The Uzumaki Family (Naruto X Justice League)

Chapter 12: "The Weight of Shadows and the Kindness of Monsters"

Raven had always known what it meant to carry shadows. She was born in one. Raised in another. Loved by none. Her father's legacy was carved into the bones of every nightmare she ever had. But none of them came close to the one that found her now—here, under the gilded cage of a man she thought she might begin to understand.

The room was dark, but not silent. Shadows moved like thoughts she couldn't chase down. The mark on her hand—his seal—burned faintly, pulsing like a heartbeat just beneath the skin. It was neither cruel nor kind. It simply was. A reminder. A leash made of symbols and silence.

She had trusted Mea. Trusted the kindness in her eyes, the warmth in her voice, the reckless sincerity in how she said, "Come with me." But trust was a knife, and Raven was always the one holding the blade the wrong way.

The house was pleasant enough. Too pleasant. Like flowers blooming on graves. Everything fit too well, too warm, too generous. And that was what unsettled her most. Evil did not always announce itself in screams. Sometimes it smiled. Sometimes it offered you a home.

Sleep came late, and it came wrong.

The dream began with fire and silence—the kind of silence that rings after the world ends. The sky was gone. The stars were gone. Even hope had been scrubbed out like chalk under storm.

Then he came.

A titan of gold, burning brighter than suns, more real than immortals. A hand big enough to swat the Earth into ash stretched down from infinity, and Raven knew—this was no metaphor. No delusion.

This was him.

The same energy that hung from Mea's skin like perfume now bled from every inch of this colossus. He was reaching for the planet like it was a blemish on his robe. No rage. No cruelty. Just… decision.

And in that moment, as his palm descended, Raven felt it: not pain. Not fear.

Erasure.

When she woke, the scream never made it past her lips. Her chest heaved like she'd been drowning in gold. Sweat clung to her skin like ice. The blanket felt like a shroud.

He wants to kill me.

That thought repeated in her head, louder than her pulse. I shouldn't have trusted him. I shouldn't—

Then came the voice.

"Sit down, Raven."

She spun, heart leaping like prey. She hadn't sensed him. Not a breath. Not a whisper.

There he sat—Naruto—in plain clothes, casual as sunlight, perched on the edge of her borrowed world. No threat in his posture. No malice in his eyes. Just stillness. Just truth.

She didn't sit. Couldn't.

"What was that?" she asked, though her voice didn't sound like her own.

His answer was soft. Like a scalpel made of lullabies.

"I forgot to block your dreams. What you saw… was me. My true form. Without this shell to contain it."

He leaned back, unbothered. "And yes, I do want to end you."

The words struck like stones dropped in a still pond. No scream. No outrage. Just a cold echo rippling through her bones.

"But," he continued, with the kind of calm that belonged in temples or tombs, "I haven't chosen that path. Not yet."

Raven's breath shook. She wasn't used to honesty like this. People usually wrapped death in riddles. Wrapped violence in good intentions. He didn't.

"You are a child," he said. "Untainted. Still on the edge. I see your pain. I know what it is to be shaped by fire. But you must understand…"

The air changed. His energy bloomed into the room like a sunrise. Heavy. Infinite. Inevitable.

"If the world knew what you could become," he said, "they wouldn't hesitate. They'd burn you now and call it justice. The League? They'd hesitate. And their mercy would cost lives. Trigon is rot—but rot spreads."

His gaze didn't accuse. It mourned.

"Mea doesn't know. She brought you here because she believes in you. That's not nothing. But my child's life will always matter more to me than the world. And if you risk her? I won't hesitate."

The words should have broken her. But instead, they grounded her.

Raven bowed her head, not in submission—but in understanding. This was power. Not the wild, screaming fury of her father. This was the cold certainty of immortals who learned to weep behind closed doors. This was what it looked like when mercy held a sword.

In his silence, she found something she never expected to.

Not forgiveness.

But clarity.

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Raven's soul was cracking—thin fractures spidering through the fortress of will she'd built from years of self-loathing and restraint. The world had turned on its edge, and now she stood in its broken seam, teetering between despair and annihilation. The kind of moment where girls like her decided whether the end was a mercy or a betrayal.

She sat hunched, limbs drawn close, as if trying to contain something monstrous inside. Perhaps she was. Perhaps it wasn't metaphor. Her breath shuddered in shallow drafts. Her thoughts came sharp and useless, like rusted blades.

Shouldn't I die then?

A simple question. The kind only the broken could ask without theatrics.

Naruto didn't flinch. He heard it, even if she hadn't spoken aloud. He was the type to listen to silences louder than screams.

He stood, dust falling from his cloak like ash from a dying fire. His footsteps weren't loud, but they carried the finality of a guillotine.

"I told you to calm down."

His voice was rough granite with a golden core—abrasive, grounding. "Take in my words, but don't sink into depression. It clouds your mind. And I haven't given up. Why should you?"

There was no poetry in it. No sermon. Just a raw kind of conviction—the kind that dragged immortals off their thrones or dared devils to blink first.

Then, without permission, without warning, he closed the distance and wrapped his arms around her.

The contact was a jarring contradiction—gentle yet unrelenting, like being held by the eye of a storm. Raven's body tensed, a marionette's twitch on tangled strings. She wasn't used to warmth that didn't burn. She wasn't used to kindness without expectation. She certainly wasn't used to being held like she was something that deserved to be held.

But Naruto didn't let go.

He wasn't gentle because she was fragile.

He was gentle because he wasn't.

The walls began to crumble. Not with drama, not with collapse—but with small, imperceptible surrenders. Her breath slowed. Her spine softened. The hurricane within her found, for the first time in memory, a place to rest.

"Feel better now?" he asked.

His voice was close—dangerously close—to something she might come to trust. Raven tilted her chin and met his gaze. Her eyes were tired, but they weren't empty.

"Yes," she whispered. A truth spoken like a confession.

Naruto's hand came to rest atop her head. Not as a gesture of dominance or control—but a quiet benediction. Like a king crowning a broken knight.

"Then rest," he said. "We'll see what the future has for us tomorrow."

And somehow, impossibly, she did.

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Raven stirred once, a whisper of a breath curling at her lips before sleep claimed her fully. Naruto stood over her like a immortal mistaken for a man—quiet, still, unyielding. His hand withdrew from where he'd tucked in the corner of her blanket, and in that retreat there was both tenderness and the weight of absolute war. The Alpha Stigma flickered to life behind his golden eyes—not with a roar, but with a scholar's whisper. Glyphs spiraled, hungry and knowing, fragments of long-dead languages and raw creation. It was not magic, not entirely. It was evolution with teeth.

He didn't blink.

The room seemed small around him—fragile. Like the world was made of paper, and he had only just remembered how sharp he was. His breath drew slow, steady. Energy moved within him like molten ore, pressed into refinement by decades of battle and a grief that would not soften.

Himawari. The reason behind every technique. The reason for the sleepless nights. The reason Naruto became more than man. She was the scream behind his silence. His curse. His prayer.

A second eye opened—not physically, not visibly, but upon the plane of existence reserved for those who spoke in destiny. He watched her through it, always. Through barriers, dimensions, lies. Nothing escaped its gaze. Not now. Not ever again.

But tonight, the eye turned. And it found Trigon.

Hell welcomed him like a dying immortal returns to the pyre.

He arrived not with fanfare, but with fury subdued—lethal not for its fire, but for its precision. The air cracked beneath his steps. Every breath he took rewrote the atmosphere. A lesser being would have been consumed by the heat. Naruto wore it like a cloak.

Trigon's voice slithered through the brimstone. "You…"

Naruto said nothing.

"You have become a thorn in my way." Trigon's words bloomed like wounds. His form towered—an amalgamation of tyrant, devil, and forgotten immortal. Planets had turned to ash beneath his gaze. Kingdoms had rotted from his laughter.

And still—Naruto did not bow.

"Likewise," came the reply, low and clean, "you are a thorn in mine."

Behind him, the dead whimpered. The damned burned. Trigon's throne stood surrounded by his court of monsters, grinning teeth and rotted prophecy.

"You dare?" the demon roared, rising, vast and flaming. "I am Trigon! Celestial conqueror! Father of the End! My name is inscribed into the screams of dying suns!"

Naruto raised a hand.

And with it, silence fell.

One motion. One expression of thought made manifest. The Alpha Stigma carved its decree into reality, and Trigon's followers—those half-formed demons, bloated souls, and war-born horrors—ceased. No struggle. No scream. Not even dust. Just the absence of what once was.

Trigon froze, the heat of his rage warring with a chill he hadn't felt in millennia.

"I don't care who you are," Naruto said, his voice a scalpel across centuries. "You threatened what's mine. That's all the name I need."

And then he vanished—leaving Trigon alone on a planet that now mourned its silence.

In the veil between seconds, Kurama stirred within Naruto's soulscape, the fox's voice rich with the echo of old battles and older scars.

"You antagonized him," the beast muttered, somewhere between amusement and worry. "Didn't think you still had that in you."

Naruto's response was quiet, surgical. "He needed to see me as the problem. Not the girl."

Kurama made a sound like laughter being buried alive. "I hope you're right. Because if you're wrong…"

"I'm never wrong," Naruto said. Not out of arrogance. But because he couldn't afford to be.

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Belial:

The moon—long silent, long dead—shivered in its orbit, a pale carcass suspended in the void. Once the bride of Earth, now a stage for devils and madmen. No stars blinked in protest. No immortal watched. Only shadows moved, and they whispered of war.

While Naruto Uzumaki sat cloaked in silence, the fox inside him a coiled immortal of old regrets and older promises, the far side of the moon nursed a darker secret.

He came with no ceremony. No banners. No sound. Only the stench of sulfur and old blood, clinging to his form like a second skin. Belial, spawn of Trigon—third of the apocalypse-brood, heir to wrath and ash—stepped onto the cratered dust with a smirk carved from nightmare.

Before him stood the ghost of Krypton.

H'EL.

Time's butcher. Hope's executioner.

He stood as if the moon itself dared not weigh him down, his long cloak rippling without wind, his eyes hollowed by a century of failed salvation. His hands could tear suns apart. His heart had done worse.

"Kryptonian," Belial's voice cut through the dead air like glass dragged across bone, "I have an offer for you."

H'EL didn't move. His gaze was a scalpel, dissecting the demon before him. "What could a hellspawn offer me?" he asked, voice brittle with disdain. "I seek the resurrection of a dead world. You offer… what? Fire and lies?"

Belial chuckled. It was a sound that had made angels weep and beasts drown themselves. "I offer a father's favor. Mine. Trigon's."

H'EL flinched. Not outwardly—his face was carved from frozen grief—but deep within, something flickered. "Trigon," he repeated, tasting the name like rot on his tongue. "And what do you ask in return for such a boon?"

Belial's eyes gleamed with crimson promise. "My sister," he said. "Find her. Bind her. Raven walks among the Kryptonians. You've seen her."

A silence settled. Heavy. Ancient. H'EL remembered her—quiet, watchful, an eye in the storm of power. Darkness behind her eyes. He had thought her a pawn. Now, perhaps, a key.

"I will not be someone's blade," H'EL said, though something in him whispered otherwise. "Show me your resolve. Bring me a trophy. Bring me Superman."

The air thickened, the moon itself holding its breath. And then—laughter.

"Deal." Belial vanished in a coil of flame, leaving scorched moonrock in his wake.

H'EL stood alone again, but the silence no longer comforted him. Something had shifted. A pact had been struck. Between a monster who killed his future and a demon who wanted to claim his blood.

Below them, Earth slumbered under fragile peace. Above, its doom had begun to sharpen its teeth.

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Arthur:

The ocean had turned against itself.

It roared, not like a wounded beast, but like a immortal betrayed. Currents screamed through abyssal trenches, dragging the dead into darker places. Leviathans once bound in myth stirred, mouths yawning open in slow, blind hunger. Even the coral bled.

At the heart of it all, Atlantis—jewel of the deeps, built on the bones of empires past—shuddered in silence, as if trying to remember whether it was meant to sink or rise.

Arthur Curry, who called himself king, sat on a throne that no longer felt like stone. It felt like ice. Like judgment. The Trident of Neptune stood beside him, resting against the steps as if daring him to wield it again, to bloody it in the name of duty.

His knuckles cracked as he leaned forward, jaw tight, eyes lit by a thousand sleepless hours. The golden scale armor he wore felt heavier now. Not from weight—but from the expectations that came with it.

"Mera," he said, his voice raw—like something scraped from the bottom of a storm, "Tell me what you've found."

His queen—his heart, his fury—stood tall, though her shoulders trembled ever so slightly beneath her battle cloak. There was salt in her hair, blood on her lip. She had not rested in three days.

"I can't sense the source," she said, her voice brittle but unbent. "Something is... suppressing me. Like a dam around my mind. I reach out—and it snaps shut." She gripped her trident tighter, the knuckles whitening.

Arthur's eyes darkened, the ocean within him growing still and cold. A stillness that came before the breaking of ice. He watched her struggle, each breath more labored than the last. And yet she stood. That, more than anything, infuriated him.

"Don't push yourself," he said. But it came out wrong—soft, like a man begging, not a king commanding.

Mera shook her head, her mouth a bitter line. "We don't have that luxury anymore."

That's when the silence of the deep was shattered.

A voice. Not spoken, not shouted. Thought. Sharp and sudden, like a sword drawn in the dark.

Zatanna.

Her words were clean, unlike the murky waters that surrounded him. They struck like lightning in the depths.

"I found the target. It's not ordinary. Wait for us to join."

Arthur rose in a single breath, the throne behind him groaning like a corpse stirred from rest. His cape drifted behind him, a shadow under pressure. His eyes, that had once known laughter, now held only the clarity of a man too familiar with sacrifice.

Atlantis shuddered again as another wave struck its outer shell. Something vast. Something deliberate.

He moved through the palace like a storm in armor, his hand brushing the walls, as if steadying the great city itself. The soldiers who passed him gave nods—not out of duty, but reverence. This was not a king of marble and crowns. This was a warrior carved from shipwrecks and tidal wrath.

"Where?" he whispered, as if the sea itself might answer him. "Where is it hiding?"

The palace trembled again.

Not from attack.

From anticipation.

He reached the war room, and before the great brass door could fully open, his communicator sparked with static—then Zatanna's voice returned, tighter now. Urgent.

"Coordinates sent. Prepare yourself."

Arthur's grip on the trident tightened. The weapon groaned in protest. Not from fear—but from recognition.

As he entered the chamber, the war maps shifted, revealing the coordinates Zatanna had marked. He didn't blink. Didn't question. There was no time for either.

There was only war.

As he turned to give the order to mobilize, his thoughts flickered—not to battlefields or politics—but to Mera. Pale. Tired. Unbreaking.

And then to the depths. The true ones. The ones no man dared dive.

This force—it didn't want Atlantis.

It wanted the ocean to forget Atlantis ever existed.

And so Arthur stood, a man crowned by pressure and pain, staring down the abyss.

He would remind it: The sea remembers its kings.

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Naruto:

Naruto did not knock. He never knocked. He simply stepped into the Green as if it belonged to him, as if it had always waited for his arrival. In truth, it had.

The gate had no guards, no walls—just vines that parted like obedient servants, petals unfurling with reverence, roots trembling beneath his feet. The Green knew power. It respected his scent. He walked in silence, his steps slow, deliberate—like a man stepping onto consecrated ground, but not because he feared it. Because he didn't.

The realm pulsed with life. Not in the warm, nurturing way of hearth and home, but like a giant beast breathing in its sleep—dangerous, barely contained. Plants whispered in tones older than time. Great trees bent with the weight of unseen eyes. Flowers bloomed where he passed, only to wither a moment later. The Green remembered everything. And it was curious what he would become.

Gaea sat at its heart. Not on a throne, but a stone bench overgrown with creeping ivy and lazy blossoms. She wore no crown. She needed none. Her hair was a garden, her skin the hue of fertile earth, and her eyes… her eyes bore centuries. The kind of weight only immortality could sharpen into sadness.

She looked up and smiled as he approached. It wasn't joy that curved her lips—it was recognition. Of something inevitable. Like rot. Or war.

"You are watching, aren't you?" she asked, her voice a wind through a dying forest. "Why don't you help them?"

Her question hung in the air, swelling like fog in the lungs. The kind of question that made immortals uncomfortable.

Naruto's reply was ice in a realm of greenery.

"Why don't you?" he said, his voice flat. "If your heart bleeds for them, then act. I feel nothing anymore. So why should I do anything?"

He sat across from her, arms folded. His presence was a fracture in this gentle world, a silent threat. Even the roots shrank from him. He radiated a cold born of purpose—refined, merciless, exact.

"The threat will be handled," he added. "It doesn't even concern my territory."

Gaea's fingers traced a blooming daisy beside her. It wilted at her touch.

"I would love to," she said softly. "But the laws of existence bind us. To act would be to declare war on my own kind. We who formed the world… do not break it lightly."

Naruto tilted his head, golden eyes narrowing. He wasn't the boy who asked why anymore. He asked who.

"Your kind," he said. "So it's your father, isn't it? The one who keeps you all leashed."

She did not answer. She didn't need to. The smile she gave him wasn't one of warmth—it was one of confession.

"I didn't think you'd come here," she said instead.

"I don't refuse invitations from old friends," Naruto replied, his lips curving slightly. "Besides, I lose nothing sitting with a immortal who likes playing gardener."

She motioned to the cup before him, steam curling lazily in the air.

"Try the tea. It's made from the essence of nature and a drop of divine nectar."

He picked it up without hesitation. Trust was irrelevant. Poison didn't scare him—he had already tasted worse. The sip was brief, but it struck like lightning through his veins. Not pain. Connection. He felt the Green. Its pain. Its power. Its endless, crushing weight.

He placed the cup down.

"It's stronger than it looks."

"It would kill a lesser man," Gaea said with a fond smile. "But you've been less than mortal for a long time, haven't you?"

"I'll take a box," he said dryly.

"Of course."

Then the air changed. The cordial veil fell away. The business of immortals began.

"I want you to go underwater," Gaea said. "To help Naiad."

Naruto blinked once. Not surprise. Calculation.

"She's being affected by an outside force," Gaea continued. "The Night."

He didn't ask what that meant. He'd seen too many faces of evil to need details. The Night. It sounded ancient. And hungry.

"If I refuse?" he asked.

"I wouldn't blame you. This is a being older than war. You would be running from something superior."

Naruto smirked, as if the idea amused him. "And what do I earn for risking my life against something you're too afraid to fight?"

"You're always so greedy," Gaea said, though her voice held no reproach—only admiration. "I will give you a weapon. One forged for your hand alone. And Naiad will serve you. Her command of water will become yours to wield."

He leaned forward, not out of excitement, but because he was enjoying the dance. "And?"

Gaea laughed. The sound was not warm. It was wild. Like wind snapping branches.

"You would drain the world dry if it bled power," she said. "Very well. A weapon. A follower. And something more. Something that will help you in the battles still to come."

Naruto nodded slowly, satisfied.

"I'll do it," he said. Then, as an afterthought—or perhaps as a warning—he added, "And maybe you'd consider visiting my home sometime. The Green could use a little fire."

Gaea's laughter echoed through the realm, rustling every leaf, stirring every root.

"We shall see," she said. "If the world survives."

As Naruto stood to leave, the plants seemed to bow.

The Green had made its deal.

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He left her warmth behind. Not out of cruelty. Not from callousness. Naruto walked away with a thread of something human still clinging to him—something soft and dangerously comforting, trailing from Gaea's eyes to the cold emptiness inside his ribcage. Something he didn't dare name.

The power around him whispered like knives sheathed in velvet. Always there. Always ready.

And in the thick of that stillness, Kurama stirred. The fox's laughter echoed like bones rattling in a sealed box.

"Are you also considering her? You've really grown crazy."

Naruto didn't answer at first. He didn't need to. The silence cracked like an old scar.

Kurama's voice grew rougher, not unkind, but edged with something close to warning.

"Pam was enough. Or that Raven girl—you both rot the same way, from the inside out."

"I don't miss," Naruto said. "I only choose the path that still leads to the throne."

And with that, the world folded.

The ocean waited.

Night clawed at the sky, the stars drowning in ink. Waves rolled in like cavalry, crashing upon the shores with a fury that whispered of apocalypse. Salt hung in the air like the memory of blood.

Below, Arthur fought—not a battle of blades or heroics, but of desperation. His voice roared against the tide, but the tide roared louder.

Naiad was unraveling. Her body coiled with corrupted power, water trailing behind her like funeral veils. She had once been grace made flesh, a spirit of the tide, mother to currents. Now? She was a tempest with no anchor—too powerful, too broken.

The sea was sick with her madness.

Arthur choked against it, arms trembling, armor heavy with brine and failure. Every attempt to calm her only stoked the chaos. The ocean had turned against its king.

Then came Mera.

She didn't ask. She struck—her power a blade of crystal through the collapsing tide, buying Arthur the breath he could no longer take for granted. The two of them stood amidst the swirl of madness, united, dying a little slower together.

It wouldn't be enough.

And then—

The world cracked.

Not the sky. Not the sea.

But something older, deeper, more afraid.

Naruto arrived.

He stood above the water, and the waves shuddered at his presence. Not because he commanded them. But because he was the only thing left they didn't know how to drown.

His cloak whipped in the storm, his eyes glowing not with light—but with consequence. The air itself buckled as though bracing for what came next.

He looked down upon Naiad, upon Arthur and Mera, upon the sea immortal's throne sinking beneath the waves.

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There was no thunderclap, no divine heraldry, no ripple of fanfare to announce his act. One blink, Naiad was tearing the ocean apart in her madness—twisting tide and moon to her wrath—and the next, she was gone.

Naruto did not speak. He did not raise a hand or call the sky to bear witness. The sea immortal vanished as if she had never been, swallowed whole by the silence of a dimension carved from nothingness and sealed by will alone. Reality hiccupped, shimmered, and adjusted itself around the absence.

Then he turned his back.

Not out of arrogance, but with the assurance of a man who knew he'd done enough for today. The sand did not crunch beneath his feet—no footprints followed him. He moved like purpose made flesh, a storm sheathed in skin.

Arthur watched from his knees, salt and shame thick in his throat. The sea, once rabid with fury, stilled. The waves sighed with exhaustion. Mera, her power crackling in fading sparks around her fingertips, stepped forward—but dared not call out. She had felt it too.

It hadn't been mercy that removed Naiad.

It had been judgment.

The wind carried a scent with it—ozone and burning seals. The signature of an elemental immortal cloaked in mortal form. The Guardian.

When the Justice League finally arrived, panting with urgency and trailing too many excuses, they found no enemy, no devastation. Only the wet sand where three legends had stood, and the aftertaste of raw power too vast to catalogue. Batman was the first to speak.

"He was here."

There was no need to ask who he was. The echo of his energy hummed in the bones of the world like a chord that would never quite resolve. They felt it in the marrow of their cynicism and skepticism, all crumbling beneath the weight of awe.