There had to be something horribly wrong with him if he felt safe in a decrepit old building that looked like one good wind would turn it into ruins. Then again, what he found inside more than made up for the sheer hazard level of the 'house'. Which was more of a shack to be honest.
Inside was the same weird spiral he had on most of his clothes and on the backs of the flak jackets. The old man said it was the symbol of his family.
But in the same breath he refused to tell him who his family was.
So while the drunken idiots chased him intent to kill or otherwise maim him, he went to the first decrepit building he could find and laid low. Most of those idiots wouldn't think to look for him here, primarily because they either ignored it or didn't see it. They would assume the roof collapsed or the floor had.
He was safer here than he was in his own apartment.
Digging through some of the old books, he found one that was interesting to his six-year-old brain...mostly because of the pictures.
Inside were dragons, tigers, monkeys, boars, snakes...all sorts of cool pictures. And best of all there were more pictures than words! Most of them had funny drawings that looked like circles, slash marks or squiggles...but apparently they weren't supposed to be words at all, but something you drew. There were other books like that, with funny squiggles that apparently meant something.
Naruto looked outside. It would be a few hours before the drunks were all collected and no one was looking in the house.
So he went looking for a brush, some paper and some paint.
He found a brush, but it was really weird looking. It cut him when he picked it up, but he barely noticed a minor pain like that. Nor did he particularly notice when said brush began to glow just enough to provide more than enough light to see what he was actually doing.
To his surprise and relief, once he found some blank paper, the brush provided ink. All the bottles in the shack had been smashed to bits...probably from the tremors of the Kyuubi prancing around. This place had been pretty much abandoned around that time, from what he knew.
(Inside his head, said demon fox was banging his head against the walls. He did not prance, dammit. The red head holding the bars closed on him was laughing her ass off...the bars were actually shaking with how much she was cracking up.)
However a nudge here, a whisper there... and suddenly Naruto was on the way to becoming a proper fuinjutsu prodigy. It was highly unlikely the Hokage would realize what the 'books with the funny squiggles' actually were, considering how deteriorated most of them were.
It did not hurt in the least that the first tag Naruto accidentally tried was a minor explosion tag. He was hooked after that.
However it was what happened after he finally crawled out of the shack, brush firmly hidden in his sleeves, that would set the tone the rest of his life.
He found a puppy with crimson markings and a weird aura around it. It barely reached his knees, but the puppy felt about as dangerous as the rabid wolf he once had the misfortune to run into. Or at least had roughly the same potential for that kind of destruction. He was lucky the Inuzuka had killed it before it bit him...he didn't want to test his weird healing factor against something like that.
The puppy, or whatever it was if it wasn't a puppy, whined when he started walking home. Realizing it fully planned to follow him for some weird reason, Naruto decided he would keep it.
If only because he had always wanted a dog, but the orphanage matron had said a 'demon' like him didn't deserve one and would probably kill it within a week anyway.
Old hag.
So this is the new wielder. How...fascinating.
Are we sure about sending one of the pups to him?
It's either give him someone who we can at least trust to help him get the brush strokes right, or deal with shinobi who have all the grace of a drunken idiot trying to make a pass at a woman. At least his mother's family had some talent, even if they were killed off for it.
Whatever. We still need to test the brat to see if he's even worthy of using one of the Celestial Brushes, let alone learn our techniques.
Naruto, who had only listened to the admittedly odd conversation, would have jumped up and down in eagerness the second he heard the words 'learn' and 'technique' in the same sentence.
No one ever trained him, despite the fact he managed to get into the Academy a year early thanks to the old man. They usually kicked him out of the class on lame excuses, which generally made him bored out of his skull. It was part of the reason why he pranked the hell out of the village.
He wanted to scream, yell, even beg for someone to train him. If only so he could keep the drunks away from him without having to rely on the masked guys, or be able to pull off even better pranks without getting caught.
Would you look at that? The boy already has the right attitude to be worthy...and from what I see his ignorance is from lack of instruction, not from a lack of wanting to learn.
Feh. Until he starts learning how to do things the right way, I'm not letting him call on my power. Wake me up when he actually learns how to paint better than a monkey.
HEY!
You know I was referring to those idiot summons, right?
GET BACK HERE YOU BLASTED RABBIT!
Naruto would find himself in a strange place where it was warm and very bright.
In front of him was a wolf who was obviously the puppy's parent. From the lack of dangly bits he was guessing it's mother.
I am Amaterasu, Origin of all that is good and Mother to all. I am she who reigns over the sun and everything it touches.
Naruto cocked his head. He vaguely remembered the primary gods of Shinto, but considering the priests didn't exactly like him for some reason, he didn't really know who most of them were.
The wolf looked at him in amusement.
Your ignorance is not out of malice, but misplaced hatred towards another. If you wish to wield the Celestial Brush, you must be willing to learn. I can teach you the basics of it.
"Teach me! Please! No one tells me anything!"
The wolf got up and padded over to him. It placed a single white paw on his forehead and Naruto suddenly found himself inside his own mind.
This will not do. I refuse to have my favored held back by ignorant fools.
'Thank you Kami-sama! Do you have any idea what it's like being stuck in his head when it reeks of sewer?!'
I am adjusting this place to benefit the child, not the favored of Inari.
'Anything would be an improvement over what was here. It's almost an embarrassment to be stuck in him with how much of an idiot he is.'
That is partly your fault, Kurama. The human who resealed you didn't take time to adjust his work correctly, and your chakra has been overloading the boy's own since he was born. Because of that his mind is more focused on protecting him than it is retaining information. I will fix the filter, but you had better train him once he is ready.
'Yes, Amaterasu-sama,' said the other voice sullenly. Like a petulant child really. 'I heard that brat! If the great Sun Kami didn't favor you, I'd...!'
The wolf waved it's paw again, silencing the other voice, though Naruto could detect real amusement now.
That is enough out of that one. Come little one.
Naruto followed the wolf. Unlike the villagers it didn't seem to want to hurt or lie to him.
He found himself in a new place. This felt like the warm place, but wasn't his head. It looked something like a library, to be honest.
This is the realm of knowledge. Here all the information of your world has been stored. When you have collected enough of the Constellations, the door will open itself to you. Until then you may only come here with myself or your Tenant once he gets over his tantrum and decides to actually train you. Here I shall teach the Uzumaki heritage to you, since your precious Hokage has neglected his duty to those who have passed. For now I shall help you learn how to read.
When Naruto woke up, he found the baby wolf curled up to him, keeping the chill of the broken window off.
What a weird dream.
Which quickly revealed to be real when he realized he could actually read what was on the cereal box the old man had gotten him. He was too young to know maths, so once a week the old man dropped off food for him. But the mere fact he could read what was on the side of the cheerful ninja mouse cereal box was leagues away from the one-in-five letters he could read before.
'Hmph. You had better thank the Sun-kami for taking her own precious time to teach you something this basic, brat.'
It was the other voice. The one that sounded like a brat.
'Until you prove you aren't a complete moron, you may address me as Yoko-sensei. Amaterasu-sama has deemed you worthy of being given a great gift, and if I play my cards right I'll be freed. Until then we're stuck with each other.'
'So what now Yoko-sensei?'
'First you go to class, then when they kick you out I'll train you. If these pathetic monkeys can't understand they're only hurting their favor in the eyes of the kami for treating you like shit, then I'll simply take it from them. At this point I'm positively gleeful the Uchiha have fallen so far from grace. About the only one of them with any chance of seeing the Celestial Library is that Itachi kid.'
Naruto got dressed and when he noticed the wolf pup following him, he sighed.
"Not today Chibi. I'll be out of class soon enough, and then we can go train."
The wolf pup, which Naruto had firmly called 'Chibi' in his head because it was so small, whined.
"Listen to the idiot. There's no point in antagonizing the Inuzuka or the idiots in charge of training the ankle biters just yet. At least not until the old Monkey finally finds out Naruto has a pet wolf."
There was little point dealing with the idiot Inuzuka in Naruto's class complaining about Naruto stealing what looked like a clan dog. Far less of a headache for the Hokage to hear from the watchers that Naruto had adopted a stray wolf pup...or to find out personally when he visited.
"Heh...new record for being thrown out of class," said Naruto to himself. If they weren't going to bother teaching him, he would just have to be extra annoying so he could get some real training in.
At least until they got a real teacher in the classroom at any rate. So far all they had was the cast-offs and those on medical leave. And after the third time the Hokage had a 'talk' with the teacher about it, he quit trying to force Naruto into being a better student. That was simply an uphill battle he wasn't about to win anytime soon. Far less of a headache to simply wait until a decent teacher finally bothered to drag the boy back to the class, than it was to force unwilling teachers to care.
Naruto found a deserted training ground that was due for repairs, and Chibi met them there.
'The first thing the great and powerful Yoko-sensei will teach you is...meditation.'
If anyone had been there they would have seen Naruto face-vault.
'Before you go complaining on how boring it is, you should think of it this way. It's an old trick to breaking genjutsu, and one of the main stages to learning Sage training. I've heard the toads have a habit of smacking people who try to use sage chakra with sharp sticks in order to dispel it before they turn into statues. You have an advantage over most of those morons because you are not only an Uzumaki, but because you hold the Celestial Brush and She favors you enough to let you have one of her pups.'
Naruto was quiet.
'If I learn this then can I do awesome jutsu later?'
'And you can use the Celestial techniques. Not to mention the looks on civvies faces when you meditate on top of the water without falling. Now shut up and sit down. Be glad I know a variety of ways to meditate, otherwise we'd both be at this a while.'
One way of meditation, which was the most commonly known, was to sit down and clear your head. Naruto was too active for that, but the fox wasn't going to sabotage his efforts. If this didn't work then he would switch to repetitive movement meditation, which could double as taijutsu practice. Or the forms at any rate.
It was as futile an effort as he had thought. Naruto was not only a child, but he had the attention span of a squirrel on crack. He couldn't sit still without falling asleep.
So he waited until the boy fell asleep and asked Amaterasu to put one hand-to-hand style in the kid's memory, preferably one that hadn't been seen in some time, so the brat could practice the forms while he cleared his head.
She chose a style that most of her priests seemed to prefer, which ironically enough often lead to the Uzumaki's whirlpool style.
