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How're you doing?
A HUGE SHOUT-OUT to Taro of the scarlet plains, AidenJacksonSmithDSBB, AvexedAuthor, Dre17, and Spark681. You're all amazing people :]
Disclaimer before you read: a part of this story contains graphic depictions of suicide and other depressing themes. Read at your own risk.
You guys might hate the way I ended this story XD
Enjoy…
Epilogue
Twenty-four years later
6:10 AM
Akai countryside
Kiri
It was another early morning at the Uzumaki household.
The smells of breakfast permeated the house—rice pudding, and pancakes with bean paste filling, with a brew of coffee boiling on the coffee maker and a kettle of water, for tea, bubbling gently on the stove.
In the serenely located countryside, the Uzumaki home didn't stand out much from their distant neighbours; a one-storey home made from red bricks and concrete painted a dusky shade of orange and had dark blue roof tiles. A barn a stone's throw from the main house was painted similarly, albeit far older and in constant need of maintenance. A short, waist-height fence surrounded the large property, marked by warnings for visitors against wild animals that prowled the property.
A lush, trimmed field of grass made up the entirety of the grounds within the property, and the same could be said for the fields for miles around outside of the land, some of which were populated by farms and animals grazing sheep. A gravel road passed the front of the property, leading further into the countryside and also into main Kiri.
A cobbled path from the gate led to the cream-coloured front door.
It was a simple home, having a living room, dining room, and kitchen with a store, three bedrooms upstairs and a single bathroom. The windows were thrown open, allowing pleasant streams of light to bask the sleepy home in warmth.
Aoki slowly ambled up the stairs, her left hand holding the stair rail and her right hand on her hip, supporting her back as the slight bump of her belly threw off her centre of gravity. She was in a dark grey shirt, and black loose-fitting shorts and her feet were nestled in a comfortable pair of slippers. Tied over her torso was a red apron with white writing that said in block letters, Kiss the Cook.
She got to the top of the stairs and steadily walked to the first door on the left. On the door hung a sign with a name written on it.
Enter if you dare
She knocked her fist on the door and turned the doorknob without delay, pushing inside and sighing in exasperation at the total darkness inside the room.
"Nezu, I know you're awake," she called into the room, standing at the doorway with both of her hands on her hips and a slight shake of her head. She squinted into the room, her eyes jumping up to the ceiling and curiously saying, "Nezuko…?"
Two pairs of red, vulpine eyes flicked open from the ceiling and a slow, toothy grin grew on the person's face, visible enough to darken the imagery.
She lunged at Aoki and the woman casually caught the girl by her face, halting any sort of ambush with a weary exhale, even as the girl futilely thrashed her arms and legs, the eight spider appendages at her back clicking and twitching to tag her mother.
"Do we have to do this every day?"
The woman waited until her daughter had stopped struggling, swinging her hands to scratch her mother, and weathered the pointless onslaught until the girl slumped into Aoki's hand, looking up at her mother through the woman's fingers with four irritated red eyes.
Nezu was a ten-year-old girl a messy yellow hair, shortened to a curved bob with a fringe falling to her upper eyelids. The girl had a healthy flush to her skin, something she certainly didn't get from her pasty father. She was still in her pyjamas, barefoot and clearly just woken up from sleep.
Aoki smirked and shoved her daughter back, telling her, "Get dressed." Before she entered her daughter's room, she made a general gesture with her finger, flicking it up and down her daughter and pointing at her four eyes and her spider limbs. "And get rid of those. You know the rules."
The girl grunted, a simmering glare following her mother as she carefully padded into her room, tossing open the windows. Aoki distractedly picked up Nezu's books and notes littered haphazardly on the ground, neatly arranging them on the girl's desk.
She paused a moment to admire the girl's trophies, seated on a shelf—two first place trophies for outstanding performance in a math competition, first place in a spelling bee, three cheap plaques for best attendance for a student, three first place and a single second place trophies for a regional and continental chess tournament, and finally, there was a scrappy trophy made from a toilet roll and a tennis ball. Her younger brother made that for her.
"Good morning to you too, mom," Nezu said in a sarcastic chipper tone. She closed her eyes and the eyes at her temple shut, the eyelids smoothed together till they disappeared as the eight appendages sprouting from her back pulled back into her body. Nezu slowly strolled into the room and snatched a wrinkled shirt from her mother, stubbornly shaking her head when her mother insisted on taking it to the laundry, pointing for her mother to leave her room.
"Fine." Aoki shook her head and made to walk out, but stopped, turning to the red-eyed girl and asking, "Where'd your father go?"
The girl frowned and walked to her bed, fumbling with the sheets and dressing her bed. "He went hunting."
"Nezu," Aoki said firmly and the girl sealed her lips, giving her back to her mother. She flinched when Aoki called her again, using her full name. "Nezuko."
"He's…in the lab, said he wanted to work off some stress," she reluctantly supplied, spying a look over her shoulder. She saw the anguished expression on her mother's face and the girl's jaw tightened, standing upright and turning around to Aoki, keeping her hands tucked behind her. Her voice dipped to its normal tone—sombre and calculating. "Did both of you fight again?"
Aoki feigned a smile, doing her best to look nonchalant. "We didn't fight. It was just a small disagreement."
The girl's pointed stare didn't relax, narrowing somewhat as her vulpine pupils became thinner. "Was it about me and Ichiro? Again?"
The woman waved away her daughter's piercing stare, chuckling, "You're too smart for your age, Nezu." She left the room, calling after her, "Get dressed and tell your father that breakfast's ready. The bus will be here soon."
The girl's lips screwed into a contemplative frown, alone in her room and tilting her eyes to the ground, she answered, "Yeah. Sure, mom."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Nezu stepped down the stairs wearing her clothes for the day. She had on jean overall shorts that reached her mid-tight, and a dark, long-sleeved shirt underneath with matching leggings and plain white converse. The girl lugged a rainbow-coloured backpack on her back, one strap slung over her shoulder and gripped in her right hand.
The girl also wore a camouflage green baseball cap with words neatly and visibly sewn at the front.
Daddy's Little Abomination
At the last step, she hopped off with both feet, landing with an absentminded flourish. She faced the dining room and caught sight of her mother busying herself by arranging three plates at the table, fidgeting with Ichiro's highchair, until she looked up and saw her daughter slide into the dining room. At the displeased flicker of her mother's lips and the lower of her eyebrows, Nezu knew exactly what her mother was going to say.
"Must you wear that? It sends the wrong message," she said, talking about Nezu's cap.
"Dad made this for me," Nezu replied, tilting her chin up in defiance and standing her ground. "I think it's tasteful."
"It's not," the woman said immediately. "Take it off."
"No," Nezu fired back.
"Nezuko, I said, take it off."
"No."
Aoki glared and her eyes hardened. "You're too young to start rebelling against your mother. Take. It. Off."
"I said, no." Nezu's face screwed up in irritation and her mother's scowl deepened, reddening her face until the woman's hands jumped to her temple, rubbing her fingers deeply over her brow and tiredly slumping onto a dining chair. Nezu's face flickered with regret, backtracking half a step and closing her hands into fists. "Mom, I'm—"
"Please, go and look for your father," Aoki mumbled, her face hidden behind her hands.
"Mom—"
"Nezuko," Aoki interrupted her daughter, not looking at the remorse marring the normally controlled girl's expression. "Please, go."
The girl gnashed her teeth and swallowed. She stood upright, toughening her chin and squaring her shoulders, she carelessly tossed her backpack into the living room on her way to the front door and marched off to find her father.
Nezu closed the front door after herself and stood there, closing her eyes and exhaling a tight breath as she slumped against the door. She stayed like that, tucking her hands into her overall pockets and frustrated with herself, letting her head cool down as the warm rays of the sunrise poured over her.
A minute later, she pushed off the door and walked to the barn with clipped steps, treading the soft grass and crossing the field to the large, wooden building on the western corner of the property. The large doors were wide open and she saw some fluorescent lights beaming on from inside.
Inside was her father's laboratory.
The floor was tiled white and yellow checkered patterns, polished till they shone and ebbing a mildly sterilized, lemony scent. The instruments were primarily made from stainless steel, arranged accordingly inside a glass case on the far-off right side of the barn, along with a few empty beakers, test tubes and syringes. On three sides of the barn—the left, back, and right sides—was a long white counter with a marble countertop, devoid of even the tiniest speck of dust, split into three sections for the three sides but connected at an angle. At the centre of the barn was an operating table, which had a human-shaped depression from sometime recent.
An air conditioner purred somewhere in the background, obscured by the lights of the fluorescent lights.
At the back of the barn, Nezu found her father, and a whisper of a smile lifted her face.
He was in a white lab coat and black sweatpants, hunched over a microscope and animatedly scribbling into the notebook with his left hand. His unruly short blonde hair was spiked carelessly with streaks of grey running on the right side of his head, carefully carried himself from the microscope a few steps to the left and picked out a few items from a cabinet—a Bunsen burner, a beaker, a bottle of water and some ten other chemicals stored inside thick, plastic containers.
The man took a few trips back and forth from his microscope, transporting the items there before he returned to observing whatever it was he was looking at through the microscope.
Nezu noted her father had a sizeable hunch at his back, taking care not to move too much or jostle too hard with his manner of tingling excitement.
She came over to him and his ears perked up, twisting around with a large smile, eyes closed and the laughter lines of his face became genially more pronounced.
"Morning."
"Morning, dad," she greeted him, the corners of her eyes turning up and the man teasingly ruffled her hair, chuckling silently when she threw his hand away.
He went back to what he was doing, flicking on the burner and setting on a beaker filled with water, setting the flame to low. Before she could ask what he was up to, her father placed a finger on his lips, pointing his thumb over his shoulder and into the back of his lab coat, at the lump on his back. The hunch softly inhaled and exhaled.
"Ichiro?" Nezu said in a low voice, joining her father at the counter and looking up at him with knit eyebrows.
"Yeah," he said with a gentle nod. "He had a nightmare." He added with a laughing smirk. "Little leech bit my neck and nearly stopped my heart. His venom's getting potent."
The girl scoffed and her father laughed, doing so quietly. The girl hopped onto the counter on her father's left side, on the other side from the burner, leaning her head down to look into his notes.
She couldn't understand a single word or decipher any of the chemical compounds her father drew.
Her red eyes swirling with confusion, her father tousled her hair again, though this time she didn't lean away.
Relative silence slipped between them. Not nearly uncomfortable.
As hard as Aoki tried—and Nezuko's mother tried—her daughter and her son stumbled after their father, relying on him more. They had far more in common. It was difficult finding anything she could relate with her more, and she saw how alone it made her mother feel in their home, as much as her father put into bringing her into the fold.
"How's your mother?" Naruto suddenly asked, jolting the girl out of her thoughts. She idly swung her feet and the man glanced at her, raising an eyebrow. She didn't look at him, and the man smiled sadly. "That bad?"
Nezu pursed her lips and bobbed her head.
Naruto stood back from his microscope, taking account of his son sleeping underneath his lab coat on his back.
"What was it about this time?" Nezu turned to her father with a narrowed stare and the man frowned, looking at the burner as the water inside the beaker bubbled. The girl pressed harder, snapping her fingers in front of his face. "What was the fight about?"
Naruto winced. "It wasn't a fight. More like a…disagreement."
The girl resisted the urge to roll her eyes again, recalling that her mother described the events of earlier in the night as a disagreement as well.
"Looking back now, I don't even know." Nezu's face didn't change at her father's flippant answer, raptly watching him as he continued. "Something about wanting you to enrol on the school's track team, or kendo, or the football team. Maybe it was something about chess club being a waste."
"I like chess," Nezu bit and her father smiled at her kindly. "And I don't like sweating; gym is already pushing it. Football is basically pointless sweating. All of the annoying girls are in the swimming club. The track kids are hyperactive losers. The chess club is quiet. I like quiet."
"I know, I know," her father nodded understandably to her rant. The girl had spoken at length about how much she hated sweating, wasteful movements, and the bickering kids in her class, and Naruto animatedly bobbed his head to her complaints, saying, "but your mom just wants you to reach your full potential. She also wants you to hang around kids your age. Y'know, make some friends."
The girl screwed her mouth shut, glaring away from him. The chess club was perfect, in her opinion, because she was the only member. Half of the time, she was playing a match by herself, and the rest of the time she was sleeping with the club door locked shut.
That was the pinnacle of paradise.
Nezuko didn't look at him when he turned off the burner, poking her shoulder jokingly and half smiling. "Can you just…try it? For me?" The girl scoffed, and her father's grin broadened sharply, playfully prodding her cheek and singing. "C'mon, Nezu…"
The girl pouted, turning her red eyes to her annoying father and gnashing her serrated teeth. "Track."
The man raised his hands in grateful surrender. "That's all I'm asking."
"I'm not leaving chess club," she stated.
"Perish the thought."
"And," she said, pushing for a concession on his part, "I want you to come and cheer for me in the math tournament."
The man snorted, saying with a gleaming, proud smirk on his face, "Nezu, come on, have I ever missed any of your competitions?"
He didn't return to his observations and tests, judiciously pushing away his instruments. He closed his notebook with his pencil inside and took out the glass slide he was observing, keeping it in his notebook.
"It's almost time for school. Have you had breakfast?"
"Mom sent me to call you."
His eyelids fell and a large sweat drop formed at the side of his head at his daughter's purposeful forgetfulness. He made to help her down from the counter, but she said something that made him freeze.
"You and mom used to be happier before we were born." The man's hands curled back at Nezu's abrupt statement, caught flatfooted. The girl's jaw hardened and she said, looking over her father's shoulder at nothing in particular, "I've seen the photo albums. It's obvious."
"…Stop."
A dark frown crossed her father's face and Nezu's mouth shut.
"Your mother and I…have different ways of doing things, and yes, these disagreements revolve around you and your brother," Naruto said frankly, not bothering to filter his words to his daughter. She was too smart to be spoken down to, but he made sure to say his next words carefully and clearly, "but that doesn't mean both of you are the cause for any of this. I and your mother love you and your brother so much. More than she or I could ever possibly express."
He said that with so much sincerity, Nezu looked at him, seeing the resolute look in her father's vulpine stare.
"Then why won't you two marry?"
Naruto's answer was immediate. "We agreed that we aren't marrying people."
"Everyone in class is calling me weird because you and mom aren't married."
Naruto's grin leapt up and his eyes sparkled. "Your life is none of their business, Nezuko. Let them talk; that's all they can ever do."
Aoki and Naruto had two different parenting styles, and this was mainly where they clashed heads.
Aoki wanted to raise their children traditionally, the way her adopted father raised her and her brothers—Mifune and Nifune—, keeping their childhood intact. Naruto wanted to be as open and as honest as a parent could be while keeping their childhood intact.
The man's rebellious spirit and his thirst for knowledge rubbed off on his children, and the worst possible thing to do to two little people that wanted to hide something from them, the same way Naruto's childhood had been—before his godmother reached out to him. Not knowing made Nezuko and Ichiro feel weak, and feeling weak for them was similar to backing them into a corner with no way of escape; they would kick and scratch till they got the truth.
So, Naruto gave them the truth, as much as necessary, and Aoki didn't like this. It wasn't advisable parenting, but Naruto wasn't an ordinary parent.
"If they're talking behind your back about you, and calling you a weirdo—which is very true—" he chuckled and ate a few punches to the shoulder from his irritated daughter, "then let them talk. It just means you're famous."
Nezu scoffed, a smile growing on her face. "I…guess so."
Naruto gave her a bright smile and helped her down the counter, saying, "Don't get a big head."
"Too late," she snorted.
Naruto tumbled into a shivering laugh—
"Ack," he cringed with pain, hands reaching for his back at the half-awake lump sinking his venomous teeth into his father's back. "Ichiro, no biting, stop—ow!"
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Aoki-chan met her partner at the front door, waiting there and meeting Naruto's apologetic look with a remorseful one.
Nezu skirted around her father and her pregnant mother, trotting to the dining room and digging into breakfast. She wasn't in the mood to interfere with her parents' making-up.
The woman half smiled and tilted her head to the side, and Naruto scratched the back of his head, chuckling.
"I'm sorry I exploded on you," she said and the man exhaled, shaking his head and pulling her close, taking account of the bulge of her stomach.
"I'm sorry I exploded," he reciprocated, pursing his lips and furrowing his brow, dipping his head a bit and looking at her with sincere red eyes. "I've been stressed about Ichiro starting nursery school and Nezu needing glasses, and the whole debacle with the Hokage."
"I know," Aoki reassured her partner, rubbing his sides slowly. "Me too." She closed her eyes and accepted a reconciliatory peck on the lips, smiling into the kiss and leaning away teasingly when Naruto came in closer.
Nezuko had inherited her father's naturally enhanced senses, and this included a quality of vision that nearly blinded her on a day-to-day basis. To remedy this, Naruto made an eyedrop to help lower the intensity of Nezuko's vision to something a regular person would see, until he was able to make a pair of glasses or contact lenses. Ichiro didn't show any sign of this painfully amplified vision.
Aoki flicked her eyes further into the house, where Nezu pointedly ignored her parents. Aoki turned back to her partner. "I know it's ten years too late, but we need to figure out a system. I have an idea."
"Do tell."
The woman gnawed on her bottom lip, recognizing a former argument by saying, "I agree…that…I might not be acknowledging the kids and how perceptive they are."
Naruto dramatically leaned away, placing a hand over his heart and saying with raised eyebrows, "Oh really?"
The woman harmlessly slapped his chest and the man chuckled, kissing her again.
Leaning away, Aoki said, "Ichiro is barely two and he's started forming complete sentences, and Nezu's won all of those awards." She distractedly played with the front of her partner's lab coat, smoothening it and saying, "We could maybe include their opinions. Sometimes. And only Nezu, for the time being."
Naruto smothered his smirk as if he hadn't previously suggested this some weeks ago. "Excellent idea."
The woman glared at him, a smile playing on her lips. "You've won nothing, by the way."
"Mom, where's my lunch? It's not in the kitchen," Nezu interrupted them, calling from the kitchen.
"It's in the living room," she answered and the girl fast-walked past her parents and entered the living room, looking around until her eyes brightened up on finding her lunchbox on the couch facing the television.
The two parents idly watched their daughter as she picked up her backpack and lunchbox, trotting back to the dining room and returning to her breakfast. The girl rolled her eyes—an expression she greatly enjoyed doing—and ignored them. Naruto found a smile playing at his lips when the girl purposely changed seats, turning her back to them and eating spoonful after spoonful of sweet rice pudding.
"You don't think civilian school is a waste, right?" he suddenly asked.
The woman whipped her head around and looked up at him, mockingly bewildered. "Is that doubt I hear?"
The man smirked.
"Is the world's smartest man having doubts?" Aoki looked around her partner, staring up at the sky and gawking. "Is the sky falling?"
"Alright, alright." Naruto waved away the giggling woman's teasing.
Nezu enrolling in Kiri's Civilian Academy was one of the few decisions both parents agreed on; they had asked the girl when she turned six and she had said she didn't enjoy the physical exertion of being a ninja, so the two parents gladly contacted the civilian school in Hidden Mist, paid the tuition, bought her whatever books she needed and arranged for one of the school buses to drive through the countryside.
That is, on the condition that their daughter was going to be an active participant in self-defence training with her father.
The two parents didn't care that their daughter wasn't going to be a ninja or a samurai, but they were adamant that she learn how to defend herself when the need arises.
Nezu was excelling in school, which was a gross understatement.
Her mother had been tempted to accelerate her schooling by having Nezu jump one or two years, but Naruto had talked her down, insisting that the girl wait till she was twelve before she starts jumping classes.
The man exhaled from his nose, not knowing that he had been staring at his daughter, eyes creased with worry. It was an expression that would have made younger Naruto retch.
Aoki half-smiled, touching his chin and turning his head back to her. "As you said," she said gently, "Nezu and Ichiro are far more capable than either of us give them credit." A slow smile lifted on Naruto's face and the woman snorted, correcting herself, "Than I can give them credit, smartass."
Their children were genetically coded with information to survive. They got that from their father and the side effect of the experiments he performed on himself in his youth.
Nezu and Ichiro were forty per cent spider, and Naruto didn't once feel regret for that.
"Where's Ichiro?"
Naruto jerked his head to his back, at his hunch, and Aoki stifled a laugh, something that made the man inoffensively scowl. "It's not funny. His venom is a lot stronger than when he started teething."
"I keep telling you to get him a chew toy, something to keep his teeth out of your back."
"And I keep telling you that my son isn't a dog that needs a chew toy." The man sniffed, grateful as Aoki gently eased him out of his lab coat, smiling coyly at the man's stubbornness. It was the same with Nezu when she was younger, as the girl didn't have control of her venom, so she essentially exhaled everything when she bit her father's back. "I'm having Sagi prepare something more durable. It should be ready any moment now."
Now out of his lab coat, Aoki's eyes fell on her son and her expression softened.
Ichiro was a pale, twenty months old child with scruffy black hair and two whisker marks on his cheeks. His four eyes were closed and he was breathing calmly, teeth latched into his father's back and nails digging into Naruto's sides, clinging on for dear life in his spider silk onesie. The boy grumbled and shivered, no longer covered by Naruto's lab coat. He pushed closer to his father's warmth and groused, turning his head to the right and peeking two of his four pupilless black eyes, sleepily mumbling something on seeing his mother.
The woman slowly, carefully, took the boy off his father's back and Ichiro immediately embraced his mother, not so much as nipping her skin with his teeth or nails.
Even Nezuko, when she was younger, didn't dare bite her mother.
The boy clung to his mother and drifted back to sleep in her arms as she gently swayed.
"Speaking of almost dying," Aoki whispered breathily and Naruto's eyebrows lowered, looking at her with a stony, serious face. "Nezuko attacked me this morning."
"Mom!" Nezuko cried from inside, stumbling off her chair and falling on the ground in her rush, scrambling to her parents. "Dad, she's lying!"
The man's eyes jumped and he frantically checked his partner's body, his heart visibly clamouring with panic. "Did she get you?"
"She's a hundred years too young to tag me." The woman smirked. The frantic girl hopped up and down behind her father, shaking him for his attention. Naruto wilted with heavy relief, sagging for a brief moment before he reared around and glowered at his daughter, who shrunk back.
"Nezuko, I swear—"
"D-Dad, I didn't attack her," she stammered shakily, widening her vulpine eyes piteously and trembling her lips. She crossed her fingers over her heart and swore, "Honest." She looked around her fuming father, whose stoic face hardened, and found her mother's smug stare. "Mom, tell him I was just playing. Please."
That was when the bus rolled by and screeched to a stop at the gate. The driver honked the horn, jolting the twitchy girl.
"When you get home, we're going to talk about why it's a bad idea to attack your mother." He spoke with a hard grit of his sharp teeth and the girl cringed away. He pointed into the house. "Get your stuff and go to the bus." The girl sulked back inside, her shoulders hung low and her head drooping. Naruto then decided to add, "And bring your phone."
"But, dad!"
"Now, Nezuko."
The bus driver honked the horn again and the handful of children in the bus bustled to the windows, watching Nezuko's father as he collected his daughter's phone and swiped his fingers across the screen, bypassing the security, evident from the horrified gape of their daughter and her blubbering protests.
"No internet for a week," Naruto said with finality and the girl groaned.
"But, dad—"
"Do I hear a month?" the man dared her and the girl wilted, flopping her head back dramatically and collecting her phone with both hands. "I thought so. Now, come here."
Sulking harder and lower than she had ever sulked before, Nezuko came in for a hug, squeezing her father tightly and pushing her face into his stomach as he reciprocated, patting her back.
"Have a great day, kid." The man beamed toothily and his daughter harmlessly punched his stomach, pushing away from him and hiking up her backpack as she trekked to the bus, gripping her lunchbox handle in a tight fist. Her father called to her, "Nezu."
The girl theatrically slumped her shoulders and turned around, returning to her parents and stopping before her mother. Standing on her toes, she kissed her mother's cheek. Nezuko softly touched her brother's back and received a murmured goodbye in return from the slumbering child.
"You can take that hat to school, but just this once, ok?" Aoki told her daughter and the girl grumbled, accepting a kiss on the brow from her mother. "What about your eye drops?"
"In my pocket," she grumbled.
"Call us if anything happens." Aoki kissed her daughter's brow again, exuding love and forcing a defeated sigh from the girl.
Nezuko's father stood strong as the girl levelled him with a pitiful pout and a tear-glazed look, slowly turning around, and moping her way to the bus. Wisely so, the other students stayed the hell away from her as she sat at the back of the bus.
When the bus was far enough, and the parents were out of the enhanced hearing of their daughter, Naruto broke, nearly weeping as Aoki patted his back.
"There, there," she consoled him.
"Monster," he narrowed his eyes at his partner and the woman snorted, leaning up and pressing her lips against his. "Now she hates me."
"She doesn't hate you," Aoki said, comforting the overdramatic man with one hand and propping her one-and-a-half-year-old to her chest with the other. The boy, still droopy with sleep, subconsciously reached out to his father with his left hand, patting Naruto's arm in wordless consolation, facing his face away and with his eyes still shut. "See? Even Ichi thinks you did good." The boy grumbled incoherently and shifted, wiggling for a moment in Aoki's chest before settling back again, exhaling a relieved breath and gripping his mother's shirt with both hands. Lowering her voice, the mother cooed, telling her partner, "I'll bathe him. We can have breakfast and watch TV before we drop him off at the nursery. They won't mind if we're late."
Here, Naruto's red, vulpine eyes welled up and he pursed his lips, on the brink of tears.
Aoki pointed a warning finger at him, her own eyes tearing up and barely able to contain the flood of emotion ready to pour out of her. "You promised you weren't going to cry. If you cry, I cry."
The man covered his glazed eyes with the crook of his right elbow, sniffing. "Why do our kids have to grow up so fast?"
"I blame you," the former ronin said, walking into the house.
"Me?" the man gasped incredulously, jogging after his partner. "I've got quality swimmers. Can you blame me?"
"Kami, Naruto, that's disgusting."
Naruto tumbled into a hearty laugh, clutching his stomach and kicking the front door shut after himself.
Aoki peered down to her chest, meeting Ichiro's dark, four-eyed gaze, and the mother and son pair rolled their eyes in unison.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
1:11
PM
Wave Country Town Hall
"Don't toy with me Sasuke," Naruto warned the Hokage, and the Uchiha levelled the scientist with a dark glare, standing upright as the saw-toothed man squared up against him. "These attacks have become too rampant. One of my people was almost killed."
"One less thug," Sasuke answered the blonde, and Naruto bared his teeth in a large, twisted grin.
"You're forgetting that my thugs are what's keeping Konoha from imploding." The corners of the scientist's eyes curled up, shining fiercely. "Tsunade thought she could push against the KDC, now look at her—"
"I dare you to finish that." Sasuke narrowed his eyes and his dojutsu activated, evolving with a burning spiral. His white Hokage's robe fluttered slightly in the inexistent wind.
Naruto's vulpine eyes enlarged with elation and killer intent leaked from his very pores, battling against the Hokage's ill intent.
The weathered meeting hall, vacated of everyone for this very meeting, creaked and groaned against the magnitude.
Tsunade's death was a sore topic for anyone in Konoha.
The Senju had surpassed her body's limit and died from alcohol poisoning, found slumped over Minato Namikaze's grave. The stress of her office and her attempts to untangle Konoha from the KDC broke her mind and fractured her soul.
The last person to see her in the graveyard reported that the Hokage had been weeping over the Fourth Hokage's grave.
Sasuke was sworn in as the Sixth Hokage four weeks after the Senju's passing.
Aoki—four months pregnant and mentally not ready for another feud with Konoha—grabbed her partner by his arm and tugged him back, prompting Naruto to cease his aggressive gathering of chakra, stepping back with a glower to the defiant Hokage.
"See, I'm not afraid of you, Naruto," Sasuke dared the other man and Naruto gnawed on his tongue. Itachi hovered behind his younger brother and Konohamaru lingered to the right of Naruto and his partner, raptly observing the two and warily preparing to whip out his tanto as his Hokage continued. "But, despite that, Konoha isn't the one attacking your KDC."
Over the last two months, the KDC in the Fire and Earth country regions had been mailed explosives that had decimated the supply chain of those areas. Recently, a faceless suicide bomber ran head-first into a Waterfall KDC minor hub and detonated himself at a sentry house, critically injuring five guards.
Flashback: Eight Days Ago
Koun and Hinami, two guards at the Kitsugami Drug Company's warehouse outside of Tanzuki town, conversed boredly as they placed a game of cards. Their comrades watched treeline from their perch at the top of the sentry station.
"What do you think boss Naruto is doing about those bombings?" Hinami asked, shuffling the deck of cards. "I mean, I don't think he'll just keep letting it happen, right?"
"Of course not," Koun scoffed at the hilarity of Hinami's words. "You're new here, so I get you're scared, but trust me, the big boss hates these kinds of things. He hates when people think they can try him."
Hinami was a young recruit from the Earth Daimyo's court, barely two weeks into her first guard assignment. Her mother had large gambling debts and the Yakuza were breaking down their door to cash in on the debt; they wanted to sell Hinami's younger brother, like cattle. The money she was getting from being an Earth country ninja was pennies compared to her first week's wages working in the KDC.
KDC workers had a myriad of health insurance, childcare insurance, product discounts and overtime benefits. It was no wonder the global enterprise retained workers at an outstanding rate, despite having zero retirement benefits, and a thorough background check for every one of their employees. KDC investigators were paid too well to slack off, and they did their work rigorously.
"As long as you stick to the company guidelines, you'll love working here," Hinami's superior said with an assuring chuckle.
The worried crease of Hinami's brow lifted—
"Incoming!"
And the sentry house exploded.
Flashback End
According to the reports of the injured guards, the suicide bomber dove down from the heavens.
Unlike his rattled guards, Naruto wasn't deceived into thinking there was a divine being—if any—that was pushing their luck with him.
Now, twenty-four years after the Fourth Shinobi War, the Kitsugami Drug Company was a monopoly drug supplier and medical technology developer. Naruto's KDC had absorbed eighty per cent of the private drug companies and suppliers in the market—including those in the black market. This absorption secured the KDC in the vital lifeblood of every nation on the planet, allowing them access to precious resources that weren't supplied from the spider/snake summoning realm, as well as access to information and high seats of power in most of the countries on the continent.
This meant that Naruto only had to pull a few strings to get access to the near non-existent remains of the suicide bomber.
An autopsy of the remains proved that the person possessed evolutionary adaptations and traits of a Suna indigene with grandparents that were from Konoha.
Naruto had also dusted the bomb packages and, after a lengthy tour of torturing and investigating, the man discovered something damning.
"Konoha isn't attacking my KDC, but you people are funding the attackers," Naruto reached into his jacket pockets—prompting Konohamaru and Itachi to grip their blades—taking out two fistfuls of paper and throwing them at Sasuke's face, who didn't flinch or blink, standing against Naruto as the man coolly glowered at the Uchiha. Naruto pointed to the letters and receipts on the ground, gnashing his teeth. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?"
Sasuke, with his sharingan still activated, didn't bother looking down, saying, "Fabrications and deception."
A slow smile returned to Naruto's expression. His eyes lit up with glee, catching the lines of doubt flicker across Sasuke's impassive face. "Could you be unaware of this conspiracy?"
The Hokage jerked his head to the left and Konohamaru released hold of his weapon, approaching the two powerful ninjas and squatting down on the littered pieces of paper. He picked a few and his eyes scanned them, comparing them, picking more and skimming through them.
"I'm not bound by domestic or international laws, Sasuke," Naruto said, breaking the turgid silence with his restrained words, his serrated teeth clenched hard and his irises constricting with malicious intent. "And I'm not bound by any moral laws. I've starved Konoha of supplies before, and I'll do it again."
"Well?" Sasuke snapped, referring to Konohamaru.
Naruto crossed his arms and watched as the Konoha shinobi got up from the ground, speaking to his Hokage under his breath.
Sasuke's face darkened more and more with each additional word from his subordinate.
Aoki-chan gripped the sheath of her katana and pointedly looked at Itachi's chin, one hand gripping the handle and primed to draw her elemental blade.
Despite her current state, she was still closely involved with her partner's drug empire. Her role resided mostly with the administration of the company and catering to any regional needs that arose, while Naruto worked as the face and CEO of the KDC, crafting the drugs in the background and observing the flow of supplies, as well as the return of profit from across the globe.
The exact size and influence of the immeasurably massive machinery of the KDC was a secret only Naruto and Aoki knew.
"Recall the 'Madara' you let escape," Sasuke said, making Naruto screw his lips to the side. "Obito. He could be behind this."
Naruto doubted this.
"I chased him off a cliff ten years ago," he said, slipping into a memory.
Flashback: Ten Years Ago
"What purpose would my death serve, Naruto?" Obito asked, standing at the edge of the cliff with his back to Naruto. The spider summoner strolled to the Uchiha, stopping behind him to his right and admiring the violent roiling of the sea laid out before them, smashing into the side of the cliff and churning with infrequent whirlpools.
The man Naruto had been chasing since he was sixteen—being thirty years old now—was now a hollow shadow of his former self.
Obito wore a tattered brown and yellow shawl that cascaded in multiple layers to his ankles, making his figure look larger and healthier than it was—and hiding the fact he still only had one arm. On his feet were a worn, thin pair of his old ninja sandals, doing nothing to protect his heels from dirt and abuse from his fourteen years on the run. His dark hair was messy and shaggy, cascading in dirty tangles from his head and reaching his chest, where a scraggly, unkempt black beard obscured half of Obito's face, tangled with dirt and leaves.
Obito had long since discarded his orange mask, which was now in Naruto's possession in his Kiri home, showing that his left eye was covered by a rough eyepatch.
Naruto hummed at Obito's question, stepping beside the man with his hands behind his back. The scientist's coat and thick pants deflected most of the cold wind and sea mist, billowing in the howling wind.
"Good question," Naruto smiled foxily, but Obito wasn't looking at him. His eyes were fixed on the speck of an island hundreds of miles off the mainland. Whirlpool country. Naruto's red eyes became reflective. "I guess…I hate leaving a job unfinished."
Obito grunted, conceding to that.
Naruto had been tracking and chasing Obito for the better part of fourteen years. It was a testament to both of their stubbornness.
And now, Naruto had backed him into a corner.
"I'm tired of running, old friend," Obito admitted with a heavy exhale. The way the Uchiha addressed him brought a jagged grin to Naruto's face.
One might consider their fourteen-year game of cat and mouse some sort of friendship, yes.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry for the trouble." Obito looked twenty years older than he was, with his face cracked with wrinkles and his stormy black eye dimmed from regret.
Naruto spied the look on the other man's face. "You're not going to use that sharingan to escape?"
"And prolong my punishment? No," Obito said with a forlorn look to his adversary. "I've made my peace with this life. I've asked for forgiveness for my many mistakes."
"Forgiveness," Naruto hummed, pursing his lips and pushing his hands further into his coat pockets. He rocked back and forth on his heels once, knitting his eyebrows at the word. "People go on and on about that. I never understood why…"
Obito did something that surprised Naruto.
He smiled.
Honestly and wholeheartedly, Obito smiled.
"One day, you'll be asking the world for forgiveness, Naruto."
Naruto met the man's sincere eye with a twisted expression.
Naruto replied, "We'll see about that."
"See you in hell, Naruto."
And Obito fell forward off the cliff.
Naruto peered over the edge of the cliff and watched, fascinated, as the Uchiha's body was dashed headfirst against the jagged rocks at the base of the cliff. Brain matter spattered across the sharp rocks and Obito's broken body tore to shreds. His body was washed away by the sea.
A small burst of white smoke happened on Naruto's head, and a hand-sized spider peered over the edge of the cliff as well.
"Make sure he's dead."
Fearlessly, the spider hopped off its summoner's head and floated down the cliff to search for Obito's dead body.
Flashback End
"He's dead," Naruto said with frosty finality. "His body has long since been torn to pieces whirlpools."
"It's been ten years; why wasn't this reported?" Sasuke said rigidly, jaw tightened with irritation.
Naruto matched the man's glare with a genial smile, his eyes darkening with hateful intent. "I didn't feel like it."
Sasuke didn't respond, his sharingan sluggishly twisting, visibly tempted to blanket an illusion on the scientist. But he didn't do that, because of one thing; Naruto might have made himself immune to sharingan illusions, especially since Madara's eyes and teeth had been harvested by Naruto, leaving only his head as the proof of the Uchiha's death.
It wasn't outlandish to think that the mad scientist had experimented on himself further.
Sasuke shut his eyes and calmly exhaled, gathering his wits and settling the rankling beats of his heart. "Although Konoha is not to blame for the KDC's misfortune, we will not go out of our way to prevent or investigate this. You said it yourself; we shouldn't stand in your way." Sasuke opened his eyes—his dark, abyssal eyes—and met the red eyes of his adversary. "This includes leaving you to your devices." The Hokage walked to Naruto, and the scientist didn't move aside, matching the Uchiha's stoic stare. "I heard that you call yourself 'A Force of Nature'," the man leaned a bit closer to Naruto's ear, speaking so low Aoki-chan and the two other Konoha ninjas couldn't listen in. His threat was simple. "How much of that is still true?"
Naruto flicked a look to his right, looking straight into Sasuke's flashing sharingan stare, unafraid of a genjutsu. He answered in a patient whisper, tilting his head a bit to Sasuke's ear, "You'll find out soon enough."
The veiled threat didn't miss either of them.
"Hn." Sasuke nodded once and stepped past Naruto, his shoulders barely brushing the other man as he passed. He stopped beside Aoki-chan, looking at her from the corner of his eyes without so much as a glimmer of his sharingan, and the woman stood upright to the Hokage's scrutiny, aware of his brief regard for her stomach and then to her infamous katana, nodding to her once. "Aoki."
"Sasuke," she acknowledged in return, not standing back or away. She then gave the Hokage a brief smile. "My regards to Sakura and the kids."
"You too."
And with that, the Hokage and his guards left the meeting hall, leaving Naruto and Aoki alone in their contemplation.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
There weren't many humans on the planet that had been touted to have surpassed normal human limitations and were regarded as gods of Shinobi.
Or rather, the God of Shinobi.
To be the one, a ninja would have to travel to inhuman lengths, endure bodily destruction, and grasp a godly understanding of the natural world.
They would have to be a force of nature.
Through science and mastery of all forms of chakra, Naruto was seen as a force of nature, displaying this mastery by washing Hidden Rain off the continent during the Fourth Ninja War.
But there was another.
He had been laying dormant for centuries, considered dead by all and slumbering in the realm of limbo until he had been jostled awake by the disturbance to the planet during Naruto and Madara's battle.
Hashirama Senju awoke, and the world trembled.
Author's Note
I'm the worst, aren't I? XD
Still, that's it for Ink Heart. I'm officially labelling this story as complete.
Thank you for the memories :)
I'll see you when I see you.
Foy.