Mito woke in less than a second, grasping the blade she kept by her in case of intrusion in her bedchamber. Her breathing stayed perfectly even as she threw out her senses to try and find who had woken her, but the only sounds were the quiet hum of the night and her husband's sleepy grumblings.
She opened her eyes and frowned when a second search still found nothing - surely she hadn't become so paranoid that any noise would wake her? Her mind went to her youngest child, sleeping just the next room over, a small knot tying itself together in her stomach as she pushed herself quietly to her feet.
Ikuko had rolled off her futon in her sleep, arms clutched around her pillow as she drooled into it. Mito resisted the urge to smile at the sight, instead checking for any sign of an intruder after her progeny. Nothing. And with Juzaburo out on a mission right now, there should have been no one able to come this close without alerting both herself and her husband.
Perhaps she was losing her edge. The thought did nothing to settle her thoughts or her insides even as she forced herself to walk back to the main bedroom. Hashirama hadn't moved since she'd gotten up, but she could feel the shift in his chakra that told her he was awake as well.
"Our daughter is fine," she whispered to him. "And I can't find any foreign chakra."
"Come back to bed, then," Hashirama replied, one arm lazily gesturing her over. "Too early to be up."
"I don't know," Mito replied with a slight grin. "You could always use the extra time to work out your negotiations with the Hyuuga and Uchiha."
"Noooooo," The Hokage whined. "No more meetings… so much arguing…"
"Perhaps if you'd actually listened to me and passed on the hat, you wouldn't have to deal with that today."
"I tried, but Tobi laughed at me. To my face. And grabbed a mission scroll and left for a month."
"I know, dear, I was there."
And that was the sulk that always had her and her brother-in-law rolling their eyes. Really, for the most powerful man in the world, he was more a child than their actual children sometimes.
Any thought of comforting words was cut short when the next roil of her stomach was enough to make her hiss in unexpected pain. In a split second Hashirama was out of bed and at her side, resting his hand over hers while the other rested on her shoulder.
"Mito, what's wrong?"
"I don't…" She trailed off, feeling the slight tingle along the skin of her body that she hadn't felt in a long while. "...the kyuubi?"
She hadn't intended it as a question, but her mind simply couldn't understand why, after this long, the demon she'd sealed inside herself had suddenly found this much energy to fight against her with. It was clever, to be certain, but all of its other attempts had been weak at best, mostly noticeable in how her control was slightly sloppier and her muscles a bit tighter as her body resisted.
The last time it had been this spirited had been the week after she'd sealed it, now that she thought about it. She'd spent a lot of her time vomiting out her insides as her body adapted to the seal and the thing inside of it fighting to escape. It had taken her a lot of tweaking from the inside of her mental scape in order to finally trap the thing enough to allow her to sleep and eat properly, but it had been worth it to be able to ignore its growls and threats.
Eventually the beast had given up, realizing she was capable of completely tuning it out if she wanted to, and some days she even forgot it was still there, only ink and flesh between it and Konoha.
"Is the seal weakening?" Hashirama asked, already prepared to call upon his plants to subdue the kyuubi if it was necessary.
Mito shook her head, running chakra across the seal. "No, the seal is sturdy. The demon just surprised me - it's used all its energy up, I think-"
Something connected with her chakra, but the blistering heat of loathing and hatred was gone, replaced with something just as strong but more… Confused? Annoyed? Scared? It withdrew before she could react, and all at once her insides settled as if nothing at all had happened.
Something of her surprise must have shown on her face, because her husband's hand tightened on her own.
"It's stopped," She told him, slowly allowing her chakra to settle back to normal. "But I might actually have to check on it, if only to figure out how it gathered up that much strength without my noticing."
And to figure out why the kyuubi had been frightened, of all things. Demons didn't fear anything, as far as she knew.
Did they?
~0~0~0~0~0~
The thing about mindscapes was that they were, to most people, merely theoretical platforms on which they could focus to organize and clarify their thoughts. It was a trick most Uzushiogakure children were taught to help them with visualization and compartmentalization, both of which helped when they moved on to learning their village's ancient art.
To a jinchuuriki, it was a far more literal feature, born of the warped space-time contained on their own bodies and the mass of chakra within. It was, as far as Mito could determine, the meeting place between her soul and that of the demon, a place where she could visualize more clearly than ever the efforts of her sealing work.
As always her inner eyes opened on the seaside cavern she used to explore as a child, the opening to the beach behind her and the darkness of her inner mind further ahead. Mito strode forward into the shadows, able to see the winding paths and tunnels clearly even with no light present, focused on the path downwards she hadn't taken in years.
In almost no time at all she reached the border between the two minds in her body, the cool dark caves smoothing to cobblestone walls as red light glowed in the room beyond. It was much as it had been when she'd last left it - golden chains stretched from the walls to the mass of red chakra in the center of the spherical room, as if she had trapped the sun itself in her soul. A walkway led from the entryway to the center, close enough for her to reach out and pull the demon's chakra away if she ever needed to, though she's never had reason to before.
The fox was not much different, either, pinned as it was to the chakra absorbing ball in the center with more than a dozen spikes made of ink and determination. Certainly there was nothing about it to suggest what had given it so much energy, and yet…
One massive eye opened, lips peeling back into a snarl. "Uzumaki... I should have known it was you."
"Were you expecting someone else?" She replied wryly, fingers drawing the strings that attached to the chains. Nothing so much as twitched, so the chains weren't loosening…
The demon snorted, closing its eye again. "Hardly."
Mito frowned at the show of ignoring her, recalling how much the beast loved threatening her with all the ways it knew to tear a human apart. "Then what was your fit back there for? You clearly wanted my attention."
The kyuubi remained silent, ignoring her as she strode up to it along the walkway and spun the sphere so she could look at each spike. They were perhaps a bit looser than they had been before, but not so much as to explain where it'd gotten the energy from.
"I think I like you like this better," Mito mused out loud, curious as to what had caused this flip in personality of the demon. "The death threats were getting a bit stale."
"You're mortal," It replied easily. "Eventually you'll pass me on to some other Uzumaki brat and die, and they'll pass me on and die, and one day someone will make a mistake and I'll be free. There's no reason for me to waste breath on something so temporary and uninteresting."
Mito's reply died on her tongue as she wondered how it knew what she had only started thinking about vaguely. Age was starting to creep on her bones, but she still had decades to look forward to before she had to pass on the burden of containing the dangerous beast. She had to prepare the seals that would allow the transfer anyways, as it was something never done on this scale before, and one mistake would indeed allow the kyuubi to rampage freely.
"That's… fairly arrogant, don't you think?" She replied instead. "After all, the Uzumaki are the best sealers in the world - I doubt such a mistake would get past them."
"As arrogant as thinking humans can contain forces of nature forever?" It chuckled, a low laugh at some joke she didn't comprehend. "You have no comprehension of what I truly am."
"You're a mass of chakra born of the hate of humanity," She replied, recalling the lessons of old. "You tear down mountains and blast away lakes, you raze entire villages to the ground-"
"And yet you don't even know my name."
For the second time Mito stopped, trying to find an answer to that and failing. "You have a name?"
Its eye opened to focus on her, and for the first time in a long while she felt rather and remarkably ignorant.
Eventually it spoke again, closing its eye once it was finished making her feel stupid. "If a blond brat comes by and starts embarrassing your pathetic ninja forces, tell him the old man fucked up. He'll understand."
The hair on the back of her neck bristled. "Is that a threat?"
But the demon refused to reply, and eventually she had no choice but to leave with more questions than she'd entered with. Even with her husband's specially brewed tea in hand, she could do little but stare into her cup and wonder why, for just a moment, the demon had looked so disappointed in her.
~0~0~0~0~0~
Keeping herself busy that day wasn't too difficult - the first two hours were spent arguing Hashirama out of avoiding work by fretting over her as if the demon really had come close to escaping, followed by an hour getting Ikuko out of bed and to her genin team meeting.
Once everyone else was out of the house, she locked up and began her rounds of Konoha, starting with the small cluster of homes belonging to the families who had followed her from Uzushiogakure out of a sense of loyalty. From there she circled around to the other small families and clans, making certain village life and the organized ninja hierarchy wasn't chafing them to the point of being a threat to Konoha before continuing on.
She was, as always, just on time for the Hokage's meeting with the two largest clans, smoothing ruffled feathers and occasionally jabbing her husband when he was about to do something particularly foolish. Whatever amusement the two clan heads got from it was hidden well, and in the end everyone walked away satisfied if not necessarily happy.
"Sometimes I feel like getting these clans to get along is like throwing a bunch of cats into a hole and expecting them to play nicely with each other," Mito sighed as she escorted her husband to lunch, bringing him past several sweets makers to the Akimichi compound so that some housing disputes could be settled while they ate.
"Your village did it, right?" Hashirama replied with a large grin. "They just need to work together more to see how much better all this is for everyone."
"My village was made by refugees escaping the constant fighting," Mito reminding him dryly. "My family hardly wants to fight each other, and no one sane would attack our defenses. It's not the same thing at all."
"Then that just means I'll have to work harder to get people to settle down."
She sighed, wondering how her husband could be so brilliant and yet so stupid. And why she'd agreed to marry him at all.
After that business was settled, she sent her husband off to his work in the tower while she finished her loop at the training ground where her daughter was training, eying Ikuko's form to see where she needed work once she got home. She had just decided to swing by one of the sweets shops she'd passed up before when she felt the chakra beyond the edge of her senses.
Not because her skill had suddenly improved or because she'd decided to focus on that random approach to the village, but because it was enough chakra to match a demon and coming in at a rate that was fairly close to absurd. Her chakra flared in an alert to the ninja around her, and the genin were duly sent to start evacuating civilians if the incoming target proved hostile while everyone higher started preparing for a fight.
The first interceptions happened a mile outside the gates, and only slowed the chakra for perhaps eight seconds before it adjusted and started heading right for the gate. Mito arrived at the gate shortly before it did, a dozen jonin arrayed around her in defensive formation seven while she started preparing a seal to fritz out their control.
She was already swinging when the chakra came in for a landing in the clearing, only to be summarily bodied and thrown to the side. She pulled out her blade and regained her footing in time to see three of her jonin down, the stranger practically a blur as they danced around like the jonin were genin.
Mito felt something in her heart sink as the demon's dismissive words echoed in the back of her head. There was no way it could have planned for this, could it?
The stranger paused in their assault once the last jonin was down, his orange and black bodysuit looking more damaged than the one sided fight could account for. He lifted a hand to his headband, adjusting it in such a way that she could briefly see the symbol of the Leaf carved into the worn and battered plate before the sun's glare hid it again.
The boy, she noted blearily, was blond.
"Hey, hey, are you actually gonna listen to me or what?" the boy asked, huffing as he crossed his arms and stared her down. "I told the other guys I wasn't an enemy, but they didn't wanna listen and I don't have time to waste right now convincing everyone I'm a good guy again."
"You failed to announce your arrival and came in on an attack vector."
"Well yeah, what was I supposed to do, get the drop on some random dudes on a mission and tell them to give you a letter?" The boy scratched at the side of his neck, not phased in the least by the other ninja coming in to surround them. "Besides, I'll be gone as soon as I find my friend. He wasn't where I was supposed to find him and I figured here was the next most likely place, so…"
As if her day couldn't be any stranger. She considered her likelihood of getting in a surprise attack on this boy, looked to her downed jonin, back to the absurd amount of chakra her opponent had, and came to a decision.
"I was told to let you know that the old man fucked up."
At her words his entire posture changed, embarrassment and annoyance melting away as he focused entirely on her. In this instant she could see someone possibly capable of matching her husband, and barely kept herself from showing her nerves.
"Seriously? I mean, I figured as much, but if he said that, then that means plan A is out the window." The boy ruffled his hair and groaned, kicking at the ground. "Hey, is there any way I can talk to my friend? I sorta still need to coordinate with him on how to deal with stuff."
"We'll consider it if you cooperate quietly," she replied, waving off the reinforcements as she kept her eyes locked on the boy.
"You got it, granny," he agreed loudly.
Mito decided in that instant that she was not dealing with this mess without her husband's tea blend to sustain her.
~0~0~0~0~0~
Mito glared into her teacup as if it was its fault for what she was dealing with now.
She wasn't entirely unjustified in that thought either, as if she'd had a vice for sake like her husband, she wouldn't have had the terrible, terrible idea of dragging the blond menace to the Hokage's office to demand refreshments and a private place to talk, and thus the two man-children would not have had a chance to start building on each other's insanities.
"I know, right?" The blond agreed fervently with her husband's complaint on getting the clans to cooperate. "I had to fight this one Hyuuga guy who had the biggest stick up his ass because of his issues with his clan, and blamed everything on fate so he didn't actually have to change anything."
"I think most of them have trouble with their own clan." Hashirama noted. "The only reason I haven't stepped in yet is because part of the founding agreement was that clans wouldn't be able to interfere with each other's internal politics so long as they didn't risk Konoha's safety."
Mito tried to remember how they'd gotten off topic so quickly and failed. Maybe they'd never been on topic at all.
"That sucks, especially when you know that all it'd take is punching the stupid people in the face until they realize they're being stupid and fix themselves."
It wasn't too late to learn to like the taste of sake, was it? There had to be a stash somewhere in here that she hadn't discretely removed before her husband noticed.
"Does that work?"
And dammit all, the Hokage should not look intrigued in a solution that would more than likely instigate a full out brawl in the streets before it solved anything!
"You better believe it!"
She slammed her cup down on the desk, avoiding cracking it in pieces though careful chakra control. "Neither of you are starting a brawl with the Hyuuga clan, or any of the other clans for that matter."
"Mito-" Hashirama winced at her glare.
"No brawls. No diversions." She threw back the last of her tea and resumed glaring both children down. "We are discussing what this rogue ninja is doing here and what we're doing about him."
"Yes dear," the hokage mumbled, huddling in his seat and looking anywhere but at her.
"Ya don't have to be so rude, granny," Naruto grumbled. "I told you I was here looking for my friend."
Mito refused to give anything away, not wanting to guess his reaction if he knew where his 'friend' was right now. "And why, exactly, should I trust you to be who you say you are? Perhaps you're someone using a cover to get close enough to assassinate your target."
"Seriously? I mean, I didn't even plan on coming here at first, what'd be the point of making up a reason to be here?"
Mito could think of several dozen off the top of her head. "Describe this friend of yours, then, and maybe I'll believe you."
"Eh? Sure," the blond rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "He's grumpy, likes complaining a lot when he's not napping, and has a wicked sense of humor. He's also probably my only buddy who isn't a perv of some kind, but I think that 'cause he finds that stuff stupid more than anything."
That… didn't sound anything like she's associate with the demon. Was he really that terrible an infiltrator?
"And does this friend have a name?" She asked carefully, almost relaxing as she thought of the best way to lead the boy on until she could seal and properly detain him. "I know most of my husband's forces by name, so I could direct you to them once you've been cleared."
"Oh, his name's Kurama."
She frowned. "You mean of the Kurama clan?"
Considering there were almost a hundred of them in the village, it might even be a slightly less terrible excuse while she tried to figure out which one he could be pretending to refer to. Or maybe he had a Kurama agent willing to work for him, though that'd be obvious once that person showed their hand.
"Nah, he says those guys ripped off his name a couple centuries ago, something about superstitious nonsense and a misunderstanding, I stopped paying attention a couple minutes into his rant."
"A few… centuries ago?" And suddenly the sinking feeling was back.
"Yeah? That's what he said, anyways."
Mito's lips pressed together thinly, nothing betraying her desire to shake the boy until he confirmed or denied her worries without outright asking. The idea of a human living several centuries wasn't impossible - her clan regularly managed to reach nearly two hundred if they didn't go down in battle, and some of the oldest records suggested people who lived even longer than that.
However, if there had ever been an Uzumaki Kurama, she would have known it, especially if they were several centuries old and living in the same village as her. If nothing else, such a massive life force should have had him stand out against the shorter lived people around himself.
"I will go and see if… Kurama confirms your identity. In the meantime, my husband can make certain you are kept safe until the jonin you… fought with will not attempt to get even."
Translated: Hashirama you better keep a very close eye on this kid personally until I gather enough information to resolve this situation, and if I find out you slacked there will be trouble.
To his credit, her husband managed to hide his wince at her hidden threat and agree to her decision. And if the blond complained on how he didn't need the protection, well, she wasn't going to be the one to deal with it this time.
She had something much more important to check first.
~0~0~0~0~0~
Visiting the seal twice in the course of a day was not something she'd ever expected to have to do barring a dire emergency, and right now she was uncertain if this actually counted as such. The blond did not seem to be a threat to the safety of the village, but she could still remember the weight of his chakra, a brilliant well that nearly matched her husband's reserves.
For a long while she simply stood in the doorway, staring at the demon pinned to the sphere, wondering if she was looking too much into coincidences. So much had shaken up her peaceful routine of the past few years that it might not even be her fault for jumping for conclusions so quickly, and yet she couldn't forget how disappointed the demon had been on not even wondering if it had a name.
Or was it he? She suddenly recalled that Naruto had clearly referred to his friend as male, describing his attitudes with a casual fondness that came from a long companionship. It made it harder to reconcile the information with the demon she knew, who cared only for blood and carnage and threats and was anything but human.
If nothing else, she had to get information from the kyuubi, if only to stop a few of the questions bouncing around her mind. Though whether that would work with this new, quiet being who hardly seemed to care she'd been staring at it- him?- for the past twenty minutes was hard for her to say.
"Who, exactly, is the old man you referred to?"
She thought she saw an eyelid twitch, but she couldn't tell if it had opened to glance at her or not. The demon did not reply in any other way, deepening her frown.
"You know, if you cooperate, I might consider loosening some of your bindings. I have a few other configurations for the seal in mind that would be more comfortable for you."
Still nothing. The demon even had the gall to look peacefully asleep despite the fact that it shouldn't have needed or wanted to pretend at it. Mito wondered if it'd stop if she pulled on some of its chakra, only to shove the idea away, because there was no way to be sure its chakra wouldn't just amplify her irritation further.
"I won't leave until you give me something, even if I have to drag it out of you," she told it instead, hoping deep down that maybe she could find where the spark of fear had been once, or any sort of reaction she could work with really.
Silence. She wondered how her husband was doing, dealing with that blond stranger. Were they talking about clans troubles again even now? Should she have put this off until she was certain her husband wasn't going to do something incredibly short-sighted?
She counted another hundred deep, even breaths from the demon before she sighed and conceded the first battle.
"Is your name Kurama?"
The breathing stopped. Its eyes didn't open, but she knew that she had its attention at last.
"There's a clan with that name," she continued, watching closely for any further twitches, especially if this was something that could rile the kyuubi up. "Rather good with illusions, compared to most. It's rumored that their secret techniques can even fool the Sharingan and Byakugan, though of course that could be a bluff. After all, if they did possess such a technique, it would hardly be tolerated long enough for them to establish themselves as a clan."
"Naruto brought that up, did he?" It finally asked with bared teeth, one eye sliding open to stare at her. "I assume you didn't bother to tell him where I was."
"And why would you assume that?" She asked, keeping her despair from showing at the blatant confirmation of her concerns.
"Because he would be here right now," the demon replied, and with a start she realized that it was laughing at her. "Even if you tried to keep him out, he'd argue at you until you gave in, and as that hasn't happened, you couldn't have told him anything other than the fact that I am somewhere nearby."
Damnit, she didn't like the kyuubi being this insightful. "So what? He's an unknown who already knows far too much of what should be top secret and has no reason to keep it to himself. Giving him access to you would only guarantee disaster."
"Naturally. I assume you learned from when you gave away the others as prizes to the other villages, then?"
Mito failed to bite back the snarl of frustration in time. "That was a completely different situation, meant to keep the balance of power between the villages-"
"You mean prevent the other villages from uniting against you in fear of your capabilities."
Mito didn't reply, which was all the confirmation the demon seemed to need.
"Don't bother coming back without Naruto," the demon dismissed her, closing its eye again. "This back and forth is annoying."
Despite not being able to move, the demon made it seem as though it were making itself comfortable, breathing evening out again even as she stared it down incredulously. The sudden, vicious thought of dragging it until it told her how it knew so much took her a minute to shove down, and as she turned to leave she couldn't keep herself from feeling like she was no longer in control of anything in her life.
AN: So I had an idea a little while back on Spacebattles. People liked it, so it became a thing.
Updates weekly on Saturday.
