Chapter 6: Naruto's Relaxing Brew For Beginners
Naruto scowls up at the man, his arms crossed.
"Kid, I've told you, when we find anything we'll let Snape-san know," a tired-looking Uchiha Reji tells the blond boy.
"That's what you said yesterday, and the day before and the day before," Naruto replies back, scowling some more.
The Uchiha sighs. He looks around the Police Bureau for some help but his other clansmen are doing their best to pretend that they're not listening to the amusing conversation and have their heads down. Everyone tries not to catch his eye.
Reiji sees the kid start tapping his foot impatiently on the floor.
"Kid," he tells him again, "there really hasn't been any developments. We'll let you both know as soon as we find something but there's really no need to keep coming here every day."
Naruto harrumphs, arms still crossed.
"You'll really let us know right?" the blond asks.
"Yes, I promise," the man tells him, rubbing at his temples.
Naruto tries to imitate one of Kuro-sensei's glowering looks, which the tea shop owner often uses to stare down at people he doesn't like, and then nods.
He leaves out the door with his head held high.
'There's an evil ninja going around knocking people out and the police don't seem to be doing anything,' Naruto thinks to himself.
He'll have to try something different.
On his way to school the next day, Naruto has a plan firmly in mind and is determined to carry it out after school. He'd asked Kuro-sensei for a day off from work, making up an excuse about kunai target practice.
Kuro-sensei had looked doubtful but had soon agreed, reminding him to stay away from any civilian areas.
"The last time you tried to practise in my back garden with the kunai you nearly decapitated one of Suzuno-san's prized peacocks," sensei had pointed out.
'Which wouldn't be a big lost,' Naruto had thought.
Those peacocks were the devil incarnate and tended to glare unblinkingly at him from the neighbouring garden every time he looks over. Naruto doesn't know what their neighbour, Suzuno-san sees in them.
He's skipping along the road, humming softly to himself when he soon spots a familiar red fox doll on the path.
It sits inconspicuously against a tree, looking like someone had accidentally dropped it and left it lying there.
Naruto looks about, hoping to see a familiar black-clothed figure around but doesn't see his sensei.
'Maybe he walked by this morning and accidentally dropped it,' the boy thinks and bends over to pick the doll up.
He dusts off the slight bits of sand on it and pockets it into his own pants pocket.
He'd seen the small palm-sized fox doll around his sensei's house these couple of days; especially at breakfast when the doll sits by sensei's tea cup out in the open every morning.
If Naruto didn't know better, he'd have thought that it was possessed.
He'd be innocently going about the house, studying in the living room, relaxing by the back veranda or even taking an afternoon nap in the futon in the spare bedroom, when he'd turn his head to spot the doll sitting innocently on the floor right next to him.
He'd been creeped out at first but after a few days, had decided that Sensei tended to leave the doll about the house and had simply left it close to him as a small prank.
'Or it could have been Kazu,' he thinks. The raven was much too intelligent for his own good and had almost seemed human-like at times.
Sensei had called it his 'good luck charm' when Naruto had questioned him about the doll. And although it might look weird for a grown man to carry a small doll around in his pocket with him, Naruto has seen weirder shinobi in the village and had dismissed sensei's odd quirks.
He shakes his head and crosses his arms.
Naruto thinks that his usually meticulous sensei was finally showing his more absent-minded side. 'He keeps leaving the doll everywhere, and now he's dropped it on the road,' the whiskered blond tuts in his head before speeding off to school.
The fox doll sits silently in the boy's pocket.
Iruka-sensei raps his knuckles on his desk by the blackboard and reminds the class, "You have a small test next week, so remember to study for it."
The newly promoted chuunin and academy teacher then signals the end of the school day and leaves the classroom with all their handed-in homework in tow.
The children start to pack up and Naruto's eyes zoom in to eye the back of the head of a dark and spiky haired boy sitting in the middle of the classroom. The boy gets up and starts packing his books away, not noticing that he's been marked as a target.
When the boy makes to leave, Naruto gets up, school bag already packed away, and follows the dark-haired boy out the classroom door.
'His brother's away on a mission,' Naruto recalls. 'So, he'll be walking home alone today.'
The blond boy follows sneakily behind the Uchiha, planning his ambush once they're further away from the academy.
Some time later, as Naruto slowly trails behind the other boy, Uchiha Sasuke turns around to call out, "Why are you following me?"
Naruto laughs, one hand behind his head in chagrin, and replies, "So, you found out huh?"
"That's Sasuke for you," the blond boy continues.
The Uchiha merely rolls his eyes.
"Ne ne Sasuke, are you free today?" the blond comes up to him and looks at him with a pleading gaze.
"Why?" the Uchiha asks suspiciously, knowing how much of a prankster the other boy can be.
"Cause I need your help for something!" Naruto tells him with a wide grin.
"What do you need my help for?" the boy questions again.
"He he, you'll see," the boy says, grabbing on to one of the Uchiha's hands and dragging him along.
"What are we even looking for?" the dark-haired boy asks with a sigh.
"Anything that stands out!" the blond tells him, bending down to look at the river bank.
"We've been looking around for hours and so far all we've found are rocks, stray twigs and dead leaves," the Uchiha tells him deadpan.
"Well, this is the scene of the crime and according to sensei's detective books, a good detective always needs to properly search the scene of the crime for important clues," the other boy replies, moving to look at the running river.
Sasuke sighs again, wondering why he'd agreed to this endeavour.
"Why did you ask me to help?" he questions, wondering why Naruto had dragged him into the picture when they weren't exactly close friends in the academy.
"Cause your family are all police officers so you must have inherited the crime-solving talent!" the blond reasons.
Sasuke feels like whacking his forehead with his palm in exasperation.
"Naruto, if the adults who are trained police officers couldn't find anything, what makes you think we can?" he questions again.
Naruto pauses, staring morosely at his reflection in the river.
"Sasuke, I've grown up around people who have never liked me and have only ever made empty promises," he tells the other boy.
"I know when someone promises something but is really not going to do anything," the boy continues, sounding quite unlike his usual boisterous self.
Sasuke feels a sense of surprise at the boy's statement. He'd known that many of the adults have expressed dislike for the boy but he didn't think it was anything serious, merely the adults' annoyance at the boy's endless pranks.
"What do you mean? Has someone been mistreating you?" the Uchiha questions, somewhere in his mind he recalls that the blond is an orphan. 'Perhaps someone at the orphanage has been unfair to him,' Sasuke thinks.
Naruto turns to look at the other boy and squashes the sense of envy that wells up as he studies the Uchiha who has only ever grown up in a loving household. He shakes his head to pull himself out of his thoughts.
A picture of a tall adult in black robes flashes through his mind and he feels a sense of longing to run over to the tea house to see his sensei. 'No, we must keep looking,' his inner- determined voice pops up.
"Let's look by the trees over there," he says to the other boy instead of answering his question. "Maybe the evil ninja was hiding there waiting to ambush his victims!" he bounces up from his crouching position and says excitedly.
The whiskered boy soon runs towards the trees and Sasuke is perplexed at the abrupt change in topic.
"Come on Sasuke!" the blond shouts loudly at him, waving.
Uchiha Sasuke sighs and slowly walks towards the other boy.
'Maybe I'll ask Father about the case when I get home,' he thinks.
The two boys search about the path next to the river for a few more hours before calling it quits.
The sun was already setting and their stomachs were growling in hunger.
"I don't think there are any clues here," Sasuke tells the other boy.
Naruto nods at him unhappily.
Sasuke looks at his downtrodden expression and speaks up.
"I'll ask Otou-san about it, maybe he knows something."
Naruto turns to look at the Uchiha and then breaks out into a bright grin.
"Really? Thank you Sasuke!" he says happily.
Sasuke looks at the bright shiny blue eyes aimed his way and turns around to say with a cough, "But I can't promise you anything. Otou-san might not know about the case."
"It's ok! Maybe he does know something!" Naruto responds optimistically and they part ways to head back their respective homes.
When Sasuke gets home and asks Father about it, the older man looks quietly at him before saying, "We can't proceed any further in this case," and leaves it at that.
Sasuke is at first bewildered by the statement before recalling that things have been tense politically around the compound in recent times.
He feels disappointed at the answer but decides to leave things as they are, knowing that there were some things that he could not interfere with.
When Naruto approaches him excitedly at school the next day however, he feels a sense of guilt well up but simply answers, "Otou-san says he doesn't know anything about the case."
Naruto looks disappointed for a moment before thanking him for asking.
During lunch, Sasuke sees him scowling at the ground and sitting alone across the playground with a small bento box on his lap.
The Uchiha goes up to the blond and plops down next to him on the bench.
They have lunch together from that day on.
Kakashi watches the two boys search the path by the river for hours and a sense of guilt bubbles up in his gut.
He knows that the case will go nowhere because the Uchiha are wary, politically, of charging him with anything.
Their clan hasn't been quite well liked among the villagers for some time and Kakashi knows that something large is brewing in the background.
He thinks about handing himself in but dismisses the idea.
He'd only been watching out for the boy and was within his rights as an ANBU of Konoha to suss out suspected spies.
Nevertheless, Sarutobi had thrown a piercing glance his way when Panther had reported what had happened to the tea shop owner.
As such, he expects to be given the most boring and undesired missions for the next couple of months in punishment.
Nothing quite escapes the Hokage after all.
Perhaps he'll leave an anonymous gift to apologise. Tea shop owners should like tea right?
The next day, Naruto sits in the classroom and listens to the other students gush about what they'll be giving to their parents today for Parents Day.
Ino boasts about how she'll be giving her father a bouquet which she'll be putting together. Kiba chimes in and says that he'll volunteer to walk his mom's companion-dogs. Chouji mentions that he'll be trying out a new baking recipe and hopes that it'll turn out well as a present. Sakura says that she made bookmarks for her parents.
Naruto frowns at the floor.
He'd never had a parent before so he's never had to think about Parents Day. But today however, he feels a sense of panic well up.
He wants to give Kuro-sensei a present to thank him for all the things that he's done for him but doesn't quite know what to get the man!
He hears Shino pipe up about extracting a new specimen of honey from a hive of bees as a gift to his father when something suddenly dawns on him.
'Honey! Drink! Tea!' the words pop up in his mind.
Sensei had been teaching him to brew teas for quite a while now but he hasn't personally brewed anything for Kuro-sensei.
'Yosh!' he thinks with vigour, 'I'm gonna show sensei how much I've learned and surprise him with some tea!'
When Iruka leaves the classroom for the day, Naruto grabs a hold of Sasuke and drags him with him to look for Shino.
"Shino!" Naruto calls out before the other boy can leave.
Sasuke just sighs and lets himself be dragged about.
Shino pauses at the sound of his name and turns to look at the blond.
Naruto grins toothily at him and asks about purchasing some honey from his clan.
Shino tells him that they have more than enough to spare and leads them to the Aburame compound.
Sasuke sulkily trails along but is soon impressed at the sight of all the insects and their hives.
The boys spend some time being showed around the insect-farm and is handed a small jar of honey each by Shino's dad who pats their heads fondly before seeing them off.
They wave goodbye to Shino and Shino's dad and Naruto promises to return the favour by brewing tea for them once he's polished his tea-brewing skills.
They take their spoils home.
Naruto arrives at sensei's house, looking sneakily about.
'Sensei should be in the tea house,' he thinks as he sneaks into the house with a bottle of honey in his hand.
He's going to surprise sensei with the tea when sensei breaks for tea-time.
Some time later, sensei walks into the house searching for his young employee who happens to be late for work. He senses Naruto's chakra in the house and wonders what is keeping the blond.
He steps into the kitchen and sees a steaming hot brew of tea on the table.
Naruto shouts at him, "Surprise!" and then nervously shuffles on his feet.
"I tried making it myself," Naruto tells him, rubbing the back of his head.
Severus eyes the blond and soon picks up the cup.
He tries it and his taste buds immediately identify the ingredients.
He looks at the blond boy and then says, "Good job".
Naruto breaks out into a blinding smile.
*Relaxing Brew For Beginners*
- Green tea (2 spoonfuls)
- Jasmine (a few buds)
- Honey (1 spoonful)
Naruto sleeps with a smile on his face that night in his rented apartment.
A fox doll watches him quietly from where it sits by his bedside table.
The boy had forgotten to return the doll to his sensei and reminded himself before he had shut his eyes to give it back the next day.
The fox watches the boy throughout the night.
The next day, the boy knocks on Severus's door bright and early to return the doll before rushing off to the academy.
He's happily shouldering his new backpack which Severus had presented to him as an 'employee bonus' the night before.
Kazu had looked on knowingly at the two.
Severus carries the doll into the house and heads back to the kitchen to finish his tea.
The fox jumps lightly onto the table and comments reluctantly, "The brat's not so bad."
Severus just smirks and continues sipping at his teacup.
A box of aged roasted tea sits on the table in front him.
It had been left anonymously on his doorstep the night before.
Severus knows who it's from but thinks snidely that it takes more than tea to forgive that headache-inducing man.
'He gets a free pass from my poisons, for now,' he generously concedes.
A/N Thank you for your kind comments. Some of you have asked about the appearance of different characters but honestly, you'll just have to wait to find out :p Have a good weekend!