I do not own Naruto
Rain pours steadily down from the heavens in fat, slow drops. The liquid pitter patters down from the atmosphere and sets off a chorus of drips from leaves and stone and sky. Thunder rolls across the clouds, lazily and heavy in the dark depths of the night. Its rumbling reverberates through the world below, lethargic waves of sound resonating inside her body and soul, accented by blinding flashes of purple-white light. The heavy winds shake the leaf-filled trees, and the rustling noise it makes sounds like a small wave crashing on wet sand. It stinks of wet earth and ozone, and something Ryuishi can't name, but the pieces of her all quiet and stand in appreciation of the discordant tranquility of the weather. She always did love a good storm.
She tries to enjoy it and not think about how the rumbling of thunder makes her thigh and calf muscles tense, as if preparing to dodge out of the way of an incoming Doton technique; she tries to ignore how the crackle of lightning and the stench of ozone makes her body vibrate with a tangible need to utterly eradicate a threat from the face of the planet.
On the battlefield is different from the off. Remind yourself of what is different, not the same, she hears Orochimaru tell her in her head. For a man with such dangerous degrees of sociopathy, he certainly knew how to compartmentalize.
So she thinks of how it is different, how she is hiding instead of attacking. She focuses on the lack of death in the air, the absence of agonized screams and roaring balls of fire. She breathes deep and focuses on how she can't hear the shriek of projectiles cutting through the air, how she cannot smell blood, piss, and shit. The patio is stable beneath her feet, not rolling and heaving like an injured animal, and she doesn't hear the sounds of clashing metal and enraged insults, except for inside her head.
She thinks of fonder memories, of time spent in the water with her boys, of Zabuza standing atop the lake's surface as he tried to snatch Kisame and her out of it like the fish they were. She thinks of warm beds and ambient lighting and two hands, one for each of hers. The contrast of pale white and grey blue against warm bronze. She feels the weight of metal in her ears and remembers the way a man who she used to think of as an alternate version of Josef Mengele tenderly pierced her ears, three on the left, one on the right, just like in her old world. How his soft breathing soothed her when she was out of her mind and how the rasp of his voice, like the sliding of pages against each other, reminded her what reality was.
The rain soaks through her clothes, tepid in contrast to the warmer weather, and each patter of moisture against her skin is a little like an embrace. She let her hair down a while ago and she can feel the heavy, waterlogged weight of it pulling her head back and sticking to every part of her, right down to the curve of her backside where it ends.
She does love being wet, she thinks, then smirks at her own double entendre.
Naruto stares at her from the safety of the warm, dry inside of the house and he looks like he thinks she's crazy, but she grins while he rolls his eyes.
"What?" she asks, "I can't enjoy the weather a bit?"
"It's just a thunderstorm," he tells her in his adorable, childish, matter-of-fact way.
She scoffs and rolls her eyes, tilting her arms up the the sky as if in praise and letting the rain absolutely drench her. If she had known thunderstorms in Fire Country got like this, she might have considered their coastlines a bit more. Actually that's a lie, Fire Country is the center of some absolutely crazy shit and she would prefer not to deal with it.
"For a brat called Maelstrom, you are entirely unappreciative of some chaotic weather."
"You're weird," is her answer.
She snorts and focuses on the weather a bit more, attempting to reclaim another thing this life has stolen from her. She is going to find peace here, she tells herself, she is going to come to terms with the way things are now. Sure, sometimes she might have to kill people, and she might be particularly good at sabotage and manipulation. Okay, she still partakes in the occasional battle, but it is on her terms now. No mission orders, no absent Mizukage, no endless need to pretend. She is growing up, and her body looks more and more like her own every day; her life reflects that.
Now she can take some one on one time with lonely, neglected children because she wants to. She can invade villages because she wants to, she can see the Mumei if she wants to. The choice is back in her hands.
It is worth the guilt and loneliness, she thinks, worth the blood I have paid, and the scars I wear with pride. I made it eleven years in hell, I survived a war and crumbled with the village of Kiri. I have known heartbreak and confusion, apathy and regret. Madness was my companion and remains a threat, but for now I am in control and I choose what I want.
Granted, what she usually wants can range from an entire bottle of sake to a binge meal of sweets, but she never said she was responsible.
Eventually she turns to head back in, but is met with a squawk of indignation from a little blond haired boy who is staring at the puddle her hair is dripping onto the floor.
"It just got clean!" he cries, and she gives him an un-amused look.
"Like you had anything to do with that. I distinctly remember spending a good fucking portion of the morning and afternoon making sure it was that way," she drawls.
"Hey! I washed dishes AND helped with floors!" he retaliates and she rolls her eyes, squeezing water from her hair out the window.
"Don't forget, you put the detergent in the machine too," she replies sarcastically, molding her chakra in her hands and collecting the water out of her clothes and hair. She's still damp, but it's better now.
"YEAH!"
She rolls with it, because in the scope of things, there is nothing to lose by letting him have this. There isn't much for her to lose anyways, because she owns nothing but the pack on her back and a house somewhere in Wind Country with wood panel walls and a raised deck. Socially speaking she has some ties (an understatement if there ever was one) with the Mumei and the infamous missing-nin Orochimaru. From there she has nothing, nothing but two little boys she uses to keep herself sane and diverted.
Looking down at him, she wonders if she ever can fully put into words how cute Naruto is. Even though she found nothing but flavored ramen cups and packaged meals inside his cupboards, he is as hale and healthy as a child with a well balanced diet. His skin clean now that he's had a bath and his clothes close to being mended. Bright blue eyes that are like clear marbles made of sea glass hold her own. Hair the color of lemons and sunshine lays in a charming, ruffled mess on his little head and his teeth couldn't look more perfect, even if the toothbrush in the bathroom looked suspiciously unused.
It must be nice, she thinks, to have a giant mass of malevolent chakra sealed inside your fucking guts making sure you're healthy.
It may seem like a callous thought, but Ryuishi is used to much worse than neglected children. She hadn't even known how bad Kiri was until she got out of it. She had acclimatized herself to ribs poking out underneath chests and sallow skin stretched over brittle bones. It was normal to have sunken eyes and cracked lips, unhealthy distended bellies and rickets in joints. Traveling around, she realizes what she should have known all along: no one in Kiri was healthy, be it mentally, emotionally, or physically.
A part of her resents the other nations for ignoring them, for blocking out their suffering cries and their need for goods. Then she remembers that revenge is being served slowly, steadily, as the Mumei spread. They are steel, forged in the fires of Kiri, warped by pressure and pain, but still strong.
"So, sunshine, what should we have for dinner?" she asks, pushing those thoughts away.
"RAMEN!" he belts out, and she is not surprised in the least. Why bother framing it in the form of a question?
"How about you bring me my bag, and we check what I brought with me."
He scurries off into the adjacent living room, still in full sight. He reaches around, and she is amused to note her pack is almost bigger than he is. He tries to pick it up, fails, and tries again. She muses that it's not that heavy.
Startled at the notion, he turns to look back at her, sweeping an arm out to the off-color canvas. "Is this a trick?"
"No, it's a bag."
He scowls and braces his weight against the floor, leaning back as he grasps a shoulder strap tightly and heaves, grunting at it. She lets him strain against the weight, twisting and squirming. After one particular maneuver, she even heard the soft sound of a fart and had to bite her lip from howling with laughter.
Farts are natural, she thinks, don't make him ashamed of a bodily function. But it's still funny as hell.
"Stop, before you hurt yourself," she forces out, and she's sure her face must be red from the effort it is taking not to giggle like a child.
"I can do it!" he tells her, still writhing like an angry dog with a chew toy.
She walks over, ribs trembling from the exchange, and pick up the bag one handed, carrying it over to the counter for easier access. Naruto stares at her with wide eyes.
"Nee-san is strong," he whispers.
"Took me a long time." she answers honestly, because it had. She muscled up easy, but no matter how easy it was for her, she didn't grow at the same rate as an adolescent boy. Keeping up with Kisame and Zabuza had left her constantly tired, and she isn't sure if she'll ever get to their skill level. Swinging around big-ass fucking swords is hard work and requires an upper body like a tank. Ryuishi might be able to punch down a few trees and leave a crater in the earth, but her boys (still her boys, always her boys) can break a bridge and shatter cliffs.
Muscle bound testosterone nonsense is what that is, she'd like to see them do it with half as much flair as her. Or take their foot and touch it to their head still standing.
She idly opens the rucksack, flipping through the main pocket. Inside is more than one would think could fit, and she sends a quiet thanks to her snake-faced caretaker for the seals he painted within. They probably also track her or can be remotely detonated to explode or some shit, but now she can carry tons more stuff.
She pulls out her clean clothes, washed alongside Naruto's, and her weapons scroll. Then her maintenance kit, survival water scroll, survival rations scroll, a wad of cash that definitely did not come from extorting some douchebags, candy, papers, a full thing of ninja gear, a bag of cosmetics, a hygiene bag, a box of tampons, and her 'spa kit' which held various perfumes and oils and treatments. Naruto grabs at this one, which he recognizes from the night before, and she lets him even though most of those little bottles cost more than his apartment might cost each month.
"Careful," she warns.
On a side note, it pays to be so tightly connected with sex workers. Not only does she have an assortment of bukijutsu, taijutsu, ninjutsu, and genjutsu to use, but Kagami and her girls helped remind her that her body is a weapon in different ways as well. Sex is a natural thing, and though she could really care less about what she looks like to other people, it can be a weapon too. There is a strength in the dip of her waist and the curve of her wide hips, and if someone wants to be stupid enough to stare at the sweat slicked expanse of her stomach while they are fighting, then you can bet your ass she's going to use that. Thus, crop tops. Also, they let her girls get a underboob breeze that she didn't know she needed.
Eventually they reach the box she's looking for, accompanied by a small scroll. The child abandons the bottles he was sniffing curiously and hovers by her side, looking at the accumulation of junk.
"That's a lot of stuff." he tells her, wriggling his hand through the pile. Ryuishi is suddenly glad most of the blades are sealed up and that her meteor hammer is wrapped around her underneath her pants.
"Sure is. Now, dinner?" she asks.
"What's that?" he asks, jutting his free hand toward the case and scroll she is carrying, ignoring her previous words. She resists the urge to roll her eyes again.
"Spice box and some staple ingredients stored away," she tells him. It was a habit she picked up with her old unit, because meat strictly cooked over an open flame or eaten raw was bland and boring.
"What is an in-gred-ient?"
"A component used in a dish. Like water is an ingredient of ramen, get it?" she asks.
"What is a comp-onent?"
"It means it's part of something else."
He nods, tucking his hand under his chin. Every time she answers his many, many questions, he seems to act like she showed him the whole world. Seriously, his epiphany moments are way too cute.
"Now, I have vegetables, eggs and fish in this one. I think you have some rice, maybe, and there was some miso paste still in the fridge," she lists, going over it in her mind.
"Vegetables are gross!" he exclaims. She unseals them before looking over at the boy with narrowed eyes.
"Sunshine, I made a demon eat his vegetables, don't think I can't make you," she tells him seriously, hair down and hands braced on the counters.
He looks shocked and uneasy. "You knew a demon?" he asks.
"Sure, he was my best friend growing up," she tells him easily, washing the vegetables. Just for his sass, she's going to make a whole bunch of them. "Hated vegetables, and talking, but we got along pretty well. Knew a monster too. He was much easier to talk with."
"What were their names?" Naruto asks excitedly.
Then she realizes belatedly this is dangerous territory. Naruto can't know what their names are because he's too young to keep a secret. If he tells everybody he has a garbage fairy nee-san, well, maybe they'll keep a better fucking eye on him. If he blurts out two of the Kaijuu no Kiri's names, it isn't going to be hard to figure out what the third is doing. She pauses in her knife chops. Fuck, what was Hanako calling them again? Shit was all kid friendly and fairy tale like, but it always made her out to be some sort of princess buddha or something, so she chose to ignore it most of the time. Come on, come on—
"Odayaka Oni and Chujitsuna Same," she remembers out loud.
Then she wants to snort because "gentle demon"? That's a fucking load of nonsense. "Loyal shark" is something she can't argue with, though.
"What were they like?" he asks as she prepares dinner, and she smiles as she tells him.
"That's a hard question to answer because they were very different people, and I'm not sure you would get that quite yet," she tells him honestly. How do you tell an idealistic child that the boy who slaughtered a whole school and the teenager who tried to kill her were actually okay people?
"How about I tell you about the time Odayaka Oni split his pants open in the middle of a skirmish and somehow still managed to make it look like it happened on purpose?"
"Is there fighting?"
"Yes."
"YEAH, TELL ME DATTEBAYO."
She laughs and scrapes the medley off the board and into the simmering saucepan, adding some of the thinner slices to the miso pot. He's so excitable about it, and she can remember laughing about it as well. It's good to tell these stories, she thinks, because she get to remember the fun she had with her unit, the good points in the war. She gets to recall brighter times and remind herself about the boys she loves.
"Okay, well, A few years before you were born, on the border of Water Country, Odayaka Oni, Chujitsuna Same, and I were preparing for an ambush. It was war, and we were all pretty scared—"
Ryuishi spends most of dinner spinning out the story, trying to impart just how silly those three kids were, how happy there were to be together, even in the horror of war. Yes, she tells him about war, she tries not to glorify it and sometimes he looks a little wary of it, but she won't paint him a better picture. She refuses. War is terrible, it is larger than she can ever hope to imagine, a force beyond comprehension. Her father was right about that. She saw acts of utter depravity and boundless mercy on the same fields.
Sometimes war is called for, she thinks, but not this one. She is still recovering, and some elemental nations are still at it right now.
By the time dinner is cooked she thinks that Naruto might have some unsettling heroes, and she laughs, because it is beyond funny to her that her old teammates are so relatable to him.
"Why is he a demon, though?" he asks, picking at the fish on his plate.
She smiles to herself, because she wonders why they hate what they created, why her unit was stigmatized for being the best with no other choice.
"We're all just people, sunshine," she says, "Some might be meaner, scarier, ruder, more violent, and more powerful. Some might be kind and sweet and gentle. People come in a thousand varieties and each one is special, but that can be hard to tell. Like snowflakes we are unique, but you never really notice and in the end it almost doesn't matter when they're piled high on each other, covering everything."
He looks confused and she takes a sip of her miso, playing with the floating strip of wakame inside the broth. There was no tofu, but it isn't horrible without it. She wants to maybe add that big differences are hard to point out in corpses piled on top of each other, just like snow, but it's a bit dark of humor for a four year old.
"We're all just people. You, me, Odayaka Oni, Chujitsuna Same, just people, for better or worse," she says.
"But you're a garbage fairy."
She sighs and guesses it was a little high concept for someone who essentially just quit shitting his pants, but whatever. She honestly has stopped giving a damn at this point, so she rudely jabs at him with her chopsticks.
"You just volunteered to do dishes."
"NO I DIDN'T!"
"I'm sorry, what is it your supposed to call me?"
"I'm gonna call you mean butt, dattebayo!"
"Step up your game and try again sunshine, I've known infants that can insult better than you."
He stews on this with a mouthful of rice, the fish and vegetables already gone. The juice looks about finished too, and really it's like six dishes, she already washed the pots and pans. He chews furiously because he knows after the breakfast incident that she will in fact swat his ass if he spits food in her face like a disgusting heathen child. Swallowing, he looks nervous, but strangely anticipatory.
"You're a no good, dirty, rotten little monster," he spits, and wow, she is entirely too certain that he has heard that come from someone else. Ryuishi lets it roll right off of her, showing him that those words mean nothing to her.
They should mean nothing to you, goes unsaid.
"You are a turd-burgling buttmuncher," she slings back, because yes, four years old is an entirely appropriate age to begin mudslinging. She can't wait to hear how the Hokage reacts to this.
He looks like it takes a moment for him to understand what is happening, then to process the insult. His face is scrunched up, but slowly it dawns on him that this too is a game to be played, just like the pirates they played while cleaning the bathroom.
"Nee-san drinks pee and farts like a cow!"
She laughs, because that first part is patently untrue but that last one might be a little too close to the truth. Naruto smiles with pride, and yes, she thinks, keep smiling like that. Don't let anyone ever take it away from you.
Later, before bed, after re-packing her bag, she teaches him Uno and gives him her deck of cards. He can't count that well, and colors are a little hard for him, but it helps him to make things into a game. She can always make another deck, just like she did with this one. They stay up making a big fort out of sheets and emergency blankets from the pack. After they wash up and brush their teeth, yes that means you Naruto, they fall asleep in it too.
Having a small toddler snooze on her belly is oddly comforting, and she finds herself smiling. She has no idea what she is doing anymore, and somehow, that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
AN: DOMESTIC RYUISHI! AHHH! Seriously though, look at her mom the hell out of that child. She can't help but wan to take care of cute things. In this chapter we also see that Ryuishi is working through some PTSD, and that Orochimaru is a surprisingly efficient counselor who will also pierce your eyes for you. More mentions of Kisame and Zabuza because she might be a little broody over them.
That being said, I want to post a few side stories I have written for this story under a new title, but I need to collect more. I have a few already, but their just things like what the academy instructor thought of Zabuza and Ryuishi, or what Kisame thinks about fighting.
There is some people questioning Ryuishi's sexuality, also. I do not mean to bait anybody, and if you ask, I will tell.
Now, we give thanks to the reviewers. THEY'RE GREAT. We thank the followers, favoriters, and in the darkness lurkers.
We also thank the great and capable beta Enbi, who is also totally cool.
Now for another one of these fun time questions:What are my readers headcannons for Ryuishi? As in, what weird habit do you think she has/ what do you think others think of her?
