Trash Compactor

A Naruto drabble

By

EvilFuzzy9

A/N: It's been a couple months since I updated this, so I figured I'd do that.

In a small shack in the middle of nowhere in the Land of Rain, a trio of figures were gathered around a low, traditional table, seated on mats as they polished off a small meal of grilled fish and rice.

One, a young woman with short blue hair decorated with a single origami flower, was delicately nibbling on a piece of the fish. Another, a young man with spiky orange hair and a bright smile, was stuffing his face with a bowl of rice. The last one, another young man with longish bright red hair, pale skin, and gray, ripple-patterned eyes, was seated in the seiza position and waiting for his two friends to finish.

Little remained of the fish except bone fragments and a few inedible bits of offal. The trio had been taught by their sensei not to waste anything from their kills, and they took those lessons to heart, even going so far as to crack open the fish bones to get at the rich, nutritious marrow. As orphans in the poverty stricken Land of Rain, even with their ninja training the three could never be sure from where their next meal might come.

So they made the most of every kill, cooking and eating even parts that most people would never even touch. Fruits and nuts and bark were okay when they could be foraged, and they did occasionally use their shinobi training to steal supplies, but to keep up their strength, meat was nearly ideal. Thus, they hunted and fished as often as they could without too badly depleting whatever local wildlife lived in the area.

Still, there were parts of the animals that they simply could not eat – things like poisonous organs and indigestible bone fragments – and thus had to throw away. They didn't exactly get trash pick-up either, out there in the boonies of Rain, so they had to make do with getting rid of it in whatever ways they could come up with.

"Hey, Nagato," said the orange-haired one as he finally set down his now-empty bowl, "it's your turn to take care of the garbage."

The pale, ripple-eyed young man frowned slightly. "I thought it was Konan's turn."

Konan, the blue-haired woman, shook her head.

"No," she said, "Yahiko did it last time, and I did it the time before that. You're next in the rotation, Nagato."

"Oh, yeah..." said the redhead. "You're right. It is my turn, isn't it..."

He smiled weakly. "Well, I guess I'd better take care of it before it gets dark out," he concluded softly. Turning to Yahiko, he said, "We're still using the pit near that one bent tree, right?"

Yahiko nodded. "Yeah, we are," he said, answering in the affirmative. "It's getting a little full, though..." he added casually.

Nagato sweatdropped as he looked up at a mound of waste and garbage that towered over him.

"Only a little full...?" he muttered disbelievingly, shaking his head as he looked down at the nearly unnoticeable edge of the hole in the ground they had been using as a trash pit. Garbage was piled up several feet above the ground, bone shards and wrappers and rancid, rotted hunks of flesh spilling out at the base of the ludicrously massive pile.

Nagato couldn't help but wonder how so much garbage could have piled up in the two weeks since he'd been out here, but he was getting a suspicion that he and his friends weren't the only ones disposing of their trash here. Still, though... this was ridiculous, and a considerable security risk besides. He had to pack the garbage down and bury it, or else anyone with eyes or functioning nose could easily find the pit.

Sighing longsufferingly, Nagato held out his hands in front of him, fingers splayed and palms outward. Rin'negan eyes gleamed with an inner light, and the air around Nagato seemed to shimmer as chakra, invisible to the naked eye, surged forth from his body.

Focusing his energy, Nagato felt his muscles tense up as he focused the power of his dōjutsu, harnessing the power of tendō, the Deva Path.

"Shinra Tensei!" he cried, his deep voice resonating in the air as he pushed down with his chakra. An invisible force, like gravity or magnetism, pressed the garbage down into the pit, the ground nearly buckling as the trash spilled back into the hole, before the dirt compacted and closed over the pit.

In an instant, all that remained of the trash pit was a shallow, almost unnoticeable depression in the ground where the earth had been compacted by the force of Nagato's Almighty Push.

His business there finished, Nagato departed, forgetting all about the sack of refuse that he had brought out there to dump in the first place.

Previous chapter uploaded 05-07-12

This chapter uploaded

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