The Ultimate Partnership!
Having faced a harsh childhood and with an even harsher future ahead of him, can our young hero power-up with the aid of lovely babes? Action and intense dramatic exchanges!
A young, innocent, handsome, tall boy with golden blond hair and eyes of stormy blue holds a dark secret. A secret that leaves him hated and loathed!
People on the street have their young ones look away while they scowl and curse at him! Sometimes, rocks might strike him in the head and he'll turn only to see their condescending smirks of acid disdain.
He is so noble though! He does nothing but train hard in ninja high school and work hard at his part-time job at the garbage dump. He can afford only the cheap but warm and yummy food of the ramen stand run by his childhood friend, the stunningly beautiful Ayame.
"Oh, Naruto! How are you doing?"
"Just great," said he, with a most winning and charming smile that glowed with the pure intensity of his earnest hopes and dreams, "no problems here! And it's pay day today. With the economy and all, I'm so glad the boss is willing to keep me on..."
Ayame muttered to one side, "That's only because you work for half the money and you never take sick days..."
"What's that?"
"Oh, nothing!"
Hands blurring with such speed (ninja-speed!) that the ingredients hovered in the air in between them, Ayame began preparing bowl after bowl of this most perfect food.
The broth was liquid gold, the noodles were at the perfect firmness, the dumplings large and hearty, the pieces of cabbage just at that right texture that was still crunchy but not tough, it was shivery bliss for him to sip the heat and goodness and chew the...
* * *
"Hey, hey, there's still fifteen pages more!"
At a table in a McDonald's, in some district of Tokyo, there sat two boys who could not have looked more different.
One was a bit short and thick in the shoulders, with (dirty) blond hair and (watery) blue eyes that tapered enough to reflect his half-caucasian, half-Chinese heritage. The wild hair was long and flopped about the sides of his face and down his neck, but stood up in proud spikes up top. He wore camouflage pants with the bottoms ripped up, heavy combat boots a size too large, and a white t-shirt with a picture of two ninja fighting in front of a waterfall. His arms and torso showed the thick chest and slight paunch of a young man that alternated periods of serious weightlifting with utter sloth.
The other was tall, for a purely Japanese teenager - in other words, slightly shorter than the blond. This one though, could pass for a model. His slender proportions and delicate, angular features were almost feminine, if not for the wiry coils of muscle on his body that proclaimed to the world: I'm a serious athlete. His shirt and slacks were perfectly ironed, and his red power tie also made a statement of grim, intense practicality.
It was not in physical structure that they were most different, however, but in every movement and blink, every slightest expression of the face and gesture. Exuberant and hyper-energetic as though he could barely contain himself on his seat, the blond looked like he wished to shake the other... whose furrowed brow and narrowed lips said, plainly, 'Please get me the fuck out of here.'
"I'm not reading anymore," said the almost-model, pushing the sheets of paper back. "It's junk."
"Well, sure, I mean, it's just the first draft - "
"And come on. You're naming the main character after yourself? And you're putting Ayame in there too?"
With what he thought of as gravitas and dignity, Naruto replied, "Art is best when it imitates life."
"...That's why you're calling it Ultimate Ninja Boy Naruto? Because life, your life, is like that?"
Naruto rolled his eyes. "Well, duh, Sasuke. Obviously, I have to embellish. Who wants to read about some boring college kid trying to become a manga writer or novelist? Ninja are cool! They'd only be cooler if I could also make them pirates."
Sasuke put one elbow on the table, pressed his fingers against his temples, and closed his eyes. Overwhelming smells of greasy, cooking meat patties. Salt. The lard in the french fries. Spilled ketchup. The sounds of the door swinging as people walked in and out, chatting about the recession, about global warming, about that new Korean pop girl group that was all the rage and stealing air-time from local Japanese idol singers. Outside, the sounds of cars driving by. Every time the door opened, he could smell exhaust in the air. Crowded fastfood dive, crowded city, crowded country. He wanted to be anyplace but where he was.
"What? You got a headache or somethin' dude? It's all that coffee you drink. You should really try this new holistic diet..."
An exaggerated sigh of long suffering escaped Sasuke. It did nothing to end Naruto's stream-of-consciousness discourse on the benefits of wheat grass and watercress soup.
...Diet seemed to be working though, Sasuke noticed. And he must have been working out again. Naruto's spare tire was disappearing once more, and his t-shirt was stretched more across his back and chest than his gut. Which meant that Naruto was in one of his 'inspiration' moods.
"Fuck it. If it gets me out of here faster... And you, you want me to read this? Shut up for a bit. Or I'll just happen to spill my coffee on your shit," he lifted his cup over the sheets and tilted it, the black gunk coming perilously close to the edge.
The other boy settled down and beamed a grin of such intense brightness, it almost burned out Sasuke's eyes. Or made it feel that way. In that way, at least, he had to admit that Naruto really was like this wish-fulfillment counterpart.
Another sigh, and Sasuke reached for the next page.
"Oh, oh, it's so great, it's time for the first fight scene!"
"What did I just say?"
"...What? I'm being quiet, man, nobody else looking this way even. I'm the soul of the shadow! Unnoticeable! Totally! I run like, 'wssshhhh,' like the sound of leaves on the wind!"
"Man, I really will pour this on your shit."
"..."
* * *
Kaboom!
An explosion sent broth spilling out of bowls and onto pants and feet! The shaking ground upended chairs and spilled pots! Shrieking food stand attendants and hungry food court customers were flung off of their now food-spattered feet!
The devilishly handsome but nefariously evil monster tengu-man appeared! With his demonic super-vision powers, he made all the bystanders scream. They were paralyzed in terror, trembling in their nice business-kimono-casual-wear. The cold horror of his glare sucked the courage from their hearts and made their knees weak, caused the colors of the world to fade and every happy memory to grow ever more distant.
"Haha, fool boy! I'll take your girl from you! And the Ninja Principal will let it happen! Because even he hates you! You and your dark secret!"
"No! Never, Sasuke! I'll beat you yet and become Freshman of the Year! I'll be the best Ninja High School student ever!"
But, surrounded by a glittering aura, Naruto stood up from the harrowing power of the EVIL Sasuke's eyes, undaunted. For Naruto was protected by one thing alone that was beyond the corruption of such things. He was protected by the ultimate sacrifice and love of his dead parents -
* * *
"Hell no!"
Sasuke nearly slammed his hands into the table. Just barely, he got a grip and avoided spilling coffee and sending the dregs of Naruto's fries and ketchup into the air.
"What? It's awesome dude! Admit it."
"Naruto."
"Yeah?"
"Are you hearing the words coming out of my mouth?"
"Yeah."
"Do you remember who it was that lent you a box-set Harry Potter collection?"
"Yeah!"
Sasuke started to roll his eyes and stopped himself. He would die before he started picking up all of Naruto's overdone gestures. It was bad enough that he'd picked up the foul language.
"Don't you see any, I don't know. Similarities?"
"Yeeeeeaaah?"
He could just tell that the other did not. At all. Why were they friends again?
"Change it. I'm not reading another word of your draft until you do."
"Change what?"
"No magic protection from a parental sacrifice. No special happiness-destroying look of doom. For god's sake, put some thought into this world of yours - if you're going to write it, don't just throw in every first thing you think about! Like this fight scene of yours..." Dark eyes scanned the eye-searing details briefly before closing to spare his brain further exposure. "What the hell is ninja-like about it? You got two guys screaming at each other and powering up and then blowing shit up! What the heck happened to the childhood friend while all this violence was going on? And if it's some kind of ninja universit - "
Naruto sniffed. "Ninja HIGH SCHOOL."
"Look, even that's out. There's already a Ninja High School comic. No."
"What? Don't be like that stuck up creative writing prof of ours - "
"Hatake-sensei is a great teacher. And he's won the Tezuka Award."
The glares between them were intensifying as they only could between friends that went over the same arguments again. And again.
"Kakashi's just a lazy pervert who got lucky once and scored a bestseller with some artist chick whose good looks got as much attention as her drawings. He hasn't written a damned thing since then! I can write ten thousand times better!"
"You've entered a hundred, no, a hundred-and-seven writing contests since elementary. You made me enter with you each time. You. Never. Won. EVER. Not against other grade school kids, not when we were in high school, not in the two years you've been dragging me to your Creative Writing courses! You haven't even gotten your own father to read through a single one of your short stories!"
Sasuke bit his lip. Maybe that was a bit too much.
Naruto's fists were shaking. He was practically expanding as adrenaline flooded his blood, and blood flooded his muscles. The veins popped out along his biceps, crept up his bull-thick neck. He folded his arms across his chest and looked away, out the window, looking both larger than he actually was, and somehow smaller, like a little boy pouting.
Clean scent of lilacs coming between them. It cut through.
"Well. I can see I came at a good time," interjected a gentle voice. The owner of the voice, a tall girl with waist-length brown hair, set her tray down at their table, and sat. There was a salad on the tray, a Diet Coke, and McNuggets.
She ate slowly, unperturbed by the simmering atmosphere. She reached over and took the printouts from Sasuke's trembling hands, and started reading in between nibbles at breaded chicken and not-quite-crisp lettuce leaves.
Both boys said nothing and tried not to look at the girl, and especially tried not to pay attention to every "Hmm," "Ah," "Oh," giggle and exclamation from her pouty lips. After reading it once, she took two pens out of her shoulderbag and started scribbling furiously in the margins. Some entire paragraphs, she encircled in red and marked with an 'x' while some lines were undelined in blue and a few passages got marked with a rare smiley face.
"Your ramen girl's description doesn't look anything like me, Naruto-chan," she said, grinning. "Not that I mind. This long beak of a nose I've got wouldn't translate well to a manga."
"Childhood friends that are girls must always look hot. It's one of the laws of storytelling."
That got a scoffing "Feh," out of Sasuke, but he held any further comments in after a look from Ayame.
"The parts in red are things that are... ah... a litle too inspired by other works, or need more, um, thinking through," she said carefully. "The blue parts are good!"
"Oh! See, Sasuke? I got talent, I got -"
"A whole lot of red on those twenty pages."
"Now, now," Ayame said. "There's a fair amount that's a lot of fun in there. It just needs polishing. And Naruto."
"Yeah?"
"You want to make this a battle manga, right? With Sasuke illustrating?"
"He has to win one of the monthly OrigFicFicNet forum contests with an entry first, before I'll do anything like that," Sasuke declared. "That was the deal."
"Well, one of the important things about a battle manga is the combat mechanics. You have to make that different. There's been hundreds of ninja comics. You have to make something that other people haven't yet - something that follows simple rules, but can lead to complex outcomes."
"But that's hard! Every fricking thing's been done already!" he moaned.
"If you're only writing when it's easy," she said reasonably, "can you really beat your father?"
Naruto's eyes feverishly scanned back and forth across the pages. In a small voice, he muttered, "So, uh, no cribbing from Harry Potter?"
"No cribbing. You're not going to do a Harry Potter doujinshi. You want to have the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list and also have the top serial in Jump, right? Ultimate Ninja Boy Naruto needs to be ultimately original. It's okay to have the classic hero archetype and the rival and the childhood friend and an unrequited love, but you have to do it differently, and you have to do it in a world that's only yours."
"Y-yeah."
She smiled at him and squeezed his shoulder. "So you have to listen to Sasuke too. After all, when you worked together, you placed fifth in that national contest, right? And Sasuke... take it a little easier on him."
Both boys nodded contritely.
"Bye!"
"Bye, Ayame," they chorused.
When she left, the two glared at each other.
"You have to win the next OFFN contest," Sasuke said. "Or that's it. It's almost time. I'm in France for a year on the exchange program, soon. If we haven't started on anything together in the summer, I'm not doing anything with you long-distance over the internet."
Naruto chuckled, "Why Sasuke, it sounds like you want to break up with me." He pawed playfully at a shapely, linen-clad thigh.
"Knock it off! No pretending to be gay. That was old when we were still in high school."
They both sighed then.
"She had to bring up that Nimagex contest."
Sasuke sipped his coffee, nearly sprayed it out. It had gone cold the hour before.
"What the hell happened to you, Naruto? You used to pull ideas out of your ass like a machinegun burst, and your writing... it was really something. Now everything's like something else I already read!"
"I..."
Sasuke stood up and grabbed his gym bag. "This little talk took way too long. I still have to work out at the track. Dude... I'm serious. You have to win the next one. Or that's it. I've been waiting on you to make a real story for too long. Heck, your Dad... he writes me all the fucking time asking me to get you to switch to journalism."
"Where's the geezer now anyway?"
Sasuke leveled a cold glare at Naruto. "Your father's doing important work. Right now, he's doing research for a piece on the situation in the Middle East. He could get blown up by a suicide bomber tomorrow. Return his fucking calls, man."
Naruto ignored it all. He stood up and raised his fists theatrically. "I'll definitely win the next one. Then we'll get a one-shot in Akamaru, and then serialized in Jump!"
Sasuke's somber expression cracked into the slightest smile as he shook his head. "Start with winning a little contest online first."
Ultimate Ninja Boy Naruto? It would never sell. ...It was too bad though. He wouldn't have really minded a ninja character named after himself.
* * *
Naruto skipped dinner, skipped a shower, and refused to sleep.
That night, in his tiny apartment, he did nothing but think, type in a few tentative revisions on his laptop, delete them, and type in some more. He tried hard to remember all the things he used to read that he liked and what it was in them that he liked... and what he desperately wanted to do better.
What did Ayame say? First things first. The world and the battle mechanics.
Stupid Sasuke.
So, not a Ninja High School. What? A Ninja country? A whole country full of ninja seemed, like, crazy. That would be like, if everyone used ninja for everything! They'd be like ordinary soldiers... And then other countries would have to have them too. What would the balance of power be like if everyone's got ninja? He was originally going to have them have their own secret, separate world... but he could hear Sasuke's disdainful voice muttering about cribbing from Harry Potter. A whole world of ninja?
And how would they fight? Just martial arts and swords and stuff? Every battle manga had that. He didn't have it in himself to write a really gritty story with lots of blood and dirt to make realistic hand-to-hand combat work. He didn't think Sasuke would like drawing it either. Anyway, to make it popular, they needed big stuff! Something that would demand big special-effect-ish drawings of explosions and weird techniques and stuff! That's why he was thinking magic but... again, no Harry Potter. And ki blasts, ugh - "Who did you borrow Dragonball Z tankobon from? That's right, me," Sasuke would say.
"I can't outdo other people at their own game," Naruto said to himself, "if it's not also my game."
A little martial arts though... that would be a requirement for it to be a ninja manga. But what else? Tricks? He wasn't a mystery writer, he couldn't write a convoluted spy drama about politics and intrigue in some historical period with lots of serious conversations about intelligence and big army battles like in Romance of the Three Kingdoms...
The gears spun in his mind. Creaking.
"Fuck all!"
He stretched back in his chair, almost spilling out of it.
How had this seemed so easy before? Once, he hadn't even needed to think about writing. He'd just sit at his desk and it would spill out of him, through his fingertips, and onto the screen, complete, whole, like wassname of that chick stepping out of Zeus' fricking forehead.
His eyes glanced around his room. Landed on a Yoga manual he'd borrowed from Ayame, next to his bed. He'd borrowed it thinking it might help his performance in bed. Not that he had anyone to perform with these days...
"Ninjas doing Yoga and Pilates," he cracked up.
Still...
He popped open a browser and started rummaging around, barely thinking.
"Chakras..." he murmured. "Hmm..." But how would they do magic? Wait, what was it ninja would do in the comics - the thing with the hands...
Click, click, click.
"Theories of the Chakras, by Motoyama Hiroshi." Hmm. Something about complex hand gestures, energy and breathing.
Pretty magical, he thought. The gears started to spin a little more loosely...
With one window open where he typed away on the manuscript, he kept glancing back at a browser tab on his left. The OrigFicFicNet forums. Full of righteous bastards and trolls saying shit about every little thing. But if he followed every bit of their well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning advice, he knew his story would turn into the same generic crap that reproduced itself, fission-like, endless self-indulgent author rants or raw high school blah or artsy and incoherent literature student homework assignments. He needed something more...
Not just more than they were. He needed something better than when he used to be good himself. Deep inside, he heard Sasuke's voice, nagging him about the crap he would do - it had been there since they'd somehow become friends scrapping outside the army base in Okinawa. He knew Sasuke was right, that he'd lost something.
Since his mother died... writing just... was... different.
Less spontaneous. More research. More mechanical. More about the work, the craftsmanship. More about editing and revision. Reading writing books. Reading how-to-guides. Had he really been trying to be better, to learn? Or had he just been trying to fill up the hole where he was terrified his gift had vanished from?
He paused in the middle of typing some junk about performing ninja magic with the hands.
Screw it. He couldn't write trying to cater to every phantom out there. He needed to make this an excellent story. He. Needed. To. Win. Whose judgement did he trust best anyway? Ayame's... and Sasuke's.
He would write the best story that they could enjoy, the three of them together, and forget the fuck about the OFFN reviewers.
The keys rattled away. His eyes burned, tired. His neck was stiff. He really needed to take a piss. He just kept tapping at his keyboard.
At dawn, he attached the file to an e-mail, and sent it to the only two people who could stand him these days. Then, almost running, he groaned when he got to the little toilet of his apartment and relieved two very pressing urges.
Outside, it was dawn.
---
End chapter one
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AN:
Yes, it's more junk from me. I know, I should just continue one of the unfinished fics I have here.
See, thing is, GNO and Naruto: Berserk both require a lot of planning and thinking and revision. It takes me a lot of hours to get things done for those fics.
Meanwhile, I am 10-15,000 words away from finishing the rewrite of my original novel. I need to finish that in January, because I'll need all of February to do one last polishing revision... And in March, I submit and start collecting the rejection slips.
But it's driving me a bit crazy squeezing out the best quality stuff I can do for my complicated scifi world. I needed to do some easy, relaxing writing.
This story is inspired by Bakuman, but isn't actually a crossover. It's also easy to write. This chapter was done in less than three hours.
So, yeah. This has more chance of being continued than the other stories. Don't count on it though - my focused writing is all going into my original stuff. This is therapeutic writing, and thus will only update when the mood strikes.