Brotherhood

The Chthonic Professor

Summary: The Third Hokage receives word of the Akatsuki's goals during Naruto's final year at the academy, around the same time that nine young shinobi-in-training are found to have suspiciously high amounts of Spiritual Energy. The nine students are sent to Hogwarts to learn how to harness their magic, and an unbreakable bond of Brotherhood is formed somewhere down the line.

Warnings: Good!Draco, eventual Good!Sasuke, super-mushy brotherly/sisterly fluffiness abound, alongside a healthy (or should that be unhealthy?) dose of action!

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Chapter One - Change of Pace

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Sarutobi Hiruzen had lived through more hardship than anyone had the right to boast about. He'd live through two Shinobi Wars, gained the title of God of Shinobi as well as The Professor, taken up the mantle of Hokage, strongest shinobi in the Hidden Leaf, twice, and had to deal with Naruto's pranks for the last five years.

Despite all of his hardships he'd experienced, nothing could have prepared him enough to face the information that his most vibrant student brought to him one fateful morning.

He'd listened to Jiraiya's report. He'd read Jiraiya's report, thrice. Then he'd asked to listen to it again.

His hands wouldn't stop shaking, no matter the fact that he was one of the most powerful men in the entire world.

"You're entirely sure this is accurate, Jiraiya?" He questioned one final time. Jiraiya's response was a solemn nod.

Sarutobi sighed.

"I will need some time to think on this matter." He placed the folder softly upon his desk and put his head in his hands. "Dismissed."

Then Jiraiya was gone.

-.-

One Month Later

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It had been a month since the Third had received Jiraiya's… more than disturbing report. It was a stroke of fate that one of his most trusted medics came rushing into his office not ten minutes later, announcing what very well might have been a shining ray of hope and inspiration upon the age-old leader's plight.

The hospital had just reached a breakthrough in the study of the mechanics of Chakra while studying the fluctuation patterns of some of the academy students' chakra networks during a routine check-up at the school. It seemed that, of all of the students at the academy, nine seemed to have incredibly potent Spiritual Chakra, unlike anything the medic claimed to have seen before.

The old Sarutobi, however, had seen something of the like before. It had been years ago, but he'd met an oddity of a man with a short brown goatee that claimed he was able to preform feats of magic by using what 'you shinobi', he claimed, called Spiritual energy.

So, with an intensity and vigour that hadn't graced the wizened leader's muscles for nearly a decade, Sarutobi Hiruzen began to write a letter.

Now, almost exactly one month later, several children stood before him. Or, Hiruzen should say, seven children in varying degrees of nervousness, one in an intense state of brooding, and one entirely missing.

The old man paused in his musings and listened intently. He thought he could hear the sounds of destruction heading closer and closer to the door of his office.

It was only a moment before the sounds of destruction manifested into a high-pitched, whiny voice that the old Hokage knew all too well.

"… let go of me you bastard! I'm telling you, it really wasn't me this time!"

The door to his office banged open and one of Hiruzen's unremarkable Chunin shinobi came in, holding Naruto by the scruff of his orange jumpsuit. The blonde looked up at him with watering blue eyes.

"Oi, Jiji, I really didn't do anything this time, I swear! Whatever it was, it wasn't me!" Naruto ranted, flailing in the older man's iron-clad grip on his jacket.

The Hokage just chuckled, dismissing the Chunin with a wave of his hand. The man unceremoniously dropped Naruto like a sack of potatoes on the floor and promptly left the room.

"I believe you Naruto, you're not in trouble for any pranks, or anything of the like."

Naruto stopped stone-cold. He stared at the old man sitting behind the desk and his eyes glazed over. Sarutobi could almost see the gears slowly churning in the blond boy's head.

"Eh?" His response was just as eloquent (and amusing) as Hiruzen had expected it to be. He chuckled again as he motioned for Naruto to stand in line with his eight other classmates.

"As amusing as this has been," Hiruzen slowly stopped chuckling, threaded his fingers together atop his polished oak desk, and hardened his gaze, "The subject matter at hand is a little more serious."

All fidgeting among the nine academy trainees stopped as they stood at attention before the leader of both their village and their military.

"In the last thirty days, I have found myself faced with a rather… unprecedented situation. You see, during the annual medical check-ups preformed by the academy last month, our medics found something quite, well, fascinating." Hiruzen paused for a moment, and the nine children before him glanced at each other up and down the line they'd formed.

"H-Hokage-sama?" Haruno Sakura meekly spoke up, her natural curiosity overtaking her need for maintaining military conduct, "What is it… what is it that the medics found, Hokage-sama?"

The old man smiled warmly at the pink-haired girl, "I'm very glad you asked, Sakura-chan." The little girl blushed slightly, her face lighting up at the praise from the legendary figure before her. "You see," The Hokage began, his voice taking on a tone that made the students think he was about to tell them some sort of fairy tale, "The medics, after some extensive testing, found an oddity among the chakra of some of the students in this year's graduating class. Nine students, to be specific." Once more, the nine glanced back and forth among each other.

"Oi, we're not gonna die, are we?" Inuzuka Kiba suddenly piped up, a worried look on his face.

"No, no, not at all, Kiba-kun." The boy seemed to sag slightly in relief. "The medics discovered that, unlike the other students, or any other shinobi, really, the nine of you have an unbelievable amount of Spiritual Energy in comparison to Physical Energy."

Most of the students seemed to understand, at least, the difference between Spiritual and Physical Energies and their relation to Chakra, if not the actual context of the Third Hokage's words.

Naruto was not among them.

"Eh? Spiritual Energy? Physical Energy? What're you talking about, old man?"

One could almost hear the agony in Uchiha Sasuke' forceful sigh, and the exasperation in Shikamaru's muttered 'troublesome.'

"Oh, Naruto," Hiruzen sighed mournfully, having expected this from the blond menace, "Your chakra is made up of a mixture of your Spiritual Energy, and your Physical Energy. Though Physical Energy can be constantly honed, no matter one's age, through physical exercise, one's Spiritual Energy reaches its peak around the time that a shinobi, or kunoichi, finishes puberty."

He paused to make sure that not only Naruto, but the rest of the students were following along. Though everything he'd said so far was standard knowledge, the rest of what he had to say was rather far from it.

"Though what I've just told you is common knowledge to most shinobi," He gave Naruto a pointed look, making the hyperactive knucklehead whither a little, "What I'm about to tell you, isn't." He leaned forwards slightly, as if he was about to let the nine children in on a secret, and tried not to smile at the standard shinobi tactics he was employing to further engage them in the minor unplanned lecture this debriefing had turned into.

"Now, while most believe that the differences between Spiritual and Physical energies are merely that, spiritual, or mental, and physical, it only scratches the surface of the complexities of the latent energies that make up our chakra network. Let me start with our Physical Energy, the less complex of the two."

"Physical Energy is the part of your chakra that is taken from your muscles. The stronger the muscles in your body, the greater your Physical Energy will be. Now, what the Physical Energy actually accounts for in relation to your chakra is that it represents the density, or the weight of your chakra, along with the amount of fluidity with which it runs through your coils. You can train the Physical aspect of your chakra at any time to make it more accessible and more powerful overall by training your body through intense physical exercise."

"On the opposite end of the spectrum we have your Spiritual Energy. Some people are born with a higher set amount of Spiritual Energy than others, and often those born with these high levels of Spiritual Energy are destined to become great shinobi. Your Spiritual Energy, contrary to popular belief, actually accounts for your total chakra capacity, along with the natural potency of your chakra."

Seeing more than a couple of blank looks being sent his way, Hiruzen decided to elaborate. He was still dealing with children, after all, no matter how prodigious some of them may have claimed to be.

"Here, think of it like a water balloon. Where your Spiritual Energy is the rubber of the balloon, the Physical Energy is the water inside the balloon. If you train hard, you can keep filling your water balloon with water until it's been stretched so far, that if you added any more water the ballon would pop. Some people are born with bigger water balloons than others, and so can exercise their Physical Energy to greater heights than others. However, while you're filling your balloon with Physical Energy, it's constantly expanding at fluctuating rates until you finish going through puberty. Once it hits this point, you can think of it as if the balloon has finally realized how large it can get until it pops, but hasn't actually been filled with enough water to reach that point yet." He stopped to let his words sink in. "Is everyone following me, now?"

Receiving nods all around (though some still looked a tad bit confused), Hiruzen continued with his explanation.

"Good. Now, as one's Spiritual Energy stops growing once puberty had been completed, so to speak, some of you might have guessed that your Spiritual Energy only begins to grow when you begin puberty." Hiruzen raised an eyebrow and received only a nod or two in confirmation.

"You'd be correct, this is what happens in normal shinobi. The nine of you are, apparently, far from normal." Hiruzen leaned back in his plushy, official Hokage chair and smiled genially at the nine children in front of him.

"Hokage-sama?" Sakura questioned quietly.

"You see, where normally a person's Spiritual Energy does not start growing until a child start's puberty, the Spiritual Energies of all nine of you have been increasing, in fluctuating patters, since birth. It was only just recently that this abnormality was brought to my attention by the academy's medics, and I recognized it as a phenomenon once described to me by an old friend."

"Over the last month, I have been exchanging letters with this colleague of mine, a man by the name of Albus Dumbledore, only to find out that, since we'd last spoken, he has become the headmaster of a school designed to teach children how to control their powerful Spiritual Energies."

The whole room seemed to be holding its breath, as if everyone could sense the approaching bomb lying in wait behind the Hokage's oh-so innocent-looking lips.

"Where he's from, they call this phenomenon Magic."

The room fell silent.

Information was digested.

Information was… in the process of being digested, with very, very large quantities of scepticism and wondering if their venerable old leader had finally lost his marbles.

Naruto exploded. "You're kidding!" He laughed (slightly hysterically). "You're pulling our legs, right Jiji? Oh man, I didn't know you were a prankster, old man! I mean, everyone knows magic isn't real!"

"I am most certainly not joking, Uzumaki Naruto." The blond boy froze, the old man's use of his full name cutting through him like an iron blade.

"… but… but you have to be joking." Naruto argued weakly. "I mean, magic isn't real."

"It most certainly is, Naruto, and the nine of you are the only ones potentially able to use it in the entire village. This makes you special." At those words, all nine of them subconsciously straightened their spines a little. "This colleague of mine is a man named Albus Dumbledore," Naruto let out a snort, and Hiruzen gave him the look, "And he is the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry." Sakura looked like she was about to interrupt him with a question, so he pushed on quickly.

"The school is located somewhere in a land called Scotland, which is part of the United Kingdom."

There was a pause. Then Naruto's ever-so-eloquent 'Huh?' universally summed up the reactions of the rest of the nine academy students.

"These are both lands located in the Outer Countries."

…

There was a sudden uproar of noise, from Sakura's excited chatter about the knowledge that she'd attained of the elusive Outer Countries to Naruto and Kiba shouting confused questions at the Hokage relating to the subject matter at hand.

"Quiet!" The old man bellowed, instantly hushing all noise in the room.

"Thank you." Hiruzen straightened his robes and gave all nine students a stony stare. "Now, over the last month, Dumbledore-san and I have come to an agreement. As the nine of you are at the age when the magical children of the Outer Countries begin their education at Hogwarts, you will be attending school with other children your age to learn more about magic…"

Excited chattering and glancing resumed among the nine children as Hiruzen took a deep breath.

"… for the next seven years."

The room froze. Again.

"WHAT?!" Naruto's shrill cry exploded from his lips.

"Aw man, I thought we were done with school!" Kiba whined pitifully, Akamaru whimpering along with him from inside his fur-lined coat.

"Seven… years…" Sakura mumbled, contemplating just how long seven years really were.

"How am I supposed to become a shinobi if I'm in school for the rest of my life?!" Naruto was panicking rather impressively.

"Enough!" The Hokage slammed his hand down on his desk to bring order to the nine children.

"Allow me to divulge my reasons for gathering all of you here, and revealing all of this classified information to you." The Hokage's voice was hard, and his message was clear. None of what was said today could be repeated to anybody outside of this room.

"Effective immediately, the nine of you are officially Genin of Konohagakure no Sato."

Once more, the room fell silent.

There was a sudden uproarious cheer from Naruto and Kiba, the two of them leaping into the air in celebration. Sasuke was smirking, Sakura seemed to have entered a state of shock, Ino was cheering along with Naruto and Kiba, Hinata was smiling happily, Shino was as stoic as ever, and Shikamaru seemed to have fallen asleep leaning against Choji's shoulder. Waiting for them to finally calm down (and with a small smile on his face), Hiruzen continued.

"This will be your first official mission as shinobi and kunoichi of Konoha: attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for the next seven years, and learn everything you can about magic!"

The Hokage stood slowly from his seat, hands clasped behind his back, regarding all of them with pride in his gaze.

"I ask that you take this mission with Konoha on your mind, and the Will of Fire burning fiercely in your hearts."

Nine children gazed up at him with varying levels of smiles on their features, and Hiruzen knew that this decision had not been a mistake. He smiled softly down at them.

"Go now, you have the rest of the day to say your goodbyes to your families and pack anything you believe will be necessary to take along for this mission. I expect to see all nine of you in my office by no later than 0600 hours tomorrow morning. Dismissed!"

-.-

AN: Yeah… I know. I'm going to try juggling this, SNN and The Spirit of the Tree of Death right alongside the difficulties of college life.

Don't worry about me, I'll manage. And I'm giving you people my word that I will be updating all three stories in as consistent a manner as I can feasibly manage. So expect them to be rather erratic.

Besides that: how much freaking potential does this story have? Boo yeah! My muse is on fire right now! Oh man, the fluff-and-action content in this story is going to be so real!