Naruto tilted his head. “Well, I guess if I want to be Hokage, I have to be able to protect the village, right? I mean, it’s not just about healing, it’s stopping bad things from happening.”
“One weapon of mass destruction, coming up!” Toltiir decided.
“No wait!” Naruto yelled. “That’s not right either. I don’t want to just destroy everything, then I’d be no better than…well…you.”
Toltiir remembered that he had told Naruto that he, Toltiir, was the voice of the Kyuubi.
“I don’t want to be a weapon,” Naruto said firmly. “I want to be a shield.”
Toltiir grinned. “I can work with that.”
The world went white.
Sarutobi tapped his crystal ball a few times. After Naruto relocated Hinata to the bed, all he got was snow and the picture of a strange green-haired woman with forehead tattoos informing him that service was down in his area.
That the message did not make any sense was only one of the many reasons he was going to get very drunk before the day was out. “Have the guards managed to get in yet?”
“No sir, Hokage-sama,” one of the secretarial chunin reported. “The door is not opening properly.”
“How does a door not open properly?” Kakashi wondered. He was not the only jonin in the room, although Sarutobi wondered why they were not getting into the bunker themselves.
“Um…every time they open the door, there’s a closed door behind it. And it’s the same door. They have successfully opened one hundred and eighty-seven doors and counting.”
“How do you fit nearly two hundred doors like that?”
“You don’t. They have only opened the first door, one hundred and ninety four times.”
“So it is a genjutsu,” Kakashi concluded.
“I’m going down there,” Kurenai decided.
After Kurenai left, the Hokage coughed. “Why is the newest jonin the only one who realized letting genin open a single door for an hour wasn’t accomplishing anything?”
Kakashi blinked.
“She was the only one not amused by it?” Asuma tried.
It took all of five minutes for Kurenai to reach the bunker, break the genjutsu, dismantle the barrier, and finally open the door.
It took her another ten minutes to try every genjutsu dispel she knew and a few she just made up, because she was pretty sure no part of this was right. Well, Hinata passed out made sense. Naruto being passed out was surprising but not entirely unexpected.
But Naruto wasn’t wearing that when he was sent in there.
Neither was Hinata.
And she was pretty sure they were younger than that.
The crystal ball came back to life after Kurenai opened the door. “This is going to be a lot of paperwork,” Sarutobi noted dully.
Four hours later, Hinata and Naruto were alone with the Hokage at Ichiraku’s. This may seem an unusual place for a secret meeting, but it wasn’t unprecedented. In a hidden ninja village even ramen stands tended to have back rooms for secret meetings. A few ninja made a point of eating only in such places to better shirk their duties avoid assassins.
Naruto had more bowls in front of him than it would take to feed an army, and to the Hokage’s surprise Hinata had half as many, which was still a great deal more food than the Hyuga princess had ever ordered before in a single seating. They had rested, been checked out by medical ninja, and had requested a private audience at around the same time their bodies reminded all who could hear that teenagers ate like elephants.
Sarutobi looked them over as he calmly ate his own modest bowl. Naruto’s outfit was recognizable in its orangebluewhite color scheme, but all the colors were muted. He still stood out, but without being eye-hurting. The Konoha headband on his brow was weathered but had obviously been extremely well-cared for.
Hinata maintained the same simple pale lavender he was familiar with, however her outfit was smaller on her frame. Whereas before she hid in oversized clothing, now her budding womanly figure was tastefully revealed. She still wore her headband as a choker.
Sarutobi placed down his own chopsticks. “So you two spent more than a year together?”
“One year, three months, two days, five hours,” Naruto confirmed. “And eleven minutes, seven seconds, if the Arthra’s sensors were accurate.”
“Arthra?” Sarutobi asked pleasantly.
Naruto and Hinata traded glances. “Sorry, Hokage-sama,” Hinata apologized meekly. “I think this might take a while.”
“Long stories tend to,” Sarutobi said reasonably. “Why don’t you start with where you were after leaving here?”
“The world didn’t exactly have a name,” Naruto said, musing as if over a long-unsolved puzzle. “Barren desert as far as the eye could see. Hinata was still unconscious, and it was only after we pieced together outside records that I figured out what happened. Our arrival was like a flare of chakra going off, and it attracted a lot of attention. That’s when I met Signum…and her sword, Laevatein. I got to know Laevatein very well.”
Sarutobi lowered his head slightly. Naruto and Hinata were stripped of their weapons for the ‘test’ of Naruto’s seal. Unarmed against a swordswoman, a woman good enough to earn her blade a name respected by others… “You are lucky she didn’t kill you,” he surmised.
“She could have if she had wanted to. We were found later by Chrono of the TSAB flagship Arthra. One of their own, a girl named Nanoha, had been attacked the same way.”
“Signum essentially drained our chakra coils,” Hinata explained. “We were out of it for a while. That was the beginning of what the TSAB records as the Book of Darkness incident…”
Many hours later, Naruto and Hinata finished their tale. They described the entire Book incident, culminating with Hayate and the Wolkenritter signing on with the TSAB. They then continued to describe their own adventures as part-time mages for the TSAB. It wasn’t nearly as impressive as it sounded.
“We were pretty useless during that first incident,” Hinata whispered.
“Not useless,” Naruto objected. “My clones kept them guessing and your byakugan was great at spotting those masked guys.”
“Catgirls,” Hinata corrected.
The Hokage felt out of his depth, which was rather rare for him. “Well you are only genin,” he said. Not even that, technically, since they hadn’t passed the teamwork test. But they didn’t know that.
Naruto nodded. “The Bureau was willing to help us, but we had to tell them what we could of our jutsu. Which wasn’t much.”
The Hokage looked to Hinata questioningly. She shook her head. “They asked, but I didn’t tell them.”
“Your father will be glad to hear it,” Sarutobi murmured. “So they trained you in jutsu?”
“Not exactly,” Naruto said.
(Posted Sat, 09 Jul 2011 22:09)
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