Naruto: BERSERK

by Lousy Poet Automaton

-----disclaimers: Berserk and Naruto are not mine. The lines after the chapter title appear in every episode of Berserk. You don't have to know Berserk to read this fanfic, and I wouldn't even say it's a true crossover or fusion since it really all happens in the Naruto universe. Anyway, if you have read/watched Berserk, I'm not sure if your appreciation will be greater because you can guess at what's hinted at, or less because you can guess what's hinted at.

Chapter 2: War Chest

"In this world...

man's destiny is controlled...

by some transcendental destiny or law"

"Like a hand of God

that exists."

"At least...

man knows that he has no control

over his own will..."

---

From the way they picked at each other with such carefully honed barbs, Kakashi would have thought that their teamwork would have been, well, awful.

But they passed his exam. And they did it easily.

Naruto would have charged in, but the Uchiha had given him one of those damned odd looks and that had been enough. They hadn't even needed to back off for a few minutes to talk over a goddamn plan.

Sasuke had simply... commanded the other two. With single words and efficient hand signals.

Kakashi would not have been totally surprised for the girl to be moving like a puppet on a string, but he was blown away by how well they coordinated with Naruto. The sheer size of his weapon alone and the amount of clear space it required to swing freely should have made it impossible for them to even fight together with him in close quarters.

Watching them now as they waited for their first mission, seeing Naruto fume quietly while Sakura clutched an indifferent Sasuke's arm, Kakashi had to close his exposed eye and recall how... tight their teamwork was.

Somehow, Sakura had kept moving around Naruto's wild, powerful sword strikes even while employing simple, distracting tactics such as kicking up dust, using basic bunshin and kawarimi to make it tougher to keep track of where she was, and generally being a pest. She was also maintaining a low level genjutsu over Naruto that made his blade blurry and just a little harder to see – which was actually a major advantage for them as the slightest miscalculation regarding the reach and position of that blade could have easily resulted in Kakashi's losing an arm. And all the while, Sasuke was circling around, sharingan activated, waiting patiently for the optimal time to strike, still giving the occasional instruction.

It had been unnerving. Well, that and how close Naruto's blade sometimes got, and the way it blasted completely through trees and boulders and anything else that got in the way as they fought around the training field. It was almost a relief when Sasuke had raced in from an oblique angle in Kakashi's blind spot (on the side with the sharingan eye that he had kept hidden, since, well, it was meant to be a test that it was possible to pass) and made off with the bells.

There was definitely something off about them.

In fact, being with them gave Kakashi a fucking bad headache. If he was just another jounin, he'd just let it go and accept the situation as is, but he was driven to look underneath the underneath, and there were so many layers of underneath in those messed up kids it didn't make sense.

Sandaime hadn't been much help either. A sigh, and mumbling about things being classified and 'need to know.'

Kakashi had known about the Kyuubi of course, and of the disastrous attempt to seal it into Naruto...

He shook his head and, with the ease from the practice that all survivors old enough to remember possessed, banished the horrors of what had come after. That did not matter now, though he wondered if somehow, they affected what Naruto had become.

He had read some of the sketchy reports about Naruto's years outside the village, the training, and the Hunts. But, going over them the second time, it was obvious that the reports had been doctored. No one other than the Hokage, who wasn't telling, seemed to know just what it is that Naruto Hunted, or exactly who trained him. There were subtle genjutsu sealed right into the pages that suggested to the reader 'don't read too close here... you read this word but can't remember it... you've lost your place on this page...' and so forth.

Over the years, Naruto had apparently been paid vast sums of money by various families scattered around the country for Hunts, which were not described except in the murkiest of terms, and this money was in turn paid to rather isolated temples, who would take him in for brief periods of time, ostensibly for training purposes. His work seemed to be by word of mouth only, and after he was done, people eagerly forgot that he had even been there. Kakashi had initially thought that Naruto had done some kind of bounty hunting, but it wasn't that – Naruto's name would have come in for each bounty he took, and that's the sort of thing that gets you into the bingo book and of course he wasn't in there.

It seemed insane, he could not have been Hunting those dark Others from the failure of Yondaime's seal... Naruto was indeed stronger than most genin, but not yet even at the level of a true chuunin, after all.

And Sasuke? His psych evaluation after his clan was slaughtered was openly classified. Nobody knew what the hell he did while he trained in the ruins of the Uchiha complex. No foster family had taken care of him.

No guardian assigned to him had been able to last. Nobody could keep up with him once on the Uchiha grounds – he'd turn one of those shadowy corners and disappear. Jounin had tried to track him in there and failed and that was when he had been a child.

And there were... rumors... surrounding the genius survivor, rumors about the families of non-ninja children he'd been friends with disappearing from the village, never to be seen again. People left the village all the time, after all, any non-academy-graduates were free to come and go, but it seemed that those who were friends of Sasuke always moved away within months of getting to know him well enough to be invited to the Uchiha manor.

Even the girl was not quite as normal as Kakashi had first thought. He could not help going over their performance in his exam over and over.

Sakura acted like a a young, carefree and even shallow teen most of the time, but in combat? She'd been like a machine. Her eyes were dead as dust while she was fighting, like something was missing in there somewhere. Her breathing, her heartbeat, a number of her autonomic functions were tightly controlled and balanced. And the few attacks she made were carefully chosen, and would have been lethal if they had hit – all without the slightest trace of killing intent. That kind of mental compartmentalization wasn't normal, it was like she had dissociative identity disorder... Except in a controlled, measured manner, like her personality operated on a switch.

That didn't just happen to somebody, it had been done to her. By whom?

Kakashi did not want to think about what it could mean if it was Sasuke that had caused her to be this way. He had no proof, nothing but his observations and intuition, things he could feel and connect in his mind but not things he could explain in a linear, logical fashion.

It was sometimes hard for the genius to think like a normal person – even the Hokage did not always pick up all the hints and aspects of the things Kakashi said. He was so used to thinking on multiple levels he often forgot it – he spoke a language that was layered up from body language to tonalities of his vocals to inflection to the subtle selection of words which could themselves mean multiple things, and most people only picked up the top layer.

It's not that Kakashi tried to be obtuse – he thought he spoke clearly and frankly all the time, the problem was with everyone else. Oddly enough, it was Gai who got what Kakashi was saying most of time. When Gai exclaimed that Kakashi was "being hip" - that's exactly what he was trying to do. After all, only the tights-attired maniac could understood body language well enough to spar with Kakashi while only looking at his feet. Though Kakashi did have to wonder why, for someone who picked up the underneath so well, Gai had to be so over the top all the time. It was as though Gai had close to the same interpretative faculties as Kakashi but was saddled with problems in expressing himself. Once again, Kakashi found a few threads of his complex mind running in circles about whether or not Gai had some variant of what had once been called Tourette syndrome.

But around this team, Kakashi felt... slow. There was a lot that passed between the three genin which he could detect but could not at all decipher. The surface stuff was easy, but underneath, it was like they had been together for years and had their own private under-language.

He was very much the outsider and hated being the one to not understand. He bet that Gai would be ecstatic to have these kids.

Instead, Kakashi was the one obsessively following them around, taking notes about details that would seem irrelevant to lesser minds during the times he could not spare the chakra to record their behavior with the sharingan.

---

"Weeding a what? The fuck. Why hire ninja to do the fucking gardening?" Naruto exclaimed. "Regular school children can do fucking gardening. This genin business is shit. I did more for more money on my own outside the village."

"Officially, you're now a Leaf genin, Naruto. You can't moonlight. We're supposed to take this time to build teamwork," Sasuke said, sensibly, "and train."

"Yeah, stop boasting Naruto!"

"...What's that you said, girl? Was somebody talking to you?"

Gently, Sasuke redirected her punch. And the next one. "No, Sakura. Don't touch him. You'll get hurt."

"Okay, Sasuke-kun. Anything you say." Sakura was giddy just to feel the contact of his hands, even for a moment. She wondered if Sasuke would keep deflecting her attacks on Naruto? Best not to try, she didn't want to bother him too much. That had been Ino's mistake, among others, and Sakura did her best to be what Sasuke wanted.

Naruto kicked at a pebble as they ambled along. It rocketed forward, fragmenting against a metal fencepost.

"Girlie boy, I can't believe how docile you are about fucking gardening. Fighting, that's who I am."

And though he would not admit it, his current limited nature did disappoint him, actually.

In those other memories, there were visions of himself when he had been whole, and he knew he should not have been so one-dimensional. In that other life, he had only approached mastery of his fighting craft when he had realized that there was more to the sword than destruction. It seemed strange, but his swordwork only began to be truly powerful when he learned of peace. Watching the old man hammer at the sword, entranced by the sparks, feeling the spray of the waterfall as he waited for the logs to crash down upon him. But those memories were more distant the others, and there was just so much anger and hatred and despair...

Naruto wondered if he would ever be able to gain that completeness, that quietness of mind, despite carrying the pain of everything that came afterwards, the blood, the screaming, chopping off his own hand to try to protect something more important than his own life, everything.

When Sasuke let out a breath to speak, Naruto nearly tripped. He listened to Sasuke, and as usual, felt that mixture of sadness and anger. "My right hand, there is a procedure for all things. All plans are composed of sub-plans, composed of single steps that sometimes have to occur in sequence. When the time comes, you know you will be glad for these days."

Naruto scowled blackly. "Stop calling me that, Uchiha." And then he could feel a surprising amount of... it wasn't killer intent, but it was something, coming off of the girl. "And you, groupie, stop that."

She sighed, and did so. It was not her place to choose for Sasuke his tools. She was only one of his tools herself, and wasn't that all she had ever wanted? But she couldn't help it. That big bully and his ridiculous sword, just looking at him made her want to take him down a notch. He hadn't had to do anything to earn Sasuke's trust.

She wondered how she would do if she went all out against Naruto, for real? Sasuke had taught her a lot, and he'd told her that she was better than himself already in some aspects but... Sasuke hurt his hand fighting Naruto, and she did not have the sharingan to help her predict his moves. And one mistake against that sword, even in light sparring, would result in her getting maimed. Is that why he wanted this barbarian? That raw strength?

Just as they arrived at the client's location, Sasuke seemed to recall something, and turned about, planting himself directly in front of Naruto.

"What?"

"Naruto," Sasuke growled, looking down his nose at the other despite being a lot shorter. "Do NOT use your sword techniques on the weeds. You'll destroy the landscape."

"Oh come on. Like I would."

"You were thinking it. Don't."

"Oh come on - "

"Just don't. We have to establish a reputation for professionalism, alright? If people ask for our team specifically, we get missions more quickly and can get the better missions faster. Not to speak of getting more money if we do the jobs properly."

"Bah. You are the last Uchiha. You have more money than maybe a fifth of the operational budget of Konoha's ninja operations. What do you care about money?"

"Barbarian. To unify all the Hidden Villages will take a vast war chest, with resources measured not just in terms of money and... Why am I bothering?" Sasuke sighed. "Just do as I say and you'll get to swing that monster at real enemies again sooner instead of later."

Kakashi shook his head, resisting the urge to chew on one end of his pencil. He was hanging off one side of a nearby building, observing them. What was that look on Naruto's face just then? His face had twisted, an expression that could mean a lot of things or nothing, but the way that Sakura's face had almost mirrored his just then suggested more rather than less. Briefly, they had looked like the normal kids they were supposed to be. But their words... they sounded like old soldiers that had been through too much together.

The jounin decided to take a break and go fight Gai so he could stop thinking for a while. Gai was always good for that.

---

In between the numerous, mind-numbing D missions that they took, they trained together. Sasuke insisted upon it. He would not allow either of them to skip group training.

And this time, he took it upon himself to arrange a joint training sessions with another genin team.

"The team with the damned dog boy. Why did you have to have us do this junk with the team of that fool? Groupie girl here is more useful than fricking dog boy..."

"...The time will come when we will need to be able to work with all these other teams, and more. A war is not won by individuals, or even by small teams. It is won by the proper allocation and dynamic use of a vast hierarchy of operational field, support, intelligence and logistical units."

"...The fuck you saying?" Even in his other life, as a commander for whom men had lived and died, he had not thought of combat on that level.

His memories of what leadership had been like all involved practical things he had learned in the field. The other him had not had the patience to learn the theory beneath until close to the end, before the betrayal. After... his dreams were full of those hellish fragments of memory, the constant running, the desperate battles, the suffering, the perpetual state of exhaustion from being unable to sleep, the ambushes, the dying. Being so close to her, and yet so far...

Naruto shook his head, aware of the curious way they were both looking at him. He muttered, "I don't need nobody."

"..."

"Naruto!" Sakura yelled. "Can't you stop complaining and cussing for one day? Even your muscle-obsessed meat head should be happy about all these chances to improve your strength! It's not like you can get any stronger just practicing by yourself swinging that hunk of metal!" Her hand twitched like she wanted to smack him, but by the end of the first month she had seen plenty of evidence of his paranoid, hair-trigger responses and did not fancy getting injured.

Sakura was definitely glad that Sasuke had kept her from trying to get any cheap hits on Naruto. The wild boy did not take close contact with others well, or even the presence of others in his personal space. At all. The few times she had brushed by him, shoulder to shoulder when navigating tight spaces or touched fingers when handing objects to each other for various carpentry missions, he had tensed up so tight she did not need to look at him to know he already had a hand on his sword, actually needing to exert himself to not perform a draw-strike.

What was his problem anyway? Well, in addition to all the other ones? He really could not stand being touched. Sakura considered him to be most like an animal at those times, like a wild thing that could not be tamed.

She supposed it ought to be useful when they finally got to do missions in hostile territory, but she really could see why Sasuke insisted on him attending these group training days... Naruto needed to get used to working with others for decent lengths of time or he would slip and injure somebody on his own team sooner or later.

Her thoughts rapidly cycled through their missions. Secretly, she recalled almost cheering when an extremely annoying cat they had been contracted to find in the park had jumped out of an unexpected hiding place among some tree roots, spooking Naruto into letting fly with one of those blindingly fast slashes. He had managed to stop himself in time to avoid splatting the little beast, but the rush of air pressure from the huge blade's motion had actually tossed the cat into the nearby pond. The yowls of protest it had let loose made all the other crap that day worth it.

When they got there, Sasuke asked the other team for suggestions for the day's exercises, and studiously ignored Naruto's antisocial comments in general and digs at Kiba specifically. They eventually decided on a tracking and light combat exercise.

The six genin split into three pairs composed of one from each team. They would take turns hiding, searching for and chasing each other through one of the few chuunin training courses that were open to genin. Each time one pair encountered another, the designated hunter team had to be able to detain the other pair for at least 5 minutes in order for them to 'win' the encounter. An escape team 'won,' if it was never found, or if it managed to keep disengaging from battle under 5 minutes and keep it up until they got out of 'the mission zone.' That way, one person from the more combat oriented team 7 would have an opportunity to pick up tracking and stealth skills from their partner from team 8 and the team 8 partner could pick up some combat tricks during encounters with other pairs. They would also rotate through the pairings to try to distribute skills and learn more about each other.

It was a little rough at first as some pairings were... sub-optimal. Kiba more or less dismissed Sakura's usefulness in combat until she'd demonstrated how easy it was to beat someone up if genjutsu made one difficult to see. And Hinata was at first too timid to actually suggest anything to Sasuke – he had actually needed to hypnotize her slightly, using sharingan-enhanced genjutsu, in order to get her to get her to believe he wanted to learn something from her.

Surprisingly, Shino and Naruto worked together the best. On the hunter end, they got the drop on the others most of the time, and both had ways to make it tough to get enough distance to flee. And on the escape end, they managed to make it about half the time. The combination of swarms of bugs and Naruto's all-out aggressive attack style simply worked well, and did not impede each other much. "Enh, don't look so aggrieved, groupie girl. Bug boy and I work well because our verbal communication skills both suck, so we're used to getting by on other cues."

Otherwise, Naruto did not work well with either Kiba or Hinata, and either got caught or failed to catch the others repeatedly in those pairings. Kiba acted like a whipped dog around him and Hinata obviously did not like his angry, mean personality.

Sasuke's skill set was decent in both roles, though him and Kiba were far better at the hunt than the escape and him being with Hinata was better on the escape than the hunt. Working with Shino was more difficult as Sasuke could not cut loose with many of his techniques as much since the bugs could easily get caught up in them.

Sakura was best on the escape because of her genjutsu and tool use, and her pairings reflected it. She could balance out Kiba so that they were decent in both roles, while being with Hinata reinforced the ability to escape and reduced it on the hunt because they could not detain other pairs long enough. Like Sasuke, she found working with Shino to be a trying experience, and her performance with the bug specialist was mediocre as well.

At the end of the day, all were tired, dirty, and satisfied. Naruto was pleased enough with the tricks he had learned to watch out for that he did not object too much when Sasuke declared that they would have dinner together after each went home to quickly shower and change.

"It's important to build a bond with those who might one day save your life," he intoned gravely. "Cohesiveness too is a resource, and more precious than the money it takes to arm, supply and maintain a fighting force."

"Umm," Hinata said softly. "We've been at peace for a while though, since the demon invasion those years back. Why do you keep thinking in terms of wars between the villages, Sasuke-kun?"

Sasuke chuckled. "All the villages are still at war, you know, despite what they tell the civilians and us poor genin. It's a silent war right now, still at the stage of small encounters and spying and kidnapping, threats and treaties and maneuvering behind the scenes. But if you recall from our history classes, every ninja village on the continent has gotten into a major battle between five and ten times over the last hundred years. It is as though we've been at war all this time, you see? Just on a longer scale. You can see the cycle just by looking at the years by the names carved into the monument. People die in large numbers in spurts – it is still a time of great chaos, and it will be until someone strong enough to enforce order rises and changes the system. You know there are a lot of missing-nin out there and..."

Sasuke trailed off. Only Hinata was still listening, and he could tell it was only out of courtesy. Sakura was blissfully passed out, leaning heavily against him, and Naruto and Kiba were apparently having an argument about who ordered the better tasting dish of food (at least, Sasuke thought, Kiba had managed to regain some of his spirit in Naruto's presence). Shino was, well, he was not physically moving, but Sasuke could see the guy's plate of barbecue slowly emptying - he was probably maintaining a genjutsu to hide the... eating habits... of his swarm of insects.

Around them, the Uchiha looked at the others dining in the restaurant. He saw genin like himself, numerous chuunin, a handful of jounin, and one or two academy students with their families. And of course, the civilians too, who composed fully half of the customers that night.

"I'm interested, really I am," Hinata murmured softly.

Sasuke smiled, adjusted the tall collar of his deep blue shirt. "Hyuuga Hinata, remember what your eyes have seen today. It may not seem like much of a start, but this is the beginning of real change, a change Naruto and I will make happen. Then you shall see the difference between what we have now, and a true peace."

"Mm. Um, why is Naruto important? He just seems like another combat-crazy type."

"Naruto is the most important resource in my war chest. You, the others, everyone in this village, everyone on this continent will see why, one day."

Out of their line of sight, and right in Hinata's blind spot (not that she had the byakugan activated), Kakashi's eyes narrowed. Sasuke knew about Naruto's link to the Yondaime's death. He had to. What else could he be talking about?

Had some relative of his defied the Hokage's law and told him before the massacre had occurred? Or did he have access to reports that belonged to the Uchiha clan alone, hidden somewhere that the search teams had not gotten to after the Uchiha were destroyed?

---end chapter 2