Chapter 4: Not as Useful as it Might Seem
It wasn’t until Naruto was three and a half that they managed to find out for sure in what ways Kyuubi could still affect its host through the bloodline limit.
As predicted, once he’d really gotten a handle on the whole, “being ambulatory” thing, it had become impossible for someone who wasn’t a highly trained ninja to keep up with him and prevent him from falling from one prospective death trap or another. Luckily, his guardians all were highly trained ninja, but even they had to sleep sometimes and no one can keep up that kind of vigilance 24/7. The kid seemed hell bent on sending himself to an early grave, or at the very least, scaring his mother and Shizune there. You couldn’t keep him out of trees or off of roofs to save your life and they’d all quickly learned to immediately look up whenever he’d managed to pull a disappearing act.
Unfortunately, looking up wasn’t always a good idea, even if he was up there, because he also showed an early penchant for practical jokes and pranks, so you were likely to get a face full of muddy water.
It was one such time, when he’d given all three of his frequent guardians the slip, that he discovered the horror that were bees.
Huge fuzzy monstrous bees of stinging death. For the first time in his short life, Naruto learned the true meaning of fear.
The first few stings hurt a bit and confused him. He hadn’t done anything to the noisy bugs to cause them to bite him. Sure, he’d thought about trying to pet one since it was so oddly fluffy for a bug, but he hadn’t had a chance to yet. He just wanted to get a closer look at their weird house.
Before he knew what was happening the strange structure had emptied itself of its inhabitants, and with a loud scream of terror the little boy jerked backwards to escape his small black and yellow assailants. This of course, caused him to go tumbling from the tree, and he’d really been quite high up. His cheek tingled oddly and he hit several branches he didn’t remember being there on his way down, but they didn’t do much to slow his fall. The forest floor rose up to meet him alarmingly quickly, the vast horde of devil bugs following him the entire way down. He lost consciousness as soon as he hit the ground.
†
Tsunade and Jiraiya were immediately alerted to the fact that Naruto had managed to slip out of their care by his terrified yell. The Slug Sannin had never felt something quite so horrible as the terrifying jolt that particular sound sent through her as her instincts as a mother and a medic immediately clamored together that something was Very Wrong. Neither adult even stopped to look at each other before taking off in the direction of the noise.
It took them only seconds to reach the little boy; in fact, she almost managed to catch him before he hit the ground as his fall seemed to have been slowed a little by some suspiciously conveniently swaying branches.
A quick suiton jutsu from Jiraiya managed to soak mother and son, but dissuade Naruto’s crazed pursuers from further tormenting the boy.
Tsunade quickly forced the mother in her down in favor of the medic. She knew Naruto wasn’t allergic to bees (she’d done allergen tests on him as a matter of course), but multiple bee stings could be extremely dangerous, especially on smaller or weaker people like the elderly or children, and Naru-chan was already beginning to swell up with what seemed to her panicked mind as hundreds of angry red bumps. He’d also landed pretty awkwardly on his arm, and though it hadn’t broken completely, she’d be willing to bet it was at least fractured.
“How is he?” she could hear Jiraiya’s voice, but she tuned him out, concentrating solely on completing a jutsu to pull out the chemicals from the bee’s stingers. She had to be fast or his already closing airways would seal and he’d suffocate.
Before she could apply her glowing hands to Naruto’s body, his breathing suddenly became easier and tiny wisps of red chakra began to trail up from the deflating swellings covering his body. The wounds looked like they were burning away, and Naruto’s arm no longer felt broken to her medic senses, though more of the red chakra was coming from that area than the rest of him.
“What the-?” she murmured.
“Kyuubi.” Jiraiya answered, crouching down to get a better look and be nearer if he needed to intervene.
Before the process could quite finish, the red chakra abruptly cut off, and Naruto began to tremble and retch. He immediately developed a fever, and soon coughs wracked his tiny body, flecking his lips with blood. To Tsunade’s horrified medic’s senses it looked like Naruto’s chakra system was attacking everywhere the Kyuubi’s lingering essence had pooled, re-damaging tissues in its zeal to push out the malicious energy. It didn’t take long for the large pockets of red chakra to be broken up, but the little bits splintered off when they shattered like shards of glass from a broken window and they drifted through his system, chased by enthusiastic blue bits of his body’s natural energy. This process was much slower and looked like it might take a while to complete, but Naruto’s reaction had become less violent and while he was still running a fever, the violent retching and coughing had stopped.
“What the fuck was that?!” Jiraiya exclaimed.
“Shizune and I were right. Kyuubi’s regenerative powers seem to have been passed on to Naruto, and they kicked in when he was weakened enough for his defenses to fall. Once it had taken care of most of the damage though, he had a secondary reaction to the Bijuu’s powers caused by his kekkei genkai attacking the fox’s power in his system. His body seems to be treating it like an infection.” She frowned and carefully cradled the boy against her chest, feeling some of her residual panic subsiding at the heat of his body through their soaked clothing and the familiar weight of him in her arms.
She continued stroking his suiton and sweat-soaked bangs away from his forehead. “I imagine he’ll be pretty sick for a few days at the rate things are currently going.” She sighed and deactivated the monitoring jutsu she’d reflexively started as soon as she’d reached him. “As long as there are no other complications with it, I think he’ll make a full recovery, but we’ll have to be careful and watch out for this in the future. Something similar will probably happen every time his body is weakened enough to have to draw on his chakra system, and next time it might be even worse than this.”
Jiraiya frowned and gnawed on his lower lip for a few minutes. “Do you think we should go ahead and completely seal off the Kyuubi? The kid probably won’t need the chakra boost from the assimilation. Not with you and Minato for parents.”
Tsunade stared down at the face of her baby, but then raised her eyes to meet her teammate’s gaze. “No. No, I think we should leave it. It’s kind of like my Sōzō Saisei (Genesis Rebirth) technique. It’s dangerous, but it should only kick in when he really needs it. It’s never done anything about scraped knees or anything minor. Unless we discover any really bad side effects, I think it may be worth it to leave things as they are.” She looked back down at Naruto as she started to shake a bit in delayed reaction to how close she’d just come to losing the most precious thing in her universe, the only thing that had given her back her reason to really live and not just exist. “We came so close to losing him forever, Jiraiya.”
“I know. He’s so damn hard to keep track of.” The other Sannin murmured. “I don’t know how he can be so damn loud one minute, then just POOF, disappear, the next. Maybe I can invent some sort of tracking and communication seal – work it into jewelry or something.”
Tsunade nodded and gave him a tentative smile, one far gentler than he’d seen from her in years – since they’d been kids, in fact. “Something like that would definitely be useful. Let’s get him home now and dried off. He needs to be in bed. He’s not nearly as bad off as he originally was, but he’s still a very sick little boy, and I don’t think there’s anything Shizune and I can do to make this better. It’s going to have to run its course.“
The Toad Sage nodded, “Sure. Do you need help getting up?” She looked a little shaky with reactionary nerves.
She started to automatically disagree, but then looked up at him with that weird smile again, and lifted the hand she wasn’t using to cradle Naruto against her. He took it and pulled her up with ease. Together they started back to Tsunade and Shizune’s most recent little rental. Jiraiya took off his coat and wrapped it around mother and son.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” He easily replied, then frowned a bit and peered closer at Naruto’s face, “your son’s girly clan marking is nearly black now.”
“What the-“ Tsunade tilted his face a bit to get a good look, “huh, well, I thought I saw the tree – HEY! There’s NOTHING GIRLY ABOUT MY SON!”
Jiraiya grinned and took off running. The only safe time to tease Tsunade of the monstrous strength was when she had her hands full with Naruto and couldn’t hit you or chase you down.
†
It didn’t take them long to get Naruto back to the house, into clean, dry clothes, and bundled into bed. He was still running a high fever and hadn’t yet woken up. Tsunade briefly activated her diagnostic jutsu again to see what was going on, and after determining that nothing was getting worse, she got up to get a bowl of cool water and a cloth from the bathroom.
Jiraiya sat himself on the edge of the bed and smoothed the kid’s hair away from his forehead, a frown creasing his face and pulling at the red lines which ran down either cheek. “He’s still really hot.”
“I know.” Tsunade answered, shoving the bowl at her former teammate. “Make yourself useful.”
He easily caught the cloth she threw at him after taking the water, and began gently bathing the child’s face and neck with it. Tsunade walked over to the trunk she stored her medical books in, and began looking to see if she could find any reference to treating chakra induced infections.
The room was silent for quite a while aside from the sounds of water dripping into the bowl and pages turning. Jiraiya caught himself running the damp cloth over the much darker mark on Naruto’s cheek for the millionth time. “You know – if the mark darkening means his bloodline has fully awakened, we’re going to have to start training him.”
Tsunade slammed her book shut and tossed it back into the trunk, then flopped down in the chair she used when reading to Naruto at night. “Absolutely not! He’s not even four yet! He’s just started to learn to read!”
“Most kids don’t start to train at 3, true, but most of them don’t learn to read then either. It’s not unprecedented. Hatake Kakashi started way early, and I hear the Uchiha’s heir was trained from a really young age and has advanced really quickly.”
“You’re not helping your case any, Jiraiya! I don’t want my kid to be some super ninja freak with no social skills. He’s a kid. He’s going to do kid things.”
“I don’t know if he’ll really have a choice, Tsunade.” He rewet the cloth and folded it up, before placing it on the sleeping boy’s head. “If his kekkei genkai is active, then his chakra system must be advanced enough for it to function on some level. He’s going to need to be trained or there’s no telling what could happen.” He hesitated to go further, but he felt it needed to be said, “Besides, it’s not exactly easy for him to connect with his peers if you keep dragging him from place to place. As he gets older, he’s going to have even less in common with normal village kids than he does now. It might help him to have a constant focus in his life.”
Tsunade got up and sat down on the bed opposite him, where she could see Naruto’s face flushed with fever. If they didn’t get a feel for his limits and how chakra use was going to affect his situation with the fox, things like this might happen more often and in less predictable situations… She bit her lip. “Okay, we’ll train him, but he’s going to be a Med-nin when he grows up!”
“Are you kidding me? Have you MET your kid? He’s hell on legs! There’s no way you’ll ever get him to sit through boring med-nin lectures. It takes way too much bookwork. Aside from that, you’d give him a complex trying to get out of your shadow! The kid’s like his father. He’s going to kick ass and take names. Besides, I can tell already that he doesn’t have your natural control. It’s not bad mind you, and likely to be better than most of us, men, but I’d wager it’ll be nothing to write home about. He doesn’t have the concentration!”
“He’s not even FOUR, of course he can’t concentrate yet!” She replied heatedly. “Being a med-nin is less dangerous than a stupid tank like Minato was! He’ll need to avoid injury even more than most people if this is what happens to him when he gets seriously hurt.”
“All the more reason to focus on teaching him to defend himself! We’ll toughen him up properly before he ever sees combat!”
“The hell you will! I’ll give him my special dodge training, and that’ll be plenty!”
Jiraiya looked aghast, “You’d put your own son through the torture you call “Dodge Training”? That’s child abuse! I thought the idea was to PREVENT serious injury!”
“It’s not that bad!”
“Shizune STILL flinches if you even mention the word, ‘dodge’!”
“Er…Well, I’ll go easy on him until he can take it, but he’s learning to be a med-nin, and that’s that.”
A cleared throat from the doorway made them both stop arguing and turn in that direction. A frowning and worried looking Shizune stood in the doorway, cradling a pig in a red vest and necklace. “Um, not to step in here, but what happened to Naru-chan, and don’t you think you ought to let HIM decide what he wants to be when he grows up?”
Tsunade looked indignant, “Are you kidding, he’s a little boy. All he’s likely to want to do at the moment is learn how to smash things, blow things up, and look cool doing it.”
“See, I win!” Jiraiya cheered.
“No one smashes things like I do!” Tsunade snarled, raising her fist to demonstrate.
“You still haven’t told me what happened to Naru-chan!” Shizune interjected, “don’t fight over his poor sick body!”
Tsunade and Jiraiya immediately halted their escalating argument and sat down looking like chastised children. “Sorry,” they muttered in chorus.
“Good, now, start at the beginning and tell me what happened!” She snapped, setting TonTon on the floor and marching over to them.
After they’d filled her in, all three sat silently, deep in thought. “Well, I agree that it would probably be best to start his training.” Shizune, ever the voice of reason, piped up, “but until he’s old enough to make an informed decision about his future based on facts, and his strengths and weaknesses rather than an arbitrary, ‘coolness’ factor, I say we teach him the basics and work on his physical skills. The stronger he is, the less likely he’ll get hurt badly enough for his defenses to fall…Besides, giving him something constructive to do might make him easier to keep track of and less prone to getting himself into this kind of mess again.”
The other two reluctantly agreed.
†