Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or Assassin's Creed.
Path of the Broken Creed: Chapter One
Naruto stared at the book on his kitchen table. It lay there, motionless, as if taunting him. "Nothing to see here" it seemed to whistle jauntily. Naruto gritted his teeth and scowled at the book, eyes scrunched up in frustration, arms crossed.
Cracking one eye open, he determined that the book hadn't done anything in the brief moment he hadn't been observing it. Sighing, he uncrossed his arms and stood up from his chair, aimlessly wandering in the direction of his refrigerator.
'Damn book. He paused in his train of thought to open the refrigerator door and take a quick glance over the limited contents. Not really paying attention, he grabbed a carton of milk and shook it next to his ear for a moment. The milk clunked against the plastic container, noticeably solid.
'Still mostly liquid.'
With that thought, Naruto pulled a glass out of the sink where he kept his dirty dishes and began to pour the milk into it, stopping occassionally to pound on the bottom of the carton to get an especially chunky bit through. Once the milk had been poured, he swirled it around in the glass with his finger in an attempt to break up some of the larger pieces of milk.
Preparations completed, he took a careful sip of the milk. Despite the bad taste, he kept drinking. Supposedly it was good for you and helped children grow. At least it didn't taste as bad as vegetables. Turning his eyes back to the book, Naruto grimaced. An observer would have a hard time telling if it was because of an especially chewy bit of milk or because of his thoughts. (Truthfully, it was a combination of both.)
'Everything happened after that thing showed up. Is it driving me mad? Taking me to another world? Or...am I just having nightmares?' His thoughts were optimistic and hopeful for the last, though something told him it wasn't true.
Swirling his latest sip of milk around in his mouth and chewing as chunks presented themselves, Naruto thought back over the...assassination. That assassin...Khalid...performed Bunshin no Jutsu in a way Naruto had never thought of before, never heard of, and then...Naruto could do it.
But first he'd killed, and gone on uncaring.
Naruto held his left hand in front of his face, staring at it as if the hand would solve the paradox of his dream. Of course, it didn't, and he raised the hand behind his head, scratching the back of his hair thoughtfully as he finished the last of his milk. Placing the glass back in the dirty pile in the sink, he groaned in frustration. 'After Khalid made a Bunshin...I could. Are we...? No! I cared when the guard died. I'm not a killer. I'm not.'
Shaking his head, Naruto tried to banish the thought. His eyes fell to the book.
Reaching out, he ran his hand over the light blue leather cover. It was a strange color, and the leather had an aged feel to it, but other than that the thing appeared completely normal. He lightly grasped the hard edge of the leather, and braced himself.
He tightened his grip and flipped the book open to a random page. He immediately took a step back, reflexively falling into a defensive posture he'd half-learned at the Academy. Nothing happened.
Feeling somewhat silly, he slowly edged his way back towards his kitchen table, carefully craning his neck to peer down at the book. He swallowed nervously at the too familiar picture: a disguised Khalid forming the seal for Bunshin, Riyadh looking on in confusion. Naruto knew that beneath the Henge, blood coated the two.
'...how? The book was about somebody running through a crowd!'
Flipping through the next few pages, he saw Khalid smirking at an amused looking Riyadh as they strode towards the house, leaving behind the clone. Somehow the expressions managed to capture the entire feel of the conversation without actually saying anything.
The misgivings Naruto had felt when living that moment were entirely absent.
The book followed the assassination he'd had in a surreal fashion, as if this was a dream and he'd lived through the real thing. He paused on the page showing a comical cut-away shot of the broken lockpick inside the lock.
Naruto paused. He knew what came next. 'I...I have to know.'
Gently, almost fearfully flipping through the two Assassin's entrance to the room, Naruto saw Khalid holding his hand above the sleeping merchant, deadly-sharp spike gleaming in the dim light. Naruto closed his eyes as he turned to the next page, an action shot of the hand driving down towards the unsuspecting man, though it seemed...blurry, and distorted.
Trembling hands brought him to the next picture, and he gave a startled yelp of surprise. His own face looked back at him, covered in blood, uncaring eyes staring out from the page. The hair hung downwards and was a shade darker, and the birthmarks on his cheeks were gone...no. Not him. Khalid. Or maybe it was him. Was there a difference?
Naruto shoved the book away from him and stood quickly, knocking over his chair in the process. He stared at the spot where the book had last been on the table before it had clattered to the hardwood floor, breath coming quick and fast.
He stumbled backwards over his chair, backing away slowly from the kitchen. His back hit the wall, and he froze. He edged towards the opening to his bedroom, eyes never leaving the table. Finally his seeking hands met an end to the wall, and he turned to walk into his bedroom, looking nervously over his shoulder all the while.
The mental image of the blood-covered face never left him. He remembered the feel of blood on his face; now he knew how he looked. Like the monster he heard people call him behind his back. His breath became shallow, almost hyperventilating.
His apartment was too hot, and he shucked off his jacket nervously, knocking off the poorly tied hitai-ate he'd received that morning in the process. Naruto blindly stumbled into the bathroom, turning on the sink faucet and immediately shoving his head under the spray of cold water. It wasn't the largest of sinks, but he wasn't the biggest of people either.
He stayed like that until his breath calmed. Closing his eyes, he pulled his head out from under the faucet and took a deep breath, tilting his head back. Water streamed down from his hair and spattered against the already soaked tile floor. Taking a deep breath, he tried to slow his still racing heart.
Opening his eyes, he looked down and twisted the knob for the faucet, shutting off the water. 'Calm down,' Naruto thought, idly watching the last of the water go down the drain. 'It's a creepy book that's giving me nightmares. That's it.'
The train of thought was interrupted when he looked up from the sink and into the mirror. His hair, darkened by the water, hung in an eerily familiar fashion. The water managed to blur the whisker marks of his cheeks, and the waterblood covered his face, the blood of that guard...
Naruto stepped backwards, hands held up to shield his eyes from the image of himself. His foot slipped on the wet tile, and he floundered backwards. Naruto crashed to the floor, unable to catch himself in time. His head snapped backwards against the tile with a dull crack, and the world went black.
He lay unmoving as the wet tile of the bathroom floor began to pink with blood.
-/-/=\-\-
Naruto tightened his hitai-ate in the small mirror opposite his front door, grinning. He was a ninja, one of the respected Konoha elite. Satisfied with his appearance, he gave himself one last look in the mirror before turning to his door. He twisted the handle and threw the door open in typically exuberant Naruto fashion. He took one rushed step forwards before freezing, hand tightening convulsively on the doorknob.
Hell stood before him.
The faces of the Hokage monument had been reduced to barely recognizable rubble. The only whole fragment of the monument remaining was the left cheek of the Sandaime, still marked by the mocking tear lines Naruto had covered it in a mere day ago. The houses built into the cliff wall beneath the monument were completely gone, the gargantuan stone remnants of the Hokage faces at the base of the moment giving silent testimony to their destruction.
His jaw went slack with shock and his hand fell to his side. He collapsed to his knees, sending up a small poof of soot, dirtying the hitai-ate he'd polished so carefully.
It only got worse the closer he looked. A mile away at the monument, Konoha was in shambles, burned and twisted steel girders sticking into the air in urban parody of a petrified forest. About halfway to the monument, the village still burned, sending acrid clouds of smoke billowing into the sky, seemingly amplifying the hellish chorus of broken, agonized screams.
Everything closer than that was gone. Not one stone stood upon another...except in one place. Naruto's apartment remained alone and whole, the rest of the complex vanished in the cataclysm.
His eyes teared up from shock and the thick ash in the air. His body collapsed backwards, knees bent painfully beneath him as his mind blanked, unable to keep him upright.
The sky was red with reflected flame, smoke and soot obscuring the sun and circling around the town in an infernal spiral, sucking in the flames and embers of fallen Konoha.
Naruto raised a hand to the sky, tears of numb shock leaving clean trails in the soot on his face. No god answered his silent call, and he let the hand fall limply to the ash covered ground. He didn't know how long he lay like that, staring up at the sky. But eventually, even the apocalypse before him could not keep him motionless. Naruto stood slowly, jerkily, mouth open slightly. He inhaled ash with every choking breath, and it burned his lungs.
He wandered through the ruins, a hot wind blowing at his back, pushing him onwards towards the devestation with ephemeral fingers of heat. As he came closer to the monument, the devestation lessened, until eventually there were entire rooms only half-gone and the streets were only choked with rubble instead of covered under a thick layer of ash. The air was infinitesimally clearer, though Naruto was still forced to hold the large white collar of his orange jacket over his mouth to keep breathing.
There was no time in the charred remains of Konoha. There was only burning heat, wind heavy with ash, and monotonous destruction. Naruto kept on through the ruins that were all that remained of his world, looking for someone, something to answer his calls to a world gone eerily silent. What? Why? How?
Something coughed, sounding almost as if it were choking, to his left. Naruto dazedly turned in that direction, expecting to see another body, another ashen outline against the wall.
He didn't expect to see a small bundle of rags, shaking in the lee of the wind provided by an overturned door wedged against a half destroyed wall. Naruto blinked in surprise, before hurrying forward, legs weak with exhaustion.
His knees gave out a few yards from the object, and he crashed to the ground, scattering ash into the air. It took him a moment to muster the energy to pull his face out of the filth, and when he did, the pile of rags had shrunk away from him, edging towards the junction of the door and the ruined wall. Naruto's strained to open his mouth, desperate to call out and reassure the person, but he couldn't muster the energy to shove his head up from the ground and force out speech.
The two remained distant, one huddled and fearful, the other exhausted and confused, for several minutes.
A shaky hand rose from the dirt, once-beloved-orange jacket a dirty black. Another joined it, and with a heroic effort, Naruto managed to push himself up to a kneeling position. He reeled backward, disoriented, and managed to catch himself with a flailing hand. The bundle of rags watched the display in silence.
"Wh-what ha..?" Naruto gasped, free hand rubbing at his throat. Every half-word was a battle against the wind-driven ash that sought to choke him to deathly silence.
The person pressed itself further into the dark corner, seeming to grow smaller with every gesture on Naruto's behalf.
"No! Don't...afraid...I'm...ninja..." The hand moved from his throat to poking at the heavy hitai-ate, the metal plate burning against his skull. Naruto was rewarded with a lack of fearful motion from the other figure. Naruto grinned weakly. This was a triumph.
He rose to shaky feet, stretching out to steady himself against the broken wall. "It's 'kay...'m not gonna hurt ya..." he muttered to the person as he took one wobbly step after another, a broken stream of reassuring nonsense pouring from his mouth, each word scraping a burning trail in his throat as he forced it out.
When he was no more than a foot away, he could see the person's face for the first time. His face fell, and he swallowed nervously. A little girl, no more than three, squatted down in the ash, brown, bandage-like rags the only thing standing between her and the murderous wind. Large green eyes peeked out at him distrustfully from behind the flapping cloth.
Naruto couldn't stand how she looked. Vulnerable and afraid, afraid of him. Shaking hands unzipped his jacket, and after a moment of weak struggle, he held it out to her, ignoring the way the wind burned the now exposed flesh of his arms.
He smiled weakly, trying to overcome the profound wave of sadness the sight of the lone girl's mere existence brought him. "Here."
She remained motionless, though the distrustful green eyes flickered in the direction of the dirty garment, something like hope kindling in the girl's expression. Then the eyes turned back to his face and became guarded once more.
Naruto reflexively brought a hand up, feeling at the object of distrust. Comprehension dawned, and he chuckled, the noise sounding more like a death rattle than anything else. "'s jus' ash."
Naruto dropped his filthy hand a few inches to the neckline of his relatively clean black undershirt before raising the garment up over his eyes and scrubbing furiously against his face, trying to get the worst of the soot off. The movement caused his other hand to jerk, dipping the jacket slightly into the ash of the ground. After a few moments he let his shirt fall back into place, ignoring the discomfort of the dirty soot now on his chest in favor of the little girl's reaction.
A hand slowly stretched out past the rags, and Naruto gave the little girl a congratulatory smile for accepting the jacket -
but the hand kept going past the jacket. The girl stood, slowly edging forward, wide emerald eyes focused on his face, dirty brown hair matted around her head like an angel's halo. She brushed a hand against his cheek, leaving a streak of black filth. Naruto remained motionless, his only response a confused tightening of his eyebrows. The girl turned her face slightly, her eyes drawing him in. Her lip trembled as she opened her mouth, horror beyond the worst things this Hell had shown him shaking her voice.
"Bakemono." Monster.
Naruto's jaw fell slack and his hand balled into a confused fist around the neck of his still outstretched jacket, wide eyes giving silent plea to the girl. The world grew black and shadowed, narrowed down to just the two of them. She shuddered violently, mouth opening to utter a scream...but all that came forth was a trickle of blood. She fell forward, collapsing against his chest, and Naruto could see a cloaked, hooded figure standing behind her, arm outstretched over the broken wall.
A small, thin blade extended from the figure's hand, deep crimson dripping down its length. The figure flicked his arm to the side, blood flying to the ground before the small blade disappeared. Naruto's hands tightened unconsciously on the girl's motionless form, jaw clenching at the sight.
"Why...why did you...?" he growled, teeth grinding.
"Why did I? No, that's not right..." the figure responded in an eerily familiar voice, gloved hands moving slowly to his hood. The figure slowly revealed his face as he said, "The right question is...why did you? Because..."
Naruto looked up at his face in horror, eyes widening, orange jacket falling from numb hands.
Naruto looked down at himself, watched as the jacket slipped into the ash, felt the blood of the still-wet hidden spike trickle down his wrist.
Double-vision spiked into his brain, and he fell to his knees, clutching his head, agony driving everything but an omnipresent voice from the world.
"Because...we are the same."
Something inside Naruto snapped. His body went limp, and the words continued to echo. He couldn't find anything to protest.
Because...was the voice right?
-blood-
It couldn't be. He wasn't...but he was.
-/-/=\-\-
At his entrance, silence slowly enveloped the classroom. Heads turned, conversation ceased, and an air of stilted shock permeated the students-cum-genin. He ignored it all, shuffling to his usual seat next to Sasuke.
He collapsed bonelessly down onto the bench, blood-caked blonde hair sticking out at all angles. He'd been there for less than a second before his arms were on the desk. He pitched forward, landing heavily on his pillowed arms, and passed out.
The class continued to stare expectantly at Naruto, as if waiting for the boy to spring to his feet and return to his normal stupidity. Before any of them could muster up the courage to poke him with a stick (standard procedure for confirming that something was dead) the door slammed open, causing them to all reflexively turn to the front of the class.
Iruka barely spared a glance at the assembled students as he strode to the teacher's desk, clipboard in hand. Nothing seemed out of place - Naruto was asleep, the girls were already turning their attention back in the general direction of Sasuke...then his eyes froze in their hasty inspection of the class and he did a brief double take.
Shikamaru was awake? Strange. Oh well, it saved him the trouble of having to wake the boy up and tell him his team assignment. He'd probably be seeing Shikamaru again after he failed his sensei's exam...the boy had no drive.
Trying to banish that morose thought, he turned his attention back to the clipboard, resolutely refusing to look up.
"From now on, you are no longer students, but fully fledged shinobi," he began, mind drifting as he went through the rote speech welcoming the new graduates. "The next step in your career is the assignment of official duties on behalf of Konoha. We will begin by dividing you into three man teams, each of which will be mentored by a jounin who will instruct you as you become more familiar with your various duties. I've divided you all so that the cells would have roughly equal abilities."
That last bit was pure fiction, of course. He'd only controlled the selection of maybe half the graduates; the rest had already been sorted into teams when he'd been assigned the task. He knew better than to ask, but the reasons were obvious. Couldn't have a clan scion fall into disgrace because they failed to become genin, after all.
The first six team assignments went well, with only the occasional moan of frustration. It would be short-lived, as would the teams themselves. None of them were slated to pass this year.
He prepared himself for some sort of exclamation when he announced Team Seven. "Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura..." - the sound of the girl's forehead slamming against her desk was audible clear across the classroom - "and Uchiha Sasuke." Her cheer was deafening from the same distance. Iruka paused in his reading of the teams to give a quick glance up at Naruto, who appeared to still be asleep. On another day, an eraser would have been in the air before one of the students could blink, but this was supposed to be a solemn occasion. Shrugging mental shoulders, he continued on with the team assignments.
Nobody in the classroom noticed blue eyes slit open and carefully study the two who had been placed on his team. Something unreadable gleamed in their icy depths before the lids shut once more.
"...and I'll be introducing your jounin-sensei later this afternoon. Until then, you're dismissed."
-------
Dead blue eyes gazed off blankly into the distance while he slumped lazily against the red brick wall of the side street. All of his attention was centered on his male teammate, eating what appeared to be a rice ball, several stories beneath him. Sasuke finished, oblivious to the other's presence, and leapt off the wall he'd been sitting on, heading in the direction of the Academy. He gave up his pose of apathy and moved to follow, silently bounding along the rooftops.
The pursuit continued for several more minutes, Sasuke oblivious. The blonde had a natural talent for avoiding attention; he just rarely had any inclination to use it.
Finally, Sasuke stopped outside a market stall, eyeing something that was concealed from Naruto by the stall's awning.
It would be a long time before before he got another chance like that.
His hand crept for his kunai pouch and unbuttoned the flap as quietly as he could. There was no chance to be heard at this distance, but stealth was never a bad habit.
The hilt felt comfortable in his hand, and he cocked his arm back, keeping his eyes on Sasuke. It wasn't that far a distance, but one shot was one shot. It would have to hit, and be fatal quickly, or the inevitable deluge of medic-nin would stabilize him.
He turned his arms back and bent his knees slightly, then took a step forward, hurling his arm forwards with lightning speed.
A bony hand clenched around his fist, and before he could react he'd been whirled around and thrown to the ground. He looked up at horn rimmed glasses that shone with reflected light, concealing the grey eyes of the woman who pinned him with almost laughable ease. But he'd never been one to give up, and he twisted his upper body, left hand crossing his waist, going for the kunai pouch at his leg.
Shink!
He froze, left eye open wide, futilely attempting to focus on the small blade scratching the tip of his eyelid. With his right eye, he could just manage to make out the holster for the knife inside the woman's sleeve. The entire thing looked to be a mechanical device, some internal mechanism propelling the blade outward...and through the hole in her fist left by an amputated ring finger.
'A hidden blade!? Is she...?'
Neither spoke, and he held his breath, fearful that any movement might end with the hidden blade lodged in his skull.
She broke the mutual silence first. "I've been looking for you." This seemed like a rhetorical comment, so he didn't answer. Answering would require movement, and he was deathly afraid of any movement. "I only have one question for you. Blink if you understand."
He could feel his eyelashes brushing against the razor edge of the blade as he blinked, and swallowed unconsciously.
"What is your name?"
His mouth opened, reflexive response from years of answering the question on the tip of his tongue. No words came out, and his head rocked backwards, bumping lightly against the rough bricks, sending a bolt of pain through his still tender scalp wound. Confusion flickered across his features, and his brow tightened as he sought the answer that he knew he should know. Mental gears spun furiously in place, but nothing connected, and his thoughts ran wild, down bright mental paths that were and dark ones that were not.
"Kha...Nar…lito? No...no...that's not..."
The hidden blade and the oppressive presence radiating from the woman disappeared, but he remained motionless on the ground, barely aware of the world around him. A distant voice echoed, and he looked up, trying to focus dazed eyes upon the speaker.
The woman, who he could now clearly see was the librarian, frowned, pale thin lips drawn into a grim line. Her eyes flicked over him, taking in the dirty, unwashed clothes, bloodstained hair, and unevenly dilated pupils. "Worthless. You've already succumbed to the memories."
He reached for the word like a drowning man for a lifeline. "Memories?"
Her grey eyebrows rose above the horned rims of her glasses. "So…there might be a few shreds of sanity left, if you can actually form a coherent thought," she thought aloud. Giving the blond a calculating look, she asked, "Why were you following that boy?"
"He's my…target? No…my rival? I…I think…" he trailed off, mouth moving silently.
She sighed. "You'll never survive if you can't answer those questions. You're too far gone…"
He didn't respond.
She slowly shook her head. "But maybe he knows who you are?" Her voice was quiet, hinting, and unobtrusive. It hit the boy like a brick to the head. She continued on in the same un-ignorable voice. "Follow him." The voice continued on, a misty haze enveloping his mind, and he couldn't help but nod affirmation.
He rose slowly from the bricks, still ignoring the dried blood clumped in his dirty hair. The command completely bypassed the few remaining centers of logical thought he possessed, and went straight into motion.
As he raced off over the rooftops, the librarian frowned silently to herself, rubbing her now aching head.
And everything was going so well, before that meddling kid showed up…
-------
His disheveled appearance didn't attract more than a briefly upturned eyebrow from his dark haired teammate, though the other spent several minutes loudly telling "Sasuke-kun" how it made "the idiot" look like a madman.
The three were alone in an empty classroom, still waiting on…someone, he'd forgotten who. Or why, only that he was supposed to wait and…follow.
An hour later the door slid open, and a very tall, slim man with impossibly angled silver hair walked into the room. The man's hitai-ate was slung down over his face like an eye patch, and a cloth mask concealed the lower half of his face, leaving only the right eye visible.
The man spent a few moments looking over them, making a show of inspecting each of them closely. The eye closed, and even though he couldn't see the man's face, he knew that there was a smile plastered upon it.
"You must tell me who does your hair. I've never seen something that manages to pull off the 'dropped on my head as a baby' look quite so well."
The blond grinned even as his female teammate gave him a superior look. The other frowned darkly, trying to pierce the stupid look of innocence on the silver haired man's face.
He was right to be suspicious. After all, the silver haired man had been facing all three of them when he'd spoken.
------
The group of four sat on the roof, the silver haired man perched precariously upon a railing over a hundred feet from the ground. The children had taken the simpler option of sitting on the stairs.
The silver haired man carelessly waved an arm at the trio of children, ignoring the way it made him wobble on the railing. "Now, I'd like you all to tell us about yourselves. You know, the usual stuff…what you like the most, hate the most, dreams, ambitions, hobbies...things like that."
The girl hugged her knees close to her chest. "Why don't you go first? We don't know anything about you, either."
An eyebrow rose in mock surprise, disappearing behind the tilted cloth of a hitai-ate. "Me? Well…my name is Hatake Kakashi. I don't feel like talking about my likes or dislikes, my dreams for the future are none of your business…" All three children could see where this was headed, and none of them enjoyed it. "But at least I have a lot of hobbies!" Kakashi finished brightly, his one visible eye closed as he somehow managing to pull off a smiling look.
This would bear further investigation. Was he using some sort of mental projection?
"Now, it's your turn, starting with you on the left."
The girl perked up, hands clenching into girlish fists in front of her face as she cast a sidelong glance at the dark haired boy in the middle. "My name is Haruno Sakura. My favorite thing isn't really a…thing, it's a person. A boy. And that boy is…" she brought her fists up over her face, as if attempting to conceal the deepening of her blush. "Uh…let's move on to my dream."
Her eyes widened briefly, and then she shut them tightly, entire body quivering. Her bright pink hair fell over her face, concealing her expression. He could hear the faintest hint of a squeal come out of her mouth.
Thankfully Kakashi interrupted, head shaking almost imperceptibly to himself. "That…that will be enough. Thank you, Sakura. Now…you in the middle."
Everyone focused closely, Sakura blushing, heart in her eyes, Kakashi with thinly veiled interest. The last, with a strange kind of hope.
"My name is Uchiha Sasuke," he began, mouth concealed behind interlaced fingers, giving him an air of the dramatic. "There are plenty of things I hate, but I don't think it matters, considering there is almost nothing I do like. It seems pointless to talk about 'dreams.' That's just a word…but I do have an ambition."
Sasuke's face turned hard as he finished, and, tilting his head upright to stare Kakashi in the eyes, he said, "To restore my clan and…to kill a certain man."
Sakura gasped, and slowly began to outstretch an arm in compassion. Her courage quickly failed her, and she turned the gesture into a nervous brushing of her hair.
'I wonder if he's talking about me?'
Kakashi nodded, face...eye…unreadable. "And finally, you on the right."
Silence. Blue eyes clouded over, and he froze. Struggling against himself, he narrowed his eyes, trying to bring up the name that wouldn't come. That disturbing, alien feeling of the wheels of his mind spinning in place returned, and he couldn't -
Whack!
"Naruto! He's talking to you!" Sakura yelled, chest heaving as she shook her fist at him. "Pay attention!"
Sasuke turned to stare at her, registering emotion for the first time. Sakura blushed and let out something that sounded suspiciously like "meep!" before turning away, as if nothing had happened.
The blond ignored the exchange, mental gears crunching into place. One could almost hear the whirring clicks as his life exploded behind his eyes.
He spoke boldly, as if the declaration would make it more real. "My name…is Uzumaki Naruto!"