Four hours after Mizuki's shocking pronouncement, Iruka found himself in a bind. At his suggestion, one of the janitorial staff had left to alert the Hokage. The academy's staff had received a response less than half and hour later containing orders to continue with their normal routine.
Iruka suspected that the Hokage intended to discuss this latest development with Naruto later. However, it was nearly impossible to go about his day as if nothing of note had occurred. Iruka couldn't stop wondering why Naruto thought the Fox was his father. If the boy was human, as the Hokage claimed and as Iruka had begun to suspect, it should be obvious this was not the case. If Naruto was really the Fox given flesh, why would he tell such an absurd lie? If the boy wasn't lying, how in the world had he come to such an absurd conclusion?
In the end, Iruka had to concede defeat. Every thought and action led him back to the same dilemma. He sincerely doubted he would get any work done until he had his answers. With a sigh, he set about cleaning the classroom. A quick water jutsu and some cloth left a clear blackboard. He examined each desk, checking that there were no obvious messes that needed reporting and that no one had left anything behind. He stopped at a desk near the back of the classroom. Choji Akamichi had made a mess of his desk again. There were chip crumbs and smears of something purple all over the inside of the desk. Iruka made a note of this and stuck it to the classroom door. The janitor could deal with it later. He would talk to the boy about it, but Choji had already had people harping on him about his eating habits since he entered the academy. Now the teachers rarely bothered him unless he made a larger mess.
Naruto should be in detention with Mizuki right now. Iruka considered. It would not be going about things in the usual manner, but hopefully the Hokage would forgive him such a small trespass. He suspected the orders to pretend nothing interesting had occurred were to ensure the children's schedule wasn't disrupted, and as such he doubted a change in handling detentions would be penalized. Mizuki had a wife waiting at home, so getting him to swap supervision of Naruto's detention should be easy. Iruka pinched his nose in irritation, and ran his finger along the scar. If I'm going to do this, I need to get moving.
He walked out the door, fully intent on getting his answers from the blond prankster.
Naruto grimaced as he scrubbed the toilet, Mizuki looming in the corner. He snuck a quick glare at the chuckling silver-haired man. He's laughing at me again! Why was the bast— erm, meanie laughing at him? He had a feeling that his teacher was being mean, but was disconcerted to find he was unable to understand what, precisely, the man was actually laughing at. Was he actually being mean, or was Naruto just being — what had the old man called it — paranoid?
As he dipped the toilet brush back into foamy water, the door to the bathroom opened. Naruto spun around, slipping on the wet floor. He flailed frantically in an attempt to catch his balance, and slid sideways onto the toilet. His arm slid downwards and was immediately soaked up to the elbow. Naruto gagged. Even if it was soapy and supposedly clean, it was toilet water!
"Gross!" Naruto exclaimed and ran for the sinks, where he desperately scrubbed his hand and arm. He turned to glare at Mizuki, who he expected to still be leaning against the entrance to the toilet. I am going to prank him so hard for making me clean the toilets! It's not fair! All I did was tell Sakura who my daddy was!
Naruto froze. Mizuki-sensei was gone, and Iruka-sensei was standing there instead, looking at him with an incomprehensible mixture of emotions. Naruto gulped.
"What are you doing here? Where's Mizuki-sensei?" he asked hesitantly.
Iruka smiled slightly at him. "He wanted to get home to his wife. I offered to supervise your detention for the rest of the day."
Naruto noticed that he seemed to want to say something more, but was hesitating. It made him slightly nervous. Maybe Iruka hadn't known about his daddy? The instructors was a nicer person than his other teachers but he had always seemed to dislike Naruto. So he must have known, right?
"Did you want to ask about my daddy?" he asked. "Everyone else wants to talk about him." Sakura's the only one who believes me AND still acts the same. Naruto's certainty that he wanted her as a friend had multiplied at that realization.
"In a way…" Iruka confirmed, looking at him. "Do you mind telling me how you learned that he was your father?" he asked with obvious interest and barely-concealed confusion.
"Maybe…if I don't have to clean the rest of the bathroom for telling the truth." Naruto said cannily. Well, as cannily as a six-year-old can manage.
Iruka grimaced. "All right."
Naruto hesitated some more. "The old man said not to talk about it. It's an S-class secret."
Iruka fought an urge to groan. If Naruto wanted to keep it a secret, why had he blurted it out in the middle of a classroom? "Well, I already know the secret, so you won't be breaking the law," he pointed out. This time.
"You know what a lot of the villagers call me, right?" Naruto asked, then continued, nearly spitting the words. "Demon. Demon brat. Nine-Tail brat." He hated giving voice to those oft-repeated appellations.
His teacher nodded hesitantly. "Of course. It isn't easy to miss."
Naruto felt a bit of surprise and respect. Iruka had not even attempted to deny how he was treated. Many of the nicer adults would pretend they had no idea of how he was treated, or would claim that he was making mountains out of molehills. "I'm going to prove them all wrong, though! I'll be Hokage and then they'll have to respect me! Believe it!"
Iruka nearly groaned. He repeated his question to try to bring the hyperactive, nervous blond back on track. "How did you learn he was your father, though?"
Naruto returned to the topic. "Well, I was trying to buy some Ramen…"
As Naruto described the conversation he had heard, he paused, then asked, "Did Sauske really burn down his house?"
Iruka snorted despite himself. "No." Naruto pouted in disappointment. "He nearly burned down his great-aunt's house and set two other houses on fire at roughly the same time."
Naruto burst out laughing. "Sauske burned down three houses!" That's even better! THREE!
"Yes he did," Iruka replied, amused and filled with as sense of fearful anticipation. If he knew pranksters, and he did, Naruto was most likely already planning to do something with even more impact. "Lighting houses on fire is bad, Naruto. Don't imitate him." The kid was still laughing. "He was banned from eating Ramen for the next year." Iruka fibbed. He had no idea how Sauske's family had chosen to punish him.
Naruto stopped laughing immediately and stared at Iruka, aghast. "That's terrible!"
Iruka forced down his instinctive negative response to the demon container. "Don't ask him about it. He'll just feel even worse if you remind him." That should stop Naruto from figuring out he had been lied to.
Naruto nodded frantically, feeling sick. No ramen for a year! That had to be the most terrible punishment ever invented. Well, except for no ramen for more than a year, obviously. He shuddered at the mere thought.
"Can you get back to telling me how you learned about the fox?"
Naruto nodded, relieved for the change in topic. He did not want to consider what life would be like without the food of the gods. "Well, during that conversation, I noticed something. When they said brat…"
Iruka listened to the story with growing disbelief and amusement. He could easily understand how the six-year-old had come to such an absurd conclusion. When Naruto told him about his conversation with the Hokage and the S-class secrets, Iruka fought an urge to laugh. He could not help but feel sorry for his leader. Nothing the man tried had worked, even reminding Naruto that the fox had attacked the village. The man had even sworn that Naruto was unrelated to the fox.
Iruka wondered who Naruto's parents were. However, he chose not to consider the subject very deeply. The poor child was far from the only shinobi whose parentage had been hidden. Bodyguards were expensive. As such, the village generally did not supply them to orphans, and so when the children of particularly infamous shinobi were orphaned early enough so as to be unrecognizable, their heritage was often hidden. Information on their parents and inheritance would be withheld until the child was old enough to make the choice of whether they would defend themselves, hire bodyguards, continue the deception, or were adopted by another strong ninja family.
That led to the conclusion Iruka had finally reached as he listened to the small boy's story. He had long held doubts that Naruto was actually a demon, but this story had killed the idea altogether. This mistake was the act of someone who was pure, stubborn, innocent, and childish. While he could imagine a prankster trying to act out this scenario for fun, he doubted a malicious demon would bother. Besides, Naruto was just too earnest. Iruka could not bring himself to doubt the boy's story.
So it was an amused and slightly regretful (he had resented Naruto for years, after all) teacher who finally broke down in roaring laughter as Naruto described telling the Hokage that he knew the secret and running away before the old man could be forced to lie again. Even the Hokage has trouble dealing with a six-year-old as unpredictable as Naruto. Iruka thought with a grin.
"Hey! What's so funny?" Naruto snapped, wondering if he should be offended. People at school normally only laughed like that for two reasons - either he had just pulled a good prank or they were making fun of him. Of course, there were exceptions, like the Hokage.
Iruka grinned at the small, blond-haired, blue-eyed brat. "Sorry. I was just imagining the Hokage's face," he chuckled. "I bet that shocked him."
Naruto grinned tentatively back. "Maybe." He noticed that the reserved, resentful look Iruka sometimes had around him had completely vanished. Maybe he just didn't like keeping secrets? It would make sense. Iruka was a teacher, so he was supposed to teach ninja, not keep secrets. But he was a ninja as well as a teacher, and they all kept secrets, right? Naruto frowned in confusion.
"Why are you being nice to me now?" he asked hesitantly. He did not want to offend Iruka, but he had a feeling Iruka would tell him.
Iruka looked a bit guilty. "Well, it was because of the S-class secret," which Naruto still did not know and which he still could not talk about. This would take some delicate handling to be honest without revealing village secrets or causing Naruto to feel betrayed when he finally realized that the demon was not actually his parent. "At first, I thought you were a demon," Naruto wilted at this, and Iruka's conscience stabbed him sharply. "But I've known you for a while now, and I finally made my decision. You aren't the demon, Naurto." Iruka said with a smile, patting the boy's head.
Naruto fairly beamed at him. Iruka smiled hesitantly back into those happy, blue eyes. Yeah, definitely not a demon. The Hokage was right about this kid all along. He was shocked when the blond suddenly grabbed him in a hug. He had never seen Naruto hug anyone before.
"You're my favorite teacher, Iruka-sensei! Believe it!" he yelled with a grin. Iruka winced as his ears rang. Someone really needed to teach Naruto how to use an indoor voice.
As this conversation was taking place, Hiruzen Sarutobi was winding up a meeting with his council: Danzo Shimura, Koharu Utatane, and Homura Mitokado. As the business of the day drew to a close, the Hokage brought up a subject that had been causing him no end of frustration lately.
"Now that that business is settled, I could use some advice," Hiruzen said in deep exhaustion. "I am having some trouble getting Naruto to listen to me."
Danzo snorted. "I am good at causing emotional damage, not resolving it, Hiruzen."
Koharu added, "Children don't always understand when we are busy. You should know that by now. You've had your own, too."
Hiruzen groaned. "No, no, it's not that. You are aware of how many of the more ignorant villagers treat him, of course."
They all indicated their agreement. It was regrettable, as such treatment was bound to affect the jinchuriki's loyalty to the village, and it was painful to see their former leader's son treated as a pariah.
"Well, a few weeks ago, Naruto was listening to some ninja converse and realized that people often used the word brat when referring to someone's child. He remembered how often he has been called demon brat or Nine-tailed brat, and—"
Homura and Koharu started chuckling at this point, and even Danzo suppressed a snort of amusement. "So, he thinks the demon is his parent?"
Hiruzen nodded in resignation. "Unfortunately. Nothing I say will budge him. He's convinced I just don't want him to know an S-class secret. It doesn't help that he knows there is some sort of big secret or law about him and the fox, or that I told him I can't tell him who his parents are."
Homura started in surprise. "I thought we had agreed not to let the boy know anything of his heritage. Didn't you tell him you had no idea who they were?" he asked accusingly.
Hiruzen grinned sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. "Well… I may have slipped and told him his mother was a ninja when he sat on my lap, crying, and asked me, and I quote, "Was the Nine-tailed fox my mommy or my daddy?"
Homura and Koharu stared at him in bemused shock. Danzo snorted and face-palmed, which turned three looks of shock in his direction. Danzo never laughed. He believed shinobi should not show emotions — or even have them, though he had never conquered his own.
He quickly recovered and looked at them stoically. "What?"
Homura shook his head. "Nothing."
Hiruzen smiled. "It's good to see you laugh again."
"I did not laugh."
"Of course," Hiruzen nodded seriously. "You snorted."
Danzo ignored him studiously. Even the man many called War Hawk or monster had his own quirks. Hiruzen found it fun to poke at them.
"So what did you tell the boy?" asked Koharu.
Hiruzen sighed, returning to the subject at hand. "Well, the game was up the second he heard his mother was a ninja. I caught myself before I could tell him about his father, thankfully. So I tried to distract him by telling him some stories about his mother, ones that could not be used to identify her. I told him he couldn't learn her name or about his father until he was older because it was an S-class secret."
"And he still believes he is related to the fox?" she asked in disbelief.
"Have you considered giving him The Talk?" asked Homura.
"Yes and no." replied Hiruzen. "He's six. I am not giving him the talk." Seeing Danzo about to speak up, he added, "No one else will be either. That will wait until he is older." Danzo sat back, looking dissatisfied.
"You could tell him that his father was a loyal ninja."
"I tried. He said it was good to know his father was a powerful and loyal person before he got hypnotized or turned into a puppet and attacked the village like in that play they've got going in the theaters."
His advisors were beginning to get somewhat frustrated.
"You could just tell him who his parents were."
"No! We've been hiding children without relatives to take them in this way for decades. I don't want him having to deal with assassination attempts. The occasional attack by an angry villager scares him enough!" Hiruzen declared passionately. "He won't keep the secret - he even told his entire class he was related to the fox this morning!"
All three advisors were shocked. Danzo looked at him and asked dryly, "Is there any point to the law anymore? It only serves to spread misconceptions among the ignorant. I doubt many villages are unaware of our jinchuriki's identity at this point — all a spy would need to do is visit a local bar."
Hiruzen glared at him. "He needs a chance to make friends, have the closest thing to a normal life he can manage, and create bonds within the village."
"He is a weapon," Danzo pointed out helpfully.
"He is a boy. He is Minato's son!" Hiruzen retaliated.
Homura sighed in exasperation, cutting off the oft-repeated argument. "He does seem to have thrown that opportunity out the window with his unintentional impersonation of Suna's jinchuriki."
Hiruzen sank back into his chair. "Maybe… But I feel that he still has a chance this way. Most children should be too intelligent to believe him in another year or two."
"They are going to draw a connection to the fox now if they didn't before, Hiruzen. Even if they don't believe him, his treatment might point them in the right direction," reminded Koharu gently.
Hiruzen firmly declared, "No. That is my final word on the matter."
The three looked exasperated. "Choose some random dead ninja with no real enemies, maybe a chunnin, and say that is his father. He will get over the lie later," suggested Homura.
"No. I refuse to disgrace Minato's memory that way."
Koharu groaned. "Hiruzen. Claiming you had no idea who his parents were or that they were nameless civilians was just as bad. Would it be any worse a defilement than having the boy believe that his father is the enemy Minato gave his life to seal?"
Hiruzen glared stubbornly at his advisors. "No. I refuse to lie about his father."
Danzo slowly added, "We could use a sea—"
"No. I've told you repeatedly that I consider such means far too inhumane to use on an ally." Hiruzen said heatedly.
Danzo looked at Homura, who got the message and spoke up. "It seems there is nothing you can and will do then, Hiruzen. You won't deceive him. You won't tell him. You won't give him The Talk or any other information that would definitively prove him wrong. I, for one, am at a loss."
Koharu patted her old teammate on the shoulder. "It'll be all right, Hiruzen. Children go through phases. I'm sure he will learn his error soon enough." Her tone said she suspected it would be some time, though. Naruto was not known to be particularly bright.
Danzo added, "Any other suggestions I could make would only serve to make you angry. I'm out of ideas that you would consider."
Hiruzen looked ready to cry. "That boy is as stubborn as Kushina!" He groaned and banged his forehead on the edge of his desk, causing it to creak dangerously.
Koharu blinked in shock. "Is that what keeps happening to your desk? I noticed this one appears to be new… again."
As soon as he was back at his base and behind anti-spying and noise-suppressing seals, Danzo broke into a totally uncharacteristic belly laugh. It was one of his best-hidden secrets, but there was a reason he rarely pressed too hard for Naruto to be brainwashed like his agents, and had never made more than a single attempt to recruit him behind the Hokage's back. The boy's antics were hilarious!
Danzo grinned despite himself as he imagined a blond-haired child dropping that bomb on Hiruzen. That type of tactic belonged in T&I. Maybe the brat was a natural?
He would have to reward the boy for this laugh by discarding another short, well-illustrated pranking manual near Naruto's apartment. Maybe he would even include a nondescript note in the margins with a map of ANBU HQ. He had noticed a few of the younger ANBU slacking on their equipment checks recently.
After he had regained his composure, Danzo left to make up for his little spat of emotion by emotionally breaking some children into short-lived, traumatized ninja who could do nothing but follow orders. Another squad had perished following a stupid order from their superior, who Danzo had since put down without fanfare. Unfortunately, the inability to identify your own emotions or think for yourself had downsides, and three of his agents had actually jumped off a cliff when jokingly asked to do so.