Chapter Text
Author’s Notes: You voted for it, so here it is. And to be honest, been itching to do a Naruto x Star Wars cross over for awhile now, so thanks for the excuse!
Alright, so this story is going to take place during the prequel era, namely around the time frame of the Clone Wars series. Though I may bring in characters like Darth Talon, as she is a favorite, from the later era. The only character I am planning on bringing back from the past right now is Lana Beniko, as she will play a pivotal role in shaping our favorite whiskered blonde. That, and it would be extremely lazy to recycle the same cyro-stasis plot device for others. Though, do not rule out Sith Sorcery.
Anyways, enough yapping, let’s get this show on the road!
Harem – Anko, Koyuki, Ashoka, Barriss, Aayla, Shaak Ti, Lana,
Side Pairings – Anakin x Padme
Maelstrom: Dark Force Rising
Chapter 1
Border of Kawa no Kuni (River Country)
It had been just over six months since Naruto Uzumaki had been dragged out of his home village and hauled across the breadth of Hi no Kuni by Jiraiya of the Sannin, the man who was supposed to be his godfather, his sensei, the guiding hand that would forge him into something worth fearing. Three years. That was the promise. Three years of training that would transform him, sharpen him, make him strong enough to face whatever darkness was already hunting his name. Instead, half a year had bled away into nothing, and Naruto had precious little to show for it beyond calloused feet and a deepening, festering resentment he was running out of room to carry.
In the span of six months, the man had taught him absolutely nothing of value. Or rather, nothing he couldn't have puzzled out on his own, given enough time and enough bruises. No coaching on what he was doing wrong. No advice on where he could improve. Absolutely nothing. The minuscule amount of ‘training’ he did offer, revolved around relying on the foxes power. The last attempt left a deep scar on the Toad Sage’s chest after he had forced open the seal when Naruto had refused to call upon the kyubi’s power.
Naruto sat on a fallen log near the small, crackling campfire, one sandal digging a restless groove into the dirt. He wasn't aware he was doing it at first that slow, methodical scrape of heel against earth, carving a rut like he could somehow grind his frustration into the ground and leave it there. The sky above the border of Kawa no Kuni had begun its slow descent into dusk, streaks of amber and violet bleeding together across the horizon in colors that might have been beautiful under different circumstances. The air carried the faint, clean scent of water and wet stone drifting from the rivers whispering somewhere beyond the treeline, threading through the dark gaps between pine and cedar. Somewhere out in that wilderness, a bird called once and fell silent.
Eight hours.
Naruto's fingers tightened around a thin twig he'd absently picked up at some point, squeezing until the wood groaned and snapped clean in two with a sharp crack. He looked down at the broken pieces in his palm for a moment then lobbed both halves into the fire without ceremony.
"Checking on his spy network," he muttered under his breath, voice low and tight with a bitterness that had long since moved past the hot, volatile stage and settled into something colder. Something quieter. "More like spending every ryō I have on sake and women who'll laugh at his terrible jokes."
The fire popped in answer, a small eruption of sparks that drifted upward like the ghosts of fireflies before winking out against the dark. Shadows stretched long and lean across the ground around him, rippling with each flicker and spit of the flame. The campsite itself was painfully sparse with only two bedrolls, one of which had been untouched since morning, a half-empty pack slumped against a root, and the battered iron pot Jiraiya had left sitting beside the fire. As though the pot were some kind of proxy for his presence. As though leaving behind a cooking vessel was equivalent to staying.
Naruto stared at the pot for a long moment, then he exhaled through his nose, and looked away.
Six months of this.
He turned the thought over in his mind the same way he had a hundred times before, examining it from different angles like a wound he kept forgetting not to press. Six months of being shuttled from one town to the next, from one forest road to another, told to observe, to be patient, to absorb the world around him. Jiraiya spoke those words like they were lessons in themselves like simply existing in motion was the same as growing. And maybe, for some people, it was.
Naruto was not some people.
He learned by doing. By failing and getting back up and doing it again until something finally clicked, until his body understood what his mind couldn't explain. Watching Jiraiya vanish into the nearest town with some muttered excuse about intelligence networks while Naruto was left alone in a camp with no target to hit, no technique to wrestle into shape, no one to spar against that wasn't training. That was waiting. And waiting, in Naruto's experience, was indistinguishable from falling behind.
At the rate this trip was going, he would return to Konoha weaker than when he'd left.
If he returned at all.
The Akatsuki were out there. He knew that much and they were hunting bijū and their jinchūriki, which meant they were hunting him. He had narrowly escaped his initial encounter with Itachi Uchiha and his partner Kisame Hoshigaki, a man who weilded a chakra-devouring blade. He had just barely survived his initial encounter with the two. He didn't know how many more were out there. He didn't know their faces, their names, their abilities.
And here he was. Alone in a camp on the border of River Country, fire dying down, one half-empty pack, and no godfather in sight.
He found himself wondering, with a morbid detachment that bothered him less than it should have, how exactly Jiraiya would explain it to Tsunade-baa-chan if something happened. He could picture it clearly enough; the old man standing in her office with that practiced, solemn expression he broke out whenever he needed to seem like a responsible adult, spinning the story just right, letting the blame land somewhere else.
‘The boy wasn't careful enough. He should have stayed put. I told him not to wander.’
Naruto's jaw tightened. He could definitely see the perverted sage throwing all the blame on him and not taking accountability for his own actions, or in this case, lack of action.
He had considered, more than once, using the toads to send a message back to Konoha. Directly to Tsunade, bypassing Jiraiya entirely. But every time the thought formed into something close to a plan, a voice of doubt whispered in the back of his mind; Jiraiya was the senior summoner of the Toad Clan. Any scroll, any messenger toad he called up there was no way to know if the old man would be informed first. And if he was, any leverage Naruto might have gained would evaporate before it ever reached its destination. He would be left with nothing except a more watchful, more irritable mentor, and the silent confirmation that his complaints had been heard and dismissed.
So he waited. And said nothing. And let the bitterness accumulate like sediment at the bottom of a still lake.
The fire crackled and shifted, and in the quiet that followed, Naruto's thoughts drifted somewhere he usually tried not to let them go. He thought about his teachers.
All of them, stretching back to the beginning and the longer he sat with it, the more a grim, almost darkly funny pattern began to take shape. As if the universe had decided, from the very start, that the people placed in charge of his growth would treat it as an afterthought.
Iruka-sensei, he had genuinely cared, Naruto knew that. Still believed it, even now. There was real warmth in the man, real sincerity in the moments where it had shown through. But the classroom was a different thing. In the classroom, Iruka had a tendency to reach for Naruto's name in an ass backwards reverse psychology method to encourage the whiskered blonde to improve. The wrong answer pulled from the air, held up for the class to see. The failed technique picked apart while twenty other students watched. It had never felt malicious, and that was almost what made it worse.
Then there was Kakashi. The man that had preached about those abandoning their comrades were worse than trash.
Naruto exhaled slowly through his teeth.
Team Seven had been, on paper, the kind of placement that should have meant something. Two promising students and one dead-last, assigned to one of Konoha's most decorated jōnin, a man whose name alone carried weight in certain circles throughout the shinobi world, whose reputation preceded him everywhere he went. Naruto had been thrilled at first.
Unfortunately, that had not lasted.
It hadn't taken long to understand how Team Seven actually functioned. Kakashi had his eye on Sasuke from nearly the beginning. Extra time, additional attention, techniques explained at a depth and patience that wasn't extended to anyone else. Naruto wasn't blind, had never been as blind as people assumed, and he had watched it happen exercise by exercise, mission by mission, training session by training session. Sakura hadn’t cared for the lack of training, feeling as if the Uchiha deserved it more. While Naruto had been largely left to fend for himself with vague instructions and little to no advice on how to work out complex exercises.
He understood in to an extent, why. Sasuke had the Sharingan as well as the lineage and the potential that made investing in him feel like a certainty rather than a gamble. Naruto understood the logic, as hard as it was to swallow. That didn't mean it hadn't cost him, the knowledge that he had to wake up every morning knowing that his team's teacher had already made his quiet, unspoken decision about who in the group was worth his time, had ate away at the trust and respect he had put in the silver haired man.
In the end however, it was all for nothing. After all the attention that was lauded onto him and personalized training, Sasuke defected from the village, severely injuring numerous others, himself included, to join Konoha’s most infamous traitor. Orochimaru.
And now Jiraiya.
Naruto almost wanted to laugh. Sannin, legendary shinobi, one of the three great figures of a generation that had personally trained the Yondaime, if the perverted hermit could be believed and the man couldn't be bothered to spend eight consecutive hours in camp. Couldn't spare a single afternoon of structured training without some excuse pulling him away to drink and scribble notes for his next book. What had made this sting and fester even more, was that this man was suppose to be his Godfather. A man his parents had allegedly trusted should the worse come to pass for them.
Three teachers. Three different styles, but one fundamental truth.
You are not the priority.
He stared into the fire, jaw set, something quiet and fierce turning over in his chest. Not self-pity he'd made his peace with his self-pity a long time ago, had discovered it didn't actually do anything useful. This was something more focused than that. More tired. A wish he barely let himself fully form, because fully forming it felt dangerously close to hoping, and hope had a way of costing him.
But it rose anyway, in the stillness, in the space between one crackle of flame and the next.
Someone. He wanted, just once to find someone who would actually teach him. Not because he was convenient, not because he was a useful example and not because someone more important hadn't wandered into view yet. Someone who would look at him and see a student worth the effort. Who would show up, the next day and the day after, and not leave him waiting alone in the dark wondering when the lesson would finally begin. Someone who would choose him.
It was a small thing to want. He was aware of how small it was. He was also aware, in the way of someone who had learned not to expect too much, that small things were often the hardest to find.
The fire crackled softly, settling as the wood shifted beneath the heat. Naruto propped one elbow on his knee and rested his chin in his hand, gaze drifting not purposefully, not at first toward the cluster of rock outcroppings a short distance from the edge of their camp. Slabs of dark granite pushing up from the earth at uneven angles, mossy and ancient, crowded by the undergrowth that had spent decades trying to reclaim them. They caught the firelight oddly, holding shadow in their crevices even as the glow touched their surfaces.
He hadn't paid them much attention when they'd made camp that morning. But somewhere over the course of the afternoon, without his quite realizing it, his eyes kept returning to that spot.
It wasn't restlessness. He knew what restlessness felt like, restlessness was loud, made his legs bounce and his hands reach for something to do. This was different. Quieter. A pull, subtle and persistent, like the barely-perceptible tug of a current beneath water that looked perfectly still on the surface.
Something was over there. Or something was there, in some way he didn't have the vocabulary to describe yet some quality of that place that hadn't been there before, or that he simply hadn't been still enough to notice until now.
Naruto lifted his head from his hand, blue eyes narrowing slightly as he studied the rocks. At the very edge of perception, hovering just below the threshold of something he could name. A sound that wasn't quite a sound. A voice that wasn't quite a voice. The barest suggestion of a whisper curling at the rim of his awareness, soft as breath against the shell of an ear, gone the instant he tried to focus on it directly.
As if a faint whisper, licking at the edge of his ears.
He tried to ignore it, instead focusing on the crackling embers of the camp fire. Imagining what it would be like if Jiraiya had actually invested more time in his training so he could fulfill his promise to Sakura and bring Sasuke home.
Naruto lasted another twenty minutes before he gave up pretending he could ignore the silent call.
He told himself it was boredom, that it was the kind of thing any shinobi in training should investigate, that it was practically responsible of him to check it out. He told himself a lot of things as he plucked a thick branch from the edge of the campfire and held it aloft, the makeshift torch throwing a warm, unsteady halo around him as he crossed the camp and pushed into the undergrowth toward the outcropping.
The rocks were larger up close than they'd appeared from the fireside. Dark granite, slick in places with moss, crowded by roots and creeping vegetation that had been making slow, patient war against the stone for longer than the village of Konoha had existed. He moved along the face of the formation, one hand trailing against the rock, torch held out ahead of him and found it almost by accident. A narrow gap between two slabs, partially concealed by a curtain of hanging root and dead bracken. No wider than his shoulders, maybe less.
He tilted his head and gauged the opening. The pull was coming from inside. Of course it is, nothing could ever come simple for him. He exhaled through his nose, pushed the roots aside, and squeezed through.
The smell hit him first.
Wet soil and cold stone, deep and mineral and immediate, the way only underground air smelled locked away from the sunlight for a long time, undisturbed. Underneath that, something sharper and organic. He wrinkled his nose as his torch painted the narrow tunnel walls in flickering amber, identifying the secondary smell after a moment as his sandals stepped into something soft and moist.
Bat guano. Wonderful.
He pressed forward, hunching slightly where the passage tightened, the torchlight dancing across uneven walls and a floor worn smooth in places by old water that had long since stopped flowing. The tunnel bent twice, descended gradually, and the air grew colder. The pull strengthened with every step, clearer now not louder, exactly, but more present, the way a sound becomes not when the volume increases but when every other sound falls away and leaves it standing alone.
He was close to something.
The tunnel opened into a slightly wider passage and then, abruptly, ended.
A dead end. A flat face of stone, unremarkable and offering absolutely nothing. Naruto lifted his torch and studied it, lips pressed thin. He reached out and pressed one palm against the surface solid, ungiving, exactly what it looked like.
He frowned and took a step back. Then, the floor gave way beneath him.
It happened fast as a section of stone tilted suddenly under his weight like a ramp, physics doing the rest, and then he was sliding in the dark on a slab of smooth rock at a grade that gave him no purchase and no time to find any. The torch tore from his grip, guttered, died. Pure black. The sound of his own grunt and the scrape of stone against his back and then impact.
He hit flat ground on his side, hard enough to empty his lungs in a single rough ‘oof’, and lay still for a moment. Staring up at an invisible ceiling and waiting for his body to submit a full report.
Scraped palm, a bruised hip and wounded pride. But nothing was broken.
He pushed himself up onto his elbows, breathing returning slowly, and became aware that the darkness here was not quite total. A faint, source-less illumination, cool and bluish that carried a soft humming sound that he could not identify. His eyes adjusted to the darkness that surrounded him. Gradually, a shape resolved itself out of the dimness.
A door. Or rather, something that looked like a door. Though it was of a style he had never seen before.
Slowly, he rose to his feet and approached the door like structure.
It was set into the rock face at the base of what appeared to be an artificially cut wall smooth, precise, with none of the roughness of natural stone or the tool marks of anything he recognized and far too precise for an elemental jutsu. The door itself was the source of his confusion, it looked alien to him. Seamless metal made from a dark alloy he had no name for, with faint lines of pale light tracing along its surface in patterns that suggested technology that he had only seen in sci fi films, rather than seal work. The edges were perfect. The division between the two panels was a line so fine it was nearly invisible.
Naruto stood in front of it and felt, for the first time in a long time, genuinely uncertain. He glanced back at the dark tunnel behind him, debating if he should just return to his camp above and forget about the cave, then forward at the door.
The pull was coming from the other side, with a heavy sigh he steeled himself and stepped toward it. The panels slid apart with only an almost inaudible hiss. Revealing a vast room, filled with various machines and monitors he couldn’t even begin to identify. A large, cylinder like object at the center.
He stepped through the threshold and stopped, wide-eyed at the automatic illumination of the massive room that was coming to life around him in response to his presence. Cool white light from panels in a ceiling too high and too precisely constructed to belong to any village. The walls were smooth. The floor was smooth. Consoles lined the perimeter, most of them dark and dormant, their surfaces embedded with controls he couldn't begin to interpret. While others were alive with scrolling texts in a language he couldn’t even begin to identify nor understand.
This was not a cave. This was not anything from his world.
He walked slowly toward the center.
The cylinder like object stood out in the center of the room, made of a clear glass-like material, taller than he was and mounted on a raised platform with machinery clustered around its base like the roots of a tree. Whatever filled the interior was opaque, pale, some kind of suspended medium that held its contents in absolute stillness. Not quite ice but something that moved like liquid had once been present and then simply stopped, frozen mid-motion.
At the center of it, suspended and unmoving was something humanoid in shape.
Naruto leaned closer, attempting to get a better look. He couldn't make out detail through the frosted medium, but the silhouette was unmistakably humanoid, with the silhouette indicating that it was potentially female.
A sharp red light swept across him from above without warning, thin and precise, moving from his feet to the crown of his head in less than a second. He stumbled back instinctively, one hand dropping toward a kunai he realized he hadn't brought, before a voice emerged from the room itself dry, androgynous, and completely without emotion.
[SIGNATURE RECOGNIZED. INITIATING REANIMATION SEQUENCE.]
Naruto's hand froze and eyes widened.
"Initiating the what?" Was his intelligent remark.
The machinery around the cylinder's base came to life with a low, resonant hum. The medium inside the tube began to shift some kind of chemical process, a gradual dissolution of the preserving agent, frost retreating from the transparent surface as warmth was reintroduced in measured increments. Naruto watched, rooted, silently praying to whoever was listening that he did not just accidentally release a vicious alien swarm to consume the world, as the pale suspension slowly clarified.
The first thing he confirmed was that the figure inside was indeed a woman, a very human looking woman. The second thing he had noticed as the last of the fluid drained and the transparency completed itself was that she was completely, unambiguously, and entirely without clothing.
A healthy blush spread across his cheeks as he involuntarily took in the sight of the nude woman. He did not immediately look away, though he had intended to. However, the time between the intention to look away and the execution of that intention was approximately three additional seconds, which his conscience would relitigate for some time afterward.
The cylinder cracked open with a soft exhale of depressurized air, splitting along the center seam and folding back in two precise halves. The woman inside swayed immediately, legs failing to remember their purpose after what Naruto could only assume had been a very long time without use. She pitched forward off the platform with nothing resembling grace.
He caught her. This however, became its own problem.
She was warm, well, recently rewarmed, but warm and approximately his height, and the arm he'd thrown out to catch her had ended up around her waist in a way that left very little ambiguity about the situation. She slumped heavily against him, her weight pulling them both down to one knee as he struggled against the sudden additional weight, her head coming to rest against his shoulder while her legs sorted themselves out at a molecular level.
Naruto stared at the ceiling very intently and tried to think about literally anything else.
Training. Ramen. Bushy brows in tight spandex on a cold day. Gai-sensei chasing after Kakashi while being naked and oiled up. Anything, anything at all to keep his mind off his current predicament. Which was easier said than done, considering he had a beautiful naked woman with a respectable D-cup bust pressing against his chest.
Several deeply uncomfortable seconds passed before the woman stirred. A sharp intake of breath, not panicked but as if drawn by someone who was merely waking up from a deep sleep. Then she straightened, pulled back, and looked at him with eyes the color of amber that were already, even now, alarming in their focus. They swept across his face with the brisk efficiency of someone taking inventory, cataloging, and processing all at once with practiced ease.
It was at this moment that he became aware once again that she was not wearing anything, much to his embarrassment.
"Here…." He yanked off his jacket so fast the zipper made a sound like a brief scream and held it out, averting his gaze to the left wall. "….so you can cover yourself."
She looked at the jacket. Then at him. Something passed through those amber eyes that might, in better lighting, have been amusement. Grasping the jacket, she silently put it on. Struggling only slightly as the use of her muscles slowly came back to her.
It fit the way he'd feared it would, with the sleeves a little too short, though the shoulders approximately right. The zipper however failed, as the clasp had been broken off in the Uzumaki’s haste to offer the woman covering, leaving a significant portion of her cleavage exposed. Though fortunately, most of her was covered.
She looked down at herself, then at him again with an expression of cool equanimity, as though she had been through things that re-calibrated one's sense of what constituted inconvenience.
"Thank you," she said. Her voice was low and measured, accented in a way he'd never heard before. She straightened fully, even on unsteady legs, even in a borrowed jacket that was losing the battle against her proportions, she held herself like someone who was accustomed to being the most composed person in any given room.
She extended a hand in greeting as she moved to formally introduce herself.
"Lana Beniko. Steward of the Eternal Empire and Hand of the Emperor." A slight pause. "And I suspect I have been asleep for considerably longer than I intended."
He shook her hand, somewhat numbly. Quickly noting how her fingers felt calloused, yet soft. A clear indication that this woman was no stranger to the battlefield.
"Naruto Uzumaki, Genin of Konoha." He responded, though his rank was nowhere near as fancy nor as important sounding as the woman before him. “And um, I don’t know how long you’ve been down here.”
She absorbed this without any particular reaction, which made sense given that the word almost certainly had no meaning to her. Her gaze moved to the room around them, sweeping the consoles and the ceiling with the look of someone conducting a rapid damage assessment.
"Tell me, Naruto Uzumaki from Konoha." She looked back at him. "How exactly did you awaken me? This facility was not designed to respond to unregistered individuals."
"The machine said something about ‘signature recognition’.” He gestured, somewhat helplessly, toward the ceiling to indicate where he thought the voice had come from. “And then everything started."
Her expression changed. A small frown forming on her lips as she pondered what it could have meant, before something seemed to click into place behind those amber eyes.
"Interesting." She mused, her amber colored eyes staring at the one who had awoken her from her stasis. Silence hung between the two before she spoke again. "I need to test your blood. Will you permit it?"
"My... blood?" He stammered.
"A small amount. The medical console is still functional." She moved toward one of the peripheral stations and began waking dormant systems with a familiarity that confirmed this was not the first time she had stood in this room. "If the facility recognized your genetic signature, there is a specific reason why. I would very much like to know what that reason is before we have any further conversation."
Naruto looked at the needle-adjacent device she had produced from a panel in the console with apprehension. Never being a big fan of needles.
"...And that's going to tell you something from just a small amount?" He inquired with uncertainty.
"Considerably more than a small amount of something, yes."
He was quiet for a moment, weighing the pros and cons, before coming to a decision. Then he rolled up his sleeve, looked at the opposite wall.
“Fine.” He said, letting his own curiosity get the better of him. Namely as why the facility had responded to him.
He hadn't expected the console to print anything. Though at the same time, he wasn't entirely sure what he'd expected. Lights, maybe, some kind of readout on a screen he couldn't read. Instead, after a pause of approximately four minutes during which Lana stood with her back to him reviewing whatever the console was showing her, a panel in the machine's side produced a thin sheet of material covered in text and what appeared to be a complex structural diagram.
“You can understand what it says?” He inquired quietly, gesturing towards the read out the woman was reading.
“You can not?” She responded, turning to face him in curiosity. Earning a head shake, signifying a negative.
“I don’t understand any of this.” He gestured to the room all around them.
“Interesting, you speak Basic but can not read Aurebesh.” Lana mused, mostly to herself but was still loud enough for Naruto to hear. Which only created more questions for the whiskered blonde. Quietly, she turned back to the readout.
The expression that settled over her features was not quite shock, it was too controlled for that, but rather the look of someone whose working hypothesis had just been confirmed at a magnitude they hadn't fully prepared for.
"Sit down, please." she requested lightly, without looking up.
"I'm fine standing."
"You may want to sit down." she insisted.
Frowning a little, Naruto sat on the edge of a dormant console. From past experiences, when someone used the tone the blonde haired woman had just used, what ever needed to be said was vitally important.
"Your blood contains a genetic marker that is keyed to this facility. Specifically, it is keyed to the founder of this facility and the civilization that produced it." She stated firmly. "You are a descendant of Emperor Valkorion."
The silence resonated throughout the room as the whiskered blonde struggled to comprehend what he had just been told.
"I'm a descendant of a what?"
"An Emperor," she said, with the patience of someone who had been an advisor to powerful and occasionally bewildering individuals for a very long time. "Not of your world, by the evidence available to me. A man of extraordinary power, extraordinary age, and it must be said in the interest of accuracy, extraordinary moral complexity. He ruled the Eternal Empire, people loved and feared him at the same time. And he was, by most reasonable measures, one of the most powerful beings who has ever lived."
"You're saying I'm related to him." Naruto stared at her.
"Distantly. But the genetic marker is there." She glanced at the printout again, and something else moved through her expression. "There is something else."
"Of course there is." He groaned, expecting to hear some bad news.
"Your blood contains a concentration of midi-chlorians that is…." she paused, appearing to select her words with the care of someone building something load-bearing. "Exceptional. Among the highest I have ever encountered in a test result."
He squinted. "Midi-what now?"
"Midi-chlorians," she said, and then took a breath and settled herself against the console across from him with the posture of someone who recognized they were about to give a long explanation and had made peace with that, as it was obvious the young man was severely uninformed. "I suppose I should start from the beginning."
She talked for a long time, and Naruto who had not, historically, distinguished himself as a patient listener found himself unable to look away. It was something in her voice that had it alluring, not the monotone droning that Iruka-sensei would do when he had to give a long winded lecture.
She told him about the Force.
An energy field. A binding presence that ran through all life and connected it at a level beneath anything the eye could see or the hand could touch. The midi-chlorians, she explained, were how one listened to it microscopic life forms that existed within all living cells, more concentrated in some individuals than others, and in the individuals where that concentration was highest, the Force spoke loudest.
"And my count is..." He searched for where she'd landed on that.
"High enough," she said, carefully, "that with proper training, you would be a very formidable Force user. Potentially extraordinary." Her tone remained measured, but he was beginning to read the precision behind it she chose each word deliberately, and that word, extraordinary, had not been chosen casually.
“Bear in mind that a high count does not equal power. It merely indicates potential.” She advised, her amber eyes piercing his ocean blue sapphires. “And just like any potential, it can either be cultivated or it can be squandered.”
He was quiet for a moment.
"What does that mean? Using it.” The whiskered blonde inquired. “What does that actually look like?"
She had given him a small demonstration of lifting a data pad off a nearby terminal and suspending it in the air before explaining it to him. About lifting and moving objects with a mere thought, about perception expanded past the body's ordinary limits, about the ability to influence minds and the edges of physical reality. She told him about combat applications and about the more subtle things reading intent, sensing approach and the awareness that came with being, in some sense, plugged into something larger than oneself.
And then she told him about the sides of it. She was straightforward about being biased against the Light Side of the Force. Something that he appreciated, more than he might have expected to.
"The Light Side, offers clarity. Calm. A certain purity of purpose. Its practitioners at their best are genuinely formidable and genuinely principled. The discipline it requires produces a kind of centeredness that is real and not trivial." She paused for a moment, allowing Naruto to digest what she had explained. "It also demands the suppression of emotion as a precondition of power; grief, anger, love, and desire. Not the management of those things. The elimination of them, or the attempt at it. In my view, this is both unrealistic and limiting. And in the individuals who achieve it imperfectly, which is to say most of them, it produces a particular form of self-deception that I find more dangerous than honest darkness."
He thought about that and found that he agreed with her assessment. To restrict the very thing that made you an individual felt wrong to him. He understood the need to not let your emotions dictate your actions, as that could lead to a premature end, but to eliminate them entirely, one may as well be a puppet with no will of their own.
"And the Dark Side?"
"Power," she said, simply. "Passion. The Force channeled through emotion rather than in spite of it; your grief, anger, pain, and love. All of it becomes a source of power that can be used. At its worst, it consumes and corrupts those who are ill prepared. The history of those who have walked it purely is not a comfortable one to read." She met his eyes, a sense of weight behind them that spoke volumes that she had witnessed it first hand.
"But the worst of the Light Side is also not a comfortable history either.” She continued after a brief pause. “What I believe, and I am biased as I told you, so weigh this accordingly; is that the Dark Side is more honest. It does not ask you to pretend you are not what you are."
Naruto looked at her for a long moment. He thought about the Kyuubi's chakra and the way it moved through him when it came, burning and violent and undeniable, power that came from somewhere that felt nothing like peace. He thought about the times it had been the only thing that got him back up. He thought about how he'd always been told to suppress it, control it, and refuse it.
He thought about a very long list of people who had, in one way or another, told him that what he was needed to be managed rather than used.
"What do you suggest?" he asked after a handful of moments.
"Learn the Dark Side as your foundation," she advised. "But do not discard the Light entirely. Use it to balance yourself, to keep the passion from becoming the thing that steers you rather than the thing that powers you. Walk closer to the dark, but do not shut the other door."
"There are few who have managed both.” She tilted her head. “The ones who have, have been nearly unstoppable."
He looked at the printout, still in her hand. At the room around him. At the door, still open, the dark tunnel beyond it.
"Can you teach me?" He asked, probably a little more hopeful than he had intended to sound.
"Yes." She answered simply. “You have great potential within you, it would be a waste to not help you cultivate it.”
There was truth in her words. For the first time in his short sixteen years of life, he felt someone was being completely honest with him. No ulterior motive, no veiled intent. Just simple and pure honesty. It was at this moment that Naruto realized, her presence in this very room was what had been beckoning him to come. Maybe just this once, the little something he had desired had been found.
The walk back through the tunnel was awkward in the friendly way, Naruto in his undershirt, torch retrieved and re-lit from flint and steel he kept in his pockets and Lana behind him navigating the narrow passage with more composure than he would have managed in her situation. She had scavenged what she could from storage compartments in the lab. A top that was at least a size too small for her, forcing her to have to cut the chest area a little for comfort, which led to her cleavage being exposed once more and a pair of trousers that fit adequately from the waist down. Lastly, a simple pair of black leather boots. It wasn’t perfect, but at least for all intended purposes, she was dressed.
He tried very hard not to think about this.
The campfire had burned down to reliable embers, still sufficient to take fresh wood, which Naruto fed it while Lana stood at the edge of the circle of light and looked at the wilderness around them taking note of how much had changed since she had first come to this system. How long ago, she couldn’t say exactly.
"It's not much," he offered, gesturing at the camp, prompting her to turn around and view the campsite.
"I have slept in considerably worse circumstances." She glanced at the two bedrolls.
"You can have mine." He offered, gesturing to the fully unrolled one. "The other one is...I'd recommend not touching it,"
“It is to be assumed that the other belongs to the one you were traveling with?” Lana inquired, having been briefed during their trek out of the cave. “Your….sensei, as you called him?”
“Yeah,” The whiskered blonde replied with a frown. “Not much of a sensei though, hasn’t taught me anything of value in the last six months, and he's been gone for over ten hours now."
"He does this all the time, disappears into town. Says it's for his spy network." Naruto sat by the fire and poked at the embers with a stick, a clear indication that it bothered him to no end. "What he is actually doing is drinking and paying women to keep him company and when he finally does come back, he'll have spent all the money that is technically mine and will come up with some bullshit excuse that it is to ‘pay’ for the privilege of being his apprentice.”
Lana was quiet for a moment, she didn’t need the Force to tell her that her newly acquired student was less than pleased with his current situation regarding the absent man. Perhaps this was the reason he had unintentionally woke her, as someone she once knew had once said. ‘The Force works in mysterious ways.’
"And this is the man who was meant to train you." She inquired lightly.
"For three years, supposedly." He scoffed. “And the worst part of it, he’s suppose to be my Godfather.”
She looked at the second sleeping bag again, along with the haphazard travel bag that was carelessly thrown beside it. She was familiar with the concept of what a ‘Godfather’ was, even during her time, however long ago that was.
"I see," she said. Clearly unimpressed with the man she had yet to meet, but as one who had prided herself in her teaching skills to those of years past, his lack of interest in putting forth the smallest amount of effort was an insult.
She crossed to his bedroll, lowered herself onto it slowly. While it was easier to move around, her muscles were still feeling the after effects of being in stasis for so long, and pulled it around herself with a kind of conclusive finality.
Naruto looked at the ground beside the fire, mentally laying out his options for sleeping arrangements, and began to make the best of things. His best option was to keep close to the campfire, knowing the temperature was going to drop in the early hours of the morning.
"You should get in." Her voice broke him from his thoughts. "The temperature will no doubt drop further before morning. It would be a shame if you were to succumb to the elements before I could properly begin your training.”
She had opened the bedroll, matter-of-factly, with the posture of someone making a practical suggestion rather than any other kind. Along side a stern look that told him that she was not going to accept ‘no’ as an answer.
With silent reluctance, he stood from his place near the campfire and made his way to the bedroll and climbed in.
She was warm, which was the detail his body registered before his brain had fully processed the situation he found himself in. The bedroll left them little room as Lana pressed up against his back, eliciting an atomic blush from the whiskered blonde. Despite being adequately clothed, he could still feel her rather generous assets were firmly pressed against him. Her soft breath tickling the back of his neck as she fell into a peaceful slumber. Naruto stared out into the camp, thinking rather loudly about anything other than the attractive woman pressed up against him in the cramped confines of his bedroll.
He did not sleep well.
Jiraiya arrived back at camp just past dawn, stumbling through the treeline with the trajectory of a man who had made his peace with the ground's tendency to tilt. His eyes were half-closed, his horned hitai-ate was on sideways, and he smelled, authentically, of sake and several hours of decisions he had not yet begun to regret.
He registered the two figures emerging from the bedroll through a processing delay of several seconds. Recalling that he had only left one brat, not two. Then one of those figures resolved into a blonde woman in a top that threatened to expose her modesty and the delay ended with remarkable abruptness.
"Well," he said with the sunrise warmth of a man whose morning had just improved dramatically, "who do we have here?"
"Jiraiya-sensei," Naruto began with forced politeness, as he had a multitude of other names he would rather call the man, however Lana advised a more diplomatic approach. "this is Lana Beniko. She's…."
"Beautiful," Jiraiya grinned. Already ignoring the presence of his ‘student’ and focusing all his attention on the gorgeous woman. "I'm Jiraiya of the Sannin, perhaps you've heard of me? The legendary Toad Sage of Mt. Myoboku. The one who personally trained the Yondaime Hokage and renowned author of Icha-Icha…."
"I’m going to be learning from her…." Naruto pressed, his patience already running thin.
"How about we ditch the brat and have a nice private chat, just the two of us. I know a great place not far from here." Jiraiya openly invited the blonde woman, ignoring her sneer of disgust.
“I’m afraid I will have to decline.” Lana simply stated before she raised one hand and with a subtle twitch of her finger, gave a silent order through the Force. As if on command, Jiraiya's eyes closed. His body swaying every so slightly before it slumped back, landing on his posterior first before laying completely on his back.
“And I thought the smuggler from Ord Mantel was insufferable.” She idly commented to no one in particular.
Naruto looked at his unconscious pervert.
"I thought you said to be diplomatic." He stated, turning his attention to Lana whom merely gave an uncaring shrug.
“And we were,” She responded, a slight grin on her face. “I simply shifted to a more….effective form of diplomacy.”
“Is he?” He questioned, looking at the perverted sages prone form.
"Sleeping, deeply and comfortably. He will wake in several hours with a headache he will attribute to the sake." She glanced at Naruto. "I have also erased his memory of this moment, however I suggest we not be here when he awakens. Prepare what you need."
Naruto didn’t need to be told twice as he quickly moved to secure his items, which wasn’t much. His pack was light, as he had learned to limit what he packed months ago out of sheer necessity. Mostly because Jiraiya had kept stealing his money, forcing Naruto make due with only the bare essentials; namely rations and tools.
Then he found a sheet of paper and sat with it for a moment, writing brush in hand. He didn't overthink it. Doing so would have produced something longer and angrier, and he'd decided he didn't want to be angry on paper. He just wanted to be honest.
‘Pervy-sage; after six months of wasting my time waiting for you to fulfill your promise to train me, I have come to the realization that you have no intent of making good on that promise, as such, I have found a different teacher. One who won’t steal my money and will not abandon me like you have. Don't bother looking.
Naruto
He placed it on Jiraiya's chest, ensuring the note was securely under the sleeping man’s heavy hand. Pausing for a moment before he reached into the man’s coat and produced a modest sized wallet that was full of ryo. All the money Jiraiya refused to spend while stealing Naruto’s. Deciding he was owed some compensation, the whiskered blonde pocketed the cash and left the empty wallet.
He then turned his attention to the large scroll that was on the ground not far from where Jiraiya was sleeping. Swallowing thickly, he grabbed it and opened it. Revealing the signatures of those that had signed the Toad Summoning contract, which was only three people currently, soon to be two. Biting his thumb hard enough to draw blood, he swiped it through his name and channeled his chakra into it. Effectively burning his name from the contract. While he would miss Gamakichi, he couldn’t risk being reversed summoned when Jiraiya eventually woke up.
Having finished his task, he rolled up the large scroll and placed it next to his now former teacher.
"Ready," he said as he grabbed his pack and slung it over his shoulder.
Lana, who had repacked what she'd taken from the lab while also ensuring it was destroyed to prevent the technology from falling into the wrong hands, glanced back at him. Her gaze moved to the note, to the scroll, then to the unconscious Jiraiya.
"Good," she said.
They turned east as the morning light came fully over the hills, moving at a comfortable pace that was neither hurried nor leisurely. Naruto didn't look back. For the first time in six months, it felt like it was pulling him somewhere worth going.
Though, unknown to him at the time, he had just taken his first step on a much larger journey than he could ever imagine.
Additional Authors Notes: And there we go, the first chapter for Maelstrom: Dark Force Rising.
Been awhile since I played SWTOR, so I hope I was able to portray Lana adequately enough to be mostly in character. Had to bounce back and forth between Youtube and Wookiepedia to gather all the details when talking about the Force and such.
As you may have noticed, Lana only explained the ideologies of the Light Side and Dark Side of the Force, while not explaining the difference between Jedi and Sith. That will come later. She had admitted to being bias in her view of the two, but she is giving Naruto a solid foundation first before introducing him to the concept of Jedi and Sith.
On a more subtle note, it was mentioned that Naruto could speak Basic, but couldn’t read Aurebesh. As well as him being the descendant to Emperor Valkorion. A little hint on how (at least for this story), civilizations started for this particular planet.
Now, I know some may not be pleased with my use of the midi-chlorians, but I assure you, this is the only chapter they are mentioned in, as they are used more as a plot device than anything else. A sort of excuse to segue into Lana explaining to Naruto he can use the Force.
Now to be clear, I have no time frame on when the second chapter will come out, but I will try to work on it in between all my projects.
Until then, be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments, reviews or private messages!