![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cywscrossFandom: Naruto
Summary: The first thing that happens is that Anko moves in. She declares that if Naruto’s allowed to stay, then she damn well should be too.
They slot into each other’s space easier than any of them probably thought they would. It’s a bit chaotic but they manage.
The first thing that happens is that Anko moves in. She declares that if Naruto’s allowed to stay, then she damn well should be too.
Orochimaru protests by saying that there is literally no room, which is actually very true.
Anko doesn't care. Within a day, she’s moved all her stuff into the house, taking up a third of Orochimaru’s closet space, a third of the bathroom space, and a third of pretty much everything else. She also claims the living room as her bedroom, which means that Orochimaru has to do all his research in his study because the floor of the sitting room is more often than not occupied by Anko’s futon.
Less than a week of the three of them living in what is technically a one-person house, Orochimaru throws in the towel, kicks them both out with some of their belongings, and tells them not to come back for two weeks. He glares them both into submission, and they sulk about it, but they obey. It’s hard to disobey when Orochimaru looks at them like that.
It’s the longest two weeks of Naruto’s life because he hasn't been away from Orochimaru’s house for so long since he first moved in, and Anko is equally cranky but Naruto suspects that that’s because she’s still a little afraid that her sensei will change his mind and boot her out of his life again.
They spend the two weeks mostly getting to know each other and arguing over the smallest things (dango versus ramen comes up a lot), and Naruto will never admit it but he thinks it’s kinda fun, especially when someone sneers “demon trash” at him, and Anko smashes a fist into the wall beside the guy’s head. The guy wets himself.
When they return two weeks later, they find – to their astonishment – that Orochimaru has expanded, enlarging the house by knocking down one wall and building another section so that there are now two extra bedrooms, two extra bathrooms, and a proper dining room instead of just a small table in a corner of the kitchen.
“Seals and doton jutsus, Naruto-kun,” Orochimaru answers with a hint of smug pride when Naruto manages to scrape his jaw off the ground long enough to ask how.
Apparently, the Jounin is paranoid enough that he won’t allow someone else to build his house so the man figured out a way to construct his own.
“Sensei isn’t called a genius for nothing,” Anko brags as if it’s her accomplishment before dashing off and claiming one of the bedrooms for herself. Naruto races after her and promptly gets into a fight over who gets which room. Orochimaru just shakes his head and leaves them to duke it out (Anko wins, darn it).
After that, things settle down. Sort of.
The first time Naruto sees a spar between Orochimaru and Anko, he’s in awe. Anko’s good, she’s fast, her aim with kunai and senbon is excellent, and she can even breathe fire.
But Orochimaru is just better in every way. She doesn't land a single hit on him that isn’t either blocked or dodged, and while Anko looks like she’s fighting hard, Orochimaru makes everything he does look easy, whether it’s blasting a waterfall at his apprentice or launching invisible air cutters from out of nowhere or – once – even using a tattoo on his left arm to summon five super fast white snakes to trap his opponent. And if Anko storms through the spar like a forest fire, then Orochimaru dances through it like wind and water combined, fluid and refined but with an edge of untamed ferocity like an unleashed force of nature that just can’t be stopped.
By the end of the two-hour spar, Anko is flat on her back and gasping for breath while Orochimaru is still standing, sweaty but nowhere near as bushed as his student.
“When I grow up,” Naruto blares as he bounces over to Orochimaru’s side with stars in his eyes. “I wanna be just like you!”
From the ground, Anko wheezes with laughter. Orochimaru just stares at him for an unreadable moment before closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Stop laughing, Anko,” He orders. She totally doesn’t but he tosses a clean towel and a bottle of water at her all the same before turning for the house, resting a hand on Naruto’s head as he passes by.
“You should be your own shinobi, Naruto,” Orochimaru tells him. “Don’t be like me.”
Naruto doesn't understand that, though he figures that it probably relates back to whatever bad things Orochimaru did that he’s always trying to remind them of for some reason. Still...
“Well, I won’t be exactly like you,” Naruto compromises, scampering after Orochimaru with Anko bringing up the rear. “But! I want the Snake summons too! And I want you to teach me stuff; you already promised anyway. I'm gonna learn every cool jutsu in the world and be the best Hokage ever!”
Anko smacks him over the head as she ducks past him to get through the door first. “Hah! An idiot like you learning every jutsu? And becoming Hokage? I’d like to see you try!”
Naruto bristles and chases after her, refusing to let her get the last word. “Just you wait and see! I’ll do it, dattebayo! And I’ll be a better ninja than you! That’ll be easy cuz you’ll get all fat on dango- AAHH!!”
“YOU DID NOT JUST SAY WHAT I THINK YOU SAID, YOU DAMN BRAT!!”
As the two of them dissolve into yet another fistfight, with Anko smooshing his face into the floorboards, Naruto catches a glimpse of Orochimaru watching them from where he’s leaning against the doorway. He’s not visibly smiling, but his eyes are soft all the same.
~0~0~0~
Anko throws open the door, one hand fisted around several crumpled pieces of paper while the other drags a squirming blond boy into the house in her wake. “SENSEI!”
She storms into the kitchen where Orochimaru-sensei is calmly chopping up some daikon, though he does look up when they enter.
She strides right up to him and shoves the papers under his nose. “Look at this! Look at what the little brat’s been hiding!”
Sensei doesn't even blink. He just tilts his head back a little to focus on what Anko has already seen to be pages of faded writing and tattered corners.
Her master is a genius. He can connect the dots no problem. These crumbling factsheets on basic math formulas belong in the trash more than a student’s hands.
“I see,” Sensei’s gaze slants down to where Naruto is red-faced and still trying to wiggle out of her iron grip.
Yeah, good luck with that, kid. The boy still has a long way to go before he’ll ever get the upper hand on her, but that doesn't stop him from trying. On the bright side, Anko can use him for target practice, and the brat gains experience at escaping death. Everybody wins.
It’s been a year and a half since she moved in, and about half a year since Naruto started at the Academy, having finally convinced the Hokage (ie. the Hokage convinced the fuddy-duddies in the Council) to let him enroll. Anko has never been happier. Sure, she has to put up with her friends casting worried looks at her like they think her master is going to chop her up into itty-bitty pieces for ingredients or something, and after the first time she summoned a snake in public, she also has to put up with shinobi acquaintances and asshole civilians giving her sideways looks that never fail to make her want to commit homicide, especially when she hears snatches of gossip about what Sensei is supposedly doing to her out in the middle of the woods. She’s even gone out of her way to fling senbon at the ninja population several dozen times. Lucky for them, shinobi and civilians, none are stupid enough to actually venture out into Sensei’s territory to spy on them.
She doesn't care though, not in the least. She finally has her master back, and while there are parts of him that are different from what she remembers – good different (he’s a lot more stable now, no longer obsessed with his pursuit of immortality, no longer teetering on the brink of insanity, something she wasn't perceptive enough to truly take notice of when she was younger), and bad different (on occasion, when she catches him in a moment of solitude, she’ll find him sitting in the shadows and staring off into space, lonely and lost in a way he’s never shown to anyone, with a dark shroud of melancholy choking the air around him, and during those times, she’s always deeply, desperately grateful for Uzumaki Naruto, because she can imagine all too well that her master was probably even worse off before that ball of sunshine whirled into Sensei’s life like a fresh summer breeze and promptly refused to leave) – there are also parts of him that have stayed the same, the kinder parts that she’s always cherished and always will because Sensei didn't used to show them as often as he does now, like automatically buying extra dango when he goes shopping, and baking her chocolate chiffon cakes because they're her favourite and Konoha doesn't sell them cheap since even the remotely decent ones have to be imported in from River Country, and working patiently with her for hours on end when she gets frustrated over a jutsu that she just can’t get down.
People can say what they will; Anko will simply send them to the hospital if and when she hears them criticizing her master.
“Naruto,” Orochimaru-sensei is saying at the moment, and he’s always been able to command respect, even if – for some – that respect is fuelled by fear. Now is no different, and Naruto instinctively freezes before reluctantly raising his head. Sensei fixes him with a cool stare. “An explanation, if you please.”
Naruto’s bottom lip sticks out in a pout. Anko rolls her eyes but refrains from saying anything as the brat finally coughs up. “I didn’t wanna bother you with something this stupid,” He mutters, scuffing the ground with one shoe. “It’s not like it’s anything new. The teacher’s just being mean. I can handle it.”
Orochimaru-sensei’s expression doesn't really change but Anko knows him well enough by now to recognize the simmer of wintry wrath that turns his eyes a few shades lighter that their typical dark gold.
None of it shows in his voice when he speaks. Anko has to admire that.
“Whether or not you can handle such attitudes from the Academy instructors is neither here nor there,” Sensei goes back to chopping daikon, movements smooth and unperturbed. “This is your education on the line. Not being able to fully understand your lessons won’t help you in the long run.”
Naruto droops like a wilting flower. Anko rolls her eyes and slaps a hand against his back. “Jeez, kid, this is what you have us for, okay? Both Sensei and I have gone through the Academy. I still have some of my old books that I haven’t bothered throwing out yet, and Sensei’s an old-timer-” She ducks the senbon that comes flying at her head so that it embeds itself into the far wall instead. “-and back in his day and age, the school curriculum was even harder, and Sensei still graduated at the age of six. So between the two of us, it doesn't really matter how much crap the Academy gives you. But you gotta speak up when this sort of thing happens, you know? I'm good, and Sensei’s deadly, but we’re not mind-readers.”
The brat is staring at her with thankful eyes of gooey proportions so Anko gives him a noogie just to get rid of it. It’s embarrassing.
“You graduated when you were six?” Naruto asks once Anko generously lets him go after only a few seconds.
Orochimaru sends her a reproachful look but replies all the same. “Yes, but six was standard during those times, simply because there was more conflict overall, so all the villages tried to churn out more new shinobi as quickly as possible to replace their dead. Graduating young was nothing special back then.” A spiteful smirk flits across his face. “It was whether or not you survived to adulthood that counted as the mark of a truly competent ninja. Out of my entire generation, only three Konoha-nin – myself included – are still alive today.”
Anko has to smile a bit when she glances at Naruto and sees him hanging onto every word. Orochimaru-sensei doesn't talk much about anything related to his past, even when it comes to the most innocuous things, but sometimes – like now – he’ll offer little tidbits of information that you can’t find in any textbook or scroll, and they’ll have that personal flavour to them that says that Sensei was there to experience it all firsthand.
“Anko will dig up her old schoolbooks for you,” Orochimaru continues, flicking a glance at her that Anko readily nods at. “I take it that this issue is why you’ve been doing so badly on your homework and tests?”
Naruto flinches but nods meekly, though even Anko winces in sympathy. Sensei can do a lot of things; mincing his words has never been one of them. Or, well, he can, but he’s always been one to state things exactly as they are, especially when it comes to education.
“What if they mark his stuff unfairly even with us tutoring him?” Anko brings up.
Orochimaru-sensei’s eyes glitter under the kitchen light, and it’s positively astounding how the man can look so damn lethal even while wearing an apron. Anko is unashamedly jealous.
“They won’t,” is all Sensei says, and it sounds like a threat.
Two weeks later, when Naruto brings home another math test, the score reads 82, and Anko grins around a stick of dango as the kid describes with more than a little puzzlement the way his Academy teacher sweated bullets as he handed back Naruto’s test and even asked if he wanted a new set of schoolbooks and factsheets, which Naruto turned down because Anko’s are still in pretty good condition, and Orochimaru-sensei’s are more advanced.
(“He kinda looked like he wanted to cry when I said no though,” Naruto adds, and Anko almost falls off the couch laughing.)
“What if it leaks back to the Hokage?” Anko asks her master later on when Naruto’s gone to bed. “What if the teacher talks?”
Orochimaru-sensei smiles at her, sharp and vicious as a cobra’s fangs, and it reminds her that this is the Snake Sannin, and nobody truly crosses him or his without consequence.
“If he knows what’s good for him,” Sensei tells her with all the placidity of someone commenting on the weather. “He won’t breathe a word. I’ve made myself... exceedingly clear.”
Anko smirks, satisfied but equally relieved too. She’s been a bit worried about this, actually. For all that she likes the fact that Sensei is easier to get along with now because his moods are no longer interspersed with a high-strung temper, there’s also a... mellowness in him that’s secretly troubled her, if only because her master has never been mellow. Orochimaru-sensei is composed and calculating when it comes to his own actions and reactions, that’s still the same, but there’s also been a distinct lack of bite in him nowadays where once there were nasty, jagged edges that cut with an acerbic tongue and a vengeful nature, something she – as a somewhat vindictive kunoichi herself – has always appreciated.
And before today, she thought it gone forever, but there’s a steely fire in Orochimaru-sensei’s eyes again, one that apparently hasn't been burned out of him quite yet after all.
~0~0~0~
“That. Is. Awesome.” Naruto breathes. “You're really not pulling my leg?”
Anko rolls her eyes. “Why would I do that? There’s no point.”
“That’s awesome,” Naruto repeats, looking elated beyond belief.
Orochimaru has no idea why. It’s such an inane little fact, yet the boy seems to take an absurd amount of joy from it.
Their birthdays, as Anko just noted, all reside in October. The tenth for Naruto, obviously, the twenty-fourth for Anko, and the twenty-seventh for Orochimaru.
And Naruto is absolutely ecstatic about this.
“You should've said something last year!”
“Sensei and I were both on separate missions; it’s not like we had time. Besides, I celebrated with some other friends when I got back.”
“Fine, then we should totally have a joint birthday party this year!”
Well, anything to make the child happy.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 05:02 am (UTC)Anko and Naruto really are like siblings who fight with love, and Anko will kill anyone who looks at Naruto wrong, and Orochimaru will just make you wish you were dead, as that Academy teacher found out to his detriment.
This chapter was so fluffy and happy and bonding <33. Obviously a joint birthday party is in order.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-28 10:59 pm (UTC)