Again shall I be born
by Sarah Koh / Ouvalyrin
Summary: Nathan, Sanada, and the demon fox in Nathan's head. It's hard to let go. Reincarnation!AU.
Rating: PG13
Author's Notes: This is a story I've had on my computer for a while that I've been dying to finish. The original ending was going to be really unhappy and fairly twisted, but Nathan and Sanada proved to be more stubborn than I really expected. (What did I expect, they're Naruto and Sasuke; of course they're stubborn.) There is a second part from Sanada/Sasuke's POV, but it's not complete and I'm not sure when it will be. Details about the foster care system are pretty much incorrect, because, well, I kind of needed Naruto and Sasuke to end up in the same place and the chances of that happening in real life are pretty much 10000000:1. There are brief cameos by other Naruto characters; they really aren't that subtle. Anyway, enjoy!
Nathan doesn't believe in reincarnation.
This is pretty much the definition of irony.
His earliest memory is of sitting in the sandbox, sun warm on the back of his neck, talking to-
Even now, he isn't sure. He just knows that the voice belongs to something old and strong and unhappy and that he is young and weak and afraid. He thinks the voice would like to hurt him, but when he cuts his hand the jagged edge of the sandbox, he can feel heat hissing through him and watches as the scratch closes up.
"Kyuubi-sama?" he whispers the first time. He doesn't know what the words mean, but the voice told him to call it that, and Nathan thinks that everything should have a name.
There is no response. Nathan squashes the disappointment, reminding himself of the fear that tightens around his throat every time he hears the voice, and starts sculpting a spiral in the sand.
The older Nathan gets, the more it talks to him. When he's eight he starts seeing strangely shaped shadows in the corner, strange colors around people. His third grade teacher is a woman with green eyes and red hair, and everyone teases him for having a crush on her. All he wants is to see her happy.
The voice never speaks when Nathan is near her, but Nathan can hear something breathing, soft and heavy. He always wants to sit down and scream and hit things when Kyuubi-sama feels like that, and he's not sure if the desire comes from Kyuubi-sama or him. When he moves up to the fourth grade he hurts all over, and the voice says, "we've lost her."
Nathan has a birthmark on his stomach, a patch of discolored skin that looks more like a tattoo. Sometimes Nathan wants to claw it off his stomach, but the desire makes no sense and he always feels so, so tired.
(In kindergarten Nathan wore a fox mask to show and tell. The teacher thought it was a harmless, silly looking face, but when it slipped over Nathan's beaming face it leered, eyes yellow and tongue red, and she could not bring herself to look at Nathan for a week.)
By the time Nathan is twelve, Kyuubi-sama is rarely quiet, and everyone's a little afraid of him.
But that's okay, because by that time, Nathan's met Sanada.
Back up—reverse. Rewind and replay.
Nathan's parents die when he's four, some disease he doesn't know the name of and can't pronounce anyway. He keeps the memories of them tucked away like an old photograph. He used to think about them a lot, lying in his bed and staring at the ceiling as he bounced from foster home to foster home, all these people who were meant to be substitutes. He remembers wanting to connect and holding himself back, afraid in some way of replacing the people who meant the most to him.
By the time he's ten it's pretty clear that no one's going to adopt him permanently. He's a good kid, all the families say, but—there's just something about him...well, they're sorry anyway, but better luck next time. When there's another kid staying, things don't go too well either; the last kid called him crazy for talking to Kyuubi-sama, and Nathan found himself wanting to punch his face in.
When he's twelve he's shuttled off to a home with a blank-faced woman and a blank-faced man. There're two other kids and Nathan prepares himself for the fighting and name-calling, and he isn't looking forward to it precisely, but he knows how it works.
Except-
"Figures he's an orphan here too," Kyuubi-sama says, laughing, and Nathan—only he thinks of himself differently in that moment, another, truer name on his lips—wants to do the same.
"Hi," he says, jumping to his feet as the new kid slinks into the room, bag over his shoulder, eyes downcast. "I'm Nathan."
The new kid throws him a deeply unimpressed look. He's not the same age, a few years younger maybe, and he has a scar slashed across one cheek and cuts all over his arms, and Nathan wants to lock the door and never let him out.
"Mine," whispers Kyuubi-sama, voice so strange, so adult. So old, so longing, so strong, as if the world bends to its desires. Nathan agrees with it for a wild moment, world tilting, spinning dizzily. Everything moving but him and the pale-skinned, dark-haired boy who Nathan half-believes he dreamed into life.
"Sanada," the new kid says, and that's not right either but it's close enough. "Don't call me Sandy."
"Why would I?" Nathan asks and that's enough to get Sanada's shoulders to relax.
Sanada doesn't know who he is, but Nathan isn't really surprised, though it hurts more than he wants to admit. In any case, he can redo it all—and the thought makes him weary before he summons up strength—and he won't have to be so alone.
Just after Nathan's parents die and Nathan is sitting in a strange room with his arms wrapped around his legs and chin resting on his knees like he'll never move again, when all he can think are flashes of her warm arms and his strong ones, when he has just passed the hope that this is all a dream, Kyuubi-sama tells him a story.
It's about a fox, Kyuubi-sama says, but not as you know them, boy. This fox lived for a thousand years and more, and every year it grew stronger and wiser and wilder, and every thousand years it gained another tail, until there was no beast it could not force to submit beneath its bite. Until it lost its flesh and became a creature of fire.
And it was strange, Kyuubi-sama continues, because the fox was clever and wild and strong but so stupid, so lost. The king of the bijuu, it sneers, didn't know how lost it was. Nathan doesn't know what that word means, but he doesn't ask.
One day it attacked a village filled with humans, and it nearly destroyed that village. The fox didn't know how lucky it was to lose until much later, Kyuubi-sama whispers, and Nathan feels the sensation of tails wrapping around his small body, of a muzzle resting on his shoulder and a hot crackling voice in his ear.
It was pushed into the body of a newborn, Kyuubi-sama says. Shoved and compressed and cut down until it fit, locked into a cage in the newborn's soul. And it was so strange, Kyuubi-sama says, because the fox had lived all its life in dark places and now—it was so bright, that newborn's soul. Every moment lit up until the fox's eyes hurt and his own flames were a small, weak thing.
It had never seen the sky as the newborn saw it, and it did not like how everything around it changed as the newborn grew into a child and into an adult. It did not like feeling small, feeling so helpless, and yet-
Everything felt so different in the human's soul, as if the fox had never smelled grass or rain or seen how blue the sky could be. As if the fox had found a light in the dark places. And there were shapes in the bright places, in the human's life, and the fox understood what the human felt, but with the desire to own and possess came the need to protect, and the fox floundered. It could have hated the shapes, the other flickerbright humans with their infantile rages and hurts, but it found itself thrown into the web of their lives, and there was something fascinating about the way they moved and breathed and lived, unaware of their own frailty. Conscious only on a skin-deep level. Everything so new through the human's eyes, so precious and so shining. The fox was almost grateful.
But the human would not live forever and when the human died, the fox would be sent back into the dark places. The fox was so old, boy, Kyuubi-sama says, and the human so young. The human's lifespan was like a flicker, and when it faded all the fox would have were the memories of the bright places.
The human died, Kyuubi-sama says, and Nathan feels something punch into his chest and rip out his heart. He gasps, almost screams because the pain is snarling its way through his body and the heat of the demon cannot match it. But it vanishes in seconds and Nathan is left panting, shuddering.
But the soul, the place where the fox was imprisoned, Kyuubi-sama says, the soul lived and was reborn.
Nathan is too young to understand, but he recognizes that Kyuubi-sama is offering some strange form of comfort, being kind in the only way it knows how. Imaginary fox tongue, fire scorching his back—but there has never been a flame hot enough to burn him.
He doesn't realize until years later what Kyuubi-sama is telling him, until it's too late to hate the part of him that was forced on him in another life.
Nathan hovers around Sanada, who doesn't seem to care enough to notice but also doesn't reject, which Nathan knows is an acceptance in itself. Sanada is younger and smaller and skinny despite the baby fat, and that means the other kids want to push him around and shove him to the ground, and they do that until Nathan tackles them and hits until something breaks.
Sanada's eyes, so wide the first time he does that. Afraid in some way. A reminder that Sanada is not the same as he is in those old memories that Nathan can barely hold onto, because there was a time when Nathan's brother (in a way that has nothing to do with blood) would have done more than break a few bones.
Nathan has dim memories of blood the first time he lived. He wonders why Sanada's an orphan, but he's not dumb enough to ask. Instead he lets himself be labeled a troublemaker for Sanada's sake (ADHD DID possible schizophrenia; you're a crazy freak and you always have been, demon brat) and sometimes Sanada will smile at him and look so sweet and strange that Nathan's hands shake, and he finds himself furious at what could have stolen a smile like that the first time around.
But things don't last like that. Sanada and Nathan get put into different homes—there's no reason why they'd keep them together, they're not brothers, barely even friends—and Nathan wrestles a promise out of Sanada to keep in touch.
Sanada tries, at least, but the letters rarely come. Sanada remembers nothing of battles and of plunging his hand into Nathan's heart and ripping it out in more ways than one. Nathan's blood on Sanada's hands, Sanada's blood in Nathan's mouth. Blood brothers.
Nathan doesn't know how to hate him.
But he does know how to hate.
Nathan's skin pulling tight over his bones that won't stop growing and around the muscles that seem to come out of nowhere. Kyuubi-sama's flames just beneath his skin, keeping him warm. Sometimes he feels as though Kyuubi-sama has eaten his insides, as if his human face is the real mask.
"If you're feeling so fucking maudlin, go out and kill something," Kyuubi-sama hisses through its cage. Nathan's learned the trick of pulling himself inside until he's standing in a tunnel, but he doesn't do it often. He always feels strange, as if he's the wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong—just wrong. He gets enough of that from other people, though he doesn't give much of a shit. Catches himself thinking that the first time around it hurt so much more.
"I'm not into killing, fucking fox," Nathan snaps back. He'll never stop thinking of the thing inside him as Kyuubi-sama, but he doesn't have to call it that to its face. Its eyes the size of his head, gleaming out of the darkness. His hands itch.
"Shame," Kyuubi-sama says. "We'd both feel a lot better." It laughs in his face. "We're stuck together, you and me, and I've been here longer than you have. You're no monkey anymore." Bares teeth the length of his arm, yellowed and sharp.
Nathan's skin feels too small for him these days. Four years later and he thinks of Sanada almost constantly, and isn't sure if it's him that's doing the thinking or Kyuubi-sama, who wants and wants and wants-
Sometimes he thinks Kyuubi-sama might be trying to do him a favor, holding onto something he dreams he died for, but his head is hurting and all he can taste is blood from his torn throat and all he can see is a life he never lived. (And he wishes so much he could just rip Kyuubi-sama out of his mind and walk away and have friends and let people take care of him, but Kyuubi-sama's sense of betrayal strangles him into silence.)
Nathan wakes up from the conversation and gets dressed to go to school. He thinks if anyone tries to make fun of him he really will rip someone's throat out. Pressure building in his head. He isn't sure if his name is Nathan. Just like Sanada—so close, so wrong.
But it's on the way back to the foster home (four weeks and already they want him gone, because they are only human and he is fox) when he sees the familiar turn of a head, the wing of jet-black hair.
Stops.
Sanada sees him too and lifts a hand in an awkward wave. His hair is different but his expression is just as closed off as Nathan remembers, and he says, "Hi."
Nathan says: "What are you doing here?"
Sanada puts his hand down and looks annoyed. "I saw you the other day. You didn't see me," he adds, as if Nathan could ever ignore him.
"Are you living near here?" Nathan can't really breathe, his hands gone tight around the straps of his backpacks until the palms have turned red and his knuckles are white. Behind his eyes somewhere Kyuubi-sama has gone still. Sanada, eyes as dark as ever, face as sullen as ever, so small for some reason. Body missing the lines of muscle that Nathan knows the shape of, but the tilt of his head and the almost-smirk and the sharp angle of a hip that Nathan could wrap his fingers around-
"Well, that's new," Kyuubi-sama says. "I wasn't expecting that." It starts to laugh, low and unpleasant.
Fuck you, Nathan doesn't say.
"Yeah," Sanada says and lifts a shoulder in a shrug. "New foster family. You know." No one has ever understood Naruto like Sasuke. No one has ever understood Sasuke like Naruto.
(The names are right but Nathan forgets them within seconds. Still can't hold onto them and Sanada doesn't know them.)
"Yeah," Nathan says. "I do."
He's smiling so hard his face hurts.
Sanada is fourteen years old and he is the most beautiful thing Nathan has ever seen.
"Mine," says Kyuubi-sama like he did four years ago, and Nathan swallows hard and agrees, because what Kyuubi-sama really means is ours.
Sanada sticks close to Nathan at school and Nathan lets him because sometimes he looks over at Sanada's thin form and his face breaks open in a smile. If Sanada catches him he says nothing, until one day he says, "That's really creepy," shoulders hunched in as if he can't understand why anyone would smile when they saw him.
He's a little broken here too. Nathan wants to hold him and put him back together. Maybe just hold him.
Kyuubi-sama laughs and says, "Even when he was broken he didn't want you. Why would he want you if he were whole?" The brief press of fur against his skin. Nathan's hands feel weird; when he looks down he sees that the nails are, very slightly, longer.
"If he doesn't want me, then he won't want you," Nathan mumbles back.
"He's always been the same," Kyuubi-sama says. Its fur is matted and dark; its eyes are a sick, diseased yellow. Its laugh is cracking and the fire bright flame of its fur is peeling back to reveal dark empty patches. Nothing is born for captivity, and Kyuubi-sama least of all. Its smile is hateful and old, and Nathan understands suddenly that it hates Sanada as much as it loves him. That it would kill Sanada if it could, and would destroy itself first, and that they are the only remains of a dead world.
Kyuubi-sama adds: "If he knew about me, he'd want me. Not you. He'd never want you if he could have me instead."
"You're a giant fucking fox," Nathan sneers, "and fucking look at you. You're worse than a junkyard bitch. Some old diseased sack of shit howling about your glory days. What've you got to offer him anymore that he might possibly want now?"
Before Kyuubi-sama can say anything, Nathan jerks himself back to seventh period English, feeling guilty. The teacher is a kind-faced, scarred old man who talks about Faulkner and Joyce like he doesn't understand why anyone might not care. Also, he keeps his gray-streaked hair in a ponytail, which Nathan thinks is pretty cool. For an old guy.
But then the bell rings and Nathan remembers that Sanada is only five doors down.
Nathan never talks about Kyuubi-sama because if he's crazy he doesn't want to know about it, and because he doesn't feel crazy, but instead as if he's drowning. Holding onto something he doesn't know how to let go of, because-
Sanada is talking to someone else. Another boy his age, with blond hair and an ugly T-shirt and old jeans. Nathan thinks about pulverizing that friendly, boyish face into pulp and bone. He could do it. He would enjoy it.
Instead he smiles and puts his hands in his pockets and says, "Hey, Sanada. You ready to go home now?"
Sanada tilts his head up and shrugs.
"Sure," he says. "I'm just about done here. Thanks, Brian."
"No problem," the boy says. "I'll see you Monday, yeah?"
"Yeah," Sanada says and he looks-
-normal. Like everyone else. Like he never turned his back, like he never tried to kill his brother, like the disease never curled black ownership along his skin and-
There's no one left in the hallway now. If Nathan tries to kill him, Sanada can't even fight back.
His heart thuds like someone's hitting his breastbone. His eyes are burning and somewhere in his gut the aching, screaming loneliness wakes up and nothing has ever been so wrong because Sanada, Sanada is the first person to have stopped it, even all those years ago, the first person to have acknowledged him as someone strong.
Except.
Sanada doesn't remember.
If he doesn't remember...if he doesn't have those memories...is he still the person Nathan knows? Is he still the person who Nathan was always running behind, always trying to catch up?
If he isn't...
Nathan's heart is whispering something.
"You okay?" Sanada has stopped, is looking at him with dark eyes filled with concern, and even that is wrong because Sasuke would never allow himself to express so much emotion.
Nathan misses him so much. He misses all of them but Sanada is the only one who is here with him and he loved Sanada so much. He could have forgiven him everything. He did. He has. No matter how far Sanada runs away, no matter how much he changes, Nathan has always loved him.
Nathan leans forward and presses his lips to Sanada's-
-and he's done this before, but the memory slips out of his grasp because there was never any intent in that first kiss and he just wants to hold onto the person he remembers. His fingers are digging into Sanada's shoulders so tightly that the grip hurts and he can't bring himself to let go and Sanada is squirming and trying to pull away and hissing all sorts of words and Nathan just wants to keep him.
And finally Sanada stops moving and kisses back, reluctantly and hesitantly, and he is so young that Nathan hurts all over because in all of his broken, blurry memories, Sanada has never been so young as this. Sanada's hands come up to hold Nathan's arms and finally, there is peace.