Aggressive Action
The Bridge Incident
Naruto stumbled home in a daze, his stomach full of Kakashi's tasteless bento and thoughts rippling in his mind. Surprisingly, he could actually feel the sand in the storage fuinjutsu that covered his skin, a feeling similar to having a full gut. However, only the barest amount of control was afforded to him over the movements of the sand. It took a bit of experimenting to even figure out how to open the seals in the first place: he had to use chakra, but it had to be 'angry' chakra, killing chakra. Then the sand fell out in motionless piles, like the desert at the bottom of an hourglass, until he could no longer hold up his killing intent.
So with that in mind, Naruto considered what to do about the development. He didn't have the fine control necessary to make the sand dance to his tune, which left one of two options. Either he could change that, or try to hunt down a shinobi who could teach him sand manipulation techniques. They were possible; after all, he had somehow managed to create clones made of sand using the shadow clone seals. A bit more useful than the average clone, considering that it served as a distraction, an attack tool and a trap.
On the other hand, Naruto had to admit that he had no clue where to find a Suna ninja just vacationing in Konoha, and the shadow-turned-sand clones were a bit of a dead end. That left training up his chakra control, and if there was one thing Naruto knew how to do, it was train until he dropped dead or mastered whatever technique he was trying to learn.
'I wonder if Iruka would tell me how to do it,' he wondered idly. 'I guess it's as good a place to start as any. He doesn't leave until four, plenty of time to go for ramen with him.'
With that in mind, he tossed on a dirty white shirt, threw the mostly uneaten lunch into his (unplugged) refrigerator, and began the relatively short walk to the ninja academy.
XXX
Sasuke was a bit numb, to be honest. He'd only just found out how to use his sharingan, and now his eyes felt like they were on fire. Words could not convey exactly how much agony his red-rimmed eyes were pouring into his skull, like a bucket full of angry bees and molten glass. Maybe it would suffice to say that for the first time in years, he no longer felt like tearing his brother a new one, as strange as that may seem.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the surviving Uchiha dragged himself through his front door. He didn't want to kill Itachi. That was disturbing on so many levels. Sasuke's train of thought ground to a screeching halt before swerving off the tracks and crashing through the underbrush of his mind. In order to reconstruct his worldview, his fragile psyche began to painstakingly assemble a theory in which Itachi was coincidently also responsible for this new headache.
Possibility one: Itachi was using some kind of long-range torture ninjutsu for his own perverted pleasure. A bit unlikely, given that torture techniques tended to be less localized, although it was possible this one was developed for use against dojutsu users.
Possibility two: Itachi had done something to his eyes the last time he saw him, designed to react when he unlocked his sharingan. Slightly more plausible, but there remained the fact that Sasuke had created a massive violet skeleton out of pure chakra. If nothing else, that was not a sharingan ability. Maybe his mother had her own kekkei genkai and passed that on to her sons. Wait, Mikoto was his father's cousin, so maybe not.
'Don't think about that,' Sasuke urged himself, forcibly ignoring images of Mikoto and Fugaku Uchiha committing incest.
Possibility three: Itachi's comment about 'eyes like his' had some merit. Sasuke liked this idea the best, because it meant that he was finally making some progress towards being able to avenge his clan. However, from what he could gather, Itachi had slaughtered all of his relatives to get the super-genjutsu he'd used to make Sasuke relive the massacre. Did that mean he was as bad as his brother?
Unnoticed by Sasuke, his hands began to shake, his fists clenched so tightly that the fingernails were drawing blood from his palm.
Almost enraged, yet not knowing why, Sasuke shut his mangekyo sharingan off with superhuman effort, relishing the cool release as well as hating the way the world fell out of glorious, sharp focus. He needed to find what passed for his happy place before the neighbors started complaining about the killing intent again.
XXX
It was the next morning, and already she was restless.
Sakura was on the hunt, and the Forest of Death knew it. The wildlife was conspicuously absent whenever she neared, and even the predators gave her a wide berth as she circled in wide, spiral tracks around the massive foliage and mutant patches of swamp.
There was something specific she was tracking, but she couldn't put her finger on it. The giant scythe lay discarded under her bed, hidden under stacks of frilly pink knickknacks, and the pink-haired monster was armed with only her superhuman sense of smell and industrious reflexes. Right now, the scent lay cold, but in a certain direction the particles of fur and scat grew denser, and Sakura's psychotic grin grew feral. She dropped to all fours, lowering her nose right to the freezing mud-caked bark to pick out the individual fragrances.
'Rosemary, pine, spearmint, cat.' She grimaced momentarily. The heady concoction stood out like a splash of red on a white canvass, bloody like the hands of a daimyo's wife. The comparison clicked in her mind, and suddenly Sakura was off like a rocket, bounding off of trees and shrubs with both hands and feet, almost flying in her haste to catch the fleeing creature.
As she neared, the little beast started yowling in sheer, animalistic terror, and she positively laughed with dark delight.
"Run!" she urged viciously, putting on a burst of speed to round off a corner and cut it off. Shrieking again, her prey went into an uncontrolled tumble as it struggled to right itself. Sakura obliged, waiting for seconds that stretched on and on for her prey to recover its balance, and then the chase was on again. Determined to make the hunt last longer, Sakura allowed it to believe it might outstrip its hunter, and then cornered it with one deft lunge and a roar laced with traces of madness.
Cornered, it released its bladder in one last-ditch effort to scare off the predator, but Sakura was having none of that. She grabbed the tiny thing by the scruff of its neck and held it close to her face. Predictably, it lashed out with its hind legs, scratching frantically at Sakura's face. Little lines of dotted blood popped up on her face, but the cuts sealed themselves instantly with a wisp of Jashin's intervention. Smelling of fresh blood and piss, the pink-haired cultist laughed.
"Lord Jashin, accept my sacrifice!" she shouted into the empty air, jabbing her bare fingers into the cat's gut. The blood ran out slowly, and Sakura licked a few droplets off.
"Mmm, salty," she purred, releasing the pet. The beribboned housecat shot off quickly, but the damage was done: the white markings of the death god were flitting across Sakura's skin, dripping from her robes to form an inverted triangle within a circle beneath her feet. With hands trembling from anticipation, she drew her sheathed tanto and aimed it for her heart.
XXX
Kakashi looked down at his students, feeling a little unnerved. The bridge he'd originally designated as his meeting point for them was on fire. The fire was black, and it wasn't spreading, and Sasuke looked far too satisfied about that for it to be a coincidence. His eyes were the same as they were yesterday, red on black with three ovals encircling a lotus design around the pupil. Casually tilting his forehead protector backwards, Kakashi observed that the ruby chakra of sharingan abilities was present in unusually high concentrations in Sasuke's new bloodline limit. He was humming under his breath about skinning a weasel, and stifled a laugh every time a section of the bridge crumbled into the water.
Sakura was right next to him, practically draped over Sasuke's shoulder and talking loudly about what she would do with him when they were alone. Kaksahi merrily tuned it out after "… tie your hands behind your back so you can't stop me from…" failed to get a reaction from either him or Naruto. Instead, he focused with mounting horror on the venomous vines of chakra twisting through her body. They swirled around her internal organs and shot thin spines into her every cell. His sharingan could see in intimate detail every tissue's unholy cocoon, and he could only surmise at the pain she must have been in.
Naruto was almost tame in comparison. He was simply standing under the shade of the oak tree next to where the new bridge would have to be built (Sasuke actually giggled when the last flaming piece toppled into the river, and Sakura sighed dreamily). Every once in a while he tried putting one foot on the bark, but then he would take it off again and shake his head. Kakashi couldn't find anything out of the ordinary with him, so he pulled his forehead protector back down to cover Obito's eye again.
"Good morning, my cute little genin!" Kakashi sang, jumping into their midst with a poof of smoke. Instantly, Sakura was bounding after him, producing her scythe from God-knows-where and jamming it into his kidneys. She yanked back on the blade… and Kakashi's shadow clone disappeared with an identical smokescreen.
"Now, now, today isn't the day for beating up your poor old jonin sensei," Kakashi said sadly, managing to retain a calm composure. Inside, he was sweating bullets. Sakura was almost as fast as he was, and coming from the student of the late Minato 'Yellow Flash' Namikaze, that was saying something. He'd barely managed to create the appropriate clone and swap it for himself in time to avoid getting skewered.
"Aww, I wanna know what your blood tastes like," Sakura whined, reluctantly lowering the tip of the scythe and loosening the cord at the end.
"You smell kinda bad, Sakura," Naruto finally managed to say, looking like it was a topic he'd been avoiding for some time now. "What happened?"
She shrugged. "I forgot to cook breakfast. Had to eat it really rare. Couldn't even get any barbeque sauce on that stringy little bitch, tasted like s***."
Kakashi and Naruto stared at her. "What?" she demanded. "I was f***ing out of time, okay? I wouldn't have hurried if I knew this bastard was going to be thirty minutes late."
'Only thirty minutes?' Kakashi thought, horrified. 'Oh God, I'm giving them the wrong impression already!'
"Whatever," said Sasuke. "I would appreciate it if you never touched me again, if this is what will happen every time." When Sakura had leveraged herself off to attack Kakashi, the massive red patch on the front of her robes was revealed, as was the stain that had dripped onto Sasuke's tunic. It looked rather like she'd been stabbed two or three times in the chest…
"I think I'm going to be sick," admitted Naruto, his voice faint. "Can you two maybe wash Sakura off while I go, uh…" He gagged, abandoning all pretense of interest and running around to the other side of the oak. Retching noises filled the morning air, and both Kakashi and Sasuke shot Sakura dirty looks.
"… What?" the pink haired girl asked, raising her hands as her male teammates advanced on her with matching evil glares. "This is a really s***ty time to start showing teamwork," she muttered.
Once again drawing on the sort of agility and speed typically reserved for the S-class missions of his ANBU days, Kakashi snatched her scythe away, pounding the long blade into the soft earth before Sakura could react. Sasuke, meanwhile, drew two kunai and sliced her robes from neckline to waist, dragging the fabric down to her ankles with a few deft movements. Underneath, Sakura was wearing a white undershirt with a gash over the heart and panties embroidered with little hearts. The bloodstain streaked through her undergarments, ending at the tip of her underwear.
"Oh," she muttered. Her right hand twitched, but her tanto and the spool for her scythe cable had been torn off with her clothes. A wicked gleam entered her eyes.
"See something you like, Sa-su-keeeee?" she inquired seductively. One of the Uchiha's eyes twitched, but before he could do anything Kakashi caught one ankle and the opposite shoulder in a judo throw that Sasuke managed to record with the sharingan, and later use against hundreds of sparring partners. Screaming obscenities, Sakura was gracelessly hurtled backwards into the river. She landed with a splash and disappeared.
"That could have been much more efficient if we'd told her to wash herself," commented Sasuke.
"True, but this way was much more amusing," Kakashi countered. "And now we can clean the rest of her clothes." With a flourish he held up the bloody undergarments, leaving Sasuke to wonder what Sakura would do when she found out he'd seen her naked. Either the traditional reaction, the sort Jiraiya teased out of woman all over Fire Country every day, or one that involved flaunting her newfound indestructibility, endless stamina and tiny breasts. He shuddered violently.
Incidently, many years later, Sasuke would begin to mysteriously find his opponents' underwear in his weapons pouch. Until his speed reached that level, however, he would simply assume that Kakashi's taijutsu was faulty, and try not to be bothered by his bewildering, clumsy attempts to steal people's clothing in the middle of heated sparring matches.
"When I get out of*glub*here you two are f***ing DEAD!*glub* DO YOU HEAR*glub* ME, F***ERS?" Sakura screamed, her minimal swiming training keeping her afloat for scant seconds. With that, Sakura's bobbing head vanished beneath the waves like the periscope of a sinking submarine.
"Are you worried–"
"Nope!"
"But she'll–"
"Don't be ridiculous!"
"Don't be what?" Naruto asked blearily, wandering back into their midst with little splotches of vomit crusting his lips and forearms, and sand leaking from his pant legs. The orange was now more of a dusty brown, and Kakashi found himself wondering if he should give his other student a bath too.
"Kakashi, why did you slap yourself again?"
"I- I don't have to justify myself to you," the silver haired man replied petulantly, feeling unsettled by the fact that he was arguing like a six-year-old and making Naruto look mature by comparison. Sighing, he revved up his chakra system and poured a few grams of aerosol methane into his lungs.
"Great Fireball technique," he murmured, exhaling a weak blast of fire that enveloped Sakura's robe. The flames rose to a decent height, and he tossed the undershirt and panties on the pile to burn as well.
"Sensei!" Naruto shouted, scandalized. "You can't just set fire to Sakura's clothes! That's just mean!"
"Do you want me to throw you naked in a river too?" Kakashi asked menacingly, rounding on the Uzumaki with feverish malice in his eyes. "Because I can arrange that, you know. I'll tell the Hokage that I was teaching you how to walk on water and you slipped. Genin fall in all the time, you know, and it's such a shame those cheap clothes fell apart in the water..."
"I wanna learn how to walk on water!" Naruto declared, presumably missing most of his instructor's sentence and only hearing the magic words Iruka had mentioned in his brief discussion on chakra control training exercises. Water walking was an advanced version of the indispensable wall climbing technique, and in addition to being a valuable tool in its own right, was also a way to hone one's mastery of their chakra system. Iruka seemed to think that it should be part of the academy curriculum, but Naruto only knew one person who could even consider trying it, and she was knee-deep in a riverbed right now.
Kakashi twitched, a twitch that Sasuke knew well. It was the twitch of the mentally unstable, the twitch of a man whose heart and mind were so conflicted that one of them would have to snap. It suited the Hatake much more than Itachi.
"Let's begin your training," said Kakashi. Naruto frowned, just before Kakashi executed yet another seamless sequence of judo techniques, throwing Naruto over his hip with a similar trajectory to Sakura's. Shouting, the genin was sent tumbling into the river without most of his clothes on. Kakashi hadn't managed to disassemble Naruto's underwear, nor had he pulled them off, so the blond boy still had a semblance of dignity even as he was sent to an ignoble end.
Sasuke was mesmerized by the perfection of Kakashi's movement. In the years to come, more and more of his foes would end up inexplicably naked, and he would be helpless to stop himself for want of the reason.
Humming his own little tune about skinning fish and cherry blossoms, Kakashi inspected Naruto's bargain-bin quality orange outfit. "Disgusting," he judged gleefully, and threw the lot of it on the bonfire.
XXX
It took Sakura a few seconds after sinking for the final time to realize she was stark naked. She shrugged, deciding that since nobody was watching it didn't matter. Jumping as high as possible, the weight of the water above her shoved the Jashinist back down to the muck below, and this time it sucked at her feet until she was in to her knees.
"F***!" she cried, a flurry of air bubbles escaping her mouth and carrying her vulgarity away in the current. Not breathing wouldn't stop her, or for that matter neither would breathing in water, but it would sure as hell slow her down. Involuntarily, Sakura sucked in a deep breath, and was surprised to find that her immortality extended to asphyxiation as well. Jashin's power crafted chemical oxygen and injected it directly into her heart, exhuming carbon dioxide from her pores.
It was a novel feeling, with the water reaching all of her intimate places and tickling her skin, but enough was enough: Kakashi needed to die.
Sakura reached down to clear the debris free, ripping away clots of mud and weeds, heedless of how they tore at her skin. There was a good foot or so of muck to be dislodged, so she bent over and attacked it with gusto.
It was only her sixth sense that saved her from having her back snapped in two like a twig (like that would stop her!) by something else launched into the river. Sakura bent herself sideways and hugged one ankle to avoid being hit by Naruto, who rocketed into the mud within arm's reach of her. He was almost naked as well, though Sakura noticed that he still wore underwear.
Self preservation beat out curiosity, and she quickly returned to digging herself out of the silt without paying him much mind.
XXX
Now, Naruto could hold his breath for almost three minutes, give or take thirty seconds. In this case, he sincerely hoped for those extra thirty seconds. Before him, in all of her pristine, bathed glory was the girl he'd pined for fruitlessly for half of his life. Not paying any mind to him at all, Sakura's pink hair flew in a candy-coloured corona around her torso and between her thighs. And she was naked, too. Naruto was torn between the little demonic voice that riveted his attention to her butt, thrust upwards as she worked at the binding debris around her ankles, and the much quieter angelic voice that pointed out that he was quickly running out of oxygen.
'Do you want to die down here?' asked the angelic facsimile of the jinchuriki floating above his shoulder.
'Well, maybe he does, if it means seeing that before he goes!' countered the demon.
The angel slapped his face with his palm in frustration. 'Hurry up and get out of here!' he squeaked.
Sakura shifted a little bit, and the giant mop of pink hair, which had previously censored her torso and groin, was blown behind her head.
'Oh yeah, just look at her!' the devil cried lustily. 'There's no way you can lose her to someone like Sasuke!'
Naruto found himself quite agreeing. Apparently, she had naturally pink hair. In fact, he was only able to tear his eyes away when he noticed his nose was bleeding profusely. A trail of red liquid stretched from his face off into the water, and it seemed some of it was going to reach Sakura.
'Nice going, moron,' chided the angel.
XXX
Sakura was almost done when she froze, partially resuming her hunter mindset. Her nostrils widened as her water-filled lungs brought in another gulp of the river, and with it came a faint trace of blood. 'Prey!' her mind screamed, and she straightened out to take advantage of whatever dead fish Jashin had thrown her way.
Instead, she found Naruto, staring at her ass shamelessly with only a hint of a nosebleed to show his arousal. That, and the fact that his underwear had a bulge in it the size of her fist. Her first reaction was one of surprise ('Holy s***, what a monster!'), followed shortly by indignant rage. If human vocal cords could function underwater, she would have screamed implications against her teammate's ancestry, but as it was she opted to grab him by the throat, pulling him out of the mud and pushing her deeper into it, and tightened.
It was kind of sad that Naruto took as long as he did to stop ogling her butt. When he finally noticed that she was trying to kill him, he started flailing his arms wildly, trying to knock her hands off.
It was when she hauled her right leg out of the silt, her knee raised to perform the oldest and most reliable method of female self-defence, that something happened. An explosion of white mud rippled out from Naruto, propelling him out of the water and swarming around Sakura like a horde of angry insects. The sand washed down her throat and into her eyes, winding around her tightly like a blanket made of chakra and murder. And then it squeezed. Hard.
XXX
It had been two minutes since Kakashi had sent Sakura off to bathe herself, and was getting a little worried. Did the academy still teach ninja how to swim? They couldn't have it both ways; if the kids couldn't walk on water, they had to be able to swim. Sasuke seemed content to wait, and Kakashi could feel his madness gradually slip away, so it seemed there was nothing else to do. Truth be told, the jonin was a bit worried what Sarutobi would do to him when he found out. Hiruzen was fairly level-headed, as far as Hokage went, but even he had a limit. Throwing two students naked into a body of water was probably beyond the pale.
Then, Naruto was catapulted out of the water, a trail of white sand streaming behind him. He landed on the bank, rubbing his throat with one hand and trying to recall the sand with the other. Then the river turned red. Kakashi immediately smelled the blood spilling from his sole female student, and he dived into the river to rescue her. Naruto was screaming about not meaning to do it, until Sasuke gave him a rather hard shake to shut him up. Sadly, he tripped over something.
Kakashi was finding it rather hard to get through the water. The sand was inevitably making the riving into a sludge, which inevitably dyed red by Sakura's bloody entrails as she fought a losing battle with Naruto's sand. He covered his eyes with one hand as he swam, until he was roughly over where Sakura sank. Kakashi reached down, grabbing the first solid thing he could find, and pulled.
'Just a branch,' he thought, as Sakura's severed arm went flying towards the shore. He reached down, fingers brushing something a bit more solid, and this time he was sure he'd rescued her. Literally jumping out of the water, Kakashi stood on the surface holding what had to be the most gruesome thing he'd ever seen. Sakura, or what was left of her, was missing both legs and her left arm, blood slicking her entire body and most of her saviour's uniform. Her torso was perforated with holes the size of her wrist, showcasing internal organs Kakashi was previously unaware that humans possessed. Half of her face was a putrid, crushed mess, the eye reduced to a glob of white jelly in a mulch of flesh and bone. He rather felt like emptying his own stomach right then.
Moments earlier, Sasuke was shaking Naruto out of his trance when the wet ground made him slip. Both fell over, Sasuke landing on his teammate with a slight grunt and a wince of pain. Naruto stared up at him, eyes filled with confusion, until they hardened. "If you kiss me again, I will rip your head off," he promised, and Sasuke nodded slowly. Then there was a wet flopping sound as something landed next to them. A human arm, to be precise. There was a Leaf headband wrapped loosely around the wrist, and the red fabric suggested that it was none other than Sakura's. They stared at it.
"AAAAAAAAGH!" screamed Naruto.
"AAAAAAAAGH!" screamed Sasuke.
Meanwhile, Kakashi watched in amazement as Sakura's face slowly knitted itself back together, the vines of darkness he'd witnessed earlier proturuding from her skin and regenerating the old cells, pushing everything back into place. Sakura's right arm came up shakily, and pressed the outermost part of her eye socket back into place. It clicked there and stayed in place, and her arm fell back down, exhausted from the effort.
The screaming of his other students alerted him to a problem, but not one that could override the flashback he was having of Obito's dying moments, so instead he sent a shadow clone.
XXX
"Hey," said Kakashi's clone. "What seems to be the problem?"
Sasuke looked up and saw a towering giant with one red eye, covered in blood, and he panicked. Just a little bit, mind you.
"Amaterasu!" he shouted desperately. Every square inch of the shadow clone caught fire, and it took surprisingly long for the copy to stop yelling in pain and stumble to the river, where it tried to extinguish itself. Unbeknownst to either Sasuke or Kakashi, the black flames were undeterred by water, and so it simply rolled around a bit in the shallows before it died.
The real Kakashi, the one holding Sakura, was instantly assaulted with memories of dying in a horrible fire that refused to be doused with water, and the pain was real enough to almost make him drop his badly mutilated cargo. There was indeed a fumble, and Sakura somehow drudged up the willpower to flip him the bird with her good hand, but at least he didn't drop her again.
The sand, which was bogged down by becoming mud at the most inopportune time, realized that its master was in an environment causing elevated stress. This stress stemmed from the image of Kakashi, and so this simplistic thinking process brought it to the conclusion that Kakashi was the new source of Naruto's woes, and as such it assembled to crush him.
This time, Kakashi was ready, and without thinking he ran off a fire release with low range and intense heat, and then sprinted towards the edge. Breathing heavily, he deposited Sakura's body next to Naruto and Sasuke, and turned to face the sand. Fortunately, the sight of Sakura dying made Naruto faint, and so the sand no longer had enough will to power it. Two tons of sand and a glass statue were whisked into Naruto's storage seals, and Kakashi decided it was safe enough to go cry.
Sasuke ran his eyes over Sakura, memorizing every inch of her perfect form with his sharingan. Saving it for a rainy day to cheer him up, when she became too much of a bitch for him to handle. Then he could bring up fond memories of their first day as genin. Once again, his kekkei genkai backfired, as every time he did so it was accompanied by the image of him almost kissing Naruto.
XXX
"These itch, you bastard," Sakura muttered halfheartedly. Their sensei had produced some extra flack jackets and ninja pants when Naruto complained about his lack of clothing, and they were quickly discovering that there was a reason you were supposed to wear shirts under the kevlar material. Only Naruto was wearing the pants, because she no longer had anything under her navel. Kakashi had quickly bandage it to stop her intestines from spilling out, but Sasuke couldn't help but think it was a serious deleriction of duty that she hadn't been hauled off to the emergency room immediately.
"Can we go get some lunch before we start training?" asked Naruto. Apparently, his coping mechanism was to ignore the problem, so Sakura's lack of legs barely registered with him. "We can go get some ramen, and then you can teach us all of your cool ninja abilities! Like water walking, and tree climbing, and teleporting!"
Kakashi, who was now the proud owner of a nuclear headache, had a brief vision of two dangerous, out of control genin and a homicidal maniac walking/crawling into Ichiraku's Ramen, and immediately nixed the idea.
"Sorry, kid," he replied, rubbing Naruto's head fondly, "we're going right into missions."
Naruto's eyes went wide, sparkles shining in their cerulean depths. "Woohoo!" he cried, much to the annoyance of the other three, "I'm really a ninja now! What're we doing first, huh?"
To their surprise, Kakashi already had three mission scrolls. He passed one to each of them and waited gleefully for their disappointed faces. Naruto dashed off as soon as he read the contents of the scroll, Sakura didn't read hers at all, and Sasuke's face remained neutral.
"How the hell am I supposed to do this without f***ing legs?" Sakura asked bluntly. "It's going to be another hour before I can walk right."
"Figure it out," the younger Hatake said pleasantly. "I have things to do today." He produced Icha Icha Violence and walked away.
Sakura turned to Sasuke, a coy smile already on her face. "Oh, can you help me with– Sasuke?"
The penultimate Uchiha was gone. He'd left shortly after Naruto, willing to do anything it took to get this farce of a genin cell to actually accomplish something. The scroll was red, unlike the other two, and it had the daimyo's official seal in the wax holding it shut. It probably paid a good bit more than the average D-rank mission, then. Without a hint of trepidation, Sasuke opened the scroll.
The Tora mission was a classic, originating with the pet cat of the Nidaime Fire Daimyo's wife, Tora. Despite the name of the mission, Lady Shijimi's pet was actually Tora IV, the great granddaughter of the original Tora. She was a heavyset tabby with thick brown fur and a velvet red ribbon tied to one ear, and a temper to match her namesake.
As of that morning, she was also dead. Sasuke had no way of knowing this, but he would eventually run into the dead cat somewhere in the Forest of Death, after dodging the attacks of giant bears, mutant sloths and an amorous plant-thing. It gave him great pleasure to dump the corpse into Shijimi's arms and walk away, listening to her sobs.
XXX
"May I have a word with you, Hatake?" insisted the Hokage. It was a testament to his character that Kakashi didn't run screaming from his employer when he heard his voice, though it was a near thing. Hiruzen's tone was stone cold and merciless, promising punishment if the conversation to come didn't satisfy him.
"Of course, Lord Sarutobi," replied Kakashi. It was a bad sign that the Hokage wasn't in his office. That usually meant someone had died, or someone was about to die...
"I've been following your progress with your new team," Sarutobi said casually. "It seems that Iruka was correct in assigning them to you, as he had reasoned that you would be the most capable of training them."
He walked right up to Kakashi and leaned into him, lowering his voice to barely above a whisper. "You threw them in a river?"
Kakashi winced. "Yes, well, Sakura was covered in blood and it was making Naruto uncomfortable, so–"
"It is her responsibility to wash her blood off. Not yours. What were you thinking?" hissed the Hokage.
"That was her blood?"
"Irrelevant," the God of Shinobi deflected. "You will teach them until they are prepared for ninja life, and then you may return to your previous schedule. There will not be a repeat of what has occurred today, do I make myself clear?"
XXX
Just as Sasuke had lowered his face towards Naruto's, right before what would have been their second kiss, the sand stopped. The autonomous force controlling one of the deadliest weapons in Konoha debated tearing the Uchiha to shreds for daring to molest her son again.
Then Kushina Uzumaki's spirit decided to let the show go on, because it was too damn funny watching the kids squirm.
I really apologize for the wait on this story, but here's chapter two! I didn't expect it to turn out like this, but there you have it. To clarify, Naruto didn't actually have an erection while he was watching Sakura. That was something else...
Up Next:
Team Kurenai, Team Asuma, and Team Guy join in the fun. Hopefully there are no fatalities.