Chapter One
It was a surprisingly wet day in the village. Thousands upon thousands of tiny rain droplets plummeted to the ground, either landing in puddles and lakes or, more often than not, landing somewhere on the ground and running off to puddles and lakes. Not many people have ever wondered why rain droplets seek companionship with the watery bastards that made them want to leave the cloud in the first place, and Naruto certainly wasn't one of them.
He was more concerned with the leak in his ceiling, and what he would do with the pot of water when it was filled. Normally he would wait for someone to come out from the apartment below and greet them with a pleasantly unexpected shower of carefully gathered wetness, but nobody would go outside today.
Not even crackpots like Sasuke, who insisted on training even in the worst weather, would go outside today. He would still train, of course, just inside one of the many houses his older brother had thoughtfully rendered unoccupied. Naruto wondered if his fellow teammate had ever considered renting out space. Not that he needed the money, or anything, because he didn't. Family fortune, and all that.
Speaking of family fortune, the Uzamaki clan had either spent theirs prior to their demise, or didn't had any to begin with. Money was becoming increasingly hard to come by for the boy, and the worst part was, people had started to notice.
Just last week, his grocer had tossed in a few extra veggies free of charge, trying to keep karma at the top of his priority list. Sakura offered to take him on a complementary shopping trip after discovering the little blonde wore his clothes two…three…sometimes even four days in a row to save water. He refused, of course. Food charity was all fine and good, but shopping just wasn't in his nature. The food charity for today, however, was making him rather nervous.
"Hello?" Naruto spun around—not so much a spin as a poorly executed turn. The sharp corner of the kitchen sink, tired of being used for ordinarily bathroom duties, dug vengefully into his lower back. The cheap yellow plastic of a fifty-cent toothbrush groaned under the pressure of an oddly vulpine set of teeth.
A painfully average man peered around the door, his moderately square chip plagued with a worried frown. His dull black eyes scanned the room, driven by a morbid sense of curiosity, dread, hope, and unyielding compassion all at the same time. A boring, hastily-constructed ponytail followed loyally behind his average head; it was a very average black, too. Not the shiny kind. Sensei Iruka, in fact, would have been the most average, boring person in Konoha, if it weren't for the scar. It ran horizontally across the bridge of his nose, stopped to take a break, and eventually finished just below the center of both eyes. It was, for unexplained reasons, a very sexy scar. Any friends Iruka had could thank the scar for introducing them. Any friends except Naruto. Often times his teacher wondered if he even noticed it was there. The thought of someone noticing him for something other than a quirky facial appearance was comforting, and at the same time, he wished the boy would at least ask him where it came from.
"Iwuka Shenshei!" Naruto grunted, removing himself from the pointy wrath of the kitchen sink. The toothbrush obscuring his speech was hastily removed and dropped in a plastic cup next to the faucet, which tipped over and spilled its contents into an unwashed, weeks neglected bowl. Naruto thought better of turning around, smiled with such charm he never thought possible, and waved an arm over his meager surroundings. "Welcome to Chateau Naruto."
AN: Well, yes, hello.
