Naruto grumbled when he awoke to the sensation of someone shaking him. When he opened his eyes which were at this point facing the window he'd set his bed against before the Old Man had gotten him an alarm clock, it was to find that while there was a general and still rather faint lightening of the sky in the East, there was as of yet no sun. When he turned to see who had woke him up, he found that there was a stranger in his room. He knew all of the ANBU who loitered around his apartment by sight, and this guy wasn't one of them.

"I have been assigned by Danzo-sama to train you in reading, writing, and basic mathematics." the man said in a completely emotionless tone.

Whoever this Danzo-sama jerk was, he hated him already. It had been bad enough that he'd sent that jerk to him yesterday to give him a lesson and take it away at his first mistake, but now the man had gone too far. He had to get up early enough as it was, and there was no way in hell he was going to be dragged out of bed before dawn to do crap he could do at the Academy.

Grumbling several nasty words that he'd heard adults use in reference to him about this Danzo-sama character, he rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Tried being the operative word here, as the strange man who was supposed to be giving him lessons in the most boring subjects in the Academy, most likely to torture him, had picked him up bedcovers and all, carried him to the small kitchen area in his apartment, and sat him down in his chair at his table which was covered in workbooks, paper, and various writing utensils from pencils to the more traditional brushes that were used in calligraphy and on the more important paperwork like his lease which the Old Man told him he had to sign every year.

"We will begin by testing your proficiency in the subjects in which I am to tutor you." the stranger said as he opened a scroll that had been resting beside an ink stone.

The stranger then fiddled with the scroll which turned out to be a storage scroll like the one one of the Academy Instructors had shown the class last year before telling him that an idiot like him would never be able to make, much less use, something so complicated in a million years. He'd tried to get his hands on one of those things afterward, but they were too expensive for him to afford, and all of the ninjas he encountered had guarded theirs like they were made of gold.

He had started to begin thinking that they all contained gold or some similar treasure, right up until a pile of thick hard books that looked a bit like the Academy textbooks but with titles that had the words 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade and so forth in them popped out of the stranger's storage scroll rather than anything interesting.

"We will begin with this." the stranger said as he handed him a book with a title he couldn't read.

He swallowed nervously as he took the book, but after he opened it and flicked through several pages of complicated looking writing that was mostly Kanji, he found that the rest of the book looked like a picture book for babies.

"Read the first stories in these books aloud until you reach a point that you can no longer understand what is written." the stranger said as he pointed to the book he'd been handed and the stack that was on the table covering the math workbook.

After a bit of grumbling that earned him a smack on the head, he blew through the first story that was mostly pictures and a bunch of easy words. At least he thought he did, until the stranger grabbed all of the other books and put them back in the scroll.

"You have almost consistently mistaken A for O, SA for CHI, NU for ME, and NE for RE. How you manage to get the grades you do at the Academy is beyond me, since you should have consistently gotten a zero on all assignments that require reading or writing." the stranger said as he attempted to pinch the bridge of his nose through his mask.

"Though I am almost loathe to do so as it would most likely be a waste of my time, I will now test your writing skills." the stranger said as he set a pencil and a piece of paper in front of him.

"Please write about your favorite things." the stranger said.

&!&!&!&!&

"...The fuck?" the person in charge of the section of the Cryptography department that made the codes currently in use by Root said as he studied the paper he'd found in his inbox. Beneath what had to be the most incomprehensible code yet was the title Writing Assignment by Uzumaki Naruto, Consult the Academy for a Translation.

He took the paper down to the Academy, since this whatever the hell this was that he couldn't make heads or tails of no matter which way he turned the paper could be used to secure their lines of communication indefinitely.

"More of Naruto's homework?" the Uzumaki boy's current instructor groaned. "I'm sorry, I don't actually translate this. I usually hand it off to my drinking buddy Mizuki as an example of what I have to put up with every day. He's trying to become an Instructor, but due to that rumor about him and how his teammate died, they rejected his application. Maybe you could put in a good word for him with the Hokage?"

"I'll see what I can do." the Root operative said as he went out in search of this Mizuki character. Danzo-sama would either have to co-opt him or eliminate him as soon as he got his translation.

&!&!&!&!&

Sarutobi Hiruzen scowled at the mission request form that Danzo had sent him before rejecting it. He'd thought he'd done a pretty good job of teaching the boy considering the small amount of time he'd been able to set aside for doing so.

"A mission to assassinate the person who taught Naruto how to read and write indeed." he grumbled as he lit his pipe and got back to the stack of A to S rank mission requests he had to sort through. He would be having words with his old friend about his sense of humor later.

&!&!&!&

Madara groaned as he set aside the Get-Well Soon card the little brat had left him. It was probably the painkillers and the concussion, but he hadn't been able to read what the little brat had written inside the card, something he'd only attempted to do since the last time anyone had given him such a card, it had been Izuna. Of course he hadn't been able to read that one either because Izuna had given it to him shortly after he'd gone blind.

And now, he was starting to remember exactly why he had taken his sainted brother's eyes.