The sealed kunai

Chapter 19:To Toil in the Mud or Play in the Clouds

Jiraiya looked over Naruto's handiwork from the last few hours and 'hmmed' thoughtfully before balling up the paper he was looking at just moments before, "Nope. It's total crap gaki. Do it again."

Naruto grumbled at the toad summoner as he pulled out more paper and began copying down the practice strokes, kanji, and symbols that Jiraiya had given him to improve his calligraphy. The important physical things that Naruto needed to be a decent sealing artist were great speed with his strokes and flawless writing ability. It had been a month since Naruto had spoken to Sai and he and Jiraiya were still out in the wilderness of Tsuki no Kuni by the waterfall. His clones were starting to make some headway with splitting the waterfall. It was amazing to Jiraiya how fast he was getting the exercise with the help of the clones, he figured that he would have it down by the time they needed to return to Konoha.

During the day he would have Naruto make his clones to work on the waterfall splitting while he had Naruto study the theories of fuuinjutsu. After lunch he would make Naruto spar with him before setting him to work on his brush skills, which was Naruto's least favorite practice of the day, but it needed to be done. Fuuinjutsu was seemingly tethered to every major event in Naruto's life thus far. When one thought about it, it literally made him who he was, for better or for worse, therefore for him to know nothing about it would have been a travesty, he had been planning on delving into it even before he made his promise to Anko. However learning it was a pain in the ass.

It was hard to re-teach yourself how to write after doing it a certain way for as long as you could remember, but that was basically what he was being forced to do. Every little mark needed to be perfect for fuuinjutsu to be effective, or else terrible things could happen. Naruto was never so thankful for his quick healing, or else his hands and wrists would have been shot beyond use by now.

Naruto was simply taking it slow this time, making sure that his movements on the parchment were perfect enough to avoid mistakes. Naruto noticed the light begin to fade and as he looked over at Jiraiya he could see that the man did too. Jiraiya headed off towards the waterfall, yelling over his shoulder, "I'm going to go tell your clones to dispel. You can stop for the day, we're done here."

Naruto nodded and sighed as he started picking up all of the discarded papers with the efforts of his daily labor on them and put them away. He finally had time to think over all of the things that had happened to him lately. He found out that his dad was the Yondaime Hokage, strangely enough when he started piecing things together it wasn't that hard to see. He was blonde and blue-eyed, hell some people called him the Yondaime's spitting image. He was also a jinchuuriki, most jinchuuriki are children of high ranking shinobi so that they have some sort of loyalty to their village, and he had Kakashi Hatake as his sensei, he still needed to find and grill Kakashi over a myriad of things once he returned to Konoha. Needless to say, he wasn't as shocked as he should have been after he got over the initial surprise from when he figured it out.

This made the second thing that had recently happened even more absurd to him. He had been asked, no, ordered, to become Hokage or die trying. Danzo had sent one of his men, a boy Naruto's age dubbed 'Sai' for the mission to inform Naruto that Danzo had to break basically all informative ties with him, that he had to bury everything about himself and Root. Naruto wasn't sure how he felt about that. On one hand, he knew the score with him and Danzo. He knew that to Danzo he was a tool to be used to protect and serve Konoha and that he was somewhat expendable, he had come to terms with that fact years ago. On the other hand, he had spent the earlier years of his life following Danzo's lead, going off of Danzo's example, doing the things that Danzo told him to do. To say that that man no longer had any sway over his life was something he had to get used to. He was to avoid any inclination that the two had any connection. Sure, Jiraiya and Tsunade were the only people alive that knew of his past relationship, but for all intents and purposes, since the invasion Naruto had been his own person. Naruto had played that up to the hilt, all the while he had been waiting for some word, either from an assassin or someone to give him his orders, he knew he wouldn't have been left out the way it seemed he had been.