Chapter 4: The noble art of doodling

It was another day in the Universe of Naruto, starting lovely with chipping birds and a golden sunrise casting the land in an almost magical glow. On this fair day my caretaker woke me with a brownish mush of unidentified origin and almost contagious happiness, you most of all just wished to crush.

The beast in me was only mollified by the bringing of gifts, even if it was not a virgin sacrifice.

I looked up from the package in my hand at the smiling woman. "These are… crayons?"

"Yes, now you don't have to play with your books anymore, Naruto, since you can write your own... in time." She held up one of the colorful drawing tools. "See, you push this end against to the paper and let it gently drag a line..."

I tried my best to look excited.

"… by drawing other lines, you get a shape. Can you see what this is?"

A mutilated piece of paper insulting any artistic ability I had ever possessed. That and long lines of red coupled with what looks like the form of droplets, making it all very macabre. "Rain, trees…" I tried to shift position to see if it became clearer with some distance. "Three very thin men?"

"Silly." She petted my hair with an irritating patient smile. "This is the kanji for river."

Oh. I stared almost fascinated down at the paper in my lap. What a useful way of utilizing this pristine whiteness. Learning letters was important for my future ability to interact with my surroundings, since this world offered no means of sending oral messages across long distances. I was a least fifty percent sure internet and telephones did not exist but since this world was a weird mix of modern and feudal japan I could be wrong. Not to mention Fūinjutsu depended entirely on your ability to write and understand how seals were constructed.

Chika had just giving me the first tool in mastering a ninja art, one I never fully understood while skimming through the manga, but nevertheless was an magical way of bending the world to your will. Even if it was mainly by sealing and unsealing things.

In the meantime Chika had begun on drawing a simple landscape beside the kanji with a river, lots of grass and a sun above. "… limitless. Do you want to try, Naruto?"

I reached out and took the blue crayon with a claw like grasp. The missing dexterity from how I usually handled drawing tools made me frown, since I once could have made a decent shaded picture of something with this in my hand. Determined not to let it defeat me I took the paper with my other hand and sketched the faint outline of a person, moving on to writing the kanji for woman beside it.

It looked… recognizable. Certainly better than some of the drawings I had kept from when I was a child.

"Very good, Naruto." Chika's comment brought my mind back to the present. "Is this supposed to be me?"

If it made her happy, then by all means, just delude yourself, Chika. "Yes."

She gave me a happy smile which I replied with a toothy grin of my own. She was not half bad, even if our relationship was a bit tense on my part. It was hard to be treated like a child from someone who was supposed to be only a couple of years older than yourself.

"Now, I'll leave you to your drawing and come back in an hour to check on you, it that's okay with you Naruto?"

"Hm," I replied noncommittal, already busy filling the paper out with all the signs I could remember. Matching signs together to create new words, and making most on them lopsided on my first try. I was a far cry from the former 'neat-version' of my handwriting but it was better than my 'in-a-hurry-must-run' scribbles.

Most of those had earned me the well-known 'you-could-be-a-doctor' comment. It was like people did not even try to be original any more… Even if I had to agree on the terribleness of the handwriting of the medical practitioners, since I had never in my short life been able to work out what the prescriptions and signatures I had been given was supposed to mean.

Now I was rambling, perfect. Another sign of my deteriorating mental health.

The door closed with a soft bump, while I worked my way through smearing the stack of whiteness with all the colors of the rainbow.

"How… nice."

Chika had returned, as promised, to browse through all my finished masterpieces of creativity. The slight frown indicating she was thinking something radical different than what she was saying, that liar. All should be in awe of my writings and admire the skill in which I had wasted sheet upon sheet while making no progress on my dexterity in wielding a crayon.

"I can see you took my words to heart..." She gave a failed try at a smile. "But you don't have to write. You can just draw what you want. Like this teddy…" A random toy was lifted, and I had a hard time placing where exactly it had come from in the room. "See his big smile? He wants you to draw him."

I could feel my lips trembling in my effort to hold back laughter. "Does that make him alive"

She blinked. "Eh, no."

It was time for Chika to meet the undeniable power of childish questions. "How can he want things if he's not alive?"

Her head was slightly shaking in an almost mechanical motion. "He can't. But I wanted you to, Naruto. Doesn't he look nice to draw?"

"So you're projecting your low self-esteem and wish for other to recognize you, even if it by depicting you in a child's drawing, onto a toy?" I drawled. "That's not very mature, is it?" I froze as the last word left my mouth with wide eyes.

Her face mirrored mine.

"Bear!" I plucked the teddy from her loose grasp and turned away from her. "You're right, he wants to be drawn, Chi-san!" I had a blue crayon in my hand, but it was not like the picture would be pretty anyway.

The door was slammed behind me. Could I blame Tourette's?

It was a very tense dinner of mush. Chika was alternating between staring at me with knitted brows and looking everywhere else in the room, while she made sure I was feed and relived myself properly in the prepared potty. The last experience was a great deal better than when I had been trapped in my own filled diapers for hours at a time.

I was caught hallway between horrible guilt and annoyance at my brain. My subconscious should have no problems at me for taking care of incoming stress. It was healthy.

She walked out the door with a loaded tray of remains of the meal, and I returned to my mostly filled out papers to squeeze in letters in any of the blank spaces left.

We repeated the act of trying to ignore the elephant in the room the next day and the day after. The silence stretched on and became slowly more strained, while her shifty gazes turned more and more expressionless and cold. The difference in attitude made it easier to force all blame of the situation on the shoulders of my caretaker and my own realistic imagination.

Then came the confrontation.

"Naruto," It came in the form of a man in purplish clothes and a matching hat. "Has anything happened between you and Chika-san?"

The Hokage was asking a quite loaded question of a toddler. I resisted the urge to sigh dramatically and turned my big blue doe eyes on the old man. "She doesn't like me anymore." A little sniffle to emphasize my point, and it was practically perfect.

"And why is that?" He pressed.

If I had the affinity for crocodile tears I would so had abused it. Instead I opted for pointing with a confused expression at the toy bear, which had been thrown into a corner at some time in the last couple of days. "I didn't want to draw the bear."

The statement led to raised eyebrows. I could understand his puzzlement, since an event like that never should have had the consequences he was witnessing.

If he wanted the truth he should never ask someone affected by a conflict. There was no objectivity to be found in someone involved emotional in some matter or another. The old man should know that. Then again, it was hard to imagine an event that could leave a rift in the relationship between a toddler and a well-balanced kind adult.

I would have suffered my share of bewilderment too if I had been in his situation.

"So," I made a discreet eye roll. "Why hasn't doggy-san visited?"

The third Hokage found his pipe, taking one long puff where he could think about his answer, before saying. "He's a ninja, Naruto, sometimes they have little time. He will come when he can."

Hell would freeze over before he confronted his guilt and visited the spawn of his dead sensei. I would have to drag him from the street and into the apartment to have the pleasure of hosting the copycat ninja as a guest.

"Who's he fighting?" I asked with an overeager tone, which made me cringe myself.

"Ninja does not always fight." The man had adopted a patient tone of voice most often used with difficult children. "And when they do, it's for the protection of others."

Sure, when shonen mixed hardcore killers with peace-loving fluffiness and the power of friendship.

It required a slow blink to get hold of my amusement. "He's out protecting the village?"

"Yes."

I had no idea what was supposed to happen in canon at this time, but he had to build his reputation some way or another, so it was probably true he was out on a mission. If he wanted to avoid me I could easily see him take a string of assassination missions.

Huh, perhaps his nickname would change to something morbid with my presence in this universe.

I was almost excited.

The sound of paper rustling distracted me, and I forced my way back to the present. The Hokage was shuffling trough the mountain of filled paper I had produced in the last three days with an almost perturbed expression. He stopped by one of my only drawings, which pictured several drawings of human anatomy. All of them had a corpse like quality evoked by my horrible red shading.

I have always been fond of drawing zombies. If you draw naked people in public your chances of gaining long looks and teasing questions is infinite higher than if you just add some claws, a hunchback and screaming faces. The last time I drew a normal naked human was the day a classmate snickering asked if I had a fetish for eunuchs. Excuse me, but the dangling bits of manhood are not something absolutely necessary to put on every single sketch. And if my answer by drawing a severed penis terrified my classmate then so be it.

My smile while doing so was perfectly polite, it should not have been considered rude. The rumors thereafter were completely baseless.

"Naruto, do you suffer from nightmares?"

I blinked and met the searching gaze of the Hokage with confusion. How did he get to that conclusion? I gave my sketches another long glance before my mouth fell open. That explained so much…

I forced my focus back on the Hokage, even if the following thought train promised to be interesting. The question of whether zombies existed as a concept with a technique as Edo Tensei being possible could leave me musing for hours. "Sometimes…" I twisted my face into an expression of embarrassment, while my brain was busy wondering if such an expression was too adult for my current age. "But they aren't frightening… it's what's behind them that is." Hint at the goddamn demon fox and hope he will be too preoccupied to notice suspicious behavior.

A brief nod as answer, but no sympathy or comforting words yet. This guy was an awful parental figure. "Do you know what is behind them?"

"Fire, fire and hate." I can taste blood from biting my lips a bit too hard. It was hard to remember sometimes I suddenly had teeth again after a year with empty gums. "Twisting them. Reaching…" I left it on a high note, my young voice almost screeching against my own eardrums.

Ahh, there was the hug.

My pride suffered a tiny bit when I teared up and started on the waterworks. Then again, crying worked wonders on stress, so it could only be a step in the right direction regarding my poor mental health.

The physical contact lasted for a long time, while my arms hang useless to my side. They twitched once or twice in their indecision to reciprocate the gesture, but in the end they were still by my side when the hug ended.

A pat and a promise to speak to my caretaker later, and he were on his way out of the door. Leaving me strangely lonely.

Stupid brain.

Whether the esteemed Hokage had a talk with Chika or not about her very justified behavior towards the creepy child in her care, nothing changed. It left me feeling somewhat amused, a bit disappointed and a great deal of indifferent.

The last bit lasted until my supply of paper ended; then my feelings turned to pure hatred.

On my fourth day without anything other to entertain myself with than books I had read before, toys I had long since outgrown and Anbu, who had lost most of their entertainment value from sheer repetition of the same reactions to my actions, I gave in to boredom.

With boredom vanished my self-control, and I turned on the bare walls of my room with my colorful crayons. The result was obvious, and since vandalism of my own room drew no response from my ninja watchers I continued ruining the wallpaper with great enthusiasm. I gleeful began to sketch imaginary seal on the walls, and spend a meter of the walls on replicating the seal, which should be on my stomach that very moment.

Boredom turns me reckless, and since it was either this or trying to rise a new form of response from my watcher by attempted fake suicide, I was quite content with scrawling out my impossible knowledge on the walls and parts of the floor.

It was the way I lost the last stumps of crayon.

I paused to look around at my creations with the last bit of green crayon still balancing between two fingers, feeling something between satisfaction, regret and annoyance that the ability to create seals still eluded me. The green was promptly used to draw a figure repeating words for explosion and fire

With nothing left I stared down at my own hands, pondering how quickly my blood could regenerate before throwing any remaining caution to the wind. I was already severely fucked if the outcome played out in any realistic way. It's was a wonder already I had not been stopped by now with my watchers outside, so no need to limit the last of my spiteful creativity.

I ripped the skin of my fingertips with the force of my bite, and lowered them to the floor with a maniacally grin. The secret to explosive tags would be mine before this was over.

The sudden warmth flashing through my arm and fingers down into the floor left me frozen, and I had a second to contemplate the consequences of my actions before everything turned white.

Well… I reached my goal at least.

Author's note: And the first full-blown crazy freak-out, yay, kids grow up so fast. She's not very nice, no, but then again, she's getting tired of being trapped in the body of a toddler. Feel free to correct me, if I have made any mistakes regarding spelling or the world of Naruto ^^

It will be explained why she has this specific body in at later chapter, when she finally gets around to speculate on this. There's a somewhat reasonable explanation in-universe, and it prevents her from running away as soon as she's able, as her thoughts in the first chapter made clear was her plan of dealing with most dangers.