Devil Ninja

A Time of Foxes and Parties

Naruto woke up to find himself lying on his back. Up above him lay an infinite well of darkness. He couldn't tell if he was inside of a building or not. There were no stars out, and it was simply too dark to see the ceiling, if this place even had one. Only the hard surface underneath him, which reminded him of granite and contained trace amounts of water, gave him a hint as to his possible whereabouts.

A frown grew on his face. He wondered how he got here, and just where here was. The last thing he remembered was Rias' bluish-green eyes shedding tears before darkness had claimed him. Tears. Rias had been crying, and those tears had been for him.

"I made her cry," he sighed, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath before a self-depreciating smile came to his lips. "I must be the biggest bastard in the world to hurt one of the few people in this world who I really care about."

"I wouldn't call you a bastard." Naruto's eyes snapped wide open. "But I would certainly call you an idiot."

Scrambling to his feet with all due haste, the blond's eyes shot towards the source of the rumbling voice. A voice that was as familiar to him as his own. The voice of someone who had been with him since the day he'd been born.

"Kurama!"

Resting on his haunches sat a large kitsune. It's fur, a reddish orange, stood in stark contrast against the darkness of the room. Surrounded by black rings were a pair of startling blood red eyes. The fox was monstrous, taller than the Hokage Monument back home, towering over Naruto like he was an ant standing before a giant.

The kitsune's upper body looked very similar to a humans in structure, even his arms and clawed hands looked human. Naruto knew that the creature before him was even capable of making hand seals like a human ninja could. Two large, pointed ears stood high on his forehead. The inside of the ear was completely black, which extended well past the ear and moved to surround his red eyes. Two sharp canines poked out from beneath his upper black lips, which were pulled back in a grin that showed off the large array of sharp teeth he possessed.

"It's good to see you, brat," Kurama's deep rumble resounded throughout the inner world that Naruto now knew was his seal. "You don't know how long I've been trying to―O-Oi! What the hell do you think you're doing!?" Kurama cut off what he was originally going to say as Naruto bulldozed into him and began hugging his clawed hand, which, by the way, was nearly as big as Naruto was, maybe even bigger. "Dammit, Naruto! Get off!"

"I can't..." Kurama stopped himself from trying to shake his crazy partner off his hand when Naruto's whispered words reached his ears. "I can't believe you're actually here... I thought.... I thought that..."

"Are you crying?"

"I thought you had disappeared too!"

"Oh gods, you are crying!"

"I kept trying to reach you! But no matter how many times I tried channeling chakra into the seal, I could never get in! I couldn't even use chakra and you weren't healing me and I thought it meant you were gone because I remember you healing my coils back when I first used my Rasenshuriken! I didn't... didn't..."

Kurama sighed as his first and only human partner (or was that devil now?) cried against his hand. He couldn't really blame Naruto for being so emotional and, even though he would never in a million years on pain of death admit to this, it actually felt nice knowing that his partner had missed him so much. There was this strange, fuzzy feeling in his gut that Kurama was sure was happiness.

Or indigestion. That was also a possibility.

A loud sniffle brought his attention to Naruto again. He looked down and what he saw made his eye twitch.