Firefox: Serenity Now

A Naruto Tale

Chapter II: Cold Hard Reality

Uzumaki Naruto was not a happy camper, and he hadn't been for a long time. He had spent just over a year in the "hospital" on Ariel, having every test he could conceive of performed on him, and twice as many as that which he could never have conceived of. Every day suited men and women took his temperature, measured his reflexes, they had him constantly connected to a machine which measured his brain waves, and they even took his blood. He had to constantly use breathing exercises which Jiraya had taught him to keep calm throughout it. As much as he disliked these tests, he knew that trying to escape would be suicide. He had learned early on that the men and women that made up "The Alliance" knew nothing of chakra or its multifaceted applications. He decided to tell them nothing of his special abilities, choosing to instead pretend he was an ignorant villager who had been attacked, claiming he knew nothing of how he found himself here.

There were a few positive points in this crazy new world. Every day Wu Hiro would come, translating the questions his captors had for him. Their inquiries mostly related to how people lived their lives in his time. He decided to omit everything about ninjas and chakra. They seemed to expect him to be confused about commonplace things from his own time like steam power and television, so he omitted anything having to do with technology more complicated than a garden ho. After a while the questions became repetitive, and then they petered out and stopped altogether. Naruto guessed the cultural anthro-thingies or whatever they were had become bored with him. He couldn't blame them, his answers bored even himself, he had planned it that way. He knew if they found something unique or interesting about him they would never let him go. During the many hours each day that they weren't poking him with needles or pumping him for information, Naruto learned about his new world. Or worlds, to be more precise. There seemed to be as many worlds in "The Verse" as there were countries on the elemental continent, and the sheer number of people living her staggered him. He was able to learn these things, as Wu Hiro had been tutoring him in the two most common languages in The Verse, Chinese and English. Several of the words in Chinese sounded remarkably like those in his native tongue, and his progress skyrocketed when he found, to his incredible amazement, that Japanese and Chinese shared a common syllabary, called kanji. Focusing almost every waking moment, he was able to learn to speak and read Chinese and English with a reasonable proficiency in less than six months. There was something to be said for the immersion method.

He also learned about space travel, a subject which was incredibly fascinating to him. In his old world, Naruto had been almost rabidly obsessed with personal power, comparing his own strength to everyone around him, and trying to constantly better himself. True, his motives for doing this were completely altruistic; He only wanted power so that he could become Hokage and protect all of his precious people. But, still he had been fairly obsessed with power. In the elemental nations, ninjas equaled power. Ninja were the supreme warriors, masters of the battlefield, and the deciders of war. Even a raw genin was the match for at least a dozen regular soldiers. Here, they had weapons capable of killing anyone and everyone in a radius of square miles, with the push of a button. They had devices which could track people better than the most sensitive Inazuka nose, or the strongest Byakugan. They had machines that could travel farther and faster than all ninjas combined, since the dawn of time. Naruto was first frightened, and then awed by these feats of technology. He furiously learned about these things, using the limited read-only terminal they provided him in his room as much as they would permit him. He wished that he could use the Kage Bunshin technique, as it would have been extremely useful.

Around fourteen months after he had arrived, they allowed him out of his room, and into the common areas of the hospital. Previously, they had only allowed him out in a private exercise area, where he got one hour of time each day to stretch his legs and get some sunlight. He hated the small, fenced yard with a passion. If the demon in his belly didn't make losing muscle mass impossible, he would be fat and out of shape by now. For once he was glad of its presence. The common areas of the hospital included a gym and basketball court, a swimming pool, two cafeterias, and a recreation room stocked with a three dimensional television, board games, and art supplies. The patients, for the most part, looked and acted like zombies. At first Naruto thought they were just mentally the mentally ill, but so many of them were so young, younger even than him. Most of them refused to talk to him outright, and many of the rest were too insane or emotional to hold a decent conversation. There were exceptions, of course.

About a week after they started letting him out, Naruto met a girl. She was short, and lithe like a dancer. Her dark hair swirled around her head in a nebulous cloud, alternately hiding and enhancing her beauty. Seeing her sitting by herself in the recreation room, he decided to try and talk with her.

Naruto smiled as he approached the girl, leaving his empty hands at his sides. He had learned that some of the patients tended to get violent if they thought he was hostile. He took a seat beside the girl, at the small plastic table she was sitting at. "Hello, my name is Naruto," he said, "it's nice to meet you."

The girl looked him directly in the eyes, then shook her head, and stared down at the table for a moment. She frowned, and then looked back up at the blond ninja. This time her gaze was piercing, boring into the depths of his soul. "Fishcake, they named you fishcake" She shook a little bit, then cocked her head to the side sharply "Son of number four, but you're number is nine…" Naruto's eyes widened and his breath got caught in his throat. River continued, "From the past, the past, a past, fire, leaves, I see talking snakes and frogs…" the young girl trailed off, he eyes once again pointed downward.

Naruto sat in shock… Half because of what she said, and half because he felt her using chakra while she was speaking about those things she couldn't possibly know. He kept thinking that this girl might some kind of weird kunoichi. He tried not to let his excitement show. Whatever she was, she was insane, or at least near enough for government work. Still, she was easily the most coherent patient he had met in this place so far. It was just his luck that the place they felt best for him was a mental hospital. He recognized that it made sense, though. Who here would believe that he was actually from the past, and that the Alliance was holding him to gather information for a bunch of anthropologists and scientists?

"You know some interesting things, girl. What's your name? I learned a long time ago that it's only polite to give your name when someone introduces themselves," said Naruto.

The dark haired girl smiled a beatific smile that lit up her face. Naruto decided that despite her insanity she was easily one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She giggled lightly, a tinkling sound that made a shiver go down his spine. He realized how long it had been since he had seen a girl near his age. "I am River; River Tam. I really want green eggs and ham," she sang in a little-girl voice. Naruto couldn't help but chuckle lightly at her antics. She really was pleasant to talk to, for someone so crazy.

Suddenly River's jovial mood was gone, and her face became as somber as a dawn funeral. Her voice transformed into a harsh whisper. "I need to leave here, terrible things happen. So much pain, so many experiments. Tomorrow they are going to cut open my brain again, I know it, I know it. Please please please help me please. Oh, God, please. You can do it, you can help. Oh, I miss Simon. " She burst into tears, and turned her head sideways to cry into her arm. With the hair swept back behind her ear, Naruto could see faint lines on the skin of her head. Old scars. A shock went down his spine. All doubts that River Tam was merely insane left him in an instant.

Suddenly the ninja's eyes took on a new look, a sharper look. His brain switched from the "civilian mode" it had been in for the past year, and he used his old, new eyes to really take a look around him. Suddenly the other patients didn't look so much like the mentally ill, but like tortured prisoners who had lost the will to live. The lone orderly suddenly didn't look so kind. And the hermetically sealed steel doors made a lot more sense. This wasn't a mental hospital; it was some kind of insane prison, where the captors were allowed to experiment on the captives. He had thought himself a special case, considering his circumstances, but it looked like they had actually been taking it easy on him. If they were willing to drill into the skull of a sixteen year old girl, and then let him see evidence of it, he doubted that they were ever going to let him free.

Naruto decided then and there to get out of this abattoir masquerading as a hospital before they did anything else to him, or to the still-crying girl sitting next to him. And he planned to take River Tam with him.

~&~&~&~&~&~&~&~

Author's Note: Wai! I decided to make this a Naruto/River fic, possibly a three-way with Naruto, River and Kaylee, as I can't see Simon being a major player in this little tale, as he's not going to get a chance to break River out. Being a good, if slightly insane, sister, she will of course write to her sibling from time to time, to tell him what kind of hijinks she's getting up to. I'm thinking that Naruto will take the place of Simon in the crew of Serenity. I'll leave the details to future chapters, but it should be fine. Out of all the characters, Simon was probably the least influential to the plot. If there's enough demand, though, I'll add him.

I'm really having fun writing this, I love both Firefly and Naruto, so it's a blast. I got so many story alerts, favorites, and author alerts for the first chapter, but only four reviews… Please let me know if you like reading this, as that motivates me to write more, in a big way. To encourage you, I will open up a poll: Should I make this a mini-harem with Naruto/River/Kaylee, or should I focus strictly on a Naruto/River pairing? Ciao until next time.