Author: Crisy

Author: Crisy

Genre: Adventure/Drama

Rating: T

A/N: Heh, I haven't even posted the 2nd chapter to this yet and I'm already starting the 3rd. This is unprecedented. I think I've really hit gold inspiration-wise with this fic. I know exactly what I want to do and where I want to take this story. I know what I want the final scene to be even…it's actually one of the reasons I wrote this fic, just to get to the last chapter.

Enough rambling. Thank you for all your future reviews on chapter 2 and enjoy the next one.

Oh, btw, in case anyone hasn't noticed, I respond to every review I get even if it's just with a polite 'thank you'. (and thanks for the reviews!)

Two weeks after Naruto had arrived at their door, he was nearly part of the family. Inari constantly pestered him to teach him more ninja tricks, Tazuna bothered him about using Shadow Clones as free labor, Tsunami was teaching him how to cook, and Naruto was happy. He couldn't send any letters back to Konoha for fear of someone finding him (and on Tsunade's orders) but he figured that not many people cared he was gone. He expected the vast majority of Konoha to be celebrating his leaving to be honest.

Naruto was supervising his Shadow Clones from a comfortable spot on the roof of Tazuna's business when he spotted a familiar mane of white hair. He sent a mental nudge to one of his clones and it ran forward to greet his perverted sensei.

The clone led Jiraiya to Tazuna's house and instructed him to wait in the dining room while Naruto finished up in the latest construction zone.

For the past two weeks Naruto had been making about 100 clones every morning and henge-ing them into many different looking workers. Tazuna had been overjoyed when Naruto first suggested the idea and had cried tears of happiness when he saw how quickly a house would go up with 100 odd clones plus his regular work crew on the job. In two weeks Naruto had raised the speed at which 'Tazuna's Super Building Company' could complete a project by almost 75 percent. Tazuna was paying him triple what one worker made, but was still rolling money in left and right since Naruto could make several hundred clones at once and maintain them for roughly six hours when needed. Teams of 100 Naruto's under Henge could be seen making and finishing up to 7 different building projects in one day.

Jiraiya tapped his foot in annoyance at the long wait for his student to get back to the house. The clone had left moments after delivering him to the house and it had been about 15 minutes since then. Jiraiya was just sitting down to write in his little notebook the next scene for Icha Icha when Naruto (the real one?) slid the door open with a loud 'thud' and demanded, "What are you doing here Ero-sannin?!"

"Tsunade told me where you were, I decided to come for a visit, see how you're doing, that sort of thing." Jiraiya replied evasively.

Naruto looked at him skeptically, not believing the hermit would be here for no real reason.

"You're not here to spy on the women's baths, are you? Don't think I won't tell Tsunami-chan right away to warn the other women." Naruto growled at the self-proclaimed 'super-pervert'.

"No, nothing like that, (though I can't promise I won't) but now that you mention it, I'd like to take you with me on a journey for…a while." He said.

Naruto glared, "I'm not leaving here. Nothing you can say will make me change my mind."

"Oh yes you are, you're going to come with me for three years of intense (cool) ninja training and learn a whole bunch of new (cool) jutsu!" Jiraiya argued.

"No, I'm happy here. Besides, what's the point to training if I'm not even a ninja anymore?!" Naruto shouted angrily.

"Don't give me that! What do you call your free-labor service for the old man then? A walk in the park? I can see easily through you, you're not just doing the work from the kindness of your heart or for the money he's surely paying you; you're doing it so you'll stay in top condition! The heavy lifting is just like training and the Clone technique is training your chakra capacity and control. You know that, and I know you know that.

"If the temptation of training isn't enough to get you to leave, chew on this for a second, brat. If you stay here the Akatsuki will more than likely use this family against you. Do you want to see them dead?" Jiraiya finished with an uncharacteristically dark look on his face.

Naruto was silent for a few minutes; he knew that Jiraiya was right on all counts. He wasn't just doing the work for money or to be helpful. It was one of the only ways he could think of to train inconspicuously in both strength and chakra. He'd even noticed that when all the clones disappeared he would have all the knowledge they had learned during the day. Naruto was an excellent builder by now.

"Fine," he mumbled sullenly, "but only because I don't want Tazuna-jiji, Tsunami-chan, or Inari-kun to get hurt because of me."

Jiraiya smirked and ruffled his student's blond locks, to the boy's annoyance, and said, "Good, I knew you'd see it my way. We'll leave tomorrow around noon so you can say goodbye to the people you've met here."

Naruto scowled at the perverted man in front of him but nodded in understanding and gratitude. He'd half expected Jiraiya to rush him out of the house as soon as he'd agreed to go. It was good to be able to say goodbye instead of disappearing into the night.

Hinata stood in her room staring at herself in the mirror. Naruto was gone, that was all that mattered at the moment. A tear rolled down her cheek, he never knew that she liked him, and he probably never would. She'd wasted her chance to tell him several times when she'd accidentally found him training late into the day after all the other rookies had gone home.

Her pale eyes suddenly hardened. A determination filled her for a split second; she would gain confidence and learn from this. She would strive to become the best in order to find her Naruto-kun one day. Maybe it would be on a mission, maybe she would leave the village, but she would find him someday.

The newfound confidence disappeared as soon as she heard her father's voice down the hallway, calling her for her weekly spar with Hanabi. Hinata sighed; she had never won against her sister and never would. She refused to hurt Hanabi; the girl looked so much like their mother. It would be a disgrace to harm her, and besides. Hinata loved her sister and would never seriously raise her hand against her. Father would just have to learn to deal with it, Hinata decided, a small flame of her pervious confidence rekindling inside her.

She squared her shoulders, prepared herself for some painful Jyuuken strikes, and slid her door open to tell her father that she was coming. Hinata did not stutter for the rest of the day, even when she lost once again to her younger sister.

"Come on brat, you can do better than that!" Jiraiya taunted from his perch at the top of a tree, lounging in the branches.

"Screw…you…ero…sannin…" Naruto grunted, trying to carry a huge boulder almost bigger than him vertically up the tree, sticking to the bark with chakra in his feet.

Naruto lost his concentration for a moment and began to plummet like, well, a rock, before regaining it quickly and sticking to the bark once again.

"Ooooh, that was a close one, are you sure you can do this? I know I told you I'd teach a new jutsu if you finished this exercise in a week, but it's already the third day and you're not even halfway there!"

"I said…shut…UP!" Naruto shouted, sliding downwards a few inches at the breach in his concentration.

Jiraiya cackled for a moment before pulling out his notebook to write some more Icha Icha.

Tsunade sighed. Things were going worse and worse as of late, the council had finally managed to work around her refusal to return the Uchiha to active duty. They simply sent him on missions; they didn't really need her anymore to assign them. They'd made a decree or something similar a year ago detailing that the council could assign missions it thought was being overlooked by the Hokage. It was sound in theory, since the Hokage could and did get overwhelmed by paperwork frequently and couldn't possibly dictate every single mission personally.

The problem was that the council abused it with an abandon that scared her sometimes. She was even considering resigning from the job altogether and saddling someone else with the trouble. The only reason she stopped herself from doing so was that the next Hokage would be someone the council approved of. Someone who would have no qualms ordering a squad of ANBU after Naruto, regardless of the fact that he had officially resigned and that it wouldn't be legal.

Tsunade had been able to head off any and all such attempts made by the council, since the ANBU missions had to be approved by her personally. She would not be surprised however, if they figured out a way around that as well.

A month after they left Wave, they arrived by boat in Water Country. The horrible rock-tree climbing exorcise had taken six days in the end and they had left the day after Naruto had finished it. Jiraiya said that once they got back on land that it would become part of his regular training. Naruto had shrugged since he'd discovered the trick to making the rock lighter, channeling chakra to his arms and in a thin layer over the rock to help give it a weightless quality.

In retrospect, he could see why it was an excellent training exorcise. It had forced his chakra control to increase exponentially to the point where he would waste less than half of the chakra he used to. Jiraiya actually had him doing a similar exorcise on the water, but with a barrel full of water on his back while he attempted to keep up with the ship for an hour or two a day. The same principal applied here, but was much more difficult since the water was less dense than the rock and required more chakra to achieve the weightless effect he had managed to produce with the rock. He had to actually spread his chakra evenly throughout the water to effect it at all.

Jiraiya claimed this was training for another awesome jutsu, but Naruto couldn't remember ever hearing anything to do with weightlessness in a jutsu. He half expected that his teacher was just pulling his leg to get him to train and would give him a bogus jutsu that would float feathers or be useful to peeping in some way. At the thought of a certain part of female anatomy becoming weightless, Naruto's nose started to bleed a small bit and he cursed Jiraiya and his perverted ways. He would be lots of money that the jutsu would do exactly as he suspected.

"Alright Naruto, time for your water walking exorcise!" Jiraiya exclaimed, entirely too cheerful for such a gray day.

"But we've docked, I thought I would be done with that exorcise and you would teach me something else!" Naruto whined, thoroughly sick of that particular exorcise and dreading having to do it again.

"If you don't complete this training to my satisfaction, I won't teach you the cool jutsu I was planning on." Jiraiya taunted.

"Bah. I don't even want to learn the jutsu you're going to teach me, I should have known it would be pervy coming from you…" he grumbled, wiping a little blood from one nostril.

"A perverted move? That wasn't what I was going to teach you at all…but out of strict…curiosity, what did you have in mind?" Jiraiya asked innocently.

Naruto blushed, having to explain. "Well, imagine a…certain area…of a girl being weightless or close to it…"

Jiraiya's face broke into a lecherous grin and he began muttering about experiments.

"So, that's not what you were going to teach me?"

"Nope! Thanks for the idea though! I was just going to teach you the water dragon move, but this is a much better idea…" Jiraiya trailed off, already planning the Icha Icha scene in his head. He left the dock in search of the nearest women's baths.

'Great, what have I inflicted on the female race?' Naruto wondered to himself before the rest of what Jiraiya had said sunk in.

"Wait, water dragon? Ero-sannin, come back here! I take it back I'll do the training, teach me!"

Okay, done. It's passed 2000 words, I'm happy with it. See any mistakes? (I know there are some…) Tell me in a review or PM.

I'll write the next chapter tomorrow probably.

Until then, review please!

-Crisy