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Canon Side-Story: Popping the Clones
🕑 Added 2024-12-22 16:58:57 +0000 UTCThis is awesome, you can't convince me otherwise.
I accidentally wrote 4K and now it's your problem.
Please enjoy, I'll see you all on the 30th. Happy holidays, please spread some love to your family's for me.
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If a year ago someone had told her that her brother was going to take her out for lunch, she would have laughed at them. A part of that is that she didn’t have a brother a year ago, but even if they specified Naruto, she still would have found the concept preposterous. She always assumed she would be paying if she said yes, even when he was consistently asking her out. She didn’t know his situation was as bad as it was until they became teammates, but she always knew he was poor. She’s a little ashamed to admit his smelly clothes and his clearly lower social status was a part of why she rejected him so offhandedly.
The other part was her having zero interest in romance, not wanting to devote the time away from her games, and being so zoned out from a lack of sleep that she probably missed him asking most of the time. Ino says he straight up harassed her but she doesn’t remember that at all, which is probably a good thing. Even at her worst, her parents made her look moderately presentable - by her standards - so she never left the house with clothes that had holes in them or had food in her hair. She’d also never experienced going a week without hot water or not being sure where her next meal was coming from. She had the luxury of forgetting to eat, Naruto couldn’t always eat.
Looking back, she doesn’t regret rejecting him. She doesn’t even regret hitting him that much, she stopped well before she got strong enough to really hurt him and they’re closer for it. What she regrets the most is not realizing his situation and offering help when she had the means to do so for the entire academy. She could have made his life so much better, all she had to do was open her eyes and miss a guild raid or two to clear her head. With how easily her parents took him in, she’s pretty sure she could have done it years ago. She would have too, if she’d only known.
All that to say she’s out at a fancy sandwich deli - eating chicken alfredo noodles of all things - and Naruto’s paying. More importantly, Naruto’s in need of her opening her eyes and offering her help. No more dallying because it’s uncomfortable, Naruto’s going to freaking die if they don’t deal with this. She’s going to be a much better sister than she was a year ago, mostly because she wasn’t a sister a year ago but details like that aren’t important when it comes to her brother. “The clones need to pop, Naruto.” She urges him in between bites.
He bristles, expression scrunching, his gaze is focused right on his roast beef sandwich. It has a salty dipping sauce she’d like to try, maybe she’ll get a sandwich next time. “The twins too?” He asks her, nudging his sandwich and then deciding otherwise when his stomach flops.
“Uh-huh. Besides, getting their memories will probably make you happier, they spend half their time hugging someone. Hundreds, if not thousands of hours of hugging people, Naruto, imagine the cozy memories hitting you all at once. It’d be like a bath of fluffy greatness.” She draws his attention towards the possible positives. “You’ll learn to read better and understand advanced concepts in an instant, any lingering depression will be cured in the time it takes to breathe.” She throws her hands up and pulls them away from each-other, imagining a rainbow spawning between them as she completes a crescent.
She continues with a bright smile and stars in her eyes. “Imagine a world where your warm moments are so omnipresent that trauma can’t exist, that’s the twins and their memories. More importantly, you won’t immediately pass out and die in combat because one of them tripped down the stairs while you were fighting.”
“I dunno, it just feels wrong. They have their own personalities they developed on their own from their different experiences and perceptions. Kakashi says I need to think about ethics, because you and Sasuke need to think about survival and I can hide behind a wall as long as I want. Isn’t this ethics? I should think.”
“Yeah, how about never listening to anything Kakashi says, ever. I feel like if you immediately recreate them; it’s like a nap. There’s nothing ethically concerning about a nap.” Sakura points out, scooping up some deliciously creamy noodles. It’s smooth, and seasoned with what tastes like a little bit of salty sweetness. “It’s three seconds in the abyss and then they’re right back to the colorful world around them and a mountain of hugs, pop the clones.”
Intellectually, she perfectly understands his concern. She’s being callous about something he cares about, but it’s important. While it bothers her that she’s being forced into the role of being the bad guy, her eyes are wide open, and her brother deserves her attention and care. She’ll pop the clones herself if she has to.
“Can you do it?” He asks her, as if reading her mind.
“Nope, I promised never to hit you outside of a spar, remember?” She lies directly to his face. He needs to be pushed, but she’ll cave if she has to and they both know that. He’s more important than some lesson she’s not even fully sure she’s right about.
“That’s not what you meant when you said that.” Naruto huffs, grabbing his sandwich and taking an angry bite. Anger is a lot better than the queasiness he had a moment ago, so this is a fine twist in her opinion.
“How would you know what I meant?” He’s right, of course, but there’s some things he needs to be able to do. “I’m going to go visit Tenten and get Hunger sharpened, please figure this out before I get back.” Her fork placed down on an empty plate, she leaves with a lot on her mind that she hopes he’ll deal with on his own. Inwardly, she knows the truth, she’s not great at lying to herself.
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Naruto still hasn’t left the deli or eaten his food when the twins and Business Naruto arrive. He had scheduled an outing with them to finish his lunch even before Sakura brought up the topic of popping them, because Sakura eats really fast, and he often spends half the meal alone. He chooses not to think about how his clones make better company than Sakura sometimes. Maybe the family should team up and teach her to chew her food better. Watching her eat is a bit like watching a snake open up and devour everything on the plate. “You have knowledge that I need.” Naruto waits just long enough for their food to arrive - he ordered ahead - before he begins. “I’m pretty sure there’s entire people you know that I’ve never met, it’s awkward to get greeted by complete strangers on the street. We need to talk about popping you already.”
“There are other worker clones.” Both blonde haired pigtail wearing girls point out at the same time. It’s a little creepy when they do that, but it’s him so he puts in active effort not to get weirded out. “If you need our information, you probably need to pop all of them too. You’re basically saying you want to commit a great purge. That’s not like you.”
Naruto rubs his chin. They’re right, of course, this is all Sakura. But Sakura’s right too, this needs to happen. “I can recreate you immediately.” He tries, feeling a little queasy at his own logic - well, Sakura’s logic. “It’ll be a nap at best. We nap all the time.”
“Give me an hour to get everyone together, after lunch.” Business Naruto says, reaching into his suit and touching something. It makes a click. “It should be done at all once, that way there’s no panic.”
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After a short visit home to ask her mother where Naruto is, Sakura finds herself deflecting stray kunai on her way to meet her brother. They flow across the street like a river of metal. Neither side is ever without ammunition because they’re provided fresh blades by their enemy as quickly as they throw them, creating an infinite cycle of sharp objects flying every which way and covering the land with a blanket of death.
The sight before her isn’t one she expected, but it feels oddly familiar to something out of a game. Naruto and a troop of his clones are taking cover behind metal boxes being delivered in real time by courier clones. The office of the cleaning company has boarded up windows with slots for throwing outwards cut into them, and a horde of clones inside the building are firing upon him. The dirt has been torn up by numerous jutsu that were clearly just preamble to the back and forth currently flying everywhere all at once. It looks like bombs went off, and the real Naruto is distinguishable by the chunks of grass and dirt in his hair. Most of his side probably died already, it’s a good thing he can replenish them in seconds.
“We will not be silenced!” Sakura hears an electric screech assault her ears, and her eyes draw towards one of the twins standing on top of the roof of the three story office building. The huggable blonde looks even smaller than normal up there, her normally miniature stature undermining her position greatly. She’s got a megaphone in one hand, and sunglasses over her eyes. A mop symbol replaces the leaf symbol that should be atop the headband being used to hold her bangs out of her eyes. Not a single part of her body except her face and hair is unprotected, metal plates and padded orange layers form a complete combat suit that protects her from stray attacks. Sakura’s Item Observation skill tells her that the armor is real, which brings up a tactical thought. What if they outfitted clones with real gear to extend their life? Could Naruto form an actual army and conquer?
Her thoughts are cut short when directly after the small girl shouts at them, a volley much bigger than the previous exchanges flows through the air from above her like arrows in a movie. Shuriken rain from the sky as a waterfall of death aimed directly at the original. “They’re really trying to kill you.” Sakura realizes with a shocked gasp. She decides to stop considering them Naruto the moment she sees it, she’ll kill them all. For this, not a single clone will escape her sword.
“Wind Blast!” Naruto shouts, holding up his hands towards the death barrage. Before she can blink, enough wind chakra is shooting off into the sky that Sakura is sure she’d pass out if she even attempted to repeat the technique. The spinning whirlwind of black metal is met with a hand-made tornado. Within seconds, shuriken are sent flying and the sound of windows shattering all around is muffled by the ferocious winds. The Twin manning the megaphone has to cross her armor plated arms over her face to protect her from the hostile wall that slams into her and knocks her into the air. It’s so thick and dense Sakura can’t tell if the girl is popped or just knocked back onto the roof, but the amount of power put into Naruto’s counterattack is enough to put most of the battles she’s seen into perspective. Naruto is a walking siege weapon, and she needs to start respecting that.
Sakura has to take a step back as the winds lash out at her for daring to be in the proximity of his attack. She can’t imagine how much force just smashed into that little girl. If that Twin isn’t popped, she has serious questions about Naruto’s technique that she’s not even sure she wants answered. She looks around as the chaos enters a lull of awe, both sides getting their bearings before deciding on their next tactical move. She finds most of the street is completely vacant. That makes sense given a warzone has come alive, if she wasn’t a part of it she’d probably duck for cover too.
They’re probably getting pulled into a disciplinary meeting after this. The laws don’t expressly prohibit having an all out war with yourself in the street, but she gets the feeling there’ll be a rule about that this time tomorrow.
“Naruto, what is this?” She steps in front of her brother and his portable cover with her sword drawn and a gleam of excitement in her bright red eyes. The flood of weaponry begins again before she can even finish her question, and a deep breath is all she has time for before her dexterity trait activates. With a flash of her blade so fast she can’t even begin to track her own movements, a thousand kunai are knocked out of the air in half a second, sparks create a second sun in the middle of the street, and the molten slag hitting the ground beneath her is enough to remove a lot of the ammunition from the stalemate on its own. The screech of metal would scare everyone into cover if they didn’t already run, and shockwaves send the clones and Naruto behind her back along with the cover. If the lawn didn’t look like bombs had gone off before, it does now. Her sturdy and rapid movements create the essence of a man-made volcano in the front yard. Naruto’s never seen this technique before, something she’s glad for because of the sheer effect she manages to have on him. Both sides stop stunned, watching her with baited breath as she creates a wind almost as strong as Naruto’s from the sheer force behind her conceptual movement. Sonic booms shoot down the street in both directions, shattering the windows previously spared by Naruto’s kunai tornado. She finds herself wincing at the sound as it invades her ears and deafens the world for a second.
Only in their surprise do they stop throwing the ninja tools, and she uses the lull in their attempts to kill each-other to point her sword at the roof. The black blade contrasts perfectly with the colorful and molten environment they’ve created together, and her movement draws the eye towards the point of her weapon. Specifically, their eyes move towards the little sister clone that crawls back up onto the edge of the roof. She, and of course they, watch as the girl slams her armored shoe down hard enough to knock a broken brick off of the roof to dirt below. Her shining blue eyes glare down at them defiantly, challenging Naruto and Sakura with a potent rage. A single fang is visible out of the top of her mouth, pressing into her lip.
“We have not yet begun to fight! Don’t you dare doubt our resolve, Sakura, you’ll have to cut our beating hearts out of our chest and devour them whole before even a single one of us loses the fire welling deep within!” Hearing that proclamation shouted through a megaphone into the entire business quarter has Sakura’s cheeks igniting faster than when Ino kissed her.
They’re in so much freaking trouble. “Business Naruto tricked me into allowing him to gather all his forces, and now we’re doing a siege.” Naruto explains with so much seriousness and dread to his tone, that Sakura has to hold in a furiously powerful full body twitch and conceptualize that this is her brother, and this only sounds stupid out of context. In reality, this is very serious and kind of awesome.
“Let’s go, they want to avoid losing people so if we charge they should fall back. The moment we take their territory advantage, they’ll become lemmings, ready to walk into traps and off cliffs.”
“I don’t think they’re gonna do that.” Naruto points out dryly, clearly missing her well thought out reference. It’s his loss. She just sharpened Hunger and made him all shiny, but he’s already covered in molten slag and hardened rocks. Luckily for her and by proxy Hunger, equipment damage counts as damage and her Constitution trait negates damage below a certain threshold, so a simple slash to the side allows the flowing magma to leave her and land in the dirt, discarded and quickly forgotten. Let the sands of time deal with the environment, she has a battle to win for her brother.
She knicks her hand with the bottom of it, and feels her sword roar to life with her blood. Glowing segments of the black blade roar to life, the sigils awake and alive at her command. “Charge!” She shouts, holding her glowing weapon higher towards the sky. She feels the force of a hundred stomping feet surround her and launch themselves towards the office, while she narrows her gaze towards her objective, one of the boarded up windows on the second floor. A kunai flies towards her face and she slashes it in half, before channeling her chakra into her legs. She grips Hunger with both hands and soars into the air, her launch bringing her to her target within a single second of leaving the ground. She doesn’t have time to think before she brings Hunger down with enough force to slice the boards and glass that impede her way in half. The wall caves inwards, bricks crumble, and her feet make purchase on the loudly shattering dusty fragments.
That’s before the energy she charged Hunger with shoots off and a flash of fire and scorching lifeforce flow out and away from her in a wave of destruction that charts a high score for senseless property damage. A wide gouge cuts its way into the ceiling and floor in front of her, and she sees a clone barely dodge out of the way, falling on its ass. She blinks at it in surprise, but also to get some dust out of her eyes. “Oh wow, these clones are durable!” She gasps out, just before Naruto lands on the now shattered window sill behind her.
“Could you not damage the building too much? I own it. I have to pay for it.” Naruto points out,
“Shoulda popped 'em before I got back.” She looks back with a wink as the clone darts off. With how much damage he and his clones did outside, she somehow doubts what little she can do here will even touch the repair bill that they’re going to be served with. Also like, they might get arrested.
That’s an actual possibility, Naruto might get to experience jail with her for a few days. That’ll be fun, maybe, sibling bonding; shared bondage edition! No, that sounds wrong for some reason.
“You’re letting him escape?” Naruto asks her, looking around at the destruction with pale features. Despite her words and thoughts on the matter, she’ll try not to do that again. She’ll throw some of her earnings from managing Haku into paying him back if they don’t end up in jail. If they do end up in jail the money’s his problem, he got her arrested.
“Like you did earlier?” She asks, “forget it, let’s go deeper. We don’t need to fight, we just need to find the three main targets and then we deal with the less important remnants later, they should come out of hiding once they realize it’s not that big of a deal.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.” Naruto points out dryly.
She shrugs, “your jutsu, you figure it out.” A moment later her black blade flows to life with her blood again, fire chakra enhancing the glow and wreathing it in potent lifeforce. Sakura trudges through the office like she’s not a menace. Surely destroying an office has to give someone out there stress relief, perhaps this is a good deed in disguise.
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“Please don’t-awww… That’s expensive.” Naruto groans as her sword flows through a locked door. She tears it in half, the rending sound of cheap metal assaults their ears a second before her foot kicks the now slashed door off its hinges, revealing she didn’t need to slash it at all. Chaotic red hair falls over her eyes, flowing in the wind of her own attack, and she walks into the room wreathed in her second weakest affinity, flame. “I have the key…”
Her stomp rings out as she enters, the metal door below her proof of her conquest. There’s a lot to note about this office room; there’s an expensive looking desk that’s reminiscent of the one she saw when she was in the halfway place between worlds. There’s a computer monitor on the desk that’s glowing dimly with a screensaver of a duck, and there’s pictures of clones all over the walls like they’re Business Naruto’s children and he’s proud of them.
More important than the grey carpet beneath her feet, the dust and metal fragments scattered and sent flying every which way, and the desk chair she sent tumbling onto its side when she kicked the door off; she spots the main three clones huddled behind the desk. They’re shaking in terror, which’d make her feel bad if they hadn’t just tried to execute her brother for real. Two sets of twintails poke up from behind the desk, as does Business Naruto’s dry cleaned suit. “I can offer money!” Business Naruto shouts at them.
“Stop being a baby, you’re going to come back to life in ten seconds.” Sakura says, hoisting her sword in the air while channeling fire chakra into it. She’s been practicing this trick so she should be able to limit damage to the room and not, you know, set the whole building on fire. The bloody sword is quickly coated in a haze of orange that brightens up the carpet below and causes a glare to surface on the pictures. She lets out a breath that steams from the sheer temperature difference swirling around in front of her.
She sees a familiar hand sign from the businessman. Naruto’s savvy alternative is no longer hiding and bargaining with her, something she prefers greatly. Within an instant, another suited and well groomed Naruto appears in front of her. “Go my minion!” The cleaning CEO shouts.
“Your clones can make clones?” Sakura shouts at Naruto. “Naruto, why didn’t you say that-” She doesn’t get to finish her statement as the new clone demonstrates a fundamental difference between Naruto’s semi-permanent clones and a new one.
Specifically, new clones lack an attachment to life. It flies at her on the balls of its feet, pulling out a kunai it coats in a windy whirlwind like it’s nothing to him. His clone’s clone has more chakra than her, life is unfair but she’s a step ahead of that. Genin Agility lets her accelerate to top speed in an instant, and stop that speed just as fast. Her instant sidestep around the attack looks elegant enough to be considered a part of a dance, but most dances don’t end with a glowing sword slashing out and bisecting something with a sense of malicious vengeance. The room is filled with smoke from its death before she takes her first step towards the desk.
Thud.
It’s a little wet, and it’s barely loud enough to overcome the crackling sound her sword makes in the small office, but she picks it out despite the sound of flowing dust crystals and crackling flame, because the sound is behind her.. A look down and to the side reveals something that makes her twitch. Naruto is unconscious. He’s laying face down in the carpet, drooling with comically dazed eyes and nothing around him to have caused his sudden state.
She looks up at the bewildered Business Naruto.
She looks down at her brother again.
She gazes at the twins, who look very confused, then back to Naruto again.
“Business Naruto.” She begins, coughing into her fist while actively trying to draw as much attention away from her flaming sword as she can. “Did that clone contain all your memories?”
“I think so?” The furrowed browed business man stares.
“... You mean to tell me you could have just created a clone and popped it, at any time?” Sakura’s sword loses its intensity entirely, and her blood - no longer needed as anything but a stain to commemorate the moment - splashes down into the carpet below. She palms her forehead with a loud smack, almost louder than Naruto dropping to the floor was.
“Let me cut you a deal.” She growls lowly through grit teeth, willfully ignoring the way the carpet burns up a little from the flame chakra dissipating into the air. Luckily nothing actually catches on fire, which would have been a problem. She should practice water jutsu a little more for situations like this. She sheathes her sword and kneels down, grabbing Naruto’s hands and turning him around. With a grumble under her breath, she drags him over the metal door she cut in half. “Pay for some of the damages I caused out of your cut - not Naruto’s, I know you have something weird going on there - and summon clones to pop for Naruto every few days, and we’ll pretend this didn’t happen.”
She watches the twins nod. “We can do that.” Business Naruto audibly agrees for the three of them.
“And please clean up, this place is a mess.” She slowly drags Naruto’s unconscious body out of the office, maintaining an awkward stare with them as she does, until she can pull him around a wall.
“My brother can’t be this stupid!” She tries to hold it in, but her scream shakes the building.
Business Naruto watches the computer monitor fall off his desk and smash into the carpet, shaking his head mournfully.
They’re in so much freaking trouble, and they only have themselves to blame!
Also like, Naruto’s going to have memories of the other side too so he’s probably going to be scared of her again. She’s not sure which she hates more, that they’re about to be apprehended by anbu and thrown in a cell for trashing an entire city street, the repair bill, or that Naruto’s not going to meet her eyes for weeks!
Comments
Mest450
He kind of needed it to happen.
Christopher Cummins
It's a mysteryyyyyyyyy~ Kinda yeah.
Dopplerdee
That ending was great, I thought about that solution right at the start and looks like it was right! Also are the semi permanent clones just... growing bodies?
