Konoha's New Number One....Baby?!

Time To Change

Naruto Uzumaki felt old. It wasn't that big a surprise. He'd been alive longer than most genin graduated from the academy.

A war and Two Hokage's later, it was a wonder this genin was still walking.

Still, he had never felt tripled his years since when he young and hid from the drunken vagabonds at night.

Uzumaki was in a hospital. Again, it was not that big a deal. He was a prime target to foreign shinobi, most of which seemed to have forgotten the values of a village and how to uphold them.

The Trauma Ward of the Konoha Hospital received more traffic than the Burn Ward, the Disease Ward, and the Nursery combined. Considering the, ah shall we say, natural beauty of the female inhabitants, that gives one an idea of just how many ninja needed invasive surgery.

The particular ward the to be Hokage stood in officially did not exist. It was where the elite of Konoha, the ANBU, and certain others that could not be revealed to the public received their medical care.

The door was hidden under a strip of carpet settled upon by a cabinet of liquor that required both the chakra of one of a handful of approved doctors and a specific set of hidden locks to be opened.

Seals etched into the walls prevented any sensor, sight, or scout-type ninja from detecting the inhabitants.

There were no windows or air ducts, the air circulated and renewed by seals.

At the moment, the room held twin occupants: two thirteen-year old children.

With weary eyes, Uzumaki looked over the boy's form. He was tall, even for his age. His skin always seemed to be slightly red, no matter the time of year. His hair was a brown-blond that layed flat.

His chest was a mass of bandages, some of them still stained. Having memorized the medical report, Uzumaki knew that there were precisely thirty-four lacerations on the boy's chest, some subcutaneous, the rest managing to reach under muscle.

In a detached, purely clinical part of Naruto's mind, he mused that half the boy's intestinal system had been pierced, and the nerves had at the very least been nicked.

That wasn't the worst. That wasn't what made the Trainee feel ashamed and hopeless and as frail and ancient as his mind truly felt.

The girls' name was Samehara Gina. Her eyes were a glassy brown. Her eyes had been brown.

Gauze twirled around blond-strawberry pink tufts, hiding the gaping holes that were the ocular cavities. They were now empty.

The demented woman that had kidnapped the two and butchered his chest had also torn her unseeing eyes from their sockets.

It had happened with a red-hot blade and salty water, ensuring that it was both excruciatingly painful and that the ocular nerve and chakra pathways had been cauterized.

There was no hope of reinserting them, and not even the possibility of them being regenerated.

See, they weren't normal. Naruto himself wasn't normal. Uzumaki like healing abilities and Senju like strength. They were revered for their abilities and thus put under Uzumaki's asylum until the foreseeable future.

Any fear, pain, and anger at the Jinchuuriki had dulled and soothed over the years. If not for him they would've died during the Pein invasion and he was so gentle with the baby who was growing into a respectable young girl.

There should be laws against citizen's level of stupidity.

A quiet knock snapped Naruto out of his self-loathing, causing him to compose himself. He couldn't afford to show weakness. He was the mantle of hope .

A series of quiet clicks echoed slightly throughout the room before a portion of the floor burbled akwardly, letting two new ninja enter the secret room. The last one in closed the door above him, less than a second having passed.

The maneuver was so practiced that one nurse had once wandered in here in her sleep.

The first person wore the pristine coat of a doctor and was officially the most distinctive human being that Naruto had ever met in his life.

She wasn't tall, height barely respectable, wasn't large, hips jutting and rounded with a narrowed waist, her eyes a charcoal black that tumbled and brought forth chartreuse​ with offended indignation, her hair curled blue with flaring pink tips, the only non-exceptional thing about her was that nothing was bland.

No name was willingly given. Requested due to a rumbling nature between rambunctious silence and subdued energy an alias that was responded to as whirlpool. She answered when called and thus was good enough for the current Hokage and Anbu.

The second was more ordinary, a spouse of the doctor who insisted on trailing her like the shadow he was. Somewhere in his Thirty's and scaled the height spectrum to tower over anyone under five feet eleven inches.
Gaunt features sculpted to noble perfection with high chisled cheek bones and surprisingly doe soft turned eyes of puddle blue.

Whirlpool began to cyclone about the pair with a methodical mess of charts clip boards and soft soothing pats and prods as her husband stood beside the younger of the ninja to relay what had been gathered.

Naruto turned sharply, facing about left as he held the salute to his commanding officer and waited until it was parried back.

"I have the report Uzumaki-san, a detailed recount of what my team has gathered from the criminal at hand, as well as a few witness accounts of her playing nice with the children before she struck."

He closed the folder that held the report, locking his eyes on the comatose from of the blinded and injured Gina and her brother. The sight made his insides squirm, awakening some awful creature in his chest that writhed with something ugly, filling him with fire and ice and darkness.

He had felt the creature once before, and had fled as far as he could in the other direction.

This time he didn't turn away. He took hold of the beast and let it grow, spreading to fill his whole body with twisting, stinging tendrils that took hold and held tight like they planned on growing roots.

The Rokudaime to be deliberately filled himself with pain, rage, guilt, and hate, everything that made up the darkness of the soul.

And he planned to use it.

"Kodanshina," he said, those in the room to freeze. There was something in the young man's voice that no one had heard before.

It was a voice of burning steel, of something resolute and dangerous. "Call the Council. I must speak with them." Kodanshina nodded, his face perplexed, though he was hiding it well, and left the room. Uzumaki made a gesture with his hand and the heretofore-invisible ANBU bodyguards filed out as well.

Hello Animebookers once again I want to thank everyone for continuing to read my story and apologize for not updating. School is not allowing me the time of day in order to complete my chapters in a timely manner but what can I do about it. Shout-out to RenChan101, Aidenred, PastaMZ, and a couple others that Wattpad won't allow me put down you guys are awesome.