Konoha's Dancing Leaves

by ShadowedAuthor

It was like a scale, with one side supporting the pacifist gardener and the other the aggressive protector. That was the poetic description. Sasuke just thought she was nuts. Naruto is a powerful shinobi who would rather be doing anything but fighting. Mokuton!Naruto

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto (rightfully owned by Masashi Kishimoto) nor do I make any money out of this fiction.

A/N: Well, here it is. I have written dozens upon dozens of fanfic ideas, and some of them are better than this one, but about two years back I got it into my head to try to actually write this one. Obviously I couldn't manage it in any sort of timely manner.

I might not make this any sort of priority to write further. I have ideas of where it would lead, but my main focus would still be on writing Silent Humanity.

Also, please know that the somewhat confusing format of flashback after flashback would be only for this chapter, with a very occasional one popping up in the future.

Anyhow, this is it, my new fiction. I hope you enjoy, yada yada yada.

Already had to go back and edit it after reading a review alerting me to the dangerous lack of formatting for the time jumps. Apparently this site didn't like my chosen one in the word file.

OXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

Large cerulean eyes blinked open as the warm yellow sun began to glide over them. His mouth immediately spread into a smile as he jumped up onto his feet, unaffected by the normal drowsy lethargy that plagued everyone else in the moments directly after waking. The blond boy, shorter than most of his peers, still smiling widely, turned to survey his particularly vibrant apartment and the sight he was met with filled him with such overwhelming joy he couldn't help but jump merrily off of his forever-unmade bed and onto the old floorboards.

He'd liked it more when his apartment was carpeted with nice, soft grass, but the Old Man had said it wasn't good for the floor or the apartment below his or something.

Naruto stretched at length, working out all of the kinks in his back, before hopping out of his bedroom and towards the kitchen area. He filled a pair of watering cans and splashed his face before taking said watering cans in hand and walking back into the main living area, albeit at a more sedate pace.

The vibrancy in Naruto's apartment could be attributed to three things, according to the only two people who regularly visited him there:

1. The extra large windows that he'd had installed in both the bedroom and open-plan living area, allowing every ray of the sun to shine into the relatively small home;

2. Naruto's own smile had, at times, been called blinding by those same visitors;

3. And finally, the exuberant, microcosmic jungle of plants and flowers that were potted and growing on every surface in the apartment. The plant life was so abundant in the living room, that there was hardly room for two people to sit on the sofa without being overwhelmed by one plant's leaves or another's.

Naruto emptied both the watering cans as he hydrated the blooming flowers and had to refill them before going into his bedroom and repeating the process, instinctively knowing just how much water he had to give each flower to make it grow to its fullest vibrancy.

It was a monumental task to water all of his current plants, by the time he had finished the chore, he saw he was going to be late to meet her; so, in a rush, he dumped the cans back in the kitchen, boiled the kettle, set his instant ramen to cook and ran to his bathroom, the only room that wasn't filled with a variety of plants. He just had a few of the more exotic ones in there that needed regular misting to stay healthy in there, though he'd removed the cacti after bumping into them more than once. Frankly, backing into a cactus wearing only a towel just once was more than enough.

Once his hasty shower was finished, failing to remove some of the ever-present dirt that accumulated on his person, the hyperactive preteen dried himself off and slipped into his favourite clothes, a pair of bright orange dungarees and a blue shirt and returned to his cooked ramen. Looking back at one of the many clocks in his abode, most of them usually being obscured by the taller plants depending on where one stood in the apartment; he saw he was really going to be late. Even if it was still a good few hours before the majority of his classmates would rise from their beds, Naruto started his days with the sun and he always tried to get things done before going to the Academy in the morning. With the time being what it was, Naruto grabbed his cup ramen and tied a straw hat around his neck for when the sun got a little hotter, and ran out the door barefoot, ignoring the pristine sandals the Hokage had implored him to wear, sat by the entrance way.

It was moments later that he darted back into the colourful apartment to retrieve his forgotten ninja equipment, holding his ramen and chopsticks precariously in his mouth whilst he unhappily attached the small bag to his lower back and ran back out the door.

On the way to his regular morning stop off, Naruto leapt through some of Konoha's and the world's most beautiful gardens. He always tried to take a route that led him through a few of the picturesque gardens, both public and fiercely private, whenever he was travelling around Konoha. It, at times, meant he was a little late to whatever he was meant to be doing at his destination, but his instructor at the Academy was always pretty forgiving, Iruka only turned red when the wayward student missed more than an hour.

By the time he reached the silent Hyūga compound, Naruto had finished his breakfast and disposed of the rubbish. He really hated litter.

The nightshift guard detail were still on duty and they were as stoic as ever when he approached, maintaining their controlled visages against his infamous infectious smile that he never failed to show off even to the usually officious and suspicious Branch House guardsmen.

"Good morning... whichever Hyūga-person you are, and to you too, second Hyūga-san. Is Hinata-chan ready yet?" The imperceptible tightening of the guards' jaws and the ticks that grew on their heads were lost on Naruto as he made to walk into the compound uninvited, only to jump back in avoiding a swift kick to the head.

"I'm still not allowed in? You haven't been talking to Neji-niisan again lately, have you?" He tried to laugh but the Branch House had long held that Naruto was a suspicious entity, entirely too close to the Hyūga heiress. And it was common policy not to allow the Uzumaki menace into any clan compound due to his history as a 'prankster', though, in Naruto's defence, he hadn't pulled a prank since he was six or seven years old.

The reformed Academy student would have thought the citizens of Konoha would have gotten over his youthful indiscretions by now, but apparently his status as village pariah meant that six-years just wasn't enough to clear his name of the minor infractions.

"Morning Naruto-kun." Naruto turned around, having, only moments prior, resigned himself to waiting outside like always and inadvertently further insulting the guards by turning his back on them.

"Ah, Hinata-chan, good morning. I hope you slept well." Naruto spoke surprisingly softly, his preferred manner of speaking, especially when he was in friendly company. And no company, Hokage aside, was ever close to as friendly as Hinata was.

"You're a little late today, Naruto-kun. You didn't get held up again, did you?" Hinata's smile looked a little accusatory as she walked through the gates, wearing a pair of overalls herself.

Naruto rubbed the back of his head and laughed softly as he began walking away from the compound with his best friend, swiftly changing the subject of conversation, a practice he was masterfully proficient in, towards something less troubling. "So, what do you think we should do this morning? I looked in on a few places earlier and the Kozuki's could be a good target."

"Naruto, don't you think it would be a better idea to spend some time practicing for the exam in an hour. You know it's your last chance don't you?" Hinata tried to turn to look at Naruto whilst still walking but the blank look on the usually beaming face was too much for her soft heart and she dropped the pressure that Naruto was so adverse to.

"Come on; let's go do something fun instead, maybe we could just spend the whole day there as well. Who cares about things like tests and being a stupid ninja, right?" Naruto was actually pouting when he saw the frown on Hinata face, meaning that he definitely was going to the Genin Exam whether he wanted to or not.

They went to the Kozuki house, a great target for their work since the owner was bedridden most of the time and didn't care about much outside of his books. The garden outside of the surprisingly well-maintained wooden house was almost perfect, with vibrant bushes, trees and flowers in full bloom and various water features and pieces of wooden garden furniture making it stunning to behold. Since their time was so limited, Naruto figured it was the perfect place for him and his long-time accomplice to come and do some of their illicit gardening, that is, gardening without any permission from the owners.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Boredom, as any child will tell you, is one of the most abhorrent experiences they can imagine enduring with their wonderfully limited childhood imaginations. Boredom to young Jinchūriki has been linked to more deaths than the total annual kills made by some minor ninja villages. Admittedly, the boredom of five-year-old Naruto Uzumaki had been linked to more pranks around his home and village than deaths, but it was still a feeling that the child wished to avoid at all costs.

The Kyubi-host had been moved out of the orphanage only two days ago, the matron having threatened to resign over the matter when prospective adoptive parents began to refuse to take in children from them for fear of 'tainting by the monster'.

The Hokage, wearily, had had to move Naruto into his own apartment, in one of the quieter districts of Konohagakure to keep the peace and make as many people as possible happy. He'd even generously paid for the apartment out of his own family's money, a fact that he thought the young boy had failed to appreciate fully when said boy had loudly wailed as he was forcibly dragged out of his home to 'some stupid lonely place.' Hiruzen knew for a fact that Naruto had been lonely in the orphanage, the other children, sensing something from the way the adults behaved, avoided him as much as they could, sometimes even moving on to bullying.

It truly made the God of Shinobi sad, that even the scornful looks of his peers and benefactors was preferable to Naruto than being on his own as he was now forced to be. Sarutobi had everything, short of happiness, provided for Naruto, but he knew that that would do little to appease the boy as he spent his days wandering around his big empty apartment, waiting until he was old enough to join the Academy, which the boy had already set his heart on.

With the young boy; roaming around the apartment, though big and new, had grown especially tiresome after two full days and nights and he needed some new stimuli. He'd been told to stay close to his apartment, within the 'line of sight' at all times, otherwise Jiji would give him punishments, since Matron wasn't there to do them anymore.

In another world or another time, the blond trouble-maker might have made a left after he reached the bottom of the outside staircase and walked out into the bustling streets of Konoha, and that would have led down a path of lonely desperation begetting attention-seeking pranks and mediocrity. In this world, however, as Naruto's absent mind wandered to infinitely more interesting places, he carried on walking when he reached the bottom of the stairs, straight forwards along the front face of the building. He walked until he came to the wall marking the edge of the apartment complex's land and the start of the neighbour's, the neighbour in this case being the edge of Konoha's internal forest. Between the property wall and the building, Naruto's curious mind honed in on the gap that ran all the way back to the rear of the building, an area Jiji hadn't mentioned when Naruto had calmed down enough to be shown around his new home.

Curiosity replacing boredom, for the most part, Naruto moved through the narrow alley, probably too small for a fully-grown man to fit through, and suddenly a new game began: he was the Fifth Hokage and he was on a super-secret, top-secret mission by the king of Fire, whatever he was called, to explore this enemy territory and defeat all of the enemy bad guys, and he definitely had to keep it all a secret because he was a super-powerful, secret ninja.

This game, while initially exhilarating, hit a snag when the end of the alley led, not to a hidden training ground or, indeed, an enemy base, but rather a desolate patch of earth that was surrounded by the same external wall that boxed it off from the forest. The garden, though definitely not a garden in the true spirit of the word, was barren and could have been mistaken for a patch of Suna. Though the prospect of pretending that this desert-like yard was in fact an insidious plan by the 'Suna-Hokage' did occur to Naruto, he soon grew tired of that too, seeing as he was still just playing on an empty patch of dirt, on his own.

And it wasn't just boring, Naruto bemoaned as he kicked another rock, but it was ugly too. He supposed it made sense as clearly no one came back here and there were no windows overlooking it, but it still should have had some flowers and some trees like the orphanage had.

It was all just so boring!

He used the private space as his own special play area to run around and make-believe as best he could on his own with nothing to explore or engage him.

He still had a week until he was allowed to go back and meet the Old Man again, and maybe try and score some new toys or ramen with an apology, since he'd spat in the Hokage's hat when he was upset about moving and because the hat had been within spitting-distance.

So, he went back to his place day after day to try and entertain himself. The five-year-old tried to tell himself that he was only a year away from joining the Ninja Academy where he would not only get to meet all kinds of interesting people and make loads of friends but he would also begin on his path to becoming a super-cool ninja for real. Maybe then people would like him...surely...

With nothing to do, Naruto even resorted to using an old spade, left behind from a bygone era when someone actually cared about this large patch of earth, to dig random holes in the ground and at one point tried to dig his way to the other side of the world. He made it all of three feet before he began to form blisters on his tiny hands and decided he didn't need to know what was on the other side of the world. It was probably somewhere terrible like... like the corner of Matron's office where he was made to stand when he'd been naughty. He swore that that one corner was so much further away from anything good than the rest of the office.

One day, after being generously treated by the Sandaime to ramen (the most glorious food ever invented by multiple gods; he was sure of it) once he apologised for both spitting in the hat and 'disrespecting the office of the Hokage' (He would have apologised for any crazy thing, like razing the village five years ago, if it meant he could get ramen), he came back to his play area and saw what he'd made of it. There were holes and piles of uneven dirt all over the place, any old trash he'd found was strewn about, the few tools he'd been left were lying, dented in the random places he either dropped or thrown them, as if they were special ninja weapons. Now his newest game was born: fix the yard. He wanted to make it even better than the one at the orphanage. He'd have a big swing and some trees and lots of bright flowers. If he made it good enough, beautiful enough, everyone would be happy and they wouldn't think he destroyed everything he touched anymore.

OXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

After some difficulty, Naruto had been able to procure a few seeds to plant in his newly fixed and cleared, but ultimately bare, garden. He knew the basics of growing things like flowers: you took a seed, put it in the dirt, bury it, pour water on it, and the flower comes out. Simple!

Naruto performed the ritual to the best of his abilities, re-digging his three foot hole and dropping a seed in before packing the dirt, rocks and cement fragments on top. He then poured a glass of water onto the tightly packed ground and waited. He was sure, with his own personal style of planting, it would work even faster. When he had one flower, he'd plant the rest. He just wanted one to start with. And to think, some people (the Hokage and Ichiraku-sama to name a few) called him impatient.

Now, why hadn't his flower popped out yet? He'd been sitting there for, like, five minutes already. Maybe the seeds he'd gotten were broken. That'd make sense. He'd thought the seed-giving girl was suspicious. No one gave him things except the Hokage, and she hadn't been nearly as cool or great as the Hokage. But then, they had looked like normal seeds, as far as he could tell. Under the hot sun, Naruto wished he had saved some of the glass of water for himself as he was getting too hot to crouch there any longer. Eventually the impatient, ignorant blond had to abandon his flower in favour of his cool apartment. He'd go back tomorrow; the flower would have grown by then, definitely!

But, lo and behold, the next day he returned to find the unremarkable patch of disturbed earth to be exactly the same as the day before, minus the wet patch that had long since dried up. He dumped another cup of water on it angrily, feeling cheated and ultimately disappointed that all of his hard work clearing the garden, moving all of the old stuff that had been lying around, and even sneaking into town to procure the seeds, had been for nothing. More than that, having seen some of the beautiful flowers in the flower shop, however briefly, had really inspired him to create the same beauty in his own domain.

Slumping down onto all-fours before the patch of dirt, as if grieving by the flower's graveside, Naruto shut his eyes tightly and wished with all that was in him, that he could create something for once, to make something beautiful and great.

Under the bright, baking sun, Naruto began to cry at his propensity for destruction and for the flower that hadn't grown, cried for his inability and stupidity, for his loneliness and for his boredom. Frustration fuelled him in his wishing, in his imploring, so when he opened his eyes to see a green speck poke out of the ground he was almost overcome with a terrible hope that his circumstances had always warded him against.

Almost invisible, if Naruto hadn't been so close to the ground, he wouldn't have seen the speck of green, ever-so small, breaking through the top layer of compacted dirt towards the sun and to him. At first he wasn't sure of what he was seeing, whether his eyes were playing tricks on him, but slowly at first, and then quickening as his excitement grew, the speck continued to germinate until it was as tall as Naruto's pinkie-finger. The tiny plant, growing impossibly fast and resiliently, sported a pair of furry leaves on either side that Naruto thought were the greatest thing a plant had ever had.

The growing did not stop, moving upwards, more leaves stretching out of the green base. Naruto was cheering all the while, elated that not only was his plant alive and well but it was growing so quickly and so strongly. Within minutes the green rod was as tall as the six year-old and had as many leaves as Naruto could count, which wasn't a lot. When the trunk of the plant was twice the size of Naruto and still green and thin, he began to wonder if he'd somehow planted the beanstalk from that story he liked. Those golden eggs sounded really tasty. He'd have Ayame-chan give them to Ichiraku-sama to put in his ramen.

But when the top of the exceedingly tall plant began to form a bud, already half as tall as the building, Naruto enthusiasm reached a crescendo and the green bud literally exploded outwards, popping to reveal the head of a sunflower. The flower continued to grow, quicker and quicker, until it was as tall as Naruto's apartment complex, and the stem was thicker than a grown man's leg at the base. The leaves were soft and warm to the touch, and the glorious flower at the top, almost too high for the young child to see, was beautiful beyond his feeble words.

Once the adrenaline rush of witnessing the birth of a sunflower with a head as wide as an cart's wheel had begun to wane a little, Naruto, ever the curious child, began to wonder about whether it was the flower that was special, a specially, super-fast growing flower, or if he had somehow made the pretty flower grow.

Naruto was almost sure that flowers weren't supposed to grow as fast and as big as this one, as the ones in the orphanage that he'd always explicitly been forbidden to touch, would have already grown by the time he'd picked them. Also, and he kept coming back to this, if flowers were so quick and easy to grow, why would they cost so much. Maybe people didn't know it was this easy? But then loads of people grew flowers in their gardens. What if he'd been given special (magical) seeds? But he'd gotten them for free and magic seeds would probably cost loads. So, he concluded in his roundabout way, that it had been him that had made the sunflower grow.

A daunting realisation hit him, his head already spinning from everything that had been happening, that maybe this was the reason for everything. He'd never seen anyone else make flowers grow, even the super special ninja didn't do it, so maybe that was why he was alone. Everyone knew that he could do something weird to make flowers grow really quickly and they didn't like him because of it. It'd make sense, why that lady had chased him out of the flower shop earlier, once she'd seen who he was. That had to be it! The lady was afraid he'd sell his superior flower and steal all of her customers. And he was tempted to do it too, just to spite the old witch.

Even with the revelation that he was indeed special, Naruto didn't feel all that great. He'd always wanted to be special, to have some kind of jutsu ability, maybe then he wouldn't feel that pain inside, where he couldn't reach it; but now that he knew he was special, it didn't feel like such a good thing.

Naruto pushed about the remaining seeds in his hand, and selected one and poked it into the ground with his index finger. He put his hands on either side of the hole and made the same wish, for a beautiful flower to sprout, and as he'd hoped/feared, it did as told and grew. The second sunflower only reached one story before slowing and revealing its no-less stunningly bright head. As Naruto admired the shorter sunflower, he couldn't help but wonder whether he was only capable of creating sunflowers. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the flower, he loved them, they were probably his favourite flowers, but he would like to see some other stuff.

He stared down at the seeds he'd received and realised with a start that they were all identical, when he knew for a fact, that different flowers all had different seeds. Part of the impetuous youth wanted to storm back there and shout at the generous benefactor for only giving him sunflower seeds, but the part that had actually listened to the Hokage's tired lessons on manners stopped him in his tracks.

Instead, Naruto stood still in his garden of two flowers and sullenly wished he had some of the nice orange tulips he'd seen in the flower shop. Little did Naruto know, the seed had only worked as a catalyst for his power to activate, and now that it had been triggered, he didn't really need seeds to make flowers grow, he just needed to wish for them and to know what they looked like. All Naruto knew was that when he wished to see the orange flowers, they began to sprout too. One by one the stunning orange flowers popped out of the ground until he had a solid bed of them.

For the next few hours, Naruto continued to play about with different kinds of flowers, seeming to be limited only by his imagination or memory. He made them grow, he made them go back into the ground, he even made a few small trees grow, but that made him tired so he had to give up for the day.

The end result had been a mess of different flowers and a few small trees randomly placed within the otherwise dry and barren area. It wasn't exactly the Eden Naruto had intended. It would be months and years before Naruto understood his abilities more fully and before he understood the fine arts of taste and flower arranging.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Hinata activated her Byakugan almost as a soon as she and Naruto touched down in the Kozuki garden. She used her all-seeing eyes to scan the surrounding area for any hidden watchers, especially those from her own nosey clan. It had become standard procedure for Hinata to use her Byakugan to check for spies while Naruto and she did their secret gardening together, all in order to protect the secret they had shared since the day they had become properly acquainted. The Mokuton was one of the rarest and most powerful bloodlines in history and the last thing they needed was for one of Hinata's overbearing relatives to catch a glimpse whilst trying to snoop on her.

Naruto, heedless of any potential security threats as per usual, sprang into his cherished pastime and began to dig out some of the dead weeds from the otherwise magnificent flora. His powers could force the plants to recede into the earth but he preferred to take them out when he could by hand, especially since he liked to let the plants naturally decompose in a compost heap.

Hinata soon joined Naruto on her knees and took out a trowel to get at the roots of a particularly stubborn bramble. She glanced over at her partner in crime more often than an accomplice might strictly find necessary but instead of the usual appreciation of how the morning sun reflected off of his golden hair, or how his crystal-clear cerulean eyes would squint ever so slightly as he used his bloodline to make the most fantastic flowers grow, she was trying to find a way of broaching an assuredly uncomfortable topic with her cherished... friend.

"Um, Naruto-kun...?"

He stopped pushing his chakra into the dry patches of grass and turned to look her straight in the eyes. "Yeah, Hinata-chan?"

"How are you feeling about, you know, today?"

Immediately Naruto turned away from her white eyes and began to focus intently on pruning a small rose bush he'd grown the last time he was in this garden. He waited a few moments, but Hinata didn't turn away and take his silence with the sentiment it was created but continued to press into him with that hard stare that she had developed over the course of their friendship.

Eventually he said, "I'm fine. It's a nice day." He turned his head to flash her a wide smile, but the radiance it had been imbued with earlier that morning had dimmed.

"The exam, Naruto. What about the exam? You know it's your last chance." She only dropped the honorific when she was getting serious, which was hard to do when Naruto was as free-spirited as he was. Still, this was one subject that had been a sticking point for a long time and she needed to impress upon him the seriousness of the matter. She wouldn't be separated from him without a fight, even if it meant forcing him to do something he didn't want to do, in the short run.

Naruto ignored her this time, intently excising dead buds or unwanted leaves while expertly avoiding the sharp rose thorns that had left his hands covered with innumerable cuts over the years.

"Naruto, look at me!" She stepped forwards and seized his wrist and she felt absolutely no resistance when she pulled it towards her, turning him forcibly to face her. Although, that didn't mean he would meet her eyes, instead choosing to stare at the grass by their feet.

"Naruto, you need to fight this time, otherwise you won't pass the exam." Naruto flinched when she said the word 'fight', but it wasn't unexpected. "I know it's hard, Naruto-kun, but it is your last opportunity and if you don't pass you won't become a Genin and you will have to resign. You'll never become a shinobi." Thinking again, knowing that Naruto wasn't all that interested in being a ninja anyway, she spoke once more, "If you fail, you'll never become a shinobi and I won't be able to see you anymore. My clan already say I shouldn't be around you, but if you become a civilian then they'll forbid it. If that happens, I don't know what I'll do."

Hinata knew very well what she would do: she would beat anyone who told her to stay away from Naruto until they stopped saying it. And she didn't mind whether that was because they were unable to speak or not.

Naruto still didn't look at all inspired, perhaps a little ill instead. His queasy look only got worse when she started to discuss the various parts of the exam and came to the sparring matches. The dreaded student sparring. It didn't make any difference that she enthusiastically remarked that he could probably defeat most of the boys in their class, and simply made Naruto even more miserable on the inside.

Hinata dropped the matter for the time being, and quietly tended to the garden for the rest of their free time together. After she had raked up all of the trimmings from Naruto's perfect neatening work, she told him that she'd see him at the Academy, with the dark overtones that he'd better show up on time today.

She'd gone looking for him on exam days before and she'd said some quite hurtful things to him when she had found him. No one wanted a repeat of that.

Whereas Hinata went home to change out of her gardening attire into her shinobi uniform, Naruto saw no reason to go back to his apartment to wash or switch to clean clothes when he hadn't even been working with manure that morning. No longer feeling up to gardening on his own, his mind in turmoil and focussed on the impending exam instead, Naruto went straight to the Academy to dwell on the horrors that were his chances in this test.

As was the norm since he had started attending the Academy, the looks directed towards him when he passed through the front gate were of derision and contempt. They had always been like that, since the first day when he turned up dressed in overalls and a sun hat, looking like a farmer, they said.

Some of the younger students still softly whispered insults at him, about going back to the farm and things like that. He had always insisted that he was a gardener and not a farmer, but semantics weren't the bullies' strong suit. They wanted to take the chance to insult him before the hot-tempered Hyūga heiress returned to his side.

He walked straight through the yard and into the building, not wanting to linger too long out there with all of those people who hated him, including the parents who seemed to hold a grudge against him for some reason or other. It wasn't as if they knew about him sneaking into people's gardens at night to bring them up to internationally recognisable standards. And even if they did know, would they still hate him with such open hostility?

Most of the people already present in the teaching room ignored him as he ascended the stairs, through the rows until he reached the back. The sneer that Sasuke Uchiha wore when he had gone by wasn't lost on him, but Naruto paid it as little heed as he did any of the insults he regularly received. Things like these weren't worth raising a fuss over and certainly weren't worth starting some kind of conflict over. Rather than frown at the thorns of others, Naruto took his regular seat at the back, next to the window, and began to inspect his bonsai tree and small chilli plant on the window sill.

Hinata and he always sat there by the window and he had taken to gardening intermittently during class to help him concentrate. It helped enormously. When he'd first done it, upon the advice of the kindest sensei he had, Iruka, one of the meaner boys had destroyed the potted plant in spite and then teased him about it. Naruto had just cleaned up the mess and started another plant and more soon followed and no one ever repeated that first act of vandalism after Hinata knocked out several of that bully's teeth. She'd seen how upset her friend had been and how unwilling he was to fight so she had taken it upon herself to enact justice.

She'd been scolded, but Iruka didn't have the heart in him to do anything too drastic and the boy's parents had been silenced when they had been informed that it hadn't been that troublesome, demonic child that had hurt their own boy but the Hyūga heiress. A girl beating their son in a fight had been too embarrassing to raise any more of a fuss so the matter had been dropped. Naruto had never found out about it, to Hinata's relief.

Soon, belying having to bathe and change her clothes and formally greet her family, Hinata entered the room in her full ninja garb and smelling of lilies with time to spare. With her came the rest of the class, and then Iruka and Mizuki, in time for the beginning of the day. All they were doing today was holding the exams, which meant that Naruto was paying even less attention to proceedings than his already distraction-prone mind was liable to.

Everyone was given a written test to begin with, which many celebrated for getting the worst over with or because they were most proficient in theory. Hinata was great at written tests, even without using her Byakugan to cheat, but Naruto was one of the worst in academics, only managing to answer questions about terrain, poisons or anything tenuously linked to plants. Other than gardening trivia, Naruto was hopelessly bad at taking tests and almost always failed them.

Plus Iruka always stood at the back of the room to keep an eye on Hinata to stop her from passing answers to Naruto or from using her bloodline to cheat, not that she really needed to. He also wanted to check on Naruto as the boy was normally in a foul mood during these exams and he was the sort of child who wore their heart on their sleeve.

Once they were done on the test, Naruto dropping it onto his sensei's desk with all the promise of a condemned man, Iruka announced the three basic jutsu that were to be performed to pass the ninjutsu portion of the exam: henge, kawarimi, and bunshin.

Naruto had no issues with any of the three basic techniques, except the clone which he secretly substituted for a Moku-Bunshin since, for some reason, Naruto had never been able to perform a normal clone no matter how many times Hinata made him practice.

After he had displayed his prowess with basic jutsu, he waited with everyone else until they could go outside to demonstrate their proficiency with simple camping, orienteering and target practice. Naruto wasn't all that worried about these portions either, since he was more than used to sleeping outside from time to time, and he knew Konoha like the back of his hand, having traversed almost every area at night at one point or another in his prolific career as an unsolicited landscaper and horticulturalist.

His accuracy, on the other hand, wasn't the best, but then he was still leagues above some of the untalented students in the class who didn't have a kind and caring best friend forcing them to relentlessly practice their fundamentals day after day when they failed a test.

Considering he couldn't use his Kekkei Genkai to build himself a wooden hotel, Naruto performed better than most in setting up a campsite and then concealing the traces when he'd packed up. As she did whenever he passed any of his trials, Hinata congratulated him profusely on his victory and tried to imbue her cheers with as much enthusiasm and encouragement as humanly possible. Of course, even with Naruto cheering her on with all the same energy and more, Hinata was a top student and breezed through anything and everything set before her.

Naruto was perhaps most suited for things like the assault course race where he could utilise some of his boundless and untapped stamina that even his long hours labouring under the hot sun did little to ease. He whizzed around the track neck and neck with Kiba Inuzuka and his dog Akamaru for the most part, but managed to pull ahead at the final stretch when he hopped up and around the final obstacles without any apparent strain.

That was one of the most damning things about Naruto, he was clearly very physically able and was faster than the majority of his classmates, but when it came time to perform in sparring matches he might as well have been a civilian. If he had been as unable in all of his abilities as he was in fighting, most would disregard him as a washout or a failure, but his obvious refusal to fight made him a target for ridicule and other negative attention. He'd failed every single spar he'd fought in the Academy.

The students were given time to rest over lunch but few ate anything, except an Akimichi boy who had continued eating throughout the various tests. Hinata tried as hard as she could to bolster Naruto's confidence as well as reiterate the necessity of this minor evil ahead. There was also the swarm of fangirls hovering around Sasuke Uchiha that she wanted to distract herself from; the gaggle of girls that made her despair at the gender. Sasuke was just so horrible in so many ways. She had someone a million times better. It would have helped if the other girls weren't all so obnoxious about their appreciation.

Although, she had to admit there was one or two of them that were marginally better, not that she'd ever admit such a thing out loud. She had other grievances with those who weren't entirely blind to the shortcomings of the last loyal Uchiha.

Naruto, during this intermission, relaxed against a tree and watched the clouds pass by, trying to escape in a way very reminiscent of the Nara at the other side of the courtyard. Naruto had never been able to connect with the oddly similar boy because he was just too proactive (read: troublesome), but their similarly relaxed mannerisms had been noted by more than one.

The instructors called them all around to the back field again to be sorted into their sparring sets but Iruka held Naruto back a few moments for a quiet word. Naruto was an uncommonly kind boy, without a spiteful bone in his body, so it was painful for those around him who cared to watch him fight in these events. Naruto had lost every single match he'd participated in at the Academy, and, more so in recent years, the other students had taken their fights way too far and gone on to beat Naruto senseless. Iruka hated to watch it happen and always intervened as soon as he could, but he could only go so far.

Naruto was a failing student, having spectacularly broken the record for negative marks in combat practices, and had failed a number of the written tests as well. He'd flunk the program if he didn't fight and win today, which he told Naruto as bluntly as he could.

Hinata had been sorted into the girl's section of the class, as apparently female ninja should only expect to fight other female ninja... when she spotted Naruto following a little ways behind Iruka, carrying a wooden bo staff and a grim expression that was out of place on his normally exuberant face.

The boy's matches were to go first, and as per their pre-existing arrangement Iruka would leave Mizuki to announce the pairings in the exam. Luckily, none of them were likely to go too far in the fights, the match-ups being quite amicable as far as the experienced teacher could see, up until the final bout was announced. With more glee than Iruka rightfully thought belonged in his colleague's voice, Mizuki declared that the final sparring match was to be Uchiha Sasuke versus Uzumaki Naruto, and more than a few winced at the implications and wondered who had decided on such volatile a mix.

The fights went as well as was to be expected, no prodigies rearing their ugly heads in the combat, and then all too soon came the one that many of the female population of the year group and some of the more sadistic male students had been anticipating. Sasuke immediately, confidently strolled to the centre of the ring but he had to wait a minute before Naruto pushed his way through the bushes beyond the practice area and joined him. He was evidently still wiping the bile from the corners of his mouth.

Most of the matches had attracted a handful of student spectators, the participants' friends or diligent pupils wanting to observe as many fights as possible, but the crowd around the ring for the final bout spoke volumes. Either they were fans of Sasuke's or they wanted to watch Naruto get beaten to as bloody pulp again, and then there was the smallest group, of Naruto-supporters.

Mizuki ventured forwards to officiate the match, eager to prolong the inevitable cruel public spectacle as long as Iruka or the emotionally unstable Hyūga heiress would allow. He'd picked the Uchiha boy to face the demon precisely because Sasuke always went a step too far against Naruto in these 'friendly' spars.

The boy never aired these thoughts, or any others for that matter, but Sasuke always went that extra mile in hurting and humiliating Naruto because he knew that the ridiculous, pacifist farmer would have been a good stepping stone to fight if he would only retaliate. Instead he was forced to waste his time in fighting a boy who would only defend until he was thoroughly defeated. It was frustrating and infuriating. Naruto was pathetic!

Iruka briefly reiterated the rules once more, for Mizuki and Sasuke's benefit more than Naruto's, and wished both the contestants a good fight and let Mizuki take over. Mizuki moved to the edge of the ring and brought his hand up to the air.

In those few seconds, Naruto looked over to Hinata, his mind tired already before the fight had begun from all of this turmoil that his simple lifestyle was supposed to mute. Hinata was worried, scared even, which was a further blow to him since Hinata was meant to be the strong one and she was looking like he felt. Almost.

He did want to become a shinobi, despite some of the violent duties involved, because he cared for Hinata more than he'd ever cared for anybody else, except perhaps the Old Man, and she was right when she said that his only chance to stay with her was to follow her on the path of shinobi.

Hurting others brought him so much pain, but just this one time he would have to bear with it. Just one more time.

Naruto swung his staff into his initial fighting stance and Mizuki dropped his hand and called for them to begin. Sasuke lazily fell into his own stance after the fight had begun and didn't waste more than a half-second to see that Naruto wasn't going to initiate an attack before he darted forwards. He'd uppercut Naruto's jaw and then return him to the ground with a hammer-kick. He smirked when Naruto made no move from his starting stance as Sasuke ran under his guard and brought his fist back. And then Naruto knocked him out cold.

So surprised to witness Sasuke slump to the floor, no one had quite seen how Naruto had side-stepped Sasuke's first attack, spun around, and struck Sasuke on the back of the head with his staff to efficiently and carefully render him unconscious. Mizuki was so speechless with the instantaneous one-hit win that Iruka eventually stepped into the ring and announced Naruto's victory by knockout himself, and congratulated him quietly and ushered him away afterwards.

Naruto was at first reluctant to move and then ducked under Iruka's guiding arm to land on his knees by Sasuke's side. The panicked expression on his oft serene face was enough to give him a few moments respite before Iruka would try again to move him away. Technically it was bad form for a proctor to allow a fighter near their defeated opponent whilst unconscious but he trusted whole-heartedly that Naruto didn't have any bad intentions.

Naruto checked Sasuke's pulse and then his pupil's light-sensitivity and then breathing before he was knocked away by one of the many girls that had rushed onto the field after they had overcome their monumental shock. They had seen that the weirdo-farmer was doing something to their precious idol and had darted out to protect their sleeping prince.

Also recovering from the surprise thanks to the renewed violence, Mizuki looked over at Iruka and desperately wanted contest the declaration of victory because Naruto had cheated somehow, but he knew that that would get him nowhere. They were ninja; they were supposed to be encouraged to use the element of surprise. Technically it was Sasuke's fault that he had underestimated his opponent to such a degree and then charged in blindly. But he was still bitter.

It seemed every girl in the cohort had stormed the field once the victory had been announced, including one of the rare non-fangirls, Hinata, who rushed to Naruto instead and hugged him in a moment of ecstatic pride and overwhelming happiness that Naruto had now fulfilled all of the requirements to become a Genin, and he'd gotten to smack that arrogant, sadistic Uchiha upside the head. Watching Sasuke fall to the ground had felt good.

The moment of joy subsided and Hinata remembered what she was doing and who she was hugging and jumped back and blushed furiously, crawling inside of herself and touching her index fingers together in a nervous gesture reminiscent of her past, meek self. True to form, Naruto was totally oblivious to Hinata's anxious shifting and fleeting glances towards him.

Naruto was snapped out of his stupor when a handful of the more zealous Sasuke-acolytes began hurling abuse at him for being a cheater and a fraud and a weakling, and pretty much anything else they could think to insult him. Hinata had turned back to her usual intensity and quickly began threatening the girls back, with some rather crude embellishments. If Naruto had been cognizant, he might have scolded Hinata for using such un-ladylike words, and for being so aggressive.

Hinata was glad to see that she wasn't the only one manning Naruto's corner, as two of the Sasuke-fans migrated over to her after they had ascertained that Sasuke was indeed okay, not that anybody in their right minds would have believed that Naruto would hurt anybody. But then, Hinata had long maintained that anyone who had any sort of feelings (except contempt) for Sasuke was probably ill in some sort of way.

The two fangirls who Hinata considered to be bordering on sane, had been friends with Naruto for a few years now. Naruto had met Ino first, and then Sakura through her, and the two girls had initially disliked Naruto for many of the same reasons everyone else seemed to. Eventually, though, they had warmed to him. Part of Hinata didn't like the loose friendship (competition…) but the saner part understood that Naruto could use all the friends he could get.

Naruto, for his part, cared for all of his friends and would happily be friends with everyone, but he couldn't help but notice that the only three friends he had his own age were all kunoichi. It wasn't a bad thing, but he hoped he might have a male friend one of these days. If only because all of his female ones were really intense and he wanted another placid, serene person in his life.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

It was only once he had filled in the holes, cleared away the debris, moved all of the equipment and pulled all of the nasty weeds from his private, super secret patch, that Naruto realised he was still missing the flowers. As it was Konoha he was in, he figured loads of trees would grow on their own soon anyway, but he knew that he had to go out and buy flowers if he wanted nice ones.

He didn't have much money, since the tight-wad Hokage had everything bought for him and didn't trust him with the cash, but he thought that since flowers grew out of seeds for free anyway, they should be really cheap.

He was certain, as he finally ventured out of his apartment complex unaccompanied, that he could purchase enough really pretty flowers to cover the garden with what he'd 'borrowed' from Jiji's wallet and still have some left over for ramen. Imagine Ichiraku-sama's surprise when he paid for his own ramen for the first time. Maybe the shock would earn him a free bowl as well!

He was a genius!

The reality of money soon dawned on Naruto as he looked at the numbers under the flowers in the shop and then slowly, so very slowly, counted how much money he thought he had on him. Even if he put all of the paper money and the metal money together he still could barely afford a few different flowers. It didn't occur to Naruto that he didn't have much money at all, and that the Hokage had been perfectly aware that he had been robbed and hadn't pursued Naruto because of the small amount; no, instead the confused five-year-old went inside to talk to the regal owner who was at that point re-potting some camellias.

"Hey aunty, how come your flowers are so pricy?" It had often been said that Naruto didn't have an 'inside voice', and this occasion was certainly no exception. "I mean, flowers grow on their own, so why do ya' jack up the price?"

"Excuse me, young man, but flowers don't just grow on their own. You need to nurture livings things with love and attention," The woman hadn't yet turned around, too engaged with her own task, so she continued, "and our flowers are very reasonably priced. If your parents are around they'll tell you the same. Now," At this point the woman dusted herself off lightly as she stood and took off her apron and hung it on a nearby hook before finally turning to see who had been insulting her shop.

"I don't have any parents, and I still think you're trying to rip me off!" Naruto was sure – as he stared at the woman intensely, not liking being tricked – that he hadn't been mistaken about the cost of things. Ramen cost less than most of these flowers and surely they couldn't really cost more than Ichiraku's patented ambrosia. "These flowers aren't that great anyway, they don't even smell nice and those ones look ugly. And that one over there stung me. And I think that one over there ate a fly!"

Matriarch of the Yamanaka clan, Keiko Yamanaka had had to deal with all sorts of errant young men, thankfully not as a mother, but still they had been a handful each and every one. Even her husband was still a teenager at heart, if even that mature. So she knew how obnoxious children were liable to be, especially young boys, but this was bordering on intentionally insulting now, and then when she saw who had been insulting her business, her flowers, and had shown a complete ignorance in what he was talking about, it all made sense.

Keiko had never fully understood the details surrounding the sealing of the Kyubi, having watched the beast's terrible rampage with her week-old daughter in her arms; and so, seeing who was supposed to house the monster within him, she could only assume that somehow he was at least in part influenced by it and so was trying to upset her. It was all logical, to her mind, and so she grabbed a nearby broom and threatened to beat him to a pulp if he didn't leave immediately. Upon reflection, much later on, she had to admit it might have been a tad irrational of her.

The young blond, who had been shooed away like a stray fox poking at the garbage, was less than pleased and was already considering how to prank his way to justice (something along the lines of salting the earth around the shop's gardens and filling all of the plant pots with weed killer) when he heard something whispering frantically to him from the side alley next to the shop. Not even pausing to wonder the coincidence of back alleys and him, Naruto moved right on over to the little platinum-blonde girl who was whispering for the 'annoying boy' to go over.

"Why did you say those things about mommy's flowers?!" She promptly brained him over the head after heatedly whispering her admonishments.

"Ow, why'd you hit me?!" Naruto did not whisper his reply so he was quickly hit again and hushed.

"Shh, my mommy will tell me off if she sees me talking to you. And you shouldn't have said those things about our flowers."

"Why not? They're really expensive and they aren't that great anyway."

Ino, not willing to admit that she knew even less about money than this loudmouth boy whose only redeeming feature was his hair colour, quickly quashed her panicked look and moved onto righteous fury as she'd been learning how to grow flowers and knew how hard it was to make them grow and even harder to make them as pretty as her mother's were. "Shut up! My mommy's flowers are the best. Flowers are super hard to grow and that's why they're expensive."

"Well, that's stupid. Flowers grow on their own."

"Well... then you're not allowed to buy any from our shop. You don't deserve them because you're smelly and ugly and a stupid boy!" Ino puffed up her cheek in rage.

"What!? Where am I going to get flowers now?" Naruto had, panicked, realised during the course of this conversation that this was the only flower shop near to his apartment and his only hope if he wanted to make his play area look nice.

The little girl gave a pantomimed sigh and told him to stay there. She darted out from the alley and into the front of the shop. Here mommy wasn't anywhere to be seen, so Ino darted under the counter and into the back of the shop. She could hear her mommy in the nursery outside so she walked into the storage closet and grabbed the first packet of seeds she could reach.

They weren't the colourful packets they sold to customers, they were the plain kind mommy and daddy used to grow the flowers, so she tore it open as she absently navigated her way back out to the front of the shop, to see what sort of seeds she was giving to the annoying boy.

Oh, they were sunflower seeds! She loved sunflowers. They would be perfect.

"Here." She unceremoniously thrust her hand out to him, opening it to show the half dozen sunflower seeds inside. "Try to grow these. There's no way you'll be able to make them pretty like momma's, so then I want you to come back and apologise for being a stupid, silly, smelly boy."

Never one to be seen as ungrateful in the face of such unbridled magnanimity Naruto responded in kind after he had taken the seeds: "Thanks for nothing!" He then stuck his tongue out at her and ran off, not looking back for fear she might have come to her senses and be trying to catch up and take back her gift.

Naruto had decided as he ran that she was his first friend of his own age; he thought so at least, but people never liked him for long after meeting him (except the Old Man and Teuchi, and Ayame) so he didn't want to jeopardise his first friendship by being there.

Besides, he was excited to plant all of these cool flower seeds.

And that was the day that Naruto discovered his abilities and his absolute love of making things blossom and bloom. And in the years that followed, amongst many other good and bad things, Naruto and Ino met again in the Shinobi Academy. He was so grateful to her (and wanted to impress the pretty pink-haired girl she was with) so he had tried to give the pair of them a luscious bouquet of flowers that he had grown specially.

Unfortunately Ino did not receive the thoughtful gift in the spirit with which Naruto presented it to her in. For some reason, Ino did not believe that the obnoxiously loud and mischievous new admittance to the Shinobi Academy could have grown the bunch of award winning flowers all on his own.

They were brighter and more splendid than her own family's shop's, and they had been growing flowers for generations, whereas Naruto was the boy who had not known flowers needed to be tended only two or three years before. Thus, Ino and shortly thereafter Sakura accused Naruto of having stolen the flowers from someone's garden or from one of the few shops in Konoha that could produce such fine specimens and claimed them for his own.

Ino has thrust the 'stolen' flowers back into Naruto's hands and had dragged Sakura away from the 'troublemaker'. Naruto has been righteously annoyed and had passed the flowers off to the first girl he saw (since girls like flowers, he thought). As it turned out, he lived in a small world and the girl who had blushingly taken the beautiful flowers was Hinata, who had come dangerously close to fainting.

Naruto hadn't remembered that last part of the tale until, a little later, Hinata had reminded him. He had thought it was a funny coincidence, she considered it destiny.

Hyūgas and destiny…

Over the following years, even after he had become friends with Hinata, and after he had… changed and become more peace-loving, Naruto still tried giving Ino (and Sakura) flowers to prove that they were his. A fair few of his classmates thought he was a terrible womaniser, considering that Hinata was in love with him and yet he was still making romantic gestures towards two other girls, often in front of his paramour. All of this, Naruto was blind to.

Hinata was not. If Naruto had been anybody else, she might have been hurt, but she knew his flowers were not romantic. They were his way of expressing gratitude, as she understood it.

Eventually, seeing as no one had been reporting dozens of prize winning flowers going missing Ino had come to accept that Naruto was some sort of gardening prodigy and that the flowers had all been his. She had taken this as a point of pride that it had been her that had introduced him to the art of growing things, and so all of his successes were hers as well.

It was just a shame that his genius in botany was entirely exclusive and he was hopelessly inadequate in fighting. Still, when he flunked out of the Academy, Ino would definitely suggest to her mother hiring Naruto at the shop.

Through all of this, Naruto had struck up a loose friendship with Ino and Sakura which had kept the two girls on speaking terms after they had both resolved chase after Sasuke, a subject that the three had silently agreed to avoid since it was a sore subject for two and the third simply didn't understand the appeal of the broody and violent boy.

Meanwhile, Hinata had discovered that Voodoo really didn't work. There was no way in hell she would ever accept that airheaded pinkette as he rival. Never!

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Hinata continued to lash back at the horde of fangirls while Sakura and Ino took it upon themselves to carry Sasuke to the nurse's office. It was thanks to Hinata that the other girls were too busy to notice their stealing him away, but really Hinata wasn't concerned with that head case Uchiha, she just had a long list of scores to settle with these girls.

Naruto has looked like he wanted to follow them, or help carry Sasuke, but both the girls quickly shot down his attempts to help. They hurriedly explained that when Sasuke woke up later, he certainly wouldn't take kindly to hearing that not only had Naruto (somehow) knocked him out in front of everybody but had also carried him to the nurse's office.

Having finished their rather lengthy notations of the preceding fight, Iruka and Mizuki finally stepped in to quell the budding all-female riot before things turned bloody, which seemed imminent since Hinata's hand had already snaked into her weapons pouch and the vitriolic Sasuke-fans were universally foaming at the mouths.

"All right everyone, back to your places. It's time for the next match." Iruka said, his mouth smiling but his eyes promising painful death.

Many had postulated over the years that Iruka would have made a fine interrogator if he hadn't gone into teaching. It was an equation that popped up far too often with the Academy teachers for the Hokage's taste.

The girls almost all fell back into line, but Hinata looked about ready to pursue with deadly intent until Naruto took her hand and guided her back to the spectators' area. Iruka had to contain his laugh with a cough when he saw the snarling girl turn red and shy in a split second and be guided like a lost puppy by the friendly (and eternally oblivious) blond.

It reminded him of when he first met Hinata. It was a year after he had started at the Academy and she had been the most bashful person, bar none, that he had ever met.

But then, the children had all changed so much since then. Hinata had overcome her shyness (and jumped right to the opposite end of the spectrum), Naruto had turned from rambunctious budding prankster to meek and withdrawn gardener; and saddest of all, Sasuke has turned from a happy child to the tragic husk that they saw today.

He had had civilian adults and parents accuse him and the entire institution of shinobi of turning children in weapons, of carving out their hearts for their own goals. Iruka was much softer than the majority of shinobi, he knew that, but even he would argue the concrete necessity of ninja in this world.

These children, and so many countless others, had been moulded into what they were long before they were trained to fight. Iruka hoped with all of his heart with each new generation that one of them might somehow end the cycle of suffering children, even if it required the previous generations to channel their pain into killing.

Speaking of which…

"The next match will be Hyūga Hinata versus Rokubungi Ami." Iruka had pulled some strings so that Hinata's fight would follow Naruto's as that was usually enough to distract her from drawing out her fights. She could be as much of a sadist as Sasuke at times, but if Naruto had just lost a fight (as he had in every other fight to date) she was always anxious to go and be with him.

Now that he had finally won one of them, Hinata couldn't wait to get back to him and continue comfort/congratulating him.

Ami was known as one of the toughest girls in the class and also one of the meanest, Iruka having had to stop Hinata swinging for her more times than he cared to count. Ami was one of the more zealous Sasuke fangirls and had no compunctions about slandering both Naruto and Hinata. She was very confident in her abilities.

That said, the match ended before Ami was able to so much as sink into a stance, with Hinata sprinting forward and performing a chakra-less Jyuken strike to her abdomen, knocking her unconscious and out of the ring.

Ami might have been strong, but Hinata's taijutsu was second only to Sasuke's in that year. Although, where Naruto came into that ranking was debatable since he had no record to speak of, but everyone knew he was probably somewhere above average considering his speed, stamina, and his perfect kata with a staff.

Iruka called the match while he also tried to figure out whether Hinata had been in a rush to get back to Naruto, or whether she had intentionally beat Ami before she could showcase any sparring, thus failing that part of the exam. Ami would still pass, but her class ranking would have been hurt quite badly. Looking at how Hinata was hugging Naruto and then shrinking into herself again in some bizarre pattern of affection and insecurity, Iruka imagined Hinata's thinking hadn't extended much further than being with Naruto during her bout.

Iruka had, since coming to terms with who and what Naruto was, come to the amusing conclusion that Hinata's friendship with the harmless Jinchūriki had worked as a sort of coping mechanism for the pair of them. They had both been allowed to slip to the opposite end of the scale and were balanced by the other. Naruto had turned from a troublemaker into a pacifist totally afraid of any sort of human conflict, and she had begun as diffident as one could be and become a confident, combat orientated aggressivist.

Then again, with the way she still blushed and the way her would occasionally smirk, he supposed there was still a healthy measure of the old them still inside.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

It hadn't taken at all long for Naruto's interest in gardening to take a turn towards the mischievous. By day he might prank people in all sorts of imaginative and damaging ways, but at night he had found an even better use of his time and pranking energies.

With his single-minded mentality, which otherwise was used for evil, Naruto had excelled at all things aesthetic and had turned his small patch of earth into a new Eden, but there was only so much he could do behind his apartment block. After he had designed and redesigned the area, he had tried to take his serviced to other gardens, offering to fix up some of the bedraggled ones he had seen around his area.

The responses had not been exactly grateful. Naruto had set up some kind of practical joke against most of the rude ones, but when he hadn't found any outlets for his green thumb in over two weeks, he had hit upon the idea to just prank people by fixing their shitty gardens.

People would go sleep and wake up to find their neglected or lacklustre gardens looking like prize winning entries in gardening competitions. Unaccountably, there were even new plants and trees planted overnight that looked like they had been growing there for years.

The citizens of Konoha had gone through a very brief period of shock and indignity at the invasion of their homes, but that had passed when the nightly transformations continued and nothing untoward befell anyone. It was, for all intents and purposes, a miracle.

One or two had approached the Hokage, worried at the breaches in security, but for such a minor issue the Hokage had assigned a single chunin to patrol gardens at night. Predictably the peeved and sleep deprived teenager didn't catch anybody.

Naruto had renovated a few dozen private gardens with impunity, but some places were off limits to even him. Mostly clam compounds and a few private gardens owned by particularly vigilant and angry shinobi. He had almost be caught twice by this one man with a scary face and a bandana over his head.

The two compounds with the heaviest security were the Uchiha one and the Hyūga compound. The former was regularly patrolled and the shinobi in there no only hated him personally, for whatever reason, but they weren't afraid of throwing kunai at any shadows close to their precious walls. At least the other clans tried to capture any intruders first. That was the polite thing to do.

Nonetheless, the forbidden fruit was the sweetest, so Naruto had decided to try his luck in the uptight Hyūga gardens since they so desperately needed his magic touch. Most of them had rock gardens, which were so ugly Naruto considered it a public duty to correct the problem.

He had been sneaking by one of the back walls, trying to find a hole in their security, or at least a hole in their tall wall, when he finally found a gap in the patrol routes. And there were no overlooking windows. It was a perfect entryway!

And then a shinobi wearing a dark uniform and no head protector had jumped out of the secured compound through the very vulnerability Naruto had wanted to exploit. He would have ignored this were it not for the unconscious Hinata under one of the man's arms. Naruto like Hinata, she was weird and seemed to be constantly feverish, but she was one of the nicer people in the class of jerks, so he wasn't going to stand by and let her get treated like a sack of potatoes by this strange man.

"Drop her!" Naruto shouted, calling forth his power and growing a wooden spear from the ground.

In no visible hurry, the incognito Kumo ambassador turned to address the child who had spoken, and had to stifle a chuckle when he saw the child, who couldn't be any older than the six year old Hyūga heiress under his arm. He wasn't from any clan that he recognised and he was holding a stick, or was that a blunted practice spear?

He didn't say a word, intending to kill the child and hide him on route to his rendezvous outside of the village. He smiled when his lazy approached cause the child to raise his toy like it was a real spear, ready to throw it at him.

"S-stop! Don't come any closer!" Naruto was terrified by this mysterious shinobi, but he refused to back down and let his classmate be abducted.

The ambassador was not longer amused by this obnoxious child, whose shouting would attract the Hyūga guards ten minutes earlier than were scheduled to discover the missing girl. He miscalculated, though, when he stopped his slow approach and then jumped forwards at the terrified child. He had miscalculated because he couldn't have imagined that his sudden movement would make Naruto throw his 'stick' straight at the man, and he hadn't known that the training toy was a needle-sharp spear made out of condensed oak that was as hard as steel.

When it had flown towards his head, the Kumo-nin had thrown up a hand to block it, and had only lived long enough to spell out the first syllable of 'Shit!' before it pierced his brain and he fell to the floor, dead.

Naruto, shocked by what had happened, darted forwards to free the sleeping girl and try to help this strange man. He didn't want Hinata to get stolen, but he also didn't mean to hurt the man too bad. He took a hold of the wooden shaft and had to turn it to prise it loose from the man's skull. It was slick with blood, so Naruto set it on the ground and had it sink back into the earth.

The blond child knelt next to the man's head and tried to shake him awake, he tried to open his eyelids to wake up, but with mounting horror he eventually realised that the man was dead, and that he had killed him.

Naruto screamed when he heard Hinata, who had been awoken from the genjutsu she was in when the enemy ninja died, asked, "Naruto? What happened?"

Naruto hadn't processed the question or the person who asked it, he simply jumped to his feet and ran away, ending up in the play park near his apartment building that he liked. His head was reeling with the reality of what he had just done, and how he was a bad person for doing it.

Despite certain laws he would not be made aware of until he was older, Naruto had heard people call him a monster behind his back, and that was the reason no one liked him. He had always questioned and refuted this designation, but now he wondered whether he deserved all of the scorned he had received.

He really was a monster!

The guards had been alerted to the incident when they heard a muffled shouting beyond their walls, followed a minute later by a child's scream. When they arrived, they found Hiashi's oldest daughter standing next to the dead body of Kumo's ambassador. When she was taken to her parent's, the story soon became all too clear: she had been sleeping peacefully until the man had come in through her window, and had used some sort of sleep genjutsu on her.

Hinata told her father and later the string of people up to and including the Hokage himself, that she didn't know who had rescued her and killed the Kumo ambassador. Initially she did it to stop Naruto getting into trouble, and later she decided it was best for Naruto that no one called him a hero for killing.

The rest of the Kumo delegation, minus the ambassador himself and two of his aides who had disappeared around the same time in the evening, demanded Hiashi's head as recompense for their esteemed Jounin leader's death. The Hokage had diplomatically explained that Hiashi had done nothing, as evidence by the fact that none of the Hyūga used weapons that could have left a wound like the found on the corpse.

He assured them that a full investigation would be carried out, and that they would find out everything that had happened that night, including why the ambassador had been in possession of the Hyūga heiress.

The delegation had accused him of making up lies of false allegations, but Sarutobi stayed calm and asked them to pass on his regrets, apologies and condolences to the Raikage over the senseless murder of such a fine shinobi.

They left and Sarutobi had to deal with months of posturing from the Raikage until things settled down again and they could get back to brokering their trade deal from scratch.

In the Academy, for no apparent reason that anyone could see, Naruto had become a changed boy. In the immediate aftermath of the Kumo incident, he had developed raccoon-worthy rings around his usually lively eyes, and he was acting jumpy and distracted on a whole new level. It had gotten to the point that Iruka had tried to reach out to Naruto, but the previously outspoken child had withdrawn further into himself.

He had completely shut himself off from the outside world, and when the weekly practical lesson had come around, where he was teaching the proper technique for throwing shuriken, Naruto had acted like some shell-shocked veteran from one of the Great Shinobi Wars, dropping the weapon and running off and hiding.

Naruto's only thoughts were, in those days, tending to his gardens and never hurting anyone ever again. No matter what.

He soon began to cut classes like never before, skipping out of whole days and hiding out away from his apartment where one of the Academy workers might find and drag him back to class.

Hinata hadn't been sure how to approach the boy she had a crush on, who had saved her life, but now who seemed to be breaking down before her very eyes. She could see the signs of stress on his face and body, and she saw how scared he seemed to be of going near anyone. And then he stopped showing up for days at a time, and she became scared that she might lose him.

It took the worse part of a week to track down where Naruto had been hiding to avoid Iruka, who had been trying to catch Naruto even after the Academy let out for the day.

"Naruto-kun." She said, having seen his blazing chakra hidden under the playground slide. She saw him flinch before settling back down. He made no sound to respond, so Hinata forced herself to be brave and say what she needed to say.

"Naruto-kun… thank you." She fought down her instinctive blush when the blond peered around from his hiding place, tears still fresh in the corners of his eyes. "You saved me, you saved my life, and if you hadn't come he might have hurt one of my family. Thank you!"

"I killed… him…" Naruto had barely whispered it, but hearing his sobbing voice was difficult for her. He had been her strength since she started the Academy.

"You killed him, but you had to kill him to save me." Her blush was rising again. "I've always…" She wasn't built for this, "I've always admired you, Naruto-kun. You worked hard no matter what people thought or said about you. And you worked to make the village prettier, even when no one thanks you!"

Naruto's eyes widened for a second, his mind whirring to life as he worked out what she meant.

"I've seen you making people's gardens better." She didn't bother mentioning how many times she had followed him outside of the Academy using her Byakugan. "You are a good person!"

Naruto abruptly broke into fresh tears and he howled, "It hurts so much! Why did he have to die so stupidly?!"

Hinata crouched down under the slide and hugged her crush, the present circumstances providing ample distraction from what would have otherwise resulted in a nosebleed at least.

"If it hurts too much, then you never have to kill anyone ever again. If you get into any fights, I will protect you," She said resolutely, followed by, "even if I am weak and slow. But I will train with you and we will become stronger, so you never have to hurt anyone ever again!"

Naruto cried and sobbed into her shoulder under he couldn't cry any longer. They stayed there in the abandoned play park for a couple of hours, way past when Hinata would get into trouble for breaking her understandably strict recent curfew.

When he had calmed down, Naruto led her back to his apartment block and showed her his secret personal garden. He also showed her, in person, his special gift. He reckoned Hinata of all people was good enough to tell about his Mokuton.

She was astounded by the revelation that Naruto's peculiar ability to make plants sprout using his chakra was the fabled Kekkei Genkai used by the Shodaime Hokage. And it was so much more beautiful to behold in person. It was wondrous that the legendary ability that had been used in countless battles in their text books could also yield such creation.

Iruka was immensely relieved when, in the following weeks, Naruto broke out of his downward spiral and starting attending classes again. He was still a changed person, but out of all of it he had made a very close friend in Hinata Hyūga. He was quieter and less outgoing, and that was the point when he had begun to shirk all violence and Hinata had started to welcome it.

Hinata, along with her embracing a new aggressive stance to counterbalance and protect her cherished friend, also got involved in Naruto's world of gardening. It was a revelation to her, the menial labour of working with her hands to create something beautiful and maintaining the cherished existing works of art.

Of course, the friendship involving a Hyūga as well as the demon brat who dressed as a gardener and was birthed by a foreigner was not taken lightly by the Hyūga clan. They tried a number of ways to stop her from traipsing around after the failed Jinchūriki and doing peasant work, including having escorted to and from the clan compound by her older cousin, commanding her to cease contact, threatening punishment for her and for Naruto, and even trying to have her moved into a different class at the Academy, even if she had to be held back a year.

These all resulted in resounding failure. She had become at ditching Neji-nissan, who wasn't all that concerned either way since he didn't really like Hinata and they couldn't prove that he was slacking. Their commands and threats to stop their friendship had crushed against the newly founded resolve and backbone of their heiress, who refused commands and returned threats.

Their last-ditch and desperate move to have her transferred was stopped by the Hokage himself who declared that the children's friendships were there's to make and decide. They were not civilian children and they would be adults in the eyes of the law when they were just twelve, so they couldn't interfere so heavy handedly before then. Besides that, he wasn't about to let the Academy's resources get pulled into such a ridiculous scheme when he supported the budding friendship.

Then they had started escorting Hinata from the compound every day after classes ended, which resulted in Hinata becoming an expert at escaping the compound at night when Naruto and she could garden in peace.

Eventually, the Hyūga clan as a whole gave up on their heiress and secretly planned contingencies including boosting her younger sister to be the heiress should Hinata's allegiance prove to be a fickle as she had indicated. It was all they could do, realistically, since they couldn't afford to completely alienate their own future. Not after the Uchiha clan had been whipped out by their own heir overnight.

Behind the scenes, Hinata and Naruto had also been training, with the former insisting that the latter had to be prepared to defend himself, especially if he didn't want anybody to get hurt. He had to save any Mokuton-related training until night time since the Hyūga often spied on their training or gardening after classes and Naruto couldn't afford to be found out by the mean clan.

During his first official Academy sparring match, he had coincidentally been match up with Sasuke Uchiha, the last of his clan and most likely student to develop a personality disorder, according to the unofficial faculty poll. Naruto had tried to refuse the fight but was told that he had to if he wanted to pass into the next year.

Naruto let Sasuke beat him up until Iruka stepped in to stop him.

And so it went every year, with Naruto getting beaten up by one of his classmates, except the time he had been paired with Shikamaru and the boy had forfeited the match since he didn't feel like tiring himself out. They had both failed that match. And each time, Iruka and the Hokage would sit down with Naruto and question whether he still wanted to be a shinobi. Each time, though reluctantly, he would affirm that he would be a ninja, but that he just wouldn't hurt anybody.

Neither ever expected Naruto to pass the Academy's final exam, with the Hokage worriedly planning a contingency since they couldn't allow civilian Jinchūriki.

Conversely, Hinata had improved at an astonishing rate, moving to the top of her class with the speed only a genius of hard work might achieve. Despite the machinations of the upper echelons of the clan, and thanks to the survival of a brother that might have otherwise been killed, Hiashi's softened heart and Hinata's increased strength had assured her place as the clan's heiress and future leader.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The results weren't supposed to be released until the next day, but at the end of the day's classes, after Sasuke had been restrained by the Academy nurse before he could enact one of his vengeances against Naruto for his humiliating defeat, Iruka pulled the blond aside for a quiet word.

"Naruto, I am proud to say that you have passed. You're going to graduate with your class!" His words were more excited than the reaction that they inspired in the boy, who looked green. "You may have been at the bottom of the year, but you are going to be a shinobi. So you need to be careful, Naruto. There will come times when you need to fight, and you cannot abstain any longer. Otherwise you will die."

He didn't want to have to spell it out for the boy, but it would be worse if he said nothing and he had to hear about one of his students being killed in the line of duty. Naruto mutely accepted the words and went to meet Hinata, who was waiting outside to celebrate Naruto's probable graduation.

The next day, the results were posted and Naruto was indeed at the bottom of his class, whereas Sasuke was at the top of the Shinobi list, and Hinata was at the top of the Kunoichi. Iruka and a few sympathetic peers, including Sakura and Ino, advised Naruto and Hinata to avoid Sasuke for the next couple of days until the team assignments were made and they would all have a little space to cool heads.

Hinata was raring for the fight, but Naruto had distracted her by commenting that she looked nice with a Hitai-ate around her neck. Naruto had his sown onto the front of his overall since it would get in the way of his hat otherwise.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

"Okay, okay Naruto, I'm coming. There's no need to rush, is there?" Sarutobi said, shuffling after a particularly energetic Naruto, who had shown up at their scheduled meeting enthusiastically insisting that he showed him something. The old man was sure Naruto was going to present him with a dead frog or a particularly dead rock until, half way to Naruto's apartment, he had claimed to have made something.

When he had been directed to squeeze along the narrow space around the side of the building, he never could have imagined in his wildest dreams the paradise he was about to shown. He had inspected the entire property personally before sending Naruto to live there, so he knew that only a few weeks ago, there had been no garden behind the building. Now there was.

"Naruto, what… what is this?"

"It's cool, isn't it, Jiji." Naruto said, smiling widely at him.

Hiruzen had then noticed that the thing green trees in the middle of the luscious garden were in fact giant sunflowers.

"I made them all grow! I wanted to make it pretty, so I got some seeds, but then they still wouldn't grow, and I really tried," the Hokage had tuned Naruto out for a second, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He couldn't think of a way that the Kyubi could have caused this sort of effect…

"But then I wished really hard and then they all grew. I didn't even need seeds!"

"Naruto," He said, but when he was ignored in favour of the boy ranting further about the prices of flowers in terms of ramens, he interjected, "Naruto! Do you know what this is?"

"I dunno, Jiji, I figured it was just because I'm awesome. I made all of the plants grow, and some of the trees, and I can make them go back into the ground."

That confirmed it. Remarkable.

"Naruto, this is a powerful bloodline called the Mokuton. Only one person has ever had it before, and I never would have guessed that you were related to him, but this is all the proof I could ask for."

"Who was the person, Jiji?" Naruto asked, wide eyes. He wondered if he might have a family.

"He was called Hashirama Senju, the Shodaime Hokage and founder of Konoha." He could see the sparkles in Naruto's eyes. "Naruto, I want you to promise me that you won't tell anyone you can do these things, that you have the Mokuton. Can you promise me that?"

"Why?"

"Because it is a rare and powerful ability , and certain bad people might target you if word gets out that you have it. It won't be forever, just for a few years until you are strong enough that you can protect yourself from those bad people. You can't tell anyone who you don't trust completely and fully. You have to wait until you find someone who you can trust to keep you secret with their very heart."

"Like you, Jiji." Naruto concluded.

"Yes, I suppose so. So, can you promise me that?"

"Of course, Jiji!" Naruto's smile was one of the things that made Hiruzen's life more bearable these past few years since he was forced back out of retirement.

"So, what do you think of my Mokuton?" Naruto asked, holding out his hand and calling forth a bushel of white roses to grow and bloom out of nothing.

"You know, Naruto, I was a student of the first Hokage, and I watched him use his abilities, that great and powerful shinobi with the same Mokuton bloodline you have, and yet I have no doubt in my mind that yours is the most beautiful use of any bloodline that I have ever seen!

"You should cherish the dream you are building here. I think my sensei would have been in awe of what you have made with the infertile earth that others have neglected."

Immature perhaps, but Sarutobi blew off the meetings he was supposed to be having for the rest of the morning, and instead stayed with Naruto to enjoy the garden he had created and to witness more of the miracles the boy was able to produce.

He was say when the afternoon brought matters he couldn't ignore and he had to leave the flourishing Eden. As he walked back to his office, he mused on how truly remarkable it was that Konohagakure still had the will to grow such wonderful blossoms.

OXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

A/N: Well, as I said, I make no commitments to continue or much less finish this one, but I hope it gets a good response, or at least some people enjoy it.

Next time will be team selection and the genin test.