Published: Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Notes: Thank you for all the reviews last chapter! It really makes authors feel good when they know people got some enjoyment out of their hard work! Well, wish me luck for my Algebra test tomorrow! Don't forget to let me know what you think and check out some of my other stuff if you enjoy my writing.
Chapter Four
An Avenger
Naruto grinned, something beyond joyful and into the realm of ecstatic. "I'm going to become Hokage. I'm going to be coronated." And then suddenly everybody froze.
Naruto left Tony Stark far enough behind to trust that the borderline puppeteer couldn't see anything, and the ninja ceased his mad dash for a moment. He clung to the underside of a large tree branch, hiding from the dim moonlight as he perked his ears. He could hear a flapping sound, muffled gusts of wind preceding the sight of a white washed bird alighting before him.
Three cloaked nin immediately jumped down, and then the avian once again took off, punctuated by a flash of lightning shining on Sai's grim, soaked features. He gave a nod to Naruto, and was out of sight.
Then, at the edges of his vision, Naruto could see his guard. He noted, dispassionately, that they had instinctively adopted the marching order of the War. Sai had flown off as advance scout, while Naruto could sense that Kakashi had taken the rear guard. He saw his Intelligence officer at his right side, and his Medic Nin at his left.
He raised his hand and flipped through half a dozen hand signals with familiarity. Stay out of sight. Keep an eye on puppeteer and captain. I'll confront the enemy.
They nodded once, sharply, and then for all intents and appearances they had never been there. Naruto closed his eyes and focused on his ears, pushing a bit of chakra into them to expand his hearing.
While local wildlife were nowhere to be seen, their small hearts were beating out of their chests in alarm as they huddled in their dens. Naruto singled them out and dismissed them, expanding his search radius. He could hear Stark's quietly whirring machinery, and the sound of Rogers' dash across the forest floor. There was the sound of the jet's turbines, trying to find a clearing. Then, there it was, Loki's voice: bitter and full of vitriol.
The ninja straightened, standing fully upside down and saving himself from a messy spill only by the mysterious power of chakra. A tardy owl flapped past to its tree hollow, and it left behind only a wisp of airborne leaves in a windless, miserably wet night.
Naruto monitored the conversation as he neared, something about summoning dark energy and Odin, and about brothers.
Maybe it said something about his past experience that he didn't break stride, didn't doubt his hearing for a moment, but only thought, typical.
As it stood, the parallels between Sasuke and Loki were plain to see, and it didn't paint a very nice portrait. Both had suffered an early life in the shadows, unwanted. There had been some sort of catalyst that had set them on the path of an Avenger.
For Sasuke, it had been the Uchiha Massacre, of seeing every family member he had cut down in front of his eyes. Who knew what it was for Loki.
And after that catalyst, the pressure in them had bent their minds in some strange way. Then all they wanted was power, power to get their revenge. A mind focused entirely on vengeance was a mind entirely twisted out of shape. There would be no reason, no mercy. Not until someone gained their trust.
And even as he stretched out his hand to grab Thor's arm and drag him off the rocky outcropping, Naruto had a thought that he hadn't dared to entertain for a long while.
Maybe I can save him.
~ oOo ~
One instant Thor was standing in front of Loki, fighting down the urge to strangle his aggravating, murderous, insulting (alive) brother, and the next moment he was sailing through the air from a force he did not expect nor recognize.
With effort, he swung his body away from the constricting arm to regain control over the flight, and left grooves of his feet in the earth as he landed on the forest floor. He immediately turned about, mighty Mjolnir at the ready to smite his foe, but he was alone in the clearing. There was no sign of his abductor, only the silence of the forest.
He straightened to his full impressive height, stretching out his booming voice. "Who are you? Come out so I may see you!"
For a few moments, Thor thought that the coward would remain in hiding. He perked his ears and peered into the shadows, but could see nothing of the other. Only the underbrush.
Then, amongst the layers of trees, a figure slowly emerged into the illumination of the moonlight. It was a mere Midgardian youth, the garments recognizable from his recent stay in the realm. The t shirt and jeans were both black, the edges mixing with the darkness of the forest behind him. And then, in blood red, a symbol of a stylized leaf was sewn onto his shirt.
"Who are you?" Thor repeated warily.
The youth studied him for but a moment, and then his eyes darted in the direction they had left Loki. A suit of enchanted armor flew into the clearing, alighting nearby on the bed of leaves.
The faceplate lifted upwards, and the man inside looked at Thor doubtfully? "What is this? Shakespeare in the park?" He looked at Thor somewhat mockingly and struck a dramatic pose, his joints whirring. "Doth mother know / you weareth her drapes?"
Thor's face heated at the insult, but he tried to maintain his calm. "You don't know what you're dealing with," he said.
Tony's face scrunched up in a fierce scowl. There was nothing the genius hated more than people who told him that he couldn't understand something. It was a slur on his most valuable resource — his mind.
He opened his mouth to say something suitably cutting, but Naruto raised a warning hand casually. Then he shook his head, and Tony could feel the bluster fading away. He considered why he should listen to the kid, but then recalled the pure rejection of the laws of physics from before. Was he a mutant? A super soldier? Tony studied Naruto thoughtfully, placing aside a predictable argument in favor of the current puzzle.
He wanted to know how Naruto would handle this.
~ oOo ~
Naruto gave a warning to Tony, somewhat surprised that the man had obeyed him. He didn't seem like much of a follower, but then perhaps he was just digesting what had happened earlier. Naruto had given him quite a bit of food for thought with his stunt, he supposed. Civilians were often struck dumb at the power of chakra.
After Tony backed down, Naruto turned his attention to Loki, who was peering over the outcropping at them, and then at Thor, who was beginning to become restless.
"My name is Naruto Uzumaki," Naruto said. "This is Tony Stark," he said gesturing, and then he pointed above them just as Captain America landed from the rocky outcropping with a mighty shake of the ground. "—and this is Steve Rogers."
Steve straightened, holding his shield against his chest and giving Naruto a look of worry. Then, when assured that Naruto's reckless drop hadn't injured him, he turned his attention to Thor.
"Rogers," Naruto said. "This is Thor, Loki's older brother."
Naruto gave both Stark and Rogers a sharp look, wondering if they would try to pick a fight, and then returned to Thor. "You can't take your brother," he said. "Not yet."
"But he is my brother," Thor protested, earnest face stubborn. "And he has the Tesseract. I must deal with him. He must face Asgardian justice."
It's my fault, my problem, Thor meant.
"It's gone too far for that now," Naruto said, not without sympathy. He recalled when Sasuke had attacked the Kage Summit, how it had suddenly ballooned beyond control or village containment. "Loki attacked a crowd of Civilians. These people, SHIELD, demands that Loki repay them for it. You can't expect your brother to get away with this. Not when he's not sorry."
Thor winced.
Captain America took a step forward. "So, if we're done with this, can we all go back onto the jet and talk like reasonable gentlemen?" he said, with just a touch of surliness.
Tony's hands hummed with restrained power, while Thor's hand flexed around his hammer handle. Naruto sneezed at the rain soaking through his clothes.
"Yeah," Steve answered himself, turning back to Loki and the jet.
~ oOo ~
The flight from then on was a mix of awkward and more awkward, Steve and Thor looking at nothing in particular while maintaining total silence. Even Tony seemed a bit tired and subdued. Meanwhile, Naruto stared at Loki curiously, and Loki glared at Thor resentfully.
Naruto closed his eyes for a moment, hearing the small beating wings of one of Sai's messenger birds above the whirring of the jet's engines. He put his hand in his pocket, pressing his fingers into a hand sign to focus his energy. He flared his chakra, just a bit, and then Sai's bird poofed into the white smoke of a dismissed summons. Opening his eyes, he saw Loki's attention now fixed upon him, a gleam of what could be called surprise in his eyes.
"...So where did you come from?" Naruto asked Loki conversationally.
Loki regarded Naruto thoughtfully. The Midgardian's energy had changed for just a moment, in a manner that only sorcerers could manipulate the inner forces. How curious. Despite their initial meeting, the boy seemed not entirely set against him. It wouldn't do to alienate him now. Such a game piece might prove interesting.
"I came from the shadows betwixt the branches of Yggdrasil," Loki answered obligingly. "Before then, I was taken as the spoils of an ancient war and raised in Asgard."
When it came to reasons to become an Avenger, that might do it.
"Are you getting revenge for your home country?" Naruto asked, a hint of shadow in his eyes.
Loki threw his head back in a burst of unkind laughter. "For Jötunheimr?" he snorted. "You really amuse me. Maybe once I have subjugated this realm I will keep you alive as a jester."
Naruto wondered at the bitterness, at the insult that was meant to distract him from a vulnerability, but allowed Loki's scorn to go on without mention. He'd begun to have a few suspicions, however. Still, all the same, he commented, "I don't think that will work out so well. I'm expected somewhere in a month, and I can't be late."
Loki tilted his head. What could possibly be so important as to put world domination on the back burner? A marriage, perhaps? But the boy seemed a bit young for that. "What, pray tell, would claim such a strict date?"
"Maybe a video game release," Tony ventured.
Naruto grinned, something beyond joyful and into the realm of ecstatic. "I'm going to become Hokage. I'm going to be coronated."
And then suddenly everybody froze.
~ oOo ~
Loki paused for only a second, and then beamed a polite, slightly brittle smile. "Congratulations," he said. "I would bear gifts for this coronation, but as you can see I'm slightly tied up." He raised his manacled hands into the air.
Naruto wasn't entirely sure how to take that, but he had the feeling that he'd stumbled across the crux of this whole thing without meaning to.
"I am curious, however," Loki said. "I had been led to believe that Midgard had long ago left monarchies behind for republics and democracy."
Naruto froze, realizing that now Stark and Rogers were shooting him stunned stares. Crap, he thought.
"I couldn't say," he spoke carefully.
"Indeed," Loki replied, generously changing the route of the conversation with a sly smile on his thin mouth. "Tell me, what form of sorcery allowed you to fight with me earlier? You are not a mere soldier, but something vastly more exciting."
Naruto was stuck. He was trying to gain — not Loki's trust, Loki was too slippery for that — but for Loki to establish a habit. He wanted Loki to know that he could start a dialogue at any point in time and Naruto would oblige him. It was surprising how many people could be persuaded to stop their schemes when they had a sympathetic ear. Most people were just ... alone. Then Naruto shrugged off his own remembered hurts.
"It is called chakra," Naruto admitted. "A form of energy that pierces both the outside and the inside, the physical and the mental in equal parts."
"Fascinating," Loki said softly. "For an imperfect study, it is very effective."
"And how about you?" Naruto asked. "Your energy isn't the same as mine, but it is very similar."
"Midgardians wouldn't understand," Loki said. Naruto could tell that Loki wasn't being purposefully patronizing, but truly believed that Midgardians couldn't understand how to manipulate the energy he used.
"Hey!" Tony protested on principle.
Loki snorted, turning his back on the jet and dismissing those inside disdainfully.
"We're approaching the Helicarrier," Romanoff called from the front.
~ oOo ~
They landed on the Helicarrier's surface, Romanoff quickly shooing all of the superheroes off of the jet while a team of SHIELD operatives escorted Loki below deck.
Naruto quickly scanned his surroundings, searching for cameras. He tried to calculate blind spots, the trajectory calculations usually reserved for shuriken passing through his mind. As Loki turned out of sight, Naruto put his hands in hand seals inside his jacket sleeves and summoned a a Shadow Clone inside a thin blind spot as he passed by. The Shadow Clone nodded, and then it Henged into a nondescript man with brown hair and boring blue eyes and stalked after the criminal.
Naruto narrowed his eyes, but made an act of following Romanoff without protest. Here, he wasn't a general, wasn't a Kage in all but name. He was just Naruto Uzumaki, protector of Civilians and ghost in their records. And military groups didn't like ghosts.
~ oOo ~
As Boss followed Romanoff meekly, the clone sneaked around the ship carefully. While the cameras made it more difficult than it might normally be, it wasn't impossible. Though Naruto was trained as a heavy ninjutsu assault specialist, he was a ninja, and all ninja were trained in infiltration.
"Good morning," he said with a bland smile toward a patrolling guard.
The guard nodded at him politely, scanning him for unauthorized weapons casually as he continued on his way.
Act like you belong. It was the first and best lesson to blend in somewhere you weren't supposed to be.
He stretched out his senses, searching out for Loki. It was harder now that Loki was keeping silent, but Naruto continued on. He isolated the sound of footsteps, and then the footsteps of those who were in groups of seven.
There were a few groups of these, including the group containing Boss, but only one with nervous, thudding heartbeats in six of them. A grin dropped onto his features, and he turned suddenly down a corridor, passing by a woman in a pantsuit holding a tablet in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
He kept a corridor behind them all the while, occasionally taking the long way around so that no one suspected him of tailing the group. It would hopefully confuse the people behind the camera as well.
Then there was the heavy thud of a high security door, and the clone knew that he had arrived. While the six guards dispersed to guard the door, another figure entered the room with heavy footsteps.
So this was the Fury that Romanoff had reported to.
Naruto passed out of the view of the people in the adjoining hallway and disappeared into one of those blind spots, using chakra to climb up the wall and paste himself into the shadows. He crawled along the ceiling and its pipes, directly above the heads of those who were guarding the door. Naruto stopped, eavesdropping on the conversation enfolding within.
The conversation wasn't exactly amiable on either side. Fury hated Loki's unpredictability, while Loki hated Fury's need for total control. Plus, you know, eighty deaths. Add that to being enemies, and there were hateful, mocking remarks on either side.
Fury left after a moment, and Naruto took the opportunity of the door opening to slip inside undetected, speed turning his form invisible to the guards.
~ oOo ~
Naruto stepped onto the main deck, taking in his surroundings with a mix of comfort and wariness. As the strongest nin and nest Hokage, he had often switched between the home base and the front lines. Seeing dozens of people sitting down in tidy rows as chaos loomed in the background was familiar, like a homecoming. Knowing that all of them were ready to attack him at any sign of hostility left him a bit on guard. He quietly leaned back against one of the walls, subtly hiding in plain sight and watching the Captain, Stark, Romanoff, and Thor.
After making some pointless small talk with some of the others here — a man named Bruce Banner and a woman named Maria Hill — the man in charge strode in, seeming slightly annoyed but mostly just underwhelmed. So this was Fury, the man on the communications system from Romanoff's secret report.
"Welcome," Fury said, "to the Avengers Initiative."
~ oOo ~
The clone took a moment to study his surroundings, marveling at the strange cage he beheld. It was a cylinder, glass encasing the entire thing in a way that would, apparently, drop it down below at the first sign of trauma.
Loki was facing away, but he turned around and walked forward almost to the edge with a mocking grin. "Were you sent here to bring me that magazine?" he wondered. "I should marvel at the efficiency of mortal imprisonment. There are those in Asgard's deepest dungeons who would benefit from this needless kindness."
Naruto's clone approached the glass slowly. "Why?" Naruto pondered absently.
Loki tilted his head to the side. "Why what?" he said. "Why attack Midgard? Why surrender to my clear inferiors?"
Naruto huffed. "No," he said, shaking his head and clarifying. "Why can't we understand your magic?"
"Now, where did you hear that?" Loki wondered with an insincere grin creeping up his face.
"Doesn't matter," the clone said. "I'm just curious."
Loki was silent a good while, but eventually his own curiosity was peaked. He paced backwards, his restrained energy made manifest in his restlessness.
Loki took a long breath, his face turned halfway into sight. "Imagine that you live in a world where everything is twofold — everything exists in two realms simultaneously. Each action reverberates in Asgard, but also across the branches of Yggdrasil. You live your lives so blind to the consequences of your actions, while I can see everything that happens. And I reach out my hand, my words, and I tweak it to my liking."
"And tweaking," Naruto said. "Do you mean you take what is already there and manipulate it, or that you add something new?"
Loki considered that. "Neither, and yet both," he said. "Yggdrasil is a dimension of existence, on which I walk, but I am still in Midgard. Which is why you can't understand. It takes centuries of meticulous study to understand the structure of the universe. It takes years more to cast spells, and years after that to no longer need them. Your limited mortal existence makes such mastery impossible. Mockery, yes, a false science, but not mastery."
Strangely, the guard didn't seem much effected by that. "Centuries of studies, hm?" he muttered, strolling toward another blind spot. For a secure facility, its cameras were extremely poorly placed. "Spending that long concentrating on the fabric of existence would make one into a literal force of nature. The universe would have to keep a balance, giving power but also responsibility."
Loki frowned. "How did you come by that knowledge?" He didn't seem to be humoring anyone now, and his features were suddenly dark and foul, unlike the fake camaraderie from before.
"You said that mortals can't understand your magic," Naruto said. He felt suddenly reckless and mischievous, as he had been so long ago before the war. He dropped his illusion, bland features flowing away like water. He grinned, puffing up his whiskered cheeks confidently.
"Try me."
Please Review; Constructive Criticism Welcomed!
