As The Pendulum Swings
Prologue
Yeah I know another new fic but the idea hit me like a ton of bricks and I couldn't put it down.
A blond haired boy with a large scroll slung across his back races across rooftops in the waning evening light towards the forest in the nearly abandoned training ground 22. As the boy, Naruto, made it into the forest he tripped and hit his head on a sharp rock. The boy got up dazed but determined to continue and graduate and missed that under the blood was a very small amount of bone, not enough to do any permanent damage, indeed red chakra was already healing the fractured skull but enough to give the boy a severe and very much ignored concussion. Naruto continued on and opened the scroll determined that a 'scratch' and a 'headache' were not going to rob him of his chance to graduate and focused through the pounding headache enough to struggle out the meanings of the characters written on the scroll. He didn't struggle because of his headache (although it definitely did not help), nor because he was the idiot his classmates claimed him, no Naruto Uzumaki did not know how to read very well because what little he did know was self taught. Naruto is not well liked in the normally pleasant and 'soft-hearted' village of Konoha. Still the boy used the pictures and the characters he knew, however few they were to know the name of the first jutsu and how to do it but not a word more.
'Ka ge bu....shin, kagebushin ah man bushin is my worst technique!' Naruto thought cursing. He looked quickly at the other ones on the list but his head swimming and the foreign character told him to just take the first one.
'I'll try the others if I have time... on second thought I'll copy them down if I have time.' Naruto thought as his head gave a particularly harsh throb. So the Orange clad Academy student went through the motions for the kagebushin, having to recheck the scroll several times to remind him of what signs to use only to find that it was still the same cross seal with no othere hand seals to it. Finally in frustration he poured a slightly larger amount of chakra than he did for a regular bushin and in a poof, a kagebushin appeared with along with a vicious throb as his mind copied itself into the kagebushin.
"I think" Naruto groaned from the ground holding his head, slurring slightly eyes fuzzy as the concussion worsen from the strain of copying his mind. "I'll call that good, I should copy a few of the others" Naruto however could not bring himself to move to the Forbidden Scroll. What happened shocked him, his clone moved to him and picked up the blank scroll the original carried in order to write down good ideas for pranks and wrote down three of the jutsus, including all of the kagebushin before rustling was heard. The original managed to stand up as the kagebushin, in a moment of concussion induced brilliance picked up the smaller scroll and dashed off for home, after all they didn't want the scroll taken away. Out of the foliage came an angry Iruka who was met with the sight of a bloodstained and ill looking blond.
"Hey Iruka-sensei I learned a jutsu from the scroll that means I pass right" The blond academy student said barley managing not to slur. He didn't want to look weak in front of Iruka after all.
The rest of the events of the Mizuki incident happened relatively normal until it Mizuki is beaten and tied up. The blond tired and hurt sank down and sat not bothering to dismiss the hundred kagebushin he had summoned to defeat Mizuki and watched sleepily as the traitor was taken away by ANBU.
"Naruto close your eyes" Iruka said to the original, who was the only one on the ground. The blond did so too tired to protest and felt his goggles removed and something cold put in its place, causing the boy to almost sigh in delight as it relieve some of the terrible pain in his head. "Okay Naruto open them" As Naruto opened bleary blue eyes he noted idly that Iruka's forehead protector was missing and that his goggles were in his hands. Reaching up slowly out of disbelief but mostly exhaustion he felt the engraved cool metal of a forehead protector. He leapt forward towards the young man with a cry of joy in a sudden and short lived burst of energy. "Let's get you home eh" Through all of this the kagebushin watched cheering lightly, why only lightly? Well they were copies of the original down to the headache even if the originals headache was worse due to strain. Two of the bushin propped the original between them and carried Naruto off telling Iruka to go to the hospital instead promising to meet up with him for dinner at Ichiraku's the next day. As the platoon of blonds reached the door another blond copy, the one who was sent home earlier, opened the door to let them through. As the two clones put the original down on his bed they realized that the quickly filling small apartment was not big enough and woke the creator up to bid him to dismiss most of them. Naruto did so bleary-eyed, and dismissed all but the two who carried him. It was a good thing he was already laying down because his headache exploded as information flooded the three blonds causing the other two to dispel causing even more pain to Naruto who finally dropped off into the peaceful and pain free abyss of unconsciousness.
In the end I took this to school and conducted spell check on it, be verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry thankful I did because the sheer number of red on the page that indicated spelling problems reminded me just how BAD my spelling is.