyes darted across the length of Naruto’s blade. “...I swear that I mean you no harm, by the way.”

Naruto’s eye twitched and he begrudgingly sheathed his blade.

"...But you still are my opponent, are you?"

"Oh, I am, don't worry about that." and instantly, he knew that the man-thing could kill him where he stood without so much as batting an eye.

The thing laughed when it saw Naruto’s eyes go only a fraction wider. "But I am no Doragonken Shikon."

Naruto raised an eyebrow. "You said your name like it was a title. What the hell are you?

The thing laughed again; a hearty, brotherly laugh that shook its entire frame but made Naruto’s skin crawl. "What, he asks! Ha! By the Eldritch Stones none have asked me that so early into the word-fray in so very, very long!"

"I'm different, I guess, and I’m asking you now." Naruto said and thought that he was not talking to a teenager his age but something very, very ancient. Something that had seen the rise and fall of kingdoms and been partly responsible for at least a quarter of them.

“Why should I tell you?” it asked?

“Because I want to know what you are.”

Nothing outside of the high-ranked daemon-drakes swore by the Eldritch Stones of the Brood (3). If this was a daemon-drake he was dealing with, it could be another attack by the Akatsuki and that would not be good at all..

"Do you honestly want to know?" and the laughter died in its voice; replaced by edging, black sarcasm.

Naruto nodded, said: "Hell yeah I wanna know! I don't wanna die not knowing what really killed me!” and heard the announcer on the other side of the door say something like 'Do not be frightened of out next contestants'!"

The thing that was not a human laughed again and on the edge of its laughter was the faint sound of rumbling earth beneath mountains. "By the Brood, do you take after your inquisitive mistress in more than just embodiment!"

There, Naruto froze. "What. Did. You. Say."

It rolled its eyes, shrugged its shoulders and appeared to be sincerely confused. "No idea. I normally do not pay attention to the idiosyncrasies that come out of my maw."

Naruto arched an eyebrow. “What does fuck does that mean?”

The thing coughed in the back of its throat, the sound more like a crackle of thunder or fire, shrugged, and held up three fingers. "You have three guesses, youngling.”

“Three guesses as to what idiosi...idiosi...that word meant?” he asked, scratching his head.

The thing shook its head, almost laughing. “You get three guesses as to what I am, young one."

The game would’ve taken Naruto by surprise had he not known and participated in these little riddle-quests all too while having bartered with minor imps and pixies for information in the Underworld. He decided to go with his first guess. "Three guesses is way too many, daemon-drake."

The lanterns around them blazed a little higher when he said the name. When the thing laughed at him the sound was like cold scales wrapping around his neck, and he knew he was very, very wrong. "Ha! I am nothing so quaint, little kitsune! But nice try! Very close! Just a few celestial rungs higher and you'dve had me!

Naruto bristled at the kitsune, muttering underneath his breath. “Only Kyuubi and Akatsuki call me that...so...”

The thing tilted its head, obviously amused. "Is that your guess? It sounds a bit off, but no. I am no dog of the Red Heaven-Red Moon, though I have ties to them; and no, I am not your nine-tailed vixen. Though I am her immortal nemesis...Sort of. You have one guess left, so please," and its next words slinked out from its black-red pattern lipsticked lips in a low, dual voice somewhere between a baritone human male and a draconian, snarl like embers taking to life: "...Do make it count..."

The voice hit Naruto almost physically. The threat behind it was real enough. Daemons usually tried to eat humans who failed at their word games...Gah. What in the world could it be..?. The thing’s eyes watched him as he thought, almost as if the thing were picking at his brain.

It came to him, though Kyuubi may have had a hand in it. Nothing else, save that would swear by the Stones, and he’d rather not have to face that ever again. When he spoke the name, the air shivered and the fires burned low, whispered out and left his insides feeling very, very cold.

"Brood," and he felt as if he had to savor the word in the cold hallway like it was a fine wine or a flame that he had to drink in deeply of or hold within himself until it threatened to fill, and burn, and devour him like some maniac wildfire.

"That I am, that I have been.” The thing that was Brood smirked, fangs glistening in the darkness like ivory sabers, and ran a hand through its blazing red hair looking up at the ceiling and pretending Naruto did not exist.

“Are you afraid of me, now that you know?" When it spoke, there was weight to its words; like a compulsion, or a threat, or a mixture of both aimed to make him run away and hide.

"I'm not afraid of death. Or the Nether, for that matter."

The thing ‘tched’, and the burnt out wicks of the lanterns blazed to life almost ominously. It was for effect, Naruto knew, but it still caused him to jump.

"Yes, death is all but too natural. You have no reason to fear it. ...The Nether? It is only a place, and places cannot harm you, no matter how foul their inhabitants. ...But you say that you are not afraid of me? If that is true, young kitling, then you are both wise and foolish and I must wholeheartedly agree that, while completely idiotic to think so...” When it spoke, the thing looked up at the ceiling and languidly, as if its hand were a spider slinking up towards its kill, it slid a hand up its face and dug its middle and pointer fingers underneath the skin of his eye and pulled.

"You should not be afraid of me...", and here Naruto got an intense feeling of déjà vu. As if, somewhere, sometime, he had seen someone do this before and it had hurt and it had scarred him and the thing was pulling way too hard on the skin beneath its eye and he had seen this before and who had in the world had...

"...You should be terrified." the thing that was Brood said, its smile wide and crocodilian, too wide for its face but vile all the same...

...And it clicked into place, and he was taken by, or drowned with, or thrown into the infinite expanse that were Orochimaru's serpentine eyes.

‘...You should be terrified’Orochimaru hissed, tongue flicking out across his lips in languid, obscene pantomime...

Orochimaru’s ultimate Doujutsu, was, if one wished to call it so, the bastard, mutated offspring of the Sharingan. Though it did not spin and Orochimaru’s eyes were gold, tarnished yellow instead of bloody red Naruto was ensnared wholly; memories of whirling blades and vipers slithering across his skin in a rapid maelstrom of things he didn’t want to experience ever, ever again.

Naruto’s knees hit the floor and he didn’t feel the pain; his body paralyzed by fear ad memory and everything he saw turning into flashes of sound, of color; of screams in the dark, murky places where the sun did not chose to wander long for it even feared the sunless lands. There was pain in the place without light, without life; pains like fire in the pit of his stomach of ice shot through his veins.

Do it Uzumaki!

No! I can’t!

It’s the target, you little shit! Kill it!

I CAN’T!

She’s only a little girl!

That’s the point!

He screamed and the sound died in his throat as the images played, and warped, and overwhelmed him like low, curling marijuana smoke or hot, rising opium steam through his senses. There was Sasuke, how betrayed him, befriended him, left him. There was Orochimaru, who tried to rape him, kill him, was killed by him. There was Kyuubi, who had stolen his virginity, who had stolen his innocence, who was inside of him until he died. There was Zabuza and Haku, who both had changed him. There Itachi, who wanted him. There was Shukaku and Gaara, who was the first daemon he met and his first family he gained. There were The Demon Brothers, who were, perversely, the progenitors of his kunai promise to himself.

Lastly there was a boy who looked his age but could destroy the universe if he chose to. The boys name was Laharl, the power Naruto had seen him wield was ineffable. These were his fears, embodied in blood and flesh and sentience.

Then there were feelings. A stab through the chest that pierced his lung but broke his head. A rip of the jaw that he still dreamt about but killed the world’s greatest nightmare upon humanity. A plunge into a neck that disgusted him but aroused her. A fire inside that he could never extinguish, but ethereally and mentally.

The feelings vanished and all he could see were eyes. Eyes he could swim through. Eyes he could drown in. Eyes he could wrap around himself and disappear within for all of time...

Wake up

Something screamed like the blast of a furnace or a raging inferno in the back of his mind and reality hit him so hard he stumbled backwards like a kunai had slammed straight into his forehead.

The other thing shrugged, its head tilting as it watched the kitling’s eyes focus and unfocus in fear. Naruto growled, low, deep, rumbling earth underneath earth and the thing’s jade eyes flashed in the darkness like twin chips of malachite, or like slit, cracked emeralds, or like balls of dragon fire. "That's strange. You should be screaming by now. Or dead from the massive shock to your nervous system."

“I don’t die that easy” he gasped out for breath, for solidity, for anything as a sense of vertigo overtook him and he dropped to his knees and held back bile in his throat. The dragon-thing leaned down to speak to him; its breath was hot and moist against Naruto neck and reminding him entirely too much of Anko’s.

"You smell like your bitch, child...like wildfires and primordial forests, like sacred glades and brimstone and hot..." Its breath slid inside of his ear, inside of his mind. "Moist." Its hand rested on his back. "Animal-sex." It lashed out faster than he could follow and Naruto actually felt proud, for a moment and only a moment, that he threw himself back to avoid the blow. The pride vanished when he landed on his back and pain tore through his spine to leave his fingertips numb and prickly.

It, obviously, found this amusing and let Naruto get back to his feet.

“Good. Now that your up I can knock you back down again.”

Or so he thought.

When it punched him in the solar plexus Naruto felt a searing, immaterial heat erupt out from its fist and blast him backwards like a small explosive tag had gone off between them. He landed on the ground, skidding across the unrelenting stone like gravity didn’t affect him, and when he stopped he somehow managed to get to his knees before his chest convulsed and he ended up coughing blood onto the ground.

The thing was still laughing at him when the announcer asked them both into the ring.

“You may have her stench, but you have none of her strength!"

“Fuck... Fuck you.” He sputtered out between spitting blood and wiping his mouth.

It walked to the doorway, haloed by light like some perverse holy-idol. When Naruto looked at the thing, the lanterns were lit again and its shadow grew, and stretched and resembled nothing like the human skin it was wearing...

"The name is Jormungand Amon and I'll enjoy killing you...”

When it walked out into the ring and left Naruto alone, he was sure that it meant every word.

Out of the night, the sun shone brighter than Naruto thought was really appropriate, or natural, inside of the coliseum as he made his way into the ring. The thought made him wonder how many days he had been out, how many days he had been in surgery, and why in the fuck was he thinking about this when he was going to die anyway?

Better get on task...

His eyes darted from corner to corner. The crowd remained silent as he entered the ring and just barely, he could hear people muttering or cursing his name. Hijos de putas, every single one. (4)

Amon stood center stage and looked seemingly disinterested with the world. Only when Naruto got close enough did the thing acknowledge he existed by flicking its tongue out past its lips like a snake tasting the air, or the fear, or his skin.

The thought that Amon could taste vaguely sickened Naruto for two very different reasons, but he kept up the façade of cocksure warrior he was wearing; his smile easy, his stance and muscles loose even though he knew Amon could see right through him and out the other side.

Tsunade began her speech, though Naruto chose not to hear and kept his eyes glued on his opponent. Amon did the same, though out of nowhere the world seemed to ‘flicker’ and Naruto felt a tug at the base of his spine as the world fell out from beneath his feet and he was suddenly standing amongst the stars.

What’s happening?

He asked without speaking, trying to feign calmness.

It called your Mistress

The human-thing smiled.

It?

He asked, not quite sure what Amon meant.

The Brood.

It answered, and was silent as the stars glittered around them like a field of broken diamonds in the morning sun and Amon’s beast awoke.

The Dragon, or the Brood, or whatever it was that called itself Amon's daemon, rose from its hibernal slumber like a glimmering, languorous tide of glittering red and black filigrees of light pouring out of Amon’s back and forming the outline of a creature not completely as draconic (it looked nothing like an eastern dragon, that was for sure.) as he had thought it would be.

Wheeeeereeee issssssss theeeee Kyuuuuuubiiii?

Like a rush of evanescent smog or rolling, barely-lit flames that licked and sparked and flew up to the sky in a columned blaze of flame the Kyuubi came, not manifesting itself above Naruto but beside him.

I am here.

And that was when Naruto knew why he felt empty, why felt cold and why his body felt as though it were disjoined. Kyuubi did not rise from inside of him as the Dragon had from Amon; she had come when the thing had called her.

The realization horrified him more than the eldritch, cyclopean voices speaking to each other inside of his skull.

Ciiiirrrrceeee iiit haaath beeeeen faaar toooo loooong. When the Dragon-Thing spoke, it was the sound of rumbling glass, or breaking earth, or the death-groans of dying humans.

The name made him freeze. The flickering outline of fire that was Kyuubi, or Circe, or whatever the hell she called herself, smirked, sounding more than mildly annoyed. Not as long as I had hoped it would be, Four-tailed Jorumgrand.

The thing laughed, and the laugh either did or did not suite something Naruto could imagine as being the size of several mountain ranges. Yeeeet Iiii aaaam heeeereee nooow, aaaam Iiii nooooooot?

Kyuubi seemed to secede to that point. I hadn’t been planning on seeing you so soon, my old half-nemesis. I suppose that word of my recent... and at this, she paused, searched for the right word and looked at Naruto out of the corner of her eye. ...Disincorporation has traveled as fast as light and dreams across the Aether, has it not?

Kyuubi was using big words to try and confused Naruto. Not cool. The dragon-thing seemed to shake its head. Aaaas aaaa moooortaaaal oooof liiiittleee coooonseeequuueeenceee ooonce saaaaid: Theeee ruuumooorssss ooof youuuur deaaath haaaveeee greeeaaatly beeeen eeexaaagerrraateed. Every word was an intake of breath or was an entire sentence instead of being only apart of one. Naruto found that it was mildly disquieting hearing someone talk as if they were missing a lung.

Kyuubi smiled, black-rimmed lips wrapped around pearl-white blades. I plan to stay alive forever, or did you not know what Seiryu?

The Dragon-thing shook its head. Theeee fiiirrrrsssst tiiiiimeeee yooooouuuu kiiiiilleeeed meee I waaaassss callleeeed thaaaaat...Noooot aaaaany loooongeeeer

The vixen laughed, sparks and her tails dancing in the air. Do you plan to return the favor and kill me, in this weakened state?

The thing paused, thought, and Naruto felt as if a thousand great something’s were thinking with him. Iiiii nooooo looooongeeeeer haaaathh tiieeeessss tooo thooossseee whooo woouuuld seeee yooouuu deeeaaad, myyy neeeemeeessiiisss-kiiitssssuuuneeee. Yeeeeet Iiii aaaam iiiimpriiiissssooooneeeed aaaassss thoooouuu aaaaarrrrt aaaaand shaaaalt seeeee tooooo iiiit thaaaat thhhhy seeeecrrrreeeet oooof freeeeedoooom iiiissss miiiiineeee...

The kitsune smiled, and Naruto briefly imagined cogs and wheels turning inside of her infernal mind. You, oh faulty God-killer once-and-forever--four-tails, would kill me?

It seemed to laugh yet again. Iiiiif Iiiiii mussssst Iiiii musssst...Doooo nooooot foooorrrrceee myyyyy haaaaannnd Ciiiirrrrceee. Teeeeell meeee hoooow thyyy suuucceeeeedeeeed aaaannd Iiii shaaallt leeet thheeee rrrruuuuun frrrreeeee.

Kyuubi looked at the dragon-thing with a gleam in her spiked eyes. ... Do you think I would let you have my secrets so easily because you simply let me go yet again thinking the act would bring you salvation or a swift death, Old One? Do not make empty promises I do not want fulfilled, Thrice-failed of the Gods. I know you cannot defeat me without the backing of the Cardinals, without the other Three who are Tiger, Turtle, and Phoenix

To her apparent surprise (and seeing Kyuubi surprised scared the shit out of Naruto) the thing laughed in her face. Theeee Caaaardiiiinaaaalsssss aaaarrrreee looooong siiiinceeee confiiiiineeeed, Ciiiiirceeee. Weeee allll haaaath aaaa priiiissssoooon noooow.

Kyuubi froze for a horrific, mind-numbingly silent moment, then spoke with a clear-edged crystallinity that frightened Naruto. Pity, that. I suppose you will have to kill me yourself, then?

Naruto had no idea what was going on, but the dragon-beast smiled and that, he knew, was not a good thing. Sooo beee iiiit theeen...Iiiii shaaallt kiiiill theeee, Kyuuuuubiii Noooo Kiiitsuuune, aaaand I shaaaallt taaaakeee theeee grrreeaaateeeesssst ooooof pleeeaaasssuuureeessss iiin dooooiiiing sssooo.

Everything righted itself and Naruto was facing Amon in the center of the ring as if nothing had happened. When Amon caught him gaping and staring at him confusedly, the thing tapped the side of its head as if it would clear all doubts or mysteries.

Then, Kyuubi’s voice whispered into the back of his mind. Kitling, I need you to listen to me because we have very, very little time...

When he spoke his voice sounded like hers, like crackling flames and his own voice shouting in the background. Kyuubi, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!

My name is Circe, little one. But that is neither here, nor there, and for the time being I am going to need your help.

What in the hell would you need my help for! Why the FUCK DID YOU MANIFEST OUTSIDE OF MY BODY BACK THERE?

That, unfortunately, is a side-effect of helping those fleshless rats you call your comrades heal your broken body. But it is unimportant as I am not free of you yet and am too weak to try and take over your mind. If you die, I may die, so listen closely...The thing you are about to fight. It’s a daemon. More precisely, it is one of the Tailed-Beasts and it is inhabiting that human body...

Do you think I’m stupid or something? I knew that the moment I looked at him.

Fine, brat. Did you also happen to know that it’s the Four-tails, Jormungand the World-Serpent, and that it can, and will, kill you if you do not accept my offer?

It told me the first, and you said that while it was talking.

Stop being smart! Do you accept my offer!

...You sound like the devil, or gift-horse I should be looking in the mouth.

Eloquence. That’s different, and unneeded. Listen to me...!

Tell you what, Kyuubi, lets forgo the lies your about to tell me. We don’t really seem to have time for pleasantries and I really, really don’t want to die here.

Insolent little...!

Yeah, yeah. Get on with it.

I want your help in solidifying this... ‘tether’ of sorts we have connected to each other.

What?

The tether, or the chain, that the Death God connected us with. It is the sole reason I can speak into your mind and the reason I can take over your body when your primary consciousness is weak enough.

Why would I want to strengthen that

Because if you don’t, I’ll die when the chain deteriorates in the next year or so.

I see no downside to this.

When my chakra tries to escape your body and rejoin the chaos that is the netherworld it will flash-fry all of your chakra pathways solid and leave you an invalid vegetable for the rest of your life.

Ouch. Alright then. What do I get in return?

Greedy bastard-child! Is life not the greatest gift I can...

Stow it. If I have to help you, you have to help me.

You little...fucking prick...

Learned from two of the best. Are you going to listen, or do I have to hear you call me more names?

...What are your demands?

Heh. Knew you see it my way...

Stop gloating. What do you want?

Your Help. Your Power. A guarantee of sorts...

Eloquence and vague threats. Who are you and what have you done with Naruto?

I’ll tell you what when you tell me what you’ve done with Kyuubi?

I’ve done nothing.

Then, so haven’t I.

Enough of this game of verbal-tag! What do you want!

A guarantee that, when I ask, you’ll help me.

That is all? I thought we had already forged that particular contract.

You’re not holding up your end of the bargain.

Fuck you. Yes I am.

No, you’re not, and I’ll only accept your offer if you promise, underneath your true name, Circe, that you will give me your power when I need it, or ask for it.

Who in the nine hells do you think you are talking to, kitsune! I am Circe, the Kyuubi no Kitsune! I don’t answer to you!

You’re also forgetting that you’re a mangy bag of orange and red fur stuck inside of my head for the time being and neither of us knows what will happen when I die...So either fork over your fucking power or you can take your offer and shove it down your throat and I can try and get Tsunade to fix me when your mangy ass kicks the bucket.

How... How dare you!

Do we have a deal!

I would rather die than give you my power!

We will die if you don’t give me that power you moronic Bitch!

Then so be it!

And he felt a door close between him an Kyuubi as Amon made a twitch upwards with his fingers and Naruto swallowed, hard, as the match began without him even noticing. The dragon-thing took the gulping as fear and its easy, sardonic smile twitched up by fractions as it began to circle Naruto.

Naruto moved with a certain grace to his steps, following Amon as the thing wearing human skin seemed to slide from foot to foot; kicking grass and dust up in its wake. One of its hand moved too near to the sheathe on its back and Naruto, crystal-clear sapphire orbs flickering to Amon and then to the blade for a brief moment and thinking it very, very bad if he struck first with his weapon, transformed into five copies of himself without so much as a hand seal.

Amon laughed and eased his hand down, as if he were testing the blonde. He didn’t even look mildly surprised or impressed at the five sets of eyes glaring daggers through him. “Scared, aren’t we?” it asked casually

The five clones gave him all the same wintry glare so uncommon to Naruto and Naruto thought he would have to change that cocksure grin on Amon’s face. (Violently, if need be.)

There were less than ten feet of earth between them when the battle began, and Naruto would make sure to not have less than five between them when the battle ended. The six Naruto clones bum-rushed Amon in blurs of red, black, and orange and split from five to ten hollering and whopping Naruto’s in mid-run.

“Get im’!”

The first clone that reached Amon died almost instantly, causing the other Naruto’s to skid to a stop as Amon, moving from its standing position fast enough that it seemed to leave behind a faint, shadowy afterimage, delivered a straight-kick to the clone’s face that connected hard enough to turn the clone’s nose into an explosion of cascading red blood and send splintered, broken bone fragments out through the other side of its skull.

As it fell and poofed into obscurity, two other clones ran towards Amon with their twin shavers drawn and murder in their eyes. With a smirk and with grace as inhuman as its beast, Amon gracefully swept the first clone off of his feet, twisted its body in such a way that its booted heel caught the second clone in the bottom of its jaw with a sickening snap that displaced the bone structure and then brought that same foot slamming back down on the first clone’s Adam apple and made it gasp out a bloody death-noise before both turned to smoke and loose particles of spent chakra.

When Amon was apparently done break-dancing another clone neared and faired marginally better; getting close enough to land a kunai blow to its shoulder that drew a thin sliver of blood before it saw the slits of Amon‘s draconian eyes narrow, and unfocus, and draw it inwards into an eternity of pain.

Frozen as it was, Amon dispatched the clone mercilessly with a backwards heel to the neck. Before he could complete the movement the rest of the clones and Naruto leapt high into the air, drew out as many kunai as they could hold, and let loose an obsidian storm of metal.

Amon smiled, but did not withdraw its blade to counter the steel daggers streaking towards its vital areas. Instead, it opened its mouth impossibly wide, showing row upon row of needle thin teeth and pulled off one of Uchiha Sasuke’s favorite and most powerful techniques without even making a seal.

The Ryuuka no jutsu, or the dragonfire, or the bloodline ability, or whatever it was (Naruto honestly didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to think it was natural for a daemon-container to start fusing that much with their daemon ) flash-fried the kunai and took the forward-most clone head-on -- instantly vaporizing flesh from bone and bone to anonymous grey ash. Before it could reach them, Naruto and his last two clones leapt off of the dying clone’s shoulders and landed behind Amon’s back.

The ashes drifted away on the winds as the two clones around Naruto transformed into a pair of gargantuan Fuma-class shuriken without so much as a verbal command. He grasped one of them tightly, whirling it in his hand so that it spun and blurred like a buzz saw in reverse and when Amon turned to face him, menace radiating from every inch of it and embers falling from its jaw without any indication of pain, Naruto let it fly.

Had it struck its mark, it would’ve split Amon’s skull lengthwise and instantly killed him. That was not the case, unfortunately, and Amon caught the whirling blade with only two fingers and a shit-eating smile across its face. The crowd ‘oh’d’ and ‘ah’d’ and then and there Naruto knew he was going to be outclassed by sheer, unholy strength if he didn’t start thinking his strategies in layers instead of counters.

“Nice try.” Amon smirked at him as the second shuriken came on low and soundless like a windless hurricane that would have taken Amon’s leg off at the knee had it hit. It didn’t, obviously, and the man-thing ‘tched’, broke the shuriken in its hands in half and delivered a quick, vicious stomp downwards that drove the second shuriken into the earth and shattered it into so many pieces of metal.

Naruto stood still for a brief moment, head cocked to the side, and laughed as he made a one-handed seal and figured that a thousand small explosions would make up for the loss of two larger ones.

“Boom.”

A second later, the remains of the two Bakuretsu Kage Bunshin littered around Amon’s feet titled up awkwardly, pointed up at the sky before swelling to physics defying proportions in an infinite, breath-holding, drawn-out moment before they exploded in a thousand flashes of incandescent orange-yellow-red.

The fireball blazed, morbidly beautiful, and reached wispy, elongated hands towards the sky in mock prayer or profanity. When it died out tiny shards of earth fell down from the sky. All that was left of Amon was curling smoke and dust; but, as the announcer made to say something, Naruto, eyes darting within the smoke and dust, held up his hand.

“Not...”

When the last fragment of earth hit the ground Naruto cursed, the crowd cheered and boo’ed respectively for who they were rooting for and the dust cleared all at the same time. Amon, looking none the worse for wear, was standing, unmoving and blinking very rapidly as he wondered and wondering who in the HELL TAUGHT THAT KID ITACHI’S JUTSU.

“...Oh” he began, the word more dangerous than it had ever intended to be,

“It’s on now.”

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

Up in the stands, Rock Lee (who had sat next to Neji, Hinata, Tenten, Ino, and the newly-healed Kiba when the ordeal with Naruto had passed over) blanched openly at what was going on in the ring.

“Did you just see that!” Hinata asked way too enthusiastically as Naruto’s clones exploded and disinterred the ground so that it met the air in a flurry of fire.

“That was so cool! I didn’t even know you could make Kage Bunshin explode like that!”

Lee only nodded half-numbly, thinking that only a seriously disturbed person would invent a technique like that and that only a psychopath would use a technique that made one’s almost-clone basically turn into a suicide kamikaze bomb.

“...Woah.”, Tenten mouthed, her eyes wide and her voice bringing Lee’s attention back to the ring to find nothing but...blurs of color...?

What the... he rubbed his eyes and the world seemed to correct itself. What was in the ring were not blurs, but were Naruto and his opponent moving so fast that his eyes couldn’t keep up with them without chakra enhancing his vision with the first gate unlocked.

The earth splintered and broke in the wake of their movements. Naruto came on like a blood-stained hurricane; splitting into seven copies of himself as his opponent (his name started with an S, Lee was certain) literally reached into the ground and yanked out a molten fireball.

“Holy”, whispered Ino, amazed, as a veritable storm of kunai neatly pierced lines through the semi-solid ball of liquid fire and came out the other side, not affecting it at all.

“Shit.” Kiba finished and echoed Lee’s sentiments as Naruto’s opponent threw the molten ball faster than was humanly possible and pulled off his rather good, but not accurate because he’d seen Sasuke do the real thing, imitation Ryuuka no jutsu to create a fiery column of fucking death that would leave no trace of Naruto if it hit him.

Naruto did dodge it, apparently, because next thing Lee saw was Naruto pulling off his famous (infamous if you asked the right opponent) Uzumaki Naruto Rendan. Though... It did look kinda of different from this angle.

The crowd, strangely, was chanting with him when the first clones slide into the ‘push’ that sent Naruto’s opponent flying.

“U!”

Next came a pair of clones that leapt from the ground and slammed their elbows into his opponent’s spine to thrust him up even higher.

“ZU!”

Three clones, already high in the air, came down and flip-smashed their heels into the man’s chest before poofing away. As he fell, two other clones jumped so that they crossed him the air. Silver blades glinted in their hands and the man’s body twisted so that he plummeted face first to meet the ground faster than he had left it.

“MA-KI-NA-RU-TO!”

One clone, presumably the real Naruto, stood underneath the man, his fist raised just as his opponent’s jaw came slamming down back into it with a sickening crack and he yelled.

“RENDAN CUSTOM!”

The crowd went wild, though quite a few people were chanting for the man to get back up as he slid off of Naruto’s hand and fell to the ground. Naruto turned around and ate up the attention, his grin wide and cocksure.

...No one but Lee and possibly the Hyuuga children saw the man’s eyes open.

“Shit! NARUTO!”, Lee tried to yell over the crowd as the man rose to his feet and... “NARUTO! NARUTO LOOK OUT!” ...horrifyingly...pushed...“NARUTO BEHIND YOU!” ...his...hand...through... “MOVE YOU BLONDE FUCKER! MOVE!” Naruto’s...“Oh Gods...no...” ...chest...and...clean...out “Uzumaki...UZUMAKI...!”...the...other... “NARUTO! NOOOOO!” side...

Lee saw Naruto’s life flash before his eyes for the blonde. Neji just stood, mouth agape, as the man tossed Naruto’s body to the ground and eradicated it with another Ryuuka no jutsu Tenten and Ino were crying before the man ended his jutsu.

The crowd was strangely, almost heartbreakingly, silent.

“How in the world can he pull that shadow clone jutsu off without a seal?”, out of nowhere, Hinata asked Neji.

“...Better question, cousin, is how can Naruto move that fast when he’s not using chakra?”

Lee’s, and Neji imagined everyone else’s, eyes went wide.

“Are you serious?”, Ino asked.

“I don’t usually lie, Ino-chan.”

Lee looked back at the ring. The dead body poofed into oblivion and Naruto, this time, came barreling towards his opponent with the sun screaming to life in his hands and stealing then crowds collective breaths out of their lungs.

“GO GET ‘IM YOU CRAZY IDIOT!”

His opponent didn’t have enough time to turn around. Naruto slammed his Rasengan directly into his opponent’s chest and blew the man all the way across the ring and into the opposite wall.

“FUCK YOU!” Naruto screamed and the crowd went wild behind it.

Lee just...sat. That was incredible. He was usually never one to be astonished like this and he usually took things he couldn’t explain with a grain of salt and a rigged sense of Youthful Disbelief (as Gai-sensei would say), but this time, looking as Naruto, once the almost-weakest of the Genin, and his opponent, who came from a dead-end village no matter how you looked at it, made every other Jounin and ANBU leveled shinobi in the stadium look pathetic.

“That’s...that’s insane.” Hinata muttered, leaning over the metal guard-bar.

Lee didn’t know why his hands were shaking, but when he looked at Neji and saw the raven-haired nin idly tapping on the armrest of his seat, he knew that his rival wanted to fight Naruto just as bad as he did.

The dust settled from the whiplash of the Rasengan and Naruto took to the center of the ring right as Amon’s body fell out of the imprint it had made on the steel wall it was sent into.

Bastard's still not dead...What the fuck?

Amon got up and, without a hint of being hurt, started moving to intercept the blonde on his path to the center of the ring; his jade, reptilian eyes focusing wholly on his opponent’s advancing form as if Naruto were the center of his universe or his most hated enemy.

The stare briefly unnerved him. He didn’t hate Amon because he didn’t know the...thing...but he also didn’t want to die, so he would have to, simply and without any qualms about doing so because Naruto was, as of late, a tad bit on the sociopathic side, kill the thing by putting a Rasengan through its fucking head.

Simple, yeah?

They advanced on each other slowly, gaining a slight momentum and magnitude with each step as if they were holding themselves back from outright charging the other and trying to rip out a throat. Naruto began first, chakra gathering inside of his palm like a slowly whirling hurricane of wild light. The Rasengan at level three hadn’t hurt him, so he’d go maximum this time.

Level Five Rasengan: Broken Diamond Shards. (Nicknamed: Death by a Thousand Cuts – Uzumaki Arashi) By creating a spinning orb of loosely held together chakra, in essence, a chakra’ cluster-bomb’ and letting it go or throwing it at the exact moment before your chakra can burst apart, one may be able to slice apart the enemy at a fairly ranged distance or completely tear them apart at close range.

The thing manifested itself in his hand as a perfect round orb barely spinning off the center of his palm. As he close the distance between them he fed large bursts of chakra into the thing at random intervals, causing the orb to shift and loose solidity.

Tendrils of loose sunlight rose and spiraled outwards off of the Rasengan’ circumference; whipping around, behind, and above him and lazily lacerating the earth or cutting through the sky as he walked. His arm shook with every step. He barely had the thing controlled and with so much chakra placed into the Rasengan, if he let it just ‘go’ it would more than likely loose any damaging effect and just become him expunging more chakra than was necessarily good in a battle.

Amon kept advancing but made no move to counter Naruto’s jutsu but let one of his hands dangle low and opened in the shape of a claw. As they drew to meet each other Naruto sucked in the tendrils of the Rasengan and made it a perfect ball of light and let it fly.

It was beautiful.

The orb shot forward as its name described it, physically seeming to crack and shatter like a diamond of golden ice set far too close to the sun. It pulsated and contracted like a human heartbeat; screamed the scream of a hurricane or a violent zephyr tearing across a forest of hollow trees before it began to deteriorate and loosen and unwind in a flurry of bladed edges so sharp and thick that when the ones that passed the ground sliced through it the Rasengan left three foot trenches in the ground.

Amon did not move as the thing bore down on it and exploded in a magnificent brilliance so blinding that the crowd had to cover their eyes to keep watching it. It did not move as the flash dissipated and as thousands of miniature spiral bullets flew outwards like a shotgun blast towards it and imbed themselves in the ground, in the wall behind it and into its body as they passed and struck their mark.

Naruto had thought he had gotten it. He had honestly thought that would have torn Amon to pieces...Not for the first time, and possibly not for the last, he was so wholly wrong it sickened him.

Amon’s technique was not beautiful. It was not brilliant, nor was it the Rasengan in any capacity. The thing burst forward and, lithely bending backwards as Naruto struggled to try and hit it in the head with another on of his Rasengan, dislocated Naruto’s arm at the elbow as the Rasengan passed and disappeared harmlessly over its head.

Naruto screamed and again, Amon speared the boy in the chest.

Though, it screamed when it did so because, yet again, Naruto was a shadow clone and this wasn’t a battle. This was a game of goddamned tag and Amon was it.

As the clone slipped off of its morosely dry fingertips and let out a wet, dying gasp Amon threw it to the ground and buried its heel into the thing’s face just to show the Kyuubi-child who he was trying to make a fool of.

“Stop cowering in the shadows like a fox and fight me like a man Uzumaki Naruto!”

Naruto, or another clone, obliged, happily, and came from on high -- his blades drawn and angled for a downwards slash aimed to take Amon between its shoulders until at the last moment Amon withdrew its blade just enough to block the incoming high-strike.

The moment their swords hit one another, a sound like metal striking something hollow echoing, Naruto simply hung in the air, momentum lost, and Amon withdrew the rest of its sword in an unimaginably fast reversal aimed to bisect Naruto in mid-air.

Naruto didn’t know anything save a daemon could be so fast with a blade. A clone poofed into existence and saved his life, almost as if mentally conjured to shove him out of the way and take the hit that would’ve killed Naruto instead.

When Naruto landed, crouched low and on all fours with both of his shavers still in his hands, Amon was advancing on him with its fire in its eyes and its strange, alien weapon slowly ticking at the ground. Naruto took a moment, and only a moment, to study the blade that was neither katana nor samurai sword and realize that if it hit him he would barely have enough chakra to make another clone.

The metal of the almost thinly made cleaver-shaped blade was silver, or something colored silver and just as, if not more, harder than steel. It sounded as if the entire thing were hollow on the inside, judging by how every tick of its tip against the ground seemed to echo. At the base of the blade there was no guard; but instead there was something that looked like a cross between a very small, very round thimble and a six-cylinder chamber. At the base of this cylinder was a small, curved and, looking at it, useless spike inside of a metal half-loop. (5)

When Amon neared him, its lips split in a smile and its strange, hollow sword beginning to rise, Naruto stayed low to the ground. As the slender blade came crashing down Naruto rolled to his left, legs tensing beneath him, and sprung forward with both of his shavers aimed to stab Amon in the heart. With grace inhuman, Amon took a step backwards and whipped its blade in a circular motion that ended in both of their weapons locking in the single-cross high stance above their heads.

Naruto was not pleased at this. Against an opponent of Amon’s size and strength, it would be impossible to break the guard with sheer force, and it was all he could do just to concentrate on staying in place. Naruto muttered “Shit”, knowing he was going to break as Amon tried to bend physics (and the blonde’s arms) into the exact way it wanted them to bend.

He lost inches and centimeters that seemed like hard traveled miles as Amon’s arms corded like thick ropes and bulged as he literally tried to press Naruto into the ground and succeeded in doing so, terra cracking beneath Naruto’s feet as he stood his ground and muttered “Shit”, turned it into “Shitty shit” as his elbows kept bending and finally ended up breaking the guard to not break his arms.

Amon’s blade came crashing down in a streak of quicksilver. He didn’t feel the tip of Amon’s sword slice into his arm and leave a stinging scarlet warning but he felt the blood dripping down to his fingertips and realized he’d been hit.

Amon didn’t give him pause, spinning on its heel like a maniac top and lashing out with a back-wards heel strike that struck Naruto in the stomach, hard.

He remembered falling, distantly, as if he were watching a movie of himself. When reality came back to him with its friend adrenaline Naruto was flipping himself up to his feet and gathering chakra into his mouth just as Amon rammed its sword straight into exactly where he had been laying down only moments before.

“Have at you!”, the thing screamed, swinging its blade around in an underhand vertical slice that, having known and seen how the move was countered and thinking Amon a fool for using such a basic technique, Naruto dodged by leaning back on the balls of his feet.

Amon expected something different, clearly. The movement led Naruto into taking in the breath he needed to complete one of the most damaging and chakra devouring technique h had.

The Grand Fireball.

His chest swelled to its fill as chakra began to flare and flash through his veins. Amon moved to impale the bending back blonde but Naruto snapped back up just in time and breathed out the literal tempest.

The gargantuan fireball consumed Amon in a hail of incandescent glory; fire twisting and turning and roaring high to the sky like the screams of dying serpents...But it did not burn. Amon just...stood there...consumed by fire...feeling the heat.

But. He. Did. Not. Burn.

Quicker than a streak of lightning, Naruto closed the gap between them and was satisfied when his shavers sank into something soft and malleable and ended (hopefully) the battle then and there.

“Got ya...”, he sighed to the dead man, twisting both of his shaves inside of Amon in a way that would break bones and rupture organs before he viciously pulled them out of the dragon-thin with yet another series of twist that sent streaks of bright red blood splashing across the ground.

Logic dictated that having one’s most vital organs scrambled should have, by all means, caused death. But, then again, Amon seemed immune to most of the physical laws of the world and when its head snapped forward from staring at the sky and smiled at Naruto’s turned back, he, distinctly, because he had heard a sharp intake of breath, knew there was no way to kill the man.

No way at all.

“Close, but so very, very off.” It whispered, lacing its arms around Naruto’s waist and bringing him close as a lover would his beloved. The crowd gasped, thought Naruto was dead and homosexual at the same time, and all Naruto could concentrate on was the smell of the thing’s breath -- the stench of it like woodland fires and volcanic ash, and the feel and press of its body suggesting that, had Naruto tried to break free before Amon let him, it would’ve broken him in half.

When he was free, he staggered, and Amon laughed.

“I’ll kill you.”, the blonde growled, low and vulpine.

“Like to see you try.”, Amon muttered merrily before it slammed it’s fist into Naruto’s spinal column hard enough to send him flying and skidding head-over-heels across the ground.

When Naruto got back up again, he could barely see straight. Black splotches swarmed on the edges of his vision like taunting, onyx-skinned goblins. His spine hurt, felt broken and bruised and his head felt as if it were cracked down its middle. Amon advanced and Naruto’s vision snapped back into place because adrenaline demanded it to do so.

Adrenaline didn’t help, much, as Amon exploded forward faster than Naruto could blink with its blade held out to its side in a cut directed to Naruto’s midsection.

Oh god. I’m going to be bisected...

Not if I can help it.

Had Kyuubi not intervened, Naruto would have died. He felt her slide through his body and burn his pain away; felt her rise like a tide of immaterial heat that made his muscles relax and his body feel reenergized. Amon missed slicing Naruto in half by fractions of inches as the blonde bent back underneath the blade. When Amon came back around, Naruto moved without seeing, without relying on his eyes; slashing, stabbing, and moving as instinct and Kyuubi dictated him to in the dance of blades and finesse that had almost kill him the first time around.

The sights blurred and the movements became one in the same. Twist. Duck, Parry. Thrust. Under-cut. Over-cut. Sideslash. Duck. Jump. Flip. Their swords clanged and emerged and tangled and beat against one another to the sound of echoing metal. Amon was fast. He didn’t tire. He was stronger than Naruto. His daemon was stronger. It was the only way that Amon could so wholly not die.

Are you telling me that the FOUR-tails is stronger than the NINE-tails? Are you inept?

Why haven’t you accepted my offer yet!

Because it’s fun to see you squirm!

His mind shut down at that but seeing Amon try to decapitate him made it quickly reboot.

WHAT THE FUCK!

I just came back to give you a tiny boost and keep this ever-so entertaining battle going...But now, it’s boring, so tootles. When you die, do look me up in the netherworld.

Her presence gone, Naruto proceeded to curse Kyuubi with every foul word he knew and some he just invented on the spot. Amon came low with a cut aimed at his knees that he leapt over and twisted it around in such a way as to end up cutting through Naurto’s vest and into his stomach. This made him realized that he was tiring and losing the war of attrition he had going with Amon and also realize more and more that he needed Kyuubi.

Kyuubi!

Not my name. Not coming.

Their blades slammed together from two different techniques; Amon’s from its sweeping half-crescent down-stroke and Naruto’s from his dissecting slash. The sound of metal against echoing metal filled his ears as the blades locked, tightly, in a perverted version of the double-cross-low guard and Naruto had the single most brilliant idea he had ever had when faced with an overhead or underhand double-guard.

His foot lashed out faster than Amon could move and caught the thing in its ribs with enough chakra behind the blow to actually cause something to shatter inside before he was sent flying backwards.

“BASTARD!”, and the small victory energized his tired limbs and Naruto flashed forward, his shavers pointed down and aiming for Amon’s heart.

The thing spat out blood as it pushed itself up to one of its elbow and raised its sword in Naruto’s direction. That earned a puzzling chuckle from Naruto, who was aiming to take off Amon’s head. Either Amon was an idiot, which was unlikely, and thought Naruto would impale himself, or...

There was a sound like dry, booming thunder off in the distance and a click-strike of metal slamming against metal. Naruto felt something almost faster than the wind itself slam into his shoulder bone and the impact twisted his entire body around, tangling his legs and his arms so that he ended up sprawled across the ground as his shavers flew from his grasp.

He could barely move. When he somehow managed to get back to his feet, blood was leaking from a wound in his shoulder that looked as if a small, baby-sized fist had gone through it and out the other side.

What the hell...!

Looking at it made the pain worse but he didn’t have enough time to contemplate what had happened as another object he couldn’t see whizzed a fraction of a hair’s length next to his ear and Naruto hit the ground with his arms crossed over his head and his shoulder throbbing with an unimaginable pain. The things he couldn’t see skewered the empty air in rapid succession.

WhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefucWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuck

WhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefucWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuckWhatthefuck...?

The things kept coming towards him, though none were hitting their mark. Knowing that Amon would hit him in the head if he tried to get up and run, Naruto used the blood leaking from his shoulder and made six one-handed seals and thanked the gods that the ANBU made it mandatory for its members to learn at least one technique one-handedly.

He slammed his free hand into the ground, hoping that his small blood sacrifice was enough to get the exact summons her wanted, and sparked a series of tribal-style chains to flash out from the center of his hand and form a summoning seal. All the while he was envisioning a seven-foot, blood red and black marked toad-human hybrid with a gargantuan shield in his mind.

In a theatrical poof of smoke one of the more anthropomorphic bullfrogs, Gama Toku, poofed to his rescue. Naruto breathed a short lived sigh of relief as another wind 'bullet' passed overhead.

"Toku!"

Toku sensed danger and slammed his gargantuan tower shield down in front of the blonde.

“What ze hell mate! I waz jus’ havin’ dinner wit the old missus!”

Naruto patted the poor red bullfrog on the snout and hid behind its shield listening to the sound of small, metallic things crash into the length of metal as he tried to think of something to do.

Kyuubi chose, at this moment, to stop being a maltempered child.

Since you are not going to break down, my offer is as such, kit. If you help me fix the tether between us, I’ll give you my power when you deign it necessary.

Naruto felt like screaming in joy.

But...

Then it all came crashing down.

You are to let me ‘out’ once every week. We can argue the details of doing so later, after you kill this fallacy of a daemon.

How in the fuck do I do that?

Easy. Make it so he can’t regenerate.

HOW THE FUCK DO I DO THAT!

Heh... Let’s see... The Level Five Rasengan...Can it be released at any moment?

Naruto had to blink at that.

Yeah.

Do you remember the two-step kill you learned back at the thing you called the Genin academy?

Naruto though for a moment, still getting what she was trying to say.

Yeah.

How about you put two and two together?

Wah..?

You never were good with math. The concept of the Two-step kill, what was it, Naruto?

Disable an opponent by...cutting...off...Oh.

Good boy. Now go kill.

...Naruto ran faster than his eyes could keep up with his surroundings. Chakra gathered in his palms, sizzling, crackling, igniting with the friction he created by slamming them together and he had, in essence, almost copied Amon’s technique when his Rasengan bursts to life in a twisting filigree of sunlight.

The thing had gotten to its feet and was tilting its head awkwardly. Yet again, Amon didn’t seem interested in the swirling tempest in Naruto’s hand. It raised its strange, hollow blade and its finger curled around the trigger at its base. “Never.”, and a sound that would later be dubbed as a ‘gunbladeshot’ and later shortened to a ‘gunshot’ echoed like dry thunder in the distance.

“Ever.” another, and the crowd both cheered and screamed, and flinched at the sound and the sight. “Ever.” Another, and his friends saw Naruto falter but aside from the Hyuuga many did not see the reason why. “Run.” And the sun went out, and the clone poofed into obscurity and the rest of Amon’s words died on his lips. “...Straight towards me...?”

Naruto came round the things back with a level five Rasengan snarling to life in his palm. Amon turned slowly, too slowly, and as its finger was just about to pull the trigger when Naruto shoved the spinning ball of energy in his hands directly between its ribs.

Amon made a small, laughing sound that was cut off when Naruto shoved an even smaller level two Rasengan through its neck with his free hand in a wet, squishy noise and a burst of sanguine gore. The skin twisted grotesquely around his second Rasengan, splitting and ripping and leaking effluent blood in one infinite moment before Naruto tore his hand down through Amon's neck to his ribcage while pumping chakra into his second Rasengan and increasing its level to five.

When both Rasengans went off inside of Amon, it was horrifying.

There was a wet, grotesque tearing noise not unlike the sound of a thousand blades through flesh and Naruto closed his eyes, sickened at what he saw the Rasengans doing to Amon’s body before they completely exploded inside of it.

The...The...The winner is...

The crowd wasn’t cheering anymore. When Naruto wiped blood and...heavier things out of his eyes he saw that Amon was spread out over the entire arena.

Uzumaki...Naruto?

It somehow seemed fitting.

...There had been a previous match before his, but Naruto didn’t want to know about it.

That night, after the tournament had ended and the child with no first name, Subaku no Gaara, Uzumaki Naruto, Hyuuga Neji, Hyuuga Hinata, and Rock Lee were escorted to a different, higher section of the Tree, two figures appeared in the ring.

They stood side by side, one crouched low to the ground and sniffing at the bloodied chunks of meat that had been left for the scavengers. The other, coolly, calmly, reached down and through the ground and grasped...something.

Accounts vary of what went on that night because the dead do not tell their secrets and the wind speaks to no one. Words were spoken, though none could hear them, and the two vanish, soon after.

...In the morning that followed Naruto’s fateful match, no one could find a single bloodied piece of the thing that wore Jormungand Amon like a red-stained cloak of skin.

In the end, only one shinobi preferred it that way.

TBC

Authors Notes

I tried to keep everyone in character and tried to write people as I thought they would act. The five bloodline clan head people in the council are, as follows:

1) Hyuuga Hiashi, who I think, is not that bad of a man. He’s just very stern, very asinine and sometimes bull-headed to blindness. He wants Hinata to succeeded because, as the clan head, he knows she’ll have to grow up and stop stuttering to deal with things like the Caged Bird Seal and assassins. He wants Neji to be the perfect guardian, and I think because Neji has turned out to be the son he never had, he’s seeing the light on the Main House. (Still a rigid ol’ fuck, though. So don’t expect kindness from him in the future.)

2) Akimichi Chouza, is in fact, was one of the people in the very first chapter of the Naruto manga to want to go after and kill him. Obviously, he doesn’t like Naruto. Therefore, I wrote him as such. I think, eventually, if he talked to him, Chouza could like Naruto.

3) Inuzaka Tsume. He’s Kiba’s mom. Give it up. He’d act just like his mom would and his sister (who, I think is kind and almost Hinata-ish in the manga, I’m not sure) would act like his dad.

4) Aburama Shibi. He’s an Aburame. All for one, one for all. Go figure.

5) Nara Shikaku. Shikamaru’s dad. Probably where he gets his brains from. Also, go figure.

This chapter, as the longest one ever posted, raped me. Mentally, I mean. It started outt incoherently. Sat in front of me for like two weeks just begging to be written and has gone from ANGST-fest (Naruto originally gets bitchy was Tsunade) to what it is today.

...And I still think its bad, but that’s just me.

I thank everyone for reading that monster, and also, if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review it would be much appreciated. If I don’t get feed back from my fans, I A) Curl up into a little ball and cry (kidding) B) Have no idea what you guys –don’t- see right, or see as ‘in-character’ as it happens in the story and C) I don’t get any clue on how to better my writing style. With that, I bid you all adieu

- Over and out.

1: The Sunless Lands
Roughly a thousand mile stretch of blasted, grey-earthed land that separates the east of the continent from the west, the Sunless Lands are a no-man’s land where lightning storms frequently rend the earth and where rain washes away everything almost monthly.1: Roughly a thousand mile stretch of blasted, grey-earthed land that separates the east of the continent from the west, the Sunless Lands are a no-man’s land where lightning storms frequently rend the earth and where rain washes away everything almost monthly.

None save for tribes of wildmen and beasts that are rumored to use chakra live in the Sunless Lands and it is even said the Death God itself, or an aspect of it, dwells somewhere within.

This stretch of land, as you can see, greatly hampers ground-based trade between the east and the west so most trade is either done by boat or by legendary bird animal summon. Anyone banished to the Sunless Lands, usually, does not survive long.

((Hint, hint: This’ll come into play later. : smile :

2: Huh?
And Naruto’s mind goes WAY off in the wrong direction yet again, folks! Lets give it up for proper characterization!

3: What?
A Breath of Fire Reference. That, and the whole Brood thing. It’ll come into play later in the fic, I promise.

4: Say who?
For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, it means “Sons of bitches”, and Naruto learned it from the Sand, who I believe, because they are such dark-skinnded people, may be latin. Or something. Gimme a break here. I wanted to add Spanish into my fic for some odd reason

5: Oh no you didn’t!
Oh my word. Holy sheet. It’s a GUNBLADE! Yeah. Yeah! It is. I included it in here for my own reasons too. Plot important, almost. Remember, the Asians created gunpowder and rockets before the Europeans. I do believe a gunblade would be possible in the Naruto world... I mean, they have wireless communicators, breathing apparatuses (underwater maybe) a sword system that can channel electricity, a sword made of electricity, and a sword that eats chakra. I think a gunblade is fairly in the bounds of realism here.

But, nevermind that. Look at it! Its so purdy! And...and...It’s gone! WHAT! NO! The main person who uses one is GONE!
: Darth Vader yell © : No...!