Never Free

Chapter 1: A Request

By: Lord Raine

Disclaimer: I don't own this, but Naruto owns you, so I guess that evens out.

Wrong. Wrong is a funny word. Wrong implies that something is not the way it's supposed to be. Bad. In some way broken or deviated from what should be. It's a handy word. But there's a pretty big problem with it. Because, you see, for things to have gone wrong, you have to believe that they could have, at some point, gone right.

Right. Ha. What a load of shit. What a fucking fairy tale. You couldn't name one thing about my life that ever went right.I know you couldn't, because I sure as hell can't, and I lived through every minute of it. No one took me in. Not surprising, considering what I was, though in retrospect, it seems odd that the old man never did. I used to think he was just too busy for it, but he always had time for his own grandson. I'd ask him about it, but he's dead.

That's another mark on the Shit List, by the way. One of the greatest men who ever lived, certainly one of the kindest, cut down for no goddamn reason. Not that you need much reason in the line of work we're in. I'm sure he chapped plenty of asses back in the day, and in spite of all the veneers of civility, I can't imagine any of the other Kage not being pleased to have his head brought to them on a platter. Still. A fucking Konoha ninja. Ex, sure, but still. Orochimaru was always an unspeakable bastard. That's mark number three, right there. Orochimotherfuckingmaru. The list of things he cocked up would be an entire list on its own. Just about everything that went sideways in my life could be attributed to either what I am, or what that son of a bitch did, and the first one sort of petered out after I turned sixteen. I'll let you do the math.

I'd have mentioned the fact that the old man's idea of a decent life was being raised to kill people, but we aren't exactly going in order here. The really fucked up part, though, is that becoming a shinobi was probably the only thing that actually paid off for me in some positive way in the long run. Sure, it means I basically kill people for a living, but that's small time, and I probably would have wound up doing that anyway. Learning how to be a ninja gave me skills. Skills I would need to make a living. Fun things, like how to defend myself, how to make money. How to kill a man seventy two different ways with my left hand. The sorts of things that you just never stop finding uses for. It's a hell of a job. Even the training was fun. I'd be lying if I said I didn't like fighting, learning seals and techniques was always a good way to kill time, and the courtesan training was probably the best six months of my life.

But really, getting to be an assassin, professional boytoy, and unstoppable shocktrooper for a living wasn't anything compared to the snake bastard. No amount of sunshine could make that pile of excrement any prettier. The worst days of my job are a fucking vacation next to the things he's put me through. The things he's still putting me through.

Which brings us to where we are now, actually. Shock and fucking awe, a bad day for me has something to do with Orochimaru. Normally, being surrounded by Konoha ninja with long pointy sharp things aimed at me would have nothing to do with Orochimaru. That would fall neatly into the 'what I am' category of shit. But after they elected Tsunade's replacement, the distinction between the two went down a deep, dark hole and hasn't been returning any of my calls.

But hey, let's try and look on the brightside. Always have to try and find one of those. I suppose that fucker Madara is happy.

An Uchiha finally got to run Konoha.

There were twelve of them. The eight ANBU were obvious, they weren't even trying to hide. The Hunters, though, were. Naruto absently noted that the formation was perfect. The Hunters, almost invisible in the forest, completely surrounded his small camp in a square, each one corresponding to a pair of ANBU. Each one positioned to perform a killshot if he moved towards their assigned ANBU.

With a faint pop, the Raijin appeared in Naruto's hand, unsealed from a tattoo on his wrist, the blade humming quietly. Two of the ANBU twitched. The Hunters were as still as stone. The only sound was the faint crackle of the fire in the middle of the camp. Even the birds had stopped singing.

"This is bad. Baa-chan was supposed to keep the Hunters off me. If they're here, that means something must have happened. If I start killing off ANBU and Oinin, she won't be able to keep me from being marked for death in the Bingo Book. Fortunately, these guys aren't as good as they think they are. Nobody put up a genjutsu to keep the birds singing to cover their approach. So either they're overconfident, which is possible, they're green, which is unlikely. . . or they wanted me to know they were coming. Shit, shit, is that bastard Uchiha 'trying' to get me to kill Konoha ninja? It does sound like something he would do. Damnit all to hell, I need to get out of here without killing anyone."

Suddenly, to Naruto's surprise, one of the ANBU stepped forwards, breaking the entrapment formation. Naruto's eyes narrowed. This was very bad. If they were going to make the first move, it would be a hell of a lot harder to escape without killing someone. It also meant this guy wasn't your garden variety shinobi. Not if he was willing to take on the Kyuubi. No amount of stupid would make that sound like a good idea, so Naruto had to assume it was skill, or worse, specially developed techniques designed just for this occasion.

Deftly, carefully, Naruto shifted his stance from neutral to focus towards the person he assumed was the leader. Every ANBU tensed as the yellow blade of the Raijin turned red with Kyuubi's chakra.

Holding up a hand in a sign of peace, the ninja reached up and removed his mask.

Naruto blinked. It had been over six years, and there were a few more scars on his face than he remembered, but there was only one person, ever, in the history of ever, who had eyebrows like that.

". . . Lee? Is that you?"

A dazzling smile that was entirely too white to be natural lit up the clearing like a hundred watt bulb. "Yosh! Naruto-kun, I am happy to see you remember me! It has been quite a few years since we last met, but I assure you, I have kept in shape!"

"Lee. . . what the hell are you doing in the ANBU? I thought the bastard blacklisted you?"

Lee's smile faded, and he became serious. "Naruto-kun, there is much you have missed. Tsunade-sama had me enlisted in the reserve corp due to my outspoken objections to the Rokudaime. I was upset at first, but eventually I realized she was trying to protect me."

Naruto sighed. Lee apparently hadn't thought this through. It was nice to know some things never changed. "Look, Lee. I'm glad to hear someone is still covering for me, but don't you think you would have done a hell of a lot better job if you had, I don't know. Gone in the opposite direction? Not finding me is doing me a much better favor than anything else right now."

Lee suddenly smiled again. "Oh! No, Naruto-kun! No. We aren't assigned to kill you! We're here to bring you back! The Rokudaime is no longer in power. There was an incident, forcing him to flee. Tsunade has been reinstated as the Godaime Hokage!"

Naruto blinked. Or maybe things did change. "The bastard. . . wait, he's not the Hokage anymore? What the hell happened? And what do you mean you're here to bring me back?"

Lee's smile, somehow, got even wider. "Tsunade-sama wants to explain everything to you in person, Naruto-kun, but with the removal of the Rokudaime, you are now being welcomed back as a shinobi of Konoha!"

Naruto frowned at this. Jiraiya's information network was the best one there was, period. Even the Akatsuki's wasn't as impressive, and only Jiraiya knew exactly how far his own reach went. He hadn't heard anything from the old bastard in two years, but this seemed like something Jiraiya would tell him about. It could be a trap. But they didn't come more honorable than Lee, and he could out-stubborn a rock. There was no way he would ever rat out a friend. Had it been anyone else, he would have bluffed his way out and ran like hell, but Lee. . . there was only one way to be sure.

Biting his thumb, Naruto wiped the blood down the bare flesh of his right arm, and a toad the size of a large dog appeared in a faint puff of smoke.

"Oi! I was asleep, Naru-bro!"

"Gamakichi, this is important. Go to Konoha using the pools. Get a confirmation from Tsunade that she's the Godaime again, then come back here as fast as you can. I'll get you whatever snacks you want when I've got the time."

"Really? Awesome!" the spirit animal cried, and disappeared again with a faint pop.

They didn't have to wait long. Less than two minutes later, Gamakichi popped into existence next to Naruto, chewing something in his mouth.

"It's cool, Naru-bro! The Slug Princess said it's not a trap! Also, she gave me snacks!"

Naruto relaxed with a sigh, lowering the Raijin. The pools were a secret known only to the toads, and unlike most of his brothers and sisters, Gamakichi had thoroughly mastered them. He could travel between almost any body of water that had been touched by the sacred oil, and could even talk through mirrors that had been smeared with it, one of which Naruto had smuggled to Tsunade a few years back. There was no way in hell anyone could catch him to use a genjutsu on him. Not unless he wanted to be caught.

"So does this mean you will be returning with us, Naruto-kun?" Lee asked, smiling again. "We were supposed to retrieve you 'no matter what,' but I would greatly dislike forcing you to do something you did not want to! If you do not want to return just yet, we can always lose your trail and try again later."

Naruto tilted his head back and looked at the sky. Good old Lee. Still as law-abiding as they come, still willing to bend and break every last one for a friend. Damn. They hadn't talked in six years.He couldn't remember what he did to deserve friends like that. Lee was offering him a way out. A part of Naruto was tempted to take it. But he had been gone for so long. . . doing freelance mercenary and bounty work, taking on indirect missions through Jiraiya. Wandering the elemental countries continuing his training, seeing the sights, getting to know people. Cockblocking the Akatsuki at every opportunity.

That last thought caused a wolfish grin to split his face. Oh yes. The Akatsuki hadn't started with a good reason to hate him, but he had sure as hell given them one. Assassinating spies, destroying safehouses, flat-out stealing their income. They'd want to suck out his soul even if he had nothing to do with the bijuu. Uzumaki Naruto liked to earn his enemies.

"Lee," Naruto said, still looking at the sky. "Are you sure Konoha wants the Kyuubi back?"

Lee's smile faded, and for the first time, he looked genuinely upset. "Naruto-kun, you don't have to call yourself that. Regardless of what anyone says, you are not the Kyuubi. "

"You should know better than that, Lee. It's the only thing that ever mattered with me. It's the only thing that ever will. I amthe Kyuubi, and nothing will ever change that."

"Even if that is true, Naruto-kun, that doesn't mean we don't want you back. We all do. Your friends, your comrades, your team. We didn't give up on you. None of us."

The Raijin disappeared with a small pop, and Naruto turned his head to look at Lee. "And I don't suppose I can give up on any of you, either. That would make me like him, and at that point, I think I'd probably kill myself on principle. You know what? What the hell. Why not? It's been too long since I've had a decent bowl of ramen anyway."

Now, you're probably confused at this point, so since we've got time to kill, what with jumping through trees for twelve hours like a bunch of overdressed monkeys, let me clarify something for you. When I say "I'm the Kyuubi," I'm not being sarcastic. I'm also not spitting out existential horseshit like "because some people view me as being the Kyuubi, I am, in some ways, Kyuubi." I don't have nearly enough vagina to go around saying shit like that, even when using Oiroke.

When I say "I'm the Kyuubi," what I'm trying to articulate to you is the fact that the giant-ass demon that frequently takes the shape of a sapient fox is, in fact, me.I am Kyuubi, the Red Demon King.

Now, if you're anything like me, your first response to hearing that was 'what.' That makes no goddamn sense, does it? I've had people telling me ever since I was twelve that I wasn't actually the demon, just a container. A living martyr, the old man said. I keep the Kyuubi from destroying everything, and can, in times of stress, even draw upon its power, but I'm not the demon itself.

Somebody once said that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This falls firmly into the second category. It is a great goddamn lie, an enormous fucking lie. You couldn't lie more if you told someone that the sky was green and water was orange.

Now, before we get any further, let's get two things straight, here. The first is that it wasn't everyone who was lying. Most of them, pretty much all of them really, were telling me what they thought the truth was. It was really only a single person who was lying, and that was the Sandaime. And he was lying because the Yondaime asked him to.

The second is that I don't blame them. Surprised? Think about it. You've got a lonely, abused orphan that everyone seems to hate for no real reason and goes out of their way to make miserable. Are you going to tell them that they're actually a Demon King with the power to effortlessly annihilate those assholes all day, cutting a bloody swath of vengeance and destruction all over your city-state? Or do you think it might possibly be a better idea to keep that shit under your metaphorically-enormous hat, and try to shape the kid into a decent human being with friends and loved ones before dropping that particular bomb?

It's kind of difficult for me to be pissed at Sarutobi for doing something that I would have done in his shoes. Plus, that was just his reasoning for it. The Yondaime's was completely different, and a hell of a lot more noble. He wasn't trying to destroy the Kyuubi. He wasn't even trying to contain it. He was trying to redeem it. Can you believe that shit? Him, a goddamn human, trying to be a demon lord's personal, private Sage.

The part that really gets me, though, is that it seems to have worked. He was a crazy son of a bitch, but I respect the hell out of him. He's the closest thing I've got to a father. Jiraiya was always more like an uncle, and Iruka seemed more like an older brother. But the Yondaime made me. He gave up his flesh and blood, fuck, he gave up his soul,to give the Kyuubi a second shot. It's his blood running through my veins. His and hers. I'm his son. Hell, I'm practically his clone. And I'm certainly different than I used to be, if the stories of what Kyuubi used to get up to are anything to go by. The Kyuubi destroyed and pillaged nonstop whenever it left the spirit realm. The last time I pillaged was when Anko showed up with a message from Tsunade, and that was totally consensual.

Well, as consensual as you can get when swords and bondage are involved, anyway. Damn, now I'm starting to miss Tenten, too. I need to stop thinking about that.

But still. All that said, it was a gigantic goddamn lie. The Yondaime wanted Sarutobi to lie because he wanted to give me a life that didn't involve being a giant supernatural monster, and Sarutobi lied for all of those reasons plus the fact that he didn't want an enraged berserking seven year old orphan-who-is-really-a-demon tearing his entire village a million new assholes.

Hell, even the fox in the seal is a lie. The giant thing, in the cage? Pure horseshit. It's just a gigantic illusion. Granted, a really, really good one. The Yondaime really outdid himself with that one. It's convincing as hell. It certainly scared the scales off Orochimaru's ass when he tried to waltz in and take over the place. But no matter how convincing a genjutsu is, it's still just an illusion. No amount of skill on his part could make Kyuubi anything more dangerous than a particularly well done funhouse mirror. You would need bloodtraits the Yondaime just didn't have to make that thing genuinely dangerous. Well, genuinely dangerous to anyone without a decent pair of balls and a head for muscling through killing intent. The thing damn nearly put Orochimaru into cardiac arrest. He left fucking skidmarks in my mindscape. But if you're brass enough to actually step up and try to rumble with the thing, you'll quickly find out that there's nothing actually there.

You know what's really back there? Chakra. More chakra than you've ever seen. More chakra than you ever thought was possible. We're talking oceans of the stuff. I've got enough chakra that this body the Yondaime gave me will live forever. I've got enough chakra that I can stand around and do techniques that would kill absolutely anyone else all day without breaking a sweat. I've got enough chakra that I can make gigantic fuckoff beams of fuck you that can vaporize small mountains just by pointing my finger, though I will admit part of that last one was due to training with that fruitcake rapper-swordsman from Cloud. Long story, it was on a giant turtle under a waterfall and I fought an evil version of myself. Yeah. Welcome to my life.

It's just chakra back there. Chakra, and memories. Memories of my past life, the old me. Those memories are incredibly valuable, because the Kyuubi saw and knew things that no one else ever did. It experienced first-hand secrets that no human alive ever has. I mean fuck, it passed a lot of its spare time interrogating people in Hell for shits and giggles, and some of those fuckers actually knew some shit. The true names of powerful entities from the otherside, forgotten and forbidden combat styles and techniques. Hell, I didn't believe sorcerers were even real until I saw Kyuubi literally twisting one's arm to get him to spill on where he learned Arcana. So I guess I can put "Magic" on the Stuff I Had No Idea Wasn't Bullshit list.

But tapping those memories is also very dangerous. Contact with my old memories makes me more like. . . the Kyuubi? How I used to be? Fuck, this shit still gives me a headache just thinking about it. Too much contact with those memories makes me angry. Incredibly angry. Unspeakably angry. That's actually the source of my berserking when I was younger. It took me and Jiraiya a long time to figure out that it wasn't the chakra that was doing that. It was the memories. I actually think the Kyuubi was a demon of anger or wrath. It would sure make a lot of sense. That, or 'I' knew what the Yondaime was trying to pull off, and deliberately sabotaged my own memories somehow as a final fuck you. Either way works. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that I can't just tap into them. I can't tell you how much I wish I could, what with some of the glimpses of things I've seen in the back of my own mind, but it's just not doable.

It's also the problem with the chakra. Emotion plays a part in chakra. I think I skipped that class in the academy to hang out with Shikamaru and Chouji, but Jiraiya made sure to beat it into my skull. It's equal parts physical energy, derived from the body, and mental energy, derived from the mind. So your mental state can actually change the properties of your chakra. And Kyuubi was, apparently, mad as hell. All of that chakra is stained 'angry,' and it's a hell of job trying to change it to be anything else. Used raw, Kyuubi's chakra is mostly only good for techniques that can use any kind of chakra, or ones that benefit from the user being pissed way the hell off. I can change it, filter it through the seal, to alter the emotions in the chakra. Minato was a clever bastard, and he had apparently thought that far ahead. But it takes awhile to build up a lot of filtered chakra, so I can't just do it on the fly. Still, if you need things broken in a hurry, there is no better ace to have in your back pocket than a fire hose connected to ten billion gallons of fuck you.

It gets worse, though. If you think about what's behind the seal, you might see another problem. My old memories are in the oceans of chakra. Unless I draw out the chakra in a certain way, I end up bringing out memories with it. And that's when things go to shit, in a RAPEMURDERKILL kind of way. Of course, I wasn't exactly complaining when I bitchslapped Orochimaru through five of his little pissant Shikomon gates, or whatever the fuck he calls them. I'm just saying that trying to murder Sakura immediately afterwards made it almost not worth seeing the look on that sonovabitches face. Almost. Sakura is a big girl, she can take care of herself.

In case you haven't noticed, I really don't like the Snake Sage. I'm not sure why. Either it's because he fucked up my life, turned Sasuke into a psychopathic manchild, murdered my grandfather, declared war on my home, tried to assassinate my father, and convinced war orphans that he was a good guy so he could experiment on them in his fucked-up quest for immortality, or it's his choice in aftershave.

I'm thinking it's the aftershave. Gotta be.

Naruto smiled as their group walked up to the massive doors that comprised the front gate for Konoha. As it was a working week, they were thrown open, lending a clear view straight up the main road through Konoha, all the way to the Hokage Monument on the far side.

The Hokage Monument which now sported a sixth face, much larger than the other five, placed on top in an obvious display of dominance.

"Lee, you said that the bastard is gone, right?"

"Yes, Naruto-kun. There was an altercation with an outside entity I have not been fully debriefed on, which ultimately resulted in the deaths of a large number of deep cover shinobi and the flight of the Rokudaime."

"So, seeing how he wasn't terribly popular, and wasn't even really much of a legitimate Kage, it's safe to say that they're going to take his face down, right?"

"I believe the motion has been issued, though it is experiencing some resistance from the civilian councils, many of which were in favor of the Rokudaime, and the merchant and labor guilds, which see the deconstruction as an unnecessary expenditure of Konoha's assets."

"So they've formed a committee to discuss the validity of doing the paper to form a committee to get together to talk about the problem, then?"

Lee grinned. "Yes, Naruto-kun, they have."

"So there's no on up there right now, right?"

Lee frowned, thinking. "The area has been declared off-limits for the moment by Tsunade-sama, so no. There is no one up there at the time."

Naruto nodded, smiling, and pointed a finger up at the Monument. Lee barely had time to register a shining orb being fed by streams of white and black chakra before a colossal beam of burning red energy shot out from Naruto's outstretched hand, bathing half of Konoha in an unearthly, bloody light. A split-second later, a colossal boom washed over the entire village like a gargantuan thunderclap, and Uchiha Sasuke's face disappeared, vaporized by the immense force of the attack.

Naruto smiled, and blew away the trail of smoke curling up from his finger. It really was good to be home.

Hell, things were even starting to look up for once.

You guys know the drill. Comments, questions, and criticism welcome.