-Hiruzen-
.
Hiruzen stood on top of the Hokage Tower, taking in the peaceful air. He closed his eyes to revel in a moment of silence, for he knew that very soon this peace would disappear from the world. In a moment of weakness, Hiruzen considered (not for the first time) conveniently disappearing to some remote island where no one could find him. He could melt into obscurity, never to deal with hardship again. Ah, but such pipe dreams are a waste of his precious time of silence. Hiruzen simply enjoyed the sweet sound of villagers singing Christmas carols to each other through the peaceful stillness.
As if on cue, a horrible sound like a cow screaming from inside a blender floated up to grace Hiruzen's ears. It slowly but steadily drowned out the joy of the Christmas carols, leaving naught but pain and burst eardrums in its wake. Hiruzen resigned himself to the incoming pain and retreated to his office to wait out the storm, and provide earstops to those who came to him.
.
-Minato-
.
Naruto was practically vibrating with his excitement! He'd been preparing for the whole month, twining twinkling lights into his poison ivy, baking endless cookies, and even learning every single Christmas carol he could squeeze into his head! Tonight and tomorrow, all of his blood, sweat, and tears (there were no tears, but the saying sounds cool) would be presented to the world. Naruto belted his heart out for the village to hear, leaving his dad speechless with his incredible progress as a singer. See, the villagers' ears are bleeding! That's way better than last time when a few people actually tried to impersonate some guy named Van Gogh!
Naruto eagerly turned on his beautiful lights, showing off the beautiful highlighted poinsettias that he set up on his balcony. Naruto was excited to get poinsettias at first, 'cause a lot of people say they're poisonous, but apparently they actually aren't. Fuzzy even let the plant sugar get digested normally, and all it did was give Naruto a little stomach ache. So, not poisonous, but still really pretty! And they went really well with the poison ivy! Maybe Naruto can keep those year-round instead of just as a festive thing? Oh, but he can think about that later. Right now, he's got something important to do!
Naruto found a high-up perch near the center of the village, and began spreading as much chakra (both his and Fuzzy's) as liberally as he could throughout the wind. It quickly spread throughout the whole village, interrupting everyone's sleep.
Minato piped up with mild concern in his voice.
"Naruto, why are you pouring so much chakra over everything? You're going to make it hard for people to sleep peacefully."
"I wanna meet Santa!"
Santa? Minato did tell Naruto about Santa a few weeks ago, but it's generally considered to be a civilian myth. And what could Naruto gain from talking to Santa, anyway? He had immediately labelled Santa a creep as soon as Minato finished the story, and Minato was under the impression that Naruto tended to avoid creeps at all costs. Something about how Fuzzy gave him the Talk well before he was ready and spent years warning him away from pervs.
Thankfully, Naruto was more than happy to fill the silence with explanations and ramblings as he listened to his chakra on the wind.
"I dunno if Santa's real, but if he is, he's probably one of the best ninja ever! Imagine a guy who can sneak around a whole major ninja village totally undetected, visit literally every house, and steal everyone's cookies, while lugging around presents for the whole world! And then do that with literally every other village and house in the world, including all the other ninja villages! Not even Hokage-jiji or Kakashi-sensei ever notice him! So either he's real or he's not, and if he is real, he's better than every ninja in the whole world! There's no way I could pass up getting tips from a guy like that, even if he is a creep!"
Fuzzy was nodding along to the whole spiel. Minato made a mildly sour face.
"Then what about Jiraiya-sensei? If you can stomach being around creeps if they give you good tips, why did you stay away from him and the Hokage?"
Naruto responded without skipping a beat.
"They suck."
As Minato spluttered, Fuzzy nodded along.
"Brat, you should really pay attention to your senses. You won't catch a guy who can evade your entire village by being off in your own world."
Naruto immediately snapped back to attention, effectively shutting himself out of the conversation. Minato just watched for a bit, before turning to Fuzzy with a confused raised eyebrow. Fuzzy waited a few minutes, just to be annoying, before finally deciding to elaborate on Naruto's obvious distaste for Jiraiya's "skills".
"The man's obviously either a terrible ninja or a masochist. The first time the brat met him, he was totally absorbed in peeping at the girls in the bathhouse. I may not particularly care about human ideas of privacy, but he was not subtle at all. And when he was inevitably caught, he was almost immediately apprehended by a gaggle of naked women, including civilians and peacetime kunoichi. It's certainly true that angry females can be a force to be reckoned with, but this perv is supposed to be a legendary war veteran. He should be able to escape from these naked, wet, non-war veteran women. The fact that he can't means either he's let his skills fade, his reputation is unearned, or he's just turned on by beautiful naked women beating him. The first two mean that his advice isn't worth dealing with him, and the last one just means that I don't want him anywhere near my brat. Plus, it doesn't help that Naruto's been consistently handing the perv his own ass since he was, what, six? Not exactly conducive to respect, is it?"
The fact that Minato totally gets everything that Fuzzy is saying makes him question his own existence. He decides to just store that confusion for now and deal with it later. Right now, he's going to watch his son display some genuinely impressive sensory abilities.
"He's been working on these sensory abilities since he was four, right?"
Fuzzy radiated pure pride before confirming it haughtily. Minato echoed the pride easily, distracting Naruto slightly from his watch and warming his son's cheeks with happiness. Minato hummed in contentment, before tilting his ghost-head in thought.
"What's on your mind, idiot?"
"He's very easy to track right now, isn't he?"
"It's not really a problem. He can sense any threat the moment it comes into his range, which is big enough to give him a chance to react."
"Maybe, but it also means that effectively every single ninja, or even civilians, around this area know for sure that he's around here. And his chakra is very uncontained. It seems that this technique relies more on oversaturating the air with chakra rather than fine control, which means that he'll be leaking much more chakra than he needs. His chakra extends far past the range where he can effectively sense with it, so even if he knows everything that happens inside his range, there will be more ninja outside his range who will be able to tell he's here. And any ninja who are inside Naruto's range will be easily able to tell that they're inside his range. Relatively speaking, this technique is incredibly inefficient. If our target is Santa, and we know that he will visit every house with children in the whole village within the span of the night hours, we should stake out a few houses with many children to preserve both focus and stealth."
"... I hate that I love the way you think."
.
-Naruto-
.
Naruto abandoned his stakeout when the sun rose in favor of opening the temporary stands he set up outside Foxbux to distribute his gift to the village. Fuzzy told him a few weeks ago that families often share cookies for Christmas, and since Naruto's coffee shop also works as a bakery, Naruto decided to prepare as many cookies as he could to give as his gift to the entire village on Christmas! He eagerly made an army of clones to spread fliers and give out free cookies to any and all children and cult members they came across. Whole boxes were given out to anyone who would take them. A welcome treat for the children who had apparently gotten little to no sleep last night. Maybe it was the excitement for Christmas presents? Yeah! And the parents look exhausted, too! Everyone's probably ecstatic for Christmas!
Well, far be it from Naruto to keep everyone waiting! He steps up his game to throw a cookie party in the middle of the marketplace, stopping by every home, every apartment, even the orphanage, to pass out as many cookies as possible until just about every child in the village was on the sugar high to end all sugar highs. See, even Dad was amazed at Naruto's amazing Christmas present!
"Those poor parents."
Fuzzy cackled shamelessly. The clones continued to bake more cookies.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A/N - Merry Christmas, my fellow nutcases! I hope that your wrapping paper is glittery and your cookies are sugary!
And on a side note, I'm trying to simplify things by implementing nicknames. Kurama calls Minato "idiot" and Naruto "brat". He just seems like the kind of guy to use a demeaning nickname affectionately instead of an actual name.