Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart
Part 5
By Mieren

Naruto was the very first out of the car when they stopped at a small cottage in the middle of nowhere. Never before had he been so mortified as he had been at the mercy of Yuy’s driving capabilities. Quatre sighed, knowing he’d have to deal with this new mess.

“I’ll contact G,” the blond said. “We’ll take him off duty until he stops acting weird.” The other pilots in the car nodded.

“I’m not babysitting him,” Wufei argued.

“I’ll watch him,” Bangs said, getting out of the vehicle and approaching Naruto. “Come on, Duo.”

“Naruto,” he corrected again with a sigh. He got an evil little look on his face. “And I believe Wufei promised to be my personal slave for a week.”

It was nothing short of a miracle that the Chinese pilot didn’t spontaneously implode. He had already developed a ticking muscle in his cheek. He slid out of the car with a murderous look on his face, leaving the other two to follow.

“Are you sure you want him?” Bangs asked.

“Sure!” Naruto chirped, watching the vein in Wufei’s forehead twitch as his blood pressure rose to dangerous levels. “I’ve never had a pet before.” The only thing that stopped Wufei from drawing a gun and shooting him in the head was the fact that there were people between them. Naruto had to stifle a giggle. It was easier than baiting Ebisu.

“Baka,” Wufei growled, sounding much like Heero.

“Don’t ‘baka’ me. I own you,” Naruto taunted. He was avidly watching the vein jumping in Wufei’s forehead. He took a calculated guess on the Chinese boy’s temperament. “Unless, of course, you’re going back on your word.” Bingo. Wufei looked like he was going to pop.

“Maxwell,” he growled.

*Maxwell? Naruto thought.*

*Duo’s family name,* Shinigami supplied. Naruto thanked him silently.

“Uzumaki,” he corrected gleefully. “It’s Naruto Uzumaki.”

“Just give up and use that name,” the blond advised. “It’s easier than arguing about it.” With that, he led the retreat inside, leaving Wufei and Naruto to duke it out. Yuy and Bangs were quick to follow. Naruto grinned maniacally as he eyed his prey.

“You promised to answer some questions,” he said bluntly.

“Yes,” Wufei acceded warily.

“Okay,” Naruto beamed. “What are the full names of everyone her and everywhere I may need to know? Who is G? What’s a Gundam? And what’s the deal with space?”

Wufei looked concussed. “Are you serious?”

“Yup. Start talking.”

Two hours later and Wufei was in distinct danger of going bald from ripping his own hair out in frustration. All he’d heard since the questioning began was series of half-assed, pointless inquiries. “What’s that?” “Who’s that?” “Why?” “How does this work?” The poor Chinese pilot had been ready to kill Naruto until he’d slowly come to realize that the other teenager honestly didn’t know. Their session of Q and A was interrupted by Heero.

“We have a mission,” he said flatly. He looked at Naruto accusingly. “And G said to bring him, memory loss or not.” Naruto just stared at the other four teenagers, not quite understanding their worried and accusing expressions.

“What’s a mission?” Naruto asked innocently, knowing darn well what one was in his own world if not here.

“This is just perfect,” Trowa, previously known as Bangs, said sarcastically.

“He’s dead meat,” Wufei added emphatically, looking at Naruto.

“What?” Naruto asked innocently, not understanding the myriad of looks passed across him between the four pilots.

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Kakashi was beyond vexed. For almost four days, he had been searching for Duo and the boy’s demonic charge. Without the constant chakra use and explosions that followed Naruto, making him simple to track, the boy had all but disappeared. Even conventional tracking seemed to fail. Considering how uncoordinated and slow the blond was, he could hide like nobody’s business. He finally located the teenager just outside of Kohana, hiding in a small shack that had long since been abandoned. He crept in through a window and flat out froze at what he found.

Wires and bits of metal filled the place, the occasional object glowing. Half-built… *things*… littered the floor. Some strange framework was partially set up, easily eight feet tall, the top bumping the ceiling, and the sides spilling unattached wires. Duo was in the middle of the mess, tinkering with something in his lap and occasionally glancing at a fat cylinder at his side. The item in his hands snapped into place and he set it aside to reach for something else, revealing a rather sizable revolver to the jounin. While guns existed, they were generally not used in favor of more dangerous and destructive jutsus. Now Duo had the glowing cylinder in his lap and had popped open a panel to play with some heavy wiring.

“Yo,” Kakashi greeted uncertainly. Duo responded according, snapping his latest device in his direction. The jounin raised his hands in surrender, remembering their last encounter with the teenager’s toys. Snorting, Duo backed off, and much to Kakashi’s relief, set down the glowing cylinder.

“What do you want?” Duo asked a bit sourly, not appreciating being interrupted.

“I spoke to the Hokage,” Kakashi offered, still eyeing the weapon despite the fact that the younger man had set it down. A bazooka made with a reed was bad enough. Something with heavy metal plating and wires that glowed was simply not something he’d rather see in action, especially against him.

“And?”

“She’s never heard of anything like this, but promised to research the situation,” he said slowly. “Where did you get all of this?”

“Creative financing,” Duo answered, picking another piece of his work and toying with it a little, despite the fact that it would be more polite to face the man speaking to him. He just liked watching the jounin squirm.

“You stole it,” Kakashi translated. Duo smirked. “In a town full of ninja, you managed to steal all of this?”

“Nobody can catch Shinigami,” Duo chuckled half-heartedly. He tampered with the new device and it loosed a harsh hiss. Raising a piece of it to his lips, he started speaking into it. “Shinigami to base. G, where the hell are you?”

*Shinigami?* Kakashi wondered mutely. God of Death. He stared at Duo uncomfortably, wondering if he was in over his head. Every time he spoke to the youth, the situation went further downhill.

“Is that all you came for?” Duo asked, interrupting his introspective thoughts.

“No,” the jounin admitted. “The Hokage decided that it was best to keep the events hidden for your own safety as well as ours.” He had the distinct impression that the simple request would have been denied had he not added that last bit. While Duo frankly made him uncomfortable for some reason (perhaps because of the glowing things littering the room), he doubted that the boy wanted them to be hurt. “We need to be seen in public taking missions together.”

“Can I have a few days to prepare?”

“Prepare?”

Duo grinned a bit at the confusion in the older man’s voice. He did a quick inventory of his collection of stolen property as he prodded the jounin on.

“Is there a mission already scheduled?” he asked lazily.

“Yes. Tomorrow, we’re traveling to a nearby village to investigate a robbery…”

“I only hit Kohana,” Duo muttered.

“Of a ninja scroll,” Kakashi finished, glaring. He wasn’t amused that his newest charge was an unabashed thief, but he didn’t want to say anything about it. The boy seemed to be trying to find a way to fix whatever had happened. He almost drew a weapon when the device in Duo’s lap sizzled and started to give of a scratchy noise. Duo quickly fiddled with the wires until the crackling sound became intelligible as speech. He recognized it as a modified transmitter, much more complex than the simple ones they used on missions.

“Shinigami, this is G. Where are you?”

Kakashi perked up, thinking for a moment that they had found a source to help them. The grim look on Duo’s face drew him up short.

“Can you triangulate?” Duo asked in return.

“Not from here.”

What does triangulate mean? Kyuubi asked. He had been avidly watching every last move his new host was making in an attempt to understand some of the technology, but he didn’t recognize anything more complicated than the headsets, and only then because ninja already used those.

It’s a way to locate people, Duo said simply. And he doesn’t know what it is either.

“Whoever he is, he’s avoiding the question,” Duo said aloud so both of them could hear. He turned his end of the transmitter back on. “You are fifty-three miles to the north of us. Can you move to intercept?”

The moment he flipped it off again, Kakashi exploded.

“What are you telling him for? You just said you didn’t know who he is!”

“On my way,” fizzled back. Kakashi looked even angrier. Duo just started laughing hysterically, setting the device to the side.

“Don’t worry. He’s somewhere to the southwest a few miles from here. Whoever this guy is, we’re not going to be seeing him anytime soon.” He studied Kakashi. “How many people here can use a two-way radio?”

“Almost everyone.”

“Who would pretend to be G to find me?”

That was what had him so worried, the exact reason that the Hokage was trying to bury all knowledge of what had happened. “There are a few people quite interested in Naruto and…”

“The fox,” Duo finished.

“Exactly,” Kakashi sighed. “Which is why you may need additional protection.”

“I think I have it covered,” Duo snorted. “Or I will by tomorrow.”

Kakashi eyed the odd, half-built weapons. “That’s not exactly what I meant. Sasuke, Sakura and I can protect you from physical attacks…”

“So you did tell them what was going on.”

Kakashi ignored the statement of the obvious and bulled on. “But we can’t risk you being hit with high ninjutsu. The seal could be damaged.”

“So I’ll stay here out of sight. Problem solved,” Duo said loftily.

“Even if we aren’t in battle, you’re still in danger,” Kakashi said hesitantly. Duo knew evasion when he saw it, being a master of it himself. “We think it would be safer if either myself or the Hokage placed a second seal on you.”

*No! Don’t let them!* Kyuubi burst out. *It will trap you here. The first seal binds me to Naruto. If you let them do that, it will be much harder to get rid… get you home.*

“Denied,” Duo told Kakashi. “Even if I was comfortable with letting you try that, Kyuubi said that it will trap me here.”

“You can speak to it?” he exclaimed. “That’s all the more reason to seal you.”

“My ass,” Duo snapped. “I will not have you hindering my attempt to get home for some paranoid excuse. I’m used to speaking with demons. This is nothing new.” Kakashi actually looked more unnerved than before.

“Who exactly do you talk to?” he asked slowly, paling when he earned a maniacal grin from Duo. He set aside his half-built weapon and stood up with a flourish.

“I seem to have been remiss in introducing myself,” Duo beamed. His eyes shone with a slightly mad light. Oh, how it was fun to tease the man. “I am Shinigami.”

Kakashi nearly went ballistic, just as Duo had anticipated, but for an entirely different reason than he expected.

“Naruto has access to Shinigami?!?” he exploded. “Please tell me you have a stable seal.”

“Actually, until I got here, I’d never even heard of seals,” Duo offered, seeming to take great pleasure in watching Kakashi give birth to a litter of kittens where he stood.

“No… seal,” he said in a strangled voice.

“All the more reason you don’t have to place one on me. He’s no threat,” Duo finished. Kyuubi hissed at him, but remained otherwise silent. To his credit, Kakashi actually considered the facts before he pressed his side of the argument.

“Then why can’t you use chakra at all?”

“Because I don’t know what chakra is,” Duo quipped.

“Please tell me you’re kidding.” Duo shook his head. “Then how do you control Shinigami or plan to subdue Kyuubi?”

“Because I’m an ornery little shit,” Duo said honestly. “Pissy counts for a lot, especially in my line of work.”

“And what do you do?” Kakashi asked, allowing himself to take the bait even though he knew he’d regret it.

“Depends on who you ask,” Duo grinned. “Ranges everywhere from the contemporary Gundam pilot to trained terrorist and assassin.”

“Gundam?” Kakashi echoed, too stunned at the information to really say much. In the last few minutes, he’d learned a number of facts about the teenager that made him extremely uneasy. He’d managed to get over the boy being from space, and now he found that the fifteen-year-old, he assumed the two were the same age, was in the middle of a war from how it sounded. Add in the God of Death, who Naruto now had full access to without the aid of a seal, and he was headed for a complete mental meltdown.

“Deathscythe, my Gundam, is a piece of mobile artillery about fifty-four feet tall, weighing in at more than seven tons,” Duo supplied, happily knowing that if Kakashi’s hair wasn’t already silver, it would be turning gray.

Duo really didn’t mind giving up personal information, since no one in this world could possibly use it against him. He was just enjoying watching Kakashi get more and more worked up. Some people were just fun to rile. He was just waiting to see how much the man would believe before flat out calling him a liar.

“Fifty-four… never mind,” Kakashi sighed. It was no wonder that the boy couldn’t fight. He had toys to fight for him. In a way, he had to respect that. Since they either didn’t or couldn’t use chakra to fight, they used their brains. “Have you seen the front gate to Kohana?”

“Seen and bypassed,” Duo acknowledged, amused that he’d managed to fry the ninja’s mind entirely. He plopped down amidst his toys and grabbed one seemingly at random.

“Meet us there at seven tomorrow morning.”

“Got it,” Duo affirmed, still working on something he was assembling. After a moment, he looked up when he noticed that Kakashi hadn’t left. “Yes?” he prompted.

“Do you mind if I watch for awhile?” Kakashi asked, truly curious. Duo sighed.

“You and Kyuubi both,” he muttered. “Watch all you like. You’re never going to figure out what I’m doing.”

The jounin nodded and settled against a wall to watch Duo work, quickly losing track of the wires. When the teenager started the tedious task of soldering, he began glancing around at the rest of the pilfered items. Watching someone with Naruto’s appearance do something intellectual, along with a look of concentration, was weird anyways.

A small pile of short pipes filled a corner, and with the fuses sticking out of one end, it didn’t take a genius to identify them as bombs. Not far from that was a collection of glassware on a long sturdy oak table, some of the containers empty and some filled with unidentified liquids or powders. One jar was braced above a candle, the liquid inside gently boiling. It gave off a pungent smell. He didn’t know what it was, but he was willing to bet it wasn’t good.

“I thought you were trying to get back,” Kakashi said carefully. “Most of these things are clearly weapons.”

“I refuse to be defenseless while I’m here,” Duo said half-heartedly, not really listening to him. “The Hokage may not be able to help and I’ll have to look for alternate sources. I don’t expect you lot to babysit me while I wander around.”

Kakashi opened his mouth to refute the babysitting accusation but was cut off by a high-pitched whir that quickly built in volume and frequency. He spun around to see a fat cylinder in Duo’s hands, different from the one before, the end braced against his shoulder. Light shone down the sides, building to a painfully bright ball of illumination at the other end. Duo pulled back a lever and the light and shrieking whir both faded away.

“What is that?” Kakashi asked in a strangled voice, a tone that he was quickly perfecting around the technologically oriented brat.

*What is that?* Kyuubi simultaneously echoed.

“The end product of three days of construction,” Duo laughed, delighted that he had managed to build it correctly without access to real technology. “I call it BAD. Buster ala Duo!”

“You’re treating it like a toy,” Kakashi remarked.

“It is,” Duo returned cheerfully.

He almost responded harshly to the flippant answer before remembering a few earlier comments. ‘Fifty-four feet tall’ and ‘more than seven tons’ ran on an endless cycle through Kakashi’s head. “Duo? Tell me that Naruto doesn’t have access to your… Gundam.”

“Of course not!” Duo exclaimed. Kakashi started to relax a bit when he continued, no doubt for the sole purpose of making him crazy. “I blew mine up. That’s how I got here.”

“Yours… Are there more?” Kakashi asked cautiously.

“About half a dozen Gundam, and some odd thousands of mobile suits and mobile dolls,” Duo shrugged. He set aside his newly made buster rifle. “Most of the things there, you simply don’t want to know about or plain wouldn’t understand if I told you. Just like I won’t know anything you tell me about this place. Oh, and if you enjoy the use of your arms and legs, you probably shouldn’t be leaning on that table.”

Kakashi moved quickly, glancing at the table of glass vials and beakers before turning his attention back to Duo. he didn’t bother what it was, trusting that it was something destructive he wouldn’t recognize the name of. He felt a pang of sympathy for both Duo and Naruto at that moment. Both they, and anyone who had to deal with them, would be feeling grossly confused and out of their league.

“What happened to finding a way home?” he tried again, still studying various items in the room. The metal scaffolding overflowing with wires kept most of his attention.

“Priorities,” Duo answered promptly, keeping with his prior answer concerning his toys. “Have to make sure I’m alive long enough to get home.”

“Work on getting home. I’ll make sure you’re safe,” Kakashi said carefully. The teenager seemed to have a volatile temperament that he couldn’t quite figure out. He wasn’t sure what would or wouldn’t set him off. The blond seemed to love to argue, but at the simplest comment or action, he would more or less explode.

“I told you, no babysitters,” Duo protested.

“I just want my student back. Helping you is the best way to make sure he’s safe,” Kakashi said shrewdly. Duo gave him a flat look for the dirty tactic of claiming to be worried for a friend.

“Seven at the gates,” Duo said, dismissing the jounin curtly. He was miffed that he had so abruptly been made to look like an uncaring heel. “Now get your butt out of my workspace before you manage to blow yourself up.”

Kakashi nodded and left, letting Duo have the final word. While he was slow and clumsy, the boy obviously knew something about dangerous weapons. For the meantime, he’d ignore anything odd and wait for the Hokage to find a way to send him back.

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To Be Continued…
Please R&R! I run my fics on response. I’m trying so help me out here. R&R!