Disclaimer: There's a chance Kishimoto would kill me for the contents of this chapter.
Kakashi Hatake was by no means impatient, but as anyone sharing his position, he thought it wise to leave before Konoha awoke at dawn. Iruka, on the other hand, was quite hasty and pushed the time of their departure up an hour or so. For Sasuke, complying with this schedule would present no drawbacks. There weren't many perks to being an orphan, but one of the few was the ability to come and go as you pleased.
Sakura had a bit of a harder time, as her mother was waiting by the door and worried sick. Apparently Ino had come by later that evening, and the results were predictably to the pink-haired girl's detriment The last thing the kunoichi needed was her family doubting her own mental stability. A great deal of precious time she could have spent packing was instead spent with hasty explanations. At first her pleas to leave quickly fell on deaf ears that believed her delusional, but after explaining things through the third time, her mother just sighed dejectedly and waved her off. Though she still doubted her daughter, the woman accepted her powerlessness in her daughter's decision to leave.
Sakura halted when she entered the room. The squirrel's cage was on her bed where she had left it, but the undeniable oddity lay in the fact the latch was open, and there was a lack of fuzzy creature therein. Now, while Sakura hadn't really wanted the pet, she wasn't really sure she should let it go so easily, and she doubted either Ino or her mother had the guts to stroll into her room and let the rodent roam free.
Sakura looked around her room for an explanation, but her window was shut, and her top dresser drawer was open the way she'd left it. The Haruno was squeezed for time, and though she wanted to pry into the mystery of the missing messenger, she had to let it slide in favor of the important packing she had to do.
After placing all of her necessities in her main bag, Sakura wandered into the kitchen to stock up on a few imperishable meals. What she didn't notice as the result of the errand was the missing rodent wandering into her bag by complete accident while doing something uncharacteristic of it's species. Indeed, the particular creature's life had reached a state of total upheaval ever since it had been caught by the Kyuubi's misfortunate container, the most notable of which involved perception.
The change was slow, but the touch of the boy in question had caused something odd to occur in the composition of the small animal's brain, starting to dissipate a haze that had dwelt in that very squirrel's brain for nearly two hundred years . It could be argued that perhaps the Uzumaki had injured the squirrel in some way, but as the effects were not detrimental, the squirrel himself would have to disagree; for you see, the squirrel had once been a powerful ninja summon, the Squirrel Lord Tsuoomi.
Tsuoomi didn't remember being the great summoning lord, of course. The state to which he had been reduced to was a divine punishment, you see. The once-powerful rodent spirit had broken a sacred rule by turning on the man who had summoned him. The man himself had revealed villainous intentions, but as a shinobi spirit, it was not his place to disagree. Tsuoomi had meant well, you see, he really had, but when an entire nation was at stake, those with good hearts acted rashly, and the end of the drama had left his master dead and forgotten, his plans never to come to fruition. Seeing his good intentions were present(and the fact that Ameratsu found Tsuoomi's tail adorable),the death penalty that often followed such an action was replaced with a much simpler solution: exile. Tsuoomi had taken the sentence with dignity, and was henceforth stripped of his knowledge of anything beyond squirrel instinct, but the details beyond a life of scavenging and scouring for nuts were beginning to come into focus.
While becoming both very confused and over stimulated, the animal was capable of thinking and acting autonomously. So, it was in that childlike state of curious wonder that the tree-dwelling creature had begun to play with the latch of it's cage.
The way objects moved when Sakura's new pet grasped them caused a thrill. Despite the fact the structure had always been attached to the rodent's hand, it hadn't been aware of it's blessed opposable thumbs for centuries.
Up.
His former voice directed his paws from the back of his head, allowing the wooden rod that had once held the cage to fall away.
Out.
The squirrel had darted out of his prison to the spacious room of the pink-haired kunoichi. His black eyes darted from one object to another; he sniffed the air. He continued doing such sensory tests until his small furry ears detected the Haruno girl's approaching footsteps. Primal instincts took over yet again, and the once-powerful creature dashed to hide, ending up in an open drawer.
He had watched with wild eyes as the human looked at his cage with puzzlement and stepped around the room, prodding and moving several objects. The female made several dejected sounds before reaching directly past his tail and removing a pink, frilly garment from her dresser and placing it in a bag.
Ooooooooh. Tsuoomi's eyes focused on a particularly shiny object in a pocket outside the baggage. It was sharp, metal, and round at the top. Kunaiiii.
The girl left the room after filling the sack with several things no girl could be without, and Tsuoomi was compelled to examine it. That being said, the creature had made use of it's naturally-agile body and had swiftly leapt from the drawer it had taken refuge in to the side of the kunoichi's bag.
He spent a few seconds staring at the kunai before another shiny object caught his attention, though this one was slightly under the duffle flap. Tsuoomi was not deterred, however, and darted under the cloth to ultimately fall into the Haruno's belongings moments before she retuned with an entirely separate bag tied to her waist.
The human girl sighed from outside the cloth shell, murmuring something about hoping the 'thing' found food, but Tsuoomi was less-than aware of that. It was all he could do to stifle a squeak when the human slung the bag he inhabited over her back.
So it was with the all-powerful squirrel stowed away in her duffle bag of belongings that Sakura met the others at the gates of Konoha.
"You're late," Kakashi Hatake remarked casually when Sakura came into focus, earning himself a blow from everyone present for the hypocritical elements of his words.
"YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SAY THAT!" Iruka, Sasuke, and Sakura shouted at once, causing any gusto that the jonin might have prepared over the last few minutes to flush itself away in the tide of their annoyance.
The four shinobi left their hometown without anymore mishap, their destination the Land of Waves, where something entirely different was going on.
The night following the daring showdown with the Mist Village's ANBU, Naruto had done what anyone in his position would do, and blindly ran into the forest when the others appeared asleep. After all, it wasn't every day that an infamously vicious shinobi lengthened a mandatory training trip indefinitely, continuing a stretch of time that separated a person from almost everything they knew and loved.
Uzumaki Naruto had argued at the time of the announcement, but Momochi Zabuza had snapped right back, his defense astounding(even though Naruto wouldn't hear a word of it).
"You can't do this! I have to get back home! My friends are counting on me, dattebaiyo!" Naruto practically shrieked, shaking his head and backing away from the resolute rogue ninja before him. It was likea nightmare, where everything he did correctly put him one step further from his objectives; life had at some point gone horribly wrong.
"Your friends…" Haku had echoed with pity, expressionless eyes boring into the blonde's somewhat exhausted body.
"People who abandon their comrades aren't friends, kid." Zabuza had bluntly announced, watching Haku's little friend carefully. Surely enough, the boy's face reddened.
"They didn't abandon me!" he shouted for real this time, scattering the birds. Again, Haku looked on with masked pity.
"I hate to break it to you, brat, but your sensei is known for his tracking abilities. If your precious Kakashi had wanted to locate his student, he would have accomplished long before my village's force." The gauze his condescending curl of lip, but Naruto knew it was there anyway. "Either you're a low-priority missing ninja, or your village just didn't give a damn. I don't know which, but I really don't care, either."
"Shut up." Naruto's throat burned, but not nearly as much as his face. His conviction and loyalty was not so easily cast aside, even if he knew there was a degree of truth to the browless-man's continuous verbal assaults.
"Haku told me you don't have a family. There's no reason for you to go back to that place; I know these civil economies, there'll be nothing left for you there."
Naruto was seething now, forced to think back on his life and prodded to see the flaws it contained. What seemed like it would be a hurtful climax lost it's grip when he wrestled it, and inner turmoil ceased with a single smiling face in Naruto's memory.
"You're wrong," the Uzumaki stammered with a growing conviction.
Haku looked on in awe as the missing member of Team 7 stood up to squint his master in the eyes with a confidence that had only newly-manifested itself. A crimson aura welled around the Uzumaki, overwhelming Haku's senses with blind power. Zabuza, on the other and, watched with awe and fascination with the transformation at hand.
"They'll find me, and you will let me go." Naruto hissed, unaware of the fangs that had just begun to peek through his gums.
Zabuza gaped for a moment under his facial coverings while he came to understand exactly what was going on.
"Like hell," the elite shinobi murmured and knocked the boy out with the blunt side of his sword, causing the kid to revert to his normal(though unmistakably unconscious) self.
Thinking back on the conversation, Naruto should have known that the two Mist ninja had been expecting him to bolt. This time, they apprehended him with more purpose, and Naruto was tied to a tree with chakra-halting seals for the rest of the nocturnal rest period, where he struggled and shouted until he wore himself out.
Author's note: I'm hungry and in need of good love. chews on her own heart Yummy.