Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Hidden Truths ❯ Meeting Drake ( Chapter 9 )
[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]
By: blackflames8 
Anime/Manga: Naruto Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.20.2005 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.4K | Visits: 230 | Status: Work In Progress
Anime/Manga: Naruto Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.20.2005 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.4K | Visits: 230 | Status: Work In Progress
9: Meeting Drake
Back at the campsite, Sasuke had just sat down. It had been quite a day of embarrassment and he didn’t feel like taking anymore of it.
He sat on one of the logs that would eventually serve as a bench during dinner time. He looked down at the ground and then to his hands.
Was he right about me? Is that all I will become? Nothing more than a common ninja whom I try so hard to distance myself from? These thoughts flashed through his head repeatedly and almost completely different voices, first Alek, then Kay, Kakashi, all of them until it finally came to Naruto.
Inside his head, the blonde-haired boy stared at him harshly, almost mockingly. When his lips parted however, they did not mutter the same questions that had come from the others. This Naruto seemed older, both in appearance and in the deepness of his voice and Sasuke realized that this was the image he had in his mind of what Naruto would look like in later life.
“We were always there for you,” he said monotonously. “We wanted to help but you pushed us away. And now look at you, still clinging to the hope that you will one day defeat Itachi. Yet you do not realize that he is dead and has been for a very long time.”
And then the voice changed. “You were so stupid to think that you could ever beat him. You aren’t fit to kiss his shoe. I think it would be easier just to kill yourself,” he grinned evilly.
The voice changed again, this time becoming more serious. “All along you’ve been searching for Itachi, to kill him, to make him regret what he did to your clan. But in reality, you are just as guilty as he is.”
Stop it!
“You could have stopped him.”
I said stop!
“But you were a fool, you were too weak. And you should have died with them.”
Get out of my head!
But the voice continued to taunt him. “You search so hard to find a way to kill him when it would be as simple as one, two, three. Itachi will die, one way or another, but your family can not rest knowing that the person who betrayed them, the person who wasn’t strong enough to save them, is still alive. How could they rest in peace knowing such a pathetic offspring of theirs is still running around, when he should have died a lonnng time ago.”
The voice finally subsided, leaving Sasuke on the ground pressing his palms to his ears.
“Ahh, Sasuke Uchiha. So nice to finally get to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you. But even I did not expect to meet you in person. I guess I would have imagined that you hadn’t gone crazy, even after that massacre.”
Sasuke’s eyes darted open and he jumped to his feet.
Standing on one of the branches of a large tree was a man in a solid black bodysuit that covered every bit of his body except his knuckles and eyes, which were a shade of blue. His eyes seemed a bit soft for a man as did his hand but then again, his voice wasn’t much different.
“Who are you?”
“What you don’t already know? Well I’ll humor you. My name is Drake,” he said, dipping into a bow.
“Why are you here?”
“Well I was just checking up on my enemies. It’s been a while so I thought I’d drop by. But I can see I’m not wanted around here and it is obvious that you are the only one here so I will leave.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked another voice.
They both turned to see Alek standing on the other side of the clearing with the peregrine falcon on his shoulder with his arms crossed. Behind him stood the rest of the team except for Kay and Kakashi who had circled around unnoticed to surround Drake and Sasuke.
“I thought I was going to leave but since you’re all here, I think I’ll stay a bit longer. It’s been so long hasn’t it, Alek?”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what you have done to me and what I will do to you when I get my hands on you.”
“Now, now. Let’s not be hasty. I merely have a few things to say before I go on my way. The first is that Caitlin is perfectly unharmed. And the second thing I will tell you is to turn back. This entire mission is a waste of time. There is no way that you will make it to the end and kill me before you lose your entire team. And that is something I do not wish to happen; even I have respect for those brave enough to take on this mission. But is it really worth getting them killed over?”
“They will not die, but you will.”
“That’s what you think. But I can assure you, at least one of your teammates will die.”
“You talk too much. You know that don’t you, traitor?”
“Me?!? A traitor? Never. In case some of the details got a little confused, which I’m sure they did, let me tell you the real story. What you were probably told was that I was creating jutsus that required mass amounts of sacrifices, weren’t you? I’m sure that’s the case and I can assure you that that is a lie.”
“Get to the point Drake. If you aren’t here to fight, then why are you here?” Kay asked.
“All in due time my dear. I was in fact creating new jutsus, that part was correct. But it required the same sacrifice as any other jutsu, chakra.”
“Why do I fail to believe you?” Alek asked.
“Because they fooled you into thinking that it was I that was the bad guy. I was only trying to help them, but they only wanted to point a finger at. The mass murders that were occurring around me were in fact caused by me.”
“So then it was you.”
“So quick to jump to conclusions, and so very rude. Did I interrupt you when you were talking? Anyway, the people that were my test subjects were those oppressed by his Lordship, the one who told you this story. They were a poor group of people who hated life more than you could possibly imagine, yet none of them were even given a knife in which to end it. He wanted them to suffer. They were very depressed, it was a pitiful sight to behold, even shinobi were among these masses.
“I called for no subjects for which to test my jutsu, they came to me seeking death. I just gave it to them. I would consider it euthanasia. But for his Lordship, he considered it wiping out more of his pathetic followers which he would one day either torture to death or, like myself, use them to develop new jutsus. It just so happens that I was one of his loyal subjects, I was very close to him indeed, nothing more than master and commander, but it was a powerful bond.
“One day he was telling me about a jutsu he was trying to develop, one that would have the power to kill large amounts of people without notice. So I took up this study and beat him to perfecting it. There is such a jutsu already known but it creates such a power when it is used that it can be detected and stopped before being completed. This one however, leaves no such precursor, and therefore it is a very valuable technique.
“He blamed these deaths on sacrifice. But as you can probably guess, that wasn’t the case. And so he banished me under false pretenses, so I rebelled,” he finished, shrugging his shoulders.
“How touching,” Alek said mockingly. “It makes me feel like a kid inside, now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go shove my finger down my throat.”
Drake smiled and lowered his head. “Well I can see talking to you isn’t going to do anything for you. But at least give me the pleasure of showing you my face, so you will recognize me when the time comes.”
“You know you sound like a girl, don’t you?” Naruto asked rudely.
Drake reached for his head with both of his hands, the right one went to the side of his head where it unclipped the fabric hiding his lower face and the left pushing back the top half.
They all held back gasps for what they saw was not the face of a man, as they had all been told, but that of a woman’s. Her skin was slightly pale but smooth all the same and her black hair fell below her shoulders and was whipped around when a breeze kicked up, making it cross her face and adding a certain look of deeper femininity than before. She actually looked, what some might consider, (in this case was the entire group of males) hot. “Surprised?” she said, her voice was even softer now that her face guard had dropped off to the side.
“This isn’t Drake,” Alek said declaratively.
“I’m not?”
“No. You’re an imposter. Everyone knows that Drake is a--”
“Guy, yes I know. Like I said, everything you were told was a bit distorted. They wouldn’t want to look like fools having everyone know that a woman could go head-to-head with them, it wouldn’t seem right.”
“Got that right,” Naruto said drearily.
“What did you say?” Sakura, Tenten and Kay yelled in unison.
Naruto quickly jumped behind Sasuke and grabbed his sleeve, ready to swing him in front of himself as a shield if they chose to attack.
“Well it looks like Naruto has had some bad run-ins with Sakura,” Drake pointed out. “But you must know that not all girls are as idiotic as her. Surely there is someone better that you can go after?”
“Hey!” Sakura yelled.
“‘Hey’ what?”
“This mind reading thing is getting old. Can’t I have a single thought to myself?” Naruto asked.
Drake turned her head slightly to the side, closed her eyes and smiled. “I guess not. You’ll get used to it eventually. And yes I did hear that, Sasuke.”
Everyone turned to look at Sasuke who blushed slightly.
“You have to just come out and say things like that. You’re probably just too afraid of rejection, or it might me because I’m you ‘enemy’. But I have done nothing to you and you have done nothing to me, so we aren’t enemies yet in my mind at least.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he declared.
“If you say so. But your pants don’t agree,” she smiled and coughed gently as he turned a deeper shade of red.
“Enough with the romance crap. Why are you here?” Alek asked irritatedly.
“No reason in particular. I guess I just got bored of listening to your girlfriend tell me about how you were going to beat me and save her. Ooh, what’s with the sudden mind closure for? Like I don’t already know. You’re a pimp, in the words of my long departed friend.
“Girlfriend number two over there wasn’t quick enough to close her mind,” she said pointing a finger palm-up at Kay.
Alek clenched his fist tightly and tried to shake this off. “Why are you attacking these nations for?” he finally asked.
“Well, if you must know, I got bored with our region and decided to come over here to check the prospects, see if any of them would be daring enough to challenge me. Looks like I’ve found seven and all from the noble Konoha. I was hoping to fight Gaara as well but from what my scouts have told me, he is away in the northern regions. But the real prize is already here. Naruto Uzamaki, Jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi. The one beast more powerful than ten thousand shinobi, or so the story goes.”
“Then why don’t you two fight and get this over with,” Neji suggested.
“Don’t put us in a situation where we’re at a disadvantage, Neji” Kakashi said. “Now is not the time nor the place.”
“He’s right,” Drake agreed. “But I wouldn’t fight in such a place anyway. I prefer a more leveled place where there’s nowhere to hide, builds pressure and it’s more climactic, I think. In the forest, you could be fighting for days and not even see the person’s face.
“Well I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got challengers waiting.” She replaced her face mask and disappeared.
“Are all people like that where you come from?” Naruto asked abruptly.
Alek bobbed his head up and down a few times. “Pretty much.”
_____________________________________________________ ___________________
Sorry it took so long to update, my teachers have been killing me with homework. Hope you liked it though, I kinda made it in a hurry.
Back at the campsite, Sasuke had just sat down. It had been quite a day of embarrassment and he didn’t feel like taking anymore of it.
He sat on one of the logs that would eventually serve as a bench during dinner time. He looked down at the ground and then to his hands.
Was he right about me? Is that all I will become? Nothing more than a common ninja whom I try so hard to distance myself from? These thoughts flashed through his head repeatedly and almost completely different voices, first Alek, then Kay, Kakashi, all of them until it finally came to Naruto.
Inside his head, the blonde-haired boy stared at him harshly, almost mockingly. When his lips parted however, they did not mutter the same questions that had come from the others. This Naruto seemed older, both in appearance and in the deepness of his voice and Sasuke realized that this was the image he had in his mind of what Naruto would look like in later life.
“We were always there for you,” he said monotonously. “We wanted to help but you pushed us away. And now look at you, still clinging to the hope that you will one day defeat Itachi. Yet you do not realize that he is dead and has been for a very long time.”
And then the voice changed. “You were so stupid to think that you could ever beat him. You aren’t fit to kiss his shoe. I think it would be easier just to kill yourself,” he grinned evilly.
The voice changed again, this time becoming more serious. “All along you’ve been searching for Itachi, to kill him, to make him regret what he did to your clan. But in reality, you are just as guilty as he is.”
Stop it!
“You could have stopped him.”
I said stop!
“But you were a fool, you were too weak. And you should have died with them.”
Get out of my head!
But the voice continued to taunt him. “You search so hard to find a way to kill him when it would be as simple as one, two, three. Itachi will die, one way or another, but your family can not rest knowing that the person who betrayed them, the person who wasn’t strong enough to save them, is still alive. How could they rest in peace knowing such a pathetic offspring of theirs is still running around, when he should have died a lonnng time ago.”
The voice finally subsided, leaving Sasuke on the ground pressing his palms to his ears.
“Ahh, Sasuke Uchiha. So nice to finally get to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you. But even I did not expect to meet you in person. I guess I would have imagined that you hadn’t gone crazy, even after that massacre.”
Sasuke’s eyes darted open and he jumped to his feet.
Standing on one of the branches of a large tree was a man in a solid black bodysuit that covered every bit of his body except his knuckles and eyes, which were a shade of blue. His eyes seemed a bit soft for a man as did his hand but then again, his voice wasn’t much different.
“Who are you?”
“What you don’t already know? Well I’ll humor you. My name is Drake,” he said, dipping into a bow.
“Why are you here?”
“Well I was just checking up on my enemies. It’s been a while so I thought I’d drop by. But I can see I’m not wanted around here and it is obvious that you are the only one here so I will leave.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked another voice.
They both turned to see Alek standing on the other side of the clearing with the peregrine falcon on his shoulder with his arms crossed. Behind him stood the rest of the team except for Kay and Kakashi who had circled around unnoticed to surround Drake and Sasuke.
“I thought I was going to leave but since you’re all here, I think I’ll stay a bit longer. It’s been so long hasn’t it, Alek?”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what you have done to me and what I will do to you when I get my hands on you.”
“Now, now. Let’s not be hasty. I merely have a few things to say before I go on my way. The first is that Caitlin is perfectly unharmed. And the second thing I will tell you is to turn back. This entire mission is a waste of time. There is no way that you will make it to the end and kill me before you lose your entire team. And that is something I do not wish to happen; even I have respect for those brave enough to take on this mission. But is it really worth getting them killed over?”
“They will not die, but you will.”
“That’s what you think. But I can assure you, at least one of your teammates will die.”
“You talk too much. You know that don’t you, traitor?”
“Me?!? A traitor? Never. In case some of the details got a little confused, which I’m sure they did, let me tell you the real story. What you were probably told was that I was creating jutsus that required mass amounts of sacrifices, weren’t you? I’m sure that’s the case and I can assure you that that is a lie.”
“Get to the point Drake. If you aren’t here to fight, then why are you here?” Kay asked.
“All in due time my dear. I was in fact creating new jutsus, that part was correct. But it required the same sacrifice as any other jutsu, chakra.”
“Why do I fail to believe you?” Alek asked.
“Because they fooled you into thinking that it was I that was the bad guy. I was only trying to help them, but they only wanted to point a finger at. The mass murders that were occurring around me were in fact caused by me.”
“So then it was you.”
“So quick to jump to conclusions, and so very rude. Did I interrupt you when you were talking? Anyway, the people that were my test subjects were those oppressed by his Lordship, the one who told you this story. They were a poor group of people who hated life more than you could possibly imagine, yet none of them were even given a knife in which to end it. He wanted them to suffer. They were very depressed, it was a pitiful sight to behold, even shinobi were among these masses.
“I called for no subjects for which to test my jutsu, they came to me seeking death. I just gave it to them. I would consider it euthanasia. But for his Lordship, he considered it wiping out more of his pathetic followers which he would one day either torture to death or, like myself, use them to develop new jutsus. It just so happens that I was one of his loyal subjects, I was very close to him indeed, nothing more than master and commander, but it was a powerful bond.
“One day he was telling me about a jutsu he was trying to develop, one that would have the power to kill large amounts of people without notice. So I took up this study and beat him to perfecting it. There is such a jutsu already known but it creates such a power when it is used that it can be detected and stopped before being completed. This one however, leaves no such precursor, and therefore it is a very valuable technique.
“He blamed these deaths on sacrifice. But as you can probably guess, that wasn’t the case. And so he banished me under false pretenses, so I rebelled,” he finished, shrugging his shoulders.
“How touching,” Alek said mockingly. “It makes me feel like a kid inside, now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go shove my finger down my throat.”
Drake smiled and lowered his head. “Well I can see talking to you isn’t going to do anything for you. But at least give me the pleasure of showing you my face, so you will recognize me when the time comes.”
“You know you sound like a girl, don’t you?” Naruto asked rudely.
Drake reached for his head with both of his hands, the right one went to the side of his head where it unclipped the fabric hiding his lower face and the left pushing back the top half.
They all held back gasps for what they saw was not the face of a man, as they had all been told, but that of a woman’s. Her skin was slightly pale but smooth all the same and her black hair fell below her shoulders and was whipped around when a breeze kicked up, making it cross her face and adding a certain look of deeper femininity than before. She actually looked, what some might consider, (in this case was the entire group of males) hot. “Surprised?” she said, her voice was even softer now that her face guard had dropped off to the side.
“This isn’t Drake,” Alek said declaratively.
“I’m not?”
“No. You’re an imposter. Everyone knows that Drake is a--”
“Guy, yes I know. Like I said, everything you were told was a bit distorted. They wouldn’t want to look like fools having everyone know that a woman could go head-to-head with them, it wouldn’t seem right.”
“Got that right,” Naruto said drearily.
“What did you say?” Sakura, Tenten and Kay yelled in unison.
Naruto quickly jumped behind Sasuke and grabbed his sleeve, ready to swing him in front of himself as a shield if they chose to attack.
“Well it looks like Naruto has had some bad run-ins with Sakura,” Drake pointed out. “But you must know that not all girls are as idiotic as her. Surely there is someone better that you can go after?”
“Hey!” Sakura yelled.
“‘Hey’ what?”
“This mind reading thing is getting old. Can’t I have a single thought to myself?” Naruto asked.
Drake turned her head slightly to the side, closed her eyes and smiled. “I guess not. You’ll get used to it eventually. And yes I did hear that, Sasuke.”
Everyone turned to look at Sasuke who blushed slightly.
“You have to just come out and say things like that. You’re probably just too afraid of rejection, or it might me because I’m you ‘enemy’. But I have done nothing to you and you have done nothing to me, so we aren’t enemies yet in my mind at least.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he declared.
“If you say so. But your pants don’t agree,” she smiled and coughed gently as he turned a deeper shade of red.
“Enough with the romance crap. Why are you here?” Alek asked irritatedly.
“No reason in particular. I guess I just got bored of listening to your girlfriend tell me about how you were going to beat me and save her. Ooh, what’s with the sudden mind closure for? Like I don’t already know. You’re a pimp, in the words of my long departed friend.
“Girlfriend number two over there wasn’t quick enough to close her mind,” she said pointing a finger palm-up at Kay.
Alek clenched his fist tightly and tried to shake this off. “Why are you attacking these nations for?” he finally asked.
“Well, if you must know, I got bored with our region and decided to come over here to check the prospects, see if any of them would be daring enough to challenge me. Looks like I’ve found seven and all from the noble Konoha. I was hoping to fight Gaara as well but from what my scouts have told me, he is away in the northern regions. But the real prize is already here. Naruto Uzamaki, Jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi. The one beast more powerful than ten thousand shinobi, or so the story goes.”
“Then why don’t you two fight and get this over with,” Neji suggested.
“Don’t put us in a situation where we’re at a disadvantage, Neji” Kakashi said. “Now is not the time nor the place.”
“He’s right,” Drake agreed. “But I wouldn’t fight in such a place anyway. I prefer a more leveled place where there’s nowhere to hide, builds pressure and it’s more climactic, I think. In the forest, you could be fighting for days and not even see the person’s face.
“Well I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got challengers waiting.” She replaced her face mask and disappeared.
“Are all people like that where you come from?” Naruto asked abruptly.
Alek bobbed his head up and down a few times. “Pretty much.”
_____________________________________________________ ___________________
Sorry it took so long to update, my teachers have been killing me with homework. Hope you liked it though, I kinda made it in a hurry.