Parrotboy

A Naruto commemorative of my very first fic

By

EvilFuzzy9

It was dawn. The sun had yet to peer over the horizon in the Hidden Leaf, and all was silent within the Uchiha compound. It was still very dim out, so dark you couldn't see your nose in front of your face. No sane man would be up this early. Even the night watchmen were sound asleep at their posts, dreaming optimistically of assignments less tedious and menial.

It was dawn. Even in the ninja village of Konoha, almost everyone still slept soundly in their beds, save the bare minimum of personnel coming and going in the administrative center of the village, and a few workaholics who practiced their arts all through the night in the training grounds.

But these places were far away from where our story is focused, and thus utterly irrelevant to the narrative. So let us simply say that it was dawn, and no sane man (or woman) would be up at this hour.

Unfortunately, for the mental health of a certain rising star in the ANBU Black Ops, five year old Sasuke Uchiha could be hardly be called sane within any reasonable standard of deviation.

"Itachi...! Wake up!" whined said adorkable twerp, back when he was still actually kinda cute and friendly, and not at all any kind of cold or brooding loner. He was in his older sibling's room, trying to rouse the young teen in question. "Wake up, big bro! I wanna play with you! You said you'd help me practice my shurikens today!"

Itachi stayed perfectly still and silent in his futon, perhaps desperately hoping that if he did this, his little brother would get bored, or tired, and go somewhere else. Not that he didn't love the little guy, but Sasuke could be a real handful in the morning, and Itachi had been up doing some dreadfully draining nighttime training with his squad until just a few hours ago.

So he wasn't in the mood – or, honestly, the shape – to play with his baby brother. Not at the crack of dawn, at least.

But Sasuke would not be so easily deterred.

"I-ta-chiiiii!" he whined. "Get uuuup! I wanna play!" He grabbed his brother's arm, and tried to drag Itachi out of bed. "You promised!" he said.

Itachi groaned, sounding rather like a zombie. "Mrrruughrlen..." Drowsily, he yanked his arm out of his little brother's grasp. "Ngugh..." he moaned grumpily. "...leggo, 'toto... M'tired."

Sasuke pouted at this, eyes getting watery. "But... you... promised!" he whined, sounding sincerely betrayed by this in that peculiarly innocent yet maddening way that only the earnest sociopathy of a young child could produce.

He tried to get Itachi to roll over and face him.

"C'mon...!" he pleaded futilely. "Pleeeaaaase?"

The young ANBU and future nuke-nin stonewalled Sasuke with the practiced ease of an older brother.

Sasuke, scowling, climbed atop Itachi's futon.

"Anikiiii...! Pleeeeaaaaase...!" he whined, straddling his big brother's chest. His lower lip was quivering, and tears were starting to pour down his chubby, little-kid cheeks. He was starting to cry.

Itachi tried not to sob.

"Uuuhhh..." he moaned blearily. "Sasuke... lemme sleep. M'tired... 'll play with you later."

Sasuke pouted.

"Fine," he said childishly, trying to act like he didn't care.

...although the tear tracks, puffy red eyes, and runny nose kind of gave it away. But Sasuke still turned and left.

"We'll play later," he said. "Right, Itachi...?"

The elder Uchiha son simply snored.

Little Sasuke was very drowsy as he fiddled with the bunny ears on the TV in the living room. While their father disliked the modern invention, decrying the device as a brain-rotting boob tube, their mom had insisted on putting one in, citing the general predominance of educational documentaries and local news reports over any kind of trivial or non-beneficial programming.

There were really only three channels that could be received in Konoha, anyways, and they were all state-run. The first was largely news and political propaganda, with some economics and business. The second was very bread and circuses, with a sparse collection of bland and inoffensive sitcoms and historical dramas imported from the capital, as well as a couple of locally-produced, midday soap operas.

The third channel, which Sasuke was trying to get now, was primarily educational programming on various subjects. Officially, it was intended as a means of edifying the average man so that he could make more informed decisions and ultimately (through an ill-explained hypothetical series of stages) result in a better quality of life for everyone in Konoha. In reality, though, pretty much the only objectively useful programming was the stuff on ninja history and basic ninja training, sponsored by some crusty old ex-ninja who used to work with the Hokage.

According to Itachi, those shows were intended as a tool for Academy dropouts who still wished to be members of the Civilian Infantry Reserve Corps. He'd muttered something about groceries and big shields, Sasuke recalled, but all he knew was that the installments on elemental chakra theory were totally gonna help him with learning awesome fireball jutsu!

(Itachi's actual words had been "mass-produced meat shields," but that was neither here nor there)

Unfortunately for Sasuke's plan, however there were two problems with his current plan. One, was that television and radio reception in the Uchiha district was famously awful because of a combination of archaic village zoning laws and unfortunate geography that put the Uchiha compound on one side of a relatively innocuous hill that happened to be located just between this residential sector and the entertainment district, where most of the radio towers were located. And because of some outdated law that prohibited the construction of buildings taller than the Hokage Tower, these radio towers which broadcast to the village were not quite tall enough to send their signals clearly over that hill.

Even channel three, the tower of which was located just beyond the low, steeply sloping eastern shoulder of the hill, was still only readily available at decent quality to a third of the Uchiha district. For half of the compound, the reception on the channel was seriously spotty in bad weather, and still quite mediocre even under the best conditions. The remaining sixth of the compound couldn't get any reception for that channel, or most others, period.

The house of the clan head happened to be located roughly between the one third and one half zones. While this put it more or less squarely in the heart of the compound, at the point of highest symbolic importance and strategic defensibility, it also rendered most kinds of radio reception very unpredictable. Mild atmospheric variances could cause the quality of incoming radio signals to vary wildly between "great" and "bloody awful".

And this morning, much to Sasuke's chagrin, the signal was in the "cruddy" end of the spectrum. So he was forced to mess around with the bunny ears on the television to try and form the senseless white noise and static coming from the TV into something more comprehensible.

Eventually, after much finagling, he did manage to get something resembling a halfway decent signal. But unfortunately that was when the second spanner in the works of Sasuke's "Become an awesome ninja!" plan made itself known.

Namely, that the program he was looking to watch didn't actually air at this time of the morning. It usually ran the same episode several times over the course of the day, in time slots strategically chosen for the specific purpose of maximizing exposure across demographics and schedules, but this particular time slot was a "free" one that would just be filled with some random documentary or educational program.

In this case, it appeared to be a special on exotic birds.

"—the cockatiel, or Nymphicus h—icus is a member of the co—too family endemic to—"

The announcer's speech was coming in pretty distorted, parts of it lost in static as the signal swung erratically between good and poor. The image was also hard to make out. It was flickering a lot, and Sasuke spent a few more seconds trying to adjust the antennae to a better configuration.

After a moment more of futzing with the rabbit ears, Sasuke was finally able to make out the image on the screen. He saw a small bird with a body and wings of gray and white. Its tail was black and long, and it had a small, hooked beak. Its face was yellow, and it had dark orange cheeks. Most striking to young, impressionable Sasuke, however, was the crest of feathers. It was held down flat along the top of the skull, but stuck out distinctively at the back.

"—The male cockatiel is believed to use its distinctive crest to communicate its—state and attract the attention of—cockatiels in order to—"

The signal petered out again, and static quickly intruded on the program once more, but Sasuke didn't notice.

Attract attention. Those birds used their "hair" to attract the attention of other birds.

Sasuke thought of the hawk summoning contract his dad kept in storage. The Uchiha had a lot in common with birds and the like, didn't they? ...well, that, and small mammals, but Sasuke didn't really wanna be associated with weasels.

Not that there was anything wrong with that.

But if that crest thing worked for those cocky-twos, then maybe it would work for Sasuke. Then people would HAVE to pay attention to him! And maybe then he could get Itachi to play with him, and their dad to notice him...

It was foolproof!

Heading to the bathroom, Sasuke decided to put it to work right away. And after liberally applying a bottle of hair gel to his skull, he went to pester his brother to spend some time with him.

And this would result in a chain of events, from Itachi becoming more distant due to sleep deprivation, Mikoto getting fed up with the terrible TV reception in the Uchiha district and convincing her husband to lead a coup against the current regime so they could rewrite those accursed zoning laws, and a drowsy Itachi with his critical thinking skills dulled by a lack of sleep agreeing to a mission to wipe out his clan, and – perhaps most heinously of all – caused the girls in Sasuke's class to start taking notice of him, resulting in a fan club that would harry Sasuke for as long as he was in Konoha, tainting his memories of the place when he left, and making him more open to the idea of wiping the village out, several years later...

All because Itachi wouldn't play with his baby brother.

A/N: I've noticed, for a bit now, that I am very close to having posted one hundred fics on this site. Most of them might seem pretty bad to me, now, but everyone has to start somewhere. And, for a few years, I've kicked back and forth the idea of doing special rewrites of certain fics for a special milestone – particularly, of my VERY FIRST fanfic, Parrotboy the tale of How Sasuke got his hairstyl [sic].

I'm also planning on doing a rewrite of my first series/complete multi-chapter story, Another Day + Another Saturday, and a rewrite of my very first lemon, Operation Fatal Harem. These three will put me at one hundred fics posted to this sight (discounting that one truly awful dark!Sokka fic that I generally pretend never existed).

And for my 101th(...st? ...rd?) fic, I am planning something so ambitious that I'm really not sure whether I will actually complete it. But let's just it say will be something encompassing a full fifth of the fics I've written here, if I actually pull it off, just to show how far I've come.

To myself, if no one else.

Chapter added: 12-15-13

TTFN and R&R!

– — ❤

P.S.: Yes, I am perfectly aware that Sasuke's hair is canonically just bedhead. But Canon has never gotten in the way of bad fanfiction before!

...plus, the original was written way back in the Summer of '06. Those were some seriously wild and crazy times.