"Whooo're theese brrats? They couldeeen't look after a pet cactus, let alone liddle ole meee…"
Naruto's nose twitched. He never forgot a scent, and he knew this one.
---
He screwed his eyes shut in concentration, but regretted it immediately. Thousands of incoherent thoughts streamed through his mind, so fast and furious that he could see them forming and flitting across his mind. The first thing he'd seen forever. He was mentally analysing this smell and comparing it against all the thousands he had tracked and catalogued in the back of his head.
Shattered glass.
His eyes clicked open after that one thought. All processes in his mind stopped at this one simple action. His cerulean eyes, trimmed around the pupil with deepest purple, flicked up to the man sauntering through the door. His somewhat simplified brain processes offered him one option, so he took it. Using his considerable speed, amplified slightly with chakra, he appeared in front of the man in under a second. The jinchuuriki wrapped his hand around the man's throat, and pressed down hard, but not quite hard enough to stop his breathing. All this happened in less than two seconds.
"Naruto!" yelled the Sandaime, "What are you doing? This is the man you are supposed to protect!" Naruto growled at this word, and his hand tightened on the old man's neck. Unseen, a single unsheathed claw trailed around the back of his neck, drawing blood. To his credit, the man did not cry out, but by hearing his heartbeat, he could tell how terrified he was.
"Do you like that your life is at my mercy? My infallible mercy… I could end your life right now." The Sandaime sucked his breath in. How could he explain this, if Naruto's client died by his own hands? "However," he whispered, his fingernails digging in more with each word, his eyes now ringed with red, and a husky bloodlust present in his tone, "It would be nothing," he trailed his fingers down the back of the old man's neck, fingernails still imbedded, ripping his flesh in the kind of cut that never heals, "Nothing!, Compared to what your actions have done to me these years." He withdrew from the man, discreetly wiping his claws on his yukata sleeve. He toned his voice down to a whisper and leaned in so close the man could feel this… thing's breath on his ear. "I think I will let you suffer. I will watch, and wait. You will wait. But hear me now. I will get my revenge, one way or another. May it be a slip of the hand during 'training', a 'nuke-nin', or an unfortunate incident after the mission, I. Will. Kill. You." He withdrew from the man, and bowed to the Hokage, but not apologising once. The bridge builder wondered for a second if his yukata were dyed from blood.
"Naruto," the Sandaime said gingerly, "If you don't want to take this mission…" He stopped when he saw the blond's hand raise into the air, silencing him.
"I know what I want. I will do whatever it takes to get it. Even," he snarled, "No-good bridge builders. Even the one that made me… this." The Hokage's reassuring smile faded at the edges. The rest of the room looked on, perplexed.
"Don't even think it." The blond said before the Hokage could open his mouth. "I have never been wrong." He paused, grimacing. His mouth opened and shut for a few seconds, a few 'ak's coming out before he managed to choke out "I said it already. I will… accept the mission." The Hokage sighed a big mushroom-cloud sigh.
"Then it is settled. Meet at the Great Gate in one hour. Say your goodbyes. Pack your things for at least a month. Kakashi, you were meant to be there two hours before now, so don't be late." Everyone filed out of the room, except the two confused genin.
"Don't we get a say in any of this???"
-time skip no jutsu-
-タイムスキップノジュツ-
At the gate, Kakashi was arriving, a surprising 5 minutes late, and Team 7 was finally managing to get to grips with Kakashi's sense of timing.
"Okay team, let's go!" he yelled, expecting someone to be angry at his lateness. No response. "Okay then… Aren't I late?" Everyone present sweat-dropped, and Sasuke managed to grunt a 'no'. The copy-nin sighed, and sunk into depression, kneeling down in the corner, sobbing out his troubles.
-time skip no jutsu-
-タイムスキップノジュツ-
By the time Kakashi was finished being all emo, Naruto was about to jab his eye with an extra-sharp chopstick. It was now officially his favourite past-time. However, just as he was pulling his arm away for the strike, the copy-nin jumped up, evading the attack, and yelled, "ARE WE LATE YET?"
Maybe he should try a sharpened pencil next time, for better results.
"YEEESSSSSSSS!" was the reply from an irate Sakura.
Maybe a senbon… but he might have to pay damages… and he didn't want to do that…
"Can we just get this show on the road now?" asked (another) irate avenger.
"For once, I agree with him." Naruto, annoyed, settled with poking Kakashi in the small of the back, causing him to almost topple over. (Try this. If you know someone who slouches a lot, jab them really hard in the small of the back when they're slouching, and they'll either be forced to sit up, or fall over.) The Intrepid Team 7 (pfft!) strode through the gates into the rest of the world. Yay!
-time skip no jutsu-
-タイムスキップノジュツ-
Sakura was bored. Sasuke was bored. More importantly, though, Naruto was bored. He was bored of being serene. Why did he have to be serene anyway? Why? And why was it so hot? Were the elements conspiring against him or something? And why in the hell was that bridge builder looking at him all the time? So what if he left a scar on the back on his neck? He didn't have to look at him like that did he? 'What if he's a paedophile…?'
…
Leaving that thought…
-Somewhere else-
Orochimaru sneezed violently, spraying into the open arm of his current experiment, and knocking Kabuto's glasses off his nose. The glass in the viewing windows of some of his subjects, and some of the containers for liquid-sustained subjects, cracked into thousands of pieces. Chaos was everywhere. The experiments that were still alive ran out through the windows towards the light, and the dead ones… Well…
Orochimaru found himself on the receiving end of a look.
"What?" Kabuto gave him another look, one which would have been a lot more sinister if he still had his glasses. "You didn't expect this village to be called 'sound' if its leader didn't have some awesome sound-related abilities, like breaking glass, right?"
Kabuto sighed. It was going to be a long day.
-Back to the main storyline-
Damn, it was hot. And not just hot, either. It was boiling. Without another thought, the jinchuuriki reached down to his obi and pulled out a blood red…
'Fan?' Sakura melted. No. Really. Well, practically. And then she proceeded to sidle up to Naruto to catch just one waft of cool air, but, instead, she nearly got her head chopped off. Yes, it would seem that Naruto was practising his kenjutsu style, anrui, 案類, or silent tears. Somehow he managed to work his kata white still walking forwards. Amazing. The powers-that-be at work –cough-. Of course, no-one realised that he was actually doing anything. To them, he was just fooling around with some fans, but details schmetails.
That was, until Kakashi got jabbed in his 'one good eye' by a particularly awry fan, after which Naruto flicked the fan open, made a downward slash into the air, and sashayed away, into the distance, aka 5 metres. Saddened, Sakura moved back over to Sasuke and resumed pestering him for a date. Yeah right.
---
54 rejections and still going strong, the group was rapidly losing their will to live. Kakashi was nursing his now-bleeding eye, and wondering why in the seven hells he took on a team of genin anyway. It was just after Sakura got rejected another time when he felt a dangerous chakra spike from the left… in the ground? He turned, trying not to get anyone's attention, very slightly to the left to see what was happening. Unfortunately the blood rather impaired his vision in his right eye, and his hitai-ite rendered his left eye practically useless, so he couldn't do much when he saw – or rather, didn't see – a chain coming at him and wrapping around his body very slightly, in fact all he could do was to look on in terrified awe as he saw a yellow flash, and was pulled out of their clasp by an unknown someone. With the vision of his sensei in his eyes, he passed out cold.
Who ever knew that Kakashi was a wuss?
---
Naruto was carrying a dead weight.
The attack went rather smoothly on their account. After Kakashi's fainting spell for no apparent reason, the team managed to contain and interrogate the newly-named 'Demon Brothers'. While Sakura managed to keep her lunch down, Naruto and Sasuke managed to find out that they worked under the shipping magnate Gatou, after making them cough up pieces of their lungs, and were after the old man Tazuna. Pfft. As if he cared. Oh wait, he did, because he had to kill Tazuna. No-one else. Kukukuku-
"-Kukukukukukukukukuku" etc.
Everyone backed away, slowly, except from the unconscious Kakashi, but you had to make sacrifices in the shinobi world. Sasuke, Sakura and Tazuna all paid their last respects to the copy-nin's sanity, and headed off for the wave.
-A/N no jutsu-
Meh… these chapters are just getting shorter and shorter. Sorry for the late upload, but I had to go to my karate lessons, and then I went up to London for my sister's performance platform (which was great), and THEN I had to catch up on all my GCSE course-work. I think I am failing my life. Oh well.
Please do review if you read it and like. Or don't like. Or whatever. Because I seriously doubt that only just over 1 of the people who read this like it. Or think it's worth of writing one or two words for. Please? Make an old (pfft!) woman happy?
