Author's note: I should consider warning everyone that there is an actual scene of childbirth. I did my best to avoid any great details. Trust me, I can get quite detailed with things. I opted to spare my readers of such. All of, oh, six or seven of you who made it this far. Also, Madara is a product of his time. (He's misogynistic.)
"You are a disgrace," Madara said. "You should be ashamed for your weakness. Crying, as if it hurts. How painful can this process be, for you?"
A whimper was his only answer, shortly followed by a howl. Shinzou held her breath through the contraction and pushed, but still had the strength to level a glare at Madara. Being on all fours with her cousin Boshi preparing to catch prevented Madara and Hashirama from a bird's eye view of the actual miracle of life. It also made it easier for Shinzou to glare at them.
"Labor," Madara continued, enjoying the chance to allow his sadistic cruelty reign free, "is no excuse to break down and snivel. I honestly expected you to be stronger."
Hashirama shook his free fist at Madara. "She is breaking my hand! You hold her hand, and see how well you don't cry when she snaps all twenty-seven bones!"
Shinzou took a breath as the contraction eased up. "What the hell was I thinking when I invited you two?" Then she sucker-punched Madara in the knee. It ached and throbbed immediately. "You still haven't heated up the water, yet. We're going to need that for clean-up."
Hashirama attempted to free his hand from Shinzou's iron grip. Her claws had sunk deep, and blood ribboned from his hand down to her elbow. "The Mystic Palm, by its very name, requires use of my hands. It's hard to heal with just one hand!"
"That's lousy." She reluctantly released him, and he scooted out of her reach, cradling the broken, bruised, swollen limb to his chest. His other hand glowed green and he pressed it against the mess that Shinzou had made. Before Madara could move towards the leather bucket, Shinzou snatched his hand. "Squeezing something helps focus my mind," she told him, as he studied her grip and wondered if he should cut her hand off above, or below, the point of her wrist.
"Why do we need them again?" Bashira asked, crouching next to Shinzou's head. Bashira was the youngest of the Inuzuka women present, and Madara would eat his armor if she wasn't any older than fourteen years old. She was as half-naked as her kinswomen, but her chest was flat and easy to ignore in favor of the graceful, sweeping horses painted in the same plum-purple that colored the triangles on her face.
"Because the Senju has the Mystic Palm, it's a bitch to run with vaginal and perineal tears, and I don't trust the Uchiha's control to contain the fight to themselves and not get our daughters caught up in the middle."
Madara grunted as Shinzou tightened her grip and pushed with her next contraction. He was beginning to regret mocking Hashirama's discomfort.
"Almost here," Boshi said. "The head is starting to crown."
Madara felt his stomach swim at Boshi's announcement. Across the ravine, where they had crossed earlier to provide some semblance of privacy, the remaining Senju and Uchiha men were lounging in the bushes with fingers stuffed in their ears. The four other Inuzuka women were nestled in a pile of their ninken, and they all appeared to be taking an afternoon nap. It was exceedingly rare for men to be present when their wives gave birth – it was unheard of to be present with a woman they weren't married to.
Shinzou, apparently, didn't seem anymore bothered by the presence of Madara and Hashirama than she was bothered by displaying her leaking breasts or squirming stomach to the world.
There was no shame in retreating from this area, but there was probably shame in cutting off a woman's hand while she was in labor.
Madara was strongly considering the pros (many) and cons (at the moment, very few) of throwing honor to the wind and bringing shame down on his head to escape this horrific situation when Shinzou finally pushed life into the world.
The squalling infant made more noise than Shinzou did. Boshi passed the infant to Bashira, and Madara stared as Boshi quickly tied a leather thong around the grotesque white cord that stretched from behind Shinzou to the infant's stomach, pinching it tight. She tied another leather thong just few finger lengths above the first. Boshi then held her hand out to Madara expectedly. "Kunai!" she barked.
Madara blinked at her. There was a spread of pooling blood between Shinzou's knees, and he was pretty sure that a sharp blade wasn't going to improve the situation. Was it normal for woman to bleed like that? No wonder so many died in childbirth.
"Kunai! You've got the blade, and I've got to cut the cord." Madara reluctantly handed it over. It was sharp enough that Boshi sliced through the cord without any effort. He suddenly felt slightly better, like he had contributed an important part in this entire process.
"What do I get to do?" Hashirama asked eagerly, stroking the infant's goop-covered head with a single finger.
"You can't do anything until after I pass the afterbirth," Shinzou replied.
Madara studied the infant as Bashira carefully cleaned white gunk and blood away from the infant's face. It shrieked like a cat, and almost as loud. He focused on the size of the infant's head and shoulders. He thought of how tight it felt in sex, sheathed deep in a woman's body. He mentally compared the size of those shoulders to the size of his erection. There was a discernible difference.
With a full body-shudder, Shinzou squeezed Madara's hand again and rocked her hips as Boshi carefully tugged on the end of the cord still attached to Shinzou. A reddish white blob, almost as large as the baby, plopped to the ground with another gush of blood.
Madara gritted his teeth and refused to let his own pain show. He had always considered women to be the weaker sex. He still did, even after this. So if Shinzou wasn't going to scream when the infant and whatever the hell that was came out of her body, through what was normally not a very large orifice, then he wasn't going to make a fuss over his hand.
As Hashirama, guided by Boshi, moved around and raised his glowing hands to soothe away damage that Madara gratefully couldn't see from his angle, Bashira carefully displayed the infant in front of Shinzou. Her smile was bright. "You have a daughter," Bashira announced.
Shinzou didn't smile, but her face glowed with pride and satisfaction. "She shall be called Koppun."
Madara's gaze flickered to the blood that continued to pool beneath Shinzou. It now reached the point of her elbows.
"Um, is this level of bleeding normal?" Hashirama asked. "I've never, uh, had to be a midwife before, and the uterus is not an organ I'm familiar with."
"The bleeding? Yes. Those tears?" Boshi pointed. Hashirama tried not to look, but did so anyway after she elbowed him in the side hard enough to audibly crack a rib. "Those are not normal. And make sure you see what you're doing – don't heal the vagina shut, you idiot."
"What," asked Madara, "would you have done if this had been a son?"
The warm look in Shinzou's face froze. Her eyes glittered, like sun off of the hilt of a kunai. "I suppose the usual action wouldn't do, what with all of us working together to rescue children." There was no joy or amusement in the smile she gave him. "But that doesn't matter, here and now. I have a daughter, and she is mine." Then she turned her head south, brow furrowing with concern. "Ah, my sister has called upon her guardian. Bashira, get some water and help me wash up – we're going to have to move fast, now."
oOoOoOo
(In another world or another timeline...)
As Hashirama, guided by Boshi, moved around and raised his glowing hands to soothe away damage that Madara gratefully couldn't see from his angle, Bashira carefully angled her body away from Shinzou, hiding the infant with sight. "It's a boy." She spat the word like it burned in her mouth.
Madara had thought the grip Shinzou had was painful before. He was so wrong. So very, very, wrong. The grip tightening in rage was worse. Then, with a deep breath, Shinzou released Madara. She pushed herself upright, ignoring Hashirama's squawk as she sat on his hands. Madara really, really didn't need to look at Shinzou's body from this angle. Her stomach was still swollen, and yet oddly deflated. Her nostrils flared as she gripped Bashira's bony shoulder and pushed her around to verify the infant's sex.
Her claws left bloody pricks in the infant's leg. "Leave it," she growled. "Should've known… worthless lump of flesh." Her eyes gleamed with moisture. "Of course it would also run a week late and inconvenience everything."
"Hell no!" Hashirama slid free from Shinzou's backside. "You do not get to lecture Madara and me on the safety and wellbeing of children, you do not get to drag us cross-country as part of your rescue party, and you do not get to leave a newborn to die from abandonment!"
"Then you take it!"
"I will!"
Bashira immediately shoved the infant into Hashirama's arms before he could change his mind.
Shinzou's expression immediately settled into something remarkably smug. "Hah. Natsumi bet that I would just pawn this one on to Shikataro. She now owes me two hundred ryo since I found an entirely different clan to accept it."
Madara eyed her as he tucked his aching, protesting hand under an armpit and tried to pretend that it wasn't on fire in utter agony. "So that's why Shikataro offered to send some clansmen. Not because he felt we needed more help, but because he knew that you would try abandoning your own flesh and blood if it was a boy."
Shinzou eyed him back. "Inuzuka don't claim boys. We won't claim them. Boys grow up to be men," her expression darkened, "and the only thing I've found a man to be good for is for breeding, and not even pleasurably, at that. My sisters and I can do anything that you can do, and more." Shinzou's expression shifted once again. She looked smug and sly. "Besides," she added, "it was a Senju I seduced to sire my child. It seems appropriate to give it back to its sire."
Hashirama turned white. "Wait – what?"
"Not you, personally."
Hashirama heaved a sigh of relief. "Oh good, because I know who I've slept with, and you're not it. So, um, now what?" He looked plaintively at the infant. His legs and arms jerked in the air with his wails. "How am I supposed to feed the baby? What do they eat?" He looked at Madara.
"Why are you looking at me?" Madara asked.
"You've got nieces and nephews."
Madara pointed at Shinzou with the hand that wasn't broken. "She's the one with the experience." The closest he had ever come to childcare was holding the children when Izuna had offered, although two weeks ago he had attempted to show little Obito how to correctly hold a kunai. (Madara decided he would leave early instruction to Izuna's care, after the rotten little chibi stabbed him in the hand with said kunai.)
Shinzou sighed, as if she was martyring herself. "Oh, very well. I can't expect you to find a wet nurse right now. I shall agree to breastfeed your son until after we've rescued our children, and have agreed to part ways."
Hashirama's eyes narrowed. "That's quite generous of you." He wasn't given to sarcasm often, so Madara didn't know if Hashirama was just being polite, or really was sarcastic.
oOoOoOo
Whales are very large animals. Izuna had seen the stripped-down carcasses on the beaches. The Sarutobi clan moonlighted as whale hunters during the winter; the Uchiha would travel to the beaches to trade for blubber so the clanswomen could make candles. And while summon contracts were rare, Izuna was familiar enough with them to know that the more powerful the summoned creature was, the larger its size. Izuna just couldn't tell if Natsumi had summoned a very powerful whale, as they tended to be the size of a mountain anyway.
Izuna had never seen a live whale out of water. He was pretty sure, given the expression in its eye as it rolled around before finally settled on Natsumi, that the whale had also never been out of water before.
"Really?" the whale asked Natsumi, its voice so deep and so low that Izuna's eardrums throbbed with pain.
"Desperate times call for desperate measure," Natsumi replied, one hand on her hip as she surveyed the damage.
The whale's fins flapped in the air and the tail thrashed as it floundered on dry land. The tail wiped out a third of the cottonwood trees, sending the ancient trees flying through the air like they were match sticks. "Do I look like I'm the best thing to call up in a fight on land?" The deep rumbling of its indignant voice made the creek flow backwards. "You couldn't have tried the geese, the lions, the boars, or even the damn squirrels?"
"I needed something large enough to give me room to breathe." Natsumi's hands flared green, and she ran them up and down her legs and torso. Her right knee cap, swollen and livid purple, quickly returned to a normal state. The bloom of bruises across her liver disappeared. Lastly, she closed the laceration across her cheek. "Things are about to get much more serious." She glanced towards the tree where Izuna and Tobirama were perched. "I don't know what the hell just happened, but the moment, he touched his tongue to my blood, something sunk its claws into my soul."
The whale's eye, which seemed strangely small for its gigantic size, rolled in exasperation. "I'd ask you if you're sure you know what you're doing, but you never know what you're doing."
Tobirama snorted, even though Izuna was the only one who could hear him at this distance. "Hell of an understatement."
Natsumi tossed her head back and laughed. "I like to wing it, but I'm so sure of myself, it all works out in the end."
The whale almost said something more, but instead its expression froze. Natsumi slapped her hands together at the same time as it roared – a deep roar that blew one of Izuna's eardrums, blood instantly streaming out of his left ear, and shook the trees. Natsumi dispelled the whale, but not in time to prevent a spray of blood as the berserker carved a black path through the whale with his axe. Beneath the rain of blood, his skull was intact, fused together as if it had never been injured. His blond hair and beard was now a deep black, and his skin was a deep shade of silver without a single bruise to be seen. His erection still jutted upward. Without the whale's body covering him up, even in the pool of blood, they could see that he stood in the center of a ritualistic-looking black triangle that was surrounded by a black circle.
"Before he welcomes you, sváss, Jashin says you must embrace your suffering."
Natsumi made a show of looking up and down the length of the berserker's body. "I like to think of myself as a modern woman who enjoys a good roll in the hay with a handsome stud, but I'm going to have to pass this time around."
The berserker cackled, half-mad and half-amused, and silently slammed the butt of his axe into his left thigh. As the sound of the femur shattering echoed across the countryside, Natsumi's left leg collapsed. She instantly dropped to her right knee, bending over with a half-strangled shout as she pressed her left hand against the surface of her thigh, no glow evident. Through his Sharingan gaze, Izuna could see the rapidly spreading bruise beneath her bronzed skin.
The berserker cackled again, and made a show of digging the point of one axe blade into his skin, just below the clavicle, and tugged it with vicious jerks down and crosswise, flaying open a ragged laceration that bit through skin and muscle from chest to hipbone. "Praise Jashin," the berserker cried with a moan that would've been better placed in a bedroom. "As we share our suffering, the heathens are baptized and brought into Jashin's beloved folds."
With her back turned towards them, they didn't see if an identical ragged laceration split open Natsumi's torso, but they saw the stream of blood drip to the ground.
As Tobirama's breath hitched, Izuna realized in an instant how his clanspeople had died. The men had attacked, and the berserker waded through them, shrugging off their assault with the same supernatural ease that allowed him to survive Natsumi's blows. He would've slowly collected the blood of the attacking Uchiha men with swipes of his axe blade, so that everyone was pulled into this bizarre ritual at the same time. That was why everyone's wounds had been identical.
Natsumi's elbows flounced as her hands moved through several hand signs, and her chakra flared – Izuna immediately copied the jutsu. "Water bullet!" She spat, and the attack struck the berserker's left upper arm, drilling a precise hole through it. His grip on the axe wavered only slightly as an identical hole immediately formed in Natsumi's left upper arm. "Hey!" She clamped her right hand over it, but the blood didn't stop.
The berserker's pelvis rocked forward. "Yeeeesssss. Everything that happens to me will happen to you. We are linked."
Natsumi's breathing was ragged. "Everything?"
"Everything."
Her hand flared green. The hole healed over, a quick patchwork job that only knit muscles and skin together to keep the arm functioning and to stop the bleeding.
The hole in the berserker's arm remained open and bleeding.
It was Natsumi's turn to cackle. "It's a one-way link!" She stood upright, gingerly transferring her weight to her left leg, shifting her stance as the berserker's glee melted into an expression of uncertainty. She moved her green glowing hand to her left thigh. "All the damage you incur is what will get shared with me, but all the recovery I make doesn't get shared with you." Over her shoulder, she yelled, "Uchiha, this is now a two-man job!"
He was beside her in an instant, moving too quickly for a stunned Tobirama to interfere. "What do you need me to do?"
"First thing first, you get rid of the arm with the axe, and I find out if I can reattach severed limbs."
Izuna was must faster than Natsumi, even faster than the berserker. It took three enhanced blows with his wakizashi, however, and very fluid dodging from the berserker's limbs that the Sharingan predicted, to cleave the left arm away from the shoulder. A quick glance into the berserker's eyes sent another shiver racing up and down Izuna's spine. He kicked the arm out of the circle and dodged backwards, skidding to a halt beside Natsumi and raising his sword upward to parry any follow-through attacks.
"No one invited you to my party," Natsumi told Tobirama irritably as he bent over Natsumi with her cleaved arm in his own hands.
"You don't have enough free limbs to hold your severed arm in place while you heal," Tobirama snapped.
"Oh, right. Huh. I guess I should've thought that through a little better." Her hand was glowing green still as he carefully pressed the limb where it belonged – blood gushed around them. The famed Uzumaki regeneration also worked in Natsumi's favor, as steam rose from the laceration that crossed her chest while her flesh knit together.
The berserker roared. He dug and clawed his other fingers through his stump.
"Ow! Owowow you sonovabitch!" Tobirama kept her severed arm in place with one hand, and wrapped his other arm around her torso as Natsumi's legs jerked violently and collapsed. He gently lowered her to the ground, amidst flattened prairie grasses, and summoned a bubble of water to wrap around her healing hand and severed limb – the bubble of water stopped blood from spurting from the large, exposed arteries.
"He's not stepping out of the ritual circle," Izuna whispered.
The berserker flung his hand wide and chanted in his native language. Izuna, seeing the arm and axe outside of the circle twitching, flashed across the site and pinned the axe down with a heavy foot.
"Dibs!" Natsumi yelled. Umeboshi was a brown blur, growling and snarling as he raced across the prairie. He sunk his teeth into the fleshy wrist, and braced his paws against the dirt as the arm elevated in the air and spun towards the berserker. The arm pulled towards the berserker with such force that it slid through Umeboshi's teeth, flaying the skin open like ribbons.
"Hey!" Izuna flickered his gaze back to Natsumi and Tobirama at Tobirama's shout. "The teeth! She's not getting injured!" Natsumi's severed arm didn't have any identical lacerations caused by teeth. And it wasn't even severed anymore – she had forced bones to reattach, and the muscles were now stretching towards each other, half under the influence of her Mystic Palm, half uncontrolled from the Uzumaki regeneration.
Izuna felt a smile stretch across his face. "I'm going to incinerate the arm and see if it's as indestructible as the rest of him. Release the arm, Umeboshi!" With a whine, Umeboshi opened his jaws, and the hovering arm shot back towards the berserker. Before it reached the ritual circle, Izuna freed the burning flames he sensed behind his right eye – the detached limb was instantly engulfed in the black fire of Amaterasu.
The berserker screamed again, this time in rage.
"Dibs on the axe!" Natsumi called, which was still pinned beneath Izuna's foot.
The berserker slammed his right fist into his right thigh – the femur shattered from sheer force. The berserker stayed upright as Natsumi gritted her teeth and flinched. Izuna left the axe behind as he shunshinned sideways to hover in front of Natsumi. She flickered her gaze up to his, steely with pride and utterly lacking in any fear, either of further injury or even her own death, and he pulled her into a genjutsu that would last only a heartbeat in real time.
"The fucking hell, Uchiha!" He had pulled them into an illusionary world of the Uchiha winter fortress, and filled it with a fog so she couldn't get a closer look at the structures. Between the emptiness of life, and the faded edges of white, it looked like an eerie ghost town. "I don't have time for this shit!"
"This is happening at the speed of thought. It's the only thing we have time for. How much can you take?"
She planted her hands on her hips. "Take what?"
"You're linked to the berserker. I know how the berserkers fight now, I know why they managed to survive and slaughter my clanspeople, but I still don't know how to kill one. Every strike I make, every injury I cause, you're going to experience every single thing. You can heal from the injuries, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the berserker will die from the injuries."
"I already know I can repair severed limbs. We know you can set fire to those pieces. Whittle him down, piece by piece. Even if we can't kill him, there's not much he can do if he's missing his arms and legs."
"Can you survive decapitation?"
Natsumi tapped her chin in thought. "Probably not. I don't think I'd be able to heal myself fast enough to recover from garroting, either, even if we kept the spine intact. I haven't yet figured out how to use the Mystic Palm to improve red blood cell reproduction, so I'm still at risk for shock from blood loss. At the rate we're going, I'll just die faster from exsanguination if you try to separate head from shoulder."
"Can you survive evisceration?"
She wrinkled her nose at him. "I already told you, Uchiha, intestines stink when you cut into them. I can deal with getting dismembered, but having to smell something like that on top of everything else is bordering on torture." After a moment of studying his face, her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "You do want torture."
"Not you," Izuna said quickly. Given this woman's strength, stamina, abilities, and the fact that she could squash him with a whale, he was better off not making enemies with her. "After this, I probably owe you at least two good favors. It's just…" He took a deep breath, and braced himself for the truth. She seemed like she would appreciate it.
The fog swirled, and revealed the bodies. "When a woman is five months pregnant, do you know how large the baby is?" Natsumi said nothing as she walked closer, and then crouched at the funeral pyre, ready to be lit. "My wife tried to defend herself with a wok. He eviscerated her. I… I want him to feel everything that she felt."
Natsumi placed her hand, palm-down, flat on the pyre, and compared the size of it against the smaller of the two bodies present. Then she stood up. "Ah, fuck." She stretched her neck, rocking her head side to side. "Whatever you dish out, just make sure you give me time in between to heal enough that I keep on surviving. If you can get him out of that ritual circle, then you can chop off his head. I still want to live until I'm a hundred years old."
"Why?"
She grinned at him. "Why not?"
Izuna pulled them out of the genjutsu. Natsumi flashed him a smile that showed all her teeth and grit. "Make it hurt," she told him. She lifted her glowing green hand up and patted Tobirama's shoulder. "Let Izuna do his work," she said softly as Izuna stalked towards the berserker, blade flickering silver in the sunlight. "He's got permission to make it as brutal as I can endure."
Author's addendum: Koppun roughly translates into powdered bone. Also, Natsumi's guardian should've been a magpie, on account of her greedy love for shiny/fancy/powerful objects.