I Am NOT Going Through Puberty Again!
A Naruto crackwut
By
EvilFuzzy9
Rating: T...ish
Genre: Humor/Parody
Characters/Pairings: Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Hinata; [NaruHina, SasuSaku]
Summary: Our heroes did not come from a future where everything has gone horribly wrong. They did not travel back in time to save the world from a bleak or miserable fate. As a matter of fact, all they want to do is find a way back home as soon as possible. [cracky, epilogue-compliant time travel fic]
Secret Ward
Timeline Gamma
The Future
"You're serious."
Shizune stared in dismay at Yamato, walking through the hospital hallway. She held a clipboard close to her chest, eyes wide and lips drawn back in something like a weak grimace. Distractedly, she brushed a loose strand of hair out of her face.
"Indeed I am," said Yamato wearily, sighing as he met Shizune's gaze. "He's here to see the Lord Seventh, and I daresay he won't take no for an answer."
"...dear me, that's kind of a problem." Shizune bit her lip and looked anxiously around.
"Isn't it, though?" Yamato agreed. "If this becomes any more of a mess than it already is, I just know we're the ones who will have to clean it up."
"Yes, we usually are," Shizune mused, looking ruefully up at the blaring fluorescent lights. "Ugh. Well, maybe this will all work out fine with no trouble or complications whatsoever."
"And maybe Tonton will sprout wings and fly," Yamato sourly replied.
Shizune sighed.
"No, it really isn't likely," she conceded. "But a woman can hope, can't she?"
"True, fair enough," Yamato said. "Maybe you actually will get married one day."
Shizune punched him on the arm, scowling darkly.
"That was uncalled for." She gave him a black look, pursing her lips. "What's gotten into you? You're being kind of a jerk today, Yamato-san."
"I'm in a bad mood," he said with a shrug. "This business smells ripe, and it looks ready to blow up on us at any second now. And like I said before, we're usually the ones getting stuck on figurative custodial duty."
"When it hits the fan, we'll be the ones getting it in our faces. Is that what you're saying?"
"Basically. Really makes a good day feel rotten, doesn't it?"
Shizune glowered at nothing in particular, her expression darkening.
"Yeah, it really does."
A beat.
"...and for your information, I happen to be seeing a very nice man," she added with a sniff, giving Yamato a scornful look. "He's quite handsome and well-to-do, and he seems very taken with me."
"Who is it?" Yamato blandly inquired.
"Y-You wouldn't know him," Shizune mumbled, clearing her throat. "He lives in, ah... Tea Country. We exchange e-mails quite often. I can't show you, though, they're all pretty... er, steamy."
"Really," Yamato said. "This man wouldn't happen to reside in a dating simulator, would he?"
Shizune glared.
"There's nothing wrong with that," she said a touch defensively.
"Uh-huh. Sure," Yamato said, nodding. "Whatever you say. I won't judge."
Shizune shoved him.
"Oh, shut up. Let's just go prepare the patients," she said.
"Prepare them for what?"
Yamato and Shizune gave a start at the new voice coming from behind them, realizing that they were no longer alone. They spun on a dime, turning around to face the speaker, and beheld the Lord Fifth Kazekage standing right before them.
Turquoise eyes were rimmed with dark rings, a cosmetic remnant of his youth, and in the area of his left temple was tattooed the kanji for love. He wore the kind of natural poker face that would send pro gamblers running for the hills.
Hearts loudly hammering in their breasts, Shizune and Yamato stared at Gaara. A tense silence reigned over the trio for several lengthy seconds.
Temari and Shikamaru then came jogging down the hall from behind Gaara, huffing and redder in the face than they ought to have been as elite ninja. The woman and her husband were visibly a mix of flustered, frustrated, sheepish, and peevish.
Yamato felt a little bit of schadenfreude in seeing the pair running after the Kazekage like a couple of common aides, but only a little. He was a nice guy, after all.
"This is the wing where Naruto is being held, right?" Gaara said, looking at Shizune.
Put on the spot, and still a tad frazzled from the man's sudden appearance, the dark-haired medic froze for just moment. She recovered with admirable speed, though, and plastered a professionally pleasant grin across her face.
"Yes it is, Kazekage-sama," she answered. "But please don't spread it around. We keep this ward hidden for a reason."
Temari grimaced.
"Yeah, um... Shizune? Gaara wasn't actually, er, given the authorization to come back here, yet," she said. "He just ran off from us when we got halfway to the hospital, and... and now that I think about it, how did he even find this ward so quickly?"
"Sakura-san showed Kankuro and myself where it was back when you were in labor with Shikadai," Gaara said in matter-of-fact tone. He cocked his head, looking quizzically at his big sister. "Don't you remember?"
"You are severely underestimating how many drugs they had me on," Temari reflexively answered. "No way in hell was I going to give a NATURAL birth, not when I had access to state-of-the-art medicine and first rate care from Konoha's finest professionals."
"I don't remember much from that day either," Shikamaru added with a shrug. "Childbirth might be a beautiful thing in an abstract, moral sense, but everything between her water breaking and cutting the umbilical cord was a frantic, sweaty, gory blur. I'd like to keep it that way."
Gaara pouted.
"Well, we were there," he said. "And that's how I knew where to find the secret ward."
"...Say, why DID Temari have to give birth in here, anyway?" Yamato wondered aloud.
"Politics," Shizune promptly replied.
"That," Temari said, "and a vocal minority of stubborn, xenophobic jackasses."
"Oh. That makes sense," Yamato said.
And considering that the initial inspiration for the creation of the ward had come from a comment Naruto made to Sakura after the war about the circumstances of his mother's death, it really did.
Another pregnant pause followed. Shizune looked around at the other four, bit her lip, and sighed. With an air of slight reluctance, she gestured for Gaara and company to follow her. Shikamaru looked like he was itching for a smoke, and Temari was clearly forcing herself to smile, still miffed by her baby brother's earlier rudeness.
"You're here to see Naruto, of course. Isn't that right?" Shizune remarked, looking over her shoulder at Gaara. It was an easy deduction to make, really, hardly the makings of a mystery drama.
He wouldn't have come all this way for anyone but family or Naruto, and the Naras were all healthy as horses. Or deer.
Or horse-deer.
B...Baka.
"Yes," Gaara redundantly said, as though Shizune's reckoning needed any confirmation.
She nodded and absentmindedly double-checked her clipboard.
"Right. This way, then. Follow me."
Yamato, Temari, Shikamaru, and Gaara did as Shizune said and followed her lead through the secret ward. It wasn't long at all before she stopped, standing outside a door with the nameplates:
Uchiha, Sasuke
Uzumaki, Naruto
Shizune knocked once, waiting for a reply. An impatient curse reached her ears. Shaking her head and smiling in mild exasperation, she turned the handle and ushered the others inside. Gaara was the first one through the door, followed by Shikamaru and Temari, then Yamato, and Shizune brought up the rear.
The Lord Fifth Kazekage looked at the two hospital beds standing side-by-side in the room, the nearer one holding Sasuke and the further holding Naruto. Both men looked relatively well, if peevish, lying in the beds. They were hooked up with enough tubes and wires to star in the robotic equivalent of a tentacle hentai, though, and the beeping of monitors and machines lent the scene a peculiarly ominous medical atmosphere.
Naruto and Sasuke stared at the five visitors. Suddenly, the room seemed terribly crowded.
The blond looked at Gaara and frowned.
"...who the hell are you?"
Gaara stared with a twinge of visible worry, his stoic expression slowly falling away into concern, before abandoning all pretenses and hurrying to Naruto's side.
"Oh, goodness," he whispered. "It's even worse than I thought... Naruto, how long do you have left?"
This was a dumb question brought on by panic and needless care, a spurious assumption based on percolating fears and superficial details overwhelming an otherwise very calm and rational mind. Normally Gaara would have been able to take one look at the scene and tell that Naruto was just fine (physically, at least) under all the wires and junk, but emotional investment could make people act terribly irrational, and there were rather few individuals about whom Gaara cared as deeply as Naruto.
His lover, his family, his village. Those were the only things Gaara placed as highly in care and esteem as he did the Lord Seventh Hokage, and in some ways the blond superceded at least one or two of those. Plus underneath the stoic intensity and unreadable expression, the Kazekage was secretly an awkward dork.
So when he saw Naruto lying on a hospital bed and hooked up to like a hundred different tubes and wires (possibly a slight exaggeration), he naturally freaked out and jumped to a few hasty conclusions. That was only natural, because humans are dumb and irrational creatures deep down.
Naruto, at Gaara's words, went from blankly staring to blinking once, twice, thrice.
His eyebrows rose into his hairline.
"EHHHHH?! Sh...Shizune-baachan, we're dying?!" Naruto exclaimed, whipping his head around to look at the woman, whose eye was twitching at being called 'baachan'. "Why didn't you tell us earlier?!"
"No, Naruto, you're not dyi—" she began to say, only to be cut off by Sasuke.
"Oh, yeah, you're dying alright. A terminal case of Ignoramus Syndrome, from the looks of it," the Uchiha deadpanned.
Shizune shot Sasuke a black look, before she cleared her throat.
"No, Naruto, you're not—"
"Is there a cure?!" the blond shamelessly blubbered, tears pouring down his whiskered cheeks like twin waterfalls.
"Like I said," Shizune vexedly interjected. "You're—"
"Does he need a blood transfusion? An organ transplant?" Gaara asked, now looking determined. "I'll do whatever it takes to save him."
Shizune snapped.
POW. BOP. WHAM.
Naruto and Sasuke sported brand new, matching, throbbing hematoma.
Gaara was bemused, a few grains of sand trickling down from a superficial crack in the sand armor on the top of his head.
Shizune winced and shook a red, stinging hand.
"Owowow..." she whimpered, feeling like she had just punched a brick wall without using any chakra reinforcement. Snappily, she then hissed, "He's not dying!"
Naruto blinked.
"Oh," he said. Then he breathed a sigh of relief.
Gaara blushed underneath a concrete carapace of hardened silica granules.
"...oh," he said, awkwardly clearing his throat.
Shizune glared.
Konoha/Kumo/Bijuu Telepathy Space
[ERROR: VALUE UNKNOWN]
Er... Both... Neither... N/A?
Killer Bee held his cellphone up as high as he could reach, precariously balancing himself on an outstretched chakra tentacle atop the highest peak he could find. The reflective outer surface of his sunglasses gleamed in the light and his face was screwed into a look of concentration as tiny, barely visible sparks of electricity danced over his fingers.
"Yo, Naruto, what do ya know? You say I gotta call your son, but what if that boy is busy, yo! Say, tappin' his girl's tight buns?"
Linked through telepathy with his sibling, Gyuuki tried not to groan as he relayed his jinchuuriki's message to Kurama. The Nine-Tails sniggered at the embarrassment clear in his sibling's pitch and hue as the Eight-Tails conveyed Bee's query, with the utmost reluctance communicating it verbatim to the infuriating fox.
Kurama repeated the message to Naruto with mirthful relish, greatly enjoying the surge of beflusterment he felt from the blond in response to the mental image of his son quote-unquote "tapping" any part of Sasuke's daughter, let alone in such a ribald manner as Bee's question suggested.
Blushing hotly, the adult Naruto coughed into his thirteen-year-old fist and looked down at the scroll he'd been writing in. He absentmindedly checked to make sure the language was clear and simple, using as few complicated kanji or technical terms as possible. After a moment the part of his brain paying attention to this made him nod, before he cleared his throat and spoke.
"If he wants to tap anything of anyone before the age of thirty, then he'd better answer," Naruto said sternly. "I already worked out with Sakura how to route the call through my number, and you've got her instructions memorized. I don't care if I'm not personally there; Bolt will answer that call, or I will find a way to lecture him across space and time."
In their telepathy zone, Kurama looked at Gyuuki for a long moment.
Kurama shrugged.
"Just do like we agreed," he blithely said.
Gyuuki squinted at Kurama.
"You are paraphrasing him rather severely, aren't you?" he guessed.
The Nine-Tails did not dignify this with a response.
Sighing, Gyuuki thought at his partner.
We've already worked out the plan. If the boy doesn't answer, we'll figure something else out.
Bee frowned, then shrugged.
"Alright buddy, I've got a signal now. Just gotta call him up and tell 'im what 'n' how."
His thumb tapped a rapid sequence of numbers and symbols on the touchscreen interface of his phone. After a few seconds of input, the phone began to ring.
Bee held it up to his ear.
Thrice it rang—three times it rang—and thrice it went unanswered. Three times it rang—thrice it rang—and on the fourth ring, it was answered.
Mentally, Bee wondered if he could work those lyrics into something.
"Hello?" came a hoarse, raspy voice very much unlike what Bee remembered of Naruto's son. "Who the hell are you? I know my dad's in no state to be working a phone."
Keeping in mind the message Naruto had conveyed to him, and struggling against reflex to NOT make it rhyme or rap, Killer Bee spoke into his phone's receiver.
"The shitty old man says: 'You're grounded, Bolt.'"
There was a lengthy silence on the other end of the line.
"...old man Bee? Okay, what the fuck is going on here?"
"Space-time don't mean shit when you got a bijuu by your side," Bee rapped into the phone. "Telepathy will seek us out, ain't nowhere we can hide!"
"... ... ...what."
Gyuuki patiently conveyed this exchange to Kurama.
Kurama, in turn, flippantly said to Naruto: You can probably guess how it's going.
Naruto swore, before running a hand through his hair.
"Shit. Is that good or bad?" he bleakly wondered.
Killer Bee is our only realistic hope of making contact with the others in our home timeline, Kurama snarked. You tell ME if that's good or bad.
"..."
Kurama took this silence as his cue and sarcastically asked Gyuuki, "So, how goes the impossible plan so crazy that it can only succeed?"
"Boruto hasn't hung up, at least," Gyuuki replied. "That's some good news."
"And Bee?"
"...he's being Bee."
Secret Lab, Hokage Tower
Timeline Gamma
The Future
Sarada stared bemusedly at her boyfrie—er, partner as he argued with someone on his cellphone. Boruto sounded very exasperated as he asked the caller several times for verification of this or that. She could figure out, from listening to Boruto's end of the conversation, that the person he spoke to was the venerable... or at least aging jinchuuriki of the Eight-Tails, and that somehow their discussion had something to do with his father.
She hadn't quite been paying attention at first when he answered the phone, but when she heard him groan and tiredly ask the caller to repeat whatever they had just said without rapping it, please and thank you, she found herself getting intrigued. Thus she watched and listened with perked ears and arched eyebrows as Boruto spoke on the phone.
"...okay, okay, can you tell him I've been working on identifying potential coordinates? I've been able to narrow it down to a dozen or so... well, yes, Sarada's been helping out a lot, too."
A pause. Boruto's face went beet red.
"No, I have NOT been... um, 'tapping that'," he mumbled into the phone, low enough that Sarada reckoned he was trying (if failing) to keep these particular words inaudible to her. "And even if I was, it would be really rude of me to just discuss it with anyone who asked."
Sarada sighed, thinking ruefully of how little private time she and Bolt had been able to get in the past couple months. She very much would have LIKED to be able to brag about tapping that, a part of her thought as her eyes wandered down Boruto's back, but unfortunately they'd been so busy working on this that they really hadn't been able to make any time.
Not for lack of trying, either.
"Please, don't," Boruto said on the phone. "I... uh, I'm sure your song is lovely, but if you're in contact with him, we really should focus on this. That is, figuring out how to reverse that whole mess. You know what uzumachyons are, right? We've been using those to..."
A pause.
"...what do you mean, you've never heard of them? They're an elementary particle crucial to explaining the pseudo-material properties of chakra at high densities. Without them bijuu would be intangible and invisible, and like half of all jutsu in existence just wouldn't even work!"
Another, longer pause.
"Seriously, this was published in all the respected scientific journals last year, you know? All those articles about Boruto Uzumaki, the genius wunderkind who singlehandedly hypothesized, observed, and proved the existence of these aforementioned uzumachyons?"
A beat, yet another pause.
Bolt coughed.
"...okay, yes. I suppose I might've, er, done an interview for Playninja Publishing as well. Cloud Village Cuties is owned by them, right?"
The blond looked askance at Sarada, who looked away and pretended to still be working on the computer. Covering his mouth, Boruto then whispered into the phone, his voice just low enough that Sarada would have missed it if she hadn't actually been paying the utmost attention.
"...well actually, I've always been more partial to Hidden Mist Hotties, myself..."
Sarada resisted the urge to giggle and snort at how secretively Boruto said this.
As if she didn't know about his secret porn stash. And as if he didn't know about her secret porn stash.
Or the real person slash fiction about him and Mitsuki.
But that was another matter altogether.
"Yeah, that's basically it. A bit simplified, but it seems you do get the gist of what we're doing, at least." He paused for a few seconds. "...what do you MEAN, you don't? How could it be any more obvious how this should work? Ugh, okay, I guess you're not really trained in advanced physics, but can you at least tell our dads to channel their chakra?"
Sarada perked up at this.
Again, another mention of Lord Seventh, and this time her own father as well. This was curious, and Sarada could not help but idly wonder for just a moment if Bolt was somehow talking about his actual dad, and not the scrappy loudmouth of a twerp who'd replaced him.
But that couldn't possibly be the case, she told herself.
...could it?
"Look, we have the machine right here. I can turn it on now and fire at each of the possible space-time coordinates. If all of them work together we can... well, we can at least figure out when-and-where the hell they are."
Sarada frowned.
Okay, what the hell. There was no way this could be interpreted in any other way, yet there was no way that he could actually have any means to do what his words were suggesting.
Not unless...
...no, Sarada could think of no unless.
Frowning, she went over to the device in the center of the lab and fiddled with the holographic input, absently aligning it to one of the suspect coordinates. It charged for a moment, glowing brighter and brighter, before anticlimactically dimming.
Boruto looked up from the phone, startled.
"Huh? Sarada? What are you...?"
She ignored him and headed over at one of the monitors, tapping out a few commands and scrolling through the feedback. Her eyebrows rose into her hairline. This reading was...
"Er, Sarada...?"
She headed back over to the device, aligning it to another set of coordinates. Again it charged before silently, motionlessly firing, and again Sarada went over to the computer.
The readings she saw this time were much more normal.
"Hello, Sarada? Are you on autopilot or something?" Boruto asked, sounding somewhere between concerned and confused.
Again, she ignored him, going back to the device. This time, she cleared the coordinates, aiming it just outside of the solar system.
For a third time it glowed, then dimmed. The monitor's display brought up a command prompt, and Sarada went over to type a command in. It flickered, before showing a pattern that was almost eerily familiar.
At last, she turned to Boruto and spoke.
"Belay that order, private," she said in a mock professional voice. "I've found the timeline we were looking for." Smiling, she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "Your dad contacted Bee-san through the bijuu telepathy, didn't he?"
Bolt blinked.
"Uhh... yeah? How did you know?"
"I listened," Sarada quipped. "I thought. And then I acted. The bijuu were all originally part of the same being, so of course they would resonate with their true counterparts, and not necessarily the counterparts sharing their present coordinates. Right?"
Boruto's eyes widened. He grinned from ear to ear in realization.
"Of course!" he said. "A colossus astride the shores of time... Gyuuki and Kurama's chakra together comprised nearly half of the Juubi's power, according to mom and dad. Something that big would surely be enough to partially synchronize the two disparate timelines, at least for as long as they're resonating together... Sarada, you're a genius!"
She blushed, returning his grin with interest.
"You're exaggerating," she said modestly, though she clearly enjoyed the praise.
"No, seriously, babe! This is perfect. We know which coordinates our parents are at," Boruto said insistently. "We have contact with my dad, and we can tell him which jutsu we used. This is it. This is the breakthrough we needed. We have all of the pieces at our disposal to fix this mess! It's only a matter of time now!"
He laughed and bounded forward, throwing his arms around Sarada. Beaming, she kissed him, and then she grabbed the phone.
"Tell Lord Seventh to get the others together," she told Bee. "Call us again when they're ready. We finally have definitive progress to report!"
She hung up the phone.
Boruto laughed and gleefully returned her previous kiss.
A/N: Killer Bee is definitely one of my favorite characters from Shippuden. I have a LOT of favorites, to be sure, but he ranks fairly high. Most of my other favorites are females, of course, because... well, I am a pervert? Does that make sense? It makes sense to me, at least...
Been playing a lot of Fallout the past few days. Not 4, but 2 and New Vegas. A bit of Tactics too. I got them all real cheap.
It was snowing real hard for most of the morning today, and I reckon we've got at least an inch of it outside by now, maybe. Maybe two or more, I can't tell, I'm terrible at guesstimating measurements.
Oh! And it's also been more than a year since I first posted this fic, holy carp.
Updated: 12-1-15
TTFN and R&R!
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