Black fluid shot out from Yagura's mouth, coughs racking his body as a tan hand soothingly patted his back. Yagura's messy-grey hair obscured his vision momentarily as his body rejected the liquid that was slowly turning crimson.
Fū gave calming strokes to his back, using her other hand to hold back the older boy's hair away from his face.
Yagura gripped the edges of a plastic bag, pink pupiless eyes screwed shut in pain.
It took some time, but Yagura eventually looked up at Fū with tired eyes, haphazardly wiping away blood from his chin.
"Remind me never to commit pseudocide ever again," Yagura said with a raspy voice.
His eyes suddenly widened and he forced his face back into the bag so he could choke up the last of the distasteful solvent.
"Duly noted, kid," Fuu said.
Yagura rubbed away the last of the liquid from his chin and glared at her.
"I'm older than you," Yagura said, annoyance underlying in his tone of voice.
"So? You don't look a day over 13," Fū mocked Yagura, giving him a smirk of victory.
"I'm 19 years old, Fū!" Yagura growled, almost snapping at the younger child.
"And I care why?" Fū didn't seem to comprehend the annoyance rolling off of Yagura.
Yagura calmed himself and spoke again, "Fū, I am the Mizukage and you will stop disrespecting me."
"I wouldn't care if you're the HOkage!" Fuu snapped back with all the sass she could muster.
Yagura felt himself grow impatient with the green-haired girl.
"The Mizukage and Hokage have the same amount of power within the Five Great Nations, idiot!"
"I don't respect any of the Kage, so get that stick out your a—!" Fū was cut off mid word by a feminine voice in the doorway.
"Language, Fū."
The grey haired boy and orange eyed girl winced at the scorn in the third party's voice, both murmuring their apologies to the blond.
Maru had entered the completely bare room after hearing a swear word start to form in the tan child's mouth.
Maru sighed.
While they were proud of the fact Fū was able to get Yagura to loosen up a bit with smalltalk and debates, it became quite the headache when Fuu's argumentative personality started taking action.
Decades later, Maru would find themself still asking the short girl just how she thought she could befriend everyone she met with such a lacklustre control of her own anger.
Yagura and Fū sat on the floor, not bothered much since the floor was carpeted with a rather large and soft mattress.
Maru walked closer to the pair before bouncing off the ground and landing cross legged in front of Yagura.
Pink coral eyes met blue oceans as Maru started to bombard Yagura with question on his health and if he was feeling okay, or if he needed anything.
Yagura felt his face heat up as Maru fussed over him.
There was a solid three years between the two of them, but Yagura had always seen the blond as an older sibling, someone he could model himself after, so when they started to fret over him, he felt embarrassed that he had made such a powerful figure worry. Many times, Maru had tried to convince him that they only did it because they cared, but Yagura couldn't help but redden every time Maru openly showed affection towards him.
Eventually, Fuu used her small hands to clasp Maru's cheeks and bring them to eye level, acting like she was talking to a small child as she explained to Maru that Yagura was okay. Maru gave the 15 year old a sheepish grin, scratching the back of their head in nervous habit. Despite the confirmation of him feeling completely fine, Maru forced Yagura to take a nap so he could fully recuperate after having just faked his death in the most painful and unnecessary way possible.
--
Yagura stretched as he was lying down, letting out a yawn that showed off his unusually sharp teeth. His teeth weren't nearly as sharp as Kisame's, instead his rounded off when they became a little longer than the average tooth, but they were still surprisingly intimidating. Yagura's eyes were sunken with sleepiness as he sat up, a state of consciousness he quickly replaced by smacking his cheeks a few times. His pink eyes suddenly lit up with life as he realised that he had slept through the night and now he had the aroma of pancakes wafting into the room. The night before, Yagura had claimed the room as his own due to its close proximity to a natural water resource, letting Maru shove a double size bed into the back wall.
Yagura left the surprisingly comfy bed in what he considered his new favourite pyjamas. They felt like silk, making him feel like he was free, but still secure in the knowledge there was something covering him. Restricted freedom, the best type of freedom ( in his opinion ). The shirt was almost a crop top, cutting off at his naval, and his trousers were knee length shorts. His clothing was all a medium shade of blue, rimmed at the hems with a dashing shade of green-blue a few inches wide.
Yagura felt unusually unexposed when he exited his new room, despite being in rather revealing clothes. He trusted the people around him, the outfit was comfortable, and, if worst came to worse, he could kick their butts without breaking a sweat ( or so he hoped ). It took no time to find a room completely filled out in with raven blue, the furniture coloured with shades only dark oak and mahogany could aspire to achieve. On a fluffy, bright pink double couch in the left corner of the room sat Fuu, reading a book curled up so that Yagura could only identify her by her green hair and telltale orange hair clip. Yagura took the time to approach Fuu and start a conversation.
"Hey, cousin," Yagura said, speaking softly in case there was anyone in the house still sleeping. Fuu looked up from her book ( Tale of a Gutsy Ninja, Yahura noted ) and gave the grey haired boy a tired stare from behind it.
"It's 5am, a full hour too early for this bolshevik," Fuu wearily replied with a topic completely unrelated to the greeting Yagura had presented her with. Yagura almost snorted when he heard Fuu's child-friendly variation of bullshit, his careful composition as a ruthless leader slowly crumbling under the child's dry humour and witty comments. Despite being 15 years old, Fuu was always being chastised by Maru to not swear, so Fuu had started making some interesting alterations to the swears, replacing them with hilarious words ( don't let Fuu know Yagura found them funny ).
Yagura raised an amused eyebrow and asked, "If it's an hour too early for whatever this is, then why are you awake?"
Fuu looked at the messy-grey haired boy like it was blatantly obvious.
"Because, no matter what time it is, Naruto's cooking is the best," Fuu snapped back, pointing her thumb at a doorless side room connected to the current area. Yagura tilted his head in query.
"Who's Naruto?" Yagura asked, genuinely confused at this person he had never met. Fuu's eyes widened when she realised the mistake.
"Sorry," she said. "You know Maru, right? ( What am I saying? Of course you know Maru, we saw her yesterday. ) Well, she has this cool thing where she can change her physical appearance at will!" Yagura blinked in disbelief at the younger teen. "It's true! With her different appearances come a different persona. Maru and Chihiro are both girls and Naruto and Menma are both boys!"
Yagura slumped down on the couch in an attempt to understand everything just thrown at him. Fuu tried to find a way to explain it.
"It's sort of like having multiple people in my body and so my body changes to accommodate each person every time they appear."
Fuu and Yagura looked up towards the doorless room, finding someone who looked strikingly similar to Maru in the doorway, only they looked less feminine, were taller and had an orange apron on.
"Thank you!" Fuu exclaimed. "Trust the old lady to know the best way to explain stuff."
Maru ( or Naruto ) looked down at Fuu with an incredulous look and spoke, "I'm not 'the old lady' by a long shot. Han is decades older than me, so I'm just somewhere in the middle ground."
It was Fuu's turn to give Naruto an incredulous look.
"How dare you — you can time travel! You've lived multiple lives in several different eras and you're saying you're younger than Han?! He's not even in his fifties yet! You're at least a few centuries older than him!"
Yagura was left shocked at Fuu's sudden outburst.
After several inquiries and a breakfast fit for gods, Yagura found himself with full confirmation that Naruto was a gender-changing time traveler with dissociative identity disorder.
Honestly, not the most confusing morning he'd had in recent memory.