hello friends, i am still alive!
sorry it's been so long, just had a bunch of life stuff going on with my job and getting sick and stuff.
also a mild case of the dreaded writer's block so i decided to skip forward a good few months to get into the real neat of this story, this will be the last chapter in ten academy era and i'm sure you'll know exactly where in the timeline we're gonna be starting in within the first couple lines.
Hope i didn't cram too much offscreen character development here, do let me know cause im a bit worried about that…
hope you guys enjoy this chapter :D
"We're sick of these stupid pranks!"
"Grow the heck up!"
"You're dead when they catch you! You know that?"
"I think I can see her panties!"
Naruto drowned out the screaming voices below her as she continued to work on her magnum opus. Today was quite possibly her last day in the academy and she had to go out with a bang. She dipped her paintbrush into her bucket and drew one final swirl. She then swung back around to turn and look at the villagers taunting her.
"Y'all are just jealous that I'm a better painter than you!" She called back, sticking out a tongue at them.
It had taken her a few months to break out of the shell she had found herself back in ever since she had undergone the changes to her body, but now she truly felt like herself again.
"Yeah, None of you have the balls us girls do!" A second voice called out from beside her.
"You should try it, it's way more fun than you think from all the way down there!" A third echoed.
"That's the Hokage monument you idiots!" Someone called from the gradually accumulating crowd.
"You think we don't know that?" Naruto shooted back with a grin, "Now who's the idiot, huh?"
Another, much louder voice then boomed out, "What the hell are you three doing during class time!?"
Uh-oh, Naruto recognized that voice.
"Get down here this instant!"
"Yikes, that's Iruka-sensei!"
The three scrambled to untie the ropes that harnessed them to the monument. Pissing off a bunch of villagers Naruto could handle, Iruka was a different story. Well, at least it was fun while it lasted.
Next thing the three of them knew, they were tied up in a corner of their classroom with their peers glancing at them with various degrees of amusement. Iruka glared at them disapprovingly.
"Tomorrow is the Academy's graduation exam. Naruto, you've already tried to take the exam once early and failed. Tomorrow is your last chance! This is no time to be causing trouble."
Iruka sighed and turned his gaze to her accomplices.
"And you two, you should know better than to listen to this troublemaker!"
Ino and Sakura grinned at their teacher, not a shred of regret on their faces, "We're sorry Iruka-sensei," they said with practiced ease.
Iruka rubbed his forehead, "The three of you are going to be the death of me."
Naruto simply matched his friends' grin in response.
"Alright then, if the three of you think you're so comfortable that you think you can slack off on the last day of class, I'd like the three of you to demonstrate the three basic Academy Jutsu for the class."
He untied the three of them.
"Sakura, you're up. Perform a perfect Henge of me, and if you do, you can go back to your place."
Sakura did as asked, transforming into a perfect copy of her teacher. Iruka simply sighed and let her back, knowing full well that she was going to ace it.
"Ino, Bunshin."
Ino took a second to concentrate, then executed a perfect clone jutsu, creating an exact replica of herself, down to the fading scar on her chin that she had gotten from a previous prank she had pulled with Naruto. The plan had gone off without a hitch, it's just that she tripped cause she and Naruto were laughing too hard and didn't notice a stray pebble on the path.
"Alright, you can go back."
Iruka stared pointedly at Naruto, "Now you, miss ringleader, kindly demonstrate all three to the class."
Naruto gulped, alright, moment of truth.
Iruka tossed a duster at her, first jutsu to be displayed being obvious
Tiger
Boat
Ox
Dog
Snake
Naruto disappeared with a puff of smoke, and the duster smacked one of the dummy logs Naruto knew were kept in a storage closet right across the hallway from her classroom.
She calmly made her way back, not to the classroom, but the courtyard outside , breathing slowly as she walked. That was the easy part, now things might get dicey.
Ino and Sakura had spent several hours of several days of several weeks with her to make sure she could pass the exam, and she was going to prove it to Iruka.
When within view of her classroom, she picked up a pebble and tossed it at the window she knew to be her classroom, familiar with which one it would be from all the times she used it to sneak out and back into class.
Iruka opened the window with a confused expression, "What are you doing out there, don't be thinking you can run away again!"
Naruto tsk-ed, "If I wanted to get away, I wouldn'ta chucked the rock to get your attention." she said plainly
"Fair enough, but why are you out there, you're supposed to show me the Bunshin no Jutsu!"
"I'm gonna need some room for this!," she called back.
Iruka looked curious, but indulged her.
Naruto inhaled sharply, she could do this. Sakura had noticed her immense chakra pools, and noted that perhaps the reason she couldn't create a single proper clone was that her chakra pool came at a deficit to her control over it.
Instead, she helped Naruto come up with a workaround.
Ram
Snake
Tiger
"Bunshin no Jutsu!"
The entire courtyard was filled with a massive puff of smoke, when it finally cleared, dozens of Narutos littered the area.
Every single one, a perfect copy.
Iruka's eyes widened in surprise, "That's brilliant! How could I have missed that, I've always known of your chakra reserves, but never thought about it like this! Your chakra is so plentiful that you cannot control it at a precise enough scale to create a single clone, I must say the idea to spread it over so many clones is a genius idea."
Naruto rubbed her upper lip, "You can thank Sakura for that, she's really smart, ya know!"
Naruto could see Iruka say something out of Naruto's line of sight, likely congratulating Sakura's intellect.
Naruto dispelled the clones, she knew what was coming next and she hoped she had practiced enough.
"Alright then, you know the last one."
Iruka looked slightly apprehensive, obviously knowing about everything that happened with that one particular technique.
Mischievous glint in her eye, she ran through the ever so familiar hand-signs that had changed her life ever so drastically.
Dog
Boar
Ram
"You can thank Ino for this one. Henge!"
Another puff of smoke, this one much smaller than the last.
Naruto looked down. Ever so familiar orange and blue jacket. Orange pants. Blue sandals. Her hands reached for her forehead. Goggles.
She had done it. It was the first time she looked like how she did all those months ago. It had taken a really long time, a lot of introspection and soul searching, but Ino had finally figured out why Naruto couldn't perform a henge. The answer suddenly seemed so stupid now that she had finally gotten past it.
It was all in her head.
She, subconsciously, never wanted to turn back. Even when she tried, she hadn't noticed herself forming an improper hand-sign. She never noticed that she didn't put enough chakra into the jutsu. She never realized that she didn't really want to change back.
What had finally flipped the switch in her was when she realized she was truly happier as a girl. It wasn't the fact that the villagers treated her better for a period of time. She truly just felt more comfortable walking around and presenting as one. Naruto chuckled to herself at the memory of when she had decided to announce to the world that this is who she is now. It was a few days after she and Ino had befriended Sakura (for the second time, in Ino's case). She had climbed to the top of a pillar in one of the more densely packed areas of the village, right in front of where it all had begun. In front of the K-Mart, she shouted for all the world to listen in.
"I'm Uzumaki Naruto, and I'm gonna be the first female Hokage! Believe it!"
At first, people were confused, a few genuinely believing she was dead or missing after not seeing her for so long. A few believed it all to be a prank and tried coaxing her to drop the act and transform into a guy again. She, of course, followed them home and painted their home pink in retaliation. Eventually things began to go back to normal, or as normal as her two new friends had allowed.
They were her best friends, Ino, ever so slightly more so than Sakura. The pink haired girl had taken a few days to fully warm up to Naruto, but she made it there eventually. It also helped that Naruto stopped asking her out every chance she got, their friendship was tentative at best and she didn't want to risk ruining that over some kind of prospective romance. Besides, while Naruto still had feelings for her, she was pretty sure Sakura liked guys, judging by how she was still in love with Sasuke, and while Naruto used to be a guy too, she wasn't anymore and wasn't about to give Sakura the wrong idea about it either.
Often, the three of them would hang around the village, Sakura and especially Ino glaring daggers at anyone who would look at Naruto the wrong way. She loved having her supportive friends around, which made life a whole lot less miserable.
Slowly, the two of them steadily helped Naruto study and improve her grades, she was no scholar, but she wasn't the dead-last of her class anymore. In turn, Naruto helped the two of them exercise and perform better in the physical aspects of ninja training. Slowly, she helped the two of them break their diet, and they helped her eat healthier, often by inviting her over to their house and even teaching her to cook things that didn't come with instructions printed on the packet.
Ino's parents loved Naruto, of course, considering her a second daughter and part of the family. Sakura's parents were less accepting at first, slightly apprehensive of the girl they had heard so much about from colleagues and neighbors, but never really openly rude or apathetic to her either. Gradually, they too warmed up to her charms and grew to enjoy the smiles she would bring to their daughter's face.
Naruto eventually got bored of being miss goody-two-shoes and began her pranking sprees again, all as harmless as before and never malicious. Ino, after a few weeks of being curious, began joining in every so often and ended up finding it just as fun as Naruto did.
Sakura took longer to convince, but one day she relented, purely to get revenge on some chunin that had been rude to Naruto. She had never seen Sakura laugh as much as she had seen that day after they rubbed itching powder all over the chunins' flak-jackets when they were in the hot-springs.
The three of them had a good thing going, and Naruto wouldn't trade it for the world.
Naruto made her way back to the classroom the quick way, waving Iruka aside before hopping into the classroom through the window.
"That's really impressive Naruto, it seems like you've mastered all three jutsu perfectly." Iruka said with pride, "If it wasn't for the written test tomorrow, I'd have passed you right away!"
Ino, Sakura and a few of her classmates cheered for her, Sasuke sneered and the rest of the class were mindless NPCs as expected, mirroring their friends in cheering or sneering respectively.
Naruto dispelled the transformation and grinned at her teacher.
Iruka then grinned right back at her, "But that doesn't mean you three are off the hook, you can pack up for the day, We're heading to the Hokage monument to clean up your mess."
Naruto groaned, her joy at seeing Iruka's pride snuffed out at the thought of washing away her masterpiece.
"Alright class, Mizuki will take over for the rest of the day, I'm gonna go chaperone these three troublemakers."
Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.
In hindsight, maybe she should have invested in some cheaper paint, this good stuff was way too difficult to wash off.
The sun was beginning to set and they were only three quarters of the way through, only the Fourth's face remained marked. Naruto had come up with the idea to paint the Hokage Monument to show the village that he was going to surpass all previous Hokage, some real complex metaphorical stuff.
Ino and Sakura had added the ideas of painting the monument pink and covered with flowers. It was brilliant, really fool-proof even. And they were mostly right, no one had even caught on until they were nearly done. It was magnificent seeing the looks on the villagers' faces when they realized what was going on.
If only at least one of them had considered the fact that they would have to clean everything up at the end of the day.
"Can't we take a break, Iruka-sensei?" Sakura whined, sweat beading down her large forehead.
"Yeah, we can finish the rest tomorrow," Ino chimed in.
"Oh absolutely not, I've promised the Hokage that I will have all this cleaned by the end of the day and I'm not going back on my word."
"Bah," Naruto groaned again.
"Oh come on, I know the three of you are working really hard, so if you can have the Fourth's face clean my sundown, I'll treat everyone to dinner."
"Can we have -"
Iruka cut her off, "Nope, sorry, no ramen."
"But-"
"No buts, if it were just you, I would have considered it but I don't earn enough on a teacher's salary to feed that bottomless pit you call a stomach along with three other people."
"Bah! I'll tell the old man to pay you more." Naruto whined.
"Come on, chop-chop! Time's a-wastin.'"
Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.
It took a lot more effort than it did to paint the monument, but eventually the three of them had the monument looking as good as new.
"Great job guys!"
"Hehe, that took a lot of effort ya know! We're starving."
Naruto housed a predatory grin on her face. Ino and Sakura soon caught on and gained similar grins.
"Oh yes, Iruka-sensei! I truly am glad Naruto talked me out of my diet." Sakura said.
"And I have this weird craving for something salty and savory," Ino supplied with a widening grin, "I think I actually am in the mood for some ramen."
Iruka groaned knowing that his fate was sealed.
"Sometimes I regret that the three of you became such fast friends."
The three merely grinned innocently in response.
i was originally going to write up a nice and long chapter for you guys going all the way up to the team selections, but i just kept adding little flashbacks and things started getting out of hand very quickly, so in an effort to have this chapter out within the weekend, i have decided to leave that for next time.
I've already decided what i want to do regarding teams, but i'm curious to see what you guys would like to see when it comes to the teams, stick to canon or change the teams up a little?
again, i know what i personally like reading and writing so your response might not be what ends up happening, but i am quite curious about what this part of the fandom finds appealing. (i might or might not have already started work on the next chapter owo)
That's about it you now, so until next time it's gonna be sayonara!