Crafty Chameleon

Popping Pearls

Last Time:

... fucking D rank missions!

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"Naruto help!" Natsu yelled as he was dragged along the ground by a group of dogs.

"Remember when I said it was a bad idea to walk all those dogs at once? Yeah, that was me helping." The blonde sighed as his brother continued yelling and grabbed all the leashes from Natsu's hands before saying in a loud stern voice, "Sit." Every dog sat and stayed quiet.

Natsu blinked, "Wow ... how'd you do that?"

"You just have to make it clear who's in charge ... here, you take these three." He gave three leashes for the smallest dogs to Natsu and he took the others. They finished walking the dogs without any other problems.

"Thanks Naruto ... wait, where did the rest of our team go?" asked the ruffled orange haired twin.

The blonde pointed to a house with a blue roof, "Sasuke and Sakura are painting that house over there and our senseis are stalking us."

The smaller twin blinked and looked behind him ... Kakashi and Kushina were indeed following them! A sweat drop appeared on Natsu's temple, "What are you guys doing?"

Kushina pouted and they came out of hiding, "N-nothing!"

Naruto looked at the redhead, "Really? Looked like you were stalking us."

"We were just ... errr ..." Kakashi couldn't come up with a valid excuse. They've been doing things like this since they went through their punishments three weeks ago.

Sasuke and Sakura came towards them, "We finished painting." grumbled the pinkette as she flicked paint off her clothes.

"Good, let's go get another mission." Kushina said.

All the genin groaned except Naruto who was too well trained to complain and Natsu who liked just spending time with Naruto ...

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Minato sat at his desk trying get the haunting images of Naruto's life out of his head. He felt so stupid. All those times Jiraiya gave him updates he never once asked about the son he left behind. If he just asked maybe this could've been avoided ...

Hell, he and Kushina risked coming into the village early to place flowers on the Uchiha's grave before meeting Naruto, but now that they knew their old friends were behind many of the attacks on their son they felt sick calling the Uchihas human let alone friends ...

The hokage frowned, he screwed up so badly. They always knew they would have to earn Naruto's forgiveness, but at the time they thought he would have a happy life not this hell ...

Kushina, Kakashi and their team entered his office, "We're ready for another mission-"

"Please don't give us another chore!" wailed the pink banshee as Sasuke nodded in agreement.

The hokage chuckled and looked at Naruto and Natsu, "Would you guys like a higher ranked mission too?"

Natsu shrugged, "Fine with me."

"What about you, Naruto?" Minato asked Naruto whose answer was really the only one Minato cared about.

The ROOT agent shrugged, "Sure." (Not like it matters since Opa is still giving me missions. I can survive a few boring ones ... Jiji is still a sneaky old man. Not telling Minato about using the shadow clone jutsu to do paperwork is an awesome idea.) The 'genin' mentally snickered as he saw the massive stacks of paper next to Minato.

"Kushina, as sensei it's your decision." Kakashi winced as his sensei completely ignored his presence. It's been like this since Minato found out about how he treated Naruto.