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Three days after the strangers had entered his home; Naruto found himself once again on patchwork sofa, the dull roar of rushing water running underneath his retreat rumbling throughout the cavernous stone room. Damp, and uncomfortable he had again he found himself the sole person awake.
He rolled over on the busted up couch, trying to get comfortable, or at least trying to give in to unconsciousness before inevitable sunrise, but over and over again things passed in his mind.
Most worrisome was that the 'Lizard', as the people on the television called him, hadn't been taken into custody, and was even now hunting the sewers for Naruto.
Next on the list was that the grey skinned man asleep on Naruto's bed wasn't as nice as he had appeared. 'I haven't seen anything in the past few days that make me believe that he is more harmful than a fly, even if he is just as annoying sometimes, but something in my gut is telling me to watch out.' Naruto thought, opening one cautious eye to take a look at the sleeping form of Caliban. So far all the strange man had done was to worry about his unconscious companion, help with her care, and play with the children.
The third issue was even now unconscious next to Caliban. Interrogating Caliban over her had proven fruitless, so Naruto didn't know who she was or what she was like beyond her name. He didn't know whether or not she would hold a grudge against Naruto when she woke up. Hell, he didn't even know whether or not she would wake up, which led to a whole slew of other problems, such as her care in the long term and acquisitions that would need to be made.
'Including another bed' Naruto though grimly as he tossed again, getting a very broken and awry spring out of his side.
Staring up at the stone ceiling he could even now begin to hear the tempo of the city above increasing, getting prepared for the new day.
Content to another sleepless night, Naruto rose and began his daily ablutions.
'Let's see what the new day brings.'
:Line Break:
Naruto filled his bag with the food parcels that had a small blue baby on the front. Next he stopped in the toiletries aisle picking up a package with the label 'Super Absorbent' on the front and sides.
"I still don't know why he wanted these." Naruto muttered, pacing the parcel in his ever fuller pack. Next up was some basic food items followed by paying for everything at the counter with bills tinted blue at the corners.
'And on top of everything, I'm starting to run low on cash again.'
Heading outside, Naruto put up his new hood, shielding his eyes from the intense morning sun.
After the mess with the Lizard people, Naruto had to go out and pick up some new 'duds' as Nick had said. His old clothes were bloodied and torn in the wake of the ferocious jaws and claws of the reptilian mutates, and generally rendered unwearable.
Now Naruto had equipped himself for protection. He wore a simple black hoodie with a double orange stripe going down the left sleeve that sagged in the front and back, made entirely too large for Naruto's smallish frame, and a pair of simple jeans, held up by a simple brown leather belt. Aside from that though, he wore metal knee and elbow guards, tan steel-toe boots, and occasionally clear tactical goggles. Underneath all of that, he wore a smallish vest he had taken from one of the downed cops on that fateful night, three days ago.
He also had one of the tonfa's he had looted tucked into the back of his pants, and covered by the sweater.
It was all quite cumbersome, but in the ever colder temperatures, Naruto was sure that he would freeze without it, and the added protection gave him a certain peace of mind.
The early morning chill still bit fiercely as Naruto ducked into an abandoned construction site, working on the sewer system. Heading into a presently abandoned construction zone, Naruto gave a short hop to fall through an open sewer grate. Throwing his feet out at the last second and lining his soles with chakra, he caught himself before he could fall into the disgusting sewer water.
'I'm getting better at that.' Naruto thought to himself, shifting his grip on his pack before flipping over and jogging the short distance back home on the ceiling.
Hopping down on the short dry walkway towards the door, he could already hear one of the kids giggling madly from beyond the door. Putting his ear to the door, he thought it sounded like someone was to the side of the door on the inside.
'Sounds like someone is setting up a prank.' Naruto thought with a smirk. 'Munchkins are making me so proud. Now do I let them get me or not?'
Putting his hand to his chin, he thought a bit more on it. 'It'd be funny for them and build their confidence as pranksters if I act the easy target. But then again I am carrying groceries which might get ruined by whatever they have planned, so maybe I let them get me next time.'
Nodding, Naruto opened the door slowly, while staying a good foot back from the doorway.
The giggling cut out immediately. Naruto took one cautionary step into the room and then teleported fifteen feet in, just in time to hear a bucket clatter to the ground behind him.
"Awww…" Sarah pouted getting down off of the ladder perched beside the door, carefully avoiding all of the water on the floor. "How did you know I was gonna be there?"
"When you get to be this awesome, you don't need explanations." Naruto said pompously before adding with a wink "But I did hear you giggling. Speaking of which, how did you know I would be here?"
The pink haired girl shook her head with a smile. "I didn't, I was on that ladder for, like, hours."
"You have come far in the ways of pranking, and your dedication does you credit." Naruto said, adopting a thick sagely accent. "But remember, the best pranks leave the prankstee no other choice than what the prankster has provided them."
Sarah squinted at Naruto for a moment before responding. "What is that supposed to mean?"
Naruto gave Sarah a small pout before explaining. "When you do a prank, make it so that the person you're pranking can only be pranked. It won't work every time, but when it does it will save you a whole lot of time and effort."
"Are you teaching Sarah how to prank again?" A voice groaned from a nearby bed.
"Yes I am, Nick. Yes I am." Naruto said proudly.
Nick groaned again and rolled over (lol) in his covers. "Could you not? She got a clove of garlic stuck in my fur for like a day."
Sarah was positively beaming as Naruto turned a questioning glance to her. Giving a stout nod and trying to keep a tear out of his eye, Naruto promptly high-fived the little girl.
"I can hear that, you know." Nick grumbled grumpily.
Naruto shook his head at the dog eared child and turned back to his prize student. So, what's been happening while I was out?"
"Methinks Callisto stirred earlier." A voice spoke quietly behind Naruto.
"SPIRITS ABOVE!" Naruto shouted, whirling around to face the grey skinned man known as Caliban. Sarah had to keep both hands in front of her mouth to stifle her giggles as Sidney sprang to his feet.
"NOT THE BLUEBERRY!" the rock child shouted clamping fiercely down on his pillow.
"STOP SHOUTING!" shouted the hyper sensitive wolf child, using his own pillow to cover his pained ears.
"WHY?" Caliban squawked.
'Oh my aching head…' Naruto thought with a hand on his brow.
"Water…" Croaked a voice not belonging to anyone enjoying themselves.
'That sounds familiar'. Naruto thought, turning towards the largest bed in the base.
"Calisto!" The grey skinned man shouted, sprinting over to the bedside of the woman.
"Where am I?" Calisto croaked, giving a short cough from a dry throat.
"Safe, Callisto, safe." Caliban said in his strange tone. "The blonde boy took us here."
Callisto rolled her neck to stare at Naruto out of her good eye. "I know you."
Naruto was expecting to hear something of how she saw him before she had been rendered unconscious, or how she had seen him before the fight. The last thing he was expecting, though, was what she actually said. "You're that mutant that keeps robbing all of the ATM's."
"How in the hells did you figure that one?" Naruto protested.
"It's the way you fought." Callisto said, waving a hand lazily. "But where am I?"
"Sewer system," Naruto said without much ado. "Pretty close to a water treatment plant."
The one eyed woman stared at him incredulously. "And why am I near a water treatment plant?"
"I picked it up a while back while I was laying low." Naruto explained with a shrug.
"So naturally, you thought 'sewer treatment plant', sounded safe." The woman raped in derision.
"Would you look for someone here, or in one of the many empty lots, apartments, and dock districts?" Calisto was silent.
"Then I say it makes a pretty damn good hideout." Naruto said, instantly feeling gratified.
"What happened after the fight?" She asked, trying to avoid that topic.
Caliban moved to speak, but Naruto interrupted again. "You went down, and Caliban wasn't moving, so being the great guy that I am, I fought off the lizard people until Cali woke up, or at least stopped screaming." Naruto paused for a second before finishing with a nod. "And then we took you here."
"I remember you being there." The lady said in her gruff voice. "Heroic isn't the term I would use to describe it."
The blonde stared hard at the cyclopean woman, before speaking to the others. "Hey guys, can you go play with Caliban for a minute? I need to speak to the nice lady alone."
The kids gave minor protests, but were quickly hushed.
"I'll be fine Caliban." Calisto said to her worried friend. "Just bring me back some clean water."
"Yes, Calisto." The grey skinned man spoke, proceeding to gather the children off.
Waiting a moment until the kids were far enough away, Naruto turned back to the woman, speaking in a low tone.
"So do we have a problem?"
"Only one," the cyclopean woman said with a resigned sigh. "When I was in the street, fighting those…lizards, and Caliban was down and I was getting more and more injured. Why didn't you help at first? Why did it take me losing an eye for you to join in?"
"Honestly?" Naruto responded. "I thought you could take them."
"Bullshit." Came the immediate response.
Naruto looked up into the accusing eye.
"If it was that then you would have left at the start. If it was you being concerned for the kids you would never have left this little hidey-hole." She leaned forward, her voice hoarse, and raw.
"Why didn't you help?"
Naruto stared into her lone eye for a moment, before averting his gaze. "I didn't know if I could take on four of them, let alone six."
The woman quirked her head, leaning back a bit. "What made you think that?"
Naruto sighed. "I fought another one in the sewers about a week, week and a half back, and it was the third most fucked up I've been since I've got here. Broken arm, broken ribs, and cuts all up and down my body. If I went into a fight where there were six of those guys? I would have died. I SHOULD have died."
"And what would have happened to me?" Came the low voice with the same accusatory tone.
Naruto pinched his eyes shut. "Probably the same. But then if it had happened to both of us, what would have happened to them?" Naruto said pointing vaguely towards the kids, and unintentionally Caliban.
"You seem like a nice lady, but I don't really know you, and I didn't know if those cops would have been enough to hold back the lizard horde. I was only out to see what was going on, and if it was just the one lizard, to destroy him…it."
"And to the lowly men and women you decide not to help?"
Naruto's felt his blood pressure rising. "You know what? Once upon a time, I might have stopped to help everyone I could. I might have gone and tried fighting the bad guy's one on one. I might have gone and tried being the hero of the day. But those days are really long behind me."
"And why is that?"
"I realized two things, lady." Naruto spit out, sick of this lady and her shit. "First, I can't be everywhere, protecting everyone. So that means I gotta pick and choose who I'm there to defend. And second, and this is the really important part. I am not the strongest guy there is. I'm not invincible. And that means I have to plan my actions and be prepared for the consequences."
Naruto looked away, his eyes losing their vindictive sheen. "No one drove that point home harder than that skull guy. Or maybe the doctor."
Callisto cocked her head. "Who?"
"Skull guy. He wore all black, combat outfit, with a white skull on his chest. Cornered me in an alley and shot me."
Callisto was silent for a moment before responding. "What in the hell did you do to piss off, the Punisher?"
Naruto raised an eyebrow. "You know him?"
"Only by reputation" Callisto responded. "Guys goes around enforcing his kind of law, killing everyone who doesn't uphold it in a very gory fashion. Last I heard he was wiping out entire gangs singlehanded in Texas."
Naruto shrugged. "I don't know that much about him. He just came along and shot me one day after I busted an ATM."
The cyclopean woman shook her head before grimacing in pain. "Wait," she gasped out after a moment. "Who was the doctor? HOW does he even compare to Punisher?"
"The good Doctor Schaeffer," Naruto spat, vindictive sheen coming back into his eyes, "kept me locked in a room for two weeks, imprisoned for nearly two months, and tortured me for information on my abilities. And tortured me whenever I got 'uppity'. And when I acknowledged my name as anything other than 'Cockroach', or 'Specimen'."
"He experimented on you?" Callisto asked when Naruto lapsed into silence. He answered with a chuckle.-
"Nothing I was awake for, thankfully." Naruto said, thinking back to his days of confinement. "But sometime I woke up with the feeling that something was missing, or just sore all over, like I'd been scraped down. Hollowed out."
Callisto was silent after that, having nothing to follow such a reveal.
"And he only got his hands on me cause of some stupid fucking fight with some damn freak in tights!" Naruto growled out.
Callisto remained silent. Her measured gaze leveled upon the blondes' shoulders which shook with rage. At the world, at the men who caused him so much pain, or at himself was anyone's guess. After a moment, his shoulder sagged, with either resignation or palpable defeat.
"So now you know," Naruto said. "Why I wasn't exactly leaping in till the last moment."
"You don't want it to happen to you again." Callisto said, surprised when Naruto snorted.
"Fear for myself? No, fuck that." Naruto said tersely. "It's happened to me, and as much as I try to forget about it, it's probably always gonna be a part of me. But they haven't seen that." Naruto said, pointing to the kids snoring softly into pillows, curled up tightly in warm blankets. "And if I weren't here to shield them from people like that, if someone were to get to them…"
The silence dragged on between them, the implications of Naruto's statement plain to both of them. Finally it was broken by the blonde.
"So no, I'm not going to go gallivanting about, looking for scraps to get into. I will avoid all conflict, unless I either have to fight for my life, or I have to protect the kids." With that said, Naruto turned on his heel, making for the door once again.
"No you won't."
Naruto turned around to see a half smile on the woman's face.
"You remind me a lot of my ex." The woman said, raising herself up on her elbows in order to see Naruto better. "Sure, it's a lot of 'What if someone gets hurt', and 'I can never do it again', but when it comes down to it, you'll get into fights. You'll have to. For them," She said, indicating the kids with a flick of her head. "For you, and for a woman who cries for help in the mean streets of New York."
Naruto stood frozen, listening to Calisto's speech.
"You won't want to, and you might even go as far away from it all as possible. But you will still fight, for people and causes both."
"So what are you saying," Naruto said in a low voice. "That I'm a liar?"
"No," she chuckled throatily. "Just a romantic."
"A What?"
"I'm not explaining philosophy or the birds and the bees this early in the morning." She said collapsing back down on her pillow, energy spent on her speech. "Go get me some water, kid."
Naruto nodded, once again turning to leave.
"And kid?" Callisto spoke quietly, stopping Naruto once more.
"Thanks."
Naruto nodded again. "Don't mention it. Apparently I'm a romantic."
He didn't understand why she found that so funny.
:Line Break:
A group of uniformed men stood, silent and at attention in front of a wide metal desk. Behind the desk sat a cyclopean man, his dark skinned fingers flicking through a paper report of the events of the evening three days past. His lone eye scanning over the pages details in a way that seemed to soak up all information before it. The minutes passed in silence as the dark skinned man paid attention to only the words before him. At last reaching the end, he filed the pages neatly back into their folder, and looked up at the men across from him.
"Well?" He said, glancing at the assembled. "Which one of you wants to explain the 6 million dollars in property damage caused by rampaging lizard people?"
Several audible gulps were heard before one of the men spoke up. "Sir, we were not expecting a chemical agent capable of multiplying the opposing forces number."
The Colonel's eye swiveled, its heavy gaze falling upon the solider speaking. The man had to stop and gasp for breath for a moment before continuing. "That in addition to the Lizard's already impressive regenerative factor made it almost impossible to stop the things from rampaging."
Fury raised an eyebrow, his penetrating gaze already burrowing into soldier who made the mistake of talking first, likely giving the poor man some form of stress induced tumor.
"It was with the apparent regenerative factor of the creature in mind, since the incident at the Queens High School, that you were allowed heavier, and more advanced weaponry."
"Sir," Said another soldier boldly. "It was like trying to spitball a moose."
Fury's lone eye glared at the bold soldier, frightening him back into obedience. Sighing, Nick Fury tucked the folder away, looking back to the leader of the sorry troupe.
"Your performance on your last mission was satisfactory, given the circumstances." A slump of relief in the shoulders of the soldiers was nowhere to be seen as Fury continued. "But that's all it was. Satisfactory. In the future I expect better out of all of you. But for now, you're dismissed."
The soldiers saluted.
"Get out." The colonel spat through gritted teeth.
The men quickly scampered to answer their colonels' command, and the room was soon empty, save for the very troubled leader, sitting at his desk.
'The equipment was bad, the troops were inadequate, and the enemy was overwhelming.' Nick Fury thought, a gloved hand coming up to massage his forehead. 'No-one could engage these things in close quarters and survive unturned.'
His eye rolled as he mentally corrected himself. 'No one but Spider-Man…no one but 'capes''
A thought crossed his mind, and the filed report of the botched mission was back out on his desk. Pictures taken by his team on the ground showed a young blonde haired boy in trashed attire, the area around him littered with the bodies of fallen lizards. A frown formed over the Directors face as he pondered another troubling question. A question that even now a dedicated taskforce was attempting to answer.
'Who are you, Naruto?'
AN
Hooray! Another chapter!
For those of you offering your exclamations of joy, I couldn't have done this without you or 7Winds!
This chapter was originally much, much longer, including several fight scenes, the introduction to another Marvel Franchise and a fight scene with a peculiar mercenary, but I realized that it had been too long since last I updated.
Brownie points to guess who's who.
Also in the upcoming chapters are explanations abound.
So that's all I gotta say.