Spoilers for up to manga chapter 627.
I'm a fan of unlikely crossovers, so I hope you enjoy my contribution to this genre. Please keep in mind that I'm ESL, so please notify me if you come across anything weird. I've researched this fic to the best of my abilities, but I claim artistic license on the effects of chakra on modern medicine. This fic is finished and about 25.000 words long. I've cut it up into five chapters and will be posting them on Mondays.
Also, I began writing this when chapter 627 came out, so I'm going on information given up to that chapter. Any new developments, characters or attacks introduced after that chapter won't show up in here.
Enjoy!
The boy's eyes were red, he noticed in the tiny window of time before the John Doe patient went absolutely berserk. IV tubes dragged behind the boy as he shot out of bed, making a sound not unlike an angry dog. The next second JD dodged a lamp, a vase and a pen which got thrown so hard it embedded itself in the drywall. The aim was terribly off, though, all three items coming to a forceful stop against the wall four feet to JD's right side. The shards still flew around, ripping through the sleeve of his scrubs and a jab in his leg told of the shard now cemented there.
"Calm down, kid!" JD yelled, sidestepping the medical clipboard flung his way. "I'm not here to hurt you!"
The growling continued, although the barrage of items stopped. Must have run out of ammunition. Had the ambulance picked up a feral child? The call said that the boy had appeared in the countryside, but he wore clothes when he arrived, JD knew. That much orange wouldn't escape anybody's notice.
"Are you done throwing things? I can come back later," he said in a light tone. Dr. Cox would be on his ass though, the minute he walked out the door and didn't have an answer as to how the John Doe patient was doing. So he stood his ground although the trickle of blood from the shard in his legs began to soak through his scrubs.
Carefully JD took a few steps towards to check if the boy hadn't fallen unconscious again behind the bed. And then there was the tangle of IV tubes to sort out. Great.
The growling made place for a voice, talking in a language JD had never heard before. Double great. The voice sounded wrong. Too low, growly, for a boy. It sounded like his vocal cords had skipped puberty and dove straight into the gruff tones of an 80 year old smoker, although with the volume of a boat horn and none of the wheezy quality.
"Hey kid, can you understand me?" JD asked. The boy answered something which JD didn't need to be fluent in to recognize as an expletive. "So that's a 'no'," JD said. He took a few more steps and could now spot the kid.
With the blood and grime washed off the young face the boy was very, very blond. A big mop of hair, sticking out every which way even despite flatness the pillow introduced to the bed head. The paleness of his face could be contributed to the extensive surgery needed to fix the kid's shoulder and life threatening hole in his stomach. JD expected him to pass out, actually, because that sort of activity after surgery was usually too much to handle. He hoped that the kid hadn't ripped out any sutures.
But defiant red eyes stared right back at him, arms curled around the stomach but the boy's whole body tensed up. That had to hurt the cracked ribs, not even the hefty amount of drugs the boy was on would be enough to suppress the pain, JD knew. But the impossibly red eyes looked clear.
JD knelt on the ground, laying the clipboard aside in order to calm the kid down.
"Hey, listen up," he began. "I don't know if you can understand me, but you're in a hospital. We found you by the side of a road, no ID, no idea where you're from. We're the ones who fixed you up and want to get you home to your family, but first I need to get you back in bed. Otherwise the stitches might rip, and you'll be a lot more uncomfortable."
There came no response from the boy, only a narrowing of the eyes. Very well, back to the basics of any language. JD pointed at himself.
"Doctor Dorian," he said. "Or John Dorian, or JD to friends. But you're a patient, so it's best if you call me doctor Dorian. Or maybe Dorian, if you don't know what 'doctor' means."
That got him a snarl. JD spotted a new wound on the boy's fist where an IV hung loose and blood dripped down his hand.
"Dorian," JD tried again. He gestured towards the boy in the universal 'and now you' motion. The boy shook his head. His eyes slammed shut and he curled in on himself, making a high-pitched noise in the back of his throat. He listed sideways and JD shot forward to catch him but at the last second the boy's hand shot out and he steadied himself.
"Easy, easy," JD said, kneeling next to him in case his consciousness did choose to flee. The boy looked up, but this time the eyes were light blue. He blinked a few times and then let loose a choice of words that weren't nice, JD guessed. The voice had changed as well, much more fitting with his posture. Pain lines erupted in his face and he covered the wound on his hand with his other hand as if gauging for the first time how serious it was, instead of ignoring it in favor of growling.
"Let me see that," JD said, slowly taking the hand, snapping on his gloves before he touched blood. The sudden sound startled the kid, prompting a new wince as he covered the bandages around his stomach with his free hand.
"Still no English, right? Spanish then? Habla inglés? Let's see... Elliot taught me this... German? Sprechen sie Deutsch?" But there cane no verbal response from the boy as JD examined the bloody hand. The damage looked superficial, although he would have to put in a new IV.
"Naruto," the boy carefully enunciated, pointing at himself. JD took that as his cue to repeat his introduction.
"Do- doran," the boy repeated. Good enough, JD thought to himself.
"Come one, Naruto, let's get you into bed again," JD said, pushing the button to summon a nurse to help him untangle the wires and get the boy back into bed without stretching his sutures even further.
And thus the mystery of the boy with the red eyes was born.
The smell of dirt was overwhelming and fresh. It assaulted his senses and it took him a long moment before he realized why that was. He hadn't smelled something with his own, physical nose in over sixteen years.
More sensations came to him, worming their way into his brain one by one. His left paw hurt, the right side of his face was cold and somehow this took long to process, his mind felt distant. The smell of earth overpowered pretty much everything else for the moment, so he was content to lay there and revel in the sensations of his own body.
After a while the numbness of his face and the pain in his paw took over and for the first time he opened his eyes. Well, his left eye.
The sky was blue. Wasn't that a surprise. The blue in the sky told him that it was around noon, with clouds forming which predicted rain later in the afternoon or perhaps in the evening. He lifted his head and realized that something was horribly wrong. The earth was much too close to him, the grass was tall, the shrubbery looked huge. The only time he remembered looking at things from this height was when Naruto stood for the first time.
He felt tiny.
With some trouble he gathered his paws underneath him and raised to full height, which was still damn small. He should be towering over the trees, not hiding in their shadows. Something had gone terribly wrong during the fight with Obito. A quick look around confirmed that Naruto was nowhere to be found. He stood in an empty field, recently plowed but otherwise bare. He saw a tree line in the distance and birds called enthusiastically to each other from somewhere up above.
Definitely not the battlefield, then. That had been plowed as well, but in a different sense of the word. Fighting with that octopus, Madara himself and of course the ten-tailed demon would do that to the surroundings.
And now Kurama was tiny, Naruto was gone and the chakra coils inside this frail body were pretty much empty. This was going to be fantastic.
JD rose from his lean on the counter of the nurse station when the woman approached. She looked cute, he wondered why he hadn't noticed her before. He walked every hallway, after all, and a brunette with that figure would sure attract his attention, unless she had... Yep, a wedding ring adorned her hand. So that tiny opportunity flew out the window. Oh well, as long as she could help with the red-eyed kid.
"You must be Ms. Carthagan," JD said, sticking out his hand. "Dr. Dorian," he introduced. Her grip was firmer than it should be, as if she thought she proved something by squashing his hand.
"I understood that you had trouble placing the language of a John Doe," Ms. Carthagan said. JD nodded and led the way to the patient's room while updating her on his status. When they entered the kid sat up from his slump, his lidded eyes snapping open. They were still blue, JD noted, with no sign of the red from before.
"Doran," Naruto said by way of greeting. He looked wary, arm tucked around his stomach to ward off any poking or prodding.
"Naruto, Ms. Carthagan. Ms. Carthagan, Naruto," JD said, gesturing from one to the other. They both nodded at each other, the smile on Ms. Carthagan's face reaching all the way to her hazel eyes.
"So you already tried Spanish and German, right?" Ms. Carthagan ascertained. She grabbed a chair and settled down next to Naruto, who scooted a bit to the right to get away from her.
"Naruto?" At the mention of his name, he looked at the woman. "I'm Ms. Carthagan," she said, pointing at herself. "I'm here to help you." She used obvious gestures to support her message.
Naruto answered something, the confusion apparent in his voice. Ms. Carthagan cocked her head. "Sounds like an Asian language..."
"He doesn't look Asian," JD couldn't help but remark, realizing a second too late that that might be racist. "I mean, he could be, but I guess... You know what, I'm going to say nothing."
His ramble went ignored by Naruto and Ms. Carthagan as Ms. Carthagan asked things in various languages. JD didn't like the way Naruto shook his head at every language the woman tried. But there was one he perked up at. Ms. Carthagan repeated that and Naruto answered with a torrent of words, gesturing wildly and pointing outside. His tirade lasted for about a minute before he concluded with a word even JD understood: sensei.
"So he's from Japan," JD concluded.
"Yes," Ms. Carthagan said as she rose from her seat. "I've got a contact at Seattle Grace Hospital who speaks Japanese, I'll get in touch with him."
"Thank you!" JD said. He could finally explain the situation to the kid and get on his way to finding the parents or other family so the kid wouldn't be so alone.
It had been a long time since Kurama was left to his own devices. He had been manipulated for at least a hundred years now, swinging from slave to Uchiha Madara to being sealed inside Naruto. The last bout of freedom was sixteen years ago, when he had laid waste to half of Konoha, but even that was accomplished under the influence of the sharingan.
The sudden freedom would have been welcome if he hadn't been so small and weak, though. If he still possessed the mighty body he was used to he would truly enjoy smelling the scent of rain on grass, but as it was, he felt miserable.
The rain was unrelenting and the bush he took shelter under didn't keep the rain out for long. He had found a road. At first it was a dirt road but soon it turned into a black road with white markings. Vehicles of all colors used this road to travel and Kurama had almost been hit twice already as he crossed it. Buildings appeared here and there, although they were small and seemed to be mainly used to provide the vehicles with fuel.
The pain in his left paw had disappeared as Kurama walked alongside the road at a safe distance. His chakra coils were still empty, though, and the need to rest and feed made itself known. His loping jog was efficient but the steps he took were so small. If he had his old body he'd be halfway to Suna from Konoha by now, but going by the numbers on the signs he had traveled ten kilometers.
His senses were as sharp as ever, and he knew that he wasn't supposed to be here. The buildings felt wrong, the roads looked wrong and that many metallic vehicles meant one thing: they were far from the world they were familiar with.
Damn that Madara, Kakashi and their space-time ninjutsu! Those sharingan eyes meant nothing but trouble for Kurama. He wanted to rip out every one of those red pupils and squash them underneath his paw. The great nine-tailed demon got reduced to eating dead fowl on the side of the road. It tasted tarry and horrible, but it sustained him for now, until he could get to Naruto and get this all sorted out.
He wasn't keen on returning to the kid like a dog playing fetch, but at least that shinobi was somewhat trustworthy. And maybe the only shinobi in the vicinity, and the empty chakra coils begged to be filled. Naruto had plenty of chakra on his own, he could spare some.
After all, Naruto no longer could claim 'rent' from Kurama for living inside his body. Now he had to find the boy, but his instincts were sharp and his mind was clear. The boy would be found.
The pain was back at half-force, the drugs coursing through his system keeping the worst of it at bay. Naruto didn't like the hazy feeling he got from them, but even his trained body couldn't endure the jagged rips his belly sent up. Not when there was a morphine button which sent it all away. He tried not to hit it often, but eventually his weak body made him reach for it.
He slept a lot, only being woken by either a nurse checking in on him or that Doran guy. The woman who spoke three words of his language hadn't returned yet, so Naruto was stuck using primitive sign language to signal what he wanted.
When he was awake his world shrunk to the morphine button, trying to eat something and enduring the pain in his body. He had no idea how long he existed in this state of mind, he barely knew if it was night or day. But he did recover, bit by bit. Nowhere near as fast as he was used to, and something niggled at his mind, but the drugs neatly kept those niggles away from his conscious mind, filed away to think about later.
But his gut instinct told him that something was very wrong.
JD checked in on Naruto. The interpreter had visited two days ago, but claimed that the boy didn't speak Japanese. There were some similarities, but the vocabulary and pronunciation were too different. Even the characters Naruto wrote down differed from Japanese in a way the interpreter couldn't read them. The interpreter claimed that he knew someone who specialized in regional accents. He got a sound bite from the boy and sent it off. JD had yet to hear the result of that analysis.
There was a solution to the language barrier, for the moment. In case someone couldn't speak or write, they used cards with pictographs to make at least some basic wishes known. Naruto caught on quick and used them to communicate.
Bright blue eyes looked back at him and JD stepped inside, clipboard in hand. It was time to change the dressing on his wound, his clipboard said. Not the most pleasant of tasks for either of them, but it was necessary. Naruto was still jittery around him, something which grated against his pride as a doctor people confided in. His bedside manner was good, he knew that, but still the kid jumped whenever JD touched him.
Changing the dressing was more of a nursing duty, but he didn't want to confront the no doubt frightened kid with too many strange faces. So JD had nicked the clipboard from Carla and ran off. He would pay for that later, he knew, but for the moment it was worth it.
"Hey Naruto, you doing okay?" JD asked. He knew that Naruto couldn't understand him, but Naruto answered to the questioning tone with words in his own language.
JD peeled off the bandages and inspected the wound. The strange tattoo centered around Naruto's navel was huge and had been a bit of a shock to the surgeon. The sutures created a new line right through the center of the tattoo.
"It looks like he has been ripped open," the surgeon had commented, Turk told JD later on. JD agreed with that sentiment. Like a fire hose had been turned on from the inside of his stomach, water which spread every which way, spraying the floor until he stood ankle deep in water, a dripping sound coming from his left. His mind drifted away from the patient's room.
JD recognized it as one of his daydreams and he tried to rip himself out of it. Daydreaming while actively dealing with a patient would earn him some much more insulting nicknames from Dr. Cox than regular girl names.
But he found he couldn't.
The walls were shrouded in darkness, the water looked greenish but clear and giant bars crossed the middle of the room. A human figure stood in the room as well. The blond hair gave the human away as Naruto, although he was dressed differently. He wore the clothes he had on the day he arrived at the hospital, the orange sticking out in this place like a cat at a dog fair.
"Hey!" JD yelled, waving his arms at Naruto. The boy turned around. Something was wrapped around his head, glinting in the light which had no discernible source.
"Kurama's gone," Naruto said, and this time JD could understand him somehow. He at least understood the puzzled tone.
"Who's Kurama?" JD asked. "And what's up with this place?"
The dripping sound continued, as well as the soft sloshing of a giant body of water. The bars in the middle of the room were immense, stretching from the floor and disappearing into the distant ceiling, also shrouded in darkness. But there had to be a ceiling, otherwise this room made absolutely no sense. This exercise of the imagination felt different from his usual daydreams.
"There's supposed to be a giant nine-tailed demon fox in that cage! Maybe not in that cage anymore," Naruto amended, "but he has to be here!" His voice raised in alarm and he gestured wildly at the bars of what JD now recognized as a cage. His mind sure could come up with some weird stuff, he knew that, but this was a new one for him.
"Kurama's gone and now he's out there, smashing villages and killing people and, and, I have to find him!"
JD blinked and found himself back in the hospital room, joined by a wildly thrashing Naruto. JD called for a nurse as he tried to hold the boy down, but the kid was strong. The weird daydream got shoved onto a back-burner for a while as his mind raced for a medical cause for Naruto's sudden fit. Allergies to a certain medicine?
The yells and no doubt threats that poured forth from Naruto's mouth assured him that the kid didn't slip into shock. A murse, no, JD stopped that thought, a male nurse joined him in making sure that the boy didn't rip any more sutures and bled to death underneath his hands. That would be just his luck.
After a minute Naruto calmed down and stopped yelling and trying to jump out of the window to look for this Kurama guy. He slumped into the bedding, exhaustion apparent in his eyes.
What was up with that daydream, though? A cage, demons, Naruto talking English, it all made no sense.
The mystery of the red-eyed boy deepened.
Hitching a ride into town in the back of one of the vehicles proved to be easy. All it took was ascertaining that the metallic smelly thing moved in the right direction and after that it took a simple jump into the open bed.
It felt a lot more dignifying way of traveling than surviving on animals killed by these vehicles and being chased out of stores. Kurama curled up underneath a loose piece of tarp stuffed in the back of the vehicle and kept his senses primed for any sign of Naruto's chakra.
He knew he would be able to feel the kid if he got close enough. It was hard to hide a powerhouse and Naruto was one of the biggest in the shinobi countries, all thanks to Kurama. And some genes, but Kurama knew it was mostly because of his presence in the boy's stomach. Not literally, thankfully.
His own stomach growled and for a second he reveled in the sensation of hunger. He hadn't felt that in such a long time it was a welcome feeling. Three seconds later he remembered that the feeling sucked. Kurama buried himself deeper into the tarp and tried to remember more of what had happened in those seconds when Kakashi and Obito clashed on the battlefield.
His transformation into this insignificant fox was solely the fault of those space-time ninjutsu the two sharingan-users tried to hit each other with. They both connected to the same dimension, but that dimension mixed with a bijuu-dama [1] the size of Konoha's market district did not end well. Or it could've been Kakashi's fault, he had that knowing look on his face Kurama hated since the day Naruto met the silver-haired man.
And now his mighty consciousness was trapped in the body of a tiny fox. His fur was a darker shade of red than that of his true self. He still possessed all nine of his tails, none of them able to swat shinobi in mid-air and smash boulders into sand. All they were good for was gaining attention from the humans he inevitably came across. It seemed there were a lot more of them around in this place. And barely any of them possessed developed chakra coils. At least it wouldn't be that hard to find the kid, he drew Kurama in like Jiraiya to a brothel. It would take some time to pinpoint his location, but at the moment he had a vague sense of what direction he should go in.
Three days he had been on the road now, hopping from vehicle to vehicle, feeding on animals slain by the same vehicles and drinking rainwater. It was one of the most degrading things Kurama had ever done, and he counted being inside Naruto while he grew up as a particularly annoying child among them. The tarp he was partially hidden under was at least somewhat dignified, and even if the vehicle he hid in was currently stationary, he knew that he moved closer to the boy. Kurama smiled to himself and yipped.
Mentally he fell silent. Did he just – what the – he did not make that sound. The grand nine-tailed demon would never even think of yipping, barking or keening like a common dog. He snarled and growled, sure, those were displays of aggression, and seeing grown shinobi flee before the low rumblings of the demon felt remarkably good.
Carefully Kurama tried to talk, like he always had been capable of. All that escaped him were three short, loud barks and a high-pitched whine.
"Fantastic," Kurama tried to add to the multitude of animal sounds which wrung their way from his larynx, but that too came out as a sound one of those Inuzuka dogs would make.
The noise he made did not escape into the woods unnoticed. Two young voices shared some excited words with each other before peering over the edge of the otherwise empty bed. The boys looked young, their hair frazzled from the long journey Kurama had been able to partially partake in, and they were loud.
Warily Kurama eyed the boys, tensing his legs underneath him but pretending like it was normal to find a nine-tailed tiny fox in the bed of a vehicle. One of the boys disappeared from view for a second and popped back up with a poking stick held in his smudgy hands. Time to vacate his position.
With one smooth move Kurama snarled at the kids, jumped out of the vehicle bed and ran across the parking lot, squeezing through a wooden fence at the other side.
At least the vehicle had brought him closer to civilization. Even more humans were around, along with many houses and shops. It looked like over here humanity had been able to spread their grubby hands and take hold of everything of value, claiming it as their own. Kurama looked at the overgrown garden he had forced his way into and once again hated the feeling of an empty stomach.
Kurama would find Naruto, this was inevitable. He would find a way to return them both home, preferably regaining his old body, no longer bound by the seal placed on him so long ago. Naruto had thrown the cage wide open and sometimes even gained access through him to the outside world, but it still wasn't the same. Naruto was in control, no matter how hard Kurama had raged and drained Naruto's chakra at one time. But before he could start that task, he had mice to catch in the weeds threatening to overtake the porch.
In case any people only used to the dubbed episodes are reading this, here be a translation:
[1] Tailed Beast Ball