Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, only this fic.
Warning: Rated M and Unbeta-ed
"Men's hearts hold shadows darker than any tainted creature."
— Flemeth, Dragon Age: Origins
Naruto looked up at me, eyes defiant and jaw stubborn. His unscarred unhands clenched into fists at his sides and his feet planted firmly in front of me. The little boy was the picture of a scared child trying to hide his fear from the world.
The poor dear.
"Well, if you insist that you're not scared, then would you mind sitting beside me while I work," I gestured to the worktable in front of me and to the alphabetical calligraphy it held. "I'm practicing our clan's calligraphy, and I've, personally, found that company makes for quick work of tiresome tasks."
My calligraphy hasn't needed practice in ages, but Naruto's been curious about sealwork for a little bit and explaining what I'm doing while I do it will help keep the energetic child occupied. If it's not enough to take the little one's mind off of his nightmare, then I can always break out the practice scrolls early.
Naruto had long since revealed his impatience with traditional education, preferring a practical, hands-on approach. But using such a brute force method of trial-and-error to learn fuuinjutsu (especially the basics) was a quick way to meet your death. In retrospect, my mother probably gave me more freedom in my education that she had likely been comfortable with. She had probably tempered that unease by being ever-vigilant while I worked –though my successes likely helped the most on that end.
But this was every bit Naruto's heritage as it was my own. So I'd simply work around something as minor as being a kinesthetic learner.
"Well, fine," Naruto ground out as though I had asked a particularly herculean task of him. "But I wanna hear more about Aunt Uri!"
The small child plopped down in my lap and let the rise and fall of my words (explaining what I did as I did it and why) wash over him. I wonder if he even noticed that he had stopped trembling? I doubt it. If this is going to happen during every full moon, then I suppose it wouldn't hurt to drop a few tidbits about my mother here or there.
The boy –I studiously ignored my body's own age –deserves to know about his own family.
xxx
No one had ever bought Naruto toys. No one had ever bought this five year old a toy before. This child has never received a childish gift. This little one has never been given a toy. My little one has never been given a goddamned toy in his life.
Righteous rage boiled in my heart and the drums of war pounded in my ears, demanding satisfaction for the egregious wrongdoing. I fixed the smile I had merely moments before on my face like an ill-fitting mask on a mannequin. No need to worry Naruto. No need to make him think that he's the one at fault. There would, however, be blood for this. I would exact revenge on his behalf. I would–
"Yeah, the old man gave me these last year," Naruto held blunted kunai and a spool of ninja wire with an immense amount of care, as though these tools of death and murder and blood were blessed treasures gifted to him by a benevolent god. "He says they're balanced, so I use 'em to practice!"
The bile that is my blood turns a little bit blacker at his revelation. Military indoctrination at its finest. Take a lonely little orphan and show a little bit of kindness, maybe throw in a cheap trinket or two, and voilà: you'll have a loyal little soldier –ready to bleed, fight, kill, and even die for your idle whims.
It was a familiar tale.
It was an intimately familiar tale.
It made me want to break something.
But I didn't. I didn't blow up the Hokage Tower. I didn't rip apart the wrinkled old prune limb from limb. I didn't make the dirt roads of Konoha into rapidly flowing rivers of deep, crimson blood. I didn't exact the retribution that Naruto was too young to know he deserved.
I didn't, because, right now, Naruto needed me more.
The very next day, I gave him a small wooden chest of poorly-carved toys. There were horses and tigers and hawks and eagles. There were poorly-carved caricatures of our family: Naruto, my mother, and me. I gave him toys that held no other purpose than to make merry. Toys that held no other purpose than to fill his imagination with fluffy clouds and happy dreams.
I had taken up the hobby, once upon a lifetime. These hands of mine, steady as they are, still need more carving practice to get in anywhere in the ballpark of proficiency. Bandages wrapped themselves around my hand like an aborted attempt at mummification.
"Well then, Naruto," I smiled deliberately, consciously crinkling my eyes in the way that would hide its falseness. "Let's play with these. What do you think, can we make an adventure?"
xxx
Naruto quickly decided that Shima-nii wasn't a bad person, he just looked like one. His hair was a dark red and was almost always tied up into a ponytail. No one was allowed to touch it, Shima-nii was prickly about it. The neighbor's boy (Hikaru, the bastard) had pulled on it once and had spent a week in the hospital. Yeah, Naruto's cousin was a little protective about his hair and had taken to tying it up "to keep it safe."
Shima's eyes would dart about the place, never stopping and never leaving anything out of sight. It reminded Naruto of some of the ninja that walked about the street sometimes, jumpy and ready to retaliate for any perceived threat. Those few were the ninja that Shima-nii had advised him not to prank… not that Naruto needed the suggestion.
Naruto had long since deduced that it was Shima's face that made people think that he was a bad guy. It was a blank. A void where no emotion could escape. Even the Anbu masks at least showed an animal!
But Naruto knew. Naruto knew that Shima-nii wasn't a bad guy, just distant. There was a subtly to his vocal inflections, a quiet display of emotion smothered by the otherwise monotone lilt of his voice. And Naruto could see small flickers of emotion in his cousin's green-brown eyes –Hazel, Naruto reminded himself.
His older cousin was weird. Shima-nii never laughed a real laugh and his smiles weren't… whole. There was something missing from there, in his cousin's smiles. There was something missing behind his too-empty eyes, too. They looked like the eyes of fish that Naruto sometimes saw at the market. Gramps said that it was just grief, over Aunt Uriah, and that time would help heal the pain.
Naruto wasn't sure about that, but Shima-nii would tell him eventually. Shima-nii told him everything. His cousin never made him feel stupid about asking a question, or not knowing something. His cousin patiently explained what words meant what and encouraged him to ask questions.
Shima-nii didn't like giving up on answers. Once the two boys had moved in together, it hadn't taken long for Shima-nii to ask Naruto a question, only for Naruto to be stumped. The Hokage always had his face carved into the mountain. It was just the way that it was.
Shima-nii hadn't liked that answer, but said it was okay not to know something. That it was okay to ask questions. But it wasn't okay to accept something because it had always been that way. "Tradition serves people," Shima-nii had said. "Not the other way around."
Naruto could have done without the gentle flick on his nose, though.
Still… Shima-nii wasn't a bad guy. His cousin cared… maybe even a lot! He just didn't know how to show it. But that's okay, because Shima-nii is family and family helps each other, just like the old man helps him!
xxx
The door to my room slid open, and Naruto crept in silently, his footfalls light and slow.
I didn't turn around from my blackboard, focusing on the complex arithmetic equations and fuuinjutsu diagrams that covered the board. I was trying to work through the lessons that my mother had left for me. Her lesson plans went through all the way to the upper tiers of the Uzumaki Library. Such was the loving forethought of my mother. Such was her fuuinjutsu prowess, that she was able to teach that much; doing and teaching are two completely different orders of understanding, after all.
"Don't step on my reference material," I idly warned Naruto. Open books and scrolls crisscrossed the room, turning the rug into a patchwork blanket of paper and vellum. Distantly, I heard him whisper a curse in a wavering voice. Normally, his childish attempts to sneak up on me would spark some glimmer of amusement from me, but the repressed sniffing I heard smothered that spark before I could even take note of it.
I snapped my head around, and caught glimpse of my little one. He had had another nightmare. All the telltale signs were there. Elbows angled slightly inwards, azure eyes watery with retrained tears, and his breathing was measured in careful beats the way I had showed him. Only nightmares could bring Naruto to such a state. Not the sneering disapproval of the civilians. Not the cautious, guarded pleasantry that Konoha's shinobi treated him with. Not even my own occasional reprimand.
Only nightmares on the full moon could debase Naruto to the point of tears.
And he got them every full moon.
I set the stick of chalk down and swept Naruto into my arms, placing him atop my shoulders and walked out of my bedroom –it doubled as a workroom now, ever since The Flashbang Incident. Carrying the small child out of my room, I secured the windowless room with a brush of my hand against the doorframe, activating the litany of privacy-seals I had carefully etched into the drywall.
I flung myself on our living room couch and caught Naruto before he could tumble from his perch, depositing him in my lap.
"Do you want to tell me about it," I asked softly. The nightmares of children are a silly thing to adults, but they're not nearly so simple to the children who have them. And the regularity of Naruto's bad dreams made me think that it had something to do with the chakra entity sealed within his stomach.
"I can't remember, not really." The blond boy looked away from me when he whispered the admission. Not lying, then. Just embarrassed to have needed me without even being able to explain why. And Naruto knows how much I hunt for explanations. The phrase 'I dunno, because it is' had swiftly been outlawed under our roof.
"Well, that's okay. Sometimes we forget things," I nodded sagely. "And sometimes the things that we have forgotten still manage to reach us from the indistinct greyness that they have faded into."
Naruto scrunched his nose in confusion, and I felt a warm amusement as he deciphered my words. Naruto wasn't unintelligent by any means, he had simply never had an adult to explain things to him. Ignorance isn't stupidity and my little one certainly isn't stupid. A little foolish, perhaps. Certainly more than a little rash. But not unintelligent. His vocabulary has become much more varied from when he and I first met, picking up on context clues from my own speech patterns and trying them out in his own. No, definitely not unintelligent.
Besides, it is the purview of children to be rash and foolish and ignorant. They have yet to learn about the world. It is the responsibility of adults to guide children to knowledge, and to catch them when they, invariably, fall.
Naruto still looked a little troubled, so I wrapped my arms around him and began to sing a lullaby under my breath. "I'm so tired of being here, suppressed by all my childish fears…"
I wasn't able to carry a tune as well as I had been, before. I'm just not able to pick apart the minute differences between notes and chords as well as I have been, in previous bodies. But I could carry an amateurish tune well enough, provided that I stay away from any score too complex for this body to match.
"When you cried, I'd wipe away all of your tears. When you'd scream, I'd fight away all of your fears. And I held your hand through all of these years…"
Interestingly enough, the pseudo-Japanese language that pervades the Elemental Nations actually has very little in common with any 21st century language at all, let alone a western one like English. The sentence structure was completely different, completely different phonetics, and I've yet to find a single word that might translate completely.
There were simply too little similarities in cultures and background history for the two languages to mesh well. So while 21st century American-English might make for a great code, it doesn't exactly mean I can translate songs and poetry with any amount of accuracy; the subtly would be lost or the flow would be warped beyond all recognition.
Still, the soft and slow melody of this song made it well-suited for a lullaby. The clear, resonant phonics of the language only compounded it as a good dialect to lull Naruto to sleep to.
"That's a sad song, Shima-nii," Naruto murmured in protest when the song came to a close, his eyes half-lidded and the weight of his head on my chest.
Sad? Hm. Perhaps Naruto was learning the language through sheer osmosis? I did choose that language most frequently when I felt the urge to sing; some people might spin a pen while deep in thought, or bob their knee up and down while working, but I simply sang. In various languages in various dialects from throughout Earth's time.
"Well then, let's pick a different one, shall we," I chuckled.
"Somewhere, over the rainbow…"
xxx
Naruto was asleep before the song was over. It was the restful, easy sleep of a child that felt safe in the arms of family. I ignored an idle twinge of guilt at that.
Coldlightning-expectant-impatient chakra flared from the rooftop of my shared house. I slowly pried Naruto's fingers from my shirt and carefully lowered him onto the couch with a pillow over his head. I would be back soon to put him to bed.
I silently put my boots on and walked out of the house, activating watchfuleyes-nakedclaws-envenomedbite security seals on my way out. Not that I expected anyone to try to break in, of course. The Konoha rumor mill had already spread word of an Uzumaki child, proficient in fuuinjutsu.
And there were some tidbits of knowledge that every ninja in Konoha picked up on. If a shinobi's career surpassed beyond a genin, they all usually learned these lessons in one form or another: Don't piss off your medic. Don't engage an enemy in their favored environment. Treat the librarian like nobility. And, whatever you do, definitely don't break into a fuuinjutsu user's home.
Secure in the knowledge that my seals would deter most people –and cull the stupid few that might try –I stepped out and into the night of the full moon.
I had a job to do.
So quick note: Trying to impress that the Hidden Nations is a world unto its own. With its own culture and practices that are separate from our own. That's why the language is different. That's why the plants are different. That's why Minato took Kushina's name even though it's not traditionally common in "Asiatic" cultures. Because the Hidden Nations doesn't have Earth's history and culture influencing its traditions and practices.
Also: Chakra is a great equalizer between genders. When both genders can sling fireballs, wield lightning, and seal Tailed Beasts, I doubt there would be very much discrimination going on. And what little there might be would be put down mercilessly. After all, never know when that man/woman might not take your shit and decide to kill you over it. Because there's no guarantee that you're stronger than him/her.
Seriously, ninja in the Naruto-verse are like walking nukes. Chakra is like being armed with nuclear warheads at all times. Talk softly and carry a big stick, indeed.
Anyway, mini-rant over. Whatcha think about this chapter?
-R
