naruto : beyond the limits of darkness and light

what does the fox say?

Generally over the coming days, Naruto could sum up Fairy Tail as a Cold War-zone.

Gildarts had made it very painfully clear with his message. One hair touched on Naruto's head, and may God help them because Gildarts would obliterate them into nothingness. That was if Master didn't get to you first, he would usually tank out one of his most infamous punishments if he saw anything, meaning that most of Fairy Tail knew better than to try and hurt Naruto.

That didn't mean they had to be nice to Naruto either, but growing up with glares and hateful remarks Naruto just shook it off and ignored them, he really couldn't care less about people who thought of him like that. Naruto in turn treated them with only the required amount of decency, he wouldn't go out of his way to insult or antagonize others but if attacked verbally on a personal level, he felt he had justification for returning that in kind, he did get a good deal of practice with Gildarts on that. If it was just a whisper or insult behind his back, he just ignored it.

Naruto made it clear to them, that despite whatever pain Zeref had caused them, he was still not ashamed of his father since he raised him from childhood, that was something that rankled badly on most of Fairy Tail who had a new member who was actually proud of the most infamous and notorious dark mage in the history of Fiore itself.

That wasn't to say Naruto was helpless either. The mages that would hunt him down as a child were much older, more powerful and much more experienced and a life time of dealing with them had taught Naruto to adapt and strategies during fights. He could easily take down mages and adults even greater 10 years older than him and there were quite a few who tried to attack him from outside the Guild but against most of the A class mages, he would struggle without a proper plan in place.

S-Class mages like Gildarts and Makarov was completely out of the question, he wasn't anywhere near as strong to challenge either of them to a fight. That was just asking to get creamed into paste, even if they were his only friends and family.

It seemed that all he really had was Gildarts and Makarov.

Gildarts was known for only staying for a few days at a time, but he chose to stay longer for Naruto's sake and remind anyone that he was still there. He also wanted to cheer up his new family member by sticking around longer for him and took short term missions to be there for Naruto more often, much to the jealously of a brown haired little girl that her father only stuck around to be around another child who he literally found in a cave.

Makarov was also similar, he'd keep an eye out for Naruto and Naruto would pay visits to the old man every now and then in his office or out at the lake where they talked before and just skip stones and talk about different topics and Naruto felt happy that he finally had a fellow intellectual to talk to. He might have been occasionally completely ridiculous at times with his perversion and drinking problems that could even put Gildarts to shame, but Naruto just set that as a standard among the mages.

And as fate would have it, those two weren't his only friends...

X776
Vulpes Woods, Edge of Magnolia

As Naruto was sitting on his own in the woods, he finished his workout/training and reequipped out his clothes for new ones and accidentally got the wrong one which was the god awful orange jumpsuit from Gildarts and felt something in his pocket. He quickly checked his pant pocket and found a small book in there that didn't belong to him.

"Where did this come from?" Naruto wondered, the book at the engraving of 9 on the cover with a picture of a nine tailed fox on the other side and Naruto looked at the handwriting on the title which read "Kurama" and realised where this came from.