Chapter 3: Snape's Restful-Sleep Potion
Severus notices the pattern quite early on.
Albeit being a regular who frequents almost every other day, Sarutobi's visits never seem to coincide with Naruto's shifts at the tea shop.
'He's still observing me without letting Naruto know about it,' he thinks, shaking his head.
It was to be expected, he supposes. This was a shinobi village and a foreigner who is in close contact with Konoha's Jinchuuriki is bound to be deemed suspect.
He feels the approaching chakra from a distance and he braces himself for impact.
"Kuro-sensei!" he hears a second after the blond whirlwind enters the shop and makes straight for him. Small arms circle about his waist and he looks down to see a whiskered face grinning up at him.
'Well, at least he's put on some height,' Severus thinks and awkwardly pats the blond locks.
"I hit all the targets with my shuriken today at practice!" informs the boy as he tightens his hug. Severus notes that brat seems to have put on some muscle and thinks that it might be time to lessen the dosage of the nutrition potion he's been feeding the child.
"Very good, now go get ready," he instructs before shooing the boy off.
"Hai, Kuro-sensei!" Naruto salutes before marching towards the back room.
"And stop calling me 'sensei'," he reminds the blond.
"Sensei teaches me stuff so sensei is sensei!" the child shouts back cheekily.
One of his customers, which he knows to be one of Naruto's many ANBU guards, snickers out loud before looking away to sip at his lemon tea when Severus turns to glare at him.
Kazu crows at him from his perch.
Severus had thought he'd escape teaching brats when he'd been unceremoniously dumped into this dimension.
'It was too good to be true,' he laments to himself.
Severus observes the child as he skips about the kitchen. They've just finished with their dinner of chashuu ramen, Naruto had insisted, and the boy was running to and from the kitchen sink to clean up after.
He'd missed it before during the busy opening hours of running the tea shop, but it has become glaringly obvious to him now.
There was something off with the brat.
He was a tad less enthusiastic in his speech and his movements were rather lethargic, for a bouncing ball of energy that literally never stopped moving about anyway.
"Naruto, come over here for a bit," he calls out, disrupting the boy's long spiel of how annoying a certain Uchiha classmate was to him that day.
Naruto pauses mid-sentence and then looks up from washing the dishes. He dries his hands on the dish cloth and climbs down from the small stool left under for a child's easy access to the sink.
He bounces over with a smile and asks, "Are you gonna teach me something new today?"
Severus studies the eager little face and notices the subtle black lines under the child's eyes.
'He looks tired,' he diagnoses as he continues staring silently at the whiskered boy.
Naruto watches the man's dark unmoving eyes staring intently at him and starts to fidget after a short while. 'Did I do something wrong?' he tries to recall nervously.
"You haven't been sleeping well," comes the comment after a while.
"Eh?" Naruto asks, surprised. Sometimes he wonders if his sensei could read minds.
"How'd you know?" he questions the dark-haired man after a while.
Severus merely gives him a look which Naruto usually interprets as the 'I know everything, silly brat' expression.
"Why?" Severus asks the boy, still staring intently at the blond.
Naruto shuffles his feet and looks down at the kitchen floor, unable to continue looking at the adult.
He didn't want to trouble his sensei any more than he already has. The man had opened his house to him and taught him many interesting things. Naruto now knows more about plants, gardening, tea, and herbal brews than he had before.
And he didn't stop there, Kuro-sensei even took the time to help him with his schoolwork when his academy teachers were more than happy to kick him out of their classes for being lazy and stupid.
He knows he isn't lazy or stupid.
He just didn't have the materials to study because the book stores wouldn't sell him any of their books. He had also tried going to the library but the librarian had thrown him out for 'dirtying their books'.
Sensei had been the only one to lend him some of his books, which looked to be really expensive as they had pretty hand-painted illustrations on them, and had taken the time to explain what they meant when Naruto couldn't quite understand some of the words.
He'd survive living on his own for this long anyway, what were these little nightmares to him? He'd just ignore them.
"Naruto," sensei calls out patiently in a firm voice, "why haven't you been sleeping?"
The boy fidgets under the stare he knows he is receiving.
"It's nothing, I just didn't feel like sleeping," Naruto answers in a tiny voice.
Severus sighs, he'd recognise this reluctance to admit weakness in an abused child anywhere. He'd seen it before.
He'd been there before.
'Some would say that you haven't outgrown it,' is what pops up in his head and Severus admits that some wounds can be difficult to heal even after many decades. He's trying, but it's hard sometimes to admit to your weaknesses and to ask for help.
'Perhaps the child is young enough to break out of this.'
"Why don't you feel like sleeping?" he probes.
Naruto squirms under his gaze before admitting, "I just don't like getting nightmares." His little head is still bowed to study the wooden kitchen floor.
'Nothing a little dreamless sleep potion can't handle,' Severus thinks but knows that it cannot remain the ultimate solution to the problem.
"What do you have nightmares about?" he further questions.
Naruto keeps silent before recalling his nightmares which have haunted him from time to time ever since he could remember.
He can't quite recall the exact details of the dream but his mind thinks of dank and gloomy corridors and a malevolent red aura that seeps out from the grimy walls. It brings a chill up his spine.
He slowly voices out the nightmare that he has been having for most of his life to the adult. When he is done, he sighs in relief as somehow telling someone else about his dreams seem to make it sound almost trivial. Under the warm kitchen light in Kuro-sensei's house, the nightmares don't seem so scary anymore.
Severus ponders on the information and wonders if the boy had seen one too many horror movies. He'd thought at first that the child would have been having nightmares about his bullies or of being reprimanded by his teachers in the academy. The picture Naruto paints about his dreams of a red aura however begins to ring alarm bells in his head.
But first, he has to make sure that the nightmares weren't simply a product of the child's vivid imagination.
"Naruto, I'm running out of lavender tea in the kitchen," he tells the boy.
The boy looks up in surprise at the sudden change in topic.
"Could you go to the storeroom and fill up the glass jar with it?" he points to an empty jar that sits on the counter with the other tea blends.
"Erm, okay!" Naruto nods before rushing off to do his bidding.
Kazu looks intently at him from his perch and caws.
Severus gives him a look before waving his right hand. The upper cupboard to his right swings open and a small bottle containing a purple potion floats down into his awaiting hand. The cupboard soon swings close and the cupboard door vanishes in under a second.
Moments later, Naruto stumbles back into the kitchen with a full glass jar of lavender in his hands.
"I got it, Kuro-sensei!" he happily says.
Severus nods in approval and then gestures for the boy to bring the jar over.
He opens the jar, takes a sniff at the contents and deems the tea to be in good condition.
"Sit," he instructs the child.
Naruto clambers up to the chair to his right and sits on it, eagerly looking at the older man. Severus knows he's awaiting another tea-lesson.
"Lavender tea, as I have told you before, is made from the buds of the lavender flower. People also use it in many perfumes and soaps for its aromatic scent but in tea, people drink it for its ability to induce calm and to improve sleep," he tells the boy.
Naruto nods at the information enthusiastically.
"Now watch," he says to the child as he starts the brewing process.
When he deems the tea to be ready, he pours out two cups of the tea. He takes out the bottle of dreamless sleep potion from his robes and drops a couple of drops into one of the porcelain cups.
"What's that sensei?" Naruto asks in curiosity.
"A simple herbal remedy," he tells the boy without further elaboration.
Naruto simply nods, used to the many different concoctions that Kuro-sensei has a tendency to pull out form his robes from time to time. He supposes that the brewing process for those were not for someone of his level of brewing yet as sensei hasn't taught him anything more than the recipes for the teas they serve at the tea shop.
'I'll work hard to be as good as sensei one day,' he thinks to himself.
Severus pushes the tea with the added dreamless sleep potion towards Naruto.
"Drink, I promise that you won't have any nightmares tonight."
He had only added a few drops so that the boy wouldn't fall asleep immediately on his kitchen table. The potion should take effect only when Naruto naturally falls to sleep tonight in his rented apartment.
Naruto sips at the cup, eager to try the new tea and wholly trusting of his sensei.
'It would be so easy to poison the poor brat,' he thinks as he looks at the innocent face.
"It's really good!" the boy exclaims. He says that every time he tries any of Severus' brews.
Severus simply nods at him.
When the boy has finished his tea, he starts to move to the kitchen sink but Severus stops him. "I'll clean up today," he says and reminds Naruto to turn in early today as tomorrow will be another school day.
After seeing the boy off and hearing the usual loud farewell of ,"Bye Bye Kuro-sensei", that could probably be heard from several streets away, Severus heads back to the kitchen.
Kazu looks at him knowingly and abandons his perch to sit on the man's shoulder.
"You suspect something," the bird points out.
Severus nods and waves a hand at the cupboard again.
Another bottle floats out and plops itself into his hand. This time, the potion is white instead of purple.
He opens the cork and white ethereal smoke begins to pour out from the bottle. Ignoring it, he fills Naruto's used cup with water before pouring a single drop of the divination potion into it.
Almost immediately, the liquid in the cup turns pure white and smoke starts to seep out of it. Severus looks into the cup and asks his question.
"What is the cause of Uzumaki Naruto's nightmares?"
Back in wizarding London, Severus had openly scorned at the subject of divination and labelled it as nothing more than a hoax. After all, not many had the gift of seeing and those who did would instinctively know the best method to use to suit their own practice of divination. Trelawney's 'lessons' back in Hogwarts made him scoff as pushing for a fixed curriculum of looking into crystal balls and reading tea leaves wouldn't correspond with everyone.
The truly gifted created their own tools after all.
He himself had not realised his own gift of seeing until he had, ironically, left the wizarding world and emerged in the shinobi continent. He had cursed Moldymort and the dark mark when he did discover this ability for if it wasn't for the cursed mark that had strangled his magical core, he would have been a much more powerful, and probably saner, wizard than he had been.
For that was its use wasn't it? To choke the magic out of the ones who weren't truly loyal to the cause.
If only he had known before and hadn't been so young and foolish.
Severus snapped out of his musings when the white smoke finally clears and an image appears in the tea cup.
A large red mass of red malevolent chakra in the shape of a nine-tailed fox stares back at him.
'Well, I guess my suspicions were proven correct,' he thinks.
'Now, what to do about it,' he ponders before an idea pops into his brain and he turns to look at the raven on his shoulder.
Kazu feels a sense of dread arise.
On Saturday, as they are having dinner once again in the kitchen, tempura this time, Severus studies the blond child happily munching on a shrimp. He looks to be more well rested than he had been the previous day.
"How would you like to stay over today?" he asks the boy.
Naruto pauses munching and the shrimp drops from his mouth to his rice bowl.
"Stay over?" he asks, confused.
"It's Sunday tomorrow and I thought we'd get an early start," he tells the boy. "I'm out of Konoha tree bark and I thought I'd show you how to harvest the tree bark without damaging the tree," he continues.
Naruto's face turns from confused to excited almost immediately.
"I get to stay over and go out to collect ingredients with you?" the boy asks with sparkles in his wide blue eyes.
Severus nods and adds, "I'd need you to do it for me sooner or later in any case. It's best I teach you now."
Naruto pumps his fist and eagerly agrees.
After dinner, Severus shows Naruto to the spare bedroom upstairs where his guests usually park themselves for the night when they visit.
Washi's spare hunting knife is still there in the cupboard from when had had last visited and forgotten to take it with him.
"Thanks Kuro-sensei!" Naruto brightly says as Severus shows him where the spare futon is. The boy already knows where the bathroom is from how often he's visited the house.
Severus is just glad he has magic to hide the secrets rooms he uses for magical purposes from overly curious eyes.
Before they go to bed though, Severus hands Naruto a light-blue concoction.
It's his latest invention, a restful-sleep potion.
*Restful-Sleep Potion*
- Silver-veined leaves powder (5 g)
- Stalk of a purple-spotted giant mushroom (sliced, 10 g)
- Blue fortune lilies (7 petals)
- White moon-tree bark (grated, 10 g)
"For a good rest," he says and informs the boy that it's a new recipe. Naruto just downs it happily, knowing that his sensei never lies about the effectiveness of his brews.
Severus bids him a good night and they both turn in for the day.
Kazu gives him a very acerbic glare as he bends down to finish adding in the last runes in chalk.
"I don't like this at all," the raven caws his discontent.
"It's for a good cause. And I thought you liked the boy," he replies.
"Tolerating his presence is not the same as risking our sanity for him," the bird croaks out.
Severus throws the raven an amused glance and teases, "I thought ravens were supposed to be good at this kind of thing, or were you guys just bragging?"
Kazu gives a bird-like sigh and bites out a very reluctant, "Fine."
He turns his head to pluck out a loose feather and flies over to land on Severus's shoulder. He then drops the feather into the man's open palm.
"You ready?" Severus asks as he moves to sit in the middle of the runic circle.
"Can I say no?" questions the bird sardonically.
Severus shakes his head in amusement and takes out a single blond hair, one he had oh so casually plucked from the boy's head during dinner.
He puts both the feather and the hair into the silver bowl in front of him and lights them both on fire with a simple flick of his hand.
The runes start to light up and the feather and hair swiftly burn to ashes when the flame turns a dark blue.
Severus feels the familiar stretching sensation and he closes his eyes. When he next opens it, he finds himself in the dream-world of the blond boy sleeping in the next room.
Kazu caws in disgust and Severus has to agree.
Like what Naruto had described, the walls around him are grimy with unidentifiable filth. The place is dank and gloomy, something almost straight out of a horror movie. Any minute now Severus expects to see a bloody ghost pop out from one of the walls.
"Do you think the Kyuubi is planning to scare his vessel to death in hopes of escape?" he asks Kazu.
"It might just work," Kazu comments as they both feel the heavy malicious aura start to thicken in the air.
"Let's go," he says as they head further towards the end of the corridor where the aura seems to be coming from.
Severus' footsteps echo loudly as he takes one step after another. It bothers him because there are no other sounds save that.
'It's just a dream,' he tells himself and continues at a leisurely pace.
All of a sudden, he hears a loud booming sinister laugh.
"Come closer stranger," calls a deep voice, it reverberates through the corridors.
He pauses for a while on instinct before looking at Kazu who nods back at him to continue the journey.
He halts at the end of the corridor where large metal bars stop him from going any further.
Large red eyes appear from the darkness beyond the bars and he gets his first glimpse of the creature in this dream world.
The creature laughs again and Severus has to control his racing heart. The malevolent chakra pouring out in waves are really not easy to withstand even in a dream.
"Stranger, why have you come?" questions the beast as he shows off all his very pointy teeth to the man standing in front of his cage.
Kazu caws up at the creature to call out to his own existence.
"A raven-summons, how interesting. I don't think I've ever seen one of your kind," the creature says, eyeing the bird.
"We've stayed away from the human continent," replies the raven.
"Oh? And why have you chosen to appear now? And with a strange human even," questions the Kyuubi.
Severus clears his throat at this point to interrupt.
"To answer your earlier question, I came to offer you a deal," says the dark-haired man.
The creature hears this and laughs out loud. "A deal? Me?" the Kyuubi continues with his booming laughter.
"In case you haven't noticed stranger, I'm a little tied up right now," the creature adds sarcastically.
"It's to do with your Jinchuuriki," Severus tells the beast after a moment's pause.
The walls shake at an alarming rate as the beast struggles with his chains in anger. "You mean my prison?" he asks enraged and malevolent chakra pours out in large waves, buffeting Severus who stands his ground.
Kazu gives him a look that says, 'Well, you tried.'
Severus sighs and waits for the beast to calm before he tries again.
"The dream-scape is a mirror of the intentions and feelings of the one who dreams," he starts.
The creature looks at him in disbelief for a moment before choosing to hear what the strange human has to say. There's something utterly alien about the power the man carries, strange but powerful.
"This filthy place," Severus indicates, "and the chains you are bound with are manifestations of the intentions and emotions, consciously or subconsciously, of both your Jinchuuriki and yourself. If you wish to spend your days in better conditions, you might want to start trying to be nicer to the boy."
Severus waits for another outburst but the Kyuubi simply sneers at him.
"What do I care of how this place looks, human? A prison is a prison regardless," the creature tells him.
The human nods and says, "But what if I could promise you your freedom in a way?"
"How?" the tailed beast regards him with suspicion.
"You're a creature made from pure energy and as such it'll be relatively easy to separate your main body, which is really just a mass of chakra, from your mind," he tells the beast.
After a moment of contemplation, the creature asks, "Are you saying that you want to leave my body inside this prison but move my mind outside it?"
Severus nods to confirm.
"How?" the creature questions again.
"Simple, although you won't be able to move very far from your jinchuuriki, say within the radius of the village, you'll be able to move freely in a different vessel; one in which only you will be occupying," Severus says.
"But I wouldn't have most of my chakra," the Kyuubi points out.
The human nods.
"What vessel would I be placed in?" the creature asks to clarify.
"You don't have to worry about that for now," Severus waves his hand in dismissal. "But I swear on my magic that I have no intention to bring harm to you in any form," he promises.
The air shimmers with magic for moment, signifying the truth of the human's oath. The kyuubi himself feels the truth of those words and starts to deliberate on his answer.
"What is it you want from me then?" the creature asks.
"Your vessel, whose name is Naruto if you didn't know, is a child of six. Although he has been a relatively independent child, being the vessel of a tailed beast is a huge burden on his growing body," Severus says.
"As such, it would be prudent for his continued good health if you didn't start leaking chakra out into his body when he doesn't quite yet know what it is or even what to do with it," he continues.
"Are you telling me that all you want from granting me a separate body is for me to control my chakra for the good health of the brat?" asks the Kyuubi incredulously.
Severus coughs lightly into his closed fist.
"There might also be a secret organisation bent on using you and the rest of the tailed beasts as a battery to destroy the world. I hoped that with you in a separate body, we might be able to come up with a solution for this world-ending scenario together," he adds on.
"They dare?!" the beast rages.
Severus waits a moment for the beast to calm down from his barrage of insults to human-kind and their mothers before asking, "So, are we agreed?"
The beast quiets down, observes him from head to toe before asking him more questions about the proposed deal and the secret world-ending organisation. Severus tells him about all he knows from what his contacts have told him and they carry on back and forth till the beast runs out of questions.
"Fine," the creature bites out.
Severus nods.
"So we're agreed, Kyuubi?" he asks again to confirm.
"Kurama," the creature says.
"I'm sorry?" Severus asks bewildered.
"My name's Kurama," the kyuubi answers.
"If I have to spend a large amount of time in your company, you might as well call me by my name," the creature adds, his snout turned away.
"You still haven't told me what my new vessel will be," grumbles the creature.
Severus just grins.
The next morning, they go out to one of the many forests within Konoha.
Naruto carries the basket and hops happily at his side questioning about different plants along the way.
He'd been dead to the world yesterday even after Severus had exited his dream-scape. Kurama had also kept his promise of stopping his chakra from leaking out.
Severus had used his own magic on the boy to check.
'Well, that solves the problem of nightmares,' he thinks.
It's just the two of them today as Kazu has returned to his kin in the Lone-Moon Forest to request for some Silver-Moon Water from the sacred pond.
In the meantime, he'd have to reach out to his contacts to spread the word. With the ninetails' cooperation, they should be able to discreetly warn the other eight tailed beasts and their jinchuuriki to watch out for any secret organisations bent on hunting them down. It'd be good if the other villages caught wind of the potential world –ending scenario and dealt with the Akastuki to save them the trouble.
Washi's comment about a secret organisation of their own flashes through his mind but he dismisses it easily. It would be just easier to get the news out to the key players and leave them to worry about their own backsides.
'Next week,' he thinks, 'the potion should be ready in a week.'
Kurama will have to wait till then.