Hatching Plans

Naruto waited. And waited, and waited, and waited.

Sneaking was mostly waiting for just the right moment and then a quick burst of movement followed by more waiting. The grand manse of the First Magister was heavily guarded even in the middle of the night but that didn't stop him, especially not the second time around.

Eventually the guard above him changed posts, walking off with a barely suppressed yawn, and Naruto could move again. Having access to so little chakra had allowed him to improve his control considerably, so much so that if he had any possible access to genjutsu instruction he would have taken it with the expectation of positive results, and that also allowed him to do things slightly differently.

Channeling chakra only to his fingertips allowed him to stick to the sandstone wall and climb up without making a noise. Doing it this way took a lot of concentration and using it in combat was most likely beyond him, but it also reduced the amount of chakra he needed to use in the first place. His left hand took more concentration than his right, the burn scar still inhibiting him, but it had gotten slightly better.

Pulling himself over one of the crenels on top of this second, inner wall left only the guards inside the actual manse between him and the dragon egg. He had heard the guard walk off to the left, where he would make a quarter walk around the circular wall before stopping and watching for a few minutes again. Naruto had observed the manse and its guards for days before ever stepping a foot inside, he knew the patterns, obvious or not.

He went left as well, his footsteps quiet on the stone walkway. In the black of night, he could not see the guard, no matter how good his eyes were, but the man carried a simple lantern, and the glow was visible for miles against the dark, reflecting again and again of the walls and merlons.

Naruto descended the first staircase to the ground he found, entering an expansive garden filled with pools, bushes, and a great variety of fruit trees. Since any source of light was so incredibly visible and all the guards outside of the actual building carried them, he could rely on his eyes as much as he did his ears to navigate a safe path to the nearest entrance.

The manse was open and airy, with many wide hallways and windows, to allow the sea breeze to cool the interior in summer. Big but shallow pools littered the middle of open-roofed sunrooms and small alcoves filled with silk pillows and or even beds broke up the straight walls now and again. Naruto was unsure just how well defended this place would actually be in the event of an attack but Lys itself was not particularly martial any ways, the high city walls manned by only sellswords.

Inside the actual manse lanterns and torches illuminated the tall rooms and hallways, so the guards themselves had no need for light sources of their own. Ears peeled he forged on, watching his step for any irregularities, and listening at every corner before entering a new hallway.

It was slow and unexciting work, but Naruto did not overly mind that. The whole point was to reduce the excitement, so that no one would ever know he had come and made off with the egg.

He had deliberated for a while how exactly he wanted to approach the whole affair. Simply go in and steal the egg, get out, and then hope no one would notice the theft quickly enough. Even if anyone did notice, it was unlikely he would be found out; he had travelled to Lys as a stow-away and he could not imagine that anyone could keep track of every single person walking around the city, but taking the risk seemed unnecessary to him.

While he had been inspecting the property for entry and exit points before entering the first time, he had considered very noticeably stealing something else as well, to draw attention away from the dragon egg and then planting the other item on some hapless stranger. That would leave him with enough time to board a ship for Volantis and be well on his way by the time anyone cared to notice the missing egg.

In the end he had decided on another route.

Words echoed down the corridor ahead of him and Naruto stopped himself from turning the corner. He was happy to wait for his opportunity again until the steps started moving towards him. He could turn around and backtrack but giving up ground while sneaking was the same as doing so in combat. Not only not his style, but not a good way to victory, as far as Naruto was concerned.

The ceilings in all the hallways were arched, creating dark corners at the very top even with a nearby light source. People that weren't Shinobi also rarely looked up.

Repeating his chakra application from before he ascended the wall next to him, until he reached the stretch of wall directly above the entrance that would soon be used by the guards coming his way. Using his hands and feet, Naruto anchored himself between the two perpendicular stretches of yellow sandstone and then pressed himself as far into the corner as possible, carefully not jostling the little bag he had slung around his torso too much.

Most of the belongings he had taken with him from Volantis were hidden in a small alcove on the roof of a house only a minute of quick walking from the harbour. Naruto had refrained from taking any weapons except a single kunai, since he did not intend to fight anyway. Stashed away in the small bag were a spool of wire, his remaining smoke bomb for an extreme emergency, and a painted, roughly egg-shaped rock.

Entering the manse the first time had mostly been about figuring out the best paths, and then the actual location of the egg. There were only so many hours in a night and there was no way he could search the whole complex in a single one with no idea where to look at all.

That first search had also allowed him to get a good look at the egg: its dimensions, its shape, its colours. Naruto was no artist, his talent enough to fake a handwriting at most, but anyone that looked at the stone for long enough would figure the trick out anyway, even had his paint job been completely perfect. He just needed it to buy some time, and his work would pass a rough inspection at least.

The voices and steps grew louder and then shadows became visible below him. He felt his heart beating like a drumbeat in his chest, regular and powerful. What was life without a little danger and excitement after all.

The Lyseni dialect was nearly as foreign to him as any other version of Valyrian that was not from Volantis, so he was barely confident about every second word. Something about expected cargo and ships coming through the Stepstones, an area often ravaged by pirates, and how Tyrosh had started guarding their merchant cogs more heavily. There were some obvious ship names in there too, the Valyrian was a galleas he had already seen in port during his stay, the armed and trained crew unlike the usual deckhands and sailors.

Both men stepped into view below him, clad in colourful and very likely incredibly expensive robes of purple, yellow, green, and red. The younger of the two was noticeably more tanned, his face lined from the salty sea air despite his relative youth. They continued walking, still deep in conversation, and never thought to look up.

Naruto waited for them to leave the hallway and for their steps to no longer be audible, hands splayed against the walls of the shadowed corner. Before he could think about getting down and continuing, another guard entered his hearing, the rhythm he had been in with the patrols upset by the short wait.

Hand on the pommel of his blade, the guard stepped into view, scaled shirt polished to a shine to reflect the status of his employer. The man yawned and walked slowly into the hallway, barely paying his surroundings any great attention. Usually, any intruders would be caught way before getting this far, so the guards patrolling the inner parts of the manse were all more relaxed than those closer to the walls.

Instead of simply crossing the hallway and continuing his way the guard meandered and came to a stop in front of one of the wall hangings. 'Damn,' Naruto thought to himself, aware of his precarious position. Inspecting the fine stitching that had gone into bringing the scene of battle at sea to life, the guard rubbed the sleep from his eyes and then scratched at his beard.

Naruto could hear no other guards coming his way, fortunately, and he quietly shifted his weight to his legs, allowing him to use his arms as long as he was quick.

The guards' eyes wandered upwards along the tapestry, and Naruto moved.

Chakra kept his feet stuck to the wall and he let gravity pull him down. Halfway down he twisted backwards, towards the arch over the entrance, and swung himself onto the other side and out of sight.

Holding his breath, he carefully listened for any kind of reaction. His equipment was secured tightly, so there should be no noise no matter his movements, but you never knew. Seconds ticked by but nothing changed and then the steps echoed down the hallway again, the distance increasing slowly.

Half a minute of more waiting and then Naruto silently touched down on the floor again and threw a quick glance over his shoulder just to make sure that he was in the clear.

Things could always go wrong, no matter how good the intel. It had been too long since he had been on a mission.

Lightly shaking his head Naruto continued, alert for every little disturbance. Hallways, courtyards, and rooms were all ignored for the real prize.

Instead of being kept in a vault of some kind, as he had expected breaking in the first time, the dragon egg was always on display. Cushioned on red velvet, it sat in a room filled with a load of different trinkets and symbols of wealth. With the whole manse guarded day and night the lack of direct security made some sense, though perhaps it was also just another sign of the First Magister's outrageous wealth.

Blue scales with small steel-grey veins, there was a natural beauty to the egg. Naruto could feel the nature of it as soon as his skin made contact. The incredible age, the stony hardness, and the potential for flame and life and fire, banked only by the ravages of time that had turned the hatchling inside to stone. Feeling that, the unique natural energy of it all, was quite disheartening for him, but ideas about hatching the egg were for later, when he was with Shiera again.

Painted stone and dragon egg swapped places.

Seeing them so close to each other drove home how poor his imitation was even more, but there was no use despairing about that now.

On silent feet Naruto got to work sneaking out of the room, the building, and then the walls of the manse.

Their blood boiled and burned but Naruto could feel no change in the dragon egg. Everything had natural energy. Air, water, grass, stone, animals, people, everything. The amount and quality differed greatly between things and places, but it existed everywhere.

If he was careful and concentrated, he could differentiate just what kind of natural energy he was feeling. Steel felt different than silver, granite felt different than marble, and an oak differed from a willow tree. He had not gotten a lot of use out of that ability yet, but he had been training it, nonetheless.

The outer shell of the egg was a contrast to the unborn hatchling inside, but the difference was not big, certainly not as big as it should be. That situation might have been fine on its own, but after three other attempts of birthing a dragon he would have expected at least a bit of a change.

Only fire and then only blood, once with only Shiera's and the second time a mix of hers and his own, had yielded nothing but theories to discard. They had moved onto using fire and blood together, after a few days to let Shiera recover physically from the amount donated.

Glancing to the side revealed Shiera carefully inspecting the process going on before them. If she was disheartened on account of their lack of results until now, she had not told him yet.

Well, perhaps something would happen over the next few hours, as the egg continued to sit in the crimson pool, wreathed in flames that feasted on the magic contained in their blood.

"Any change?" Shiera asked, breaking him from his thoughts.

"No." Naruto shook his head. "Nothing yet."

"Hmm, tell me if you feel anything happen, would you?" With a final line of ink Shiera finished what little notes she had made for this attempt.

They settled down for more lessons then, the sensation from the inside of the dragon egg just barely touching Naruto's mind the whole time.

Over the next hours he never detected a change and by the time the last of the fire had burned out it was clear that nothing would change either.

"Do you remember what I told you about the Night's Watch and the Wall? About the legend of how they came to exist?"

"The Long Night, wasn't it? An age of winter and darkness, something like that?" Naruto said, trying to recall her words. It had been a few long months since that lesson.

"In the broadest of terms, yes. The Wall was erected afterwards, and the Night's Watch created to defend it, and Westeros as a whole, from what lies north of it. How many years ago the Long Night happened, no one can agree on, but the White Walkers undoubtedly exist."

Naruto did not waste any time doubting her words. The fact that Shiera said it was the case was enough for him. For a moment she looked like she would ask him a question, but then Shiera shook her head, reconsidering.

"What the exact events of the Long Night were, I do not know, but when those events repeat themselves all of Westeros will suffer, that I am sure of," she continued.

Silence reigned between them for a few seconds, time Naruto spent trying to imagine such a situation. There had been cold winters and not so cold winters in Konoha during his life. The Land of Iron was cold and dark and snowy year-round, but Naruto had never spent more than a few days at a time there.

"What do you want us to do about it?" he said eventually, their cooperation a foregone conclusion in his mind.

"I do not yet know. I had thought to correspond with my nephew Aemon. He serves as Maester at Castle Black. Getting a message that far north in winter presents some problems however."

Few ships would make the trip ordinarily, and even fewer in the middle of winter, and the route by sea was likely easier than the one over land, from the way Shiera and her scrolls described the North.

Ravens would not fly the distance and any sane messenger would wait until spring. Glass candles could bridge the physical distance but without any way to answer the insight on the other side, they were entirely useless for actual communication.

Imagining life at the Wall, from the few things Shiera had told him, it seemed pretty horrible. Swearing away your freedom, a wife, children? Spending all your life in the cold, toiling away or fighting in the snow until you eventually died, Naruto's notion of the future was quite different.

They eventually moved on to different issues, and after a bit of training and more language practice retired to bed.

Naruto woke up a few hours into the night, though whether it was the absence of the body next to him or something else that interrupted his sleep he could not say. Back in Konoha he had always been a deep sleeper but out on missions you had to be capable of reacting to every little change in your surroundings. Relaxing enough to go back to sleeping like the dead after coming to this world had not happened yet.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly, but he felt the warmth near his legs before they could pierce through the veil of the night. Shiera was sitting up, her back to him, silver-gold hair pulled forward over her shoulder in a simple braid for sleeping.

"Shiera?"

When she did not answer Naruto scooted forward until he was right behind her. The dragon egg was in her hands, fingers trailing over the steel-grey veins running through the blue scales.

"It's beautiful, don't you think?" she said eventually, breaking the silence. There was some emotion in her voice he could not quite pinpoint. Distracted and a bit sad, perhaps. Despondent and dissatisfied, though neither was quite right in his mind.

Whatever name was appropriate was really not the important part to him, he did not like seeing Shiera that way in any case.

Acting on impulse, Naruto pulled her closer to him by her midsection until her back was flush with his chest, his chin lightly resting over her shoulder. Shiera quickly relaxed against him in response. "Yes. It is."

For all of their trouble trying to get anywhere in hatching the egg there was natural beauty to it all the same. Whether the dragon inside would be completely blue or exhibit the same vein-like grey pattern as the egg no one would know until it hatched. When that would be he could not say but judging by what he was feeling from inside the egg it would not be soon.

The natural energy felt like stone on the inside, though unlike any particular kind he had ever encountered. If the Path of Pain that had absorbed his Sage chakra had felt like this after petrifying, he did not remember, but the idea that it could be, gave him a further nudge towards the idea he had been developing ever since touching the egg for the first time.

Reaching around Shiera he placed both hands on the egg and closed his eyes, becoming still and one with his surroundings. The sensation was slightly different between both hands, not in a physical sense but the natural energy he felt, his scarred left muddying the impression he received.

Becoming aware of the natural energy everywhere around you had been the first step in training to achieve Sage Mode, drawing it into your body and then balancing it with your chakra came after. But Naruto had no wish to enter Sage Mode or to even mix the natural energy with his chakra in any way. He was still far too weak to balance out the weight.

He carefully beckoned the natural energy inside the egg, lightly, gently. Naruto was reasonably sure that if he worked slowly, he could expel the natural energy from his body fast enough that he did not turn a part of himself to stone. Probably.

Slowly, slowly the natural energy began moving out of the centre. As if pinching a balloon in two places at once a tiny amount moved beyond the boundary of the shell and into contact with his hands. The sensation was familiar and not at the same time. His scar, his small chakra supply, the conditions inside the egg.

Flesh burned anew.

Naruto's eyes snapped open to a lightly illuminated room and where the angry red scarring had been left on his left hand, flames bloomed. He lost concentration the moment after, and no concentration meant no control.

Ripping both hands away from the egg stopped the process cold, returning the natural energy back to its place in the egg, but his hand had burned all the same. It was only a cold heat, the unnatural flames quickly winking out, but it was heat, nonetheless.

"Gods!" Shiera dropped the egg as if she had been the one to be burned, dropping it onto the bed and abandoning it among the folds of the blanket. "What did you even do?" she asked, carefully cradling his left hand without touching the angry red scars.

"Something foolish, it seems." Leaning back, he braced himself against the bed with his right hand, the heat in his left slowly diminishing. He didn't feel like he had burned himself, not really at least. As soon as his fingers touched the feather mattress a new shock travelled up his forearm. "Hngg." Naruto flinched, and curled forward over his hand, the breath driven out of his lungs.

Where his fingertips had been touching the egg and the natural energy inside, they had turned to stone. He could not truly feel the tips at the moment and every little movement of his hand painfully pulled at the contrast between soft tissue and rocky hardness.

He had to tune out everything else for a precious moment, focusing only on the energies and the boundary of his body, on the spot where his fingers ended, and the surrounding air began. His mind wanted to move fast, to expel every little bit of additional natural energy remaining in his body in a single action, but Naruto controlled himself, shunting the energies away as carefully as he had tried to pull them out of the egg.

As the energy joined its' like in the air his fingers slowly turned back to normal, small pieces of dead grey skin flaking away, a not entirely unpleasant stinging sensation accompanying the change and returning feeling back to them.

"Very foolish," Naruto said, once he was sure that there was no more natural energy remaining unaccounted for. He met Shiera's eyes, worry and surprise reflected in the beautiful, mismatched pair.

"I learned to draw energy from nature in the past. If you integrate it correctly, you can empower yourself, but too much natural energy returns you to nature by turning you to stone," he began, trying to explain without too many unnecessary details. "I thought that if I drew out some of the energy in the egg, I could reverse the petrification and the dragon could hatch."

"And this 'natural energy' usually ignites your skin?" she asked.

"No." Naruto could not help but chuckle, despite the state both of his hands were in. "No, not usually." There was still some pain in his left, but the flames had disappeared quickly enough that whatever damage had been done would likely be recovered by the morning, even with his slow healing. It was beyond obvious that the scar had somehow interacted with the natural energy for whatever reason. Naruto supposed it was better to find out like this than in a fight.

Shiera was still cradling his hand in her own, her soft skin a stark contrast to the callouses he had earned through hundreds, even thousands of hours of practice. The despondent look on her face had returned and that tugged at him in a way nothing else ever really had.

He took her hands in his and lightly tugged her forward. She did not resist his pull and then she was in his arms, her head on his chest. There was a fragility and brittleness to her in this moment that surprised him. It was like she was trying her best to balance on a thin edge, unsure which side she should jump to.

"What is it?" Naruto asked. Maybe they only knew each other for a few months, but ever since Shiera had shared her identity with him, he had been finding it more and more easy to read her moods. That something was bothering her deeply was beyond obvious.

For about a minute they simply sat like that in the quiet bedroom. In another situation he would have been getting impatient already, but he had no wish to force Shiera to say things she did not want to tell him. Besides he was rather content like this, the fact that she seemed to relax on account of his presence alone only serving to warm him.

Shiera met his eyes. "If you knew that an action would have results important for the future, would you take it, even if it was something you hated doing?"

This was no random question. Even if he had no idea what she was talking about, this was clearly important to her. Shiera had never asked him something like it, the sheer breadth of experience she had acquired over her long life far outstripping his own.

Naruto thought not of his own decisions and actions, but the one act that had largely shaped his whole life. His father had made such a decision, on the day he had been born. Sacrificing his own son, hopeful that that same sacrifice would give him the tools Naruto needed to defend Konoha.

Minato had not liked doing so, but he had made the decision anyway. Naruto had been angry at him for it, but he also understood. His father had been the Hokage, sworn to protect and lead the whole village, and he would not ask a sacrifice of someone else he was not willing to make himself.

In another version of events, maybe things would not have worked out in the end but trying to figure out every lucky break or coincidence near eighteen years later seemed like a great waste of time and effort to him.

"I hope I would, as long it meant staying true to myself." Naruto did not particularly care what most people thought of his actions anymore, not after Pain and his attempts to convince the Raikage. As long as he stayed honest with himself, he would do what he thought was right.

"I thought so," Shiera said quietly, resigned. Naruto had hoped that his answer would lift some weight of her shoulders, but it seemed instead to release the strings holding her up.

Sitting up fully again she laid a hand on his cheek. His whisker marks had not returned, even though his chakra had grown slightly stronger over the months, but he was more sensitive in those spots, nonetheless.

"Maybe you aren't quite so different after all." Who Shiera meant; he did not know. Her eyes roamed over his face as if searching for something, and Naruto thought that he would move heaven and earth to give it to her, if only he knew what it was.

Shiera's other hand came up and then she was gently pulling his head down towards her own, their eyes never breaking contact until their lips met. She was soft and warm and soft against him. They had kissed before, in the embrace of passion and pleasure, but this felt different in a way he could not explain.

Naruto liked looking at Shiera, talking to Shiera, touching Shiera. But kissing her like this, he was sure, was something he could never tire of. He gave himself over to the feelings, his own hands coming up, one wandering up the curve of her hips and the other cupping the side of her neck.

They both lost themselves in the movements, the touching, the heat. Perhaps everything would be just fine.

I hope you enjoyed Chapter 18. I am done with 19 as well, which you will get next week, with 20 hopefully to follow the one after.

On the topic of dragon eggs. In all likelihood Dany's eggs are the three stolen by Elissa Farman in the time of the Old King. Then there are the Targaryens eggs. Most if not all were probably at Summerhall, and we never hear of them being recovered in the books.

However, I can't imagine that the only dragon eggs that ever made their way out of Valyria before the Doom were those of the Targaryens. The Free Cities, with the exception of Braavos, were colonies of the Freehold, Volantis notably the first and biggest, and Lys is filled with silver-haired purple-eyed descendants of some Valyrian or another. I would bet money that there are eggs behind the Black Walls, and owned by at least some of the rich merchant princes and rulers in the other Free Cities. Illyrio can't be the only one who could get his hands on some of them. To be clear, this egg is never mentioned anywhere in the books. The dragon will not be one of the ones we already know.

Shiera approaches the attempts at hatching the egg with a rough scientific mind. She is no Maester, but after all those decades trying to puzzle out sorcery she is very careful when calling an approach fruitless. The Scientific Method of course does not come around for a while, but Shiera places no stock in something like peer review. What does it matter to her what others think.

Natural energy is pulled from your surroundings/nature, and in the right ratio with your chakra can allow you to use Sage technique/chakra and Sage Mode. Naruto lets one of the Paths of Pain absorb his chakra in Sage Mode and the Path turns to stone because it can't correctly balance the energy. Naruto thinks something similar happened with the egg: too much natural energy turned it to stone. The way that his scarred hand reacts to natural energy is partly inspired by Victarion in ADWD, who gets a badass magma-hand from Moqorro.

Shiera compares Naruto to Bloodraven/Brynden Rivers at the end. That may seem inappropriate to some, but I think the idea that Naruto similarly disregards the views of others as long as he believes his own cause to be correct is understandable. Sasuke does a lot of fucked up shit in Shippuden, but Naruto is only concerned with the personal issues, not the larger societal/legal ones. Killing Danzo, who is acting as Hokage at the time, should after all mark Sasuke for death, even more than just turning traitor did, to any loyal Shinobi of Konoha, even if he was a piece of shit.

Naruto is concerned with doing the right thing, in his mind. Not the legal thing, the liked thing, or the expected thing. Brynden Rivers makes sacrifices for the "greater good" which is just doing what you think is right, regardless of what others think, with extra steps.

The last line? A little on the nose perhaps, but Naruto does feel like that at that moment. Shame it won't turn out like he imagines.

I would like to remind everyone of the rating for this story, and the universe it is set in, before next chapter. Anyone that has read the books should be fine, but I imagine some have not, and it may be surprising.

As always, thanks for reading and reviewing. Until next time.