A very old concept that's been floating in my head for awhile.

...

The Other World

...

His mouth was full of gravel.

Naruto coughed and reached his hand up through the concrete and beside his head. He twisted his burning face toward his fingers. He scraped his tongue along his top teeth to force the rocks out of his mouth, but he was too thirsty to manage to spit.

"Hey," Naruto said to his torn stomach. He lay where he was, assessing the situation Scrapes, burns, nothing as bad as it felt. He sat up, using his raw palms to support himself. Naruto hid his grimace under apathy, trying to put on a brave face. "Sasuke."

Naruto blinked. He was in the dark, and he was alone.

"Sasuke?" Naruto called out into the darkness, "I'm not going to just take that without a fight!"

There were lights at the far edge of the darkness. Naruto blinked, training his wide blue eyes on the light. The sun, it seemed, flickered in and out of existence.

There were long black curtains over a window. Nartuo sat quickly up to his knees, ignoring the pain as only a trained ninja could. He both over and underestimated and found himself stumbling. Carefully, even afraid, he steadied himself.

He was lighter, much lighter. Naruto felt under his shirt, made of a light material he didn't remember wearing, and found himself reeling at the feeling of loss. His muscles were gone, and instead his fingers dipped deep into empty air to touch an impossibly thin stomach. Naruto touched his knuckles to his skin, and gently felt up along bony ribs. "Alright," he said softly.

His feet were bare, and they hurt. With each step his middle nail dug into the side of his second toe. It was the same with the nails on his fingers, Naruto scrapped his nails against his wrist just to feel with ragged touch against his skin.

With slow steps, feeling as if he was falling apart, Naruto shuffled to the edge of the curtain. He shook his head once, feeling odd, as if something was wrong with his head. His thin fingers curled around the edge of the building.

It was impossible.

Buildings don't get this tall.

Naruto stood on the edge of a broken glass window and stared down onto a world so small he could barely see the figures of people on the bottom. More cars then he'd ever seen, perhaps he'd only even seen a few in his life, were thundering by at speeds not even the fastest ninjas could achieve. They were almost as fast as the Yellow Flash himself, but there were hundreds, thousands of them speeding by.

Naruto stepped back quickly from the scene. His eyes fell on a drop of blood on the floor. He stared down at the source of the blood, his own skin He was wearing jeans ragged enough to see all of his legs, legs that were just light skin stretch to its breaking point over bones. What is wrong with me? Naruto was terrified. There were strange markings on his ankles and his thighs, words he'd never read and pictures he didn't understand. Naruto lay back, suddenly overwhelmed, and his gaze fell on a figure only know revealed by the light.

Suspended from a rafter, a skeleton dangled from its neck.

It was not just a skeleton. There was blood all over its body, and muscles crumpled in a heap at its feet. White paste dripped from its eyes and something like thick guts was leaking out of its teeth. The brain, sliding between the incisors, slunk to the ground in an impossibly slow fall.

"Dear Kami," Naruto whispered. He stumbled on his hands and knees away from the sight.

Why doesn't Naruto test it, Sasuke had said, and then he'll be useful for something.

"I'm useful!" Naruto shouted into the darkness at the monsterous corpse, "What about you?" As he stepped back his foot touched something odd and the thing crumpled beneath it. Naruto grabbed it and held it, shifting to make sure it caught onto the light.

The note, written on impossibly manufactured paper, was in Naruto's own handwriting.

I can't go on, it read, not every day, alone, unloved. I can't keep making my way on my own. I'm almost sixteen. Sixteen years of nothing and no one.

Naruto's horrified, wide blue eyes shifted up to the corpse.

Sixteen years ago my uncaring parents couldn't drive a mile up a road to leave me at an orphanage. I've lived my life on the streets, cared by nothing, fighting for everything. Drugs won't help me, not anymore, they only force back the- this- all of my- lonliness.

The words were writted now with fast, angry handwriting, The drugs only remind me of what I've done to get them. What I've let be taken from me. Everything. I have nothing to call my own.

Naruto leaned back, riveted to the writing.

I can't do this anymore. I can't be me anymore. Why is it others have homes, families, friends, and food when I have nothing? Why is it no one will know to look for me to find my body? No one will care when I die. No one will care. I've tried all my life to make someone care for me and in sixteen years I haven't managed. I've been told suicide is selfish, but since I have no one to attend my funeral and no one will cry about me then I don't think I'm selfish. I'm getting rid of one more crackhead. One more crackhead off the streets. That's the governor's thing, isn't it? Get the homeless off the streets? Well it hasn't worked for me. Nothing has, because I'm the last to get every good thing. So I don't have any, no good things. And I'm tired of it.

Naruto. Uzumaki.

Naruto held the suicide note in his hands and realized, The crazy old market lady was right. After a long moment of silence, Naruto stood up. "New world," he said, his voice cracking in pain as he thought of the last. Thrown away, Naruto realized. He didn't mean it, his own voice inside him reasoned, he didn't mean to.

"Next time Sasuke wants someone to test some old lady's magic mirror in a market place in the den of theives, he had better pick Karin," Naruto growled.

In the awkward body, his shuffled his way to the stairs. He stuck the note in his pants pocket, all while wondering if the innumerable holes in his pants would hold anything. Slowly, Naruto started the long journey down the stairs. As he did so, he wondered what an 'elevator' was.

When he reached the bottom, he was exhausted enough to fall asleep on the gorund. His first view of the new world from eye level was lost from his sleep, but Naruto had enough sense to sneak onto a bus. He had to sneak since he wasn't sure what counted as currency and he was fairly sure he didn't have any anyways. It was better to sleep, though, sourrounded by people then in an alley where someone could stick a kunai up his back.

The new world would make sense in the morning.

...

A grumpy old lady with a fur coat poked Naruto in the arm with her cane.

Naruto woke with a jump and, surprise, disrupted the careful balance he'd achieved in the night of being sprawled over both seats.

"You're disgusting," the grumpy old lady snarled, her double chins wobbling as she did so. She was clutching her cane like a sword in one hand and a purse with a strange puddle of fur in the other.

Naruto had thought he was sleeping. "I..." He started. The bus was almost completely empty, but the morning sun light was streaming through the side. He'd been aloud to sleep on it all through the night. The new world was much kinder than Konoha had been.

Naruto tried to stand up to wake himself up better, but his hand caught on something and he fell back onto the ground with a force so hard it rattled his thin body. His arm was chained to the seat. "Or not," he realized. There was a man in what appeared to be a uniform, although it was blue, and he was watching Naruto with an angry look on his face. "I'm in trouble."

The old lady, apparently vindicated, waddled her way up to the front of the bus and sat down.

What did she even want, Naruto wondered in confusion.

The windows of the bus were slightly tinted, but Naruto could make out some things they passed. There were stoplights, shops, a few carts, and others things Naruto recognized, but despite how a quick glance of the city might look like Konoha there was a glaring difference. The city went on forever, and the world was sourrounded by things much more... modern. Besides, Naruto couldn't see a single ninja headband anywhere.

He was shaken out of his comparison by the man in uniform, who sat down in the empty seat driectly in front of Naruto and then turned in such a way that the two were face to face. "Now," the man said. And he pulled off the ridiculous glasses that covered half of his face.

Naruto was so stunned by the man's identity that he forgot he was in another word and he shouted, "ASUMA!"

Asuma stared at Naruto, stunned for a moment, before he fingered a strange badge on his shoulder and then said, "Of course." His name was sewn into the fabric below it. "Now," Asuma said, leaning cooly against the headrest, "I think you know the rules against misuse of public transportation, as someone like you might."

Naruto blinked at him.

"So, I don't think I can let you off with a warning," Asuma said, "since I can't smoke on these damn things then you have to follow the laws too."

'Smoke'. The word made Naruto interested for some reason. It was odd; he'd never cared for Asuma's habit before.

"Tell me, kid, where are you from and who can I call to pick you up?" Asuma looked at Naruto, scratching his untrimmed beard. With a single, almost impressive motion, he brough his sunglasses back onto his face.

"Call?" Naruto wondered how Asuma expected to shout to someone from where they were.

"Yes. Parents. Relative. Friends. Roommate."

Naruto's mind flooded o the note, and then to all the people he'd left behind in the other world. The real world.

GODDAMN YOU SASUKE FOR MAKING ME STEP THROUGH THE STUPID GLOWING MIRROR!

What rules does this world have, Naruto thought nervously, how am I supposed to know anything? All I know is from my note my life sucks!

"I need an answer. I don't care if you're high, hungover, drunk, or all three. Talk." Asuma's form was rigid and cold.

Naruto slowly got to his feet, and carefully sat back down on the bus. The bus stopped then, and a few people got on and then off the moment they saw Naruto and Asuma. "I..." He said. Asuma was waiting and, backed into a corner, Naruto decided to say as much of the truth as he dared. "Say, I don't remember who I am. I don't remember my life here, I don't remember where I came from, I don't remember anything. How would I convince you of that?"

"So," Asuma said coldly, "high. Very high."

"What does that mean?"

"Are you going to continue to be a public nuisance?" Asuma stared down at Naruto's clothes, the markings on his body, and frowned.

"What?"

Asuma nodded. "Then I guess I'll have to take you in. It's a good thing this bus is going straight past the station, isn't it?"

"Station? For trains?"

Asuma stood up, sat in the seat right next to Naruto, and refused to say anything more. When they stopped in front of a giant building with the words 'Amaya City Police', Asuma unlocked Naruto's wrist from the seat and, sticking the strange metal object in the back of his pants, replaced it with his hard, uncaring grip. He pushed Naruto out of the bus and forced him down the side.

"Good riddance," said the old lady. The fur thing she was holding moved, and two beady eyes peeked out of its prison. Naruto stared at the oversized rat in confusion; he didn't understand why anyone would keep one as a pet.

"Down the stairs," Asuma said when Naruto wasn't complying with him.

Naruto had to lean heavily against the railing to walk, nis legs faltered from beneath him. His stomach was growling, but Naruto seemed to have an odd place in his mind where he could easily ignore it. He buried that and the pain from Asuma's hard grip on his wrist away, concentrating solely on moving the unfamiliar body.

They were on the street for only moments, just enough time for Naruto to be blasted from all sides by the noises of the city in the day. Then Asuma had pulled Naruto inside.

The building was silent, and they walked across marble steps toward a clear desk where an impossibly beautiful woman, perhaps a geisha, was dressed in pants and a red blouse cut unseemingly low. Naruto's face reddened immediately at the site of her, but Asuma didn't seem to notice as he walked straight to her. "Is the chief in?"

"He's interrogating a subject about the homicide in the Wayner building," the secretary said. Her name, a tag pinned to her shirt by what appeared to be her bra, a black silk article that was clearly showing, was Claire Rivers.

'Claire'. Naruto wasn't even sure how to pronounce such an unusual name.

"This the four-one-two from last night?" Claire Rivers asked, sending a look of condemnation Naruto's way.

"He's stoned," Asuma said.

Naruto's eyes widened. "I'm getting stoned?"

"Yeah," Claire snorted with a chuckle, "sure is. Why did it take you so long to get him?"

"My wife had some trouble," Asuma said with open discontent, "she wanted me right away and wouldn't take no for an answer."

Asuma and Kurenai are married? Naruto shook his head, trying to make sense of the new world. That's good. That's not a bad thing.

"Well, stop talking to me and do what you have to with that drunk," Claire Rivers said. She trned to a metal block on her computer, opened it up, and began to press buttons on it.

Naruto leaned forward, trying to see what it was, but only got an image of odd squares and text on a page before Asuma yanked on his wrist and forced him away. "She's not into guys like you," Asuma said with humor in his voice.

I'm not into girls like her, Naruto retorted in his head.

Asuma led him toward a glass door, although the glass was smoked out. He stepped through, and immediately Naruto could hear chatter.

"Do you have the file for the breaking and-"

"-down the hall, to the left-"

"-chief's suspect is a forty five year old male landowner-"

"Keep the possibility of serial killers out of-"

"-the press doesn't need to know."

"-and did the criminal confess to larceny or-"

"-in interrogation-"

Naruto knew where he was. He was in the ninja headquarters, and certainly not in Konoha anymore. He'd broken a law. He was going to die, or at least loose a hand, and he was so weak the only thing that could possibly save him was the Nine-Tailed Fox.

There were rows upon rows of desks, some messy, some impeccable clean, two completely empty with black sheets over them. Asuma forced Naruto to sit down in a chair beside a desk in the corner. He took out the metal locking device and forced it again onto Naruto's wrist, this time clamping both down and making Naruto stuck to the chair.

Naruto, easily, could break his thumbs and get out, so he wondered what the precaution was even supposed to prove.

People in business clothes, most women more covered but two were in skirts short and tight enough to belong to the kind of girls Jiraya had liked to 'research' with, and men wearing odd suits, strange strips of fabric around their necks that Naruto remembered seeing maybe once back in Konoha, with shirts and pants of varying color, size, texture, and smell. The majority of the men had shadows, like Asuma, and several had deep lines under their eyes. The room was bustling, everyone running somewhere and those who weren't were yelling on a phone or writing things on some of the large white chalkboards aroudn the room with pictures clipped to them.

Naruto looked back at Asuma, feeling comfort in the strange place by being near at least one person he recognized. Asuma was searching through the bottom of his desk for something. Naruto's eyes scanned the desk and fell on a picture. It was Asuma next to a young woman. They were both smiling, and both wearing rings on their fingers. She was not Kurenai.

Asuma, doing it methodically and without probably thinking about it, pushed the picture to face down as he brought a form up to his desk and set it down. He took a writing utensil and clicked it.

"The ink is inside," Naruto realized as he stared at it.

Asuma wrote his name on the top of the form then left his writing utensil hanging over the line 'Subject'. "Name?"

Naruto was about to say his name, stopped, thought about the suicide note from his other self, and then said his name, "Naruto. Uzumaki, Naruto."

Asuma snorted at the name. "Well, your parents loved you."

Naruto's cheeks burned. "They..." he began to say, but, thinking back to the world, he realized this Naruto had no knowledge who his parents had been. "They did," he said anyways.

"Not accusing you." Asuma wrote, 'drunk', 'public nuisance', 'didn't pay fare for public transportation', and checked three boxes on the side. "Where do you work?"

Naruto had no idea, so he just shook his head.

Asuma wrote checked 'unemployed'. "Next of kin?"

"Don't have any," Naruto replied.

Asuma glared at him. Apparently that answer was not acceptable in this world, whereas in Konoha it had been common. "Parents?"

"Dead," Naruto said calmly.

"Uncles, aunts, cousins?"

"I don't think I have any," Naruto said. He remembered how his mother was an orphan, and he knew next to nothing about his father's childhood, and decided to shrug at Asuma's disbelieving glare. Asuma lit another cigarette. Naruto's eyes were drawn to it by a power he couldn't control.

"Light?" Asuma asked.

Naruto just nodded.

Asuma shrugged, "If it gets you to talk," and pulled out a second cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Naruto.

Naruto stuck it in his mouth, breathed it in, and the disgusting smell that had revolted him in the other world felt like an old friend curling around his lungs.

"Any contacts at all?"

"I don't remember," Naruto said. He had to lean down awkwardly to deal with the cigarette, but Asuma didn't bother to help him.

"How did you get stoned last night?"

Naruto, sick of leaning toward his wrist, managed to get one of his hands out of the metal locking device without breaking his thumb, and he pulled it up to his mouth and took another breath. "I don't know what that means?"

"Where do you live?"

"I'm not sure."

"Have any friends?"

Thinking about the note, Naruto said, "I don't think so."

"Your age?"

"Fifteen."

Asuma's eyes widened. He reached over, grabbed the cigarette, and threw it into a trash bin.

"What was that for?" Naruto asked.

"Why didn't you damned tell me you were underage before I started this whole damned thing?" Asuma said angrily, "Damned kid."

Naruto wrinkled his forehead in confusion. "I'm an adult," he said.

"Not in my world," Asuma replied.

The words stuck so true Naruto felt sick to his stomach. "I see," he realized.

"I need your legal guardian's name," Asuma demanded.

"I'm my own guardian. I don't need anyone to take care of me."

"Who signs your forms, kid?"

Naruto leaned back at Asuma's angry tone. "What forms?"

"Do you want me to arrest you?"

"What does that mean?"

Asuma stood up sharply. "Stay where you fucking are," he growled. "Kurenai!" Asuma stomped off.

Naruto, twisting the metal easily under his hands, slipped his second hand free. He rubbed his eyes and yawned.

Asuma had a brown bag under his desk. Curious, Naruto reached down and opened it. Inside were several pictures of the woman in the photograph on the desk and a few notes. Naruto then turned his gaze to the metal object that was exactly like the one on the secretary's desk. He pushed several buttons, not sure what they meant only several of them were characters, but nothing happened until his palm brushed against a pad and the screen lit up.

There was writing on the screen. 'Memo', it read, Chief wants majority of free hands investigating the gruesome murder on the Wayner building.

There was a photograph of the body.

Asuma came back to the desk, followed by a woman in a short white and black stripped desk.

"Kurenai," Naruto said and he smiled at her.

"Yeah," she said, eyeing Naruto suspiciously. Her eyes fell to the screen, and then to the metal locking devices on the floor. "You didn't cuff him?" She asked Asuma, incredulous.

"I did," Asuma said.

They both stared at Naruto.

Naruto grinned nervously and tried not to look at the picture of the skeleton of his own other, dead, body glaring at them from the screen.

"Alright, kid," Kurenai sat down in Naruto's chair. Her eyes, normally bright red, had a slightly darker shade then Naruto remembered. They were more auburn. "My name is Kurenai. I'm a head detective. I am a decorated war hero. I could lock you down in the jails with all of our lowlifes, drungs, drug lords, murderers, and rapists for weeks without probable cause or even a crime. If you do not cooperate with me, I will do so. Do you understand?"

"I think," Naruto admitted.

"Why do you only 'think'? Do you want to share a room with a child molester?"

"No," Naruto said.

"Now. Your name is Naruto Uzumaki. That is a fact?"

"Yeah."

"Where do you live?"

"I don't know."

"Who takes care of you?"

"Nobody."

"Where were you born?"

"I'm not sure."

"What is your birthday?"

"I..." Naruto bit his lip. "I don't kno-"

"What's your mothers name?"

"It was Kushina," Naruto told Kurenai, "she's dead now."

"Your father dead as well?"

"Yes."

"What was his name?"

Naruto wasn't sure whether he should know this, but since he did, he decided there was no use hiding it. "Minato Namikaze."

Kurenai stared at him. Her expression, which had been caring, shifted to disgust. "Really? You're going to go with that? You're the long lost son of Minato Namikaze? Come on, kid, you can do better. Do you honestly think I would ever believe someone like you is the son of a man like that?"

Naruto's face turned bright purple. "I..." Embarrasment sunk like a fire into his cheeks.

"He says he's fifteen," Asuma told Kurenai.

"Call up the local schools. We might find someone who matches his description." Kurenai sighed, "And don't forget to cuff him this time."

Naruto bit his lip hard to keep himself from saying anything else. This was not going to go well.

He wondered if Sasuke was going to find a way to get him out of this strange place and back into the real world. At least there he understood why he was in trouble.

...

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