Karin hadn't seen Naruto in nearly three days since beating him at cards. He was probably training for the finals of the Chunin Exam. He was set to face down that Hyuga Boy that beat his own cousin, and heiress of his clan, into a collapsing, bleeding mess and was only stopped from killing her by multiple Jounin. From what she was able to gather, his name was Neji, he liked whining about his supposed fate, and he was considered a prodigy of his clan even by main house standards.
'I'd be impressed if he weren't such a moaning jerkass.' She thought as she strolled around aimlessly.
Konoha was much bigger than Kusa could ever hope to be and safer by a country mile. The sun shined brighter and the sky was much bluer. Just taking the lackadaisical walk around the great village, she felt lighter, like the weights she bore in Kusa were lifted off her lithe shoulders and thrown far, far away. She took a deep breath of that sweet Fire Country air and let it settle in her lungs before exhaling.
As peaceful as it was to be carefree, Karin grew restless in her contentedness. It wasn't necessarily boredom, only that she was unsure of what to do and believed walking around as she did now was a waste of her limited time in Konoha. She thought briefly of going to the library to read, only to berate herself.
'I can read when I get home, the books aren't going anywhere.'
Her nose bled for a second at the thought of taking a visit to the hot springs only to berate herself again and wiped her nose.
'I wouldn't even know where to hide and if I got caught, I don't know what I'd do. Or what Naruto would think.' She stopped. 'Wait a minute, he's a bigger pervert than me!'
Karin found the stash of magazines in his apartment yesterday while looking for him. He didn't hide them well or lock his door for that matter, the stack just sat hidden halfheartedly under his bed with only his blanket draped lazily down from the mattress. All soft-core solo stuff of tasteful nudity, primarily of redheads and blondes. The fact that redheads were prominently in the mix made her feel a certain way. It wasn't necessarily an unpleasant sensation, however, it still felt peculiar.
'That's probably where he got the idea for his "techniques."'
The red-eyed girl momentarily thought to use her Mind's Eye to find Naruto. Karin stopped before she even started. She recalled the monstrous wickedness that lay deep within him and the terror it struck into her the first time. Was it his true nature he tucked away? Some sort of dual personality? A demon that dug its heels into his soul?
Karin was in no hurry to solve that mystery. She would have to find her cousin without her sensor capabilities. Focusing chakra into her feet, the redhead girl jumped to the rooftops in a few steps. She didn't find him anywhere around the Ichiraku ramen shop, as he hadn't been, or his apartment. He was probably home during the night, but a foreign shinobi trouncing around in the dead of night would be suspicious to anyone with half a mind.
It took her half an hour to more or less comb the village, finding nothing that would lead her to the blond boy. 'He must be out in the training grounds.' She concluded.
Quickly, she scaled the flat, wooden walls without incident.
Not far from a cool river formed from the dripping mouth of a waterfall where women enjoyed refuge from the Fire Country's summer. Record highs in hundreds abounded this year and with the heat, desiring to escape its persistent bite on their skin.
Jiraiya, The Toad Sage sat with his notebook and pencil in his lap, tucked away in a bush with a binocular. A trail of crimson leaked from his warted nose, pink dusting his slightly wrinkled face and a dark eye planted thoroughly at the short end of the scope while the other was closed. His giggling and the pencil scratching were unable to be heard over the roars of the falling waters.
This spot was most excellent for research. The distance from the targets was perfect, obscured from eyesight, far from earshot and he was skilled enough to hide his chakra should any of them be off-duty kunoichi. It would've been the perfect day if the orange pain in the ass called Naruto wasn't ten feet away and grunting non-stop.
"Hey Pervy-sage, help me out a little will ya? I can't summon anything other than these little tadpoles." His newest student whined.
Jiraiya didn't budge. "Just keep at it, kid." He mumbled offhandedly. "S'all there is to it." One of the girls in the river, rather exceptionally endowed, had lost her top. He couldn't let a prime opportunity such as this bypass him.
Naruto was beginning to regret tricking this old pervert into training him. All he'd learned in the last few days was how to walk on water and, theoretically, summon toads. He'd made no genuine progress in the time since meeting the snowy maned Sannin. The boy growled. His frustration was mounting.
'Kakashi-sensei is training Sasuke, probably more than he ever did with me or Sakura.' He thought. 'He's probably teaching that bastard some really cool jutsu by now while I'm stuck trying to summon a tiny frog!' Naruto's anger overtook his senses for a moment. 'At this rate, I'll never be Hokage! Then who would take my spot in the history books? Shino? Like that'll ever happen!' That blistering chakra he knew was the Kyubi's channeled around him, enveloping his body for the briefest of moments. With a stressed roar, he slammed his hand down, shouting: "Summoning Jutsu!"
Jiraiya sensed the fox's chakra the instant Naruto invoked it and cocked a side-eyed glance over his broad shoulder. He let a slender smile creep upon his face before turning back to the exquisite beauties in the clear blue water.
'Well, it's a start.' Jiraiya thought.
A small orange toad appeared where Naruto's hand was pointed. Blue lines ran over its body and its back was covered by a proportionally sized navy-colored coat. It cocked its boxy head up at his summoner.
"Heya!" The toad said. Its voice was high-pitched. "Name's Gamakichi, you summon me?"
Naruto stared down incredulously at the tiny amphibian. "Yeah." he nodded simply.
"Well, whatcha need?" Gamakichi asked.
"The kid's just trying to practice his summoning Gamakichi." Jiraiya interjected. "Nothing you need to worry about. What's going on over in Mount Myoboku? I haven't visited in a while."
"Ah, nothing much." the small toad shrugged. "Dad's fighting with some punks trying to take his title of Chief Toad. Mind if I hang out here for a while? Gamatatsu's been annoying the crap outta me."
"Sure, just don't distract Naruto here. The kid can barely sit still as it is."
"Hey!"
"No problem, I'll just sit and watch. Got any snacks?"
Jiraiya tossed the young summon a bag of cheap candies and went back to peeping. The toad watched as Naruto tried again to summon another toad.
"Y'know you're doing that wrong, right?" Gamakichi interrupted.
"What‽"
Karin felt it again. That vileness tucked deep within Naruto. She didn't react, not having the time to as it left as quickly it came. Instead, halting her intended jump from a branch when the blackness shot through her system. She shut her eyes and breathed slowly.
'It's gone.' She told herself. 'it's gone, you can move now.
With a few steadying breaths, Karin's mettle was renewed. It'd be easy to find her cousin now. She just had to remember where that evil came from.
When she did find him, he was squatted down with a hand stretched out over the rocky ground with a tiny orange frog sitting on a rock eating candy while an old man hanging out in the bushes for some reason. It was perhaps the strangest sight in her life.
"Naruto." She called, leaping down from her perch. "I've been looking all over for you."
He looked up. She caught them again. Those pools of cerulean blue stared back at her, inviting her to plunge in and soak indefinitely.
"Karin!" He called back. The redhead felt his arms around her, his chakra did the same. She welcomed both openly. "I'm sorry we haven't hung out! I met Pervy-sage and I got so engrossed in training to fight that bastard Neji, I forgot about everything else! Please don't be mad!"
"Who's Pervy-sage?" was all Karin could think to ask.
"Me!" The well-built older man thumbed his chest proudly. "The Greatest of All Toad Sages of Mount Myoboku, Supreme Pervert Extraordinaire, Jiraiya of the Sannin!" He struck a kabuki pose, revolving his head and neck around, his hair flowing around him in the air like a cape.
Karin was already exhausted from dealing with this creepy old man.
"Who's your babe, Naruto?" The little orange toad inquired as he scarfed down another handful of sweets. Her pupil-less eyes were pulled down to the tiny creature. She almost wanted to pick up the small toad and squeeze it, even with its warts, it still had a cute little charm Karin couldn't explain.
"Babe? Who, Karin? No, she's my cousin." Naruto answered, scratching the back of his head. "Dating her would be weird."
A pang fired through the Uzumaki girl's chest. It wasn't like when the darkness reached from within him reached out to pluck out her soul. No, instead, a kunai being shot into her chest would be the only thing the girl could think of tantamount to this new foreign agony. Unconsciously, she raised a hand to her breast.
"So? Lord Fukusaku and Lady Shima are brother and sister." Gamakichi responded.
"You guys are animals, that's different from people!" Naruto shouted.
"Yeah, how so?"
Before an utterly ridiculous argument about genetics broke out between a child and a talking toad who both knew very little about the subject matter erupted, Jiraiya stepped in.
"Have your dad explain it to you Gamakichi, I need to talk to the kid." He tapped the adolescent toad with a solitary finger and sent him back to his home with a puff of smoke. Jiraiya's unremarkable brown eyes saw a familiar sight before him now, one that struck him to his core. One he believed he would only see again when he was reunited with his first student and that terrifying woman he made his wife.
He shuddered.
That woman scared the hell outta him.
"First off, good work on summoning something other than tadpoles today. Secondly, you don't have any knowledge of genetics and genealogy, so zip it. Thirdly," The Sage was quiet for a moment. Naruto could feel his stomach tensing and Karin watched bemused. "you were blowing off a cute girl like that to hang out with an old guy like me? What the hell is wrong with you‽ I'd've killed to be your position at your age!"
Naruto defended himself "I want to but I only have a month to get strong enough to fight that Neji guy. I have to get stronger Pervy-sage, throwing Shadow Clones at him ain't gonna cut it against his Taijutsu! He's a prodigy!"
"Take the girl out on the town, you little idiot!" The older man berated. "The month's still young!"
"But-" Before his newest student could respond, Jiraiya put him in a tight headlock.
"Look, kid, based on that forehead protector of hers, she's a foreigner right?" Naruto nodded. "That means, unless she's part of a consulate, she ain't gonna be in the Leaf forever, right?" Jiraiya led on, the boy agreed again. "If you take the girl on a date, I'll teach you a new jutsu next at our next training session, how's that sound?"
"A date‽ She's my cousin you sick perv!"
Jiraiya stared blankly now at his young student. How bad did the educational system fail this kid?
"Kid, do you not know how clans work?" The Sage slowly asked.
"So it turns out most of my friends are inbred." Naruto said staring down at his steaming bowl of noodles. Jiraiya's brief, but still rather disturbing explanation of clan eugenics was still fresh in his mind.
He had taken her to Ichiraku again, it was basically the only place he knew to eat. Or was allowed to for that matter. It was never outright malicious hatred the Uzumaki Boy dealt with in his life, more so spiteful indifference. Nobody was violent toward him, but benignity was seldom a reality.
"Yeah, that's how clans and kekkei-genkai work, genius. I coulda told you that." Karin snarked, pushing up her glasses.
"It's still weird to me. Who would want to bang their sister?" The blonde said perhaps louder than he should've. People were staring now and Karin did her best to turn invisible. Had he no tact?
"Sibling betrothal is incredibly rare, even during the era of warring clans it wasn't common, but all of the famous shinobi practice incest to some degree. It keeps the bloodline pure and increases the chances of kekkai-genkai emerging in the children. The closer the relation between the parents, the higher the chances of the kekkai-genkai being passed on."
"Oh." Naruto took another bite of his food. "If it makes people more powerful, then why is it seen as gross?"
The redhead pinched her eyebrows with a heavy sigh. "You really don't know anything do you? It's fairly simple: kekkai-genkai aren't the only things passed on, so are the genetics of the family and whatever flaws they entail. If there's genetic deficits or sicknesses that run in a clan and they continue to inbreed without bringing in outside blood, sooner or later, most of the family will bare that genetic fault. Of course, every clan makes sure to track the relations between their members and it's typically the civilians and merchants that see inbreeding as disgusting as they lack understanding of shinobi matters."
"Wow, you're really smart Karin." Her cousin said, amazed at her knowledge. "How do you know so much about clan breeding?"
It never really occurred to Naruto how clans kept their secret jutsu as hidden as they were; he skipped out on and slept through academy lessons he found boring. It was still so to his more action-focused mind, but when she spoke, Naruto wanted to listen. He would've thought it queer that his attention focused on her if he paid mind to his own actions.
A soft, genuine smile formed on her pallid face. "Thank you Naruto," she meekly responded. "My parents were related, Kusa lacks any sort of shinobi clans, add those together and you get bullied. I learned as much as I could to show them I wasn't the disgusting freak they said I was."
Karin herself was unsure if her intellect was legitimate or resulted from advanced, more focused understandings of niche topics most people lacked either the will or desire to research more thoroughly. Even if it were the latter, she'd take the compliment.
It was easy to live ignorantly and have enlightenment spoon fed in bite-sized portions by those who knew slightly more than yourself. Karin wanted no part in it.
"I don't think you're a freak, Karin," Naruto said. "A nerd? Maybe. A freak? No way. Gaara is a freak. You? You're just a normal girl."
Karin slammed her ruby eyes shut and fought her damnedest to still her quivering lip. She'd cry when she got back to her hotel. For now, she just wanted to be happy with Naruto.