As I reached the stairs to the basement, I wondered if I'd finally have to use this thing. The Naruto manga had guns showing up randomly in ninja shops and Gato's hideout up to the end of the Wave arc.
There was that kid with air-spewing palms in the chunin preliminaries too, who had his arms described as gun barrels. And I think one of the past Mizukage had a technique he called the water finger gun? But the author later said firearms didn't actually exist, and even admitted conventional guns would be a mortal threat to even jonin.
I certainly hadn't seen or heard a whiff of firearms in this world all my life. Gunpowder existed, but other than fireworks and the occasional firecart used to launch them, it didn't see much use outside the odd ninja bomb.
Which made sense. In a world where superhumans could still be harmed by iron knives thrown by five year-old children, guns would have changed the shape of the battlefield every bit as much as they did in the old world.
I'll probably get kidnapped, I thought testily. If it's a ninja and I actually kill them, my life won't be my own even if I live, and the world order will crash and burn as soon as the secret to mass producing these things gets out.
Or maybe not. Either way, that was future me's problem.
Current me, it turned out, had a different problem entirely.
I stopped in the darkness half-way down the stairs and stared dumbly at the small window. The little window up on the opposite wall whose only purpose was to let in a bit of air.
And only when it was open. During the day, not at night.
The tiny window that had been locked on the inside. Had been.
Now it was open wide to make room for a dangling rope. A rope that one tiny hellion of village-wide infamy was just barely finished wriggling down.
Uzumaki Naruto, I though in dismay. What did I ever do to you?
The five year-old child landed with a thunk on the ground and froze at the noise. Just stayed there, half-crouched, his face stuck in a positively unsound cringe that I had far too much trouble not finding hilarious.
It was all I could do not to facepalm.
When nothing seemed to happen, the child straightened and looked around the place like he was looking for something. What could he possibly want with me? Hadn't he already done enough? Eventually, though, the kid realized that the little moonlight shining down on him through the window didn't let him see shit in the rest of the room, so he rifled through his bag and took out a flashlight.
That's one of mine, I realized as the kid turned it on and shone it over the room. Is that what Ren short-changed him on? I almost jumped when it passed over the stairs, but it missed me by a step and the kid stopped waving it like a madman when it alighted over my worktable.
Right where I'd put the broken pictures of my family to replace later.
No no no, I chanted mentally as the kid quietly cheered and beelined to the place, huffing and puffing as he wrestled the chair into place. Come on, kid, I already know better than to give you too much benefit of the doubt, don't do this, whatever you're planning can't be-
Naruto climbed up on my chair – cursing all the while, he was tiny and I was a very big man – and still had to stand on his feet to reach over the table. I couldn't see his face, but he stood there just staring at the pictures for a while, and the family snapshot that was there, the only one intact of the lot that I always had on my workbench.
Just when I was about to say something, Naruto reached into his bag and pulled out a little hammer. Then a bunch of thin little nails.
And a roll of clear scotch tape.
Then, very carefully, the kid gathered up the glass shards of Kenzo's picture frame and…
And began to tape them back together.
Oh…
For a while I just stayed there, staring at my home invader. I looked from him to my gun a few times.
I quietly went back upstairs and taped the gun back to the underside of my desk drawer. I briefly considered leaving it be.
Maybe pretend surprise in the morning. I was pretty good at pretending with kids, which was good because the idea that a bit of scotch tape could fix my shattered family picture frames was the sort of ridiculous idea only a five year-old could believe.
But fatherly responsibility won out in the end – my last workshop might have been child-proofed, but this one was decidedly not.
When I made it back downstairs, Naruto was pulling on his hair and angrily cussing at my worktable.
"Dammit you stupid tape, stop bunching!" He hissed 'quietly. ' "And you shut up!" He snapped at his frog wallet, what was that doing there? "I'll spill your stuffing when I'm done, but it won't help, you know! You can't fix hurt people with money, I know I can't fix it but I'm gonna try anyway, so there!"
Well damn, don't go hitting all my feelings at once, kid.
Finally unable to cope with the most pathetic sight I'd ever seen in my life, I walked over, cut a strip off the tape dispenser that Naruto hadn't recognized despite it being right next to him, told myself it had a lid so I should forgive him, and held it out for him to take.
"Thanks," the kid whispered, squinting and biting his lip as he carefully applied the tape in place of… nine failures that I could count.
Kid didn't lack determination, that's for sure.
"Yes!" Naruto 'quietly' cheered, pumping his fist. "I did it!"
"Good job. "
Naruto beamed up at me. It kind of pissed me off, nobody should be that adorable after inflicting me with the second biggest heartbreak of my life.