Work Text:
There was something wrong with Naruto.
It started on the way back from the Wave mission. As they moved through the trees, Naruto had slipped on a branch and nearly slammed into a tree — if not for Kakashi catching him mid-fall.
He'd looked disoriented at first, like he didn't know where he was, or even who he was. Kakashi had been uncharacteristically worried, his one visible eye furrowed — and she caught him glancing, more than once, at Naruto's stomach.
That didn't last long. It took him a minute to get his bearings, but when he did, he laughed it off with that dumb grin of his, rubbing the back of his head as he said he'd slipped because he was tired from the mission — and their fight against Haku and Zabuza.
The others seemed to buy it. Their teammate called him an idiot and told him to warn them next time if he was feeling exhausted, before he gave himself brain damage.
Kakashi had looked tense for a moment, and she'd noticed him slipping his bandana up just slightly, revealing the Sharingan as he took a quick look at Naruto. It had only lasted a fraction of a second — so fast she'd almost missed it — but afterward, Kakashi seemed less tense. She'd heard him mutter something about post-battle fatigue, and that was that.
If it had ended there, she might have dismissed it as Naruto's usual brand of idiocy and pushed it out of her mind.
But then he kept looking at her.
On the way back to the village, whenever he thought she wasn't looking, he'd steal a glance, his brow furrowed in a strangely unsettled expression. It might have made her self-conscious if it had been anyone else — but, well, it was Naruto looking at her like that, so all she felt was her growing suspicion deepen.
And then there was his behavior.
He was still the same old idiot as always, loud and proud about himself. But when they got back to Konoha, something had shifted. It wasn't obvious at first, but she noticed he didn't try to make himself seen and heard by everyone and their mother like before.
With Team 7, he was mostly the same, but with the average civilian passing through the streets, he'd just take a glance and ignore them, rather than try to provoke them like he used to.
Not to mention, he'd become unusually dedicated to bettering himself all of a sudden. There was a lot less whining when he lost their sparring matches, and a lot more furrowed brows.
That was another thing about him, too. He was always training. Everything was a training exercise to him now. Mission to paint a fence? He'd balance himself on the tips of his toes along the top. Mission to babysit? He'd entertain the baby by clinging to the walls, crawling along them like a spider while calling himself Supaidāman, an "emissary from hell," and making weird motions with his hands that didn't look like any hand signs she'd ever seen.
It didn't work — it only made the baby cry, earning him a scolding from their teammate — but it was weird. Weirder than his usual brand of weirdness, anyway.
He'd even begun using his Kage Bunshin differently, too. Rather than throw a bunch of his clones to overwhelm his opponent like he was wont to, he used them to probe their defenses instead. Each time one popped, he got just a little better at reading his adversary, using his clones to explore avenues of attack that would have otherwise seen him thrown into the dirt if he tried them as his real self.
Not that that was enough to let an idiot like Naruto beat her in a fair fight, of course — but he was closing the distance quickly.
Too quickly for comfort.
She'd taken a trip to the public library after one of their training sessions with Kakashi, spending a few hours searching for anything that might explain the source of his rapid improvement, until an old account from a shinobi who had been part of the Nidaime's honor guard revealed that the Kage Bunshin had a memory feedback aspect to it. Each time a clone was destroyed, the original received the clone's memories.
She'd been hungry to learn the jutsu then, that is, until she found out how ridiculously chakra-expensive it was. The Kage Bunshin divided the chakra equally between the user and their clones, meaning that the more you made, the less chakra you'd have left — until it became too dangerous to create too many.
Then how the hell is that idiot capable of creating hundreds of them?
Her mind drifted back to the fight on the bridge — to the red energy that had seeped out of Naruto when Haku had them cornered, and how overwhelming it had felt. Like she was standing at the base of a mountain so vast she couldn't even see the peak.
Does he have a Kekkei Genkai too?
She needed answers.
She found him not too far from Training Ground 7. It wasn't hard, she just had to follow the yelling — though she frowned when she saw what he was doing.
She peeked her head around a tree and stared.
There were nearly two dozen shirtless Narutos gathered around the edge of a relatively large pond, each with one foot on the grass and the other on the water, their faces scrunched in concentration.
They stepped cautiously onto the surface, and when she looked closer, she saw them gradually shifting their weight forward, sending ripples across the pond where their feet touched.
Every few seconds, one of the clones lost control, a loud splash breaking the rhythm as they slipped — only to be caught by another clone at their side before they could fully fall in.
"What are you doing?"
A chorus of yells answered her as nearly two dozen Narutos lost their balance all at once, crashing into each other and grabbing at one another for support as they all fell into the water with a series of loud splashes.
"Oi!" one of the Narutos — who she guessed was the original — yelled at her, emerging from the water with droplets dripping from his hair. "What d'you do that for?!"
She opened her mouth to respond, only to pause as all of the clones disappeared in a collective poof, leaving the Naruto that had spoken alone in the pond.
Then he got up — not by swimming to the edge and hauling himself onto the grass, but, much to her surprise, by pressing his palms flat against the surface and pushing himself up out of the water.
She stared, slightly incredulous, as he wobbled on one knee before quickly hopping back onto land.
"Well?" he demanded.
"…how did you do that?"
"What?" he turned, looking at the pond he'd just climbed out of. "Oh. I've been practicing my water-walking."
"…and you learned that by yourself?"
"Yeah?" he half-answered, half-asked, scratching the back of his head. "I saw Kakashi-sensei and Zabuza doing it back in Wave, and since Kakashi-sensei taught us tree-walking as this super, duper elite training method to improve chakra control, I figured water-walking would be taking that to the next level."
"You thought of that?" she asked, disbelief plain in her tone. "By yourself?"
"Hey, what's that supposed to mean?!" he snapped, brows furrowing — though she didn't miss the edge of nervousness in his voice. "I'll have you know I'm smart when I want to be, ya know?"
She snorted, incredulous.
He growled, glaring at her, though he eventually let out a sigh and muttered something too low for her to catch.
"I did ask Kakashi-sensei for some pointers," he admitted, "but he said it was too advanced for now, and that he didn't want me distracted because he had something important to tell us soon. But, well, what does he know, ya know? He goes around wearing a mask, uses his bandana as an eye patch, is late every day, and reads porn in public. That guy's got to have some screws loose."
She let out another snort, then smirked.
"That's the first smart thing I've ever heard you say."
He glared at her, which only made her smirk widen.
Eventually, though, her curiosity got the better of her — as well as the envy burning in her chest at the knowledge that Naruto was learning something Kakashi had deemed too advanced, and she wasn't.
"…so, how did you learn how to do it?"
At that, Naruto smirked in a way that made the pit of resentment in her stomach flare.
"Why, interested?" he asked, buffing his nails on his chest nonchalantly. "There's a magic word for these kinds of things, ya know? I think it starts with a p…"
"Never mind," she spat, a scowl forming on her face.
She turned, stomping her way out of the glade and away from the stupid idiot who—
"It's the opposite!"
She paused, then turned back to see Naruto half a step away from chasing after her.
"The opposite of what?"
"Of tree-walking," he clarified, letting out a sigh of relief. "With tree-walking, you've got to stick to the wood, but with water-walking it's the opposite. You've got to make your feet sort of… push away from the water. Since water ain't solid, you can't stick to it, so you kinda make a little repelling force with your chakra."
"That's it?" she asked, one eyebrow raised. "That doesn't sound advanced."
"Yeah, well, it's not as easy as it sounds," he said with a scowl. "The water's moving all the time under your feet, since you're blasting it with chakra, so you've got to constantly adjust the output to match it."
Repelling force? Output? she thought, frowning. Since when does he talk like that?
"I still haven't gotten the hang of it," he admitted. "I can do it well enough with my hands, but my feet are another story. It's hard to keep that constant flow while changing it every time the water shifts. I can't exactly go around running on my hands, ya know? I don't think I've got the eyebrows for it."
"What?" she asked, confused.
"Never mind," he said quickly.
"Well, thanks, I guess," she said begrudgingly. She was about to turn back and head home, satisfied with what she'd come for, when something caught her eye.
Near a tree not too far from the pond, was a small pile of clothes — Naruto's pants, jacket, and shirt.
She frowned as she noticed something sticking out from beneath his jacket. Reaching down, she pulled out what appeared to be a book tucked under the bright orange fabric.
She turned it, reading the name on the cover.
The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi.
"What's this?"
"It's a book," he answered, shaking himself like a dog and splashing water everywhere, much to her displeasure. "There are words in there — you read them… might even learn something, ya know?"
"Hm," she said, opening it and finding a photo of a man with wild white hair and red markings trailing down his eyes, grinning like an idiot up at her. The name beneath it identified the author as someone called Jiraiya.
She narrowed her eyes at the picture, recognizing it from somewhere…
"Wait," she said suddenly, her pupils sharpening to pinpricks as she slowly turned her gaze to Naruto, blood in her eyes. "Isn't this the guy who writes Kakashi's porn books?"
The sudden look of terror that appeared on Naruto's face would be engraved in her mind for the rest of her life.
"It's not like that…" he started, hands raised placatingly.
"Urgh," she scoffed. "Men."
And there it was — that weirded-out look he kept shooting her. This time, he didn't even bother to hide it; he stared at her with that puzzled expression, like he'd been expecting something else when he looked at her.
"Hey, it's not what you're thinking!" he shot back. "This isn't like those books at all! This is the guy's first book, and yeah, he's a pervert and all, but this one's not about that. It's about a guy who wants to change the world and bring peace."
She raised her eyebrows skeptically. "And the guy who writes Kakashi's porn books wrote this?"
"…I guess writing about peace doesn't make as much money as writing porn?" he said with a shrug. "I don't know, but it's really good. It's about a shinobi who tries to bring peace by making people understand each other. It's… cool, I guess."
She gave the book another look, opening it to the first chapter and skimming through it before pausing when she caught a particular name on the very first page.
Musasabi Naruto.
Letting out a soft snort, she closed the book and tossed it back to the idiot once he'd dried himself. "Honestly, I didn't know you could read."
He let out a squawk of outrage as she turned to leave, abandoning him to his own devices as she started walking back home. "I'll see you for team training later, Naruto."
Her mind was already turning over what he'd told her earlier, thinking about getting some practice in with the water-walking exercise at the lake near her house.
She paused for a moment, memories rising unbidden — hours spent at that very same lake, practicing another jutsu to impress her father…
She clenched her fists, squashing the memory down mercilessly.
Maybe she'd go somewhere else — practice until she could show that idiot up by mastering water-walking before him.
With Naruto's grumbling growing fainter the more distance she put between them, she wondered why she'd been so worried about him.
After all, it wasn't like Uchiha Satsuki had anything to feel threatened by from her idiot teammate.