Hey everybody, thesaiyanjedi here with the latest chapter of "Naruto and Sakura's Twelfth Anniversary."

Yeah, I know, I've been away for a while. I'm really sorry, but it was combination of two very simple things: me having some writer's block, and being stuck in peak season at my job. But at least peak season is over with now, so that's good news!

I think with this chapter you can get a feeling of where I am going with this story, but if not, I'll elaborate more when we get to the end.

With that said, lets get to reading!

Chapter 3: Uninvited Guests

"Okay Shina," Sakura said, "your father and I are going to be leaving now. You're in charge until both of us get back."

"I know mom."

"Son," Naruto said as he kneeled down to put his bandaged hand on the boy's shoulders. "I know we've already discussed this, but this is the first time your mother and I are trusting you to stay home alone. I just want to make sure that you understand that this comes with a lot of responsibility. We're counting on you not only to take care of the house, but more importantly, you're in charge of making sure that nothing bad happens to your sister."

Shinachiku turned his head to look at the little girl with pink hair smiling back at him. He turned back to face his father with a smile of his own. "I promise I'll take care of her dad."

Now it was the father's turn to smile. "That's my boy."

As Naruto stood back up, Sakura spoke again. "Alright, now just a quick reminder of the rules before we go. First, both of you are to be in bed no later than 9 o' clock, no excuses. Second, you have plenty of microwave dinners and other food to eat in the fridge and the pantry. No gorging on sweets and junk foods all night...Oh, and no clearing out all the ramen either."

"But—"

"No buts young man!"

The boy huffed in annoyance. "Fine."

"Third," Sakura continued, "You can watch movies if you want, but don't play anything too scary. I don't want to come home and find out Hanami's been having bad dreams. Fourth, no turning on the oven, or the barbeque, or anything that could burn the house down. Fifth, if you're going to be using the pool, then its up to you to watch your sister to make sure nothing happens to her, and absolutely no swimming until thirty minutes after you eat. Sixth, make sure you've both taken a bath before you go to bed. Seventh, I don't want either of you playing with the other's stuff without their permission. Eighth—"

"Sakura!" Naruto raised his voice to get his wife to stop. "I think they get the message honey. Lets let them have a little fun tonight."

Sakura seemed a bit skeptical at first glance, but she sighed out loud and smiled in confidence. "I guess you're right. You two just be good and take care of each other. Promise?"

"Promise," Shinachiku said.

"Promise," Hanami said.

The mother gave one last goodbye hug and kiss to both of her children before she went over to her husband and the both waved them goodnight.

"We'll be back before midnight, I promise," Sakura told them.

"Remember Shina," Naruto stated, "you're the man of the house until we get back. Don't let things get out of hand."

"Okay dad!"

With that, the parents shut and locked the door behind them and the kids were left all alone for the night.

"They'll be alright, won't they?"

Naruto didn't seem the least bit worried. "They'll be fine. I mean what's the worst that can happen?

Shinachiku looked out the window and saw his parents walking away from the front porch and out the front fence, locking it behind them. As soon as they were both out of sight, he stepped away from the window and turned his head back to the one other person left with him inside the house.

"Well sis, I guess it's going to be just you and me for tonight. What do you want to do?"

"Get wasted and laid."

"WHAAAATTTTT?!"

"Yeah, it was something I once heard Aunt Ino did with Sai once, she was talking to mommy about it. I don't know what it means though. Do you oniichan?"

A very large sweat drop appeared on the back of the poor boy's head as he was extremely uncomfortable with his sister's completely innocent question. "Umm...Hanami, I think you're a little too young to know about that stuff. Can you promise me something?"

"What?"

"Promise me that you'll never, ever, ever, say words like that to mommy and daddy."

Hanami, again too young and innocent to understand what her big brother was asking of her, merely smiled and said, "Okay!"

Well, with that uncomfortable moment behind them, Shinachiku figured that he should make his own suggestion instead. "Say, umm...how about we go watch a movie instead?"

"Okay!"

The two of them were inside the entertainment room, located on the second floor of the house. There were four leather seats set up in a row, one for each member of the four person family, and an old fashioned movie projector set up in front of a white projection screen. Shinachiku was sitting in the seat next to his sister.

They were watching some cheesy cartoon movie that Hanami said she really wanted to watch. The poor boy could barely pay attention to it; all he could make out was that it had something to do with a bunch of cartoon ponies who were always talking about friendship and such. He remembered he'd heard a few of the other guys at the Academy used to talk about this movie, quite passionately actually. Shinachiku, well...

"I just don't get it."

"Huh?"

"Oh, nothing. So how do you like the movie?"

"I think its great!"

The boy rolled his eyes as he slumped in his chair. He now regretted recommending watching a movie with her. He needed to think of a way out of this, and in the most polite, unassuming way possible.

"Hey Hanami, you hungry yet?"

"Sure."

"Great! How 'bout I look through the pantry and see if I can whip us up some dinner?"

"Okay!"

'Oh thank god! Anything to get away from this!'

Shinachiku was in the pantry, looking for stuff to make for dinner. Granted, he wasn't exactly the world's greatest chef or anything, but then again, from what his father had told him, his mother didn't use to be a terribly great cook either. He even recalled one story his dad once told him about when he was training as a teenager and his mom tried to help him by making him a bunch of food pills that were so inedible that he and Sai were nearly poisoned to death. Thank goodness that was a far cry from the woman that had raised him and Hanami all their lives!

"Hmm...What to eat? What to eat?"

He spotted some bread and the sliced meats and cheeses and some fresh vegetables and decided to keep things simple.

"Hey, how do you feel about sandwiches tonight?"

Hanami didn't say yes or no, instead merely shrugged her shoulders. Not fully getting what that meant, Shinachiku just went back to getting his ingredients ready to prepare the food.

"Oniichan?" Hanami said to her brother as he was getting her sandwich ready.

"Yes?"

"Do you think we're going to be alright?"

"What do you mean?"

"Mommy just seemed really scared about leaving us alone."

The boys put a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, mom's just overreacting, that's all. You and I are going to be fine tonight. I promised that I'd take care of you, no matter what."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Besides, what's the worst that could possibly happen?"

In the alleyways of the Hidden Leaf Village, two ragged-looking men were alone as one of them seemed to be getting cold feet.

"Hey Kaneda, you sure this is a good idea?"

"Tetsuo, you want payback don't you?"

"Well, sure, but—"

"Then stop being such a chicken and lets get a move on! The Hokage and that pink haired bitch have had this coming for seventeen years! Don't you remember what they did to us that New Year's Eve?"

"Well, yeah, sure. But that was a long time ago."

"They made idiots of us and got us locked up in prison. That was millions of ryo we stole from that bank, all of it lost because of a couple of lovesick teenagers!"

Tetsuo still didn't feel any less convinced. "Yeah, but like I said, that was seventeen years ago."

Kaneda's anger wasn't any less tempered. "Okay Tetsuo, let me remind you of something else. Remember five years later when we finally got paroled? Remember all those big scores we got knocking off all those jewelry stores and shopping malls? We were rich, swimming in money, and who was it that tracked us down and arrested us, again?!"

Tetsuo sighed, "Naruto Uzumaki."

"Damn right! That blonde idiot of a Jōnin somehow put it together that it was us and tracked us down and put us both in jail all over again! And just a week after that the punk gets chosen to become the Seventh Hokage! And don't tell me you've forgotten about what happened seven years after that?!"

"Oh, you mean when we got paroled the second time and we tried robbing the Archive Library inside the Hokage Rock?"

"Yeah! I'm telling you that other villages would have paid us through their noses for those secrets! We could have been set for life! And who was it that tracked us down and stopped us, again?!"

"Naruto."

"YES! Well no more! You and I finally broke out of the joint and now that guy's finally getting what's coming to him! You and I are going to bust into that punk's house and we are taking everything!"

"But Kaneda! It's Naruto Uzumaki's house! This is suicide!"

Kaneda slapped his forehead. "Tetsuo, I already told you, Uzumaki and his wife are going out of the house tonight for their anniversary."

"How do you know that?"

"Oh I have my connections, don't you worry."

Tetsuo was still unconvinced. "Okay...But wait, doesn't Uzumaki have two kids living with him also?"

Kaneda scoffed. "I'm sure they brought the little brats with them wherever they went tonight. No way a couple of rich stiffs like them are going to leave a couple of kids home alone for even one night."

"And if they did?"

"Who fucking cares?! They're just one Genin and a little girl. What can a couple of brats like them possible do to us? They ain't their old man. Now, anything else?"

"No."

"Good. Then if you want you're cut, shut up and get moving!"

"Mmm!" Hanami hummed as she took a bite from her sandwich. "This is tasty!"

"Yeah!" Shinachiku agreed, impressed at his own handiwork.

The sandwiches were made up of submarine bread, fresh cut lettuce, honey ham, moist turkey, thin cut slices of salami, freshly cut tomatoes, both cheddar and provolone cheese, mayonnaise and mustard, and just a hint of onion. He wanted to add some bacon also, but his mom made in crystal clear that she didn't want him using the stove.

"You make a really good sandwich oniichan!"

Shinachiku blushed as he scratched the back of his head. "Oh, hey, its was nothing really. I just threw whatever I could find onto a few pieces of bread, that's all."

"Well, I think its really good."

The boy chuckled. 'She thinks everything I do is great...'

After the two of them were done with their food, they decided to go back upstairs and finish watching the movie. Poor Shina needed to be a big boy and stomach it until it was over.

'Uh! That is the last time I let her pick the movie...Still, that one flying pony with the rainbow mane was kind of c—Wait! What the heck am I thinking!'

His own thoughts were cut off when he suddenly heard a yawn coming from the seat right next to him.

"Gomen," Hanami said.

"Don't apologize, you must be getting tired now." He checked the time on his phone. "Maybe its about time we got to bed anyway?"

"Okay."

Turning off the projector, Shinachiku led his sister out of the entertainment room and up to the third floor. Opening the door to her room he stood outside and she went inside, not wanting to invade the girls personal space.

"Well, I'll see you tomorrow morning sis. Mom and dad should be back in a little while."

But as he was about to go to his room, he felt something tugging on his shirt. "What?"

"Oniichan, can you read me a story?"

The boy sweat dropped. "Seriously?" The girl nodded, and he sighed. "Alright. Get into your pajamas and I'll be back in five minutes."

"'Kay!"

Hanami shut the door behind her as Shinachiku went into his own room next door. 'Man! Sometimes I think that girl just makes up any excuse she can think of just to spend more time with me. Its like she has some kind of big brother complex or something.'

Shinachiku opened the door to his room and plopped down on his bed. Not bothering to change his clothes yet, he instead decided to pass the next five minutes by quickly sharpening one of his kunai, knowing he was going to need them ready for training with Konohamaru-sensei tomorrow. It went by pretty fast actually, by the time those five minutes were up, he had sharpened at least five of his kunai and shuriken each.

Then he heard a knock on his door. "Come in."

The door opened to reveal his little sister now dressed in her white and pink pajamas, looking cute enough to melt any mother's heart. "Oniichan?"

The boy quickly put his weapons away in a sealing scroll. "Yeah, I'll be right there sis."

As she left to go to her room, he folded up the scroll and stuffed in into his supplies for next morning's training.

He then went back to Hanami's room to see the girl already sitting in bed with the sheets up to her waist. He stood at the foot of her bed and looked over at a small shelf containing some of her books.

"So...which one would you like me to read?"

To his surprise (sort of), she reached inside her sheets and pulled out the one that she had already picked out for him. When she handed it to him, he looked at the cover to see what it was that she had picked.

"You have got to be kidding me..."

Yes, the title on the cover said it all: The Pretty Little Ponies and the Power of Love and Friendship.

'This has got to be a cruel joke the heavens are playing on me?'

But, alas, the happy, anticipatory smile on the girl's face made it impossible for him to say no. So, whether he wanted to or not, he sat down on her bed opened the book, and started to read...

"...The End."

He'd made it. It took him twenty minutes, but he'd made it. He'd finished reading her the book. And, wouldn't you know it, when he looked back over at her, she had already fallen blissfully asleep before he'd even finished.

Shinachiku could not help the twitching of his eyebrow or the vein that appeared on his forehead. "Figures."

Putting the book back on her shelf, he turned out the light, the last light left on in the house save for his own room, made sure she was properly tucked in, and left her be, smiling at her one last time before softly closing the door.

The boy then went to his own room and got changed, getting into some casual sleeping clothes and pulling back the sheets. going over everything one more time in his head, he could not help but feel proud of himself as she got under the covers and closed his eyes.

'See mom and dad, I told you I could handle this. Our first night home alone and nothing bad happened whatsoever...'

Well outside the village, in the dark of the night, two lone figures made their way through the trees until they came to an open field. In the middle of that field stood a large, three story house surrounded by an elegantly decorated black gate.

"This is it."

"I don't see any lights on."

"What did I tell you Tetsuo? The Uzumaki's are out partying or clubbing or living large right now...While you and me were left to rot not once, not twice, but three times in the joint."

"I don't know Kaneda, they could just be asleep."

"Well then we'll be extra quiet so we can be sure not to wake any of them up, eh genius!"

Tetsuo frowned at his partners sarcasm, then took another look at the house before turning back. "How are we going in?"

"We'll sneak around the back, hope over the fence, and crack open the back door. We can make our way through the house from there. You remembered the bags and the crowbars, right?"

Tetsuo held his hands out to show all of the stuff he brought with him. "Got it all right here."

"Great. Lets get going."

The two crooks did exactly that, they headed around the back, climbed over the fence, and jumped down on the backyard grass...Or rather, they climbed over the fence and then lost their balance, promptly falling down onto the grass with a thud. Kaneda fell first, and then Tetsuo fell next, right on top of his partner!

"OH!"

"Gomen Kaneda."

"Get off me you idiot!"

Kaneda pushed his partner off of him, rather crassly actually. When both of them got up, they walked down the walkway past the garden, the pool, the hot tub, before stepping onto the deck. That brought them to the back door of the house.

"Alright get the crowbar!"

Tetsuo got the crow bar out and jammed it into the door frame. It cracked the wood frame and snapped the lock.

"Alright! We're in!"

The door swung upon. The lights were totally black and there was not a single sound that either of the two crooks could hear. They were alone. It was perfect.

Tetsuo turned to his partner. "So where do we start?"

"Let's start in the living room and work our way through the house. Uzumaki is bound to have piles upon piles of goods just waiting for us to take."

"Yeah...And I bet their food tastes really good too!"

Kaneda frowned and shook his head to himself. "Idiot."

Despite the darkness, the two thieves walked quietly through the back door and into the kitchen. Once they were in there, they started opening every single drawer and cabinet, grabbing every utensil and piece of silverware that they could get their hands on and stuff inside of their sacks. The longer their looting went, the more careless they became as they became more and more anxious to stuff everything they could fit into one sack before moving onto another room.

This is why Tetsuo threw one drawer open, causing an entire assortment of silverware to hit the floor with a loud noise.

CRASH!

"Tetsuo!"

"Gomen Kaneda."

"Just pick all this crap up and don't do that again!"

Tetsuo quickly stuffed all the silverware into his sack and then, unable to resist, he threw open the doors to the walk-in pantry.

"Whoa mama!" Tetsuo said. "Kaneda, we just hit the mother load!"

Kaneda took a peak inside and even he had to admit that he was impressed. But of course then he needed to get serious. "Take what you can, they just throw away the rest."

"Throw it away?"

"We're here for the stuff that we can sell for money, not for their food."

Tetsuo sighed, "Fine."

The lesser of the two crooks walked into the pantry and, thinking with his stomach, started rummaging through all of the food. He bit into the cheeses, he chowed down of the chicken, he cracked a whole loaf of pretzel bread in half, etc. And what he did not like, he just spat out and threw on the floor like a total slob.

"You full yet?"

"Yeah! Sure!" Tetsuo spoke while his mouth was still stuffed to the brim with food, causing him to spit some of said food out as he talked. Some of it even got on his partner's face, much to his annoyance.

"Come on. Lets get to work on the living room."

Hanami woke up about thirty minutes after she'd fallen asleep. She was feeling thirsty and wanted to head down to the kitchen for glass of water.

As she went down both flights of stairs to the ground floor, she was quietly humming a cute little melody to herself.

'It sure was nice hearing oniichan read me that story. He really is the best big brother in the whole wide world.'

CRASH!

The girl stopped dead in her tracks. She gasped out loud but thank goodness it was quiet enough for no one to hear her. 'What was that? What's going on?'

The now very nervous little girl carefully listened and became fearful when she heard a pair of strange voices.

"Tetsuo!"

"Gomen Kaneda."

"Just pick all this crap up and don't do that again!"

Hanami could hear the sounds of somebody stuffing metal and other things into bags. She may have been young, but she knew exactly what this meant. 'We're being robbed!'

"Whoa mama! Kaneda, we just hit the mother load!"

She was snapped from her growing sense of terror when she heard the scary men speaking again.

"Take what you can, then just throw away the rest."

"Throw it away?"

"We're here for the stuff that we can sell for money, not for their food."

"Fine."

Hanami was terrified. Very, very terrified. Her parents were both out for the night and these two bad men broke into their house to steal all of their stuff. She was all alone, which no one to help protect her but...

"Oniichan."

"Hey! What was that?"

The girl covered her mouth in terror, beads of sweat dripping from her forehead, scared for her life in case the bad men figured out she was down here.

"What's what, Tetsuo?"

"I don't know, I thought I heard something."

Kaneda stood where he was for a couple of seconds, then and after not hearing anything more, he brushed it off. "That's nothing. Come on, lets get back to work."

Hanami timidly sneaked over to the wall to see the two men inside their living room. One of the men was taking everything that was hanging over the mantle piece above the fireplace, while the other was dumping everything on the in table and then pulling pictures of her and her family off of the walls.

At this point, the girl had seen enough. She knew that she needed to get out of here and head back upstairs to let her brother know what was happening. After all, Shinachiku was a Genin with basic shinobi trailing, and she wasn't. And so, with absolute quietness, she backed out of the hallway slowly and ascended the stairs. Buy the time she made it to the third floor, her sense of stealth had left her and she rushed into her brother's floor, practically throwing the door open and running up to his bed.

"ONIICHAN! ONIICHAN!"

Shinachiku was roused from his sleep in semi-grumpy mood. "W-Wha? Hanami? What are you doing? I'm trying to get some—"

"Oniichan! There are two bad men in our house!"

"H-Huh?" He asked still not fully awake or able to comprehend the sudden seriousness of the situation.

"Yeas! There are these two bad men downstairs and their stealing all our stuff!"

"WHAT?!" ...Yep, now the boy was wide awake!

Shinachiku practically leaped himself out of bed and placed his hands on his sister's shoulders as he looked her right in the eye. "Are you alright? Did they hurt you?"

"N-No, I'm okay."

"Did they see or hear you?"

"They almost heard me, but they didn't see me."

"You're sure?" The girl nodded yes.

There were at least a dozen different thoughts and emotions running through the boy's brain. Fear, anger, worry, determination, and bravery, all at the same time. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. He only knew what his father and he had agreed upon the other night:

"Now Shina, don't take this lightly. This is a very serious responsibility we're trusting you with. We're counting on you to be the man of the house of one night and prove the you can take care on your sister."

"I understand dad, I promise I'll take care of Hanami. I won't let you down."

"That's my boy."

...

"Hanami, I want you to go back to your room and hide under the bed. Don't come out for any reason unless I tell you to."

"What are you going to do?"

Shinachiku went back over to his ninja gear, including the freshly sharpened kunai he'd worked on tonight, and gathered it all with him. "I'm going to go put a stop to this."

"Oniichan! Please be careful!"

"I will. I promise. Now go hide."

Hanami was about to leave the room to go do what she was told, but first she ran back in and gave her big brother a quick hug. Shinachiku knew how scared she must be for him, and so he did not resist returning the hug for her.

"Be careful oniichan."

"I'll be fine, I promise."

Her fear squelched and her hope reassured, Hanami went to her room closed and locked the door, and hid underneath her bed just like she was told.

Meanwhile, Shinachiku took a deep breath, bracing himself for the potentially dangerous mission that he never thought he would have to embark on this night.

'This is my house. Hanami is my sister. I have to defend it. I have to protect her.'

Very quickly, he slipped on his old clothes from earlier so he did not have to go down in his sleeping clothes, picked up all of his stuff, and very quietly sneaked out of his room and headed downstairs.

He had been trained in the ways of the ninja, of the shinobi, the art in invisibility. Silence was he greatest weapon, and he made sure to use it well, moving so slowly and carefully as to not make a sound until he got all the way to the first floor. Thank goodness none of the stair steps or floorboards crept from his weight, or else the boy's entire cover would have been blown and he might have been killed.

Sneaking down into the front hallway, he carefully peaked around the doorways and found the two thieves had moved into the parlor room. One of them was dumping everything on the tables into his sack, while the other was busy raiding the bar set up in the corner of the room.

"Wow!" Tetsuo exclaimed. "This is some darn good sake! Great year too."

"Hey Tetsuo!" Kaneda protested. "How 'bout instead of spending so much time on the best way to get yourself wasted tonight, why don't you come over here and help me load more of this rich people crap so we can start heading upstairs?"

"Yeah, whatever you say Kaneda."

Shinachiku studied the two thieves intently. The one called Kaneda was clearly the leader of the two, and the one called Tetsuo was the follower. Despite the one guy being slightly more aware, both of them clearly were a couple of idiots. They had to be if they both were stupid enough to try to rob the Hokage's mansion for any reason!

'Okay,' Shinachiku thought to himself, getting a kunai ready as a line of sweat dripped down his face. 'Lets do this...'

Ooohhh...this is gonna be fun!

Alright, let me get the obvious fact out of the way. A lot of you may have already guessed it, but this chapter was very much inspired by "Home Alone, one of my all time favorite holiday movies. Shinachiku is Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) and the two crooks are Harry Lime (Joe Pesci) and Marv Merchants (Daniel Stern). So...yeah, knowing that, you can probably guess what the tone of the next chapter is going to be.

But this is where I would like some of your help, if I can. How can Shinachiku best prank these guys in the funniest, most cartoonishly violent way? Keep in mind that unlike Kevin, Shinachiku didn't know that these guys were coming in advance, so he didn't have the time to prepare for them like Kevin did. What Shinachiiku does have, however, is shinobi training, and he knows his house better than either of these two ever will.

There is actually a bit of continuity in this chapter. Kaneda and Tetsuo, both of whom were named after the main characters in the anime classic "Akira," previously appeared in my story "Our First New Years." They were the bank robbers that Naruto and Sakura cornered in the alleyway and beat the crap out of to leave for the authorities. I thought it would be fun to create a pair of small time idiot criminals that Naruto just found himself coming across at at least three points in his life and stopped with absolutely no effort whatsoever. So, if these two seemed like complete idiots for trying to rob Naruto and Sakura house, know that that was entirely intentional.

I want to apologize to all the bronies and other "My Little Pony" fans out there. I mean no disrespect to those fans on any level whatsoever, it was just a bit of funny meta humor, nothing more.

I really don't have much more to talk about this time, but I will confess to myself that I am amused that the first line of dialogue that Hanami has in this chapter she wanted to "Get wasted and laid." Its a classic law of comedy: give all of your more adult and vulgar jokes to a little kid and you can get it passed the censors.

I guess that's all I've got for this time. I hope you all enjoyed it, and I hope to see you back again for the next. Until then, see ya!