My note: The characters and concepts belong to their respective owners. I make no profit off this. ... The editor seems to be playing up just a bit so the formatting might be slightly off. If you notice anything, I'd appreciate it if it were brought to my attention so I can fix it. I've had some free time recently, between classes, so here's the next part. Let me know what you think.
Ultimate Ninja
Vessels part 2
Thirty-two months ago...
Naruto had settled into a comfortable routine with the X-Men. In the mornings, before anyone else was up, he'd train his ninja skills. This mostly involved running up trees and jumping around, sometimes brawling with a bunch of shadow clones. Occasionally, Wolverine would show him a move or two, but Naruto got the feeling Wolverine didn't really trust him. It was probably just him being paranoid or something.
Naruto usually had breakfast with Jean, and sometimes Scott too, usually after she came to drag him away from his training.
After that, he had to get through lessons. Math and reading and writing... He'd tried a couple of times to sneak out using shadow clones, but Jean had gotten better at spotting them and it didn't always work.
In the evenings, Naruto practised with his mutant powers. He wasn't perfectly in control yet, but he was getting better all the time. Naruto could now block out Jean... most of the time... He wasn't sure if he could keep the Professor out though.
He could lift a whole car using his telekinesis! Engine and all! Oh, sure, he'd seen Jean lift a car, then take it to pieces, then put it back together again... but it was a start, right? It was hard to believe he'd already been with the X-Men for close to nine months, counting their time together at Weapon X.
The van pulled up to the departures terminal. Naruto pressed his face to the window, staring up at the building. The front of the building was a wall of glass supported by white metal girders, leaning out at an artistic angle from the ground. It was roughly round, avoiding the square angles of normal buildings. So this was JFK airport...
Naruto had never been on an airplane before. He'd never been to the airport either. It was very futuristic-looking. He'd seen one in a movie once, while he was still learning English. There was a strange balding man running around in the snow, shooting people, swearing a lot, and lighting runways on fire.
The Professor had written a book. Who knew where he'd found the time to do that; he always seemed so busy. Xavier had given each of the X-Men a copy of his book. That now included Naruto, not that he'd read it or anything. He'd taken one look at the long chapter titles and fallen asleep. Other people apparently had read it though, because the Professor was taking them all on a kind of world tour to give a series of lectures.
Throwing his duffel bag over his shoulder, Naruto followed the others inside. Scott handed him his ticket and passport.
Naruto eyed the small, navy blue book suspiciously. There, laminated on the inside of the back cover, was his photograph, looking studiously bored for the camera. His birthday, his height, his hair and eye colour... It was all right there, next to the photograph. "Who's Nathan Grey?"
"That's your public name," Scott said. Naruto frowned. His name was part of who he was. If he changed it, wouldn't he be changing who he was too? It was too much.
"But why do I gotta change my name?" Naruto objected. "I thought my public name was going to be Ninja."
"Look, it won't get noticed as much by security as Naruto Uzumaki," Scott said.
"Uzumaki Naruto," Naruto automatically corrected. He'd figured out the naming convention thing early on in his self-education. It still felt weird that people used given names before family names. "That's my name. Not Nathan Grey."
"You and Jean are close enough that you could be brother and sister," Ororo pointed out.
"Who was it that said, 'what's in a name?'" Hank added with a slight smile.
"Not me," Naruto huffed, stuffing the passport into his pocket. Jean smiled at him. "Next they're going to want me to change how I dress and be all moody..."
It was raining. The stars were hidden by thick black clouds. The only source of light was the small tug's searchlight, flashing across the waves this way and that, until it came upon the sailboat, dead in the water. The small ship pulled along beside the sailboat. There was no-one out on deck, but in this weather that was hardly surprising.
"This isn't our job, by the way. Ordinary police shouldn't even be handling this mental stuff," the sergeant grumbled as he climbed aboard. He scanned the sailboat's deck quickly with his flashlight, never once lowering his gun. "Some Norwegian lad trying smuggle in a wee bit of dope is one thing, but this boat hails from Muir Island, boys. I'm not getting paid well enough to handle runaway mutants."
"He's a nineteen-year-old boy, man," said one of his men. "He's been sick since he was thirteen and we've got our instructions. What could possibly go wrong?"
They opened the door to the cabin cautiously, peering inside with flashlights. "Aw, for God's sake..."
The inside of the sailboat was a mess. There were four desiccated bodies, three of them sprawled out across the floor while the fourth was slumped up against the far wall.
"Radio Doctor MacTaggert at the hospital and tell her the crew he attacked are dead, lads," the sergeant ordered. "There's no sign of her boy anywhere."
"I'm in here, you clown," The sergeant's flashlight instantly tracked the sound. The body slumped up against the wall moved, shielding his eyes from the light. "Although God knows how much longer this stupid old body's going to last me!"
"God almighty! He's jumped inside the Professor!" The sergeant exclaimed. "Fall back and shield your eyes, boys! Remember what the doctor told us!"
But it was already too late. The body's eyes were glowing bright green, and then, so were the sergeant's.
Naruto pulled himself up, onto the ledge, balancing there, before he sat down, his legs dangling carelessly over the side. The wind tugged at his hair and coat. The view was spectacular from here. The sun was setting over London now. He could see Big Ben and the Parliament buildings from here, lit up in the dim dusk light.
Naruto had wandered around the city all day. He enjoyed the feeling of anonymity again. And the feeling of adventure.
London was completely different from New York City. Naruto got the feeling that it was a much older city, for starters. Everyone here talked differently, and at first, it took him a while to understand what they were saying.
He wasn't alone anymore, Naruto realised abruptly. He turned, hearing the door to the roof click shut. There was a girl standing there, at the very edge of the building.
"Hi!"
The girl let out a startled scream and jumped back, hugging the wall behind them tightly. "I-I'll jump!" She shouted. Her voice had an accent too, so she was from here.
Naruto peered over the edge of the ledge for a moment. It was a long way down. He glanced back over at the girl, frowning. She was maybe fourteen years old. Her face was a mix of different emotions, most prominently fear. She had wavy blonde hair and blue eyes. She was dressed in overly large, nondescript clothes, probably hand-me-downs.
"Huh?"
"What the hell are you doing up here?" The girl demanded anxiously.
Naruto shrugged. "I like the view."
"Y-you're fucking kidding..." The girl stammered. "A-aren't you afraid you'll fall?"
"Why would I fall?" Naruto asked, confused.
"You're so close to the edge..." The girl said nervously.
"I'm fine," Naruto reassured her. He looked at her for a moment. She was so nervous. "What about you?"
"I..." The girl started. She trailed off and refused to meet his eyes.
"What're you doing up here anyway?" Naruto asked. The girl looked conflicted now, staring at the edge of the building from where she huddled against the wall.
"I came to..." the girl started. She fell silent again. Naruto thought about using his powers to read her mind, to pull the answer from her, but then he thought better. He wasn't so good at that part yet; he was learning, but he wasn't quite there.
"It's okay," Naruto said, smiling. He turned his attention back to the setting sun. "You don't have to tell me, if you don't want."
"You're American," the girl said.
"I learned my English there," Naruto corrected.
"What are you doing here?" She asked. "Are you on holiday? I didn't mean to ruin your vacation..."
"It's more of a school trip anyway," Naruto said, shrugging his shoulders. "I'm supposed to be doing homework. If my sister found out I was out here..."
"At least she cares," the girl sniffed bitterly.
"Don't you have anyone that cares about you?" Naruto asked, after a long moment.
"No," the girl said.
"I don't believe that," Naruto said. He could relate to how she felt, sort of. But even when the villagers called him names and glared at him and treated him badly, he still had a few precious people who treated him well. Looking at her, he saw he was going to have to open up to her, if he wanted her to do the same.
"What do you know?" The girl snarled, her mood suddenly angry.
"I grew up getting picked on a lot," Naruto said, shrugging his shoulders again. "My parents are dead. Or they abandoned me. Maybe they never wanted me in the first place. I don't know. It doesn't really matter anymore. Everyone around me always looked down at me, like I was some kind of monster or something, and no-one would ever talk to me or tell me why."
"Wow," the girl said quietly. Some of the anger faded from her eyes. "That... that sounds rough."
"I'm okay with it," he said, grinning cheerfully despite the subject of their conversation. "I do kind of regret that I'll never be able to make them think otherwise. I used to try... I wanted to get so strong that I'd force them... they'd have to pay attention to me, to respect me and not put me down and stuff."
"That's realistic," the girl scoffed.
"I was a dumb kid," Naruto admitted with a grin. "You're supposed to learn as you grow up, right?"
"I guess," the girl said. She took a tentative seat next to Naruto, still eyeing him warily, still nervous about the drop.
"I came up here to jump," the girl said. Her quiet voice was almost lost in the wind.
"What?" Naruto asked.
"I wanted to..." the girl started. "Ugh. You wouldn't understand."
"I think... I think you came up here, because you wanted attention," Naruto said, after a long moment. It made sense to him, anyway. "You wanted your precious people to notice you."
"N-no!" The girl stammered.
"You have to make them notice you," Naruto said firmly, totally ignoring her outburst. "But this isn't the way. If they ignore you, shout at them! If they pick on you, fight back! I learned... you have to acknowledge yourself first, before other people are going to acknowledge you."
"Where'd you learn that?" The girl asked.
"It's something I just recently figured out," Naruto said, with an easy grin. The girl smiled back, tentatively.
"My name's Meggan," she said, after a moment.
"I'm... Nathan," Naruto said. He held out his hand and they shook.
"Well, class," said Professor Xavier. "That's your forty-eight hour deadline expired. Should we take a look at the morning papers and see how your exploits were reported in the national press?"
They were sitting together around a table in the dining room of the luxury hotel where they were staying. Continental breakfast, they called it. Naruto was a big fan of the waffles, with ham and cheese, and he was eyeing the whipped cream speculatively.
Jean held up a newspaper, the Sun. "Storm and I took down a terrorist cell based in Tottenham Court Road, Professor Xavier," she said proudly. She had a self-satisfied smile on her face. "Britain's biggest-selling paper, pages one, two, and three."
Bobby went next. He had a copy of the Daily Mirror. "Me and the guys busted an international drugs ring stretching from Miami to Romania, Professor. Britain's second biggest paper, pages three, four, and five."
Hank was actually just reading the paper. He looked up briefly, a knowing smirk on his face. He looked like the big furry blue sort-of-cat guy who'd eaten the little bird. "Cyclops and I made short work of an ugly gang of muggers, sir. It never actually made the papers, but I did manage The Times crossword in something close to record time."
"What about you, Nathan?" Professor Xavier asked.
"Naruto," Naruto corrected automatically. "I didn't do anything." Naruto felt Professor Xavier's mind probing his and he quickly doubled his shields.
"You didn't even try?" Jean asked.
"Dude, you are so failing this one," Bobby teased. Naruto frowned at him, taking a vicious bite out of the waffle sandwich he'd constructed.
"Something tells me, my associate and I have just taken the lead," Ororo said smugly, leaning back. Naruto glanced over at Hank and Scott. They didn't look too concerned.
"Not necessarily, Storm," Xavier said. "Ordinarily, yes, your position in the morning paper is an excellent indication of your actual grade, but I'm afraid today boasts exceptional circumstances. Scott Summers and Henry McCoy come first yet again, my friends. The rest of you will have your papers returned telepathically."
"I don't get it. What was the point of this?" Naruto asked.
"That's an excellent question, Nathan," Xavier said.
"Naruto," Naruto said automatically.
Xavier gave Naruto an annoyed look. "I wanted you to go out and save lives. We need to prove to the people that we are not a threat to be feared."
"Isn't that what we did?" Jean asked. "Storm and I stopped those terrorists from blowing up a crowded mall."
"That's not what I was talking about," Naruto said. "You said, let's look at the newspapers to see how what we did was reported, right? You wanted people to see us doing good things, so you could show that mutants shouldn't scare people and stuff. So why do Scott and Hank win, even though they didn't do anything that got reported?"
"Good question," Logan said, smirking at Scott, who looked decidedly less sure of himself.
"You didn't explain the lesson right," Naruto continued, crossing his arms across his chest. "I'm sure Jean and Storm coulda talked to some people and helped them and stuff, if that's what you asked for. You asked us to do something that'd get put in the papers."
Xavier nodded, with a thoughtful look on his face.
"If you're going to help someone, you don't do it because of some dumb grade or anything," Naruto said seriously. "You do it because it's the right thing to do."
"Is that why you didn't do anything?" Bobby asked. "You're still totally going to fail, you know?"
"I don't need to be acknowledged by everyone because I look good in the news," Naruto said. "If people are going to respect me and look up to me, it's going to be because I do the right thing."
"Wolverine, you maimed, killed, or disfigured over twenty human beings in a blaze of Adamantium fury," the Professor pointed out.
"That's on page three," Naruto agreed, giving Bobby a smug grin.
"The exercise was to go out there and save lives, not act like Charles Bronson's Canadian cousin," Xavier said.
"Oh you've got to be kidding me!" Bobby blurted out angrily. "Tell me this isn't what the new term's all about, Professor, because I didn't drop out of regular school to become a freakin' social worker, man."
"And I didn't form this school to train an army of thugs, Iceman. How can I tour the world asking for change when my students are clinging to the politics of the ape-man?" Professor Xavier said.
"The ape-man?" Naruto echoed, frowning.
Xavier continued on his lecture smoothly, as if he'd never been interrupted at all. "I don't like prisons, I don't like capital punishment, and I don't like mutants dropping car-size hailstones on unsuspecting Irishmen..."
"They were going to blow up that mall," Naruto said.
"And they also happened to be members of a species we're trying very hard to ingratiate ourselves with," Professor Xavier pointed out angrily. "Gaining the trust of Homo Sapiens is integral to our agenda, my X-Men. Phase Three was designed to promote pacifist alternatives to traditional human problems. Don't give them any new excuses to hate you yet."
The X-Men hung their heads. Jean and Storm and Bobby all looked remorseful. Naruto took another bite of his waffle, then stopped when he realised something.
"Wait... You dropped out?" Naruto asked Bobby, trying to keep his tone only curious. His question went mostly ignored, except for by Jean, who gave him a look and shook her head before the idea could even fully form in Naruto's head. Naruto frowned, and reached across her plate to grab another waffle.
"H-hey!" Jean cried out.
"He's a growing boy, Jeanie," Wolverine chuckled.
"Yeah," Bobby said. "If he keeps eating like that, he'll be growing outwards."
Naruto bounced half his waffle off Bobby's head for that. "I don't have to worry about that," Naruto laughed. "Unlike you, I actually train." Naruto grinned cheekily at Bobby, who frowned...
"I suggest you all follow Mister Grey's example," Xavier said, earning a frown from Naruto. "I want you all at your best, when we go to today's lecture."
When they got back to the hotel hours after the Professor's talk, Naruto let out a relieved sigh. "That stunk!" He complained. Inside the hall, it hadn't been so bad. There were questions, sure. Most of the audience had been only curious, asking about stuff that Naruto wasn't really all that interested in.
Outside the hall had been another matter altogether. Naruto thought the treatment he got from the villagers back in Konoha was bad. They'd never actually resorted to violence against him though. It'd always been a cold, quiet hatred. The people that raged and screamed outside the hall were different. They were held back only by the police and if the cops hadn't been there, Naruto thought, maybe there would've been a riot.
Naruto knew what it felt like to be hated. The others, Jean... They'd experienced hate, real hate, tonight. It was a grim reminder of what the world was like outside the isolation of their school or the heat of a fight with some criminal or terrorist. Seeing that mob, even the kids that were taught to hate them just because they were born a little different, Naruto had to wonder about the Professor's dream. He was kind of glad he'd chosen to wear a mask, even after the Professor had given him a lecture about them being out in the open as examples.
"Get some rest, Naruto," Jean said gently, touching his shoulder reassuringly.
"Are you okay?" Naruto asked, glancing back at her. She put on a brave face, flashing him a smile and nodding, but Naruto thought he could see through it. It was never that easy to face hatred and some part of tonight had hurt Jean. "Are you sure?"
"I'm fine," Jean said.
Naruto nodded after a moment. Then he turned and walked down the hallway, heading for his own room. Jean watched him go for a moment, before she went into her own room and shut the door.
Kisame and Itachi looked around. This world, to which the nine-tails had escaped, was very different from what Itachi had imagined. The jutsu that Uzumaki had used was a prison jutsu, reserved for the worst offenders. The only reason they had been able to copy it was because it was originally one of the Uchiha jutsus, given to Konoha as a gesture of good faith upon the founding of the village.
Itachi had imagined a place of terrible torment. Instead, they found themselves in a park, in the centre of a mighty city, easily bigger than the biggest metropolis either of the two rogue ninjas had ever seen.
Kisame grinned, his shark-like teeth and blue skin causing passersby to give him a wide berth. "This ain't so bad."
"[Mutant freaks,]" someone muttered. Itachi didn't recognise the words, but the voice was filled with hatred. It was unmistakable. The man disappeared into the crowd before Itachi could isolate and question him. The people around them were mostly looking at Kisame, Itachi noticed.
"Kisame, change your appearance," Itachi said.
"What, they never see a ninja before?" Kisame asked. Itachi gave him a look. Kisame grunted, then used the transformation technique to blend in. "Let's go find the nine-tails brat, before I let this get to me and I start doing some damage."
"He's what?" Bobby nearly shouted. Naruto smacked him in the back of the head. He'd been standing right next to Bobby at the exclamation.
"Bobby, quit shouting in my ear!" Naruto complained, as Bobby rubbed the back of his head and shot him an annoyed look.
"Gone. According to reception, Colossus checked out at 3AM and took a cab to the airport with an unknown male and female," Jean said. "You don't think he might have, you know, gone over to the other side or anything, do you?"
Logan seemed completely unconcerned. "Not a chance, Jeannie," he said. "Believe me, I know his good from bad and Peter Rasputin ain't the type to do the dirty on his pals."
"What's that mean?" Naruto wondered.
"I don't like the way you were looking at me when you said that, Wolverine," Scott complained, his face set in an annoyed frown.
"What do you think, Professor?" Hank asked, turning to look at the Professor. The Professor wasn't really listening. He was staring at his cell phone. "Colossus had been unusually quiet these last couple of weeks. Do you think he's just walked out on the team or is this something more nefarious?"
"Professor?" Storm called.
"Could you excuse me for a moment, please?" Xavier said politely, already wheeling his wheelchair away. They watched him go for a moment, unusually pensive.
"I wonder what that was all about," Naruto said, trying to look casual as he stood up and stretched. He was about to casually walk over in the direction the Professor had left when Jean stopped him.
"Don't you have homework to do, Naruto?" Naruto's shoulders fell in defeat.
"The scramblers are on, Moira. What's the problem?" Xavier asked. He had more than enough on his plate without having to deal with whatever problem his ex-wife was phoning up with.
"What's the problem? God almighty, where do I start?" Moira MacTaggert asked, her voice rising in frustration. "The hospital's been trashed, my staff are half-dead and Agents Braddock and Thomas from the British division of SHIELD have just placed me under house arrest until you get here, Charlie." She sighed. "What are we going to do? He could be anywhere by now!"
"What are you talking about, Moira?" Xavier asked, more than a little annoyed by the hysterics. "Is this about David?"
"Of course it's about David," Moira snapped angrily. "Who else would I be talking about, you bloody idiot? Our son's escaped, Charles."