The morning after the night before
Genma woke up to a disgustingly beautiful spring morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Genma was feeling an irresistible urge to burn it all to ashes with a katon jutsu.
He groaned experimentally, and felt the throbbing pain in his head intensify, his stomach was still twisting itself up in queasy knots, and his mouth tasted like an army of ninken had got together and had a party in it. He didn’t know what had happened last night but it must have been truly spectacular.
He tried opening his eyes, wary of the dangers of bright lights interacting with headaches, and almost immediately regretted it. He closed them again in the vague hope that everything would go away. After a couple of minutes he tried again, opening just one eye this time. No such luck, he closed it again.
“Raido.” He said with in a tone that spoke of a thousand regrets. “Tell me we didn’t didn’t get drunk and do a Hatake with the mini InoChikaCho’s last night.” Raido grumbled a little unwilling to be woken up so early. Genma could pinpoint the exact moment he opened his eyes because that was when the swearing began. It lasted for six solid minutes and he only repeated himself a total of three times. Genma was impressed.
“I wasn’t just hallucinating then.” Genma sighed, before opening his eyes again to look at three curious little faces staring down at him. A few feet away Raido was sitting up and looking about as terrible as Genma felt.
“What were we drinking last night?” Raido asked, without much hope of an answer.
“I don’t know, but I’m about sixty seven percent sure it was Anko’s fault.” It was a fairly safe bet. When faced with a night out gone horribly wrong, it was usually Anko’s fault.
“Where is Anko then?”
“Probably back in her apartment in the village laughing at us. You know she always comes out on top in this sort of situation.” They took a moment to contemplate their situation, before the little blonde Yamanaka decided she was fed up of being ignored.
“So where are we going now?” She demanded, hands on hips. “You said that if we went with you we could get some of that amazing chocolate from moon country.” Her voice was uncomfortably piercing.
“We did?” Raido wondered out loud while Genma tried to get his thoughts together.
“Didn’t your parents tell you not to follow strangers who promised you sweeties?” He asked, in the end, for lack of a better response.
“Well yeah, but you’re jounin. Everyone knows jounin kidnap kids and take them on adventures.” It was the Nara who spoke up this time, with all the lazy assurance of his family.
“Right. Of course.” Genma rubbed his head trying to dispel some of his hangover. “Right, minions. Make yourselves useful, go and find some water and make us a cup of tea while we work out what to do next yeah.” With some chivvying from the Yamanaka girl the kids got up and wandered off in search of a stream. With the minions gone, Genma looked at Raido, who looked back at him with absolutely nothing positive to contribute to the situation.
“We’ve really gone and done it this time haven’t we?” He sighed. Genma repressed the urge to strangle him.
“Yeah, I’d gathered that much. So what are we going to do now?” Genma demanded, hoping for a constructive response. Raido utterly failed to oblige.
“Well, I suppose we start looking for work as missing nin.” Deep breaths, Genma took deep breaths.
“That’s your solution. No lets go back to the village and try to explain, no we can fix this. Your solution is to go with it and drag a full set of politically combustible brats around the elemental nations while we do mercenary work.” Raido just gave him a deeply sceptical look.
“Go back to the village and explain. Really. How would that go? I’m sorry Shikaku we accidentally stole your kid while on a drunken bender, but it’s all ok we’re back now and we’re very sorry. Yeah thts going to go down a treat.” The man had a point.
“Ok, but seriously. We’re taking kids with us on our new mercenary careers?” Genma was not sold on parenthood, it hadn’t been featured in his plans at all. Honestly he’d known drunken benders could result in accidental parenthood, but he hadn’t expected it to be so… instant.
“Why not. It seems to work for Kakashi.” Ok fine, it seemed like Raido was sold on parenthood, judging by the gooey look on his face as he watched the little blond bossing around the boys like a miniature general, clearly Genma didn’t get a vote. Parenthood had arrived whether he’d planned for it or not.
“Alright fine. But you’re giving them the talk.”
…
Hizashi was surprised when he saw Tsunade of the Sannin wandering down the street. He wondered if maybe he should go and talk to her. It wasn’t like she was still on speaking terms with the village after all, and his darling Hinata could probably use a medical checkup. He observed quietly as she walked into a bar. And then he waited, and waited, and waited, hours later she finally came out, drunk as a lord. Hizashi was horrified. He continued to watch in shock as she wandered from bar to bar over the course of the evening, drinking and gambling, and getting involved in no less than three separate bar fights, two of which she instigated. It was like sitting and watching as the people in the house across the street left their teenage kids in charge of the house. It was painful to see.
And this was one of the Sannin, the pride of Konoha? It was disgraceful. What was the world coming to when respected role models behaved like that in public? He needed to make sure to keep Hinata well away from that woman. She was obviously a terrible influence.
They escaped using one of the more high profile disguises in his arsenal, mainly because Tsunade didn’t seem to be paying much attention to any social strata above petty criminal. Hizash wore set no. 20 expensive bodyguard, and Hinata wore set no. 6 poorly disguised B list celebrity. They skipped town in a flurry of autograph papers, and no-one suspected a thing.
…
Orochimaru had the sinking suspicion he might have messed up. In his defence he hadn’t known taking small kids with you when you defected was going to become such a big thing. Now everyone was doing it and he was all alone, and no-one believed he was a proper Konoha missing nin. It was getting harder and harder to get people to take him seriously, and that was when he succeeded in convincing them he wasn’t a spy. People seemed to take his lack of small child as a sign that he either wasn’t skilled enough to escape with one, or that he was too creepy to persuade one to go with him. (For some reason most people seemed to believe the latter.) In any case it was damaging his reputation. And if there was a small, well buried part of him that thought it might be… nice, to help guide a curious young mind through the understanding of scientific advancement, well passing your teachings on was a kind of immortality. He wasn’t going soft at all.
He wondered if there were rules about which kids you could take. Would any random small child do or would he have to return to Konoha to steal one. It would obviously have to be a child with scientific interests, otherwise what would be the point. Hmm maybe a medic, it would be useful to have someone who could help keep his test subjects alive longer, and it would also seriously piss Tsunade off. He’d turned evil he was allowed to be petty.
…
Kakashi stared a bit. He suspected Naruto might have really outdone himself this time.
“Isn’t it so cool Nii-san.” Naruto babbled happily.
“Yes it is very cool otouto. But don’t you think it might be a tad… inconvenient?” Kakashi inquired diplomatically. Naruto just looked blank. Kakashi tried again.
“It’s just that, while I agree they are very impressive, they are kind of… limited in terms of where you can use them.”
“But look nii-san, look at the tentacles.” Kakashi looked obligingly at the tentacles. They were indeed very impressive, they had razor sharp hooks on the end, and what looked like venom sacs. They were also large enough to crush a decent sized fishing trawler in their coils. They were the kind of tentacles any self-respecting monster from the abyss could be proud of. But still that didn’t change the facts.
“Naruto, Krakens can’t breathe air, in fact if you try and summon them anywhere above a depth of about a thousand feet below sea level, they will explode due to the pressure differential. Deep sea creatures don’t work on land.” Kakashi wavered in the face of Naruto’s puppy dog eyes. Screw it, he was the cool older brother not the responsible parent. If Naruto wanted the most inconvenient and yet spectacular summons contract in the world then Kakashi wouldn’t stand in his way.
“Fine go ahead. Have you tried summoning the boss ninkraken yet?” Naruto shook his head firmly.
“No Cthulu kun said that I can’t summon the Great Old One until the stars come right otherwise she’ll be angry and eat everyone in a hundred square mile radius, and won’t let me sign the contract.” Kakashi thought about that for a moment, before shrugging, after all the snake contract was worse.
“Fair enough. So when do the stars come right then?”
“Umm.” Naruto held a quick whispered conference with the summon, who was apparently named Cthulu. “Half past eleven next Thursday.”
“I’ll clear our schedule. Is there anything else you’ll need?” Boss summons often had strange requirements, Jiraiya’s toads required a full merchant caravan of good sake. Naruto held another whispered discussion with Cthulu.
“Um he said that the blood of a hundred virgins was traditional, but the Great Old One appreciates that virgins can be hard to come by in this day and age, so she’ll settle for a sacrificial goat, and all the old chants done properly.” Kakashi noted those details down. The goat shouldn’t be too hard to manage and as long as Naruto didn’t have to memorise the chants he’d be fine.
…
There was a rumour going around, the villages. Or maybe more than a rumour, a warning, apparently Konoha nin had started to take up kidnapping when they went missing. Curious spymasters listened closer, and managed to divine names, Hatake Kakashi, Uchiha Itachi, Hyuuga Hizashi, Tenzo not low profile names, and the names of the children were equally damning, Uchiha, Uzumaki, Hyuuga. So far they’d stuck to kids from their own village but there was no gurantee it would remain so. The better spymasters listened closer still, heard names that were not of Konoha, Zabuza, Yashamaru, and realised that there was no gurantee the phenomenon would remain limited to Konoha jounin either. That was the trouble with ideas. They tended to spread.
Certain heads of villages did wonder to themselves why so many of the most spectacularly poorly thought through ideas seemed to originate in Konoha. Sealing bijuu into human containers and then handing them out to try and deter war, idea started in Konoha, bringing together a group of clans that hated each other to form a village, idea started in Konoha, fucking Orochimaru, started in Konoha. And now, betraying your village and going on the run wth a small child looked to be the latest bad idea started in Konoha. A whole host of village leaders would have been horrified to realise how closely their thoughts were aligned. What had the treehugging morons started this time?