What a pretty smile.
He didn't care that his head felt like cotton candy. The smile was everything, the woman was all that mattered. She could give him all that he ever wanted: friends, family, love, understanding… The only thing he needed to do was say yes.
He wanted to say yes.
But the words wouldn't come. He couldn't movie his tongue or jaw or anything else. Tears blurred the lovely vision before him and his thoughts started to clear. He started wondering, who is this? Why did he want to serve her? What was she doing to him?
Questions and consciousness faded into a soothing darkness.
[Please awaken little brother. You are needed.]
He heard and didn't hear the message but the sense of urgency and danger roused him to his senses. Naruto climbed to his feet awkwardly, his body stiff and tingling with static. Something hurt around his navel or in it? His fingers explored the doughy flesh of his belly tenderly but found no wound that would have caused the pain. The boy's eyes traveled from his stomach to the soft grass and decaying leaves around his feet. Naruto's face scrunched in confusion about being in the forest when he was fairly certain he'd been half carried back to the bridge builder's house by Sasuke. Confusion as to why he was wearing his ninja gear and orange jumpsuit when he remembered pulling on his sleeping cap and snuggling under the blankets before he fell asleep pushed the odd message out of his thoughts.
[Go! You are needed!] The not-voice commanded firmly. The words carried with them images of old man Tazuna's house, of Tsunami and Inari, and an intense feeling of dread. Naruto snapped to attention, Inari and his mom were in danger and he needed to help.
How fast could he get there from here? Wherever here was… the boy looked around to get his bearings. The clearing he stood in held a makeshift shrine to with carved wooden effigies of a long tailed deer and a pair of spiky dragons and the grass was pockmarked with hoofprints. Surrounding the clearing where trees were covered in crisscrossing cuts running up the trunks. A little tension left Naruto's shoulders, this was the spot where he and Sasuke had been tree climbing yesterday. Ok, this was good. He knew how to get back to the house from here.
Off Naruto sprinted through the coastal forest switching between running on both his legs and running on all fours. Sandy soil and moss fragments worked their way under his nails and his heart pounded in his chest. Long gashes on the trees at around the chest height of a grown up did not escape Naruto's notice, nor the fact that they formed a trail in the direction he was going. Suddenly he stopped, not because he was tired, it would take a whole lot more activity to wear on his kind of stamina. He stopped due to the scent of animal blood near by, close enough that it didn't divert him too far from the trail. The boy knew that it was from an animal because human blood made him drool, he didn't kno… well, there was probably a reason why but he prefered not to think about cravings were easy enough to suppress.
The scent came from a dead boar.
The long slashes carved into its body matched those on the trunks on the trail. The boar's body was still warm so the people who'd senselessly killed it probably weren't too far away yet. Naruto channeled chakra to his limbs to boost his speed as he ran.
The young ninja came around the back of the house and climbed onto the roof. He could hear a commotion going on inside of the building and needed to think up a plan to get the civilians out of danger. Carefully Naruto scoped out the situation. He learned that there were only two enemies, non-ninja mercenaries with cool swords and enough bloodlust that he could easily feel it. That kind of blood thirst paled in comparison to what Zabuza used on his team, but it had a similar enough effect on a homemaker and her six year old kid.
...or well it would have if Tsunami wasn't ready to rumble. Hot damn, are all moms that cool?
With the bad guys busy trussing up their captive, Naruto created two clones and sent them further along the pier for an ambush. He, himself with another clone waited hidden on the top of the roof for the right moment to present himself as an obvious distraction. A distraction presented itself in the form of little Inari gathering the courage to try and save his mom. Noble goal but Naruto decided to make a move before the kid got himself turned into sashimi. The clone teleported in silently behind the charging samurai mercenaries while the real Naruto flipped through the hand seals for a substitution. In a flash of speed the young ninja snatched up Inari and left an Inari-sized log behind in his wake.
"Nice work Inari! You gave me the perfect opening to rescue your mom!" The younger boy was surprised and delighted to be safe and alive. Naruto smiled proudly at Inari, changing one's self was hard work and the kid managed to do it. Turning his attention back to the samurai Naruto lobbed a pair shuriken at the pair who easily deflected them with their soards. It wasn't much an issue since his clones came up behind the bad guys and gave them a sound boot to the head. The grown men crumpled to the planks of the pier as soon as his clones' heels violently connected with their skulls. Once the enemy was down, the clones ran back to Tazuna's house to get some rope to restrain them on the chance that trauma to the brain didn't kill or severely injure them.
"Sorry about calling you a coward, Inari. You've got plenty of guts and I'm proud of you for standing up for yourself and yer mom." Naruto rubbed the younger boy's head affectionately. In the present he laughed with Inari and assured him that it was ok to cry when he was happy. At the same time he wondered how he got back to the forest if he certainly did go back to the house after training. Naruto decided to ask about it later since there was probably shit going down at the bridge too. His clones dispersed and the young ninja told Inari that he had other places to be.
Naruto sprinted down the dock towards the village. While he'd only been through the seaside village twice before while escorting Tsunami for errands in between training sessions, he was surprised by how it had transformed into temporary ghost town. The homeless and beggars had vanished into thin air, windows had their shutters drawn, and no lights were visible under presumably locked doors. There wasn't even a single stick of incense burning at the fancier shrine to the weird local kami in the center of the village.
As Naruto neared the bridge he spotted two completely unnatural looking clouds of fog at the end. A looser one covered the top of the bridge where construction work was still being done. The other cloud was much denser, circling around the support columns of the structure and hovering right over the surface of the water. Given the amount of grandstanding and posturing in their last battle, and the likelihood that Zabuza knew that they were on to his fake hunter-nin partner, the mist ninjas were probably in the first mist… though that left the second one kinda unexplained. Deciding to sate his curiosity and check for additional threats, the young ninja sneaked under the bridge hopping from column to column until he was staring down into the cloud with a kunai in hand just case. Blue eyes strained to peer through the fog.
[There are no enemies down here.] The fine hairs on the nape of Naruto's neck bristled at the freaky feeling of someone speaking in his head again. It wasn't the same not-voice that woke him up that morning, that one had felt young and vaguely feminine underneath it's urgency. This one felt… old and authoritative, like someone who commanded armies and expected to be listened to. Naruto's shoulders tensed as a bizarre shape appeared in the mist. It kind of looked like a deer floating on air. A deer with a weirdly thick neck and a tail at least twice as long as it was. [You should probably go help your comrades, child.]
Well huh.
Naruto had no idea how to react to meeting a god. Or a thing that could communicate telepathically, fly, and worshiped like a god. So, the young ninja sagely decided to take the thing's word that it was not an enemy and decided to go help his team. Naruto climbed up the concrete pillar and scoped out the situation. Sakura was guarding the old bridge builder, who was thankfully still alive, while Kakashi-sensei and Zabuza held a verbal pissing contest, and Sasuke was trapped in a dome of unconnected sheets of ice and getting his shit wrecked. Soon enough Sakura provided an opening for him to strike the enemy and make a grand entrance.
"All right! The hero of the story is here to save the day! Believe it!"