The Marauders _ a Naruto fanfiction by 30CK ~ troutpeoples
Chapter Ten
"-are you even listening to what I am saying to you, Naruto?"
"Should I be?"
Whack!
"Ow! What's the big deal, anyway? He deserved it!"
"Whether you think he deserved it or not, you should not-" Whack! "-humiliate your teacher like that!" Whack!
"OW! Give me that clipboard!"
"Teacher's only!" Whack! "And if you paid attention, I wouldn't have to use it!"
"Even if I paid attention, which I'm not, I wouldn't be listening to a word you're saying!"
"That doesn't even make sense!"
"Shut up! It does too!"
Whack!
"Don't tell me to shut up!"
"I tell you to shut up all the time!"
"And you got punished for it!" Whack! "You never got that connection!"
"I got it just fine, but your 'punishments' were always so low-key that it never really phased me!"
"'Never phased you'? What about that talking-to I gave you after you glued Mizuki's hair to the top of the classroom doorframe?"
"What, that 'respecting the teachers, even if they're assholes' bit? Pu-lease, that was a lame lecture anyway – and I was, like, seven at the time and besides, those were fake tears!"
"That was not what I said in that lecture, and those tears certainly didn't look fake!"
"You need to hang around more women, then, if you couldn't tell those were fake – I've done better trying to weasel a meal out of some merchants from out-of-town! That lecture was, off the top of my head, the worst performance I've ever done! And that's including that time during my second week, when I came crying to you because 'some of the bigger kids stole my lunch'!"
"You – they-"
"They were assholes, so I lied – I never had lunch at the Academy. And they were idiots, so they were too stupid to get in a word edgewise or think of denying the whole thing until after you had already informed them of their punishment later that day."
"Naruto…"
Whack!
"OW! What the hell is wrong with you!"
"You lied to a teacher!" Whack!
"I lie to everyone! What made you think you were special enough to be an exception!"
"I was an adult in charge of my students' welfare and I expected them to be honest with me!" Whack! "And I expect you to act like an adult now!"
"OW! Dammit, Iruka-sensei, pick a different fucking spot to hit – I'm getting a bruise!" Whack! "OW! Fucking hell!"
"I've told you before about how I don't tolerate swearing!"
"Shut up! Gimme that!"
"Hey!" Whack! "Ow!"
"Ha! How'd ya like that! Hurts, dun'nnit!"
"No hitting your teacher!"
"You ain't my teacher anymore!" Whack!
"You haven't stopped calling me 'sensei'!" Smack!
"OW! You hit me in the ear! I – hey!" Whack! "OW! O-kay, quit with that damn clipboard!" Whack! "Do you have any idea how immature you look!" Whack! "Ow! Well, at least you hit a different spot that – oi oi oi, not again, I give, alright? Okay, I give, I'm done. Just…put that goddamn thing down already!" Smack! "Ow! I said I give up! What's wrong with you!"
"I just told you about swearing."
"You have issues!"
"I'm a shinobi. It's a given that we have issues."
"That's…!...true, actually, yeah; that's very, very true."
"Are you finished?"
"Hey, I've been finished; you were the one going slap-happy!"
"I can continue smacking you around, if you want to continue acting like a child."
"No! Nope, I'm fine. I'm good. Perfectly adult, see?"
"You'd have to be taller to be 'perfectly adult', Naruto-"
"Hey!"
"-but I suppose it's as close as we'll get right now."
"You're mean."
"I gave you my ramen."
"…okay, so you're a god. But you're a mean god."
"That works."
Ichiraku Ayame smiled to herself as she watched Iruka-san lead Naruto out of the little alleyway; Iruka-san had dragged him over there after Naruto made a scene trying to run away and, failing that, shouting obscenities and screaming rape. When no one moved to help him, not even the civilians passing by the eatery (everyone knew of the nice scarred chuunin that worked at the ninja school, and that little trouble-making blonde brat), he began swearing at them, at which point Iruka picked him by the seat of his pants and threw him into the alley.
The two began to walk away from the ramen stand, and she watched with a smile playing idly on her lips as Naruto stopped and slapped Iruka on the back of the head; she was sure that, if he told her about it later, he would edit out the fact that he had to jump to reach the back of his old sensei's head. The older shinobi glared down at him, and the younger stared him down (up?) defiantly and said something, stubbornly crossing his arms. Iruka shook his head and waved him off.
Naruto, grinning again, spun around fully and, cupping both hands around his mouth, yelled, "We'll see you later, Ayame-chan! This tight-assed bastard says I still gotta get punished; for some reason, he likes including me in all of his twisted little feti-woah!" He abandoned his diatribe when Iruka produced the clipboard once again and swung for his head. He danced out of the way of the hand that tried to grab and pull him away immediately after and yelled "I'll be back for more later!" towards her before yelping, ducking again, and dashing off, the Academy instructor hot on his heels.
"Naruto! Get back here!"
"You'll never catch me, coppers!"
Ayame laughed until the orange-clad hellraiser vanished from sight.
"You're too fucking cheery too fucking early," a female voice grunted as the paper curtains were pushed aside and the next customer stooped in to the stand. She thumped onto the closest stool and let her head fall on to the counter, sending a wave of rust-red hair rippling over the smooth wood.
"My sincerest apologies, Goubatsu-san," Ayame said, eyebrow raised and an amused smile at her lips.
"Oh, wipe that stupid fucking smile off your face, girly," the jounin growled from beneath her curtain of scraggily, knot-filled hair without looking up. "And why aren't you making my usual yet? I've been here a whole fifteen-goddamn-seconds already."
Ayame sighed before calling back, "Dad! Come entertain your favorite customer!"
"I don't have a favorite customer!" came the reply from the back.
"Sure you do! Tall, silver hair, wants to be a pirate when he grows up…" Teuchi was there in an instant, brandishing a ladle and a knife threateningly.
"You stay away from my daughter!" he shouted before realizing that there was no Hatake Kakashi in sight.
Ayame burst out laughing, and her lone customer grumbled incoherent curse words and banged a fist against the counter in an unvoiced – but certainly evident – command for food to be brought out already because it was taking far too fucking long. Teuchi spun and glared at his child, and she only laughed harder. He stalked past her and vanished into the back.
"Oh, dad – don't pout!" she laughed.
"I'm a grown man! We don't 'pout'! We stew, we brood, and then we blow up!"
Two dirty hands slammed onto the counter as an angry kunoichi – although she refused to be addressed as such, saying that the word 'kunoichi' sounded too 'disgustingly cutesy and too fucking effeminate' for her to stand – stood up to her towering height of 5'11", almost spitting fire as she snarled, "Make my fucking meal, old man!"
"If you can't wait, then go dig in a garbage can, you bloody psycho!" Teuchi yelled back. Ayame held up her hands in a placating gesture when the woman's hands curled dangerously around the edge of the counter, sending spiderweb cracks dancing along the polished wood.
"He didn't mean it," she said quickly. "He's making it right now – he may be stupid enough to insult a customer, but he's not stupid enough to keep someone's order from them. Sit down, please…and try not to ruin the establishment too much?" she added, looking down at the counter and frowning as a chunk of wood fell to the ground.
Goubatsu stared the teenager down, her lips slowly relaxing from the beast-like snarl they had been in. When her expressions was somewhere in the realm of normal, she spat, "He's got six minutes," and dropped heavily back onto her stool.
Ayame arched an eyebrow. "That's one more minute than last time," she observed.
"I can cut it down to two if I wanted to, so don't fucking push me."
"Haaaai!" the ramen chef cried, giving the jounin a quick half-salute. "Thank you for your charity, Goubatsu-sama!"
"Stop that shit."
Ayame chuckled to herself. Goubatsu came around Ichiraku's Ramen every month or so and, even though not a visit passed without the older woman making some sort of threat against their physical and/or mental health, hadn't gone through with any of those threats to date.
There were actually a surprising number of jounin that frequented her and her father's privately-owned food stand: Hatake Kakashi, for one, had just recently started up again – his tastes changed every month or so; she knew that he had been addicted to taiyaki for a good three-month-stretch, once. Mitarashi Anko made sure to stop by once a year to blow more than one paycheck on her orders – she ate more ramen than even Naruto cared to on that one day; she seemed to be celebrating something, but she could never really say what it was for; and whether that was because she didn't want to tell, or because she truly didn't know, was an opinion that had been up for grabs for a number of years.
Other occasional but loyal customers included Akimichi Chouza, who was always offering to buy Ichiraku's from them and move it to a more populated district, Sarutobi Asuma, who had taken a liking to it after having to babysit Naruto for 'Pops' one time almost eight years ago, and Namiashi Raido and Yamashiro Aoba, who liked dragging a lot of their chuunin buddies over – with sake – to have a little party whenever they got back from a joint mission.
Goubatsu showed up one or two times each month, cursed violently at the other customers to drive them all out, and promptly and nastily ordered two bowls of beef ramen. She'd always swear to cut off 'the old man's' balls if her order was even a minute late, but she always seemed to conveniently forget about that promise when the ramen was set in front of her a few minutes later than the timeframe she had set. She would quietly eat one of the bowls, pay for both of them – plus a larger-than-average tip for Ayame; she claimed it was for 'having the common sense to shut the fuck up' – and leave without a word, the second bowl sitting freely on the counter for whoever happened to show up next. And as soon as she stepped outside the entrance, she was back to her usual self and swearing about some shit-brained idiot letting their dog piss on the side of a fucking building.
According to several of the other cooks in town that Ayame talked to on occasion, she did this at at least three other places – an old, nearly-out-of-business tempura stand was one, The Bukemono (one of the higher-class restaurants within Konoha) was another, and a little privately-owned sushi place over by the library was the last.
"Why the hell haven't you guys been shut down yet?" the woman in question asked, her voice like gravel. "The shit I gotta put up with to get two bowls of your slop is fucking outrageous, and you're goddamn lucky I don't come here for the taste of it."
"Well," Ayame replied, calm in the face of the faux-hostility; people had to maintain images sometimes, she understood, "I suppose because people still like our 'slop'. And if you wanted the wait to be shorter, you shouldn't be so picky." The redheaded jounin insisted on a new pot, new water, and fresh noodles to be used for her ramen.
"Hey, I tolerate your swill just enough when you do use fresh shit – I'd never bother even comin' through the fucking curtain if you gave me some recycled, second-hand bowl of filth."
"Still, is a newly-washed pot completely necessary for two bowls of beef ramen? We have to put a hold on everyone else's orders when someone does something like that," Ayame told her.
Goubatsu sneered nastily, showing off every single one of her too-sharp teeth. "That's why I tell everybody to shove the fuck off when I get in here. Quit'cher bitchin'." She sat back on her stool and tapped a filthy nail on the counter.
"I wouldn't call it that; 'polite objection', perhaps."
"Pussy." Ayame glared at her and received an ugly snort in return. "Stop bein' all nice and proper and shit. Grates on my nerves more than the wait does." She shrugged and began scratching a gouge into the wood. "Pretty fucking sure you can see I don't give a rat's ass. Unless you're blind or fucking retarded, which is always a possible with you civilians."
Ayame flushed an unattractive red and audibly ground her teeth in anger.
Grinning (and showing just how much she cared about dental hygiene), Goubatsu kept goading the chef/waitress. "I mean, why else wouldn't you be able to do the shit we ninja do? What's the opposite of evolution, d'you think?"
"De-evolution," Ayame spat out, holding back half a dozen swearwords.
"Ooh, a smart girl, eh?" The smile turned into a mocking leer. "The fuck're you still hanging around this shitter for if you're intelligent enough to know fancy words like that? Why, with your civilian status, you could aim high and become a librarian!"
Ayame's hands were gripping a ladle so hard her knuckles were white. This did not escape the redheaded jounin's notice, and she delighted in it. And continued to poke and prod, gouge and slash and hack away without restraint.
"Of course," she said, voice dripping with contempt, "you still wouldn't be able to handle the jutsu scrolls – which makes that job just as useless to us as the next one." She yawned once, long and wide like a large cat, and snorted. "Why-"
"Shut. The. Fuck. Up," Ayame bit out. The ladle in her hands suddenly wasn't quite the right shape anymore.
Goubatsu grinned widely like a teacher with a dull-witted student that just got the lesson assigned. Which, in her twisted logic, it was.
"Good girl," Goubatsu said approvingly, dismissing the fact that the young woman wanted little more than to shove a ladle through her eye socket.
"Fuck you."
The grin only got wider. "Why isn't my food ready yet?" she asked playfully, hoping to get another few sentences of swearwords from the normally-clean-mouthed girl.
"Because you're a finicky bitch who gets a kunai in your cunt if something doesn't go exactly how you want it."
Goubatsu had been coming to Ichiraku's for over ten years, and had never once heard a curse word issued by its owners. And now, suddenly, she gets four in less than a minute?
It was about goddamn time.
"Old man!" she barked out, the grin only fading by a small margin. "What the fuck's takin' so long with my food?"
"Water doesn't boil in fifteen seconds! Be patient!"
"It does if you can make a fire hot enough – oh, wait," she said, leering at Ayame again, "you civilians can't do that."
"And you ninja couldn't make a decent meal if your lives depended on it!" came Teuchi's voice from the back. "Stop heckling my daughter, woman!"
"I'm gonna do whatever the fuck I want to in my free time; make my shit faster, and I wouldn't have all this free time to tear your daughter in two!"
"This is art! You don't rush art!"
"The fuck I don't!"
"Screw you!"
"Hurry the fuck up!"
"I can't believe we passed! Oh, I'm so excited, aren't you, Sasuke-kun? This means we're actual shinobi now! Well, not that we weren't shinobi before, I mean, but now that we're officially on a genin team, we'll actually be accepted by others as actual shinobi instead of just kids. And Kakashi-sensei is supposed to be a really amazing shinobi, too – did you know that he managed to learn and successfully perform over one thousand jutsu since he got promoted to jounin? If he weren't such a stupid pervert, then I might actually be excited about getting taught by him." She wrinkled her nose. "By the way, what do you suppose he meant when he said that he'd probably never think about or see us again if we had failed, except for Naruto? I mean, I know that Naruto's gotten in enough trouble before that Hokage-sama had some shinobi in ANBU follow him around – I can't even count the number of times when the idiot would try and jump out of the classroom window in the middle of a lecture and get tackled by one of them – and Kakashi-sensei was in ANBU before he became a jounin-sensei, so maybe he still does some work for them on the side? Or do you think that he was hinting about how he was impressed with Naruto's performance during the test, and would have taken him on as his apprentice? Oh, that would have been unfair! If anyone deserves to be taken on as somebody's apprentice, it would be you, Sasuke-kun! Favoring Naruto no Baka over my Sasuke-kun…ha!"
"Sakura."
She perked up immediately, almost like a dog catching the sound of her master's whistle, a brilliant smile stretching across her face. "Yes, Sasuke-kun?" she asked happily, content for him to be bearing her presence so well.
"Shut up."
Her smile dimmed, but she kept it up even as she said in a subdued voice, "Okay, Sasuke-kun."
She would never say a bad word about Sasuke-kun, but…well…she did wish he didn't tell her to 'shut up'. It really wasn't a polite way at all to tell someone to be quiet. Even though her Sasuke-kun wasn't all that nice or polite in the first place, she did know that a gentle and caring soul rested just beneath the pale torso of her beloved, hidden underneath rippling muscles and an icy, prickly exterior. She just had to keep chipping away at it, bit by bit, until she broke that exterior and managed to spread her hands all over that mass of muscles and…uh…she meant the soul. That's right. Until she broke that icy, prickly exterior and managed to find and bring out that kind, compassionate soul he had buried so deeply in his bosom. She just had to be patient.
She could be patient. She could be anything, if it were for Sasuke-kun.
She wondered if he was proud of her for playing her part in getting the bells. She hoped so; she hoped for it so terribly. Anything to gain his attention, anything to draw out a kind word or a compliment from him, anything.
She could be patient for him.
She just wished it wasn't so hard.
It was nearly six hours later that a pooped-out Naruto collapsed onto his bed and stared at the ceiling. He continued staring at the ceiling until his tired eyes made the grains of the paneling begin to move around and his head started hurting again. And then he stared some more.
For his punishment of…well…everything he had done that day, really…Iruka-sensei had forced him, like the good ol' days, into cleaning the Konoha Shinobi Academy from top (the roof, where he had to retile that little bit that hung over the double-doored entrance and sweep the concrete like a motherfucker) to bottom (the basement, which held the records of every student that had ever been in enrolled in the school in one gigantic, heaping mess, which he had had to completely reorganize again), along with everything in between (scrubbing down toilets, sweeping and mopping classrooms, washing windows, taking out trash, removing dirty or profane drawings/words written on the desks – although, truthfully, he may have 'accidentally' forgotten to do that one and, instead, added a few of his own – and the like).
It hadn't taken long into the man's punishment for Naruto to attempt to skive off through the use of a clever distraction and a Kage Bunshin or two. Unfortunately, Iruka-sensei was well-acquainted with the blonde's habit of trying to escape his detentions, as well as the 'clever' distractions that he continuously tried at (like the one that morning), and as such had grabbed both Kage Bunshin and slammed their heads together, dispelling them, before the real Naruto even reached the closest window. And then he had hummed and hawed with a seventeen minute lecture about 'raping what you sew', or something – Naruto hadn't really been paying attention at the time – before handing him a toothbrush and directing him towards the nearest bathroom without a window.
"He shouldn't be able to do that to me anymore," Naruto whined weakly. He flopped his head to the side and prompted, "Right?" A partially-unrolled scroll lay about half-a-meter from his head, in roughly the same position that it had been holding for the last six-and-a-half hours, since Naruto dropped it off before changing and heading out for some ramen, since before he was abducted by his former sensei and punished unfairly. From his position, he could see a dark blob upon the paper, but he couldn't make out anything it said. So he just righted his head and began his ceiling-staring anew, muttering an assumed-agreement, "Right."
After another minute he heaved himself on to his side, tucking his arm under his chest and levering himself up with it, and got a proper look at the Shinobi's Scroll. A frown creased itself across his lips as he asked, "How d'you guys think I did today?"
The previous lines, which were responses to his complaining about Iruka's superiority over him and went something like Hawkeye tells the reader to just shut up and cry himself to sleep, Spitfire tells the kid to quit his bitching since he did deserve his punishment somewhat, and Irons tells the owner to nut up or shut up, were wiped away with the next lines of their input.
Hawkeye needs a few minutes to formulate a reply that manages to capture the sheer amount of naïve idiocy that the reader has excreted thus far.
Sparky is getting tired of telling Hawkeye-san that he needs to treat the owner with more respect…and he says that he believes the owner did a marvelous job – assuming they are speaking about the Bell Test and not about how the owner dealt with his Academy Instructor. Because even Sparky has to admit that that was kind of sad, though slightly humorous as well, if for nothing else but the utter ridiculousness of the situation.
Naruto groaned loudly when he read the first half of Sparky's reply. He collapsed back onto the bed, facing the ceiling, and fisted his hands over his closed eyelids, groaning again before complaining, "'Marvelous'? It didn't turn out anywhere near that well. I could've accepted 'good', or 'cool as shit', but 'marvelous'? You're giving the entire thing far too much credit, Sparks." He paused to take a breath. "And since I assume you're going to ask why I think that, I'll go with: it didn't freaking work right! That bowling ball was supposed to connect and split in two, not miss by thirty four thousand meters and cause almost half of the prepared traps to stay untriggered! Sure, it was all badass and stuff during it, but looking back on it now – jeez, it was almost a disaster! And not a good one, either, because a good disaster would have meant that TGH went off completely without a hitch. Which it didn't!"
He swung his feet over the side of his bed and lifted himself, running his fingers through his knotted hair as he kept speaking. "We got lucky for a lot of the other traps – the ones that we could still set off manually after the operation began were the ones that got missed, for the most part. Some of them, like trap numbers sixty-six and sixty-seven, couldn't be set off by anything except 'Akimichi vs Anyone Else'. Since twenty-two screwed up, traps like sixty-six and sixty-seven, and subsequently eighty-eight through ninety-three, were unable to be used. I still have a shit-ton of stuff that I need to clean up from Training Ground Seven." He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "It'd be cool if I just left it all there for a while, and it got assigned as a D-ranker. That'd be one D-rank mission that I'd actually like." A grin flashed across his lips as he looked back to the Shinobi's Scroll. "Just think of all the things I could do to Sasuke and Sakura!"
The grin only grew further, and he collapsed back onto his mattress in a fit of laughter.
Once it passed – something which took a while longer than it had any sane right to – he ran both hands through his hair and gave his head a wide side-to-side shake and let out a heavy sigh.
"Okay, so…the only thing I can think to say about TGH is that it was way too complicated to work as well as we hoped it could; lesson learned, never make something on that large a scale ever again." He glanced over at the scroll. "And say whatever you have to say without an insult, Hawkeye – I admitted it sucked."
Hawkeye…Hawkeye can hardly contain his surprise that the idiot reader showed an iota of intelligence, in realizing his faults. Hawkeye has to admit that he is almost impressed.
"Well…that's good news," Naruto said carefully. "I think."
Irons wants to try it again!
"Didn't I just say 'never'?"
Hawkeye says that Irons never really got things until they were repeated at least three different times. And even then, those things then had to be simplified to the third-grade level – make a sound like a doggy, put your pants back on, and eat all the food on your plate to graduate.
Spitfire liked how many times 'kashi got hit with shit; the paint, the paintballs, the catfood, the cats…
Something about what she said rattled around in his wiped-out brain, and it took a long moment of hard, concentrated thinking to figure out what it was. Kakashi…shit…paint…cats-
"Cats!" Naruto exclaimed, leaping to his feet. Horrible images slammed into his brain as he realized that he had forgotten something at the training area – a key player to the entire prank-trap, someone who, if they hadn't been coerced into joining in, would have made the entire thing impossible.
"Son of a – Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" A clone erupted into existence, and Naruto was suddenly in a much closer proximity with the floor than he was a second ago.
"You idiot!" the clone roared at him, still brandishing its tightly-clenched fist. "How could you forget her like that – so cold, and careless! Where's your heart, man?"
"I thought you were going to take care of her! You were the one who was all cuddly with her the entire time – when you were supposed to be working, I might add!" Naruto shot back, rubbing the back of his lightly-bruised head as he clambered up to his feet and stared himself down defiantly.
"It's not my fault she's a ball of fluffy cuteness!"
"No, it's not," the original admitted, "but it is your fault that you didn't have the self-control to stay away from her for more than five minutes at a time!"
"Are we really going to get into this sort of argument again?"
Naruto just sort of blinked at the apparent non-sequitor. The anger and testosterone dropped a notch and he asked in an almost-bewildered tone, "What the hell are you talking about?"
The clone facepalmed. It spoke around its fingers, voice muffled a little against its palm. "The whole 'you're me, so anything I do is your fault because it's really you doing it' argument," it said.
"Oh."
"Yeah. Remember that, now, do you?"
"Yeah…Well, when you put it that way…" Naruto rubbed his neck and gave small, sheepish grin.
"I do."
"So you're saying that I don't have any self-control, because you showed an amazing lack of self-control yourself?"
"Yes."
"So if we have the same lack of self-control, why did I stay away from her when you pounced on her and proceeded to strangle her?"
"I did not strangle her," the clone huffed, crossing its arms, looking away with a pout, and completely ignoring the question posed.
"I know a few people who would feel that it could be reported as animal cruelty."
"Liar. Besides, again, you'd just be reporting yourself. So there," it reminded him before sticking out his tongue and blowing a very confident and very final raspberry.
Naruto frowned and said, "Cat."
"Oh, shit!" The clone quickly retracted his tongue and spun towards the window. "You better be here when I get back – and you better hope that she's in one piece and well-fed when I find her, or there'll be hell to pay!" Without bothering to wait for an answer, the clone took two long strides and leapt out of the window, being careful not to touch any part of the dust-laden sill.
Naruto shook his head. "There's something wrong with me, I swear."
A soft hum filled the air, white noise against the quiet background, the whispers of a million flurrying pairs of wings and the gentle scratching of a million brittle forelimbs giving life to the darkness. The forest around the house rustled with activity nigh-invisible to the naked eye, causing the trees and the grass to sway gently in the windless night.
The rippling night was interrupted by a sharp clack. There was a brief disturbance as a million insects of all shapes and sizes momentarily froze before passing the noise off as unimportant. In the middle of the immense forest sat a collection of houses and homes of varying sizes (depending upon the quantity of occupants within) but only one shape, and it was inside one of them that the offending noise had come from.
A smooth, pale hand rested tiredly on top of a small desk, thin, lithe fingers lingering over a pair of very round, very black sunglasses. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the hand pulled away and lifted up, running once, twice, through a mass of tangled, knotted dark brown hair. From there, the fingers lowered and rested upon the bridge of a nose, where they massaged the area for a few moments, eyes closed tightly, before they, too, pulled away.
Shino opened his eyes and allowed them to see. A hundred different eyes saw, and a million different images processed through his brain as he turned away from the desk and headed towards his bed. His jacket was easily and efficiently removed and hooked primly upon the wall next to five just like it, his sandals lined against the wall beneath.
He slid into his bed and allowed the buzzing – both of the forest and wilderness around him, and of the colony that had begun to settle down underneath his smooth, pale flesh – to wash over him.
Arms held stiffly at his sides, legs straight out, Shino allowed the murmur of the insect life to purge his body of its tension. He gradually began to relax, limbs curving in closer to his body, head rolling to one side to stare at the suffocating emptiness that was his room; it didn't used to be a problem, the emptiness, but recently he had begun to wish for something, something that he personally owned that would mark the room as his, and his alone. But that wasn't how it worked in the Aburame clan.
Things were traditional, Spartan in a way; they were kept the same, they were simply-ruled, and they were possibly going to stay like that for a long time. A colony did not develop varying personalities; difference in a colony caused its destruction from within. Different brought change, and for the famed kikai-using clan of Konoha, change was frowned upon. To be different was to be punished – beaten, broken, until the difference was the same once again, the same as every other one.
Shino sighed aloud.
Clan problems notwithstanding, Shino was not in the best of moods. A large percentage of his distress stemmed from the meal his family had shared with two Aburame elders, which had begun one hour and forty-seven minutes ago, and ended twenty-three minutes ago; Shino had assisted his mother in cleaning the dishes and helped his father to store his substantial colony for the night before retiring to his own room.
A fair number of the Elders, much like a fair number of the population of Konoha, held on to their irrational dislike for Uzumaki Naruto; the blonde had come up in conversation no less than three times in the course of the meal, to Shino's irritation. They were subtle jabs, a side-comment with just enough emotion to be picked up as hostile, and they were easily picked out from the rest of the conversation, which ranged from the two newborns of the clan who had not yet been introduced to their colony of kikai beetles, to the contemptibly miniscule amount of missions being taken by the clan, to the oncoming heat wave that was supposed to be sweeping across Konohagakure and how it would affect their colonies.
At one point, Shino had attempted to stand up for the blonde by referring to his passing of Hatake Kakashi's infamous "Bell Test", but the point was brushed off with the ease of an insect taking to flight. He had refrained from speaking more than necessary after that point. His mother and father had noticed, but had not mentioned anything after Elders Sago and Hainoki took their leave – although his mother did touch him briefly upon the shoulder before he left the kitchen. Physical contact was apparently supposed to help. It did not.
He could not fathom that it had only been one day since he had graduated the Shinobi Academy. It felt longer.
He would have to speak to Naruto soon; he could not put a conversation off for long, or the opportunity might be lost – the life of a shinobi was a dangerous one, and it was not uncommon for a genin to die on their first few missions. In fact, according to records, there seemed to be a definite trend that supported that conclusion: deaths were highest in the first few months before they eased slowly off, only leaping abruptly when there were sudden changes in mission rank.
But how would he initiate such a conversation? The question had been a vexing one, and had followed him the entire day without a valid answer. There were too many paths that it could take and too many possibilities for error for him to just walk up and talk to him about the Kyuubi out of the blue. There was a time and a place for everything, and if he had to wait for that setting, then he would. Shino was very patient.
He sighed again and moved his thoughts away from the blonde, and he closed his eyelids and allowed the comforting familiarity of the insect-filled night to wash over him once again.
Tenten took a deep breath and let herself fall to the grass. She slumped bonelessly against the training post behind her, the only one – the only thing at all, really – that wasn't stuck with twenty-plus kunai.
"It's not fair," she muttered, wiping her brow with the back of her hand and wincing when sweat and grime rubbed into the open cuts and blisters that littered her hand. She twisted her head sharply and was rewarded with a somewhat-satisfying crick. "Being the best ain't all it's cracked up to be, huh?" she said out loud to the clearing as she tore a kunai out from the post just above her head. Idly, she began twirling and twisting it through her fingers, letting the ash, dirt, and splinters worm their way into her wounds and hissing in pain when they stung sharply.
The pain made her feel a little less pathetic, took her mind off her melancholy for a moment.
She wondered if all geniuses, all of the most skilled in their field of choice, were as miserable as she was right now. She thought of Neji and the year-younger Uchiha kid and decided that yes, yes they were. Strangely, the same thought did little to improve her mood.
What the hell was she supposed to do for training anymore? She could hit a target a hundred times out of a hundred, whether static or moving or flying or whatever-the-hell-they-did, she could do the same with her fucking eyes closed!
Well, okay, it was closer to eighty of a hundred with her eyes closed, but seriously, when the hell would she ever need to worry about having to improve on that? If she were blindfolded or otherwise sight-impaired, she would have undoubtedly been stripped of all her weapons in the first place; sure, 'weapons' was really a loose term for someone like Tenten, but the fact remained that if she were captured, she'd have been stripped of everything, down to the last scraps of thinly-razor-tipped slips of paper she had hidden on her.
Weapons could be anything, from trees and buildings and anvils to things as simple as fists, a ball of yarn, and a carton of milk. It all depended on how they were used.
Tenten sighed heavily and swore under her breath. She scratched an itch on the back of her head with the chipped kunai blade and sighed. What was next for her? Genjutsu was a bust. Her taijutsu was solid; a sort of blend between the Academy's basics, Jyuuken kata from what she'd gleaned from sparring with her Hyuuga teammate for over a year, a hard defense after putting up with Lee for even longer than Neji, and a little something she'd had to invent herself which revolved around her weapons use. Ninjutsu was all that was left, aside from fuuinjutsu – she had a few simple seals figured out so far since she'd started back in school, variations of bang tags, mostly – and she thought she had a fairly steady jutsu repertoire under her belt for when things got hairy, but…well, you should always have more than you think you need, as Gai was wont to say. Summarized, of course.
She groaned as she thought of the scrolls she'd have to read to find the few new jutsu that interested her. She hated reading that boring study crap.
It was at that approximate time, when she was just getting into lamenting over the hard and boring work of studying with a full head of steam, that she heard a snap of a twig. The moment she heard it, her arm was a blur of motion and the kunai was leaving her hand like a rocket, and it wasn't for another second until another sound from the same direction processed in her mind: meow.
"Holy f-"
She was on her feet and looking at where she'd thrown the knife before she finished her expletive. The kunai was stuck deep in the base of a tree a few meters away. There was no sign of the source of the meow, which she naturally assumed had come from a cat.
Meow.
Okay, that was definitely a cat. Unless the trees around Konoha had started mutating and making sounds like small, furry felines, which, while cool, was very, very unlikely.
"Uh…" How did one call to a cat, exactly? She was more of a dog person, to be honest. "Hello?" Yes, great – 'hello'. What the hell was she expecting, the cat to say 'hello' back? Jeez…
Meow.
Eh, close enough.
A small orangey ball of fluff peeked out from behind the tree and stared at Tenten. Tenten stared back at the small orangey ball of fluff.
Meow, said the small orangey ball of fluff.
"Yeah, hi," said Tenten.
And they stared.
Things would have gone on like this for another ten minutes, at least, if a very loud (both in clothing choice and in decibel level) character hadn't chose that moment to go barging through the forest and yelling what was assumed to be a name at the top of his considerable lungs.
"Raaaaan-raaaaaan!"
Just like that.
"Who the hell-?"
"Raaaaan-raaaaaan!"
The small orangey ball of fluff managed to perk up with what seemed to be eagerness and shrink away in pure unadulterated kitty terror at the same time. It was actually pretty impressive to see.
"Raaaaan-raaaaaan!"
"SHUT UP!" Tenten roared in the general direction of the screaming.
"Hello? Who's that? Is that you, Ranran? Wait – Ranran! You can talk!" A very loud laugh. "I have a talking cat! I am SO badass!"
"SHUT-! Waitaminute…" Tenten frowned. That blatant stupidity seemed to… "Naruto?"
"HA!" came another loud and ear-busting laugh. "My talking cat knows my name!"
Tenten's palm was quickly introduced to her face. "Naruto…stop yelling and get over here!"
"Where the hell is that?"
"You fail at becoming a ninja!"
"Hey! I do NOT!"
"Then get over here already!"
"Okay, okay, jeez…" A minute-and-a-half later, a tired-looking Naruto stumbled into her clearing and looked around. "Ranran?" was the first word from his mouth.
"Tenten."
He blinked. "Oh. Hi, Tenten." He pointed at her. "You're not Ranran."
"Naruto, we just really met today – don't make me hurt you." Naruto nodded rapidly, even as he looked around the clearing in not-at-all restrained enthusiasm. She sighed. "Ranran's the cat?"
"Yes!"
She nodded towards the tree. "It's hiding in fear behind there; I think it's scared of you – something I can sympathize with."
Naruto just gave a 'psh' noise and a nonchalant wave of his hand and walked behind the indicated tree. He emerged a few short seconds later with the identifiable cat held loosely in his arms. The furball appeared to be very comfortable with its current situation, no matter the horrors of its 'owner' or not.
Tenten just looked at it and said, "Your cat's as messed up as you are."
"Thank you." He raised an eyebrow and said, "So, uh, how've you been for the last…what, six hours?"
"Just about, yeah." She pursed her lips. "About the same as I was when you left, except more tired and cranky."
"I hadn't noticed."
Meow.
"I can hit cats, too, you know."
Back in his apartment, Naruto was fast asleep, and the four others continued their discussion – alone, unsuspecting, unsupervised. Their conversation would be carefully inked out before morning came, before their owner awoke.
Every scroll held its secrets; theirs' held more than most, and they made sure that those secrets stay hidden. They'd been doing so for years; they'd spent a long time sitting in the Hokage's Shadow Scroll Room, and there was very little that they had said at that time that had not been censored. One never knew who exactly would pick up their scroll next, and it was always better to be safe than sorry.
Hawkeye really doesn't know anymore; he didn't think that someone so clearly mentally-deficient as the reader could be so oddly tolerable.
Irons wants to know when exactly Hawkeye-teme became such a sap.
Sparky would really rather they steered the conversation back to the important stuff, and not the rival bickering.
Spitfire has to agree with Sparky – it really gets annoying when they're trying to have those serious conversations and all.
Sparky would prefer if Spitfire-san didn't mock him.
Spitfire was trying to get the original subject back from the idiots.
Irons would like to know the opinions of the others.
Hawkeye has no clue. The reader has given nothing to tell them who exactly he is.
Sparky says that they all know that the owner has no idea, either; he would have told them if he did.
Hawkeye doesn't know if he's intelligent enough to even know his own goddamn last name.
Sparky noticed a spiral design on the back of his jacket earlier, and on one of his shirts.
Spitfire says that that could be nothing at all, or it could be a very important something.
Irons adds that a spiral design was used in a lot of things – something as simple to household decorations, to the signature tattoo for the special forces unit of Amegakure, to one of a hundred different bases for fuuinjutsu. He says that it would be nearly impossible to tell if it really is anything.
Hawkeye very dryly states that it's a good thing the reader has two fully-functional legs and a local library, then.
Sparky already warned Hawkeye-san once; he can block others just as easily as they can block him.
Irons thinks he remembers that spiral somewhere, though…
Hawkeye assures him that he does, no matter how much of his own past he may not remember because of his distinct lack of attention to even the largest of details.
Irons would like to hear about it.
Spitfire says that she still can't believe how absentminded their Trapper continues to be.
Irons prefers the term 'Spiderman'.
Sparky replies that they all know he does; that doesn't mean they're going to use it. Sparky tells Irons that they will never, ever call him 'Spiderman', no matter how much he cries about it.
Hawkeye can assure the others that if there is anyone who can create tears while being a few strings of consciousness bound to a sheet of paper, it's Irons.
Irons would love to be the one to point out that they've gone off track again.
Spitfire assures Irons that that is going to be happening for as long as we're able to communicate together in a group like this, so they should get used to it already.
Irons would like to hear Hawkeye-teme's story about a spiral, and about Irons' forgotten memories due to blatant stupidity now.
Hawkeye can certainly grant such a request. He says that it began shortly after Hawkeye and Sparky no Baka first met at the Shinobi Academy…Mitokado-teme was still teaching there, if memory served…
I hope this lived up to what you guys normally expect of me (need to get back into the jive of things, from a four-month-long writer's block); some of it seems a little off to me, but I guess that's how some things go. I'm hungry.
The Navy is going to continue to be a problem in the way of my progress on this (well, all of them, really) story. For those who have ever gone through INSURV, and are members of Deck, Supply, Air, or Engineering, I hope you can sympathize.
Anyway, I am once again going against my better judgement and am writing more than one story at a time. At this time, they are The Marauders (duh), The Hour Unseen (midnighters x potter crossover, post-blue noon x chamber of secrets story, including Seer Harry, Mindcaster Luna, and Acrobat Cedric), and Lollipops! (artemis fowl fic that was supposed to be a oneshot involving Fowl after book 3 finding a lollipop on his desk, placed there by Holly Short as a sort of gift for him). Other smaller projects include a Potter fic about Luna Lovegood and how she's trying to rule the world, a megatokyo x naruto crossover fic of Epic lengths, a Sixth Sense-type naruto fic, and Mad Scientists Anonymous (where Mayuri of Bleach gets invited to group therapy for all those crazy wack-job lab geeks like Franken Stein of Soul Eater, Orochimaru of Naruto, Faust VII of Shaman King, and Shou Tucker of Fullmetal Alchemist).
And just for the sake of saying it: Shino is a badass.