CHAPTER 2 – Revelations
UPDATE (1/1/2015): Cleaned up some shaky parts I wasn't too happy with, changed everything to third person after great deliberation with myself. As much as I want to do first person, third person gives me more flexibility in terms of storytelling and characterization for other people than Naruto.
Hope you enjoy the changes!
The first thing Naruto's mind registered upon returning to consciousness was an faint but incessant dripping that seemed to burrow into his brain like a worm. The second was a pounding migraine that left his head throbbing in time with that awful dripping. As much as he wanted to just lay there and block out the world, his training kicked in as Danzō's teachings sounded in the back of his mind. Constant vigilance!(1)
The first thing he was trained to do when waking up in an unknown, potentially dangerous scenario was to take stock of the situation. Naruto wiggled his fingers and toes and flexed all of his muscles, heaving a quiet sigh of relief that finding everything in one piece at least. He sat up with a low groan and looked around.
He found himself in some kind of dank sewer, surrounded on all sides by pipes that glowed faintly and illuminated the tunnel around him. There was no smell, and the murky water that went up to his hips from his seated position had no temperature or tactile feeling to it. His clothes didn't feel wet at all, something that confused him greatly. Naruto reached down to touch it, expecting wetness, but to his surprise he reached straight through to the floor.
"Great," he thought. "I'm probably locked in some kind of genjutsu, and an impressively strong one at that to have overwhelmed all of my senses at once..."
The blonde boy attempted to gather chakra for a pulse that would disrupt the foreign chakra running through him and dispel the genjutsu, but the familiar rush of energy that would have normally pooled in his navel was nowhere to be found.
"No chakra. Either a suppressing seal or some kind of drug slipped to me while I was unconscious. Things just keep getting better and better."
Getting up off the ground, he checked himself for the equipment he had packed this morning to go on the little field trip to the temple but found nothing. That wasn't a good sign. The day was supposed to be a day off for him, so he had only strapped his usual kunai holster to his leg and belted his weapons pouch to his waist. But of course he would wake up in an unknown location with none of it on him anyway.
Naruto palmed his face with another quiet sigh and prayed his captors hadn't noticed the small seals on his extremities. After the first dozen times Danzō woke him up on alleged "vacation days" with explosive notes under his bed for surprise combat readiness assessments, he took to carrying at least a concealed kunai sealed on his limbs just in case. He quickly checked his fingertips, wrists, and ankles for the kunai he had sealed there with no luck either. The boy couldn't even feel the tell-tale signs of the seals having ever even been there in the first place.
"Damn," he mentally groaned. "Whoever got me had gotten me very thoroughly. If I was snatched from right under the noses of two of the most powerful men in the Elemental Nations..."
Whoever was good or strong enough to pull that off practically had his life in the palm of their hand.
"Danzō-ji-sama? Hokage-ji-sama?" Naruto called out after a moment's deliberation. It didn't seem like his captors wanted him dead just yet, seeing as how he would have never even woken up in the first place if they had. Perhaps they had grabbed the two old men as well.
His voice echoed around him, the only reply he got besides that incessant thrice-dammed dripping.
"Where the hell was I even?" he wondered. "The last thing I remember was... putting on that Shinigami mask in the Uzumaki temple."
The more he tried to recall what happened after, the more his brain throbbed in protest. Whoever did this must have been waiting for that exact moment to make their move. Reaching up to massage his temples, he surveyed his surroundings again.
There was only two ways to proceed, forward and backwards. Without any else to go on, Naruto figured he may as well go forward. If there was anything he had learned from the horror stories his Yūgao-nee loved to tell so much, it was that nothing good ever happened by heading back somewhere on one's own. Of course, just as many bad things happened to the poor protagonists that walked blindly forward into unknown dark sewer tunnels, but he filed that particular train of thought away. There was no point in worrying about what ifs or he'd be paralyzed with indecision. Better to face things head on at his own pace, he figured.
As the tired blonde trudged down the tunnel, he sighed to himself while taking stock of the situation at hand. Thrown into an unknown location, unarmed, with no chakra to boot. "Some rest day this turned out to be," he grumbled under his breath. "If this is another one of Danzō-ji-sama's ideas of a joke, it certainly isn't any funnier than the rest." The old man had a terrible sense of humor at the best of times, and this was possibly shaping up to be one of his worst ones yet. Naruto couldn't help sighing again.
His thoughts drifted to the events leading up to his unconsciousness in another attempt to figure out what the hell happened to him. At least he had learned more about his clan before things went to hell. As much as he loved his two surrogate grandfathers and all the ANBU who went out of their way to train him, he was still an orphan at the end of the day with nothing of his parents to go on but stories of their near-legendary exploits. Make no mistake, he loved hearing tales of his mother's skill with a blade or of the things his father was able to do with his infamous Hiraishin no Jutsu. But simple stories of his parents were a poor substitute for the real thing.
Lost in his thoughts, he walked for what seemed like hours with no change in his surroundings at all. Eventually, he noticed a faint light at the end of the tunnel he was in. Shaking himself out of his reverie, he mentally readied himself for any potential threat. Unarmed and bereft of chakra as he was, he was determined not to go gentle into that good night.
The tunnel itself opened into a huge expanse without walls or an end in sight. Naruto wasn't agoraphobic by any means, but the endlessly wide open zone filled him with a dread that bore down on all sides. He felt as insignificant as a rat in the middle of it all, and wanted nothing more than to just crawl into a corner somewhere and hide. That certainly wasn't a viable option to him, so he steeled myself and continued walking in hopes of finding some kind of landmark to orient himself around.
"Hello?" he called out. Nothing but echoes answered back gain. "Anyone there?"
"Naruto." A distinctly feminine voice answered him and he whirled around, startled.
"Naruto."
He threw his gaze about the room, head practically on a swivel as he desperately tried to figure out where the voice was coming from. As he whipped his head around, uncharacteristically tripping over his own feet in a near panic, he backed straight into a solid mass behind him.
The young boy turned and leapt back rapidly, facing a woman clad in a stunning black kimono with red and white flowers blooming around the bottom hem and sleeves. A white obi with a golden knot was fastened around her waist. Her long, straight red hair cascaded down to the small of her back and her violet eyes shone with a calculated sharpness that belied her obviously noble upbringing. She was beautiful, the very sight of her took his breath away, but she seemed somehow familiar to him like a fleeting memory at the back of his mind.
"Naruto. My son, you've come at last." She smiled sadly at him as he felt his world come crashing around his head, finally recognizing the woman standing before him.
The Sandaime had given him a single picture of his parents for his 5th birthday, wanting him to at least know of his heritage but telling him it was too dangerous to give him anything more. His parents had accumulated hundreds of enemies in their shinobi careers, any number of whom would love to take revenge on their helpless son before he was ever ready to defend himself. Even though he had never had any trouble with memory recall, that night Naruto had made sure to carefully study every detail of that picture, committing the snapshot of their candid embrace to memory as if his life depended on it.
Uzumaki Kushina looked exactly as she was photographed all those years ago.
"W-what? N-no, it can't be... M-mother...?" he stuttered out, shaking his head in disbelief. He dared not believe the words he swore he must have hallucinated. There was no way the lady before him was his mother. "My parents had passed away when I was born, they sacrificed their lives to seal the Kyuubi in me!"
"Now, now... Is that any way to greet your own mother?"
"I... I..." Choking back the sob that threatened to burst out of his throat, he took a hesitant step forward. One foot after another, faster and faster until he closed the gap with a leap, throwing his arms around her waist. I buried his face into her stomach, too afraid to meet her violet eyes with his own. "Is this a genjutsu?" He feared this was yet another cruel test or prank sprung on him, not daring to even consider it was real.
He felt her warm hands wrap around him as she knelt down to meet him at his eye level, drawing him fully into her embrace. "You've grown since last time I held you in my arms that fateful night."
With those words and the implications they held, he couldn't hold his tears back any longer. He wept openly into the crook of his mother's neck. If this really was a genjutsu or some devious trap, he cared no longer.
"I wanted to meet you so much," he sobbed.
She stroked the back of his head, clutching him ever tighter. "I know, Naruto. I know." Wet drops fell onto the top of his head. "Your father and I had no choice that night, we never wanted things to turn out this way."
Seven years of the loneliness and bitter sadness he kept bottled in his heart poured out of Naruto as he finally let myself cry for the first time since his training began with Hiruzen and Danzō. In order to be the strong ninja they wanted, no, expected him to be, he had suppressed those feelings and buried them deep inside. He had no time to waste feeling pity or sorry for myself as an orphan if he wanted to win the pride, approval, and acknowledgment he so desperately craved. But on certain nights, he couldn't help but lie awake in bed, wondering what life would have been like had his parents yet lived. Would they have looked at him with the same love in their eyes as they had for each other in their photo?
Now, he felt like he finally had an answer to that.
The two Uzumaki didn't know how long they stood there, son wrapped tight in his mother's embrace, not wanting the moment to end. Eventually with a sorrowful sigh, Naruto pulled himself together and separated from her arms.
"Thank you, Mother." he said gratefully and bowed deeply at the waist. Naruto felt like he had to thank her for putting up with his childish outburst. If Danzō were here to see what the old war hawk undoubtedly would have considered a shameful lapse in control over the boy's emotions, he'd have been disowned on the spot. The blond Uzumaki straightened and rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, highly embarrassed.
Kushina stifled a giggle behind her hand, a smile creeping all the way to up to her twinkling eyes. "Oh, Naruto, you silly boy. There's no need to thank your mom for doing what moms do best."
"I um, well..." he blushed at that. Today was shaping up to be quite the wild rollercoaster of highs and lows for him. "So how is this all possible anyway, Mother? Where are we? Hokage-ji-sama told me that you and Father passed away on the night of the sealing of the Fox."
"By Hokage-ji-sama, I assume you mean Sarutobi's been reinstated as Hokage then?" Kushina asked curiously.
"Yes, Mother. Father had not named any successor before his untimely death, so the Shinobi Council unanimously voted to reinstate the Sandaime." Naruto grinned, remembering the other side of that particular history lesson. "Well, almost unanimously, Danzō-ji-sama still grumbles about that every now and then. I think he's just jealous he was passed over again for the Hokage position, but don't tell him I said that..."
This time, his mother laughed uproariously, unable to contain her mirth any longer. "Wahahahaha, you mean that old coot is still as salty as ever? Oh boy, Minato-kun would have loved to hear that! Your dear old dad never really saw eye to eye with the bandaged geezer, he always thought that guy was was a hardass too overbearing with his patriotism, ya know!"
Naruto froze his face in a look of mock horror, jokingly looking over his shoulders with a look of mock anxiety and fear in every direction for any sign of the old man in question. "Shh, not so loud Mother! Danzō-ji-sama is going to put me through the wringer if he finds out we've been talking about him behind his back!"
Kushina drew him in for another bone-crushing hug with a peal of laughter, picking him up and spinning him around in the air. He smiled into her bosom and hugged her back as tightly as his smaller arms could handle. Never in his wildest dreams did he think could have ever met his mother like this, and yet here he was - hugging her and sharing in her laughter like she had never been ripped from his life right as it barely began.
As if she was thinking along the same line of thought as him, his mother slowed to a stop and gently set him down in her lap with a melancholy sigh that mirrored his own mood.
"I had dreamed of this moment when I could hold you in my arms like this ever since I found out you were on your way into my life, but I never imagined it would be quite like this."
Naruto turned and hugged his mother tightly. "I know, Mother."
A playful gleam re-entered the corner of her eye. "For one thing, I never expected you to be quite so... formal with him." She teasingly squeezed his cheek with a gentle hand as he leaned into her touch.
"Why, whatever do you mean by that, Mother?" Naruto asked cheekily, giving her his patented wide-eyed innocent stare. "Isn't it part of a son's duty to pay the proper filial respect to his parents?"
She furrowed her eyebrows at that, an attempted rebuttal dying in her throat as she processed his watertight logic. "That... well. Um..." Kushina pinched his cheek again. "Good point."
"Thank you, Mother."
"You could stop calling me that though, all of this formality is making me itch..."
"You want me to stop calling you 'Mother,' Mother?"
"Grr..."
"I can't understand you when you don't use people language, Mother."
"... You cheeky little brat." She lightly pinched his other cheek with a grimace.
"Sorry, Mother (2)."
The two Uzumaki shared another laugh at that.
After wiping an imaginary tear of mirth from her eye, she leveled a serious gaze at him. "As much as I'd love to stay here and catch up with my son, it's high time I told you why you're here."
Naruto got up off her lap and sat on the ground before her in seiza position. She quirked an eyebrow at him but continued anyway.
"Going back to your original questions, we are currently in your mindscape or in other words, the manifestation of your subconscious. It does concern me that we seem to be in what looks to be a sewer, ya know." The two of them looked around with a shared frown. "But that is a matter you can always fix later.
"What brought you here was the Shinigami Mask of the Uzumaki Clan. You see, Naruto, the Uzumaki Clan in the pinnacle of its power was famed throughout the Elemental Nations for three things: the incredibly vitality that gave us our extraordinary life spans and large chakra reserves, our prowess in fūinjutsu, and our Kongō Fūsa kekkei genkai."
Naruto's eyes widened at that. He had a kekkei genkai? Ever since he could remember, tales of legendary shinobi and their exploits filled his bedtime stories. Like any young ninja, he had always indulged in the occasional daydream of having a kekkei genkai of his own as strong as the Mokuton of the Senju or the Sharingan of the Uchiha, but it was another one of those things he never thought he could have for real! Visibly reigning in his excitement, he calmed down to keep listening attentively. It wouldn't do to have his mind wandering in front of his own mother.
"While any of these things on their own were indeed formidable, the true reason for our strength comes from the covenant our ancestors made with the Shinigami. In order to preserve the clan secrets and traditions in the turbulent times of the Warring Clans Era, the first Uzumaki called upon the Shinigami for aid. In exchange for their service to him in the afterlife, the powerful chosen of the clan reside in each generation of Uzumaki leaders where they can watch over and guide the Clan as they are needed."
If the blond had thought the revelation of having a kekkei genkai was amazing, it was certainly nothing compared to this latest piece of his clan legacy. Normally he hated and wanted nothing to do with anything dealing with the occult and ghosts, but he didn't even bat an eye at that particular aspect of it. Maybe it was comfort in the knowledge that those spirits were the family he always wanted to have. At any rate, it explained how his mother was able to stand before him now despite her untimely death.
"So how are the spirits of the past Uzumaki able to do that, Mother? Are only main family Uzumaki initiated this way?" Naruto asked curiously.
"Any shinobi recognized by the clan for their power, wisdom, or mastery worthy of being inducted into the fold for all time are allowed to bear the Seal of the Uzumaki, a powerful fūinjutsu given to us by the Shinigami. Upon their death, their spirit rests in the Shinigami mask where it is preserved in its prime with the other spirits of the clan. When the next generation Uzumaki clan leader comes of age, they put on the mask and bear the Seal as part of their rite of passage. The spirits imprint the collective knowledge of all the clan into the mind of the initiate. That is the secret of the Uzumaki Clan's power – the leader of the clan becomes the avatar of the collective spirits of those powerful clansmen who came before and their skills and wisdom are never truly lost."
"If you're standing before me now, does that mean I'm next in line for this?"
"Yes, my darling son." His mother drew him into her embrace and gently kissed the top of his head, filling him with a warmth and security he thought he would never be able to feel. "Like me and my mother before you, you too are descended from the main family of the Uzumaki Clan. The responsibility of Clan Leader falls to you next.
"Now you know why the Uzumaki were truly feared. With the knowledge of the accumulated years of experience of every powerful shinobi worthy of being inducted into the fold, our clan's power never diminished with time. Instead it flourished, our influence and prestige spreading far and wide where other clans ebbed and flowed. When the secret of our clan was eventually brought to light, our enemies united to destroy us."
"Is that why I'm the last of the Uzumaki?" Naruto frowned sadly.
"Yes, Naruto. The other villages feared the power our clan would wield if left unchecked, so they invaded Uzu no Kuni (3) to end us before we grew too strong. Though our clan fought bravely and valiantly to the last man, woman, and child, the combined might of Kumo and Kiri overwhelmed our defenses and razed Uzushiogakure to the ground."
"Where was Konoha? Weren't we allies at that point?"
"Only a small group of survivors were evacuated before the Fall, scattering far and wide." Kushina sighed bitterly. "From what I've learned from the elder spirits who lived at the time, we made them pay dearly for that. Especially Kiri. The losses they suffered that battle wiped out nearly an entire generation of Kiri-nin, sowing the seeds for the dissent that has only grown deeper since then. I imagine it still rumbles beneath the surface today."
The newly realized Uzumaki heir nodded solemnly, filing that bit of information in the back of his head for later. "Hokage-ji-sama would likely have the most up-to-date intel on the Kiri front." he thought to himself.
"Now that I've put on the mask and finally met you, what comes next, Mother?"
"It's a different process for everyone. in your case, since you didn't have the benefit of anyone to train you in our ways or properly conduct the ceremony, I went ahead and began the imprinting process ever since you first woke up in your mindscape. It was simple enough to do with the help of the other Uzumaki, ya know."
He was stunned by that almost offhand comment. "You can do that?"
Kushina smiled a smile that didn't quite reach the violet eyes now gleaming with an emotion Naruto could not identify. "The imprinting will seal most of the clan experiences, skills, and memories into you in the form of an archive in your deep subconscious. Some of it may seep through the locks and you might find yourself unconsciously incorporating what you've learned. The more you meditate to sift through and actively process the clan archive, the more control you'll gain and the more synchronization you'll achieve as you'll be able to call upon more of the Clan.
"I expect great things from you, my precious son."
The mindscape slowly began a rumbling that sent a slight ripple of panic down his spine. The omnipresent darkness surrounding mother and son grew thicker, closing in all around. Naruto felt his mother draw him into one last embrace. The last thing he could feel as everything faded to black was her lips brushing his forehead, her words swirling all around him like a gentle breeze.
"No matter what happens, be strong. Know that I love you, Naruto, and I always will..."
A searing migraine suddenly lanced through his brain as all of his senses were overwhelmed by what felt like a thousand different inputs at once.
a sky filled with black flame
It wasn't a single line of thought, sound, or image but simply memory that wormed its way into his brain like it had always been there.
smell of blood, human filth
a great whirlpool of boiling seas
Rapid flashes of - places he had never seen, people he had never met - ripped through his eyes. His hands clenched hard as Naruto curled into a tight ball to block out as much it as he could, drawing blood from where his fingernails dug into the flesh.
howls of agony, cries for water
ruined buildings corpses laying in the streets
A scream pulsed through his ears, his ruined throat telling him it was his own. Pain and a deep instinctive fear overwhelmed him and filled his consciousness.
one man standing against the darkness
There was an inhuman roar that sounded like no terrestrial beast sounding like an avalanche in his ears. Bile rose in his throat, mixing with the coppery tang of blood in his mouth.
single red, ringed eye with 9 burning tomoe
Then, nothing.
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
(1) Lifted directly from a certain other franchise's grizzled old man's favorite catchphrase.
(2) You'll notice that Naruto really enjoys giving the people he likes formal-sounding nicknames. It's a quirk of his I transferred from his canon counterpart with my own spin on it.
(3) Uzu no Kuni – Land of Whirlpools
And so we come to the end of chapter two. I would have gotten this out a little sooner, but the winter holidays are crazy as I'm sure you know yourself. I'm still laying the world-building foundation of this little AU down, so a large portion of this chapter is a bit of an info-dump. Please bear with it for now!
Lemme know what you think of my version of Naruto in a review!
Have a happy Winter Holiday Season.
