Hide
To Be a Medic-Nin
By the light of day, things were worse. Shisui should have woken by now, but he hasn’t. Naruto worries that the injury to his brain goes deeper than she had assessed last night. Kakashi’s ability to walk has diminished even more, without the adrenaline and lingering pain relief from what little healing Naruto could accomplish. Naruto has to help him stand, and he leans heavy against her as they begin to pack up camp.
She has to choose - she explains this to Kakashi shamefaced - she can try to heal one of them, or make a shadow clone so that they can move their unconscious teammates somewhere more safe. She can’t do both.
Kakashi considers for a moment. “Even travelling full speed, it would take three weeks to get all the way out here from Konoha,” he said. “I think we can assume that reinforcements will not arrive within the next twenty-four hours. We can stay put for a little while longer.”
A little while longer is measured in hours, not the days and weeks of recuperation they need.
Neither Tenzo nor Shisui will die without intervention, so she decides to focus on Kakashi. She feels ill, ranking the benefits and disadvantages of tending to each man - to each friend. There is no guarantee she can wake either one of her unconscious teammates at this juncture, so she must prioritise increasing the number of teammates who can walk from one to two.
Helping Kakashi to sit against a tree, Naruto carefully unwraps the wound. Blood has dried against Kakashi’s skin, and she winces when she inadvertently tugs on the edges of the wound.
The stitches must be taken out before it can be healed properly. She accomplishes this with as much gentleness as she possibly can, but Kakashi is still clenching his fists and breathing hard by the end of it, even with the other half of the pain reliever she gives him.
She touches his forearm briefly when she is done - not a strictly professional gesture between team captain and medic. She doesn’t know if she’s comforting him or herself.
At this point, medical-ninjutsu is second nature to Naruto. Even now, it is no hardship to call up the pulsing energy from her centre, thinner than it has ever been but just as golden, and push and pull until no trace of Kurama’s chakra blends with her own. She focuses the energy up, flowing down her arm like water under surface tension, and lets it pool in her hands. Slowly, carefully, she mends blood vessels and muscle fibres and skin, leaving the wound closed - a fresh, angry red scar.
Exhausted beyond words, Naruto lets her forehead drop down against Kakashi’s shoulder. He drapes one arm around her shoulders awkwardly as she breathes in deeply, once, twice, three times. He smells of sweat and ozone and blood, and something distinctly Kakashi.
“We need water more than anything,” she says eventually. “There should be a river due north - not even two miles from here.”
I want to wash the blood from under my fingernails, she doesn’t say. I want Shisui’s blood off my shirt and your blood off my hands and those enemies’ blood off my arms and my legs and out my hair -
Test
When Naruto turned up to training ground 53 the next morning, Hound wasn’t there. After ten minutes of pacing back and forth, she reached out, searching for Hound’s presence - his chakra signature, she reminded herself. He was nowhere nearby.
After half an hour, she gave up pacing and moved on to shuriken practice. After an hour, she began to worry. What if something had happened, back at the village? Was this a test?
If it were a test, was it to see how well she would follow orders? Or was it a test of something else - her skills in tracking? Her initiative?
By the second hour, Naruto didn’t much care if it was a test of her ability to follow orders. She’d never done well with sitting still, and she felt like she was going to crawl out of her skin with boredom.
If I get in trouble, she thought, I’ll just say I thought it was to see if I could track him.
She considered the layout of Konoha in her head - the bustling centre, where he would be hard to find by virtue of all the sheer noise, the shinobi and civilian residential areas, the red lights district, the training grounds. She didn’t know Hound well enough to predict his specific movements, but he almost certainly had an apartment in the shinobi district. She supposed that even ninjas’ alarm clocks must break sometimes.
Naruto wasn’t familiar enough with the ANBU tunnels yet to use them to get around all of Konoha, so she stuck to the overground, switching to roof-jumping once she reached more densely-populated areas.
As a rule, Naruto avoided shinobi residential districts. Shinobi might lash out at her less often, but they were considerably more dangerous when they did so. But being Fox made it easier, somehow. She felt less afraid, less like Naruto, behind the white porcelain.
Pausing atop a water tower, she searched for Hound - his distinctive, electric chakra wasn’t nearby. But - Naruto had very little idea of how her chakra sensing actually worked. She had always treated it like a sixth sense, and it wasn’t like she could improve her vision through training, so she’d never tried. If it was a chakra-based ability - and Naruto reminded herself that it was - then she should be able to change it, push its limits, hone it like any other jutsu.
Naruto makes a ram seal, the most basic of hand seals, designed to focus and call up chakra. She feels it unfurling within her, flooding her body - she called up her memory of Hound’s chakra, white-hot, dense, coiled tight - and reached out.
She nearly fell off the tower, head suddenly pounding from the flood of information. Flattening herself against the ground, Naruto felt the cool metal under her and forced down her nausea. It was almost unbearable - but there was Hound, far, far away, barely a pinprick in her consciousness, yet still recognizable.
Naruto cut off the flow of chakra, and gasped, waiting for her throbbing headache to recede. Once she felt she could move without hurling, she followed the chakra southeast. After a few minutes, Naruto realised that she was headed in the direction of the military cemetery, and slowed to a walk. At the painted red gates, she could see down the central avenue, all the way to the memorial stone. Hound’s shock of white hair was visible, even at a distance.
Naruto was careful to make her presence known, making no effort to conceal the sound of her sandals crunching against the gravel. Still, Hound didn’t so much as glance at her, even as she came to stand right beside him.
The memorial stone was 80 years old, nearly as old as Konoha itself. The oldest names had begun to fade, although the stone was carefully maintained. Naruto had read every name on the memorial many times over, had spent hours walking up and down the rows of graves, hoping to find her own name - Uzumaki - but there were no Uzumakis here, or in the civilian graveyard. She wondered if finding them would have made her feel better or worse.
“So,” said Hound, “you found me.”
His voice was so dull and blank that Naruto thought better of asking if this had been a test. She shrugged, sat down on the steps of the memorial stone, and waited.
Flow
“In regards to taijutsu, your main problem is your size,” said Hound. “And that’s not likely to change, even when you’re an adult - you’re small for your age now. With the way you fight, you’ll lose against a larger opponent every time.” He paused. “Don’t look so glum about it, either. I’d be doing you no favours mincing my words.”
Naruto ducked her head in apology.
“What can I do about it, then?” she asked, feeling mulish.
“Raw strength accounts for a lot in hand-to-hand, but it doesn’t account for everything. You’ll have to maximise your skill in other areas - speed, flexibility, and form - to make up for it.
Only about one in four ninja are kunoichi - I’ve seen kunoichi struggle their whole careers with taijutsu, because they’re using styles that are wrong for them. I have a style in mind I think you’ll excel with. I only know the basics of it,” he added, “but once you have those down, the rest will come easily.”
Over the next two hours, Hound introduced her to the basics of a taijutsu style not remotely like anything Naruto had ever seen or practised. The Academy style - so-called because it formed the building blocks of most standard taijutsu styles - focused on strength, immovability. Naruto might describe it, in its essence, as learning to plant your feet in the dirt and roll with the punches. It was conservative with chakra and energy, designed for students and genin with limited ability.
The style Hound showed her was all speed, energy, and fluidity. It was different from Hound’s style - what little she had seen of it the previous day. He seemed to favour complicated footwork, using momentum and strength to throw her off balance.
As Naruto moved her body in time with Hound’s, she realised that he was right. It was easy, to roll between forms, turning a spinning kick into a hard palm strike on the edge of a coin. It had always been a conscious effort for her to augment her taijutsu with bursts of chakra for speed and strength, but like this, it was like turning on the faucet, letting it drip steadily. Chakra flowed, Naruto had come to understand, like water. Like this, chakra steadily drip-drip-dripped through her, never coming to a full stop, bleeding out of every strike and moving with her, never against her.
Soon, they switched from katas to sparring. Naruto still ate dirt more often than not, but she was improving. Hound’s favourite tactics against her - using his superior strength and size to simply overwhelm, brutal and efficient - proved marginally less effective. Naruto kept her weight on the balls of her feet and darted out of his way more often than not, aided by bursts of speed. She still had yet to land a hit - but her defeats were less humiliating.
And then something curious began to happen.
As the afternoon wore on, Hound’s reactions slowed. He began breathing more heavily, his form just shy of perfect. It was then that Naruto’s palm collided with his shoulder, a strike that moved her chakra as much as her physical body - and sent Hound flying backwards.
He twisted in mid-air, landing on his feet, but Naruto felt an overwhelming thrill of satisfaction nevertheless.
Hound straightened, motioning for the spar to end. “Very good, Fox,” he said. “We should end on a high note, don’t you think?”
Needed
“I think I know why you can’t make a proper bunshin,” said Hound, one morning. “It uses the least amount of chakra of any jutsu, just a simple illusion. For you, it’s like trying to funnel a river through a straw.” It looked like Hound was grinning, behind his mask. “I might have a solution.”
For Naruto, the whole world unfurled.
Being in the ANBU, Naruto discovered, was not all about learning new kata and jutsu. For hours each afternoon, Hound drilled her in ANBU protocol. None of it, he explained, was written down. There were no books of code for her to study - everything in the ANBU, from command structure, to sign language, to laws of conduct was transmitted by word of mouth.
It’s a relief, in a way. She could do this - memorise rhymes, mnemonics, patterns and songs. It wasn’t so different from the childhood games she had always wanted to be a part of, little girls clapping their hands together and singing in time.
Now, she had someone to play with.
“Hound thinks you might have a water affinity,” said Cat. “Channel your chakra through this paper - if you do have a suiton affinity, it’d be best if I taught you -”
Naruto’s paper split in half.
Naruto made Shisui’s fire unfurl and blaze so fast the flames turned blue, then white. She wondered if this was what it was like to be needed.
“Today, Fox-chan, we’re going to play ninja hide and seek,” said Hound.
Naruto won.
Hide
Hound wasn’t there every day. Sometimes, it would be Cat or Crow - Shisui - who would take the task of making Naruto a passable kunoichi. She became more adept at using the tunnels, passing unseen. Still, it often wasn’t enough.
She honestly wasn’t sure what it was - her age? The fact that she was the newest one of them all? Or something else?
Naruto was recognizable, after all, even under the mask. Her bright red, foreign hair, and brighter, foreign blue eyes made her difficult to mistake. She had never seen another Konoha citizen like herself, an alien among ashy blondes and whites, browns and blacks.
It was often hissed words as she skittered past, or half-hearted swipes as she raced down narrow corridors. Fox, they said. Kitsune. Yokai.
Foreign, Naruto heard. Different.
As Naruto and Cat were on their way back to Team Ro’s training ground, fuuton scrolls in hand, Bear crossed paths with them. Naruto felt him approach from a mile away, tightly coiled and angry.
Instinctively, she fell back a few steps, hugging the wall. Shielded by Cat’s taller frame, she watched Bear go by. His eyes slid right past her.
Kyuubi
For a few precious weeks, Naruto let herself believe - she believed she had been inducted into the ANBU on her merits as a kunoichi. She believed that she could be a member of Team Ro - if not as herself, then as Fox, who could recite the ANBU code of conduct backwards and forwards and held her own just a bit more every day. She should have known that it would all crash down around her ears, someway, somehow.
Fox was only a mask, after all, and underneath it lived Uzumaki Naruto.
Hound was her sparring partner that morning.
She would wonder, years later, what would have happened had she dodged in time. Would Kakashi be alive? Would she? Would the Sandaime’s hand have been forced in some other way, some other moment?
Naruto dodged Hound’s kunai just a moment too late, and it embedded itself deep in her forearm. For a moment, it didn’t even hurt. The blade was razor-sharp, slicing cleanly through skin, fat, and muscle. It was cold, more than anything, then burning hot.
Naruto dropped to the ground with a gasp, bringing her good hand up to feel the blood soaking through her glove. Hound was by her side in an instant, spar forgotten.
Then the pain crashed over her, and Naruto hiccuped, holding back a sob.
“Let me see,” said Hound, gentle, but firm. Naruto let him examine her arm.
Hound cursed softly. “It’s deep,” he said, “we’ll stop the bleeding here, but you’ll need to go to a medic. They’ll fix you right up.”
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” Naruto protested. “Just wrap it up - it’ll be fine.”
Hound retrieved a roll of gauze from one of his numerous pockets. “It definitely won’t be fine,” he scolded.
He carefully unbuckled her arm guard, and rolled up her blood-soaked glove. The wound was deep, but no deeper than she has had before, ugly and red and pulsing blood. Hound wrapped it in gauze and pressed down hard. It hurt - Naruto felt her teeth break through her lip and her mouth flooded with the taste of salt and iron.
Underneath Hound’s hand, she felt the familiar burn that accompanied healing, of flesh knitting itself back together. She tapped Hound’s hand, pushing him away, and unpeeled the sticky gauze. The wound wass angry, red, and closed. Naruto knew that in another day or so it would be completely gone, not even a white scar to show where it had been.
“See?” she said, waving her arm for emphasis. “It’s fine already, it doesn’t need stitches.”
Hound poured water onto the gauze and wiped away the remaining blood, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Incredible,” Hound murmured. “The kyuubi heals you so quickly.”
Naruto blinked. “The what?”