It was three weeks before the ninja academy graduation exams when Naruto was finally forced to admit that he was critically behind on his studies, having failed the last three preliminary tests in a row.

Naruto knew he desperately needed to study, and yet his academy scrolls obstinately refused to be read. He had tried reading them backwards or while hanging upside down, tried reading only every second sentence, even giving up entirely and walking out of the room only to quickly run back to his scroll before his brain realized it was being tricked, as well as countless other less sensible and well-thought-out measures – all to no avail. His brain would take one look at the academy mandated material, and declare that it would rather do something else thank you very much, and to hell with Naruto’s own stated views on the matter.

Every time he tried to focus on the subject material, a million unrelated thoughts would pop up that all somehow seemed so much more interesting – anything to delay having to study for just a moment longer. Seeing an opportunity to use this to his advantage, Naruto had already cleaned his room (well, clean by his standards), done his morning exercises, written an essay on knitting, practiced balancing books on his head while hopping on his left foot, studied the fine art of origami, cooked a meal and then ate half of it before deciding he wasn’t hungry after all and leaving the rest to stew on his desk as an impromptu biology experiment. Finally, driven by purest desperation, he had forced himself to ask for studying assistance from the one person he was certain would never refuse that particular request.

So it was that on a lazy summer afternoon the orange-clad ninja was standing on the porch of a humble but tidy looking house, with blue window blinds and a potted plant next to the door. Even then, standing on the doorstep of the building, it was still strangely difficult to take that final step and knock on the door.

Naruto ran a nervous hand through the messy blond hair on the back of his head. This is stupid. I am a ninja – or training to be one anyway. If I’m gonna risk my life in mortal combat, I should be able to ask a girl for help! With those words on his mind and cursing inwardly, Naruto forced himself to knock.

“Coming!” There was a series of muffled footfalls thundering down the stairs, followed by the sound of a security chain being removed on the other side. The door swung open to reveal a bright and happy face framed by pink hair, with a forehead that was often called overlarge but which Naruto thought looked kind of cute. Sakura was wearing a red cheongsam that fell to her knees, as well as dark green shorts.

Her face fell almost immediately upon seeing him. “Oh, it’s just you. For a moment there I thought you were Ino, or better yet, Sasuke come at last to profess his undying love for me.” Her expression glazed over as her mind wandered wistfully for a moment before reluctantly turning back to reality. “You wanted help preparing for the academy exams, right? I suppose you might as well come in now that you’re here.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“Wait… Hold on one moment!” No sooner had Naruto taken one step into the building or he was forced back outside by Sakura’s pointed finger of accusation. “This isn’t one of those stupid tricks where you’re pretending to ask for help with your exams, but really you’re just trying to get close to me, until one day I let down my guard and in a moment of weakness allow you into my heart, is it?”

Naruto threw up his hands defensively. “No, I just wanted you to help me study, I swear!” A thought occurred to him then. “Wait, where’d you even get that idea from? Have you been reading romance novels? You haven’t been reading any of Jiraiya’s stupid books, have you?”

“No more questions!” She grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the entrance hall, past the kitchen of motherly shouting (“Oh are you bringing a friend how nice wait is that a boy okay well yell if you need anything!”), up the stairs and straight into the bedroom of supreme pinkness.

“My parents decorated it that way when I was a little girl,” she said defensively. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.” He had been thinking it, though. Naruto tried to be tolerant with regards to girlishness, but there were limits and they had been crossed right where the walls began. Almost everything in the room that was not pink was flowery, curly, laced, or some combination of all three.

“Sit down.” She pointed towards a plain wooden chair (though with a soft pink cushion) right in the middle of the sparkly clean wooden flooring. He sat himself there as ordered, half-expecting a team of pink-clad Anbu interrogators to come into the room and stand in a circle around the chair while she questioned him. Pink did not seem like a colour used for intimidation purposes, but then it might just be a trick to throw Naruto off and make him feel entirely out of place, in which case it was working perfectly.

Sakura seated herself on the bed opposite him, legs folded underneath in a meditative posture, a book having manifested in her hand. It was not hard to imagine where she got it from: Aside from girlishness, the other thing the room was filled with to the brim was scrolls and books. The shelves above her bed seemed to have been occupied by dolls and stuffed animals once, but over the years the forces of girlishness had been steadily losing ground to the invading armies of Bookmania. Now the plush animals were looking to make a desperate last stand, forced to choose between being trod underneath unyielding leather bindings or to leap to the soft linen doom promised by the bedcovers below.

“Okay! Let’s start by testing what you know, so we get an idea of how much catching up we need to do.” She leafed through the book at rapid speed, flipping the pages as though it were second nature to her. “First question: If the area of a right triangle is thirty and one of its angles is forty-five degrees, what are the lengths of the sides and hypotenuse of the triangle?”

“Uh, I don’t think we need to practice that kinda stuff for the academy exams,” he pointed out. “Wait, is that a chūnin exam question? Why are you learning chūnin-level material when we haven’t even graduated the academy yet?”

Sakura stared at him in astonishment. “Naruto, the academy mandated curriculum may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient to become a well-informed citizen with a half-decent understanding of the world he lives in. If you don’t learn even basic mathematics like this, how can you expect to help teach at the Academy once you become older, or research new techniques or study the nature of chakra?”

“I don’t,” he said with a shrug that made his chair wobble. “I just wanna learn what I need to pass this stupid exam so I can hurry up and become a legal adult, learn all kinds of powerful techniques and combine them so that I can become an incredibly powerful ninja like the Fourth Hokage was.”

She gave him a look as though he had just admitted to eating puppies. “Oh, well, fine. I mean, if you just want to learn how to use chakra to blow things up, don’t let me stop you.” She put the book away and just as quickly found a new one. She soon had her finger on a new question. “Okay, how about this one: Name three examples of Space-time ninjutsu.”

“Oh, uh, lemme think.” Naruto groaned inwardly. There were three things he hated in life: Tests, having to remember boring stuff, and being forced to guess what other people wanted to hear. On second thought, maybe it’s just the one thing I hate. “Erhm… the Summoning technique, the body-flicker technique, and, uh, oh, the Fourth Hokage’s flying thunder god technique.” He remembered the last one because legendary ninjas were fortunately not filed under the ‘boring stuff’ category in his brain.

Sakura shook her head in admonishment. “Sorry Naruto, that’s not quite correct. The body-flicker technique isn’t teleportation, it’s just high-speed movement. You’re really going to have to study harder if you don’t know at least that much.” As an afterthought she gave him a sympathetic smile, as if to say that he shouldn’t quite take this tremendous personal failure as a reason to give up on life just yet.

“High-speed movement? That’s ridiculous – it’s clearly teleportation. The user casts a technique, disappears, and then reappears somewhere else not a second later. That’s teleportation, right there.”

“You’re the one that’s being ridiculous,” Sakura said with a huff. She jabbed her finger at the passage once more. “It says right here that it’s high-speed movement: Do you think you know better than the ninja who wrote this book? With your failing grades?” She smiled haughtily as she said that last part.

Naruto crossed his arms, his shyness forgotten in the heat of the much more important quest of being right about things. “Well yeah. It’s not like elite ninja who actually go out and use those techniques wrote it. It was probably some stuffy academic who couldn’t care less. Besides, if the stupid book can’t even tell the difference between teleportation and high-speed movement, why should I care what it says?”

“That’s circular logic,” Sakura said with a raised eyebrow. “Okay, look at it this way: If the body-flicker technique is teleportation, why can’t you use it to teleport through walls, hmmm?”

“Uh, well, I mean…” Naruto frowned. “Maybe it’s teleportation that requires line of sight?”

“Hah! Teleportation that requires line of sight! Even though you can still do it with your eyes closed, and you can’t use it to teleport into the air. How is that different from high-speed movement, exactly?”

Naruto hesitated. “Well, if it’s high speed movement, where does all the energy go? I mean, if you’re moving faster than sound, shouldn’t there be a huge explosion when you suddenly stop or something?”

Sakura’s mouth worked silently, and Naruto realized he had finally said something she had no quick answer to. She started skimming through the chapter of the book once more, then checked the back of the book, then pulled out another book and skimmed through that as well, all in less than a minute. “It doesn’t say,” she said finally, as if she couldn’t quite believe the words coming out of her mouth. “They probably just give a simplified explanation in the academy books because they think we’re not smart enough to understand how it really works. Maybe the real explanation is in one of the secret scrolls that only jōnin have access to. But my parents are only genin so I have no way to get access to one of those…”

“But my godfather is one of the legendary Sannin, and he would definitely have access,” Naruto supplied with a wide grin. “So if we work together, we could find out the answer and get stronger in the process!”

“Exactly.” She leaned forward eagerly. “If you could just borrow one of those scrolls from him, then I’ll-”

Sakura was interrupted when the door to the room opened, and a blond woman wearing a white cheongsam appeared in the doorway. In her hands she carried a large flowery plate filled to the brim with foodstuffs. “Knock knock! I figured you two must be hungry, so I made lunch! I also got you those syrup-coated dumplings you like so much, Sakura honey, and those dried plums you always-“

Sakura rushed to the door and grabbed the plate from her mother’s hand before she could come in any further, her swift and precise movements betraying the skill she had developed for managing this particular type of crisis. “Thanks mom, we’re going to eat this now, bye mom!”

“Okay sweetie! I’ll give the two of you some time alone together. Let me know if you need anything!” Sakura’s mother looked over her shoulder with a benign smile even as she was pushed out the door by her daughter. “So is that your new boyfriend? Whatever happened to that noble Uchiha boy? This one looks kind of cute too, in a dopey sort of way…”

“Out, out!” The moment Sakura managed to shove her mother out the room she propped her back against the door, as if she were afraid her mother would come back to hound her again the moment she let down her guard. “Ugh! I swear, parents can be so annoying! Sometimes I wish I were an orphan, and I could just take care of myself and make my own decisions without-” Her hands went to her mouth as she remembered who she was talking to. “Oh no, I’m sorry Naruto, I didn’t mean…”

“That’s okay…” Naruto observed that his toenails needed clipping: The way his toes stuck out of his ninja sandals left their hooked and jagged edges clearly visible. “So, uh… What about the exam preparation?”

“…right. Right! Exams,” she said with visible relief. A second later, her eyes widened in realization, and she was panicking again. “That’s right; I haven’t even been able to help you answer any questions yet!” She immediately set to work plucking out a series of books from her shelves, seizing them with deft fingers and setting them apart for later use. “We still need to identify the key areas of improvement, make a time schedule, prepare a list of training exercises, practice doing mock exams, and… and…”

Naruto watched the pink-haired kunoichi work in silent wonder, as he sat on his pink-cushioned chair in the middle of the pink-coloured room. The two of them ended up practicing until late in the evening, and did far more work and much harder assignments than Naruto thought was necessary, but he did not terribly mind. Somehow, Sakura’s excitement as they worked made all the difference in the world, and as he suffered through the practice questions he could not quite hide the foolish smile on his face.

-o-

It was well past midnight by the time the legendary ninja arrived at his destination.

The old dilapidated structure rose up before him like a man-made mountain, its grey stone and peeling paint coloured black and blue in the pale starlight. The surrounding Village was patrolled by ninja at all hours, and in the distance the barking of dogs could be heard as a patrol made its rounds across the streets, but those were of no concern to him: The hard part of remaining undetected was only beginning.

The front door would be too obvious and too noticeable even at this late hour, but there were other means of entry available to a ninja worthy of the name. Running up the façade of the building as only a shinobi could, he swiftly arrived at the second floor window. Once there he easily pried the lock open with a kunai, before slipping inside in perfect silence. There were only scant steps to go before he reached his target, and then this would all be over.

It was on the fifth step that he made a crucial mistake: With too much weight placed on his left foot, the floorboard creaked beneath him, and his heart missed a beat. It was an error that he would never have made if not for the drugs coursing through his system – or so he told himself. After all these years, could it be that he had finally grown old? He waited an unbearably long moment, but the sound died away with no response. It seemed he had been lucky – but a ninja who relied on luck was a ninja who wagered with the god of Death, he reminded himself. He took the last steps soundlessly, and as he finally entered the bedroom, he closed the door behind him with an inward sigh of relief.

“Aha! There you are, Jiraiya!”

Jiraiya’s heart leaped as a five-foot ninja clad in night-blue sleepwear dropped down from the ceiling and landed right in front of him, one arm outstretched in pointed accusation.

“Naruto? What’re you doing in my bedroom? You’re supposed t’ be asleep!”

“I’m supposed to-?” His godson floundered with indignation. “You’re the one who said you were gonna teach me a new technique today! Not gallivanting around all night doing… whatever it is you do all night.” The boy frowned as he considered the issue.

“Ah… I was doing important ninja business! It was, uh, a top secret special S-ranked mission. I would’ve told you all about it if I were allowed to.” Jiraiya decided a quick change of subject was in order. “Hey, where’d ya learn a word like ‘gallivanting’, anyway?”

“It was in one of those stupid books you’re always writing.” Naruto stepped towards the nearest bookshelf and took out Adventures of a Gallant Ninja: The mysterious Kunoichi of Roichi Cave, part XV of Jiraiya’s famous Make-Out Tactics series. “See, it’s right here,” Naruto said, as he flipped through the book and reached the relevant section. “The legendary gallivanting ninja strode into the smoky, dimly-lit room, his breath and his audacious actions reeking of alcohol both. ‘No more games,’ he growled in the same rough voice that had stolen the hearts of half the kunoichi in the Land of Fire. In reply, her thick ample bosom pressed up against him, warm and inviting. “Oh, but I do so like to play,” she said huskily, as her hand reached down and gripped his -”

“Gimme that!” Jiraiya snatched the book from the boy’s hands in a lightning-swift movement. “You’re far too young t’ be reading that sorta thing – though now that you did read it, I suppose you might as well tell me about it.” He flashed a wide grin. “So what’d ya think? Pretty good, no?”

Naruto made a face. “I don’t get why you even write them: You’re already a real ninja, so why write about being one? And it’s all just a buncha weird stuff. Like, it’s supposed to be about ninja, but all the main character ever does is hang around in bars all night and…” He trailed off. “Wait a second…”

“Like I said, far too young!” Jiraiya hastily put the book back where Naruto found it, before giving his godson’s hair an affectionate ruffle. “Stick with the ninja stories I gave you for now, kiddo. Tomorrow I’ll teach you an incredible new technique, I promise. Now let’s both go and hit the sack.”

He watched as his godson sulkily went back to bed, and then headed for his own bed. It would not be much longer now, before he would have to tell the boy – of the events that had made him who he was, of his parents and his past, of burning daemons that consumed all life and enemies that hid in darkness…

He shook his head, and went to sleep.

I’ll let him stay a child, for just a little longer…