Disclaimer: Not mine.
Line Break
Feet scuffed over dry, sandy cement in the cold starkness of an early morning in New York City, the rays of the sun only just starting to peek through the glass and steel titans that made the city's impressive architecture.
Snowbanks from a recent storm clung to every street corner, all but blocking the view of one figure, trudging through the slushy street with arms full of brown paper bags.
Jogging across a salted, asphalt crosswalk, Naruto Uzumaki came to a broken shell of a concrete building, bowed in age and covered in local gang graffiti.
Not pausing to check his surroundings, the burdened teen skipped to the entrance, kicking it several times in sequence.
Opening the old, rusted steel door, a woman with a eyepatch made of tightly wound medical tape and gauze, cutting through a mop of blackish hair. The lone remaining eye stared at him, wrinkling in a smile.
"Heya, kiddo." Calisto greeted the blonde teen, dressed comfortably for the winter in a brown leather jacket and jeans.
"Look who's back on her feet." Naruto said with a grin before it faded into a frown. "Thought I asked you to keep an eye on the kids?"
"Caliban's got it well in hand." Calisto responded, rolling her eyes at the pun and waving off his questioning stare. "So, get me what I asked for?"
"Yeah," Naruto said, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a small blue, red and white box. "But I still don't know why you would want a Crunchy, or whatever the hell."
"I'll explain when you're a bit older." She said smugly.
"Sticking around then?" Naruto asked, eyebrow cocked.
"Are you?" Calisto returned. "No offense, but most people are crazy for even coming down here, let alone staying. I mean, you are living literally in a sewer. Why don't you go home, kid?"
"I'm trying." Naruto explained, walking down the stairs to the passage that conjoined the facility to what the tykes had started affectionately calling 'home base'. "I just don't know how to get there."
Her face morphing into one of mild concern, Calisto wondered, not for the first time, if the blond had some sort of irreparable brain damage. "What do you mean?"
"The way I got here," Naruto paused, searching for the right way to describe it, feet splashing in puddles as the pair passed the shower area in the passage back to base. "Look, do you know all the stuff I can do? The changing form, the strength, speed?"
"Yeah, I get the idea. So what about it? I figured it was just a mutation."
"Well, the thing is, I'm not the only one that can do this." The blonde said, with the brunette quirking her head to the side in mild confusion. "I mean, where I'm from, what I can do is an everyday thing. Almost everyone can do what I can do."
"A village of Mutants?" Calisto asked.
"We called ourselves ninja's." He retorted.
She tried to hold her laughter in, honestly she did, but the idea that the squirt in front of her was supposed to be some sort of lethal assassin was too much. She burst out laughing after only a pause of a second or three.
"Hey," the alleged ninja exclaimed crossly. "Hey, it's not funny! It's true!"
"I'm sorry," Calisto gasped for air, not sounding sorry at all. "I'm sorry I just need a-Hehe- just a second."
Gathering herself while an obviously distraught Naruto looked on almost set her off again. "No, I'm okay, I'm okay…Whooooo"
Looking up at the cross blond she invited him to continue his narrative.
"Anyway," Naruto continued, begin to walk up the circular walls of the passage. "Where I come from, like everyone can do this, so people made specific abilities called techniques, which nearly anyone could learn. And one of those techniques sent me here."
"So where did you come from?" Calisto asked, suspending disbelief for a moment or so.
"A placed called the Village Hidden in the Leaves." Naruto explained.
"Nice place?"
"Could be," the blonde said, his eyes glazing over in nostalgia. "Especially when you went on top of the Fire Shadow Monument, just early enough to catch the sunrise. And you could see it's rays hitting the jungle for miles around."
"Jungle?" the cyclopean woman asked, interrupting his memory.
"Oh yeah, we basically never had a day when the temperature dropped below 80." Naruto illuminated. "My old teacher said we had a…aww what the hell was it…"
"Tropical climate?" Calisto asked, surprised.
"Yep! That's it! Tropical climate!" Glancing towards the ceiling, Naruto continued, mostly to himself. "And Iruka-teacher thought I never paid attention."
"Hmm." Calisto grunted inquisitively to herself, the blond becoming more of a puzzle to pick apart daily.
"Well, oh traveler," She asked, glancing over at the supposed ninja. "What do you think of New York?
"I prefer home." A short answer, obvious in hindsight.
"Nearly everyone does."
Naruto grunted. "Makes you wonder why people come here."
"Not really," Calisto responded, shaking her head ponderously. "Everyone outgrows their nest sooner or later. Sink or swim in a dog-eat-dog world."
Naruto raised an eyebrow. "Do you want to work another saying into that sentence, or are you going to leave it there?"
She answered with a shrug. "I wanted to work in 'I'll have what she's having', but I didn't think I could."
For a moment, all that could be heard were the faint squeaking of Naruto's sneakers upon the damp walls, and the splashes of Calisto's own shoes upon the sodden floor beside the water.
"I don't get that last one." Naruto groused.
"I'll explain when you're older." Calisto said with a superior smirk. "So why don't you tell me a bit more about your home, jungle-boy."
"Well, for starters, it was in a place called the Land of Fire, one of the five or maybe six major areas in the Elemental Nations."
"I thought there were like a hundred something Elements."
Naruto looked over at her. "What?"
"Yeah, you know, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Berillium..?" She trailed off seeing the hopelessly lost look on the blondes face.
"Yeah, we just have like, Fire and stuff. Don't know what the hell you're going on about."
"Right," Calisto deadpanned. "So jungle world with ninja's and a pre-industrial society. Sounds dreamy."
"Pre-what now?" Naruto asked, prompting a groan from the cyclopean woman.
"We're going to have a long talk about history sometime soon." Calisto spoke in ironic phrasing.
"I know my history I just don't know a whole bunch about this place. New York, or whatever it's called."
"So what's your history then?" Calisto asked, more to kill the time and avoid talking in depth about the socio-economic portion of pre and postindustrial societies. Also she didn't know enough to teach it.
"Well," Naruto said, getting into his 'lecture-mode' as the kids called it. "It all started out with the Sage of the Six paths, he's the guy who taught everybody how to use Chakra."
"And chakra is?"
Naruto pushed himself up against the wall, and anchoring himself there with one leg, showed the bottom of his shoe to Callisto. After a second's concentration, the bottom turned a glowing, brilliant blue.
"This is Chakra." The blond explained, before letting the energy go with an audible groan. "It's the combination of a ninja's physical and spiritual energy. Using that, he can use techniques or manipulations, like what I'm doing right now."
Planting his foot back on the wall, Naruto continued his march down the corridor, and his history lesson both.
"So after that, there was a period, nobody knew how long, of warring clans." Seeing Calisto's scrutinizing look coming up, Naruto interceded before she could interrupt again. "The clans each had something called a bloodline limit. An ability that only people of those families could use or perform. Or the clans that didn't have that had techniques specialized in whatever field and passed down generation to generation."
Calisto continued looking curious so Naruto decided just to continue and let the questions fall where they may.
"So, warring clans gave way to clans teaming up, either to beat up some third clan or to not get attacked, and that led to the ninja villages," Naruto looked over at Calisto here. "and that's where I come from. The Village Hidden in the Leaves, located in the Land of Fire."
"Wow," Calisto spoke, bowing her head a bit in the information outpouring from Naruto. "And here I thought you weren't the brightest bulb. Proved me wrong"
"Yeah, well when it came to various awesome jutsu and the people who could use them, I was all ears. Asking me at what point a kunai on a piece of shinobi wire will detach and where it will land based upon the initial velocity and start point, and you might as well try to ask me to get to the moon by jumping."
"Why were you learning physics at your age?" Callisto asked, taking a gander at her twelve year old friend. "Shouldn't that have been in the more advanced courses or something?"
"Nope," Naruto denied from his place on the wall. "Time was when ninjas graduated at the age six and up, and were expected to hold their own in combat."
"As six year olds?" Calisto exclaimed, shaking her head in disgust. "That's just…that's so wrong."
"Hey, even the Fourth Fire Shadow went through like that!" Naruto defended.
Calisto glanced at her partner. "And what the hell is a Fire Shadow supposed to be?"
"The Fire Shadow is the protector of the village, the one that everyone looks up to. He's the guy who tells everyone else what to do and he sets the example for all other ninja's."
"So the Shadow is the leader?" Calisto asked cautiously.
"You got it. Most powerful person in the village, most of the time the smartest, too." Naruto said, stepping around a particularly grimy patch of muck sticking to the wall. "After him comes the elite jonin, the regular jonin, the special jonin, the chunin, the genin, the academy students, and then the civilians I guess."
"How high up were you?" queried the one eyed woman. "I mean, if you were dealing with these 'techniques' that threw you over here, you must have been pretty high up, right?"
The blonde laughs. Not a pretty laugh, or even one of the ones the Sarah loves hearing after a prank. No this laugh was a self-deprecating, pitying laugh.
"No, I wasn't that high up."
"Really?"
"I didn't even make ninja back home." Naruto said bitterly. "I never even made it out of the academy before I did something fucking stupid and brought myself here."
"Well, look at it this way." Calisto said, not enjoying the angst of the blonde's words. "How many of your fellow classmates could have done what you did and lived?"
Naruto thought for a moment before grudgingly admitting two or three.
"Sasuke could have, the bastard. Sakura could have made it here, too. She's like, super smart. And then probably one of the other Deadlasts. Shikamaru, maybe, or Kiba."
"And they can all do stuff like you?" Calisto asked inquisitively.
"Yeah." Naruto responded immediately before frowning. "Well, most of them anyway. Shika is super lazy. He does the bare minimum to get by, but he's also like super smart, and Kiba just kinda rushes into things, but he always has Akamaru to back him up these days. Sasuke and Sakura, though, would have no problem with this place."
"But they didn't."
Naruto glanced up at his cyclopean friend, confusion clear on his face.
"No one else came here, faced down monsters and evil, and fought for their very survival. No one else had to face down Punisher. No one else had to escape from torture and experimentation. No one else picked three kids up off the street and made sure they were clothed and fed, and looked after them like they were family. And no one else saved my life. No one but you."
Calisto held his gaze for a moment, seeing cerulean orbs started to water slightly. It was the first time an adult had really recognized the struggle he had gone through. The first time someone had actually cared about how he felt to such a point that they could cheer him up through their words alone. It felt like he was being looked after.
"So stop being a little bitch about it and get over yourself."
"Thanks, jackass." Naruto returned with a smile.
"Seriously though," Calisto said with a quirky smile. "If this becomes like a thing I have to do every few days, I just might have to hit you."
"Yeah, yeah." Naruto waved her off, feeling a bit lighter…or as light as one can feel when wall walking.
"So where exactly are you from." Calisto started after a minute or so of silence. "Village Hidden in the Leaves, Land of Fire, I get it. But where on Earth?
"Well, that's the trouble." Naruto answered honestly. "I don't know really."
At the brunettes puzzled stare, he continued. "I know where I am from, and what the maps looked like, more or less. And I have a geographical map of the world back at base that I've been going through, or was until your injured ass started taking up all of my time."
"Bite me," Calisto retorted offhandedly. "But continue."
With a sigh, Naruto did as he was prompted. "I have yet to find a single area, between what I remember of my country and the maps I could find of this entire world, which looks vaguely similar."
The older mutant was knocked for a loop there, speechless mouth working in unspoken sentences before coming to a decision.
"But if you have no idea where you came from, how on Earth did you get here?"
"I told you, I used a technique-"
"And you teleported from wherever you were, to New York?" Calisto interrupted.
"Yeah."
The one eyed mutant queried again. "And you obviously tried to use the same thing to get back."
"Obviously." Naruto said tersely, huffing out a frustrated breath. "But not once has it worked even a little bit."
"So you decided-" began the one eyed mutant before the frustrated teen interrupted her.
"No, I have a better question." Turning to look his companion upside down in the eye, he asked. "Why the interest? Hmm? Why all the questions?"
She arced a black eyebrow at his aggravated tone. "Curiosity, of course."
"No," Naruto shot back immediately. "I don't believe that. If it was just curiosity then you would have been a lot more interested into what I could do, than me going home."
The splashing of Calisto's boots in the puddles running the cobblestone floor echoed of the walls of the sewer long after she had come to a halt. She eyed the teen with some unrecognizable emotion for a long moment before speaking. "You're a very suspicious kid, aren't you?"
Thinking of a manic grin on a pudgy face, Naruto suppressed a shudder. "Only because of experience."
His eyes narrowed into a frown. "And you haven't answered my question yet."
She nodded, black hair bobbing. "I was asking because of the kids."
"What about them?" Naruto asked, eyes still narrowed at the new line of questioning.
"Well, you are a kid, living in a sewer, trying to take care of three other kids, all of whom have debilitating mutations. And all the while you are doing this, you are trying to get home." She turned to look the kid in the eye. "I'm just trying to get a sense of whether or not you are going to leave the kids."
"What?" Naruto asked, startled. "Why the hell would I go and do that?"
Calisto's eye roamed over the upside down blonde. "You said it yourself, that you'd rather be home than here, provided you knew where home was. And if you knew, then you would have to leave to get there either taking the kids with you, and adding a layer of hassle to your trip, or leaving them here." Looking back ahead, the door to their little sanctuary was coming into view around a bend in the tunnel. "Just trying to look out for them."
Naruto was silent for a moment, until they had almost reached the steel door, when he turned to his cyclopean companion.
"I'm trying to look out for them, too." He said. "In the very, very short amount of time that I've been here in your city, I have been stabbed, shot, frozen, set on fire, electrocuted, impaled and been locked up and experimented on. And there is no way in the hells that I am leaving them here, alone, to face that. If I go, I'm taking them with me."
Tugging on the door, steel screeching over stone echoed loudly down the tunnel, but was accompanied by the sound of childish laughter. Taking in the scene before him, Naruto saw the kids were having fun with a stack of coloring books he got on his last trip out, with Caliban sitting in the middle working studiously on his own, his tongue pushed out the side of his mouth while he wore a look of readily apparent deep concentration.
Naruto looked over the scene with a bittersweet smile. "Gonna be a pain though, going back the normal way, 'stead of using jutsu. Food and everything will be a solid bastard."
"So if it's all so hard, why do you even bother?" Calisto asked again, not ready to give up on the conversation before she was satisfied entirely. "It's not like they'll blame you, they've been dumped off before, hell it's probably how they got here! So why do you make it so that you're their defender?"
"I never really had anyone like that when I was growing up." Naruto explained, his eyes staring vacantly down at the stone ceiling. "I mean, I had people who cared about me a bit. People who would rather have me around, but I never really had anyone I could depend upon 100%."
Calisto was silent, instead allowing him to vent. "Sure, the old man gave me money so that I could live, and Iruka took me out every once and a while, and the Ichiraku's were just unbiased." Naruto gripped the back of a chair, simply needing something for his hands to do while he spoke. "But no one was there for me. No one helped me up when I was down, no one cared when I had a bad dream and woke up in tears. No one was there for me."
Naruto nodded at the kids, off coloring, with Sidney and Nick on the verge of another argument. "When I saw them for the first time, I thought I saw in them the same thing I saw in the mirror at their age. I thought I saw…hopelessness. The abandonment of every adult I had ever known. And like I would never wanted that at their age, I will never be the cause for it!"
A moment of silence greeted his confirmation, after which he gave a short chuckle. "Musta spent too much time around the bastard, I'm emo'ing out left and right."
Turning to look at his comrade, Naruto gave a light grin and a nod. "Thanks for bearing with me there, I never knew how having a friend to talk to could make burdens lighter."
"Don't make it a habit though," Calisto returned. "Or I might have to carry through on hitting you."
Naruto grinned foxily. "You'd have to catch me first!" And with a playful laugh, he teleported to the other side of the room, catching Sarah unawares in a tackle/tickle.
Caliban looked up at this and gave a small smile starting, putting down his book and starting towards his friend.
"Calisto," the grey skinned man whispered to his counterpart when he reached her. "When will we go?"
Her eyes trailed the back of the retreating ninja, moving forward to play with the children.
'Abandonment, hopelessness, never the cause' Words of Naruto's echoed about her mind in a way that she had only attributed before to a love, striking deep resonating chords in her very soul. 'A place to call home, Sanctuary,'
'A place that everyone hated by the world above could gather, in a world without prejudice, where their gifts would be celebrated as an achievement of diversity, rather than cast down. A place that every mutant could call home.' She thought rapidly, inspiration striking within her, like a lightning bolt running through her limbs and mind. She positively teemed with energy, her mind abuzz with possibility.
"Calisto?"
'I could call up my old friends in the city. A life of petty crime and paradise below the streets is better than stealing out of dumpsters, or thieving in the alleys. Then Caliban could help out finding the muties worse off in the world above, and they could join us. This could be more than just a group too, this could be an entire civilization down here. The way the kid set this up, we might actually have a half decent way to survive down here until we could set up some sort of system, fully gain our independence from the world above.' Her eye flicked back and forth constantly, as if a list were written in front of her. 'No, not a list, a path.'
"I don't think I want to…" Calisto whispered at long last.
Turning back to her stunned friend, she gave a wolfish smile. "Kid's got a hell of an idea here."
"What idea, Calisto?" He whispered in a dry hiss.
"Caliban, how many mutants are there in New York, right now?"
The grey skinned mutant was already shaking his head before she even finished. "Doesn't work like that, you know Caliban can't do it like that!"
"It's alright, Cali, everything's ok." Calisto said softly, patting his back. "We'll look one by one then. Where are Sunder and Masque right now?"
Line Break
A plain office building stood, dwarfed by all surrounding buildings save for a one story tall restaurant on the edge of a park in New Jersey. The dullish grey of old concrete and slate windows made up the buildings' exterior, with cheap florescent lighting illuminating the rooms within.
What went unseen by the casual observer though, was behind the fading charade and cheap exterior, a hive of activity buzzed beneath the surface of that little office building.
The mere four story building contained another ten levels below ground, all dedicated towards cutting edge research and development, and another four after that towards manufacturing of small equipment and arms.
It was all highly illegal, and completely sanctioned.
And at the top of this vast, teeming enterprise, in a room heavily shielded, and swept hourly for listening devices sat a man with a single eye, peering over reports provided by the scientists and engineers below.
Colonel Nick Fury scowled frustratingly at the report in his hands, in which a patient was treated with a dosage of Doctor Connors special chemical, and the new weapons being churned out by R&D were tested on it.
The results were less than stellar.
While the weapons were successful in that they did in fact impact the creature and damage it, while keeping reloading and overheating issues in check, the weapons made no lasting impact, to the point that in advanced tests, where the transformed patient charged down a narrow hallway towards the weapons testing station, the weapons barely slowed the monstrosities, if at all.
Putting down the rather thick binder with the results and scientists conclusions, Fury took the time to rub the overused vein on his forehead in an attempt to forfend the oncoming migraine.
Realizing that it wasn't doing him any good, Fury instead reached over to his inbox finding the next report to pour over.
Unfortunately, that one was concerning the growing number of powered people, mutants and meta-humans alike. What the report went into at great length, however, was various abilities of these individuals versus the average capacity of a SHIELD agent, and the determination that if the present rise in these super-beings were to continue, as the list of known powered people had gone up by 17.6% in the last year alone, SHIELD would soon both be ineffectual, and completely overrun.
Slamming that report shut with particular vindictiveness, the Director of SHIELD turned towards his inbox again, this time filtering through to find the folders relating to the R&D of new gadgetry and weapons.
After the first file went through Dr. Hall's desire to build his new generator run entirely by some sub molecular physics, the second went into attempting to copy the US Army's Gamma program, and the third outlining the possibility of outsourcing some of the new R&D projects to Stark Enterprises.
The fourth folder, however, was something a little different. After looking through it quickly, Fury finally felt his headache abating. Slamming the cover closed, the dark red letters on the cover now shone in the florescent lighting. ISS.
Pressing a button on his intercom, the Director spoke sharply, new purpose filling his words.
"Agent, I want Dr. Hall and the research heads downstairs in the conference room in fifteen. I have a new project for them."
"Yes Director Fury." The voice on the other side said before abruptly cutting out.
Looking back down at the ISS folder, Nick lifted it up gently.
"The Tesseract…"
Author's Notes: Sorry everyone. I got lost on the road of life.