A/N: Ahh, sorry I'm late, just got lost on the road of life and had to help a cat stuck in a tree and a grandma carrying a bunch of groceries... *ruffles hair sheepishly*
But actually, I'm really sorry I took like a month-long hiatus on this story. Just got caught up with the end of the academic year and graduating from undergrad and all... but I'm back! And as a thank you for waiting, I have a double update for y'all. Hopefully future updates will come more regularly too.
Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, followed, favorited, and lurked! You have been super patient with me and I appreciate that.
Some of y'all left comments about Sunari's status as a jinchuuriki, and I realized that the way I have depicted her thus far is pretty confusing... so that will be addressed in this chapter. Also, as one reviewer pointed out, I was a little ambitious in my timeline for Sunari's development, and I have rectified that in this chapter as well.
Disclaimer: Naruto, Suna, and the shinobi world belong to Kishi.
There are never quite the right amount of words to describe the feeling of surprise, Michi considered as she leaned against the door of the second floor quarters in her humble orphanage, watching her children fall peacefully into the gentle embrace of slumber.
Sometimes, surprise seemed like a shock that electrified her entire body, whole and to the core. She appreciated these moments, because they were the constant reminders that she was still here, still alive, still grounded to this world.
Other times had her feeling like she was thrust in the battlefield again, keenly missing a stream of kunai from behind. She had to fight everything in her to not respond to that burst of adrenaline, that wave of fear rippling through her body, the overtrained instinct to kill first, ask later.
Because no matter what she felt, the reality was that she wasn't an active duty shinobi anymore. She didn't have any reason to feel that battle-ready rush. She was an orphanage mother, and she loved her job, her role in society.
So of course, being in that role meant the biggest surprise she'd face these days was a triple adoption of her most troublesome children. All in all, nothing too big.
But if she was going to be completely honest, dropping all responsibilities as a kunoichi to raise the orphaned of Suna was one of the greatest surprises to hit her. She always had big dreams of becoming a jounin-sensei and teaching young genin in her village about the ways of the ninja. She was on her steady way to reaching her goal, if her performance in the Third Shinobi war was any testament to her fierce abilities.
Her vision of the future crumbled upon that infamous battle, one that left her too scarred to carry on. Sunagakure and Iwagakure were at a stalemate, and the Fourth Kazekage wanted to tip the scales in the favor of Suna. He ordered a night ambush on Iwa's frontlines, which despite having met all parameters of the mission, was one fatal error short of a success in her eyes.
Suddenly, Michi gripped her head with one hand while clinging to the door frame with the other, eyes squinting in pain. The beds and little orphans in front of her faded away into bedrolls soaked with blood, as she slipped away into another of those flashbacks that felt too much like a genjutsu; too close, too vivid, too real.
Luckily, her thoughts faded quickly as she heard a choked sob from the far end of the room. Her flashbacks cleared immediately, and her eyes searched for the source of the sound.
Movement in the small alcove across the quarters captured her sight, and her still-capable night vision informed her that the small child in the wooden crate was shaking heavily, as though struggling to hold back tears.
She swept silently through the room, making her way to her youngest orphan. A quick sweep of her child's sleeping arrangements and chakra capacity confirmed that the now-toddler was indeed crying silent tears, attempting to mute herself as much as possible.
Michi's heart shattered, because this wasn't the first time and wouldn't be the last. She coughed lightly, to let the child know she was near, and reached into the crate to pick her up and carry her in her arms.
Sunari didn't protest, not anymore. Instead, she obliged willingly and clung to Michi's neck like it was a lifeline. The child remained silent, but Michi still felt the tears trickle down Sunari's face and onto her own collarbone.
She comforted her child, and made her way down the stairs. Never once halting her circular hand motions on Sunari's back, Michi walked out the back entrance of her orphanage into a small backyard. About the size of a small clearing, it never was much more than an oversized sandbox, but it seemed to bring comfort to her child.
Especially when she was in agony like she was at the current moment.
Michi drifted to an old swing set toward her right, and sat on one of the swings, letting her feet rise above the ground and gravity shift her seat gently. Feeling the soft rhythm of the swing's motions and the illuminated gleam of moonlight, Sunari's breathing grew more even.
Michi smiled weakly. She could never stand to watch her child, her beautiful, brilliant, brave Sunari, when she was like this.
It was about half a year ago when Sunari's pains first manifested, shortly after a surge of malicious chakra swept the entire village and had every person with an ounce of ninja training on their toes.
Her thoughts immediately concluded that Sunari was in distress, because the chakra felt exactly like what overcame her on that fateful first meeting in the Kazekage's alleyway. Michi knew Sunari was downstairs, as she had been keeping tabs her and Takuma's chakra. After barking to her caretaking assistants to watch over the orphans upstairs, she slammed chakra into her feet for the first time in years to rush to her child.
She found Sunari slumped over on the green living room couch, unresponsive but still breathing. She reached out to Sunari's chakra with her own, attempting to ascertain what exactly distressed her and what the damage was.
To her great surprise, there was no evidence that Sunari had released any chakra at all. Not like last time, when she nearly fainted from chakra exhaustion after meeting Hisato and releasing all of her terror-inducing turmoil into the world around her.
Instead, Sunari's chakra coils now looked like something was overflowing inside them. Like a dormant seed had bloomed into vines that pushed the boundaries of what her small body could handle, and her coils were expanding painfully to accommodate them.
Michi put aside that information for the time being; rather, she was more concerned with making sure Sunari would survive.
She felt Takuma pad cautiously toward her as he dropped down from the staircase. She had somewhat expected him to come, as she knew he recognized this malignant and foreign chakra as well.
"Takuma," Michi whispered softly across the deathly still living room, "Can you bring me a glass of water from the kitchen, and some of our stronger smelling salts?"
And bless his soul, he had come out of his nervous fear almost instantly upon her request, pacing quickly toward the room of interest for her desired items.
Letting her thoughts slip away from the child in her arms for the briefest moment, she beamed faintly with pride for her other prodigy. Most children, most adults, who felt Killing Intent for the first time would freeze in their paths, a monstrous terror trickling through their bodies from the outside in. Encountering the heightened level of potency in her own child's Killing Intent, they would consider themselves gone from the world, their lives flashing before their eyes as they slowly awaited a merciless death. Hell, even she froze when encountering it for the first time.
Takuma, for all the fear that he felt because of Sunari, never let it interfere with his will to care for her. He protected her, and kept her safe from harm. He did her absolute best to make sure she wasn't alone, as she had asked of him.
The maroon-haired boy obeyed all of Michi's requests, but over these past few weeks, she was wholly grateful that he had followed this one to the T. When she first introduced Sunari to her orphanage, she had asked Takuma to watch over her like a younger sister. He was hesitant at the time, as he could tell she was obviously keeping some things from him, but accepted it like it was his dutiful mission to complete.
To this day, he hasn't failed to carry it out.
He returned shortly with the items she asked for, and they spent the next hour trying to bring Sunari back to consciousness. The greatest progress they achieved was her small frame stretching and turning away from the light they brought into the living room, muttering words that Michi couldn't quite understand.
"Five more minutes, mom" was not something she had ever taught Sunari how to say, and she wasn't sure where she had learned that. Perhaps she made up a language using that calculating brain of hers. Or perhaps she was just muttering nonsense like an actual normal baby her age did.
Either way, she didn't think this reaction was normal or healthy in any way. It also suggested that Sunari was not the cause of the chakra surge from moments ago, and instead was weakened by it.
Michi found it odd that she hadn't heard any village alarms go off yet. Something big like that had to have some explanation behind it, and she needed to know what exactly it was so she could make the appropriate preparations as needed to defend her orphanage.
She handed over Sunari to Takuma and asked him to watch her for a few minutes, as she got up from the couch and exited the front door. Warily, she approached the middle of the pathway and scanned her surroundings. Like her orphanage, the residential buildings and the marketplace plaza nearby were deadly quiet.
In the distance, toward the center of the village, she saw a series of lights flashing in the darkness of the desert night.
"No danger, all active and inactive shinobi are to report to Kazekage Tower at 0800 sharp for debrief," she recognized as the message within the Suna "light" code.
She found this method of communication quick and efficient, especially for relaying non-critical messages. Only requiring a single location for distribution, the light code worked effectively because the Kazekage Tower was the literal center of the entire village, and given that the desert had virtually no light pollution, every single person, ninja or civilian, could see the messages of the light code from the top of the Tower. No additional resources or manpower were necessary - just a ninja flipping some switches or even lighting a mid-sized Fire Release jutsu, and order could be restored in seconds.
Sighing with relief, Michi re-entered her orphanage and decided Takuma had had enough stress for one night. To his protests, she sent him to his sleeping quarters on the same floor. Having confirmed that Sunari was conscious and responsive, she returned the young infant to her own sleeping quarters in the second floor alcove.
Sunari looked like she was dozing peacefully, and Michi smiled as she shifted her gaze from the brown-haired girl to the luminescent full moon outside the porthole window. No doubt she would find out what happened at tomorrow's meeting with the Kazekage, and she was impatient to know just what brought her child to unconsciousness.
Feeling content that her job was done for the day, she stole one last glance at the steady form below her, and walked away.
At exactly 0800 the following morning, the Kazekage informed the ninja of Sunagakure that his youngest son, Gaara, was born. His wife, the strong but sweet Karura-san, had died in the birthing process. This was because they sealed Suna's tailed beast, Shukaku, into the infant and the stress of birthing a jinchuuriki, especially one that was premature, was too much for any mortal to handle. The resulting chakra surge was what all the shinobi assembled in the Tower had felt the night before; the evil, malignant chakra that stilled civilians and awakened shinobi was Shukaku's rage incarnate.
They were to carry on with all daily activities as normal, the Kazekage had ordered. There was no danger to the civilians or the ninja; his son would be under his control. They were to be assured that Gaara would grow into Suna's sharpest weapon, one that would lift them to their once-prideful stance in the shinobi world.
All the ninja in the room cheered at the Kazekage's moving declarations. They needed it - Suna was in a depression, people were dying daily as a result of starvation, and they just needed some hope to move on to the next day.
All except Michi, who worried more for the life of her young Sunari-chan. She had faith in the Kazekage to bring them back to their glory days, that much was true. But she thought about what these recent developments meant for Sunari.
That night, she was awakened by an agitation in chakra and found Sunari stirring again, this time sitting up in her crate in tears, weeping softly but wearily.
When she approached Sunari asking what was wrong, her daughter's onyx eyes widened and she turned her head away, wiping her eyes.
"Nothing's wrong, Michi-sama. Just some… some sand in my eyes," she choked out.
Michi frowned, sensing the lie immediately. She crossed her arms and put on a stern face, waiting for Sunari to pick up her cues to continue speaking.
Sunari definitely noticed, and deliberately laid down in her blankets, shifting her entire body to face away from Michi. It didn't go unnoticed by the practiced orphanage mother that Sunari achieved this with great difficulty, as though pushing through quicksand the entire time.
"Please don't worry about me," Sunari gritted out, "I'm fine."
Michi flinched, because anyone who answered with the word "fine" was clearly anything but. She tried picking up Sunari, but the moment her fingers made contact with the child, Sunari yelped in pain.
Michi backed away, because Sunari had unintentionally leaked out a bit, just the tiniest smidge of her potent chakra, upon Michi's touch. The chuunin took a glance at the room behind her. Even though all the little bodies were still, she could tell they were awakened by the disturbance because their bodies weren't showing the telltale signs of breathing in slumber. No, they were frozen with fear, motivated purely by instinct.
"Michi-sama,"—Michi's attention returned to the child, and was she growling?—"Don't touch me. Don't worry about me, don't try to help me. Just don't..."
Michi wasn't content with this answer, but she didn't know what else to do. She couldn't exactly bring the child to the hospital, because she wasn't sure how the nurses or doctors would react to her chakra. She also couldn't risk the ninja taking her away, if they found her power to be something useful.
Suna was merciless in that way. They took what they thought they could craft into weapons, and they gave no alternative paths for one to walk in life other than that of the shinobi. They pushed, and pushed, and pushed, until all that was left was the emotionless, the clinical, the killer. Michi was just lucky enough to get out before it killed her.
She didn't want that kind of life for Sunari. Certainly, she would be training the girl herself once she was of age, but she would never force Sunari to kill unless it was absolutely necessary. For the sake of the orphanage, her siblings, for Michi.
So for the sake of keeping Sunari-chan safe, she compromised by finding another way to heal her little girl.
"Sunari-chan...let's go outside," Michi hummed softly.
Sunari stilled, and slowly turned her body toward Michi.
"Really?" she whispered warily.
"Really."
Sunari hesitated, but finally decided to raise her arms for Michi to cradle her and take her outside the walls of the orphanage, where she had been dying to go for quite a while. That instance began Michi's nightly ritual of sitting under the stars with Sunari, and watching the full moon take its rightful place hovering over the black sky.
Michi's gaze returned to the patterned blanket of stars filling the present night, but her thoughts drifted toward the surprise she felt and continues to feel around this small toddler, with eyes as black as the sky above her. For all the pain and suffering this child tolerated in the middle of the night, the only thing she needed to push it all away was a moment of calm in the warm summer air.
Indeed, Sunari grew more serene the longer they sat out there, and Michi was fortunate for it. She once thought that these were just growing pains, childhood grievances that Sunari would one day stop feeling.
Michi initially suspected that the young girl had some kind of hypersensitivity to chakra, that any effects chakra normally had on a person were amplified for her. Thus, upon encountering the demonic Tailed Beast chakra, her body absorbed too much input and caused her to pass out from overstimulation.
That's what she had hoped on the very first night. But after the village-wide meeting with the Kazekage... she wasn't so sure.
Because the girl's own demonic chakra... Michi wasn't sure what to think about that. There were unsettling parallels in the chakra of the Killing Intent that supposedly resulted from the birth of Gaara, Suna's newest jinchuuriki, and from her young orphaned Sunari. In fact, it even reminded her of the chakra of an Iwa shinobi she met on the battlefield, a Lava style user by the name of Roshi.
Did that mean somehow… Sunari-chan was a jinchuuriki too? Or a pseudo-jinchuuriki?
The peaceful little minashigo who rested on her lap shifted delicately, as though she was afraid she would hurt Michi by moving too much. She found a position she was comfortable with, and burrowed deeper into Michi's neck.
No. That didn't make sense. Michi was no sealing expert, but even she knew that jinchuuriki with their bijuu extracted died. There was no way around that.
Unless… the chakra had not been fully extracted?
Impossible. She could only think of one person who Rasa would trust for the procedure, and Chiyo-baasama wouldn't make such mistakes as that.
Even if that was the case, the sheer pain of sealing and unsealing should have been enough to kill a baby.
Her brain started to throb from the thoughts about jinchuuriki biophysics. She would rest this issue for now, but each time it came to mind, Michi grew nearer and nearer to the conclusion that she was the guardian of some kind of dead-but-still alive jinchuuriki, one who cheated death and kicked its ass out the front door.
Michi laughed softly, resting her gaze on her young one. Sunari would definitely do that.
Regardless, she had no way of confirming this conclusion. Sunari herself must have been a newborn when the process took place, since Michi herself found the young girl only a week after her supposed birth date. So the girl wouldn't know…
The Kazekage must know the truth. It explained why Sunari-chan was found only streets away from the Tower.
But at the same time, it didn't. They wouldn't have left her for dead if she was still alive… would they?
Tch, just like Rasa to discard a weapon as soon as its value depreciated.
Technically speaking, she was obligated to report her hypothesis regarding the child to the Kazekage, where the final decision to investigate or not would be up to his discretion.
But also technically speaking, to the Kazekage and anyone who might have been involved in her sealing process, little Sunari was already dead.
Michi shuddered. Thinking about what the lives of former Suna jinchuuriki were like… she couldn't bear force that on Sunari. Hell, even before this came to light she didn't want the girl to be a kunoichi.
It was decided then. She would hide the girl for as long as she could, and train her to defend herself and her home. She would forge the girl's loyalties such that the orphanage came before Suna. Always, always, always, orphanage over village.
She hesitated, holding her breath. Maybe manipulating a one-year-old wasn't the most ethically moral thing to do…
Morality was relative, sure, but with the interests of Sunari at the forefront of her mind, there was no contest. She might have to do some questionable things, but in the end, she knew that the little black-eyed toddler would lose the light in her eyes if she were to fall into the hands of the village.
Yes, it had to be done.
Michi breathed out, moving her hand from the girl's back to her head. She lightly stroked the hair, a motion that proved to be very, very effective at putting the girl to sleep.
She would need to be careful about their training then, and about that uncontrollable chakra. It seemed like strong emotional surges brought about the release of the child's—no, Shukaku's Killing Intent. Sunari needed to learn how to reign in her emotions, before anything else. Given her hypersensitivity to chakra, her oddly advanced intellect, and quite frankly her age, it was normal for Sunari to be emotionally unstable.
Patience. She'd teach the girl patience, and coping, and control. She had quite a few years learning those herself in kunoichi stealth training.
Rehab had been a good place to pick up some tips too.
They were just lucky that her range seemed to only encompass the perimeter of the orphanage. She couldn't imagine what would have happened if a shinobi passing through the street managed to sense the chakra in one of her surges, especially since the entire village was now familiar with the feel of Shukaku's chakra…
Yes, emotional control was key. The girl's own chakra system wasn't even developed anyway, so trying to train in that area was pointless.
Speaking of which, she didn't quite understand what Takuma was thinking when he said he'd teach the girl puppetry. She was still a toddler - there isn't really much to work with at that age.
Maybe he was just making silly declarations again. He was a fairly stoic child—well, as stoic as children could get—but he was very determined. Plus, he'd never had another sibling before who could use chakra like he could. She imagined that behind the expressionless face was an excited five-year-old boy who was jumping up and down to be able to teach some cool things to his little sister.
Feeling confident in her cogitations, she gingerly stood up from the swing and moved silently toward the orphanage, hoping to keep the small child from waking up again.
At the door of the second-floor quarters, she stopped to glance again at the alcove, which had become illuminated by the moonlight.
It was quite funny how Sunari ended up calling that her "living space." Michi had only put her there because she ran out of cribs at the time, and the alcove, as improper of a bed as it was, was the only reasonable place that a baby could live in that wasn't the floor.
When she was finally able to graduate one of the other toddlers to a normal mattress, Sunari politely declined the move, claiming the alcove was "cute" and that it was enough for her.
"I don't want to make trouble. I'm used to being over here… and so is everyone else. Moving would require some… re-adjusting for everyone. Too much of it."
"Are you sure, dear?"
"Hai, Michi-sama," the brown-haired toddler grinned.
Her little girl was so mindful and articulate, it seemed out of place in a one-year-old. There was so much Michi had in mind to teach her, yet it seemed the girl knew more than enough to be relatively independent.
That didn't seem right. But in the end, Michi couldn't complain because her young one's resourcefulness truly did allow her to fulfill her other responsibilities. Knowing that her two children Sunari and Takuma, who were to be both protectors and protected, could handle themselves, she was then able to take care of everything else, like keeping the orphanage afloat.
Indeed, after the unexpected turn of events, she was lucky Hisato wanted to put the incident behind them as quickly as she did. Apparently, he was embarrassed that he ran out of the orphanage and trembled all the way to the nobles' district on the other side of the village. They met briefly at a small park midway between their places of residences, somewhat close to the Kazekage Tower, settling the issue and leaving with a mutual agreement to never speak of the incident again.
Unfortunately, that meant the influx of funds that she had expected with his encounter also disappeared.
Once again, her orphanage was in a precarious financial situation. A year ago, even with government assistance she was nearing bankruptcy. Most of Suna was. That was when she (begrudgingly) made her way to the Kazekage Tower, asking Rasa for a mission.
Her first one in years, and she barely made it back by the skin of her teeth. Luckily, because it was a B-rank, she made enough to scrape by for another few months.
Since then, she'd taken on four more missions. Each time, she had to lie to her children, her beautiful, beautiful orphans, claiming that her "brother" was "ill and needed a caretaker."
Takuma, of course, knew the truth—that she was a former kunoichi who needed some extra pay, and that she was a formidable one at that. He was the only one she could trust with such information. Sunari… she would learn in time. It wouldn't do right now to worry the girl. When Michi deemed her chakra system ready enough for nin- and genjutsu training, she would tell her.
For now though, she would have to be content with just doing enough to give them the bare necessities for survival. A roof, some food and water, companions…
Michi laid the girl back in the crate (another object that she oddly deemed "cute"), kissing her forehead gently.
The girl stirred, fluttering her eyelids.
Before Sunari could open them to reveal her rich chocolate-brown eyes, Michi shushed the girl. Whispering softly, she murmured, "I'll be gone again in the morning. Behave, and don't give the caretakers too much trouble. I love you, Sunari-chan."
"Never trouble… I always behave…" she smiled drowsily, "Love you too, Michi…"
When she was certain the girl had fallen into slumber again, the chuunin moved quickly to her own room. She changed into her standard mission gear: a coffee brown turtleneck long sleeve, dark brown pants taped from the shins down, ninja-standard black sandals, metallic forearm guards, and the khaki-colored Suna flak jacket with shoulder guards.
She stared in the mirror, seeing something before her that looked more like a ghost than her own reflection. Her pale blonde hair, much more radiant in her youth than it was now with its dulled shine, she patted down to cover with a turban, securing it in place with her Suna hitai-ate. She picked up a thin cloth, tying it behind her ears to mask the parts of her face below her eyes.
She took another look, faintly surprised at how drastically a uniform change could transform a woman.
Electing to take the window instead of the front door, the chuunin leapt into the warm midnight air and bounded toward the village entrance. A basic reconnaissance check on Kirigakure, that was all she was officially slated to complete.
Unofficially, any Kiri-nin who decided to get in her way… was fair game. So long as the body was unrecoverable, according to the Kazekage.
Despite her staunch dislike of all things shinobi-related, her lips pulled into a bloodthirsty grin. She had been feeling quite stressed lately, and what better stress reliever than sanctioned murder?
She stormed out of the gate, flying in pursuit of Kiri.
The moonlight cast a terrifying shadow of a monster tearing through the desert sand, as the Suna no Chikaze, caged for years, was released into the wild yet again.
A/N: A lot of monsters down here in Suna huh? Well anyway, sorry this chapter ended up being so Michi-centric. I originally wrote this chapter under Sunari's perspective, but it just flowed more naturally for me to do it this way as a time-skip with Michi's perspective. And to clarify once and for all, yes Sunari is a jinchuuriki (more pseudo than not), but so is Gaara. How? To be revealed in future chapters...
The next chapter is, once again, a Michi-centric one. It goes into her past and reveals a little bit more of her character. If you absolutely hate Michi though, you can probably go without reading it. The chapter following the next will definitely return to Sunari's POV.
Note: minashigo = orphan
Thanks again for reading! Y'all are wonderful and I hope you're liking this story as much as Itachi likes dango.