Anko had agreed to babysit Naruto during the third stage of the exam. Of course, they'd both be present in the stadium to watch. No way was four-year-old Naruto going to miss out on watching his parents kick everybody's butts in the chuunin exam, and Anko was actually rather interested in seeing how the couple had come along since her basic training those few years ago. She didn't even mind babysitting Naruto. He was a cute little gaki.
Kagome was the first one to have to battle an opponent in the arena below, and interestingly enough, according to the line-up, Kenshin would be going last. He'd actually gotten the short straw, having to fight twice in the first round, as there was an odd number of contestants – and he'd be fighting his two fights back-to-back. Well, that was assuming that he won the first fight, which both Naruto and Anko were doing.
Kagome's opponent was from the Hidden Mist village, and he wore a ninjato at his side. He was, in fact, very much a 'traditional' looking sort of ninja, as far as ninja of the Elemental Continent went anyway. Straight trousers bound from the calf down with reinforced bandages, a close-fitting shirt, pouches for small weapons and the like, and his village symbol on a metal plate that he wore across his forehead.
Kagome herself was not so traditionally 'ninja'. She preferred hakama, for all that many people thought they were difficult to move in. She had never had any trouble, and neither had her husband, who also favoured them. The sleeves of her kimono and haori had also never caused her any problems, and had even been useful over the past months as she learned how to hide weapons in her sleeves and still be able to access them easily.
The most important of her weapons, however, remained her yumi. Inspired by the summoning tattoo that Anko had described Orochimaru having on his arm, Kagome had gotten a small tattoo on the palm of one hand. A tattoo that was also a storage seal. It allowed her to carry her yumi with her everywhere without having to worry about it getting caught on branches as she tree-hopped, or becoming cumbersome when it was imperative that they travel light.
Similarly, she had a collection of storage seals on the cuff of her other sleeve, each one holding only two arrows. More than that was unwieldy in her hand, for all that she could pull her arrows more quickly from a quiver. There were just times when carrying a quiver around wasn't a good idea – and less of her arrows got broken while she was running this way as well, which was another bonus.
"Begin!" called out the proctor of the third stage of the exam, Yamanaka Inoichi, as he leapt back, out of the way of any jutsu that the two contestants might send at each other.
Slowly, the Mist shinobi drew his ninjato, relishing in the soft hiss as it left its sheath.
In contrast, Kagome had quickly unsealed her yumi and two arrows, and fired upon him. Her two arrows caught him in the shoulders, and sent him at an accelerated rate towards the trees that were in the arena for cover.
He was pinned there, bleeding from his shoulders, but still he fought through the pain to bring his hands together – he had dropped his ninjato when he was impacted – to attempt either a genjutsu or a ninjutsu.
But Kagome had been learning from her husband as well as Anko and the jounin assigned to the team she had been placed with, and he had taught her speed. She had raced in, scooping up her foe's ninjato along the way, and did not halt her movement until she was standing just to the right of her opponent, his blade pressed lightly against his neck.
"Winner, Himura Kagome," Yamanaka Inoichi declared.
Half an hour later, Kenshin's bouts were both over in a flash of his sword, his sword that had the blade on the wrong side, and his strikes left his opponents unconscious.
Naruto cheered loudly for his father, and proudly informed Anko that he was going to learn his father's sword-style when he was tall enough to be able to wear the sword without scraping it on the ground. The things he was currently learning with his shinai weren't quite the same.
His mother was already teaching him how to use the yumi, but with a smaller version made specially for his current height.
~oOo~
Naruto was six, and he'd been attending the Academy for a year, when his mother and father collected him from class at the end of the day with very serious expressions on their faces. Since they'd made chuunin, his dad had been taking more dangerous missions, while his mother had been teaching special classes at the Academy to the older kids.
"Son," his dad started. "There are some things that we need to tell you."
"The first of which is that we love you," his mother said, and pulled him onto her lap and wrapped her arms around him. "And nothing will ever change that."
"I love you too," Naruto answered, thoroughly confused. "Is something wrong?"
"No sweetheart," Kagome assured him. "No."
Kenshin smiled. "It is just that your mother is pregnant," he said happily. "You are going to be a big brother, that you are."
Naruto's eyes went wide. "I'm gonna be a big brother?" he asked, awed by the prospect.
Kagome and Kenshin both nodded.
"Will my little brother or sister have blonde hair like me?" he pressed. "Or blue eyes? Because there's a lot of kids in the Academy who think I'm not your kid 'cause I don't look like you, even though I am."
"Well, that's the second thing," Kagome said, her smile turning a little bit sad. "Naruto love, we adopted you when you were a baby."
"A- adopted?" Naruto repeated, as the implications of that word sunk in. "Does... does that mean I'm not your real kid?"
"You are our son," Kenshin insisted firmly. "It is just... you are also someone else's son."
Naruto was silent for a moment as he thought about that. "Did they not want me?" he asked in a small voice.
"Oh, Naruto, no. Your other parents wanted you very much, and they loved you with all their hearts," Kagome assured her son. "But they died when the Kyuubi attacked, so even though they wanted to be here to raise you, they couldn't be. Do you understand?"
Naruto slowly nodded that yes, he understood.
"And we have decided that you are old enough now to start learning about the things that your other parents left for you," Kenshin declared.
Naruto's eyes went wide in awe all over again. "They left things for me?"
His parents smiled at him.
"That they did," Kenshin confirmed, and withdrew from his haori sleeve – where he had been hiding it – the scroll that the Hokage had given them for Naruto all those years ago. "Here you go, a scroll that, I am told, has records of how they performed their techniques. Just for you."
"Just for me?" Naruto repeated as he almost reverently accepted the scroll. He'd been the same when his mother had given him a yumi and a quiver full of arrows, all custom made to match his size.
"We don't even know what techniques are in it," Kagome admitted. "The seal on it can only be opened by you, because you're the only one blood-related to your parents. The scroll needs a little bit of your blood to open."
Kenshin pulled his sword out of his obi, sheath and all, then presented a little bit of the back, sharp edge to his son. "Just press your thumb lightly to the edge, then smooth it over the seal, okay son?"
Naruto nodded, and immediately obeyed.
While Naruto released the seal on the scroll from his parents, Kenshin cleaned away the very little bit of blood that his son had left behind on his blade. He always cleaned his sword thoroughly after it was used. It felt wrong to him that his backwards sword should have blood on it, and Kagome had agreed with him. He had decided that he likely felt this way because there had been no hint of it having ever cut a person when the Hokage returned it to him, even though it had clearly seen use despite that.
"Will you help me read it?" Naruto asked his parents as he looked back and forth between them and the scroll that was now open in his hands. "I don't know a lot of these kanji yet."
"Are you sure, Son?" Kenshin asked. "These are the techniques left to you by your parents. If we help you read it, then we'd be learning their techniques as well."
"You're my parents," Naruto declared firmly, a stubborn set to his lower lip as he stuck it out. "And these are the techniques of my parents. You should know them!"
Kagome and Kenshin both laughed happily, and agreed to learn with him.
"Great! Now, what's this one?" Naruto asked, and pointed to a large symbol that was a short way in.
"That's a seal," Kagome answered, surprised. "Like the one on my hand, see?" she said, and held out her tattooed palm for her son to examine. "It's got something stored in it."
"I'll wager that is how your parents fit all of their techniques into just one small scroll," Kensin added with a smile. "By storing lots of other scrolls in it. Probably bigger ones too, at that."
"Wow," Naruto breathed, and stared at the scroll in his hands again.
~oOo~
Kenshin took up an administration position in the Hokage Tower, actually working with Morino Ibiki in the Torture and Interrogation department. He sat in a corner that the captive couldn't see, and he wrote down everything so that it could be sent to analysis later. This allowed him to be in the village all the time while his wife was pregnant, just in case, and he was allowed to clock-off for the day at the same time as the Academy let out.
Kagome hadn't retired from teaching just yet, so she would walk home with Naruto from the Academy, and Kenshin would meet them at their house with any shopping they needed, as the market was between the Hokage Tower and their home.
Then they'd all go out to the yard and train together.
Some days, Naruto would have lessons in the art of the sword from his father, other days he practised his archery under his mother's watchful gaze. After dinner, in the reinforced basement beneath the house – which they had only found by accident, chance and luck when Naruto had dripped a bit of blood on the hard-packed earth of the yard (sword lessons had broken his nose that day), revealing a small seal structure and a door in the ground beneath him – the family began the lessons left to Naruto by his other parents.
Naruto didn't ask who his parents had been. He had two loving – and living – parents right now, and his other parents had loved him too, enough to leave things behind for him. That was enough for him. Still, Kenshin and Kagome had explained to him that his other parents had been very good ninja, and that meant that they had made a lot of enemies. This in turn meant that they didn't want any of the techniques to be attempted until they could be guaranteed no one would see them practising. Learning the theory was fine, but practical lessons had been forced to wait.
"This is a very clever thing," Kenshin said as he studied the technique outlined on the scroll in front of him again. The first technique that they would be actually learning. "And very good for you," he added to Naruto with a smile. "It will force you to control the flow of your chakra, which you have so very much of and so very little control over."
Naruto blushed, but smiled up at his father. He was only young, so his chakra control was not expected to be good. His reserves of the stuff, however, were disproportionately immense.
"I've got the water-bombs!" Kagome announced as she came down into the basement with four buckets. Three of them were empty, but the fourth was filled with little round balloons that she had filled with water from the kitchen sink. She halted at the bottom of the stairs, a distant look in her eyes. "Now, why did I call them that?" she wondered softly to herself, then shook it off and continued into the room where her son and husband were waiting for her with the scroll.
"The first thing that we must do, is that we must use our chakra to create alternating currents within the water that is in the balloons," Kenshin explained. "This will cause the balloons to burst."
"We're gonna get wet!" Naruto sang with delight.
Kagome and Kenshin both laughed at their son and his enthusiasm.
"Only if we do it right," Kagome countered, and tapped the end of her son's nose fondly. "But that is why I brought down the empty buckets as well, to hopefully catch most of the water."
Many balloons sprang tiny little leaks that evening. Getting chakra to move in different directions was quite a difficult thing.
Kagome bit her lip in thought as she watched Kenshin, and the balloon in his hand that swayed slightly around in the direction of his chakra flow. She set her own hand on top of the balloon, and make her chakra swirl in a different direction. A few seconds later, the balloon burst, just as it was supposed to.
"Oro!" Kenshin exclaimed as the water splashed over his hand, his hakama, and into the bucket he'd been holding the balloon over.
Kagome just nodded to herself as her husband and son stared at the mess, and sat down with a balloon in each hand. Gently, she set her chakra to move clockwise in her left hand, and anti-clockwise in her right. Once she was certain she had that working, and before either balloon could spring a leak, she set down the balloon she had been holding her her left hand, and held the one balloon between both hands.
A few seconds later, it burst into the bucket below.
"Mother figured it out!" Naruto exclaimed excitedly.
Kagome shook her head. "Not quite," she corrected with a fond smile. "I'll have it figured out when I don't need two hands to do it. The instructions state very clearly that it is a technique that you should be able to do with one hand, and should be able to have one in each hand."
Naruto pouted at her.
Kagome laughed. "Alright," she allowed. "I'm making progress."
Naruto nodded firmly, very proud of his mother for doing so well, so quickly. She was entirely too humble, in his opinion. Though that by no means meant she was shy at all. She had come to his defence very loudly when the occasion called for it, and it had a time or two over the years.
~oOo~
"Well Naruto?" Kagome asked as she lay back on the bed in the hospital, covered in sweat and very tired, but smiling brightly all the same. "What do you think we should call your new little brother?"
Naruto stuck out his lower lip in thought as he looked at the little child, all red skin and with a small thatch of wet, dark hair on his head, wrapped up in a thin blue blanket.
"Kokuyōseki?" he suggested, but didn't seem all that committed to the name.
"It's a bit long, I think, for such a small person," Kenshin offered gently, though certainly amused by the suggestion.
"Hmm," Naruto agreed, nodding seriously.
"Besides, once he's all dry, that hair of his might turn out to be red like his father's, so calling him 'obsidian' wouldn't work," Kagome added with a weak chuckle and a smile up at her husband.
"Well, what about your sister?" Kenshin suggested, gesturing to the pink-wrapped bundle beside the blue-wrapped one, but which was otherwise almost identical to the first. "If you're having a hard time naming your brother, perhaps you'll have better luck with your sister?"
Naruto pulled on his still-protruding lower lip. "Hime?" he offered, clearly unsure, but shook his head before either of his parents could say anything. "I think I'd better leave the naming to you," he said firmly. "I'm not good at it."
Kagome and Kenshin chuckled.
"Tomoe," Kenshin said softly as he stroked the cheek of the baby girl that was resting on his wife's chest, a distant look in his eyes. "Himura Tomoe."
"I like it," Kagome agreed.
"It's really pretty Dad," Naruto added.
"You name our new son," Kenshin suggested to Kagome.
"Shippo," she decided after a moment's thought, a moment where her eyes went as distant as Kenshin's had when he named Tomoe. "My little Shippo."
"A good name," Kenshin agreed.
~oOo~
After Shippo and Tomoe, came Rin (named by Kagome), and then Yahiko (named by Kenshin), and by the time little Yahiko was toddling, Shippo and Tomoe were entering the Academy – and Naruto was getting ready to graduate. But to skip over all that happened in between these times would be to miss some very important things that Kenshin and Kagome had done.
~oOo~
A short week after Kagome had given birth to Rin, there was a great uproar in the village. The Uchiha clan, almost in its entirety, had been slaughtered in the night.
"I am sorry for little Sasuke," Kagome said to her husband over dinner that day. "But I will not miss the clan as a whole."
Kenshin nodded in silent agreement.
"Why?" Naruto asked curiously, and somewhat confused.
"The Uchiha were not nice people," Kagome explained to her son. "And they didn't care that they weren't nice people. They never bothered to be even polite to anybody."
"And they were the bulk of the police in Konoha," Kenshin added, a shadow crossing over his features. "But they did not do their duty to the laws of the village properly."
"Oro?" Naruto asked.
"You know the way your mother and I have had some trouble in the village, because we care for you?" Kenshin reminded his son.
Naruto nodded sadly. He knew.
"Well, there are laws in place that say we should not have had that trouble, and it was the task of the police to enforce those laws," Kenshin explained.
"But they didn't," Kagome finished.
"No," Kenshin agreed. "They did not."
"Oh," Naruto said softly, and stared thoughtfully at his dinner for a moment. "I don't think I'll miss the Uchiha either," he decided. "But who will be the police now?"
Kagome and Kenshin chuckled.
"The police were only mostly Uchiha," Kagome answered. "There are other shinobi who requested that posting as well. The police chief, who was also the head of the Uchiha clan, just always gave priority to the Uchiha, even if they didn't actually want a position there."
"Hm," Naruto grunted. "I don't think I like the Uchiha."
"Well, there is only one person carrying the Uchiha name left in the village," Kenshin told his son with a smile, "and I believe he is in the class below you at the Academy."
Naruto blinked. "You mean, if you hadn't taught me so much that I skipped a year when I entered, I'd be in the same class as him?"
Kagome and Kenshin both nodded, amused by the horror their son was showing at the idea of being in even the same class as a boy he didn't even know, except by the reputation of his family. They'd talk to him about prejudice before the night was out though. There was no good in hating a boy for his family, after all, especially not when his family were all dead.
~oOo~
When Kagome was pregnant with Yahiko, she had sent Kenshin out to the late market to fetch something. She'd had a sudden, inexplicable craving – and it was inexplicable because she normally could not stand the thing she had just expressed a craving for. Pickled radish spread. They had none in the house at all.
Kenshin had interrupted the kidnapping of Hyuuga Hinata on his way back from the shop, and shattered the shoulder of the arm that was holding the girl, forcing the kidnapper to release the child in his pain. Hyuuga Hiashi had arrived then, and would have himself attacked the kidnapper except that he was already on the ground, and Kenshin was talking gently to Hinata.
All that time in Torture and Interrogation had expanded Kenshin's understanding of psychology, as the T and I department also contained the various 'therapists' that the shinobi saw after a traumatising mission. He could think of only a few things that would be more traumatising for a child than to be kidnapped.
"Ah, Hyuuga-san!" Kenshin greeted with a smile when he saw the man. "I wonder if I could trouble you to take this man to see Ibiki?" he requested. "Only, I must return to my wife right now, yes I must."
"Hinata..." Hiashi started.
Kenshin smiled. "I shall escort your daughter home," he promised. "It is along my way."
"Thank you," Hiashi said, and slung the kidnapper over his shoulder, a vindictive expression on his face as he took off towards the Hokage Tower.
"Well, Hinata-chan, let's get going. I imagine that, with the way your father rushed after you, there must be more people worrying for you back home," Kenshin suggested with a kind smile.
"Th-thank you," Hinata answered softly.
Kenshin had been been nominated for the jounin position after that tidy little rescue, and upon completing a series of tests in the privacy of the AnBu training bunker, had been awarded the promotion. Konoha couldn't have a jounin who'd let their skills go, after all, and he had spent quite some time doing nothing more notable for the village than successfully keeping his lunch down as he took notes while Ibiki interrogated people.
After the promotion, he was permitted to perform the same task for more delicate interrogations, as he maintained a desire to do work that would allow him to be home for dinner in the evening. He was now sitting in for interrogations that as a chuunin he hadn't has the clearance for though, and being paid a bit more.
~oOo~
Once the ordeal of giving birth to Yahiko was passed, Kagome had requested the opportunity to test for the rank of jounin, a request which was granted, but the Hokage insisted that she wait to take the tests until she was completely recovered from the pregnancy and labour. Considering that this was her third pregnancy, and her first pregnancy had been twins, Kagome recovered very quickly. She was used to how things went by now.
After she'd passed the testing, the Hokage insisted that she take some time to herself. He was aware, after all, that the Himura house was now getting a bit crowded with five children living there, and as helpful as Naruto was determined to be (he was a very good big brother), there would still need to be some adjusting done.
Even (or perhaps especially) with Naruto's graduation from the Academy fast approaching.
With that in mind, Kagome and Kenshin sat down and had a good hard look at their finances. Then they bought the house next door and hired a few people to join the two houses together.
Naruto would need more room as he grew, and Tomoe and Shippo would start making noises about not wanting to share a room (with a boy or girl respectively) soon enough.
Tomoe had inherited her mother's shining black hair and her father's violet eyes, while Shippo was the opposite, his hair having lightened to his father's vibrant red, and he had his mother's clear hazel eyes. Rin had the same colouring as her older sister, but where Tomoe had a more delicate blend of her parent's features, the sort that would see her sought after by the sons of lords, Rin had her mother's large eyes and freckles. More a tomboy than a lady, but that was alright. Little Yahiko had all of his mother's colouring, but all of his father's bone-structure.
Kagome was convinced that all of her children (and that included Naruto) would be heart-breakers when they were older. Kenshin had quietly put in an order for a sword that had its blade on the normal side, to threaten the some-day suitors of his daughters with. Kagome had laughed for five minutes solid when she learned the reason he had placed such an order with the weapon-smith, most of all because she knew it would be an empty threat. Her husband would never truly use that sword.
But the time was come for Naruto to graduate from the Academy, and the Hokage had asked if either (or indeed both) of the Himuras would be interested in taking a genin team, as they were now jounin. Not their son's though. For the same reasons that shinobi in a romantic relationship were not placed on teams together, likewise family members were only assigned together in an emergency.
Kenshin and Kagome had both agreed to take genin teams.
Unfortunately, neither of the teams they had been assigned were able to pass the second genin tests, though Naruto's team had made it. Their eldest was officially a genin. There were celebrations in the Himura household that night.
