Dichotomy
A/N: I decided to re-post this. I'm taking some liberties with the characters. Chapter inspired by Preliator, by Globus. This has some elements from other anime in it as inspiration.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Chapter 1: The Devil Within
Some days he thought himself a fool.
Some days he could barely muster the resolve to rise from his bed.
And other days, like this one in particular, he left all those doubts and fears behind.
Because he could not afford to wait. He had a friend.
A friend who needed him. A friend who he had to protect.
He had to be better than that.
"Is this the first time you have seen a comrade fall? He is a true shinobi, and he deserves respect for his sacrifice."
He could still make out the partial silhouette of Haku in the fog, his trim and delicate features stirring up a well of fury and malice in Naruto's stomach. The Jinchuuriki's anger twisted into a seething rage that threatened to devour him. In that moment, he wanted to shred him, to make Haku feel the aching pain he felt in the pit of his own heart. It was for a brief moment, a fleeting fancy of fire that rose from his chest through his throat and surged like a geyser into his blood red eyes.
Those eyes, Haku thought, feeling a twinge of fear at the animalistic fury that bore down upon him like a tidal wave of terror. Those are the eyes of a beast . . .
He snapped nimbly aside the moment Naruto came for him, drawing at least another half a dozen senbon from his pouch and gripping them frantically in between his fingers, eyes wide and unfocused beneath the identity of his cracked mask. The blond skidded across the water, almost pulling the very element itself alongside him, creating a small wave as he twisted and regained his footing, coming for Haku again at a full sprint.
"I'll kill you!" came the near-deafening roar that almost brought the faux hunter nin to his knees. Haku sidestepped his first strike, ducking just barely under his second as the younger boy's ragged claws raked above him, scorching the very mist itself and setting off a spark of red embers.
He narrowly escaped, but at the last second, Naruto's foot touched down, and he spun faster than Haku could have imagined and leaped for a spinning slash to Haku's face, shattering the boy's mask and sending him tumbling across the bridge in a heap.
Escape, nary a route to venture from, the intolerant rage of the nine-tails swept across the bridge and collided with the frail Haku as the boy struggled to his hands and knees. Blood oozed from between his gritted teeth, out of his mouth and pooled beneath him. His eyes wavered, lidded as the savage tears in his stomach cause his eyesight to dissolve into blurry images. He could feel the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears.
With each pulse, blood coated the sandstone.
With each breath he felt his grip loosening.
The muscles of his stomach lurched and twitched in pain. Four ragged claw marks bore into the skin of his abdomen, revealing his flayed innards barely held together by muscle fiber. Haku trembled as tears stung his eyes, and the overwhelming heat of the young boy's chakra washed over him.
His blurred vision, the wavering quiver of his gaze sought out Naruto. "I-is this what it feels like . . . t-to die . . . ?" Haku whispered.
All at once, the red chakra faded, the very essence of his strength ebbing away as something else replaced it.
Sorrow.
It was her, the girl from the forest. Haku, why?
The rough waves of Nami no Kuni beat against the side of the bridge. He knew it the moment he saw it, that the very sanctity of his world came crashing down around him in a crumbling falter of mislead countenance. Haku was a girl. From beneath the wilted rags he'd made of her clothes, he could see the soft swell of breasts underneath bloodied bandages.
He dared not ask, but Haku told him anyway of her life; of the wars of Kiri, prejudices of the fearful and mindless slaughter of her clan. She told him how her father discovered her gift and murdered her mother in grief, of how Haku's power rose to save her from death. She spoke in ragged, hushed tones of how terrified and alone she was until Zabuza found her and rescued her from herself.
Such devotion, such love. How had he missed it? Naruto's brow creased in shame. He averted his eyes from the gastly scene he'd caused. This was something a monster would do. The villagers were right, he was dangerous. They were right all along to keep their distance. What if he'd done something like this years ago? He sunk to his knees, unable to cry; unable to think or feel. He felt so desolate, so hollow.
Look at what I've done, he cried for the soft, vacant eyes of the lost Haku and for his part in taking such a life from this world. I'm a monster. This whole time I denied what I was. I was so afraid of letting them win that I was blind to the truth. And now look at what I've done here . . .
Haku was dead now, her chest unmoving. She lay on her side, innards rolling out of her stomach, half her porcelain face bloodied and the skin flayed off. "I'm so sorry . . ."
He backed far away, his breaths coming heavy and quick, his heart pulsing hard and long.
He cried for Haku, because he'd killed her. Because now, he had no right to think of himself as anything other than a monster. They were right . . .
"Well, well. Looks like I put my faith in the wrong shinobi. I must thank you, Hatake, for doing my job for me."
Gatou's mocking voice edged out of the clearing haze.
It allowed his gaze to focus on them, and the whispering of his mind to rise into shouts. He'd found it at last, only to lose it to the ghostly murmurs of insanity; fear. He closed his eyes in pain and rose to his feet, heedless of his missing shirt and jacket.
There were dozens of them, standing before Haku's body. Gatou's foot nudged the girl's lifeless body, making a sickening squelch with her tender flesh.
A sneer twisted the madman's face and turned him into a veritable demon before their eyes. "And lookie here boys! Too bad I didn't get a chance to do it myself!" he laughed heartily, blind to the rage rising in Naruto's chest. Something primal chanted echoless in his chest, beating like a drum, chorus in another language that he could not-did not wish to discern. His eyes widened madly.
"DON'T YOU TOUCH HER!"
"Kill them. They do not deserve mercy."
His heartbeat pulsed again, in tune with undulations of his chakra.
Burning, like rage, a chasm of fury and terror.
Red chakra flowed off his body, revealing the seal on his stomach. He roared. The sound blasted apart the winds, an inhuman bellow wrenching the very cold from the air and replacing it with unmitigated, unerring terror. Uzumaki Naruto was a tempest, a storm of black wind sweeping into the skies and creating a hurricane of biblical, sovereign proportions.
Sounds clamored together into a cacophony of discordant shrieks and wails. Deafening, Naruto raised his right arm, curling his fingers into a claw. One of the men exploded in a shower of bone and blood, his ribcage blasted outward and his body cleaved from stem to stern.
Red and black covered the bridge and exploded skyward, heating the very air and scorching the heavens. When Kakashi looked back at his errant student, both his eyes went wide at the boy's gaze. Guilt ridden and struck with fear, he could only gape.
Naruto's eyes had changed. Black covered his sclera, his irises going white and his pupils red. A mad smile revealed the darkness within his mouth. One could nearly hear it, bear witness to the birth of something terrible and older than time. Black mist swirled, red chakra crackled and snapped like lightning, a ring of red and black formed into a disk around Naruto's body.
The very air detonated into ash, embers of flame borne of the fathomles pits of hell. An odorous stench of sulfur rose into the atmosphere, choking the oxygen out of the air.
Discarded weaponry littering the ground rattled loudly, twitching as though alive.
The steel girders of the bridge groaned and bent, where chunks of stone and sand teetered on the edge and dropped to the sea below. Rhubarb broke the surface of the ground beneath, snapping upward and causing the bridge to lurch forward, throwing debris into the air.
In every direction, black mist writhed and spiraled about. Given life all its own. A portion of it edged around the bridge and coalesced with what was once Zabuza's Kirigakure no Jutsu. It circled the scaffold and pitched the world into darkness.
"What the hell is that monst-urk!"
The first fell as the mist pierced his neck from behind and dragged his body under the undulating waves. The gastly sound of rending flesh and the tender echo of snapping bone gave way to a heathen bellow that shook the bridge to its foundations. And then, pandemonium.
Another vanished underneath the black mist, waves of hazy ooze plucking out the unsuspecting, devouring unwilling souls and dragging them under into the belly of the beast. 'Naruto' shot ahead into their midst, not a blur. No, it was as if he'd simply vanished into nothing, only to reappear at the front line of mercenaries, thrusting his hands through them as though they were as paltry as paper.
Screams of terror pierced the air. A veritable bedlam of horror as the mist pulled and went indiscriminately, abandoning all to the depths of chaos and fear.
Zabuza looked on in strangled amazement. He'd never felt such devilish chakra. The pressure alone was enough to crush his lungs, like a cold specter looming over him. If this boy had such a vile power, why had he not used it at the beginning? What wicked chakra. It's suffocating!
Such loathsome creatures, to fall to the weakest of minions. They were like ants scurrying about, oblivious to their fate and filled with such delicious despair.
Fear. Exhilarating fear and panic. He desired it, he baptized the skies in darkness, fed on their primal fright and delighted in the scent and taste of their blood. Such beautiful screams, to fill the air!
A mad grin spread his lips. Dying such horrible deaths, they would come under his sway in the undercurrents of fear. He laughed, his voice hollow and echoing as though there were another speaking in tandem. Delighting in the carnage, they way their souls were swallowed up to feed his pet. The shadows lurched and the mist hemorrhaged like gaseous blood over the ground.
Yes!
There was nothing inside. He needed it, craved the feeling of fullness that could only come by devouring these humans. Their bodies would feed his pet and their souls would fill him with power!
"Naruto, stop this!"
He heard, and he listened, but he did not obey. 'Naruto' craned his neck to peer at the Jounin, Kakashi. Why had his pet not gone after such a palatable soul? Why had it hesitated so? The other voice in his mind shouted the answer at him, but he shoved that measly pest aside. That one was not as strong in this splendid vessel as he! He would usher into this world a new age, from this body!
"Who are you to command me?" he quipped with disgust, forcing his gaze upon that accursed red eye and willing it away. Kakashi stumbled back and screamed, clutching the eye with the Sharingan and collapsing to his knees. "Presumptuous, stepping beyond your station! Harrowed, the wraith of forever, come to meet the maker?"
He stopped, a frown forming as something began to plow forth from within him. "N-no! It is this one's turn! It is not fair! Not FAIR!" A broken white light sprang from the seal on his stomach like a crack on glass. Another, and then another, until they spread across the length of his skin and a shrill howl was wrenched from his throat, the very sound displacing the air in a shock wave.
The dreaded black mist receded, revealing half-eaten and mangled corpses. Body parts lay strewn over the edge of the bridge with faces contorted into silent wails. Naruto fell to his hands and knees, trembling and shaking like a newborn. What happened to his resolve? He looked up and flinched back as the visions assailed him and the smell stung his nose. Did I do this?
"Boy," the rasping gurgle, still deep and grave, floated to his ears. He turned to Zabuza - or what was left of him; his legs were gone and his chest was pried open at the ribcage - and looked upon the face of his once-adversary. "I-I was w-wrong," the man stuttered, coughing up blood onto his face. "I wasn't the real demon, it w-was you . . ."
The blonde's eyes shook and widened. Zabuza breathed his last breath.
In the days that followed, Naruto was like an empty shell. He didn't talk, he rarely slept. It showed in the dark circles of his unusually vacant eyes and the poor, sallow state of his skin, now paler than Sasuke. On the first day, rework on the bridge began. Naruto would let no one but him touch or bury Haku - the boy he'd killed much to Sasuke's chagrin, and spent that day quietly on the roof of the house. On the second day, duties fully resumed and team seven worried even more over Naruto.
He blamed himself for Haku's death more than the mercenaries. Though he was quite aware of what he'd done while possessed, it didn't help to know that it wasn't really him doing the killing.
In all truth, it was his fault. He'd killed them all, and brutally at that. They'd all seen the bodies. Even the kind-hearted mother of Inari was wary around him. It hurt his heart to be held at arm's length by the warm woman, and by Inari as well. That evening, he realized that Sakura was avoiding him too. She would cast him frightened glances at the dinner table. From then on, he took his food to the roof of the house and ate there.
On the third day, Naruto felt something foreign stretching the edge of his senses. It was slow at first, like the chill of winter descending into his bones. It made his blood run cold and his heart tighten painfully when he thought of it. It coursed through his veins like a river of liquid ice over the next several days as the bridge was completed, and only when another day passed and it was time for them to return to Konoha did it abate.
It was two weeks after the bridge was finished that Naruto felt the cold chill ebb away. They were well on their way back to Konoha by the time it disappeared completely. Back in Nami no Kuni, he had no idea the tumultuous reactions of the people. The bridge was not named after Naruto, but after Kaiza, the man who'd inspired a nation many years ago.
The moment they entered the gates, Kakashi left to report to the Hokage. At the same time, his teammates slipped quietly away. Naruto returned to his apartment in silence. The walk there was tense and a little melancholy. He felt sick to his stomach immediately at the fearful looks of the villagers. I know now that I deserve this. Naruto heaved a sigh and climbed the steps to his apartment. The inside was drafty and cold, but it didn't affect him nearly as much as the chill in his veins had.
He fell back onto his bed and stared up at the ceiling, knowing that he couldn't keep moping. He had to keep going and hope that he never used the power of the fox ever again. I'm a monster, he resolved. I killed people out of anger because of that chakra. But I won't use it again.
Even so, regardless of his conclusion he could not help but feel guilty remorse eating away at him. He made himself a meal of ramen and sandwiches and fell asleep on the floor of his apartment. He woke again during the middle of the night around eleven with a stifling headache pounding at his temples, and a raw feeling in his throat. His vision was blurry and his eyes hurt. He tried to eat breakfast only to throw it up a few moments later.
He fell back asleep, exhausted from the ordeal. Later that night, the strange winter night chill descended on Konoha with terrifying sharpness that evening. As far as the eye could see in the full light of the moon, masked and robed figures stood as silent guardians, watching over their village with unerring vigilance. In a far corner of the city, Naruto jerked awake again, terror painted in his smoldering gaze.
His eyes swept back and forth over the dark bedroom as he took a few shuddering breaths to calm his nerves. His heart throbbed loudly in his ears and he felt nausea churning his stomach and increasing the tempo of his headache to nigh unbearable.
That nightmare had been almost too real. Slowly, he edged off his bed, the vertigo of his restless slumber threatening to upend the contents of his stomach. The wood was cold beneath his bare feet, but it served as a stark reminder of the late hour. His glance flickered across the red stains of his soiled linens, and with a grimace he began to gather them. Damn it.
He made his way to the laundry room at the end of the hall quietly, lest he wake and irritate his neighbors. Their tempers were more legendary than the irate pink-haired kunoichi he frequently found himself so smitten with. The light hum of the washing machine broke the silence, and Naruto had to fight to keep his tired eyes open.
Sleep tremors shuddered across his body as he stretched and noted the time on the clock hanging above the entrance to the room. The nightmares were becoming more frequent. He couldn't keep denying that they were there anymore like he had in the past. This wasn't like before, where he could brush past them with self-assured confidence borne out of desperate stubbornness.
As his sheets continued in the wash, Naruto crept up to the roof, eager to put his mind at ease. The cool air whipped his hair and nipped gently at his skin, forcing him awake.
He stared up at the luminous celestial body hanging in the sky, reveling in its beauty for a moment. He dreamt of flying on nights like these, lifted untouched by gravity, soaring on the wings of an angel only to find himself dragged into the gaping maw of the malicious nine-tailed fox.
That day on the bridge cemented yet fragile like glass. He'd seen the world through the looking glass until that moment. He'd let his darker side out. The tenebrous spirit had made him into a god for a brief moment as he devoured the wailing souls of the victims on the bridge. I let myself turn into a monster.
He closed his eyes, forcing the image away as best he could. He could almost hear the spirit's echoing laugh in the back of his mind, taunting him, beckoning him. The conciliate, commandeering voice that once accompanied him in his earlier youth was eerily silent now, and he desperately wished for its comforting words.
He was miserable.
Miserable and sick.
Naruto had never been sick before. It was a new and sobering experience, and the feeling of having to go it alone was also worrisome. No one came to visit him the whole day; no team meeting and no missions. Though he doubted he could go on a mission in his condition. That evening he was wracked with hacking coughs that brought up blood, and violent shivers. He descended back into his apartment, wrapped himself up in several blankets and tried to wait it out.
On the first day, Uzumaki Naruto fell asleep and didn't wake up
Left alone in his apartment, he had no idea that team seven was given one week of leave, and that Kakashi had come to his house an hour before he arrived and left a note. That note was floating amongst trash in his apartment, blown out of sight by the wind.
On the second day, he was discovered by his team and rushed to the hospital.
On the third day, just as the clock struck midnight, Uzumaki Naruto fell into a coma.
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