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The Method by Zabzab
 Anime » Naruto Rated: M, English, Adventure & Humor, Naruto U., Words: 63k+, Favs: 1k+, Follows: 2k+, Published: Dec 8, 2019 Updated: May 19734Chapter 5
AN: It's fluffy and it's going to be great.
Maybe.
It took Naruto one hour to produce a shadow clone, the solid chakra construct mimicking his happiness at the success - the jutsu was a bribe but it didn't mean Naruto couldn't enjoy learning it. It took another for the boy to adjust the chakra output to produce exactly the number of replicas he wanted. It took a third to discover shadow clones transmitted their memories and their residual chakra upon being dispelled.
While he was overjoyed at the prospects such a capability offered him, now Naruto had to go in Konoha to fetch a bag of groceries one of his clones had been carrying before being dispelled in an accident. The blond sighed. He was bumping into people way too much as of late.
He didn't have much hope of finding the bag but he had spent a good wad of Ryo so he had to at least try and find it.
Lowering his feet on the ground from the handstand - "finger stand", to be exact - position he had been keeping, Naruto went to the stream to wash the grim of exercise off his face. He didn't even shudder as the cold water splashed against his cheeks, long since used to the bite of the refreshing liquid. He found the sensation revitalizing nowadays.
Donning a long-sleeved orange shirt, he hid a lean and toned body, all steel-made sinew and obsidian-cut muscles under a lightly tanned skin. He was barely recognizable from the scrawny child he had been four years ago. Puberty had barreled into him rather hard as well and he was taller, wider, and his face had undergone several transformations. His baby fat, which had made his cheek puffier than they had any right to be, had melted and the shape of his head was now oval rather than round, two sharp cheekbones framing it rather severely. His wide, round eyes were now more and more slanted. His jawline had been squared and pulled back, giving him a strong, willful chin.
His hair was still a messy shock of spiky blond locks: that had not evolved one bit. The blond eyed himself critically in the wobbly reflection the stream was giving him. He had accepted the changes as the inevitable results of him growing up and working out. He had read enough of medicinal books to know what was happening to him.
However, his new appearance had not gone unnoticed and apparently roused some kind of commotion because Naruto regularly caught all kind of people staring at him like they could not believe what they were seeing. As their eyes weren't full of negative goo, Naruto made sure to greet them with a smile and continue on his way, more than a bit weirded out by the strange behaviour.
The weirdest thing was the looks he was attracting at the Academy. There were girls - girls - looking at him the way they looked at Sasuke Uchiha. Frankly, the dark-haired boy was a bit of a bastard but honestly, Naruto could totally understand his behaviour now.
Being eyed like a juicy piece of meat was creepy and certainly not something to be envious of like Naruto remembered he used to be.
Plus, that wasn't the only problem with being looked at intently by girls. Nearly every other boy looked at Naruto with something akin to murder in their eyes. The same way Naruto had looked at Sasuke, something like four years ago.
The blond did not like the thought of it but maybe he ought to apologize to the Uchiha. He had been a brat after all and it wasn't like the Uchiha actually wanted the attention he was receiving. The boy had just always done his best to, well, actually be the best but if there was one thing to be said about Sasuke, it was that the boy was not one to brag. Heck, the Uchiha was almost mute. Rather, he actually despised the attention he garnered.
Naruto understood though. He had done his best for the eight first years of his life to attract any kind of attention on him and had gotten nothing but disdain and glares. On the other side of the spectrum, Sasuke, the best student of their class, was showered with praises and shown perfect smiles but it was just as fake. People put him on a pedestal, decided he was unattainable and so Sasuke was.
The fact the Uchiha boy was always brooding silently and darkly in a corner absolutely did not help matters though.
Naruto knew why the Uchiha was like this. Like everyone else, he had heard about the massacre of the Uchiha clan. Sasuke had been there, the helpless witness of his entire family being slaughtered. That would make anyone broody, in Naruto's opinion. Now he knew that. At the time, however, he could only hear the praises and see the smiles directed at someone other than him and he was jealous.
Well, adults were supposed to be responsible and children were supposed to be brats, right? Except Naruto had yet to have an adult in his life and, well, Sasuke had lost those he had. So, yay.
Adults were slowly going extinct in Konoha anyway. Heck, the Old Man had been ridiculous just the day before when Naruto had demanded to know the truth. Why so much secret? What had he been afraid of? Naruto getting angry and going to town on the civilians? Well, first, they would deserve it in the first place because seriously, confusing him with the Kyuubi was seriously stupid but bullying him all his life for it was downright mean and deserving retribution. Anyway, the Hokage had looked like a child caught with the hand in the cookie jar and Naruto knew what he was talking about.
What was the Old Man expecting to happen by keeping it a secret from him? Literally everyone knew but him, how was that fair? What was the game at play here?
So yeah, no adult anymore in Konoha. Apart from Iruka Umino obviously; that man was a real adult with a sense of what was proper, who had a solid head upon solid shoulders, and who took his responsibilities seriously. Naruto nodded, satisfied with his analysis. He'd definitely gift Iruka-sensei something before the end of the year. He wondered what his teacher liked.
As his thoughts turned to just what he could buy to his teacher, Naruto's eyes widened as why he had interrupted his exercises came back to him in the first place.
"Ahhhh, my groceries!"
The boy abruptly blinked out of existence, leaves fluttering wildly and trees groaning in a sudden powerful rush of wind as the sound of thunder echoed in the little clearing.
Kakashi was dragging his feet in the streets of Konoha, nose-deep in his usual literature and drawing a various array of looks, from starry-eyed to vaguely disgusted. Everyone knew the orange books the one-eyed ninja liked to read were nothing but porn and the fact he dared to consume them in public was ticking a number of people the wrong way.
The children who were too young to know what pornography was didn't care about the weird orange book the tall, white-haired ninja was always seen with. All they could pay attention to was his slanted forehead protector - "he is like a pirate!" -, his black silken face mask - "he must look so handsome under that!" - and his overall nonchalance.
Kakashi exuded coolness and damn it if he didn't cultivate it! Someone had to stop Gai and his youthfulness to pervert the mind of the youths.
Plus, he wasn't even reading pornography, ah!
So anyway, Kakashi was doing his best to campaign secretly against Gai's own abhorrent life philosophy when something bumped into him.
For the second time in the span of a year, someone bumped into him as he was reading in the streets, overriding his preternatural senses and making him stumble back a step. That. Was. So. Uncool.
Mildly angered, Kakashi's grey eye immediately found the offender only to see him disappear in a puff of smoke. Something fell on the ground in a noisy concert of crumpled plastic and paper. Kakashi blinked thrice rapidly and slowly reached out with his hand into the smoke.
Nothing.
Panic crept up and insidiously invaded the ninja's mind. In a rare moment of irrationality, the jonin wondered how in the hell he had reduced his sensei's son to smoke by bumping into him. Naruto looked so strong for his age! How in the Log had that happened? For a second, Kakashi flailed, still holding on his orange book.
Then, the cold rationality of a brilliant, educated mind consolidated by years of experience told Kakashi that Naruto somehow knew the Shadow Clone Jutsu. How cool was that?
And Kami damn it, had he passed through a temporal gate again? How in the Log could Naruto know such a jutsu? The boy hadn't even graduated from the Academy yet! Kakashi closed his book and slid it into one of his pockets before he massaged his lone eye. There was really something he was missing. He knew he had told himself he would invest himself a bit more in the life of his late sensei's son and he hadn't because it was a painful can of worms for him but now the boy was learning things Kakashi was supposed to teach him!
That felt unacceptable. Kakashi didn't know why but it was what his heart was telling him. He should have been happy that the boy was learning and progressing as a ninja-hopeful but the feeling wasn't here. Rather, Kakashi had the sentiment he was missing out.
His mind immediately came to the rescue. It was alright after all. He had been the death of everyone he had been close to. He couldn't afford to be the death of Naruto too. He couldn't do that to his late sensei.
Just as he was thinking that Kakashi knew what the man would have done if he had ever heard Kakashi say something approaching that. Oh yes, Kakashi's sensei would have given him the stare. That one stare Kakashi couldn't bear to receive. The one stare that told him he was stupid to even think that way. Then he would ruffle his hair, which annoyed Kakashi to no end.
But sensei was dead, his mind informed him, and there was no one to give him the stare now, no one to tell him it was okay to be a part of Naruto's life, no one to tell him he wouldn't be the death of the child. There was no one to ruffle his hair anymore.
Kakashi looked down on the bag of groceries. There was barely any food inside aside from a large pack of rice and a few vegetables. Worry spiked in the man's heart. Was Naruto even eating meat? And why was the bag so full of medical supplies? How would a child hurt himself so much to need such an amount of bandages and denatured alcohol? What if Naruto was hurt right now and his shadow clone had been on its way with direly needed medicine and now all hope of the boy surviving was moot because of Kakashi.
Once again, cold rationality slammed away the spiralling thoughts of anguish. If Naruto had been in any grave danger, the shadow clone would not have bothered with vegetables. Taking a deep breath in, Kakashi calmed himself and wondered what to do with the bag. It wasn't his bag, he could leave the bag here, Naruto would find the bag sometime during the day. Maybe he should go discuss what to do with his favourite listener?
Talking to the rock standing for the fallen always seemed to give him direction when he was lost on the road of life.
Kakashi was seriously considering the option of fleeing - operating a tactical retreat, corrected his mind - from the bag of groceries when, for the third time in a year and the second time in a day, someone bumped into him.
"So uncool", he had time to think as he was forced to take a step to recover his balance, forward this time.
"Mister Mask!"
The cry, half joy half surprise, tore Kakashi out of his thoughts. In front of him stood Naruto, perfectly healthy, very slightly out of breath, and sporting a large grin.
"Oh man, thanks for looking over the bag, mister Mask! I thought for sure I'd lose all that!"
Kakashi managed a shaky smile, which couldn't be seen behind his facemask save for the crinkling of his one eye. "You're welcome," he breathed out.
"You okay mister Mask?"
No, no Kakashi was not okay. The boy once again managed to look like he was two years older than he actually was. And his face. His face was Kakashi's worst nightmare and most soothing dream. His face was like two persons dead for twelve years had been brought back to life in a single child. His face was the perfect balance between the welcoming roundness of the boy's mother and the dangerous sharpness of his father.
Kakashi blinked. Maybe there was someone to give him the stare after all.
"...ster Mask?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm good." Kakashi managed to mumble.
Naruto scratched the back of his head, apparently unsure of what to do as Kakashi was having his little mental breakdown. He was so like his father.
"Okay, good to know, 'ttebayo," the boy said with a slightly nervous chuckle, still undecided on a course of action as Kakashi silently offered a prayer to heaven. He was so like his mother.
"If you're okay… I can take my groceries?"
Kakashi didn't, couldn't answer, his mind foggy and his mouth too dry and his throat too tight.
"Mister Mask?"
The tall jonin nearly choked. Those blue eyes were looking at him with such concern. Kakashi was a stranger to Naruto. No one should be that concerned over a stranger.
"Kakashi," he croaked out. "The name is Kakashi, boy." He repeated, his voice steady this time.
Naruto beamed a smile his way. "Nice to meetch'a Kakashi-san. I'm Naruto."
"I know," whispered Kakashi behind his mask. "Sorry for bumping into your clone." He said.
"Oh! No worry, Kakashi-san." Naruto bowed lightly to him. "Thank you again for watching over the bag." He said, taking said bag in a quick motion.
"'Z nothing, boy. Say, Shadow Clone is a pretty advanced technique, how come you know it?"
Naruto's smile faltered for a second. "Ah, well, the Hokage gave it to me 'cause I can't do the normal clone and I needed ninjutsu to graduate the Academy."
"Oh, so you're training to be a ninja?"
The boy's flattered again and he looked down briefly. "Yeah."
Okay. That wasn't good. Kakashi was missing something here. Did Naruto not want to be a ninja? But if that were the case then…
The brilliant mind of Kakashi supplied him with an answer almost immediately. Of course, Kyuubi. The boy had no choice. Kakashi started to sweat nervously. What was he supposed to say to that?
"Well, it isn't a bad path of life..."
What the fuck was he saying and who the hell was he kidding? Kakashi sighed.
"Kakashi-san?"
"You don't want to be a ninja, am I right?" The tall man asked in a tired drawl.
Naruto startled, apparently surprised he had been read so easily and shifted from one foot to the other for a few seconds, his eyes lowered. Before soon, however, he looked back up with a crooked smile, a hundred yards stare and a dull tone and shrugged.
"Well, I don't have much of a choice anyway."
Kakashi internally grimaced. Apparently, the boy knew of his burden and had been made aware of what it meant. Well, penis.
Naruto wasn't sure what was happening exactly nor how it had come to happen but he was having tea with mister Mask - Kakashi-san, he mentally corrected.
Their conversation in the street had devolved into awkward silence until Kakashi had taken his bag of groceries out of Naruto's hands and gestured for the genin-hopeful to follow him. They had eventually stranded themselves in a little café, where a waitress who actually genuinely smiled at Naruto with pink dusting her cheeks served them a large kettle of tea and two cups.
Naruto eyed the tall jonin, unsure of what they were doing here. He had never been invited to have tea with anyone before; ramen sure but never tea. He wasn't even sure why it was happening in the first place so needless to say, he was confused.
"Hmm… Kakashi-san?"
The tall man didn't answer and sipped some of his tea, sighing in a relaxed way a second after. Naruto scratched the line of his jaw in puzzlement. He didn't dislike mister Mask, heck the man actually smiled - eye-smiled - at him and was polite to him, which Naruto returned good-naturedly but he didn't know the jonin. If anything, Naruto knew Might Gai better than Kakashi. He didn't even have Kakashi's name!
Plus, the boy wasn't sure he like the man's vibe. Might Gai was loud, very loud, and the word youth and its declinations formed a too large part of his vocabulary but it was his way of expressing his enthusiasm at living life and Naruto could get behind that. On the other hand, the little he had seen from Kakashi screamed "aloof"; it was supposed to be cool according to some people he had overheard but frankly, for Naruto that just wasn't it.
That made the invitation to drink tea even more surprising. Slowly, almost wary of some kind of prank, Naruto brought his cup to his lips and tasted the hot beverage. It was good, black tea and there seemed to be no strange substance added to it apart from an almost indiscernible touch of honey. The blond took a larger sip before he returned his gaze to the ninja seated across from him.
"Kakashi-san?" He tried again.
"If you ever become a ninja, I'll be your sensei," the man said without any sort of preamble.
"Huh?"
Kakashi sighed. "I made a promise to myself long ago, that I would become your teacher if you made genin. I never realized that maybe you wouldn't even want to be a genin." He said, talking as much to himself as to Naruto. "What do you want to be anyway?"
Naruto sputtered a bit. Why was this man - a stranger mainly - telling him this kind of things? Had they met before bumping into each other in front of the library four years ago? The blond racked his brain but came short of a satisfying answer. He was pretty sure it was the third time in all they had ever met. Naruto narrowed his eyes at the tall man.
"No offence, Kakashi-san but what's it to you?" He prodded, his tone neutral.
For a second, Kakashi looked like a deer caught in headlights before his one eye looked down and he sheepishly scratched the back of his head.
"Yeah, I suppose you're right," said the jonin with a strangely shaky voice. "It's not really my business, is it?" He asked rhetorically, his eye downcast and his shoulders slouched.
Silence fell over the two, only disturbed by the hushed conversations the other patrons were having.
"History," said Naruto suddenly, prompted to answer by the miserable sight that Kakashi was composing. For now, the blond decided, he could answer the man questions. Soon, however, the man would have to answer some of his own.
"History is my hobby and I studied a lot so I was thinking maybe I could do something of it. I also studied medicine though and I… came to like it I'd say so if I'm to be a ninja I suppose I could be an iryo-nin." Naruto explained with a shrug of his shoulders.
Kakashi chuckled as his lone eye suddenly affixed itself on Naruto, something like fondness shining in the grey iris, startling Naruto vaguely. Before the blond could ask himself any question about what he was seeing and if he was really seeing it, Kakashi spoke with warmth.
"I know it's not what you really want but I'll do my best to help you become the best iryo-nin, ever. How about that?"
Now Naruto was positively weirded out by this man who showing him such support despite seemingly not really knowing him. That got the boy frowning. He didn't want to think like that but the fact was that the villagers normally despised him and the one person he thought was supporting him had just told him his future was out of his hands. Suspicion began to creep up and read it ugly head in a corner of Naruto's mind.
"No offence, Kakashi-san and not that I don't appreciate the thought but…" Naruto's eyes narrowed and hardened into diamonds. "Why the heck would you help me? What am I to you?"
Kakashi watched over his cup of tea as the boy seated across from him went through several emotions and back. There was concern in the oby's blue eyes but once Kakashi had invited him to have tea with him, it had morphed into puzzlement. The boy had then been clearly weirded out by his behaviour much to Kakashi's secret hurt - he was supposed to be cool, dammit - only to finally grow suspicious of Kakashi's declaration.
The boy had never received help from anyone and the first time he was offered some - by a stranger admittedly - he was immediately wary of it rather than accepting of it without question.
Naruto was already a ninja.
Kakashi sighed. "I cannot answer that. That'd be breaking a law," he said with regrets heavy in his voice.
"... What?!" Naruto exclaimed in stupefaction more than in outrage.
"However," said Kakashi in a mumble, "if you were to accidentally discover things about my past and make the connections, then I couldn't be blamed."
Naruto frowned, gasped for air, frowned anew and eventually gazed into nothingness as he scratched the line of his jaw. "You definitely would be blamed," he pointed out absentmindedly. "I mean you just admitted you had some kind of connection with me."
Kakashi eye-smiled behind his facemask. "We are not obligated to tell anyone." He suggested as he observed the gears in Naruto's mind turning as the boy was back to observing him.
"Are we secret brothers or somethin'?" The blond asked with a raised eyebrow causing Kakashi to choke on his tea. "'Cause no offence but I don't see it, Kakashi-san."
Kakashi sweatdropped and shook his head. "Hum, no, we are not blood-related Naruto."
Naruto eyed him up and down and smiled slightly. "Good." The boy decided. "You might be tall but I don't want to grow up to be gloomy like you." He declared with a smirk.
"I'm not gloomy," protested Kakashi immediately, 'I'm cool!"
"Ah! As if! You're totally gloomy Kakashi-san! All hunched over and dragging your feet, pah!"
"I am not!"
"Are too. You know what? Maybe you should be my brother! This way you'd become awesome like me!" Naruto beamed a smile his way.
Kakashi floundered with the notion. No! He was supposed to be the big brother! Why couldn't Naruto realize how cool he was? Wait, why were they even discussing that in the first place?
"No no no, no way," Kakashi protested, shaking his head valiantly against the ridiculous idea. "I'm the older brother here, there's no way around that!"
"What! Why? Just 'cause you're all tall and stuff? No way, wait a year and I'm definitely going to be taller than you!" Naruto counter-attacked with his arm crossed across his chest.
"It's not that, Naruto, it's just that I am older than you!"
"Yeah well, we're not blood-related anyway so I vote that we don't decide who is the older brother by age only!" Naruto argued, nodding his head as if what he had just said made perfect sense.
"Impossible!" Kakashi retorted. "It's not what your father wanted anyway!" He protested in the heat of the moment.
It was the wide eyes of Naruto that told him he had just made a mistake. He replayed the last part of the exchange in his mind and his visible eye widened as he realized that he indeed had made a mistake.
"Ah. Well. Shit."
AN: I hope you enjoyed. Enough to leave a review maybe. Or if you didn't, to tell me why?
This is the RaNt COrNer.
So someone commented that Hiruzen's character is shallow. As far as I'm concerned, Hiruzen is incredibly difficult to write as a ff author. I don't hate the guy - I hate no character of Naruto - but when you take into account Canon, you're left with an old man who is supposed to be the absolute dictator of his village and who apparently couldn't make sure that the son of his predecessor (so basically royalty, or as close as it gets) who is also the village's living nuke, is treated like a normal human being.
What am I supposed to make of that? Is Hiruzen a scheming manipulator who willingly did nothing so that Naruto would be dependant on his support and that makes him a monstrous bastard or is he actually a "good guy" who for some reason still couldn't be bothered to act despite all his power and so isn't such a "good guy" after all?
So yeah, here, Hiruzen is just a weak old man who didn't act because he looked for a second, saw that Naruto wasn't dead yet, and decided it was good enough... so, basically Canon? I don't like to make Hiruzen a bastard manipulator because I think it's a too "cartoon villain" approach.
The ball in his plan - 'cause wrench equal ball - is that Naruto actually questions things here, contrary to Canon.
Just as well, I don't hate Kakashi. I dislike what Kakashi wasn't. I get that 15 y.o Kakashi didn't adopt Naruto, I get that he was blocked by PTSD and would not have been much help in the development of a child. He wasn't however, a very fair teacher. Teamwork, I get it. Except you need to make sure the links of your chain can actually withstand the strain. In other words, he should have trained the genin's individual skills. I'm not too keen on holding that particular point against Kakashi himself though. I think it comes more from Kishimoto's horrendous writing.
However, what I fear was completely intended, was that fact Kakashi didn't acknowledge Naruto before the boy basically did the impossible: merging Fuuton with Rasengan and beating Pain. "Wow, look Naruto, you completed an S-rank jutsu even your genius father wasn't able to make and you saved the world. I think I might begin to like you a bit."
Yeah, okay I get there were PTSD and all that jazz working against him properly expressing his feelings but he had 12 years to heal so don't get me wrong but I do think Kakashi is kind of an asshole for being this late to the party.
Naruto the manga didn't need Naruto to be an awesome ninja, it needed Naruto to be an awesome psychiatrist.
Anyway, end of the RaNt COrNer.
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