The Weight.
Tsuchi no Kuni, 6th June
Year of the Ox/ Year of the Tiger.
It was there in front of him. There when he slept. There when he awoke. He couldn't turn away from it. He couldn't work it off, couldn't suck it in and as the weeks passed it just grew bigger. It required larger clothes to cover it and it was uncomfortable, solid and far too real for him to pass off as a dream. Sasuke had never been anything close to overweight in his life; not even chubbiness had graced him as a child past the age of two. He'd been a skinny kid and a lanky adolescent with barely an inch of fat insulating his athletic frame. Into his teens, he'd become a fine instrument of ability strung with long, wiry muscles which merely emphasized the definition of his many angles. He'd never been round. He'd never been large. And suddenly, without his knowledge or consent, he was being inflated from the inside like some sort of humanoid balloon.
To further his growing mortification, the weight wasn't an individual occurrence; it had cousins. Two of them, sitting directly above it. Twins. Breasts. He had breasts. He could barely fathom how to react to breasts. As a boy, a man, he'd barely given a second thought to the importance of bosoms, despite the fact that Naruto, Kiba and their juvenile cohort couldn't seem to stop talking about them when the girls weren't around. He hadn't been interested in girls; he hadn't been interested in anyone. He tuned out to most of his peer's lecherous rumblings in favour of training and trips to the hot springs had simply been for the benefit of his aching, overworked muscles, rather than an opportunity to spy on nude women.
He felt completely out of control in his own skin; which, as it seemed, was far more skin than he was used to. And before he'd come to terms with what was inside of him, there was a terrible period of hurt and of pain. Of waking in the middle of the night, jolted alert by the tail end of a nightmare. Dreams of smoke and acid plagued him. His guilt and shame drove him into fits of violent anger, or sometimes dangerous stretches of silence in which he'd claw at his own skin with his broken fingernails until he bled and stung.
When things began to grow, and the parasite inside him was little more than a few weeks old, he fell victim to such a high level of nausea and dizziness that Nuja would have to keep him on the ground, holding him in her arms, singing to keep the silence from spinning in his ears. His internal battles forgotten, his self-contempt currently displaced, Sasuke became desperately ill - dropping weight like hot coals to the point where his chest was striped with bones and his spine protruded from the thin skin of his back like the armored plates of a prehistoric monster. His damaged leg, feeling a little overlooked since his initial capture, played up with a severe infection attacking several of the surgical sites and after several confused, swampy weeks of vomiting and fever, he was confined permanently to the medical bay being fed by tubes and monitored by machines that announced the beat of his heart and issue of oxygen through his lungs.
Time became a sticky mess. The days and nights seeped together into a lump of grey haze. When he refused to eat, a drunken, weak resistance as he tried to harness his anger and take advantage of the situation to get rid of his passenger while it was still weak, the medics retaliated with a silicone tube and a syringe. A few unpleasant few minutes later, Sasuke realized that he had no choice in the matter whether he wanted to eat or not. All he had was a mouthful of hatred and an arsenal of ocular jutsu rendered powerless by his complete lack of chakra. The medics had restrains and sedatives. He might have been one of the strongest ninja on the planet, but he was nothing against a unique concoction of wrong place, wrong time, wrong enemy and a well measured dose of barbiturates.
He wasn't sure how long he was in the infirmary, but by the time he was finally able to stagger on his own two feet, his belly was protruding well past the ridges of his hips and was heavy and full. There was a warmth in there that he didn't like, something that felt strange and alien. When he was returned to Nuja, Sasuke didn't speak, didn't make eye contact. He barely acknowledged she was there, despite her concern and gentle coaxing as she attempted to console him. He was disgusted by his own skin - even more so than when he'd first arrived. Back then, weeks ago, he'd simply been injured and captured, he could understand that. When he'd left the Land of Fire his chakra had been exhausted, depleted, his body broken and pushed well past the limits of endurance. He'd used everything he had against Madara, Kaguya and finally Naruto; his weakness was justified.
When he was altered, it was through instances that he couldn't fight against and while that was hard to accept, he was very aware that similar changes had been applied to him in the past, without causing him too much stress or emotional grief. Orochimaru's curse seal had turned him into a monster, and the Snake Sannin had also implanted his own DNA into his body to secretly spy on him before Itachi had removed it. Juugo had melded his oddly mercurial body with Sasuke's in order to save his life and he had even allowed Obito to transplant his deceased brother's eyes in place of his own to save his dojutsu. Given his rather careless attitude toward his own body, it wasn't as though he was some kind of ingenue when it came to forceful body modification. However, the Heaven Curse could be calmed, could fade. It was something he could ultimately control if he had to and it had been removed. Orochimaru had been dissolved (as far as he knew), Juugo's additions simply became part of his own skin, as did Itachi's eyes.
This? This parasite inside him? It did nothing but feed off him and change his body. Make him ill, weak and helpless. It made him alter everything from the way that he walked to the way that he slept and all that lay in between. And it was all for the benefit of some asshat, peverse clan who would sell away his fine, pedigree blood to the highest bidder. Men who bastardized his blood, his birthright - took his precious history from him, using his clan for their own gain. He hated that. He hated it the most. And he would have tried to stop them, tried to destroy it again, only Nuja was quick to warn him of the consequences. He had far worse things to face than being pregnant if he decided to mess with their "crop". Sure, they hadn't touched him this time; they hadn't needed to. Artificial insemination was swift and painless and if he quickened easily, there was little more they had to do. But if they wanted to enjoy themselves, they were more than happy to take advantage of the hidden benefits sidelining their trade. If he made himself lose it, they'd make him regret his actions. If he had any idea how humans usually conceived (He did. Kakashi never did find that missing volume of his favourite series thanks to Naruto's quick fingers and a boring evening spent rehabilitating in the Land of Waves), then he would know that his child was administered unconventionally. When the Kakkou's test subjects started interfering with their work, that was when the traditional methods kicked in.
Do you think it's embarrassing now? Nuja hissed at him. Don't look away, look at me. Do you think that you look stupid? You don't. You're far better off like this than the alternative. You don't want them trying the "natural" methods on you, trust me. You don't ever want that. You'll have nightmares forever.
He already had nightmares. They never stopped. His life was a nightmare.
Then take that nightmare and make it worse. Whatever wakes you in the middle of the night now? Add their stinking breath in your ear and on your cheek. Add their junk in your face and their hands on your throat. Add their groping and their probing. Add them screaming at you, telling you how weak and useless you are and that you're only good to breed from. They'll fuck you until you're in agony and they'll keep going past the point you fall unconscious.
So what.
So what? That's not where they stop. They know we're tough, they know we've had training to survive torture; we're ninja. So they try other methods. They give you the ultimatum. Ever killed a kid before? Like, a little kid, not another ninja kid trying to kill you, that's different. A helpless child. A baby.
That's stupid. Why would they go to all the effort of making their captives have children for them to sell if they're going to damage them?
There are duds, so to speak. Kids born as civilians without a useable level of chakra. Kids born with disabilities. They call them fodder. They use them to teach us "lessons". They take you to this open cell at the top of one of the mountains - one that stretches over a great ravine. They lay the little one down in front of you and they tell you that you have to kill it. Neither of you can come back in until you agree to work with them or the little one is dead. Have you ever heard a little baby cry when it's starting to starve? When it's dying? That little weak, wobbly sound, kinda like a lamb bleating? Only the kid's more helpless than a lamb. It can't see, can't hold things, can't even hold up its head. Could you just sit back and watch that for days?
Sasuke was silent then, not considering, remembering. Itachi had, with Obito's help, massacred his entire clan. Men, women, children. Young and old. Had he been the youngest then? Or were there babies too? Had Itachi killed babies to save him? Had he heard the children crying like that? He didn't remember, couldn't bring himself to relive the past again, not now. But others had died to save him that much he knew. Others had died to prove a point.
Sasuke didn't speak for some time, several days. And when he finally relented, he asked Nuja what she had done to abort her own. She knew from experience, the haunted look in her eyes - one that had seen death and failed to prevent it - was something he immediately recognized. She answered soft but pragmatic:
Rock. Stomach. Didn't take much. I bled like a stuck pig after.
A moment later she looked up and smiled, sadly, brushing the dirt off her knees.
Most of us here, Sasuke? We're good people. Some of us might have turned the wrong way sometimes, but deep down, we're kind and we're sane. I held out for as long I could with that poor little boy crying on the ledge next to me. The mountain is cold and there's no cover. I tried to keep him warm against my body - hell I even held him to my titties to try and see if he could take anything from me. But there was nothing I could do. And he was crying, and crying and finally I had to give in. They opened the door and took him away, and that was that.
Sasuke swallowed hard before asking if she'd seen him since then? Did he survive? Did she know if he was all right?
Sure he is. He's living in a little Goat farming village just North of here with a friendly couple who couldn't have children of their own. All the kids are. Every single one.
And at that, Nuja pushed up, crawling over to her sleeping mat before curling up on the thin, worn mattress, feigning sleep. In her mind, she constructed a lovely image of all the unwanted children riding goats and playing on the flowering hillside; their laughter painting the breeze. She didn't tell Sasuke that the unluckiest prisoners were the ones housed in the lowest cells near the bottom of the ravine. The ones who heard the final tiny, bleating cries as they carried through the air, only to be cut short by the rocks. They were the ones who heard the music of hundreds of tiny shattered bones being shifted in the mountain winds. They were the ones the Kakkou had broken past any point of salvation. Silently, she prayed that he would never learn about them; they were better off disappearing into the darkness below the earth.