Life in Technicolor Chapter 4: 61 to 80, a naruto fanfic

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Uzuki Yugao's surname was originally Mitarashi. After Orochimaru's defection her surname was changed to Uzuki to protect herself.

For the rest of their lives, Yugao and Anko kept up the pretense that they didn't know each other, to the point that Anko didn't attend Yugao's funeral when she fell in battle.

But she dreamt, she dreamt of a purple-haired girl and her kid sister, and Anko began silently to fold paper cranes.

Everyone who was a member of the Akatsuki at the time Sasori joined (Pein, Konan, Zetsu and Tobi/Madara) questioned why Sasori had chosen to attach a scorpion's tail to the modified human puppet Hiruko. They all assumed it was because Sasori had been named for the scorpion.

They were wrong. Hiruko had had a summoning contract with scorpions, who aided him in battle. To Sasori, it only seemed fitting.

Minato was not able to come up with the perfect seal for sealing a bijū into a child. At best, Minato was able to devise a seal that would remain stable for fifteen years, give or take, before it would start to break down, unfortunately coinciding with the time that someone who had been an infant at the time of sealing would be in the midst of turbulent adolescency.

Knowing he wouldn't be around to work on such a seal if he ever had to use it, Minato left behind instructions on how to reinforce the seal, hoping Jiraiya would find them. Jiraiya either never found them, didn't bother trying, or never knew they existed.

When Minato and Naruto met in the latter's mind, Minato's reinforcing his son's seal was not a permanent solution. Instead, he bought him some time, bought Naruto another fifteen years to either find his father's notes or to devise another way of reinforcing his seal before the process that had started when he was fifteen would start to repeat itself.

Namikaze Minato was born in Iwagakure, to civilians who were traveling to Konoha in search of a better life, and were killed on the journey there. He lived in a border village, living off of what he could steal and what others would begrudge him, until he was about five when a shinobi took him back to Konoha with him.

Minato never knew that his fair coloring, so much more common in northern countries like Tsuchi and Kaminari, was a prime marker of his ancestry, nor that it was only a lucky fluke that his Elemental Affinity was Fire when all of his shinobi relatives had Earth for their chakra nature.

When Minato was seventeen he was defeated in combat and nearly killed by an Iwagakure ANBU. The ANBU stopped short of killing him, his sword pressed at Minato's throat as the teenager laid on the soggy ground, only because he looked at features that practically mirrored what his own had been at that age, and realized that he was staring at the maternal cousin who had vanished into thin air with his parents so long ago. The ANBU promptly backed off and retreated with the rest of the Iwa forces. Minato gaped in confusion for nearly a minute afterwards until his senses returned and he regrouped with his sensei and teammates.

No one else in Iwa had the sense to put two and two together and connect the Scourge of Iwa with the large, politically inactive Namikaze clan of Iwagakure. The Namikaze had a reputation of being kin slayers, a bloody tradition Minato continued with his first kill. He was thirteen, the boy across him, a fair-faired Iwa genin with blue eyes the exact same shade as his own, the same age, and as Minato pulled his kunai out of the boy's temple, he felt like he ought to have known him. The boy was his paternal cousin, a member of the Main Family of the Namikaze.

A full third of the staggering kill count amassed by Minato against the Iwa shinobi during the Third War were related to him in some way. It peaked with Minato killing his grandfather in battle. He stared into his grandfather's dying cerulean eyes, and wondered why the old man looked so much like him.

Namikaze Minato's hands ran red with the lifeblood of his kin. He never knew this; it was probably better for his sanity that he did not.

The truth didn't even occur to him, when, a day after his confirmation as Yondaime Hokage, an anonymous note came to him by hawk, from Iwa, reading only one word.

'Congratulations'.

Out of every single Hokage of Konoha, Naruto was the only one who had to keep pushing the hat up to keep it from falling into his eyes when he was first confirmed.

Jiraiya and Dan had a good system going for their relationship (or lack of one): Don't bother me, and I won't bother you. Dan gave Jiraiya a respectful amount of distance when the latter wanted to talk/discuss/argue with Tsunade, and Jiraiya was content to be coolly polite to Dan in public and cordially despise him in private.

That changed when they were sent alone on a mission together.

The near-impenetrable forest on the border of Hi and Tsuchi worked both in Jiraiya and Dan's favor and against them as well. The terrain was utterly unfamiliar, even if it did provide shelter and places to hide, and treacherous, with springs and pools hidden beneath the white blankets of snow. It was bitterly cold, locked in the depths of winter, and even if it was high noon, from the amount of light that pierced the dense canopy of dark pine needles, it seemed more like an unending gloomy dusk.

And the kunai and shuriken that kept flying out of the gloom didn't help, either.

Dan and Jiraiya couldn't get their bearings long enough to figure out how many enemy shinobi were attacking them. From the make of the weapons, made of a duller, darker metal than Konohagakure kunai and shuriken, and the location the pair found themselves in, they were almost certainly up against Rock nin, something that definitely boded ill for them.

For one night, they were left alone, a night in which the pair huddled in a great depression beneath two mammoth slabs of stone, huddling next to a meager, sooty fire, silent and grim. Jiraiya had caught a shuriken with his hand earlier in the evening; while his glove had spared him of the worst of the damage, his hand still throbbed and screamed like an abscessed tooth, and he had spurned Dan's offers to heal it. They fell into a troubled sleep, weak and light.

When dawn came, they woke to find blades at their throats.

The band of four were indeed the missing nin from Iwa Jiraiya and Dan had been looking for, and Jiraiya cursed the negligence that had allowed the Rock nin to get the drop on them.

The four wore masks, keeping Jiraiya and Dan from telling one from the other. They were shoved to their knees on the ground, hands roughly pressing on their necks and feet on the middle of their backs. For a few moments, the seeming leader of the group looked down at them through the eye slits of his blank mask (they were obviously mocking Hunter nin masks with their porcelain masks), before motioning to one of the men.

That man dragged Dan to his feet and roughly shoved him about twenty feet to the east, before the crony pushed him back to the ground to where the medic was spitting out snow and dirt when his head came back up.

The leader then removed his mask, revealing a heavily scarred face. He leered down at Dan with an utterly baleful grin hovering in his crooked teeth; Dan's eyes widened in pure shock.

The man was Ijin Hiroki, a notorious nin from Iwa; his face had adorned the "Most Wanted" section of the Bingo Book so completely that Jiraiya would have known him anywhere; he had a bounty of 18,100,000 ryo on his head.

Hiroki muttered two words that carried clear to Jiraiya's ears, and made him stiffen with foreboding.

'Remember me?'

The way Dan's lips curled back in a twisted snarl indicated he did.

It was at this point that Jiraiya blew a fireball at the man standing in front of him.

The forest erupted into battle. Dan broke free of his captors just as Jiraiya did, and instead of regrouping with Jiraiya, he went straight at Hiroki. Whatever their enmity was, it predated Jiraiya's acquaintance with the medic. This set off warning bells in Jiraiya's head; what he knew of Dan told him that he was normally a level-headed, calculating soldier in battle, but he saw none of that in the forest. What he saw instead was a wild, nearly unthinking warrior who clearly wasn't fighting with a clear mind. Despite that, he fought well, better than Jiraiya had thought any med nin but Tsunade capable of.

Jiraiya's fireballs loosened several layers of snow on the upper branches of the pine trees, and they came crashing down, adding to the confusion. Jiraiya managed to incinerate two of them before another stabbed him in the side by the third.

The enemy never got the chance to finish the job. He fell down stone dead, one of Dan's kunai sticking out of his forehead, oozing sluggish blood and yellow fluid onto the snow.

Instead of stopping to heal Jiraiya, Dan went on against Hiroki. Finally, he disabled the man, breaking both of his arms. Hiroki was standing at the bank of a small spring; Jiraiya's fireballs had melted the cap of ice over it. Dan took one cold, calculating look at him, his battle madness forgotten, and pushed Hiroki in.

And held him down.

It was a full two minutes before the hapless missing nin's struggles finally ceased, and he was finally dead.

Dan said nothing as he healed Jiraiya's wound, nor as he helped the much-heavier man up and back into their cave. He sealed the corpses into a scroll, murmuring, "We have to bring them back to Konoha, Natsumi—" his older sister "—mentioned that the Experimentation Division of the Medical Corp. have been looking for cadavers to practice new jutsus on, and the smell of rotting flesh will attract every predator and scavenger in this forest," plopped down on the ground in the cave, and used Jiraiya's lighter to start and some dry brush to start a fire. All the while, he was eerily calm; Jiraiya held onto a kunai in his lap.

Then, Dan pulled a picture out of his coat pocket, and showed it to Jiraiya. It was an old picture, several years old with the edges curling and yellow. Dan was in it, along with his sister Natsumi, then heavily pregnant with her first child, but there was a third person in the photo.

It was a teenage girl who looked much like Natsumi and Dan, with long silver-blue hair, ocean blue eyes, and a dazzling smile. "My younger sister, Hideyo".

With some prodding, Dan went on and gave a graphic, gut-wrenching description of how, years ago during the Second War, Dan and his sister had been caught by Hiroki and another Iwa shinobi and Dan, incapacitated, had been forced to watch as Hiroki repeatedly raped, tortured and finally killed the girl over the course of eight and a half hours.

"She was seventeen," Dan murmured lifelessly. "She was about to take the jonin exams. She would have been twenty-three this year. By the time they killed her, I could barely recognize her anymore."

Jiraiya felt his mouth grow dry while Dan related this tale. He had heard the like from many survivor of Iwa attacks (always Iwa; the Sand ninja were too efficient for that sort of thing, the Kumo too hasty), and his response was always the same.

If Jiraiya had been in Dan's shoes, he would have done the exact same thing. Except he would have incinerated Hiroki. Slowly.

When they got back to Konoha's gates, Tsunade was waiting for them, and Dan was able to behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Tsunade could not figure out why the two of them were suddenly on so much better terms, and even asked if they were enemy nin henged to look like Dan and Jiraiya, but Jiraiya brushed her off.

There were just some things about Tsunade's lover and Jiraiya's newfound drinking buddy that she was probably better off not knowing.

Beyond microwavable ramen, Uzumaki Kushina couldn't cook to save her life. It was a testament to how much he loved her that Minato not only ate her cooking but actually liked it.

After the destruction of Uzu no Kuni by Kiri forces three years into the Second War, refugees flooded into Konoha and Suna, being, with an almost painful slowness, assimilated into the villages they fled to.

One of the refugees who was begrudgingly admitted into Sunagakure was an eleven-year-old genin named Kaisui Sayuki.

Sayuki was a small, scrappy girl, not much to look at, continuing a long tradition of kunoichi living during times of trouble maintaining an almost aggressive indifference to her appearance. She had copper brown hair hacked off above the shoulders, eyes the color of old hardwood, and fair skin that soon housed an olive tan.

Sayuki was to become the only great Water manipulator ever to occupy the Suna ranks, her mastery and raw power outmatched only by the likes of the Nidaime Hokage and Hoshigaki Kisame. She could summon a massive tsunami in the middle of the arid desert, and when she was stationed on the coast small hurricanes tended to herald her arrival into battle.

But the first six years of her career as a Suna shinobi were, for wartime, ordinary, even mundane. Sayuki, as a former nin from another village, was not give a great deal of freedom and was assigned to help guard the village walls. She made chunin at fifteen, having failed the examination the first two times she took it. Sayuki managed to exist under the radar for six long years, seeming to be nothing but a perfectly ordinary kunoichi.

Then, in the final year of the Second War, the Leaf got closer to Suna than they ever got before or would get again, close enough that the guards were called into combat.

The Sandaime Kazekage was aiding his men in combat, and he got to a sand dune just in time to witness the teenaged Sayuki blast an entire Leaf platoon to infinity with a wall of water. Sayuki was immediately transferred to the coast.

The war only continued on for six months, but in those six months Kaisui Sayuki was personally responsible for the wholesale destruction of Konoha's entire naval fleet when she drew up a Category Four hurricane to smash no les than sixty ships over forty miles of coastline. Konoha still has no viable navy.

To say that Suna was ecstatic would have been an understatement.

Sayuki was promoted to jonin at twenty, and at the outbreak of the Third War was deployed to the northern front to help stop the onslaught of Leaf forces there. She counted the high point of her career as seeing the look on Senju Tsunade's face when she was hit by a tidal wave a Sand kunoichi generated.

Sayuki eventually had a daughter she named Sari in honor of her adopted village. She would die three years after the girl was born, dead from some airborne illness caught in a military base to the west.

Kaisui Sayuki, legendary Water manipulator of the Sand, left only one legacy: the pathological fear of running water she inspired in nearly every Leaf nin who ever survived an encounter with her.

A little known fact is that Jiraiya has only ever had sexual intercourse with one woman. An even lesser known fact (known at first only to Jiraiya himself) is that this makes Morino Ibiki Naruto's maternal uncle.

Ibiki is at an utter loss for words when Tsunade smugly informs him that he and Uzumaki Naruto are uncle and nephew. He refuses to believe that the fifteen-year-old runt with a disproportionately loud mouth, who only got through the preliminaries of the Chunin exam because of his loud mouth, is in any way, shape or form related to him, and Ibiki almost manages to convince himself that the sake he drank last night is affecting his mental faculties in some way. That is, until Tsunade furnishes the DNA records.

The results are definitive. They confirm that Ibiki and Naruto share the required number of chromosomes to be second-degree relatives, and that they share the same number of chromosomes with Uzumaki Kushina, Naruto's mother and, evidently, Ibiki's half-sister.

Ibiki's answer is to promptly bow out of Tsunade's sunlit office and to behave as though their meeting never took place.

Later, Ibiki is eating at his favorite open-air restaurant when he hears what he is certain is the death knell of his dignity sounding.

Ibiki covers his eyes with his hand. "Armageddon in three, two, one…"

"Jisan!"

"Ugh…"

Tsunade plays dirty.

With all his impressive powers of persuasion, Ibiki strives to convince Naruto that they are not related, and that even if their DNA is similar, they simply are not.

But more than anything, Ibiki wants the brat to stop calling him jisan.

All to no avail. It would have taken several hours at least to crack into the blond's hard skull, let alone wind his little mind around what Ibiki wants him to believe.

And just when Ibiki thinks it can't possibly get worse…

"Ibiki! This scruffy little runt is your nephew?!"

Anko hears everything that they have said, and promptly dissolves into piercing, hysterical laughter. Ibiki shudders; if this keeps up, the whole village will know.

But for now, he can think of a way of possibly killing two birds with one stone.

"Alright, gaki, you want me to acknowledge you?"

"Yes!"

"Fine. If you are really related to me, then you should be able to think up a way of shutting Anko up without getting killed."

With any luck, Ibiki thinks, Anko'll kill him and…

And Ibiki turns around and finds Naruto beaming at him and Anko struggling to get a piece of chakra-charged paper off of her mouth.

Ibiki, a hard man to surprise, is so impressed that he decides that Naruto may be related to him after all. He managed to shut up Anko, and he'll actually live to tell the tale, so Ibiki figures he might as well acknowledge him.

On the condition that Naruto never, ever calls Ibiki "jisan" again.

Ibiki sits Naruto down and immediately begins to impart every single interrogation tactic he has ever learned on the young boy. If Naruto wants to be Hokage, he's going to need it to deal with the council.

Anyone and everyone who manages to wrap their minds around the concept of Ibiki and Naruto being related comes to the same conclusion.

It is the single most frightening thing they have ever heard.

If you were to ask Kabuto, he would tell you that Kimimaro was much easier to deal with than Sasuke.

In the depths of Sound, Sasuke used to dream of Team Seven. He dreamed of the few (all too few) good times they shared, when even then his life had been shadowed and blighted by Itachi.

He dreamed of a lackadaisical sensei who couldn't get his act together yet had been more of a father to Sasuke than Uchiha Fugaku had ever been. He dreamed of a stupid, earnest girl who kept declaring her undying love for him, and above all, Sasuke dreamed of a scrawny little blond runt who just didn't get it. They were all smiling.

The image shattered.

When, years later, Team Seven finally laid eyes on each other again, Sasuke didn't dream of them smiling anymore.

He dreamt of the savage joy he would feel when their blood and flesh crawled in his hands. Sasuke dreamt of how much stronger he would be, how much more ready he would be to face Itachi, once he killed them.

To say that learning he was wrong about Itachi only after he killed him hurt Sasuke would have been an understatement.

It destroyed him.

After he came home injured from a mission, Shikamaru found himself with a visitor in the hospital. Temari had wanted to check up on him to make sure he really was recovering, and when she took in all the bandages, she cattily remarked that he looked more like a mummy than a Leaf chunin.

They talked about battle and injuries and close people, and somehow throughout this, they ended up making out upright on Shikamaru's hospital bed.

Well this was all fine and good, and both actually found it quite enjoyable.

Until Gaara and Kankuro stepped into the room and found them like that.

Shikamaru, despite his infirmity, found the strength to pull his flak jacket back on over his bandaged chest and his shoes on and, for his health, immediately split the wind getting out of the hospital.

As he raced up the high street, the two younger brothers of the girl he'd been making out with chasing close behind, both Tsunade and Baki, from different locations, had the opportunity to witness the scene.

Nara Shikamaru, running like the legions of Hell wanted to tear him apart.

Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, Akimichi Choji, Yamanaka Ino and Inuzuka Kiba all exuberantly screaming "Run for it!!!"

The Kazekage and his older brother tearing after Shikamaru, murder written plainly on their faces.

Temari running behind her brothers, fan drawn, clearly intending to prevent a riot.

Tsunade and Baki's reactions were exactly the same.

"Kakashi, pass the sake."

"Shizune!!!"

During the early years of the Second War, the Sandaime Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen was in a border town in the north of Hi no Kuni, waiting for a reconnaissance team to get back with information from the northern front.

It was midday, and Sarutobi hadn't been able to eat anything since the morning before, so he was definitely going to enjoy his sandwich. That is, he was going to enjoy it, until a little boy snatched it off his plate and ran off.

Well, Sarutobi wasn't going to let that slide. He might have been nearing forty, but he was in good shape and he was hungry. He didn't think it would be too much trouble to catch the scruffy little brat.

Sarutobi was wrong. The boy knew the terrain of the city and led him on a merry chase for nearly an hour, losing the sandwich in the process. The urchin climbed up side staircases, scrambled over cloth awnings, ran down alleys and jumped roofs.

He eventually crawled into a culvert, which was ultimately his undoing. Sarutobi blocked off one end with a crate and simply sat over the other end, knowing that eventually the boy would have to come out. When he did (after another hour), Sarutobi unceremoniously grabbed him by the back of his grubby shirt and pulled him to face him.

The boy, Sarutobi discovered to his chagrin, could be no older than five years old. He was obviously a street urchin, by the ratty state of his clothes and his painful thinness. He had hair that Sarutobi could just barely tell was golden beneath all the grime, and bright blue eyes that were extraordinarily cheerful despite his wretched conditions.

Though Sarutobi was very much embarrassed that a five-year-old had managed to elude him for so long, it impressed him as well. He decided he'd take the boy back to Konoha with him and put him in the Academy when he was old enough. He asked the boy his name.

"Namikaze Minato! Who are you supposed to be?"

Sarutobi smiled. "Sarutobi Hiruzen, Sandaime Hokage."

The boy blinked, then his grin widened. He extended a hand. "Nice to meet ya, Hokage-sama."

They went back to the stand and got two sandwiches.

Hatake Kakashi and Maito Gai were in the same year in the Academy, but they never really knew each other until they were about thirteen.

It had been a month since Obito's death, a month in which Kakashi did very little but mope, brood, stand by the cenotaph and binge on sake even though he was eight years too young. Neither Rin nor Minato had been capable of bringing him out of it, but Gai was determined to try.

You see, Gai had always admired Kakashi from a distance, admiring him for his consummate skill and his 'coolness'.

But now, he was disgusted with him as well. Gai had recently lost his teammates and sensei in battle, but he wasn't atrophying and rotting the way Kakashi was. He knew that wasn't the way to honor their memories. And Gai had known Obito, and they had been friends. He was going to make Kakashi see the light.

So he made his mind up.

Kakashi was in for a rude awakening.

Gai marched up to the cenotaph one misty morning, found Kakashi there (as usual), and started to do what he did best. Annoy the person he was talking to.

He rattled on and on about nothing, until he got to the matter in question. And then all hell promptly broke loose.

The moment the word 'Obito' came out of Gai's mouth, Kakashi jumped on him. And thus started what Minato, who had been watching from a tree, called the 'most pathetic fight of Kakashi's career', and the only knock down drag out brawl to take place in front of the cenotaph.

Kakashi was too drunk for ninjutsu, genjutsu, or anything even remotely resembling decent taijutsu, and Gai didn't want to hurt him too much. They essentially rolled around on the ground, kicking, hitting, hair-pulling and biting, until they were both too exhausted to do anything but lie flat on their backs and pant.

The moment the mist cleared from Kakashi's mind, he started to sob. And did not stop until Minato came down and took them both back to his apartment to talk it out.

Kakashi and Gai have been best friends ever since.

After Rin died, Kakashi and Gai took care of Naruto equally until he was about five. They tried to shield the toddler from the mob, but most of the time to no avail.

Finally, one day, when Naruto was four, they were holed up in Kakashi's apartment and Kakashi himself was dabbing at a cut on the toddler's forehead did they finally decide to do something definitive about it.

"This is getting ridiculous," Kakashi muttered, sitting small Naruto on his lap and taking the rubbing alcohol. "Now," he murmured to the boy, "this is going to sting a bit."

As Kakashi dabbed at the boy's forehead, Gai came out of the kitchen. "I agree," Gai asserted grimly.

Kakashi looked up at him, visible eye glinting coolly. "So why don't we do something about it?"

"What did you have in mind?"

They knew where the leaders of the mob lived, and they were shinobi, able and willing to use intimidation.

Some of the leaders of the mob woke up the next morning with their houses vandalized, the panes of their windows sitting neatly in their front yards or in their kitchens if they lived in apartments, every single piece of furniture destroyed, and straw-stuffed effigies of themselves sitting in the middle of their living rooms, covered in chicken blood, the burlap stomachs slashed and spaghetti hanging out of it to represent intestines.

Some of the more violent leaders of the mob never woke up at all.

Either way, the people got the message.

No one ever tried to hurt Naruto again.

Uchiha Shisui's favorite hobby in his spare time was to make sure Itachi didn't stagnate. In response, Itachi's favorite hobby in his limited spare time was to infuriate Shisui as much as possible.

Gekko Hayate's chronic illness wasn't a matter of much concern to Genma. After all, Hayate always said he just had allergies, and Genma believed him.

That was, of course, until the day Hayate started coughing up blood instead of phlegm.

Yugao always wondered. Hayate would have been dead within a few years, even if that Sand nin—whoever he was—hadn't killed him. His "allergies" had morphed into something far more deadly (Yugao shuddered to think of the shadow existing over his nephew Udon, who had the same illness that threatened to turn into the same life threatening issue Hayate had had), something that involved coughing up blood and toxic medications that left him even weaker than before.

Not enough time, not enough time. That had always characterized their relationship. Not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the week… And suddenly not enough years in Hayate's life. Everything had been put on high speed suddenly, as emphasized by the engagement ring Yugao still harbored in her little apartment.

But then, everything had just stopped.

Yugao always wondered if the way the Sand nin had killed Hayate would have been more merciful than what his own body would have eventually done to him.

64: The potential for shock value was just huge.
66: 18,100,000 ryo equals about $20,000, U.S.
69 and 70: I have an evil mind, I know. I just couldn't resist.