Well guys, I have had a few sporadic moments of creativity, so I have been able to put out a few chapters to keep you regular readers interested in my story. Hopefully, it hasn't lost its luster for you yet and you still find it interesting enough to keep reading it as I update. Again, I really appreciate the reviews, but if any of you have ideas, please don't hesitate to offer them up. If I think they will fit well into the story, I'll be glad to use them and I will be sure to give you the due credit for the idea. I like writing stories tailored to my readers while still maintaining my own creative integrity, so 'hook me up' and I'll try to put out quality reading material for all you NaruxSaku fans out there. Anyhow, enough of my rambling, I'm sure you are more interested in what comes after the line break. :D
It had been another long day at the fire station and Naruto was feeling the strain of the day's events. The day started with a car fire in the tunnel Downtown, followed by two separate residential fires in the historic district of the city. Naruto mopped his brow of sweat and soot as he took a break from his overhaul of this latest house fire. This fire was a mystery to him. The fire inspector was talking with the Fire Chief about the details, so Naruto made sure to listen close for any new information. The conversation wasn't long, but what he was able to get out of it was that it seems the arsonist setting these fires was getting smarter and was refining his technique. The burn patterns were completely uncharacteristic of normal fire behavior. Naruto looked at the random charring around the house. It was almost like someone set multiple fires in the same house, putting each one out before the next was started. There were indications that the fire burned really hot, suggesting that an accelerant was used, but the odor analyzer didn't detect even the slightest hint of an accelerant. The fire inspector was baffled by this as were the rest of the responding fire personnel.
"Naruto, you gunna' stand around or are you actually gunna' do some work?" Kakashi yelled from outside.
Naruto had the decency to look abashed and got back to pulling down drywall, looking for possible hot-spots.
Back at the station, Naruto decided to take a shower to wash the soot off his body and to get the all too familiar 'smoked sausage' smell that accompanies fighting fire, out of his hair. It was five o'clock in the evening and dinner at the station would be ready soon. As the hot water rolled off his body, he closed his eyes to relax. When he opened them again he saw nothing but blackness. He blinked several times, but to no avail. He started to stumble around, water sloshed around his ankles reminding him he was in the shower. He started to feel uneasy on his feet, not being able to see anything and reached out to put a hand on the wall to steady himself. Hand met open air and he began to stumble forward. He fell face first into the water then pushed himself up onto his knees. Naruto squinted and rubbed his eyes trying anything he could think of to get his vision to clear. Finally after nothing working, he simply called out for help.
"Captain Kakashi? Kiba? Anyone? Someone help! I can't see!"
Naruto crawled through the water, trying to feel for a wall. Where the hell was the wall? His hand finally found something solid and he pushed himself up against it, leaning against it to keep from falling back down again. More cries for help brought only silence. Naruto was starting to freak out. He was pretty convinced now that he was no longer in the shower at the fire station, but the bigger question was, where the hell was he? He decided to follow the hard wall like structure he was tracing with his hand. He walked through the ankle deep water for what seemed like hours until the wall just stopped. Just when Naruto was about to turn around in the other direction, he caught a glimmer of light out of the corner of his eye. He turned left where the 'wall' ended and started walking toward the soft glow.
The further he walked, the greater the illumination grew until he could make out his surroundings. After looking around he noticed that he had in fact been traveling down a long hallway. Higher up the walls of this hallway were dingy, moss-covered and rusted pipes lining each side. These pipes seemed to come together into larger pipes, which in turn, came together into even larger pipes which all came together to one large pipe that marked the end of the hallway. Beyond the end of that hallway was a large wide open room of some kind.
As Naruto stepped into the room he noticed that the ankle deep water got a bit deeper and came up to his knees. He looked around and noticed that there were other hallways that came from this room and went other places which Naruto most certainly didn't know. His attention then focused on something in the center of the room. In the center of the room, surrounded by four lit torches, was a platform. By this time Naruto had already given up on trying to figure out where he was, and only focused on learning as much as he could about 'where' he was at now. He edged closer to the platform, keeping his eyes up, because it wasn't the platform that held his attention, but the glowing red mass of fluid that was seemingly hovering over it.
Naruto had no idea what it was, and he could feel that the red mass practically hummed with energy, but the fear of the unknown did not stop him from reaching out to it, almost as if he were being drawn to it.
A whisper in the back of his mind startled him and he pulled his hand back as if he had been burned.
"Don't be afraid my child." The whisper said, "I will not harm you. I am as much a part of you as you are a part of me."
'Ok. It's official. I have finally lost my mind.' Mused Naruto.
Naruto slapped himself across the face a few times, then he pinched his arms and legs, anything to try and 'wake' himself from what obviously had to be a very realistic daydream.
'I must have inhaled too much smoke at that fire' he thought.
He shrugged his shoulders at the absurdity of a 'red blob' talking to him and decided to just go with it. He might as well get some answers.
"Yo, uh, red blobby thing…" He scratched his head trying to think of just how exactly he was to go about talking to this thing… "Umm… Where exactly am I?"
Silence was his answer.
"Hey, uh, look… I don't know what is going on, or why I can't wake from this dream, but I really gotta go. I'm still on shift at the fire station and-"
"What you think you need to do is irrelevant!" Boomed a voice from everywhere in the room at once.
Naruto covered his ears at the unexpected voice.
"Damnit that was loud. I think my ears are bleeding."
Naruto wiggled a finger in his ear in an attempt to quell the ringing that now replaced the silence he had gotten used to.
"My apologies young one, you have been ignoring me for quite some time until only recently. My intentions were only to gain your attention." Again the voice seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once.
"Uh... it's Ok, I guess." Naruto looked around the room trying to find a person belonging to the voice, but saw no one. He shrugged his shoulders, giving up on that idea. "So, where am I?"
"It amuses me that you don't recognize your own mind young one, but then again, you don't use it that often, so your lack of familiarity is not surprising."
"My mind?"
"You catch on quick." The voice deadpanned.
"Hey, it's not every day you are unceremoniously yanked from a peaceful shower into your own mind. I'm still not thoroughly convinced I'm not dreaming right now."
It was quiet again. Naruto was about to ask another question when the red mass above the podium started to shift. It wobbled and boiled, as if something inside were trying to poke through the side, trying to get out. Slowly it began to take shape. Gradually, the features sharpened, taking on animalistic characteristics. The more Naruto looked at the mass, the more he thought it looked familiar to him. As it finished it's writhing and reshaping Naruto took a step back to take in the image in front of him.
There, standing on the podium, in the center of his 'mind', was a large, red fox. This was already new on his 'weird shit that happens to me' list, but to make matters even more confusing was the fact that the fox had not one, but nine tails.
"Umm, so I gather that you are a fox, but why the hell do you have nine tails? Foxes only have one tail… like every other normal animal that is born with a tail."
The fox bared its teeth in what could possibly pass for a grin.
"That is because I am no normal fox." The fox stated.
"Thanks Captain Obvious, I gathered that much already. Maybe you want to explain to me why I have a red-blobby-thing-fox living in my head?" Naruto, completely convinced now that he was dreaming, swore to himself that once he woke up he would never eat crawfish with chocolate milk ever again.
"How about I start from the beginning?" The fox mused.
The fox gestured toward the far wall of the room, where a large portion of it shimmered and distort into an image. As Naruto watched the image became clearer as the waving slowed to a stop. In the image, rolling green hills of grass and lush forests went on for miles. Trees swayed in the breeze. Naruto closed his eyes as he enjoyed the cool feel of the fresh air against his skin. When he opened his eyes again, he was high above the trees, soaring through the sky. Off in the distance he saw a small village.
Naruto felt a presence tug on him, halting his progress toward that peaceful village. He turned and saw the fox with nine tails hovering just behind him.
"Do you know what this place is?" asked the fox.
"No. I know I have never seen this place before, but somehow… I feel connected to it. Like how I would feel coming home from a long journey." He paused and rubbed his chin. "Kinda like I belong here."
The fox nodded at his reply. "This place is connected to you as I am connected to you. This place existed quite a long time ago, though it no longer exists in this time."
Naruto could only squint his eyes, not really understanding what the fox was trying to get at.
"This village is the birthplace of your lineage, as well as the reason you and I are two parts of the same whole." The fox gestured with one of his tails and the image was replaced with an image of war. There was fighting everywhere. Many warriors were locked in hand-to-hand combat; some were throwing knives and other weapons while there were others that looked as though they were tending wounded.
"I don't understand. What does this all have to do with me?" Naruto gave the fox a quizzical look.
"Watch and understand young one." The fox gestured again with one of his tails and the scene changed again. This time, two figures were standing opposite of each other. One was a raven haired man dressed in a white kimono and wielding a very long sword. The feature that stood out the most to Naruto was the man's eyes.
Naruto recognized them almost immediately. He had seen those very same eyes that night in the parking garage.
The fox confirmed Naruto's unspoken words. "Yes, those are the cursed eyes of the Uchiha. The eyes that could control and manipulate even the strongest of the tailed beasts, me, the Kyuubi no Kitsune."
Naruto scratched the back of his head. "Uhh… what's a Keeyoubee or whatever?"
"Kyuubi, or nine tails. There were nine of us out of the tailed beasts, our power determined by the number of tails we had. The more tails we had, the more powerful we were. I was the strongest. At the time I was nothing more than a malevolent mass of hatred, but my jinchuuriki-" he noticed Naruto had the same look of confusion again. "- but my 'host' eventually changed that. He had a strong spirit, one that would not be broken, even by the strongest force in the world."
Naruto just nodded his head, figuring that none of this would even really matter, since he was dreaming after all.
Kyuubi sighed.
"For now young one, just know that I am called Kyuubi. I am part of you, and you are a direct descendant of the other man in this image." Kyuubi pointed to the other man in the scene on the wall. The man had bright blue eyes and flowing blonde hair.
"Wow, that guy looks just like me."
"Essentially, you are him reborn. But that is another story for another time. Perhaps I have said too much already. I can tell this is quite a bit of information to take in, and you probably think you are just dreaming anyway. You humans are always quick to discount that which you don't understand. My time is about up, I shall leave you with a parting gift." Kyuubi's tails began to glow bright red. Without warning, all nine tails shot out and embedded into Naruto's stomach. Inky black marking began to appear on his abdomen and the tails continued their ministrations. Naruto grunted in pain as the tails felt like hot coals being raked across his stomach. Finally after what seemed like an eternity, the fox withdrew his tails. "The Gate is finished. My work is done. For now, rest; we shall meet again soon. Farewell Naruto."
"-aruto…"
"Na-to"
"Naruto wake up!"
Naruto jolted awake and his eyes opened to Kakashi standing over him in the shower shaking him.
After Naruto dried and finished dressing he stepped out of the bathroom. He took a few steps and quickly became dizzy and light headed.
'Why am I so tired. I haven't done that much today… and what was up with that weird day-dream. It seemed to go on forever.'
Suddenly there was a burning pain in his stomach. It got hotter and hotter until he couldn't stand it anymore. He grabbed the hem of his shirt and lifted it away from his stomach and took a long hard look.
"No fucking way…"