Naruto : Monsters

It was a bright and sunny day.

It shouldn't have been, but it was. If the world had any sense of justice it would have been a gloomy morning, maybe with a thunderstorm brewing on the horizon or hail the size of golf balls falling from the sky. But no the weather didn't even have the decency to be cloudy. The sun was shining, the birds were singing and there wasn't so much a single cloud to block the clear blue skies. It was as perfect a start to the day as you have hoped for

Which was why when Hanabi walked up to me, I was blissfully unaware of the bombshell she was about to drop on my lap.

"Onii-sama." She tugged insistently on my sleeves, drawing my attention to her, and I had to resist the urge to squeal and cuddle her when I found her staring up at me with wide puppy eyes. With a will that would have shamed iron, I managed to beat the urge into submission and patiently waited for Hanabi to finish speaking.

I'll cuddle up to her once she was done telling me whatever she wanted to.

"Onii-sama," she repeated, tilting her head to one side, "is it true that you're going to become Naruto-nee's Waifu?"

Something shattered in my heart.

I felt the world tilt beneath me at hearing those words leaving my sister's lips, throwing me off balance but, as I began to learn, children could be thoughtlessly cruel. Never did that truth become more evident to me than when Hanabi continued to speak, unaware that she had inadvertently shattered my world.

"Does this mean you're going to wear a dress for your wedding?" She asked me sincerely, her brow scrunching in thoughtful confusion as she brought a finger to her chin only to suddenly burst into an excited smile, "Then, then can I help you pick it out?"

It was on that bright sunny day, surrounded by the singing of birds that I began plotting my second murder.

I didn't know how, I didn't even know when, but one day I will get revenge on Kakashi.

And when I do, my vengeance will be sung in legends.

...

"-And then Shikamaru was like," Naruto scrunched up her face, her voice coming out as a tired drawl as she imitated Shikamaru, "this is bullshit."

I couldn't hold back a snicker from where I stood off to the side, the impersonation so spot-on. It seemed Naruto had the same problem because after a few seconds of holding the expression she lost it, collapsing into a heap as she wrapped her arms around her stomach and howled with laughter.

"You should have to see it Mom," Naruto said once she managed to pull herself together and pushed herself back up into a sitting position, humour thick in her voice. "His face, my god, his face, I don't know how to describe it. It was covered in so much soot that he looked like a raccoon. It was hilarious." She snickered and shook her head at the memory. "But I don't know what he had to complain about. We got the bell in the end, didn't we? So what if Hikaru needed to blow up a forest to do it? It's not like we can't grow more trees to replace it."

"I blew up a forest?" I parroted, blinking dumbly at the girl, caught completely off guard by what she said. As the meaning of her words began to sink in however, I found myself straightening up with indignation.

"I blew up a forest? I? Oh, no-no-no, no. You don't get to pin that one on me, that was all you." I thrust an accusing finger at the blonde as I stalked up to her, where she remained kneeling beside her mother's grave. "There is no me involved in that mess at all. You were the one who planted a thousand and one tags before triggering it and blowing the entire forest sky high. With us still in it!" Stressing the last part.

Seriously, that was the single most terrifying experience I have ever been through. Alright, maybe not the most terrifying experience. The time I stole Kakashi's Icha Icha book, that still earned the top spot. Still, it was right up there, top three easy, and this coming from a guy who had literally died before.

Forest fires were seriously scary.

You'd think that would be obvious but knowing something was scary and experiencing it yourself was a completely different kind of beast. And it was only when I found myself standing in the middle of a forest fire did I realise just how terrifying they were.

What made it worse was none of us had seen it coming until we were already surrounded by flames.

One minute we were fine, surrounded by miles of lush green forest, safe in the embrace of good old mother nature, then I caught sight of Naruto forming the 'snake' hand-seal and the next thing I knew there was a big boom and were surrounded by a sea of fire.

It was traumatizing.

Poor Shikamaru still flinches whenever someone strikes a match.

"Hey, that wasn't my fault." Naruto crossed her arms and gave me a stubborn look. "Kakashi was about to catch Shikamaru, what else was I supposed to do? And besides, it too was your fault. You were the one who told me to send my clones to get more tags."

"But I didn't tell you to set them off all at the same time! And I only told you to grab the tags because nothing else we tried worked on Kakashi." I countered as I approached Naruto and knelt down beside her before Kushina's grave. 

"We tried everything we could think of to try and stop him. Traps, ninjutsu, everything, it didn't even seem to slow him down. He just kept shrugging off everything we threw at him as if there were nothing. I swear the only reason why Kakashi hadn't ended the exam at the point was because he was having too much fun tormenting us. What choice did I have? We needed to get more fire-power or else we'd have failed the test."

"...So what you're trying to say is," Naruto, after spending a couple of seconds pondering my words, said, "it's really all Kakashi's fault."

I thought about it for a moment before nodding, "Yeah, pretty much."

Wordlessly, we nodded to each other before turning to face the grave and, speaking as one, "Kakashi blew up a forest."

That was team 7's official motto, 'If something goes wrong, blame it on Kakashi'.

It might have been funny if we weren't being completely serious. That really was our team's motto. It had been ever since our third mission went fubar on us.

Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't as if we held any real ill-will towards our grey-haired Sensei but necessity forced our hands. The amount of trouble our team kept attracting was unbelievable, and I meant that in the literal sense, as in I literally could not believe just how much trouble we kept getting into. And going by the looks the Hokage kept giving us whenever we ended up wandering into his office, I wasn't the only one.

Setting the Genin Exam and the Tora mission aside, there were two other...let's call them incidents, where we had to be summoned into the Hokage office to sort the mess out. And it's only been two weeks since our team has been formed.

At this point, I was sure that half of Konoha's population were convinced that our team was jinxed and that the only reason why the Hokage hasn't split the team up was that he's afraid that if he tried he might cause whatever unlucky curse that haunted our team to spread and contaminate the rest of the Shinobi population.

It wasn't as if I couldn't have seen this coming to a certain extent when our team first formed. I mean, I knew that Naruto and I had a certain knack for getting into all sorts of trouble and, let's face it, Kakashi was even worse if anything, but throw us all in a team together and it was like our ability to attract trouble amplified. 

Whatever synergy we had going on was frightening, our ability to attract mayhem grew to insane levels and it reached the point where our team had already gained a reputation as a trouble magnet.

After a while of suffering through catastrophe after catastrophe, we realised that it would be easier to just heap all the blame on Kakashi instead of trying to think of excuses each and every time we got into trouble. And besides, odds are, it was probably his fault anyway.

And that was how the new Team 7 motto was born.

Naturally, Kakashi tried to reject it outright, he wanted to go with the motto of 'Those who break the rules are trash, but those who abandon their comrades are even worse than trash' instead. 

And while I had to admit that was a freaking awesome line, we all agreed that the 'blame Kakashi' was a more practical slogan, so it stuck. And since choosing a team motto was a group decision instead of just the instructor, Kakashi couldn't do a single thing about it.

I swear our Sensei sulked for days afterwards.

...

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