The Uzumaki Family (Naruto X Justice League)

Chapter 5: Ashes of Steel and Daughters' Light

—In which ghosts wear armor and truths bite harder than swords—

The city was a graveyard.

Raven's boots touched down on a cracked sidewalk, streetlamps flickering like dying fireflies. Somewhere, the sky mourned behind clouds, painting the world in shades of ash and quiet dread. The further she walked from the Titans Tower, the louder the silence grew. Her breath came heavy now, not from exhaustion—but from the weight. The ever-looming truth. That her father's voice echoed in her blood, clawing up her spine like fire trapped in flesh.

She just wanted to breathe.

But then the darkness spoke.

"Come now, Raven. Father dear is waiting for your response."

It was a voice dipped in oil and rot, the tone of a man who'd danced with death and come back laughing. Slade stepped from the shadow like he belonged there—because he did. His armor shimmered in silver and bloodsteel, the mark of Trigon seared onto his helmet like a brand, a mockery, a promise.

Raven froze. Her fists clenched. Her mind screamed no while her blood whispered inevitable.

"The portal has to be made," Slade continued, like a father offering advice before handing his daughter a knife. "The clock is ticking, little chick. Do not resist your destiny."

"I am not his," Raven hissed. Her voice cracked with rage, with fear, with defiance. "And you are not my shepherd."

Darkness exploded from her hands in twin bolts, laced with fury and the sting of betrayal. They struck Slade square in the chest, hurling him into a building like a broken immortal. Concrete split. Windows screamed. And still, he rose.

Untouched. Unbothered. Unholy.

"Child," he said with a grin that didn't belong to any man. "Tantrums won't save you."

He stepped forward. Slow. Certain. The sigil on his helmet pulsed like a heartbeat. Raven's breath caught—because it was a heartbeat. Hers. Amplified. Controlled. Enslaved.

Then the sky fell.

"GET YOUR FILTHY PAWS OFF HER, VILLAIN!"

The voice was cold steel, dipped in judgment. And then came the impact—not the sound, but the force—as something struck Slade from above with a precision that bordered on divine.

Wasp arrived not like a savior, but a sentence.

Her body was a blur, faster than reason, and her first blow shattered Slade's helmet like porcelain. The second turned his armored body into nothing but red mist and scrap metal. No scream. No warning. Just oblivion.

And then stillness.

Wasp hovered above the wreckage, her armor catching the moonlight like a blade unsheathed. Her wings shimmered—silent death incarnate. Her presence wasn't comfort; it was clarity, the kind that stripped you bare.

She turned to Raven.

"Are you okay?" she asked, voice even, mechanical—but not cold.

Raven could barely answer. The silence after violence always felt heavier. Slade—her tormentor, her nightmare—was gone. Just like that.

"Who are you?" she asked, though her voice trembled more than she liked.

"Wasp," the woman said simply. "You were in danger. I eliminated the threat."

"You killed him," Raven said flatly. No judgment yet—just the facts.

Wasp didn't blink. "He posed a threat to you and others. His death ensures safety. Hesitation in battle endangers lives."

Raven's heart thudded unevenly. Something about that calm was worse than screams. Worse than evil. It was efficient. Slade had toyed with her mind. But this woman? She ended him like swatting a fly.

"What are you?" Raven asked, suspicion blooming behind her violet eyes.

Wasp's wings twitched. "A protector. A tool of justice forged by someone who values life—but understands the price of peace. You remind them of a girl who chose her own fate. So now I protect you."

There was something tragic in that voice. Not absence of emotion—avoidance of it.

Raven looked at the remnants of Slade, now just burning debris in the road. Then back to Wasp. Her chest tightened. Was this justice? Vengeance? Mercy?

"Thank you," she finally said, though the words felt foreign.

Wasp nodded. "Stay strong, Raven. Your destiny is your own, not anyone else's."

The silence returned, but it didn't suffocate. Not this time. It breathed with her. For once, the weight of prophecy felt lighter. Not gone—but bearable.

Still, she knew one truth more clearly than ever:

Freedom comes with a cost. And sometimes, it's paid in blood.

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Raven had been shaped in shadow. Not birthed from it—shaped by it. Like metal left too long in the forge, she bore the marks of something hammered again and again by divine anger and human fear. Praise, in her world, came rarely—if ever—and always with knives tucked beneath.

So when Wasp spoke gently, when her words rang with sunlight and sincerity, it tasted foreign in Raven's mouth. Suspicion curled inside her like smoke in a broken chapel. Still, she did not run. Not yet.

Raven watched her with the same sharpness a vulture gives a dying god—beautiful but wary. "She saved me," she thought, tone neutral in her mind's echo. "I should not treat her like a stranger."

But caution laced even that admission.

She extended her awareness, feeling for the telltale rot of her father's touch. Nothing. No fingerprints of Trigon. No yawning abyss at Wasp's center. She was clean—too clean. Purity like that didn't happen by accident.

And then, the oddity: Raven's mind skimmed against Wasp's surface—and failed to enter. That shouldn't have happened. Only the strongest wills, the most closed souls, could block Raven's power.

A warning cloaked in sweetness.

"Thank you for helping me, Wasp," Raven said finally, her voice a veil of silk over steel. "You seem new… And that man was already dead. So I won't press further. But try not to make a habit of killing. Even corpses have watchdogs."

Wasp's laughter was disarmingly casual, a sound better suited for sunlit kitchens than the battlefield. "No problem," she replied with a shrug. "He was undead. I checked. Besides, dead men cause less trouble than breathing ones."

Then the shift—small, but seismic. "Would you like to hang out with me?"

That word again. Hang out. As if the edges of their lives weren't frayed with apocalypse. As if tea and biscuits could sew up the future.

"You seem to be feeling lonely. I might be able to help," Wasp added.

Raven's mind snapped like a trap. She's lying. The undead excuse was a mask, and she wore it well—but it slipped in that moment. She doesn't care if he lived or died. This is about something else.

Yet still, there was no malice in her aura. Just warmth, irritating and persistent, like sunlight leaking through curtains.

"I appreciate your concern," Raven answered coolly, lifting off the ground like a thought made weightless. "But I would like to be left alone."

But kindness can be a cage. And Wasp moved fast—graceful as a lie, firm as an oath.

She blocked Raven's ascent, floating effortlessly, eyes full of concern not sharp enough to wound.

"It's not good to keep everything within," Wasp said. "You don't have to tell me your story. Just sit with me. Let someone breathe next to your pain."

Pity. The word spat itself into Raven's chest like a dagger.

"I don't need your pity," she snapped, her eyes flaring violet. "Move."

Wasp didn't flinch. Her smile didn't falter.

"I'm not pitying you," she said, and gods help her, she meant it. "You're important. To the world. To something bigger. And if you break, things shatter. Maybe this—tea, silence, company—is how you hold the pieces."

Raven's soul recoiled. Why is she warm? Why does she care? She had spent so long wrapped in the prophecy—her death birthing the end—that warmth felt like betrayal.

But something cracked. Just a little.

Could she stop it? Could this girl, made of smiles and strange immunity, truly hold the dark tide at bay?

Maybe…

"I accept," Raven said finally, her voice quieter now, stripped of its armor. "But don't expect personal details."

Wasp beamed, the light almost blinding. "Deal," she said, offering her hand like a treaty in the making.

And so, an unlikely truce was born.

The two rose into the skies, not as allies or sisters, not even as friends—but as two broken constellations caught in the same celestial drift. They moved through the air with elegance and unspoken weight, toward a Starbucks tucked in the mundane folds of the city.

Because sometimes the end of the world pauses for tea.

And sometimes devils are best faced with sugar and conversation.

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The armor felt heavier broken than it ever did whole.

Naruto held the ruined plates in hands that had crushed stars and cradled lives. There was something wrong in the steel—beyond the obvious warping, beyond the claw-slashed etchings and melted joints. The kind of wrong that creeps, not strikes. That settles into the marrow of a thing and whispers mine when it thinks no one listens.

It reeked of loss and sulfur.

It reeked of him.

Slade. Deathstroke. The old devil in a mercenary's skin. Naruto remembered the man not for his deeds but for the silence he brought with him—how rooms seemed to fall still around him, how even gods checked their footing. And now? Now he was just rot in a shell. A demon's puppet.

Naruto's jaw tensed.

"A pawn," he said aloud, though the word tasted like betrayal. Not of himself—he had learned not to grieve his own—but of the world that once thought monsters stayed dead when you buried them deep enough.

A voice broke through the slow burn of his fury.

"Father, can you check this?"

Mia.

She stood in the doorway, sunlight setting fire to the ends of her hair. The day clung to her skin—fresh, warm, alive. And she, she was the only thing in the room not broken. Not yet. He had built her strong, kept the wars from her bones, though the blood still called to her in ways he couldn't shield.

Naruto looked up, the edge in his eyes softening. "A souvenir from your first time, huh?" His voice cracked like dry leather. "You really do grow up when I blink."

She approached. Not afraid. Never afraid. She was Uzumaki in spirit, a storm wrapped in the skin of a girl.

"I found it by the southern cliffs," she said. "It didn't belong there."

No. It didn't.

Neither did the stink of brimstone buried in its chest plate. Something old had slithered through Slade's corpse, stitched sinew and vengeance together with promises, then tossed the husk aside like a toy gone dull.

"You did well bringing this," Naruto murmured. He reached out and drew her into a hug—not the warrior's grip he used on the battlefield, but the slow, desperate embrace of a man trying to hold onto the only pure thing he had left. "This… thing. It's a doorway. A calling card. And the one who sent it? He wants in."

A pause.

A breath like thunder caught in his lungs.

"Take care of the girl," he said at last. "And if necessary… bring her to me."

Mia blinked. The mask of the child gave way to something sharper. Worry flickered in her gaze like the first spark of wildfire. "But… how will I introduce her to you? You always say not to show too much. Won't it ruin—"

"Normal life is a pretty lie," he interrupted, gently. "And lies break under pressure."

There was no venom in his words. Just truth, cold and hard and cruel.

"I'll change," he continued. "A different face. Something… soft. Someone she'd trust. The armor's too much. I wore it to survive, but now…" He looked down again. The steel glinted, cruel and accusatory. "…it's just grief with a handle."

He traced the scorched edge of a pauldron. His fingers hesitated—not out of fear, but memory. Each plate sang to him in a language only the broken understand: failure, failure, failure. He had forged it once, not in metal but in need. To be stronger. To be enough. But now the very same weight dragged against his soul like chains.

It remembered what he did.

So did he.

Mia didn't speak. Didn't need to. She'd learned when silence said more. Instead, she smiled—a quiet, defiant little thing—and kissed his cheek. "Dinner's ready."

She left like a shadow before dusk—quick, soundless, trailing warmth.

The door closed.

And Naruto was alone again, save for the ruined thing in his hands. It stared up at him like a fallen god begging for forgiveness.

"Next time," he whispered to it, voice cracking like frost underfoot, "I won't be late."

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Naruto stood alone, the weight of the shattered world resting in the quiet armor held between his fingers. Metal forged for gods, dented like the bones of a fallen friend. The silence pressed on him—thick, leaden, accusatory—and in it, his mind began to rot.

Could killing her solve the problem?

The thought slithered in like poison, silk-wrapped and whisper-thin. His grip on the armor tightened. The echo of his own rage began to rise, bubbling under the surface like magma seeking flesh to devour. A demon's tendril reaching into his world. His.

His world, bought in blood, built from broken things.

Filthy demon…

A low growl rumbled from his chest, half-beast, half-man, all fury. The wood beneath him shrieked, a tortured sound. The chair collapsed under the sheer weight of his chakra and wrath. Splinters leapt like frightened mice as chakra bled from his pores, the old violence shaking loose from its cage.

His heart pounded like a war drum. The old rage was still there, curled in the ribcage, waiting for moments like these—moments when the world showed teeth and dared him to bare his own.

I should sever the link…

Crush it. End it. Before it spreads.

Then—

A voice.

Not his. Never his.

It cut through the storm like a blade honed on love, worn down by centuries of shared scars.

"Naruto… relax."

Kurama.

Steady. Low. Like the first rumble before a storm bends its knee.

"Nothing's happening yet. Anger won't make it better. You know that."

Naruto's breath caught like a stone in his throat.

The fury clawed at his spine, hungry to rise. But Kurama—Kurama had always known when to speak, when to anchor him before he drowned in the tide of his own past.

His eyes closed.

Inhaled.

Held.

Released.

Kurama… my brother.

"Thanks," Naruto said aloud. Quiet. Weighted. Sincere.

He set the armor down like it might still shatter, the symbol of something once indestructible now cracked like myth.

He stood. The man, not the beast.

The ghost of war still lingered on his skin, but he wore peace now—not as comfort, but as a choice. As a warpath of its own kind.

His eyes, once burning with fury, narrowed with something colder.

Resolve.

The sort you don't speak aloud. The kind that sinks into bone.

The kind that doesn't beg for permission.

"Take it in stride," he whispered, not for the world to hear, but for himself. For the version of him that might one day forget this moment.

He stepped out of the study.

Dinner could wait. Peace could wait.

The world was shifting.

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A.N. Cassandra is Cassandra Cain, one of the Bat Family members. Mia is Mia Dearden one of Green Arrows Side Kicks.