A/N: Thank you for the response! I am glad to see that there is still interest in this AU. Since there have been questions, I can promise you that Shinobi's Best Friends is already written and will be updated regularly about once a week. It has eight chapters.
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Chapter Two: Cats and Dogs
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Naruto was confused. His eyes and ears were telling him that this guy was a total bastard, and a lame one at that, but his nose had been telling him for years that the guy with this smell was awesome. It had gotten to the point that Dog's awesomeness was just a fact of life.
So, obviously, Dog was lying. And he wasn't Dog now, but Kakashi-sensei.
Okay, Naruto could work with that. The doggy part of him kind of wanted to go press his nose into that guy's stomach and get his hair rubbed, but that would not be discreet, and after Kana-san's many, many lectures on the topic, he knew all about discretion-
-as opposed to Uchiha Sasuke, who couldn't see the forest for the tree planted right in front of his nose, and Haruno Sakura, who didn't even smell good anymore since she had started putting on tons of the perfume stuff that was supposed to attract Sasuke to her. Honestly, if Sasuke had a nose tenth part as good as Naruto's he was repulsed, not attracted. Sakura could probably write down the textbook definition of discretion, and then in the next moment forget that such a thing even existed, because Sasuke would walk by or pick his nose in a very cool way or pass a manly wind.
Then, finally, it was Naruto's turn to introduce himself. "My name is Uzumaki Naruto," he said. "I like dogs!" It was true, but he made it a point to keep mum about ninken and contracts and adopted packs. "And ramen! I hate the three minutes it takes for instant ramen to be ready to eat!" He thought for a while, and then shrugged. "…kinda not too fond of cats."
Naruto didn't like the way Kakashi-sensei's face rearranged itself under the mask. Even if he couldn't tell unholy glee by sight, he could smell it clearly. He shouldn't have said that.
He was going to regret saying that very much.
"And your dream?" Kakashi-sensei prodded.
Naruto pouted. "It's not a dream… more of an ambition…" he mocked over-exaggeratedly, glancing side-ways to Sakura and ready to dodge if she attacked. But, no, she was drooling over the Lamppost, no brain-cells left over to listen, so all was good on the pink front.
The Lamppost himself looked even more constipated, which was actually probably really dangerous – could you rupture an intestine that way? – but Naruto bravely ploughed on anyway, saying the obvious thing rather than the true one: "…I'm prolly gonna be the Hokage."
"Idiot!" Sakura yelled.
Naruto suspected he could have said any combination of syllables and get the same reaction, so he shook it off… like a flea.
Which was… kinda funny. Heh. Sakura the Flea. He was going to keep that one for the future.
"Che." Lamppost had nothing to say, but made himself heard anyway, probably afraid that otherwise everyone – except the Flea – would forget that he was there.
Naruto listened to the instructions Kakashi-sensei gave them with a bated nose – the jounin was full of crud, but he was kind of crafty at sticking together pieces of truth and pieces of lies, so in the end Naruto knew that not all the instructions were good, but he was completely stumped when it came to figuring out the good bits from the cruddy ones.
The Lamppost and the Flea hung onto Kakashi-sensei's every word. That, Naruto mused, came from being used to trusting their teachers. That happened to kids who could trust their teachers.
Naruto was, almost, a little bit, glad that he never could trust anyone at the Academy, with maybe the exception of Iruka-sensei – and even that was only conditional and excluded any topic even remotely related to pranks. Naruto had learnt better the second time Iruka-sensei pranked someone and acted innocent, so Naruto got the blame.
Still, Iruka-sensei never let Naruto be punished if there wasn't proof, and when Iruka-sensei was the actual prankster there obviously wasn't any proof.
Naruto tentatively accepted Iruka-sensei as a person who wouldn't hurt him.
He had been very surprised – and touched – when Iruka-sensei actually went beyond that and actively protected Naruto, risking his life in the process.
"Dismissed," said Kakashi-sensei.
Sasuke was gone within a blink of an eye, presenting his textbook perfect form as he jumped off the roof and landed on the footpath. He walked away without as much as a backwards glance.
Sakura squealed – Naruto clapped his hands over his ears half a second too late, and glared at the back of her pink head – and hurried to the roof door in the vain hope that she might catch up to the Uchiha if she jogged.
When Naruto let his hands down again, Kakashi-sensei was staring at him. He didn't seem annoyed, just curious.
"You smell like an Inuzuka," he remarked.
Naruto looked down at himself. He was sure he smelled. He was sure he smelled like a lot of things, few of them pleasant to the nose.
But he knew that Kakashi-sensei wasn't talking about the right now smell. He was talking about the in general smell. And in general Naruto still didn't smell like Kiba at all (maybe a little bit like Aka-chan, but that was because he and Aka-chan were partners in pranking).
"Wrong," he said and, just before he took a leap off the edge, he added: "I smell like dogs. But then, so do you, Kakashi-sensei."
As opposed to his teammates, he went home over the roofs – like an actual shinobi.
x
Naruto's teammates abandoned him tied to the post.
He waited. Not for very long, because he still wasn't good at being patient, but he gave it an honest try, if only so Kana-san wouldn't scold him later.
He was about ready to start digging out a splinter from the wood to open a wound for summoning, when Kakashi-sensei puffed back onto the scene and freed Naruto, taking a quick look at his wrists to make sure they weren't really hurt. It was so nice of him that it actually gave Naruto a pause.
So, Dog was still Dog under that weird grey hair and stupid face-mask. He was just undercover as this Kakashi-person.
"You asked them to work with you," said Kakashi-sensei.
"Well… yeah. You're kinda… big." What Naruto meant was that Kakashi-sensei was a jounin, and even though Naruto would one day get to the point that he would be totally able to wipe the ground with a single jounin before breakfast, he wasn't quite there yet. Just a little way to go, but still, it was always better to have back-up.
Not that Sakura was useful for anything except maybe making people's eyes water with the stink of her perfume, but Sasuke was flashy and wore bright colours and seemed to be doing his best to grow up to be a walking distraction. So far his special, special powers only worked on the fangirls, but Naruto would have been willing to at least try them on Dog.
"…alright, that's fair," decided Kakashi-sensei.
"'course," Naruto continued, shrugging philosophically, "they wouldn't work with me. Sasuke has his head up his butt. Sakura also has her head up Sasuke's butt. I mean, just looking at those tiny shorts you wouldn't say that two heads would fit up there, but obviously they somehow manage. And that's not even talking about Ino, and the other fangirls and the teachers at the Academy and the Council…." He paused and blinked a few times. A horrifying realisation dawned on him. "Wow, now that I think about it, it totally makes sense that he's grumpy. Living with a whole village inside your butt must be painful." He grimaced and his hands strayed protectively to the seat of his pants.
This was what he got for having an overactive imagination – and it was at least a little bit his sensei's fault, because even a clone's memory of the Thousand Years of Pain Jutsu stung like… well, like a chakra-powered poke in the butt. And that was just one person, and he wasn't even trying to climb in there head-first.
"Naruto…" Kakashi sighed in a way that made it clear how much he wanted to palm his face in exasperation. But, and this Naruto considered a lot more important, he didn't argue the point.
x
Naruto narrowed his eyes and stuck out the tip of his tongue. "Let me get this straight…"
"Oh, kami," Sakura sighed woefully, "the idiot strikes again-"
"…I get paid to chase cats."
Kakashi-sensei seemed to contemplate the question seriously for quite some time (although Naruto was pretty sure that was just a stalling technique, because sensei didn't want anyone to notice that he was laughing on the inside). In the end, he tilted his head and squinted his one visible eye.
"Maa, Naruto-kun, it's just one cat. And Tora might not really be the kind of cat you expect. And, anyway, the jounin-sensei gets paid first, and the gennin only get a percentage-"
"I get paid to chase cats," Naruto restated.
"Idiot," opined either the Lamppost or the Flea. Their voices sounded really similar when they tried to talk quietly.
Kakashi shrugged. "If you want to think of it that way…" He pulled out his bright orange book.
Naruto took that to be a confirmation and grinned. It was shaping up to be a day full of vindictive play, and he was going to get rewarded for it at the end. He had thought being ninja was going to be a lot more hard work and a lot less fun.
x
Naruto and Naruto's Shadow Clones were mucking out a ditch.
It was dirty work, but it wasn't hard to do, and it always amused Naruto when he was fairly good at something Sasuke failed at resoundingly. It didn't happen often, and he had found that pointing out such an instance got both his teammates mad at him – then they tried to hit him, and mostly succeeded, and that kind of hurt – so he just crowed happily inside his head.
And maybe he grinned a bit. Just a little. To himself.
Sasuke grumbled, sitting on the curb of a nearby footpath. There weren't any words in the grumble. He was just like a cat (not like Tora, like a normal housecat), making hissing and spitting sounds, and trying to get mud out of his poor hair.
It was a good thing Sasuke didn't have a longer tongue, Naruto thought, because he would have probably tried to lick his hair clean, and that was just eww.
Sakura went 'round with a spiky pole and stabbed big pieces of rubbish in the ditch, then pulled them out and placed them all on a pile. She struggled a bit, especially when the mud didn't want to let go and her hands slid on the shaft.
And Kakashi-sensei was leaning against a wall under an overhang across the street, reading his little baby-blue book full of baby-making stuff. Bleh.
"I've had it!" Sakura announced over the rumbling sound her guts made. "I'm cold, I'm wet – I'm hungry – and I've mucked out half of Konoha's drainage system!"
She really didn't. Naruto had been down to the sewers and, boy, was Sakura in for a surprise if they ever caught a mission down there. It wouldn't be any time soon, though, because that was at least a C-rank, and they were firmly stuck in the D's.
"I'm going home! Sasuke-kun-"
"Hn," said Sasuke. He gingerly stuck his feet into his mud-encrusted sandals, stood up and stared toward the opposite side of the street at their jounin.
"Maa," said Kakashi-sensei, and Naruto could hear him clearly but his teammates probably didn't, because they walked over to him to listen. "Giving up already?"
"This isn't training!" Sakura hissed, "And it isn't a proper mission either! You're just getting your kicks out of seeing us humiliated!"
She and Sasuke put together weren't wearing half as much mud as Naruto was. They hadn't done half as much work either.
Naruto wasn't seeing the big problem with mud. The other stuff in the ditch was a little gross – dead animals and tossed food and he had actually found a severed human hand that he had considered just handing to one of the princesses on his team. It would have given him a good laugh.
In the end he spent too long deciding which one of them would squeal more loudly, and Kakashi ended up stealing the hand and hiding it away.
"I suppose we could stop here for the day," Kakashi fake-mused. He shaded his eye with his hand as if to block out the sun, even though the sky was all dark grey. "It's going to get dark soon. Well, Naruto and I will finish here, and you two can go home, provided you stop by the Missions Desk."
"To report our progress?" Sakura inquired, excited about being picked for Team Seven's spokesperson.
"Uh, yeah," the jounin agreed, shrugging. "And to hand this in for identification."
He pushed something into star-struck Sakura's hands and set out toward Naruto. He had come almost all the way over before Sakura actually looked down, realised what she was holding, and screamed.
Naruto and his five Kage Bunshin sniggered.
Kakashi smelled like satisfaction and schadenfreude (hard to recognise, harder to name, but Naruto had loved that word ever since Ya-san taught it to him).
Naruto forgave Kakashi-sensei for stealing the hand. Making Sakura carry it all the way to the Hokage Tower was better than just freaking her out with it.
Also, sending the princesses home meant that after Kakashi-sensei deducted his own share, the rest of the pay would be Naruto's.
Dinner at Ichiraku's!
x
It was a bright day. The birds were chirping, the flowers bloomed, the Old Man puffed on his pipe not too far away in his Old Man office, and Naruto had had a really good time sprawling all over his futon with Rikku and Juuji last night. No bad dreams.
He was ready to take the bad guys head-on and put the fear of Konoha into their hearts.
Barring that…
"Sensei, sensei! Can we get Tora again?"
"Maa…" Kakashi deliberately deliberated for a long time, even though the Hokage Tower was right there and they just had to go in and talk to the ninja manning the Missions Desk. "Let's first see what's available."
"Tora! Please?" Naruto exclaimed as they entered the office, and then pouted for all he was worth. It wasn't a sure thing that Tora had escaped again – he failed about one out of four days – but the chances were good.
The chuunin behind the desk gaped at Naruto as if he was seeing an S-class Iwa Doton user coming at him with a bouquet of flowers. "I… have never seen a gennin ask for the Tora mission. Not even Gai-san's gennin. Kakashi-san… I've got the form for psych eval requisition if you-"
"Maa… Naruto's just a little rambunctious. I'd notice if he wasn't sane enough." Considering that he said this with his mask-covered nose buried in porn, in the middle of a bright day at the Missions Desk, the paperwork ninja's expression of mute terror maybe wasn't actually unwarranted.
Naruto stopped bouncing around and squinted at the guy, who paled further and then keeled over in a faint, because there suddenly wasn't enough blood in his brain.
"Idiot!" Sakura snarled habitually.
"This is awesome!" Naruto happily bounced over to the desk, pulled out a paper, initialed it in all the right places, scribbled a henohenomoheji at the bottom and took off down the corridor. "Tora-teme! Here I come!"
