-Naruto-
.
Naruto is exhausted.
That's pretty rare, but he thinks he's justified. After he used a ton of cool red chakra (who knew Fuzzy was so awesome?) to get away from the crazy perv, Jiji and Pervy guy (who called himself a holy sage or something stupid like that so now he's Pervy Sage) tried to "negotiate" to get Naruto to let the pervert look at his belly. No way in hell is that ever happening.
So Naruto spent the day running and sticking it to the perv. But there's one thing that they offered that reminded Naruto of something important.
They offered to have Pervy Sage teach Naruto. They said he'd be better than Fuzzy at all kinds of things, like fuuinjutsu and taijutsu. Which was kind of true, because Fuzzy didn't know anything about taijutsu and never bothered to learn fuuinjutsu ("Seals are meant to manipulate chakra, and I am literally made of chakra. I'm not an idiot, you brat."). So Naruto was kind of stuck there.
He wanted to be good at fuuinjutsu like his dad. Besides, fuuinjutsu is cool. So that was going to happen someday. He'd figure it out later. Maybe work on his handwriting now because Fuzzy said that'd be important to learning fuuinjutsu. But taijutsu was a little more pressing, because it's really important to get a good foundation when you're young.
Of course, Naruto has no teacher for taijutsu other than Sasuke, who's also a kid and is still learning. The Academy is out because they don't start teaching taijutsu until the second year, and it's only the most basic stuff out there. There's absolutely no way that Naruto is going anywhere near the pervert (Fuzzy promised to let him borrow the cool red chakra if the pervert tried to get close, and Jiji somehow seemed even more terrified when Naruto told him that.), so he had to figure something else out.
.
-Kurama-
.
"Finding a teacher is going to be difficult. Most ninja are crazy, and if their chakra philosophies are anything to go by, way too closed-minded. Still, maybe it's like me. I'm made of chakra, so using it is as natural to me as breathing. You are made of your body, so using it would come far more naturally to you than it would to me. An actual ninja would be the best teacher. But we've already decided that would be difficult."
Huh. This was gonna be hard.
"I suppose the best thing we can do is watch people in action. You're already good enough at escaping, but you haven't really practiced staying undetected for extended periods of time. Try to find some shinobi to watch practicing taijutsu. We can use scrolls in the library to supplement what we learn there. This way we can improve your spying and maybe sensing skills, even if we don't end up making much progress with taijutsu."
.
-Naruto-
.
It made sense to Naruto, so he was off to try stalking some ninja. (He doesn't care what Fuzzy says, he always encourages Naruto to be objective and objectively, this was glorified stalking.)
It's actually pretty hard to hang around ninja a lot without being caught. They're so good at noticing stuff! Naruto was pretty good at escaping, but once the ninja noticed something was off they'd be on their guard and Naruto would have to cut his losses and find a new ninja to watch. So he was kind of limited to more mediocre ninja, but that was ok enough. Like Fuzzy says, learn the easy stuff first and the hard stuff will be less hard!
At one point Naruto found a weird guy with an unnaturally shiny bowl cut and a crazy green jumpsuit. He was almost morbidly fascinated by the clearly mentally unstable guy who also was ridiculously good at taijutsu, but immediately ran away when the guy noticed him.
Crazy guy followed him for a while, proclaiming something about "Youth" and wanting to "help teach someone so youthful", but Naruto was having none of that. Crazy guy was almost as creepy as Pervy Sage, and there was absolutely no way Naruto was dealing with that.
Still, Naruto got to watch a few shinobi training over the next few weeks. The scrolls in the library were pretty helpful. Sasuke was surprisingly fine with sharing a little of his clan's taijutsu too. Even Hinata shared a little, after some prodding and a promise not to tell anyone. All in all, this seemed like a pretty good strategy.
.
-Kurama-
.
Well, it wasn't perfect but it did help Naruto make some progress. Kurama supposed that was better than nothing.
Naruto's general style was probably going to be a mish-mash of whatever he could scrounge together, but that might be a good thing. He'd never be a master unless he got a real teacher, but he'd be passable, and maybe he'd get to be above average if he kept working hard at it.
Kurama could accept that. Maybe he'd encourage Naruto to find a teacher in the future, but for now their best two options were a freak idiot pervert and a freak obsessed with youth and bowl cuts. Neither of them were touching that with a ten-foot pole for at least the next decade. Maybe their favorite ANBU would be a good person to sucker into it? Yeah, with that Sharingan of his he's probably used to working with a patchwork of styles. He might actually be the best candidate they've got.
Somewhere far away, Kakashi shuddered.