Hey guys, sorry for the delay. I've been trying to finish the next chapter in my other story but I've just had writer's block, ya'know?
Anywho, let's just hop right to it.
"Who are you?"
A straight forward question with way too many answers. Naruto nodded to the two ninja, they hadn't killed him immediately so the boy figured he could at least trust them with who he was, "To know me is to know my story. Will you listen?" The ninja glanced at each other and then the woman nodded at Naruto. With their consent Naruto dove into his own tale, "Since I can remember I've been alone, shunned by the villagers of Konohagakure. My oldest memory is of being beaten. I don't know by who, but it was the first of many and at the end, as they left my bruised body in the shadows I was called a demon and from then on that was how the villagers referred to me. Since that first incident the beatings started happening more and they stopped using my name in place of calling me a demon instead. Eventually I wised up somewhat and learned to hide from them, I did my best to erase my face from among them and I did. For a time I hid and it gave me satisfaction that I'd out smarted my tormenters, I even learned how to scavenge and steal. It gave me a sense that I could fight back in a way. I might even go so far as to say I was having fun.. There was one villager who was different from the others, she was nice to me when she saw me and defended me even when I wasn't apparently there. She gave me food and clothes and she even accepted my existence, my presence. But all good things end and that time was no different. Word got around about the nice lady and one day I noticed that the village was almost empty. I didn't think anything of it at the time, I didn't know what was happening." Naruto struggled to keep his tears from falling but the sadness was evident in his crimson eyes, "The village was empty that day because all of the villagers had gone to watch her burn. I only found out later because I just happened to overhear a couple of people laughing about it the next day. They burned an innocent woman alive and all they could do was laugh. After that I did my best to keep my distance so that no one else would get hurt. Those were my loneliest days and the beatings got so bad that I almost gave up on even living. That was when I met Kurama. He made me strong, he taught me. It made me happy to have a friend that no one could take away, that I could just be myself around. But even that had to end. One day he was gone and I didn't know what to do. Then I was attacked, I guess some villager finally got tired of living on the same soil as me. It was a leaf ninja who came at me but I was way stronger, I ended up..." Naruto's voice caught in his throat as he faced what he'd done, "I ended up killing him. I knew immediately that I had to get out of the village, out of the country even. The ninja of the village had always refrained from taking part in the civilian's actions but now, now the villagers had an actual reason to convince the ninja population of the village to 'deal' with me. So I left... and here I am."
Silence reigned supreme in the small clearing and Naruto couldn't figure out what the two ninja were thinking for the life of him. They suddenly got up from their sitting positions and without even batting an eye at the young boy turned on their heels and tree hopped away. Naruto was stunned for a moment before he hopped to his feet and raced after them, "Wait!" They weren't going very fast and Naruto caught up to them quickly and matched their pace, "Hey, where are you going?" The robed woman looked at him with her amber eyes and the boy saw something more than indifference shine in them.
"Amegakure." Naruto stumbled in surprise but quickly caught back up, "Then let me come with you. Let me come with you and make some kind of contribution. I know I can do it, if you only give me the chance." The woman looked at the purple-eyed red head and he spoke in a monotone, "Do what you will, but know that he's your responsibility." Naruto head this and cried out in triumph, "Yes, I won't let you down!" The boy was overjoyed at the prospect of possibly having a place to finally fit in, but in the back of his mind Naruto wondered if he was ever going to hear Kurama's voice again.
As the group of three tree hopped through the forest Naruto wondered who these new people were. The boy didn't have any real experience outside of Konoha village, he didn't know these were the 'God' and 'Angel' of the hidden rain, Pain Nagato and Konan. To Naruto, these two ninja were lifelines, a direction for him to go, the beginning of a new path.
It took a week after that fateful meeting Naruto and his new charge crossed into the village. It had been raining constantly and had started a few days prior to their arrival. It was on that day that Pain had split from their party and left for some unknown destination. Naruto looked up at the tall woman next to him in shock and awe, "You live here?!" He was completely miffed at the entire place, "How can the buildings be so tall? It's impossible!" Before Naruto could run off to explore Konan spoke as she walked up the side of the nearest building, "Come." Pausing only to flash a toothy smile, Naruto launched himself into the air before latching onto the side of the tower with a small application of chakura to the bottom of his sandals.
Konan had performed small tests of what Naruto was capable of during their short time of travel, seeing how he'd deal with trying to keep up with her and Pain and she was pleasantly surprised that he'd performed well above what she had expected. Naruto already had a large amount of control over his own unfair quantity of chakura, he had about the same amount as Konan and he was only five and a half years old. The blue haired ninja pondered the question of what she was actually going to do with the blond ball of energy as she walked up the vertical surface. The boy was already too powerful to fit into their own ninja academy's curriculum even though from what the 'God's Angel' could tell he didn't know any legitimate jutsu despite the uncanny control of his life energy. The boy did make use of storage seals though, it seemed he drew his own instead of just using the average store-bought ones that could be found in practically any ninja village. That was something to go off of.
Konan was sure that this boy she had picked up had the potential to be instrumental in bringing about true peace, she had felt it when she first laid eyes on the blond in the bushes. The woman nodded to herself, she'd teach the boy personally as Jiraia had taught her and the others. She looked back at the hyperactive blond as he tried to take in the sights around him all at once. 'Yes,' Konan thought, 'I will push him towards his full potential.'
Naruto was unaware of the plans the woman walking next to him was making and was just doing his best to enjoy himself. Back in Konoha the young jinchuriki had always loved the rain, the villagers always stayed indoors during the rainy days and that gave the boy the freedom to roam around during the day. The rain was the key that unlocked his chains of oppression, if only for a day, and that was why he loved the rain and also why he was completely comfortable in the constant downpour because when it rained he'd always be out there.
The whiskered jinchuriki saw the tall woman floating across the large gap between the one he was now on top of and one that was even higher. The boy laughed in delight as he flung himself at the ledge where Konan stood waiting for him. As he began to loose altitude the boy launched a shurikan attached to a length of ninja wire that fastened around a pipe that jutted out higher on the building and proceeded to sling shot himself back into the air and onto the platform where he danced a crazy jig, "It worked! I can't believe it worked! The wire held and the shurikan fastened just like it's supposed to!" The young jinchuriki turned just in time to see Konan moving to another tower. And so the two went from tower to tower, steadily climbing higher into the sky.
When Konan finally stopped at their destination Naruto was curious to see what was behind the door where they stood. The boy hurried after the mysterious beauty as the pipe-ridden door opened and she walked in, Naruto close behind. The boy raced all around the large room, taking in as many details as he could, "Is this where you live?" Naruto jumped into a handstand to look at Konan instead of turning around, "No." The boy looked towards her in curiosity, "It is where I will teach you to be truly strong." That made his gears moving, "Truly strong?" The amber-eyed woman looked down at Naruto, her demeanor completely different from her reserved-self of a few moments ago, "You fight for your own survival, therefore you are weak. You hate others because they hate you, therefore you are weak." The jinchuriki's body felt a pressure begin to push down on his body and as it slowly increased he idly wondered if this was killing intent that he was feeling. Konan continued with out pausing, "You want to get revenge for what they did to you, therefore-" Naruto interrupted with a shout of his own, "I never said anything about wanting revenge for what the villagers did to me!"
"So you don't care that they burned that nice women alive?" That caught Naruto off guard, "No, that's not-" Konan spoke again, "That's not what you meant? Of course not! She wasn't like the others, she didn't deserve what the villagers did to her! Is that what you were going to say?" Naruto shut up at that and slowly nodded, "It makes you angry to think about what happened to the woman who helped you. You're guilty but you shift the blame from yourself to the villagers, saying that they were the ones who killed her, but do you remember why?" The ninja lowered her voice to a normal volume, "They killed her because she was associated with you." At this point Naruto was on his hands and knees with tears streaming down his face and pooling on the ground. He didn't respond, unable to speak between his uncontrollable gasps of breath, "When you are strong your enemies will target the people close to you when they cannot defeat you directly. That is the curse of power, and that is why you must fight not out of hate of revenge, but instead to bring peace to the world and to those who cannot fight for themselves. That is what it means to be truly strong." The blue haired shinobi's words struck a chord within Naruto, "You're right," before he had only ever fought for his own survival, "But I will take your words into my heart and I will become truly strong! I will protect those who are precious to me!" They stood silent for what felt like forever with Konan's statuesque figure and Naruto stuck in a pose with his finger pointing up into the air between them. Slowly Konan cracked a smile as she pulled Naruto into the first hug of his life, "Then I will teach you to be truly strong."
Naruto didn't know what to do. No one had ever embraced him like this before, Kurama couldn't because he was trapped inside the jinchuriki and while the woman had been friendly they had still been almost like strangers to each other. The whiskered blond did remember seeing other people do this thing before when they were happy or sad. The boy held onto Konan's robe with his fist and he truly seemed to act his age, "What is this?" The Akatsuki member absent mindedly stroked the blonde's unusually soft hair as she chuckled lightly, "You don't know what a hug is?"
Konan's training was no joke. It had been a year since Naruto left the leaf but he'd been so busy it hadn't really felt like that long. Whenever the whiskered blonde wasn't training with or learning from his mother figure (which was most of the time), he was either in the library learning something new or trying out his own experiments and things. During this time the jinchuriki had taken the opportunity to learn how to cook (mostly ramen) and also whatever he could about fuinjutsu, the art of sealing. In his independent endeavors Naruto quickly found out that the reason that Kurama hadn't explained how the storage scroll worked in detail was because of just how complicated even the simplest of seals were, you had to be able to successfully draw out and mesh together the formulas for creating a pocket dimension, the stabilizing field for such a dimension, a gateway that would open and then close upon activation via chakura, the mechanism to suck in an object if the seal was empty, the mechanism to spit out an object it the seal was already filled, and finally a second stabilizing formulae to prevent the seal from exploding or imploding on the off-chance that it's partially or completely destroyed. All of that had to be drawn out precisely for a low end sealing scroll to even work properly. Naruto had quickly realized that Fuinjutsu was complicated.
That said, Konan never ceased to keep Naruto busy with all the different things she had him doing. Altogether the training ranged anywhere from high-caliber taijutsu training to intense games of chess and from that it would coast into actual battle simulations inside of a genjutsu world where the end product would unfailingly be Naruto being completely overpowered. Of course she also taught Naruto a (very) small amount of jutsu but when it came to actual techniques the emphasis was on Naruto creating his own.
Every night Naruto went to bed feeling like his body would melt and his head would explode. Every morning he would wake up with the same feelings, though considerably less. That was he life for a year and the boy had felt it had been the time of his life. The entire time Naruto was either by himself or training under the amber-eyed kunoichi's tutelage. One day a question popped into the boy's head and right out of his mouth, "Hey Konan? Where do you always go to when you leave?" The 'God's Angel' of Amegakure turned back around from the doorway she was about to go through and eyed the excitable blonde thoughtfully, "Do you really want to see?" When her charge nodded hard enough to hit his head on the table he was sitting at the blue-haired woman let out a sigh, "I suppose now would be as good a time as ever for you to meet them."
"It's a group called the Akatsuki."
Ooooo~ scary ;'O'; So how do you think it'll go down? Don't hesitate to review...
Now, off to the next chapter! Datebiow! Datebyao. Datebiao? *sigh* Believe it!
Kukukukuku...