Title: Faith of our Fathers
Rating: PG
Pairing: None
Word Count: 326
Warning/s: None
Summary: Orochimaru's mother raised him for survival, not for loyalty.
Notes: At the Shades of War RPG, our lovely Asuka plays Nao, Orochimaru's mother. Orochimaru is three years old in the current timeline, but Asuka asked for Nao and Orochimaru and the keyword "blood," and I couldn't pass it up.

He has his father's eyes from the start: yellow-green, slit-pupiled, cool and calm and far too knowing for a child only a few hours old. Nao cradles the tiny body to her breast and stares down at him and sees Hebimaru's eyes gazing back up at her from that chubby little face, and she wonders why, exactly, the knot behind her breastbone seems to clench even tighter whenever she looks at her son.

His father is two months dead, after all, and in this birth she's lost more blood than Hebimaru spilt. It was a hard birth and if Kaiyo-sensei wasn't there, Nao probably wouldn't have survived. Konoha might have seen it as a tragedy--husband killed by Stone ANBU two months ago, wife dies in childbirth and the baby's left orphaned and alone-- but Nao is old enough and cynical enough to appreciate the irony.

And maybe, just maybe, to wish that she didn't have to live everybody else's happy ending. She still wonders sometimes, as she strokes her pale fingers through Orochimaru's fine hair while he sleeps against her chest, if Hebimaru will forgive her. If, dead and omniscient, he'll at last know the truth that killed him.

But she isn't exactly anxious to explain it to him, not just yet. She's got Orochimaru, after all, and for the first time in her life she's not just following the path someone else has laid out for her. Orochimaru never figured into her father's plans; Hebimaru's plans were ripped to pieces with the first spurt of blood that stained the stairs.

He trusted her too much. And it killed him.

And so Nao cups her hand around the back of Orochimaru's tiny head, and stares down into her husband's/her son's yellow-green eyes, and vows that she'll never let Orochimaru make the same mistake.

These Konoha nin are all too trusting. Perhaps Orochimaru will never fully be a Konoha nin. But at least he'll be alive.