Yay, only one more chapter to go! Thanks so much to all my readers for rocking:) And geez, is it just me, or can you not stand having to wait for the final Naruto manga chapters!? :D

So play a song, strum it on your knee:

We move like the wind, like the air we are free,

We move through the earth like the wind through the trees,

We hover between sky and the westward breeze.

~Verse Seven of the Third Book of Akash

Chapter 49: Cages

Five Years Later…

Her bags were packed. Her hair was swept up into a bun. Her room where she had stayed these past five years was spotlessly clean, sheets folded, drawers empty. It was as if no one had lived here in the past five years.

In a way, no one had.

Guarding the feudal lord had proved to be more of a hassle than Yuki initially thought. In the beginning, she wondered how difficult it would be to guard a morbidly obese lord and in her superciliousness, scoffed at her new job offering. Even if it was her ticket out of Konoha, she was worried she was going to die of boredom.

And that's when all the various assassination attempts began to occur. Yuki swore there was at least one attempt on the pompous man's life at least once a week. Sometimes, the assassins were foolish enough to target Yuki herself. They quickly learned their mistake.

The first attempt on the Daimyo's life happened right in the royal chambers. The assassin was a sneaky bastard too, and had been about a foot away from ending the feudal lord's life via a sharp pointy katana when Yuki materialized from thin air and looked him in the eye. The assailant fell into a deep, blissful sleep. Blissful, that is, until he woke up in the interrogator's dungeon in chains.

Yuki never killed her prey. She simply put them in a pleasant dream space and handed them over to the royal guard. Aiji often mocked her for her hesitancy to kill. He himself had slain his fair share of would-be-assassins with his wind blades. Yuki would merely shrug at his teasing and ignore him. She had her own way of doing things; that was all.

Yuki observed a lot of things while at the palace: how the lord ate until he was as fat and round as a bloated whale, while his servants were skinny as scarecrows; how he passed judgement over his subjects, arbitrary decisions he made based on his mood, or on the weather. However, these judgements had effects in the real world, and not always for the greatest good.

In fact, the most memorable intruder at the palace was the father of a girl named Koto. He had come crawling in through an open window in the east wing on a balmy, summer evening. Yuki had caught him without any trouble; after all, the man was far from a trained ninja. He was a simple farmer, and his clumsy movements alerted her to danger well before he made it to the lord's chamber.

But before she could put him under genjutsu, the man got on his knees and bowed to Yuki.

"Lady," he pleaded "please hear my cry! The feudal lord has passed harsh judgement on my daughter. For the crime of stealing food from the lord's supply wagon, he has imprisoned her for ten years. My daughter is only twelve years old—she had no idea what she was doing!" The man began crying, and he insisted that he was only trying to steal something from the palace, sell it on the black market, and then pay his daughter's bail.

Yuki sighed heavily. She hardly believed the man, but something in his tone, in his desperate cries, touched her. She felt, rather than heard Aiji approach her until he was standing a hairsbreadth away.

"Well," he breathed into the shell of her ear, making her shiver despite the warm night, "are you going to put him under genjutsu or what?"

"Shut up," she muttered to her companion before forcing the poor man's head up. She looked into his eyes and, gazing into his mind saw that surprisingly, the man had been telling the truth. It seemed fair to him—and to Yuki as well—to rob from the rich lord in order to remedy the lord's unfair judgement.

In a moment, she released him. The man, surprised that he was still awake—let alone alive—began bawling his thanks.

"Just—leave," Yuki muttered, exasperated, as the man crawled back from whence he came.

Yuki noticed many such incidents like this, where the feudal lord passed laws and decrees that she thought were decidedly unfair and ridiculous. But she was merely a tool of the Daimyo, to be used according to his will. She had not spoken out against the myriad small injustices that he passed into law, but she didn't uphold them, either. And when she found men to be innocent, and the root cause of their guilt to be the feudal lord, she allowed them to escape with none the wiser.

At the end of five long years, having seen the underbelly of the political game, the corruption of government, and the suffering of the people under an opulent ruler, Yuki had made a decision.

She was going to leave her ninja life behind her entirely.

"What?!" Aiji asked incredulously, his pack shouldered on his back as they walked down the highway leading away from the royal city. "Yuki-san, you can't be serious. You're going to quit being a ninja?"

Yuki nodded. "I'll walk a little ways with you, Aiji-san, but then I'm off to Akash."

"But...why?" he shot back, his voice hot with agitation.

She shrugged. "The feudal lord," she began, not bothering to lower her voice, "is a jerk. He pulls laws out of his ass, not for the good of the people, but for his own pleasure. As a ninja of the Land of Fire, I am a tool of the feudal lord. And you know what? I'm sick of it," she spat. "I'm going home to the mountains and I'm never coming back."

"Yuki-san," he replied more gently this time, "you're just burnt out from our last mission. Come on. Don't you want to see your family? They haven't seen you for five long years. Your little sister will be all grown up, and your younger brothers will have become accomplished ninja."

Instead of soothing her, his words simply agitated her. Her youngest brother.

Her younger brother, Kayato, the reincarnation of Uchiha Madara, would be five years old when they returned. She didn't want to see him—to see the glints of madness lurking in his young eyes.

There was nothing drawing her back to Konoha. She had no desire to return to her family, to play the predetermined roles she had become accustomed to: eldest child, older sister; the one to swoop in and make everything okay again. The last time she had been in Konoha, the food had had no flavor, her life had had no color—like a photograph left too long in the sun, the colors leached until only a dull sepia was left.

In comparison, the mountains of Akash were the places she visited nightly in her dreams, flying over the lolling hills, the undulations of eternity, the ribs and hips of the earth. The jagged line of the pine trees silhouetted against the setting sun, the ridges bathed in blue from the falling twilight, those were the sights she craved. The songs of Akash, her dreaming life, was more real to her than anything in Konoha had ever been.

Yuki looked at Aiji with determination in her eyes. "Aiji-san," she insisted, "I'm leaving. Please tell everyone I love them and that I'll be thinking about them." And with that, she turned down the path towards Akash.

She had seen the dreams, the divinations pertaining to her future if she returned to Konoha. It wasn't what she wanted. It wasn't what any sane person would choose.

But Aiji had grabbed her by her elbow. "Yuki!" he shouted. "Think about how crushed your poor parents will be if you don't at least say goodbye. Think about how Saki-chan will cry when she learns she'll never see you again!"

Yuki sighed. How could she explain that she saw Saki on a regular basis, albeit in a different dimension? Her strange, otherworldly jutsu were something she didn't discuss with Aiji. He was a man firmly grounded in the reality of the day-to-day, and she knew he wouldn't understand.

But of course, Aiji did have a point: her mother and father would be upset if she didn't at least say goodbye...

Yuki shook her head. She couldn't become weak! Nothing good would come of returning to Konoha. She had seen it in her scrying bowl, her untimely death, the destruction... No. She wanted no part in that final battle. She was through with being a ninja, of being nothing more than a thoughtless tool.

"Aiji-kun," Yuki replied softly as she shrugged his hand off of her arm, "I really appreciate what you're trying to do. You've been a great teammate, and if it weren't for you, I'm sure I would have sawed off my own fingers with a rusty kunai these past five years."

Aiji chuckled at that. "Someone has to remind you not to take things too seriously, after all."

A wry grin danced across Yuki's lips, but she continued, "But I need to go. Please—"

But she couldn't continue her sentence, because Aiji grabbed her in a hasty embrace and kissed her full on the mouth.

Yuki was entirely unprepared for this.

The two had become close over the past five years, but Yuki was a guarded person, and had been reserved around him for the most part. After all, her dream life was so active, she hadn't felt the need to deepen her bond with Aiji. Especially because if she let her gaze linger on those eyes when they sparkled with laughter in the aftermath of a good joke, on the shape of his cheek, or his sleek brown hair as it blew gently in the wind—well, she would feel things that were downright unsettling and better left unexplored. After all, she had her work to do.

But now, in Aiji's arms, she could hear the blood rushing in her ears. She felt decidedly hot, and strange. "Aiji-kun," she breathed, "what...?"

"Come back to the village—for me, Yuki-chan," he whispered in her ear, the breath tickling her skin. "Just...let's walk back to the village together, and after you've said your goodbyes to everyone—to me—then you can leave."

Yuki knew she shouldn't acquiesce to the request, but it was awfully hard to think in that moment. Aiji took advantage of her pause and kissed her again. It was a sloppy kiss, inelegant, but Yuki was seeing stars...and she wasn't having a vision of souls dancing in the heavens, but light dancing on the inside of her dazed eyelids.

"Okay," she finally breathed when he pulled away. "Just…okay."

He grinned and took her hand, but didn't say anything.

That night, they kissed under the open canopy of the sky.

Technically, Yuki was five years Aiji's younger, but Aiji acted so nervous when he first began to kiss her she had to stifle her laughter. All thoughts about consequences and caution were blown to the wind. After all, at this point Yuki and Aiji were twenty years old if you counted inter-dimensional time skips, and they had just finished a major five-year mission. They felt invincible and free.

On the third night of their journey, about a day's distance from Konoha, they slept together. Yuki didn't think it was weird. After all, the two had been friends for five years, and fending off unbelievable sexual tension for that entire time. And though there was awkwardness, overall it was sweet. She liked the way he held her hand as they walked, she enjoyed the jokes he cracked about the feudal lord and his cronies, but most of all, she liked the way he looked at her.

She could tell that in his eyes, she wasn't just a tool to be used, or a powerful ninja to be feared; she was just herself. A woman. Uchiha Yuki, who had a terrible sense of humor and who liked to sleep in too late on the weekends. Aiji had grown on her, like an old sweater or pair of shoes that became more comfortable the longer you wore them. Sleeping together was just an extension of their friendship, a logical conclusion of holding hands and kissing and sharing a sleeping mat.

But when they got back to Konoha's gates, Yuki began to realize that to Aiji, it meant that they were dating—that Yuki wouldn't leave.

"Aiji-kun," she began when they were just a few paces away from those familiar gates, "you know I can't stay in Konoha. I still plan on leaving."

His face fell and he dropped her hand abruptly. They walked to the rest of the way in silence, and even when they reported their mission to the Hokage, Aiji lacked his usual luster, like a tarnished piece of silver.

But Yuki pushed the uncomfortable tension between them out of her mind: after all, she was only here to say her goodbyes. She'd stay for a week, two at the most, and then she would make her way to Akash—to her real home, there to lay down her arms and live a peaceful and quiet existence; there to give up her surname and the expectations of an entire village to which she did not quite belong.

She was surprised when she saw the Hokage again. It seemed he had earned more than a few gray hairs in her absence. And when she parted ways with a sullen Aiji, and wound her way through the familiar streets in the Uchiha district, she found herself overwhelmed with nostalgia and with the desire to stay for good.

Yuki took a deep breath and convinced herself that these sentiments would soon pass.

To say that her family was overjoyed to see her would be an understatement. Sakura, whose pink hair had thinned somewhat, and sported some more silver streaks than Yuki remembered her having, clutched her and cried, "My baby's all grown up!" Yuki rolled her eyes but she couldn't hide her smile all the same.

Her father clapped her on the back and told her it was good to see her again. She could tell from the way he stood back from her, the lines of his mouth twitching upwards in a smile, that he was deeply happy to "see" her again. Just as Sasuke backed away from Yuki, Saki practically plowed her over in a bear hug. "Yuki-chaaaaaaaaan!" the pink-headed girl shrieked.

Yuki winced at her temporary loss of hearing and ruffled her sister's hair. She was surprised to see that Saki had grown about two feet taller—though Yuki was pleased to note that she was still shorter than herself by at least six inches.

Takeo was really the biggest surprise. He had been only a child of two when Yuki had left the village, but now he was seven, a full fledged genin. He was still slightly chubby; Yuki mused some things never changed. After promising to train with Takeo, the last member of the family came to greet her—Kayato.

By the time Yuki had taken the job with the feudal lord, Kayato hadn't even been born. Now, he was five years old. With trepidation, Yuki looked into his eyes and saw—

Nothing out of the ordinary. He waved cheerfully to her, gave her a hug, and asked her if she could spar with him later. He looked absolutely normal. He had the iconic, black spiky hair of the Uchiha, dark eyes, and a mouth that rarely broke into a full smile.

Yuki began to think that perhaps, the scrying bowl was wrong...

After all, the future was uncertain, was it not?

But uncertain or no, Yuki did not want to stay in Konoha, and later that night, told her family about her plans to take a permanent leave from the ninja register to travel to Akash. They tried to reason with her. Sakura protested that Yuki was being considered as a future candidate for the position of Hokage, and Sasuke went on about her duty as heir to the Uchiha.

But Yuki didn't care about titles, or about the meaningless trappings of duty. She would spend some time in the village training Takeo and sparring with Kayato, but then she would leave.

In her heart, she knew didn't want to see the glints of madness that might be hidden beneath the facade of Kayato's innocent face.

That night, in her dreams, she tried to use the scrying bowl, but was unable to see the future clearly. She traveled to Aya to ask for advice, but her sensei just shook her head and said the future was an unknowable entity. The divination tools were not absolute.

Yuki felt her resolve weaken.

Two weeks later, her period was late. Yuki activated her Mankegyo Sharingan and with horror, saw a tiny bundle of cells forming in her womb.

In other words: she was pregnant.

For a moment, she had the urge to just run for it, leave the village without telling Aiji about the pregnancy. After all, he had been avoiding her like the plague these past few weeks. It wouldn't be hard to slip out without his notice...

But then her inner perfectionist started talking to her, and for the sake of her own integrity, she found that she could not keep it a secret. And so, on a rainy day, she knocked on Yuhi Kurenai's door and asked to please speak to her son. Aiji grumpily trudged to the door, and for a moment, Yuki found herself tongue tied.

"Um...Aiji-kun?"

"What?" he snapped.

"Um..." Kurenai was standing right by the door, and Yuki couldn't find it in her heart to break the news right then and there. "You want to...I don't know, get a bite to eat?"

"Aren't you leaving the village soon?" Aiji asked waspishly.

Yuki shrugged. "I guess we'll see about that..."

They walked in silence in the rain for a while. Yuki savored the tapping sounds of the rain against her blue umbrella. The repetitive drumming soothed her frazzled nerves. At last, she could take the silence any longer and blurted out, "Aiji—"

"Yuki—" Aiji began at the same moment. They both paused their walking and looked at the ground. Finally, Aiji broke the awkward silence. "Yuki-chan, I'm sorry for being so rude. It's just, I thought sleeping together meant more to you, is all." He toed the ground. "I sound so stupid," he grumbled, flushing.

Yuki blinked an errant drop of rain out of her eyes. "Well...it has come to mean more to me...with time..." Yuki began uncertainly. Yep. What she thought of as casual sex had definitely turned out to be lot more. She squeezed her eyes shut then and prayed to Kami for help while Aiji gaped at her.

"You mean—it did mean something to you?"

"Aiji-kun. I'm...I'm..."

"I love you too, Yuki-chan!" He moved in to kiss her, but Yuki stalled him with a shaking hand.

"No. Wait Aiji-kun, there's something I have to tell you..."

"You've been sleeping with another guy, haven't you?" Aiji replied, his voice quiet and cold.

Yuki rolled her eyes. "Idiot. I've only been back in the village for two weeks. Who the hell would I have been with!" She shook her head. "Listen," she replied, softening her voice, "I'm...I'm...I'm pregnant!" she managed at last.

Silence.

"You're—you're what?"

"Yeah. I'm…pregnant," Yuki mumbled.

"Yuki, you were never good at jokes," Aiji replied in an acerbic tone.

Yuki placed a hand on her hip and glared. "Who's joking?"

Aiji blinked a few times before his brain could come to terms with what she had just said. "You've got…You are…"

"Pregnant, genius."

Yuki was about to hit him, but Aiji captured her in a fierce hug. "This is great Yuki-chan!" he whispered into her ear.

Yuki buried her face in his long hair and closed her eyes, not out of happiness or any other cliched feeling one might have upon embracing an estranged lover. It was more like a wince, a feeling of loss. A bird being shut in a cage.

"You won't leave the village now? Will you?" Aiji asked haltingly.

"No. I'll stay," she replied, keeping her tone inflectionless.

Aiji and Yuki were married by the end of the month, and by that time, Yuki was mostly resigned to her fate. But in her dreams every night, she flew over the Akash mountain ranges like a lost bird and wailed a sorrowful song.

#

After the wedding, things calmed down a bit for Yuki. She was forced to take a leave of absence from the ninja registers due to her condition. Not that she minded, though. She was sick of being in the system, sick of missions. She enjoyed having more quiet time to herself, where she could wander the streets of Konoha aimlessly, or go for long, ambling walks in the forest by herself.

Aiji was sweet. He was everything a woman could want in a husband. He kissed her before they went to sleep and when they rose in the morning, made her herbal tea and rubbed her feet and thought of hundreds of baby names for their bundle of so-called joy. But he woke her up at night to cuddle when she was in the middle of a journey to the other world, and when she returned to the earthly plane she was groggy and disjointed. She felt as though she was a body someone had taken apart and then put back together the wrong way.

She was thankful for the times when Aiji got called away on missions, and when she dreamed, his face was not in them.

With her newfound free time, Yuki thought she would make the best of her situation and began training Kayato in ernest. She thought that perhaps with the right influence Kayato would grow up to be alright. He showed no traces of insanity, of greed, of any of the things that Yuki would have thought the reincarnation of Madara would have. He was always polite, showed her his rare smiles when he mastered a new jutsu, and all and all, was completely unremarkable. Yuki found herself doubting her vision, and thought that the future would be peaceful.

Yuki's first pregnancy went on without any complications, and nine months later, she had a baby girl. They named her Miya-chan. With the birth, Yuki was tied even more firmly to the bosom of Konoha, and she lost herself in a whirl of maternal activity. Sasuke came over often to help with the baby, and as she watched her father play with her infant daughter, she thought that maybe, just maybe, staying in Konoha had not been such a great loss.

And so the years passed by. Yuki and Aiji tried to conceive another child, but it was as if Yuki's body had had enough. Not that Yuki really minded, because it was Aiji who was insistent on having more children. Yuki would have been content to while away the days in silence, in peace and quiet. The stories about Yuki's adventures of her youth, the ridiculous heroic nicknames—Yuki of the mangekyo whose light never leaves, Yuki of the panthers, Yuki the heir to the Uchiha—faded, until she was simply Yuki, wife of Aiji and mother of Miya. It was almost as if she was a civilian woman.

She was content. But somewhere in her heart, she was also disappointed, because in Konoha, the sun never seemed to shine as brightly as it did in her dreams.

Ten years passed in a blur. Her daughter became a fine kunoichi and went off on missions with her team, while Yuki spent many hours with her aging father, making him meals and playing him songs while Sakura was out, still working insane hours at the hospital.

One day, her youngest brother asked her to help him train: he was on the cusp of becoming a Jonin, a remarkable feat for his young age. Yuki waved in a self-effacing manner and replied that he should ask Saki, or Takeo; she herself was grossly out of shape. But Kayato insisted, saying that she was the most powerful kunoichi in the whole village, and active or not, he would only train with her.

Yuki had long since forgotten the violent portents she had read in her divination bowl those many years and began training with him. She was surprised at how fun it was to fight again, to weave jutsu, to punch air and flesh and to become breathless from battle. There was a new light in her eyes, and she looked forward to her sparing sessions with her youngest brother.

It was during this time period that Yuki became pregnant once more. Aiji had come back from a long mission badly injured, and his brush with death had renewed his desire to increase his progeny. Yuki didn't protest, but her brother Kayato couldn't help but notice that a bit of the light, so newly returned to her eyes, had vanished.

When she was in her ninth month of pregnancy, and Kayato was nearing the date for his jonin examination, Yuki would rest in the shade and simply watch Kayato perform his jutsu, being too heavy with child to spar herself.

"You'll definitely pass, Kayato-kun," she called. She was happy for him: he had his youth, his freedom, the ability to dance in the air like a bird, to create fire from the aether. She was vaguely jealous, but she wouldn't admit it, even to herself.

"Eldest sister," Kayato began as he sat beside his sister under a tall pine tree, "why do you do this to yourself?"

"What? You mean this?" Yuki replied, pointing to her belly. "I think Aiji did this actually..."

Kayato snorted. "You know what I mean. I don't think you were really cut out for domestic life."

Yuki simply shrugged and played with a blade of grass between her fingers. What could she say, really? When she had become pregnant and married, a part of her had given up. It was like a hawk whose wings had been clipped. She hadn't flown for so long, she had forgotten what the rush of air in her face felt like.

"Yuki, you're the strongest kunoichi—no, the strongest ninja—in this whole damn village. Why don't you reenlist? Don't you miss it—being powerful?"

Yuki shook her head. "Power isn't all its cracked up to be, my little brother. I'm much happier now..."

Kayato shot her a look; she couldn't quite describe it, but it seemed like even without his sharingan activated, he could see right through her.

"You're lying," he replied, his voice quiet and cold. "I've read the reports on you, how you could teleport through the air and slit a man's throat before he even—"

"Enough, Kayato-kun. It only takes a moment to end a life; it is much harder and more meaningful to create life instead."

Kayato merely snorted and rose, telling his sister that he would meet her at dusk for their nightly session. Right now, he said, he had to think.

Yuki felt a shiver run down her spine when he gave her that strange look again, but she convinced herself that she was imagining things, that Kayato was just pitying her when really, there was nothing to pity. She waddled home to make herself lunch, and ignored the gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach.

Alright guys, almost to the END! Thanks so much for reading, and please, review:)