Note:
This is a little plot bunny my cousin has been begging me to write for nearly two years at this point, so I decided to indulge him because his birthday is in a couple of days and I'm too broke to buy him something expensive XD
Might update it again depending on reactions, or might leave it as is. We'll see.
On October 10th of the 65th year since the Founding of Konohagakure, the Kyuubi descends on the village hidden in the leaves and rampages as no Bijuu had since before the era of Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara.
The very next day, when the first horrific casualty tolls start pouring in by the dozens and the news of the Fourth Hokage's death begins to spread, Hyūga Fuyuko quietly slips past the village's decimated borders and deserts.
A third of Konoha has been reduced to ash and bloody ruin, and the rest is barely salvageable as is. Their Shinobi forces are in complete disarray, the structure of command thoroughly gutted and nearly every available and barely capable hand from the lowliest Genin to the most respected of Jounin and even the formerly retired Third Hokage have been conscripted into active duty, manning relief efforts and organizing survivors and managing a hundred other responsibilities in between, all in a desperate race against the clock to establish some form of working order before the other shinobi nations smell blood in the water and come a-calling.
It's chaos and misery hand in hand, and too damn good an opportunity to pass up regardless - not even the clans had been sparred the call of duty, and the Hyūga and their all-seeing eyes were currently stretched so thin that a proper census of all their active shinobi was nigh-impossible. A single insignificant Branch House member like her could slip straight through the cracks for hours, perhaps even days with none the wiser.
By the time anyone would know to raise the alarm, she could be halfway across the Land of Fire at least.
Fuyuko knows she'll never get another chance like this, so she doesn't hesitate.
The fear of discovery is not a hindrance. She knows that her desertion coming to light is inevitable, only a matter of time, and very little of it at that.
Even with all her alterations, the stop-gap measures she'd set up and the bastardized fūinjutsu script she'd painstakingly inked into her flesh, the caged-bird seal emblazoned across her forehead with all the subtlety of a cattle brand means that avoiding discovery past a certain point is literally impossible.
Far be it for the Hyūga Elders to limit themselves to subjugating their own kin, binding them with a tool of torture and abuse under the guise of 'protecting the bloodline' and leaving it at that.
No, the geriatric fuckers had to wire in a status-surveying component into the fūinjutsu, the better to guarantee that none of their slaves freed themselves from the leash they'd so gleefully wound around their necks by playing dead.
There would be no such easy escape from the clan. Not when exposing the trick was as simple as any one of the main house members noting their absence from a single missed mandatory muster call, tapping into the tracing array built into the seal and learning that they were still alive.
After that, there would be no mercy to be had. A single pulse of chakra is all it would take to activate the kill switch built into the seal, irregardless of distance, and that would be the end of whichever desperate, stupid fool tried to slip the noose.
Such was the fate of all traitors.
Fuyuko knows that barring divine intervention or some heretofore unknown circumstances in the league of, say, a fourth shinobi war or a tenth bijuu, that will be her fate as well.
She knows, and she doesn't care.
She hasn't cared in over half a year, not since the medical-nin at the hospital had confirmed her pregnancy and she sure as shit wasn't about to start caring now when she was nine months pregnant and due any other day.
('Twins, Hyuga-san!' the kunoichi had gushed all those months ago, oblivious to her growing misery. 'Congratulations!')
Everything that had come after that had been nothing short of a nightmare, but she was done with it. With all of it, now and forever.
Damn Hiashi and his cowardice and to hell with Hizashi and his spineless complacency.
She won't subject her children to that accursed seal, bound to wait on a legacy of entitled relics hand and foot solely on account of their birth and centuries of malignant tradition.
Fuck. That.
She'd die first and give them a chance at living their own lives before meekly surrendering them to that living hell.
...
Two and half days of running later, her water breaks.
The sun is dawning, the wilderness is still, and Fuyuko doesn't stop moving despite sanity demanding it.
If she were sane, she would have thought her plan through and probably would have never left Konoha to begin with.
Therefore, sanity as a whole could go right ahead and take a hike out with the rest of her demons. She didn't have time for it.
Instead of stopping, she continues forging ahead for the next four hours, and it's not until she's only a few miles off the border to the Land of Grass and making good time that the contractions finally grow unbearable and she's forced to stop or tempt disaster.
She lays down in the middle of a grove of trees, exhausted and spent and still ready to face the biggest fight of her life.
Eight minutes later, the caged bird seal activates.
If the pain of her chakra system collapsing was any less overwhelming or the distress of her crippling failure any less unyielding, Fuyuko would have probably been laughing her ass off out of sheer hysteria.
(Holy fuck, did the kami have it out for her or what?)
Her meticulous seal work is the only reason she doesn't die immediately.
Hyūga branch house members are forbidden from specializing in sealing, and it wasn't until Fuyuko had begun fumbling blindly through her independent studies in secret that she finally understood why.
The less fūinjutsu the branch house members knew, the lower their odds of successfully tampering with the seal that kept them beneath the collective heel of the main house.
The realization and the possibility it opened up lit a fire under her ass, and Fuyuko had gone from pursuing the art with relative interest to desperately learning everything she could with a zeal that was borderline religious.
And now, years later when push finally came to shove unto the end, it took her exactly fifteen seconds to realize that her best efforts were going to fail.
She could feel the caged bird seal expanding over and beneath her skin, reaching for the internal architecture of her chakra system and savagely shredding it from the inside out.
Her own sealing array, the one she'd been so proud of and hitched all her plans on couldn't hope to compete. It tries to disrupt the attack and stitch her chakra pathways back together, but it was no different from sticking a band-aid over a stab wound. A hundred stab wounds even.
Utterly futile in every way.
The caged bird seal had dug its roots too deep and was actively shearing her everything from the ground up, and the strain of childbirth was crushing what little resistance she had left to offer.
Darkness begins to encroach across the corners of her vision.
'No!'
She'd been so close. Her children-
Her children.
She'd planned to give birth and pass the twins off to any halfway decent surrogate family she could find on short notice before the seal activated.
Humble farmers, traveling merchants, a kami-damned Daimyo, she'd have settled for anyone so long as she could ascertain that they had even a passingly decent character and were headed anywhere but Konoha.
She'd even planned to seal off their eyes at birth (and oh, the fucking irony was not lost on her there), severing the tenketsu behind their optic nerves with a seal that would prevent either of them from ever activating the Byakugan no matter what kind of life they led.
Pale eyes could be excused as a genetic aberration, and who would even think to look for inactive clan heritage in the middle of nowhere at all?
It would have kept them hidden, kept them safe, even if only barely. The life of a civilian outside the protection of a shinobi village was plagued with all kinds of danger, but even the ghost of a chance at freedom was better than a guarantee of life-long slavery.
Her counter-seal, her planning, everything she'd done had only ever been meant to forcibly extend her life long enough to see them settled, and then she would have greeted the shinigami with a smile on her face and a song in her heart.
And now all of that had gone to ruin.
After that, Fuyuko remembers screaming.
She'd screamed and screamed until her throat began to tear from the savage pressure. The part of her mind that wasn't breaking under the ungodly agony wailed in anguish. And all the while, the pain of the clashing seals and the impending birth continued to rip her apart.
Eventually, something had to give, and she felt herself finally losing, consciousness and slipping away for what would have been the final, most bitterly tragic time, and the despair of her failure could have stopped an army dead in its tracks.
(I'm so sorry.)
And then something - no, someone was grabbing for her jaw and forcing opening her mouth, and an arm was suddenly forced between her teeth.
"Bite."
(Later, she'll find out about the caravan of civilians moving only a few miles away, and how one in particular had managed to sense her chakra with a near-priceless bloodline limit and somehow mustered the guts to seek out the flailing, sputtering chakra signature that could only belong to a shinobi on the brink of death, on a whim.
Kami.
Even on the verge of extinction, Uzumaki truly were something else.)
Right now, she looks up at the woman who'd appeared out of fucking nowhere, meeting red eyes and a pinched face framed by equally crimson hair, and even the ocean of pain her mind is drowning in can't fully stamp out the sheer stupid bafflement that comes over her at the sight of the stranger.
The woman's eyes narrow in distress as she leans over Fuyuko, one hand keeping her head in place and the other still partially in her mouth.
"Please," The stranger's voice was two parts panic and one part desperation. "You have to bite now."
And Fuyuko does, teeth grinding down hard enough to draw blood.
The woman stifles a scream, but Fuyuko wouldn't have cared if she hadn't, because her mouth is suddenly full of metal and chakra and pure salvation, and she promptly loses herself in it.
After that, things get...blurry.
Her awareness comes and goes over the passing hours - the constant infusion of miraculous healing chakra helps, but at this point, the damage is already so severe that it's only a makeshift solution. She falls in and out of consciousness, the pain fading and coming back twice as strong with all the inevitability of the tides, and it's so very hard to think.
To even breathe.
The turning point arrives when, eventually, her daughter is born.
She cradles the wailing babe in her arms only for an instant, heart awash with love and devotion before she's gently pulled from her arms and placed aside, cleaned up and swaddled in a torn-off traveling cloak
"Miyabi," Fuyuko gasps before she unwillingly parts with her. "Name- her- Her name is Miyabi."
Tell her, she tried to beg breathlessly, tell her.
"I will." The Uzumaki woman vows - Kanna, she's whispered her name at some point as she reassured Fuyuko and tried to distract her from her suffering - and her chakra rings with truth and promise. "But you can't stop now - your's so close-"
And she is, and the ordeal continues.
When her second child is only minutes away from being born, something changes for the worse.
Kanna pales.
"No!"
(It's the seal. It's always been that fucking seal.)
Her chakra winks out at last, the birth sapping the last of it, and the caged-bird seal finally runs through her veins unopposed.
Even with all the damage her own work had done to halt it, it still makes disgustingly quick work of her.
Her chakra system is destroyed in seconds, her nerves pulverized completely, and her eyes boil in their sockets she is blinded beyond any hope of recovery.
Distantly, she hears Kanna screaming, forcibly manipulating her jaw and trying to get her to bite again, but it's futile.
No amount of healing can fix her now.
She feels death finally reach for her, darkness that had nothing to do with her ruined eyes washing over her, and she's too weary and close to death to do anything more than regret that she would never live to see her second child
'No matter what, she thinks of little Miyabi, and the unborn treasure struggling for life within her womb, I will love you always.
(She doesn't know it then, and she won't know it for a long, long time, but that moment was the one that changed everything)
Fuyuko feels it the moment it happens.
The shift, the change, the shatter-point.
Power explodes out of her, tangible and mighty and absolutely not chakra of any kind she's ever known, and suddenly she had the energy to howl.
The Not-Chakra rages through her veins, mending flesh and bones, restoring nerves and ruined pathways and banishing death with relentless, limitless fury.
Her mind blanks out when the foreign power surges into her brain and burns at the fūinjutsu that had dictated her life for over two decades.
The process runs its course in seconds.
(It lasts an eternity.)
When at last the light and power finally fade, Fuyuko opens her restored eyes in wonder and desperate yearning and sees.
Exhaustion still lingers, and her chakra is basically non-existent, but the caged-bird seal is gone, every last trace of it burned to non-existence.
Victory snatched from the very jaws of defeat
Somehow, against all the odds, Fuyuko is alive.
Alive, and cradling her newborn son.
A few feet away, Kanna watches her with wide, wide eyes., little Miyabi nestled in her arms.
For a moment, nothing exists beyond the four of them.
"It was you," Fuyuko whispers, and the sound carries with it awe and disbelief and certainty. "You saved me."
Her son (soft and serene and beyond all reproach even at birth) blinks, opening his eyes and effortlessly ensnaring her in their Infinity.
(One day, she will ask.
She will look to her blessed child, place a hand on his snow-white hair, meet his unflinching gaze, and she will ask him how he managed to save her.
"Reverse Cursed Technique."
Fuyuko will nod as if she understands, even though she'll have long since given up hope of ever making sense of the impossibilities that chase after her son like moths to the flame.
"But how did you know to use it?"
"I just knew. I always know stuff like that." He'll shrug in answer, utterly nonchalant and forever at ease. "Throughout Heaven and Earth, I alone am the Honored One."
"But what does that mean?" She'll ask after taking a moment to process that proclamation, and her child, her limitless boy will return her look with cerulean eyes brimming with more power and potential than any Byakugan could ever hope to match, and he'll smile.
"Mama, I have no idea. Isn't that awesome?")
But that will all come later.
For now, Fuyuko looks into those impossible eyes and knows.
"Your name." She whispers tenderly, and it's as if the whole world suddenly goes still and oh-so silent in anticipation. "Is Satoru."
And then she retrieves her daughter from Kanna, presses both of her children to her chest and weeps in heart-rending relief as the sun dawns over a new day.
...
Just like that, with the birth of a single child, the balance of the Shinobi world is forever altered.
...
As always leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.