Tsume: *instantly rejects the human foibles of personal boundaries and age-appropriate engagement* Time to help me birth a baby!

Minato: what.

Obito: Yay!

Sasori: what

Kakashi, who was cheerfully helping an eleven-year-old Tsume unlock the secrets of very dangerous Suna puppets still armed with deadly poisons at the tender age of not-quite-two-years: okay, as poor my grasp is on age-appropriate engagement, this seems a little much.

Minato: well, guess I'm committed now.

Sasori: what.

Somehow, against any and all reason, it was Kakashi's presence that managed to calm the surrounding chaos – at least momentarily. Kakashi helped Obito in removing large rocks and dead tree limbs so they could lay the tent fabric reasonably flat as Rin assisted Sasori in getting more comfortably propped up against the trunk of a maple tree, tucking a thick wool blanket around him and Komushi because even during the day and with a sun shining bright in clear skies, mid-April amidst the mountains of Waterfall was still somehow colder than a Suna night. Sasori even graciously allowed Rin to heal the visible open sores caused by Hanzo's salamander's toxic breath. She wasn't able to heal them entirely – only enough to close the sores to prevent infection. "You're pretty skilled for being ten years old." Sasori's sparse compliment made Rin's eyes glow and her face, decorated with perfectly symmetrical purple squares, flushed red with delight.

At the same time, Namikaze Minato allowed Tsume to heal his shattered wrist in between her contractions, yanking it out of her reach every two minutes. She sulked and intermittently hugged his empty flak jacket and her ninken, both of which groaned when she clamped tight for an average of eighty seconds. She didn't bother healing the cratered blisters weeping on her face and limbs, but did allow Rin to spread a lavender-scented ointment on them as she explained how Sasori's antidote kept them from dying outright from exposure to Hanzo's toxic salamanders.

When Obito lit a fire – and burnt off his eyebrows – for heating up a pot of water, Tsume clutched her abdomen once again. "Damn it! The baby is breech!"

"Uh, that's bad, right?" Namikaze said.

"Oh sensei, it's very bad!" Rin hastily cleaned the ointment off her hands. "The baby could get stuck in the birth canal, and a mountain pass isn't a clean, safe site to do a cesarean section!"

Tsume stuck her hand down the front of her pants, and then she started pushing them off. "Damn, the cord is protruding. I need someone to shove it in and lift the baby off so I can flip her around."

And just like that, Kakashi disappeared once again. And the rest of the humans descended into chaos.

Rin eeped and Namikaze's face lost all color. Obito flailed as he hurried close. "I'll stick my hand up your vagina if you need it, Tsume-san!"

And then he flinched when Rin whacked the back of his head. "You keep your hands out of Tsume's vagina!"

Namikaze eyed his large hands, visibly cringing.

With a roll of his eyes, Sasori sent five lightning-blue chakra threads sliding through the air and snaked them up and under Tsume's tunic. Her legs twitched. "Those are cold, Sashimi-kun!"

"Sasori!" he snapped, feeling a squishy, bulging rope-like structure that dangled into a twisted hangman's loop. With a sneer and a flick of his fingers, he shoved the structure back up until he met a more dense structure, the size of a watermelon, and then gently pushed it upwards. Tsume gasped.

"Rin, Rin, come here." Rin knelt at Tsume's side. "Here, feel this? Push your hands deeper, kiddo. There, feel the curve? Those are the butt cheeks. This," Tsume pressed down on the upper end of her abdomen, "this is the head. I'm going to push to my left, you're going to push to your left, and we're going to spin this little sucker around. We gotta be careful, careful! There's a chance of pinching the umbilical cord or ripping the placenta. This is tricky when the amniotic fluid level is so low. You got her lifted off the cord, Sasori?" Sasori nodded. "Okay, ease up now, Rin. There we go!" Tsume patted what was apparently the baby's butt cheeks. "There you go, sweetie, you're almost here!" Then she snapped at Rin. "Check the baby's heart rate! Make sure it isn't dropping while I brace her so she doesn't flip around again! No, keep checking. Sasori – how dilated am I?"

He blinked at her. "What?"

"How dilated is my cervix?"

Suddenly conscious of where his chakra strings were, Sasori snatched them back with all the speed of a snapping rubber band as he felt his face burn bright red. He angled Komushi as if his bulk would hide Sasori from the world. "How the hell am I supposed to know?"

"Oh for – no, keep your hands there, Rin! Baby's heart is dropping, you need to give her a boost of chakra. I don't know if it's the stress of being turned around, or if the cord got pinched or wrapped wrong. Obito, are your hands clean?"

Obito froze. "No? Yes? Maybe?" He scrutinized his hands, as if he could manifest the Sharingan to find invisible germs.

"Wash them now, I need you to check how dilated the cervix is, because I need to push, but I shouldn't push if I'm not fully dilated."

Obito immediately plunged his hands into the kettle of heating water and scrubbed, biting his lip bloody so he wouldn't scream. At least the water hadn't reached its boil point yet.

Namikaze crouched next to Tsume. "My hands are clean. I can check, instead."

She shoved him back with a foot planted against his forehead. "Oh hell no, Mooncalf! You have gigantic man-hands and sausage fingers, and what would Kushina-chan say? And don't lie to my nose about them being clean!"

He gritted his teeth and knocked her foot away. "Kushina would say it's better that I checked your cervix than a ten year old boy, you dolt!"

Tsume laughed, high and grating. "If Obito is old enough to shove a kunai into a grown man's liver, he's old enough to check my cervix. Besides, there are no boundaries in childbirth. It's gross, it's humiliating, and it's weird."

Namikaze sighed. "After your report on Noboru-dono's behaviors, I can understand that."

Obito raised his cherry-red hands overhead and managed not to trip or stumble as he returned to Tsume's side. "Where's your cervix?"

She parted her knees and tilted her pelvis. "Inside the vagina." Then, tongue sticking out in concentration, Tsume shaped a rough circle with her hands. "It's a structure at the far back of the vagina that is normally closed, but during birth, it dilates open. There's a ring, and you need to stick your fingers inside that ring and see how wide it feels. The more constricted it is, the more of a lip it will have. This is about ten centimeters. Once you're inside, spread your fingers to determine the current radius, and then you're going to compare that to this radius."

"Uuuuhhhhh…" To the Uchiha's credit, he only hesitated a moment before he squeezed his eyes shut, dipped his hand, and blindly prodded around. "Um, okay, I think I found it – whoa, I felt the baby's head! It's got a lot of hair!" His face lit up like a display of fireworks.

"Oh, wonderful! I knew all that heartburn was going to be worth it. Now spread your fingers, yeah, at least they aren't freezing cold. Ow, fingernails are long, though."

"I promise to trim them short the next time I have to check someone's cervix!"

Namikaze pinched the bridge of his nose again. "Please let that be on the far side of never."

"Okay!" Obito yanked his hands free and held up his index and middle fingers, spaced wide apart. He compared them to the circle Tsume's hands still made, and she grinned, making a triumphant fist-pump.

"Yes! I can start pushing now!" She made a come-hither gesture at Namikaze. "Help me position on my hands and knees, I need gravity to aid me." She grunted and whined as he carried her over to the tent fabric, helping her settle on all fours. She faced Sasori with far more cleavage than he had ever been interested in, which he supposed was better than a bird's eye view of the baby's entrance into the world. "Go put a blanket by the fireside, Obito, and throw a kunai into the pot of water to sterilize. We're going to need something warm to wrap the baby in. Minato, you're going to strip my tunic off once the baby's here, I want to do skin-to-skin with her. I read about it in one of Orochimaru's research papers. It's supposed to help form bond between Mom and baby, and stimulate oxytocin."

Namikaze looked uncertain; Sasori was fairly sure it was related to a certain disbelief that Tsume had managed to read and understand Orochimaru's scientific research papers. (He… he needed to get his hands on Orochimaru's research...) "I don't think bonding between you and a baby is something you need to worry about."

"Shut up, I'm in charge here."

He saluted her with a wry smile. "Yes, Inuzuka Queen Alpha Bitch."

"That is Bitch-sama to you, Mooncalf. I'm also going to need you to cut the umbilical cord with that kunai Obito is sterilizing. Rin, ready to catch a baby?"

"Yes, Bitch-sama!"

"Okay, I'm pushing with this next contraction."

As Tsume screamed, Sasori squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his face into the back of Komushi's head, trying to somehow, magically, mystically, wish himself far, far away, or at least accidentally trigger Namikaze's yellow flasher Hiraishin thingie. Whether it was behind his grandmother or in front of Hanzo's toxic storm, he really didn't care where he wound up in this moment as long as it wasn't here. He focused on the throbbing pain of his stumps, on the ache of his closed sores, on anything other than the messy chaos of life and birth taking place in front of him, He could deal with the stench of spilled body fluids when cutting down other humans, their insides rotting from his poisons and their bloods drenching the sand dunes of Wind, but childbirth?

No, death was cleaner and more dignified.

After an eternity, in which Sasori's desperate wish remained unfulfilled, Tsume's screams trailed off, and was soon replaced by a high-pitched squalling. Sasori decided to risk peeking.

With the late afternoon sun shining down on her, casting a golden sheen on her clay-plastered skin, brightening red and gold highlights in her otherwise dark hair, Tsume had dropped into a naked turtle-crouch, a pink, squalling lump nestled in her folded arms. Obito bent over the lump.

"Sensei!" Obito cooed as he tangled his fingers in the bloody, matted dark curls covering the infant's head. "I think I've found my life calling!"

"No more cervixes until you're at least eighteen years old, Obito, or you've passed a completed midwife training course." Namikaze tied the white umbilical cord off in two sections – were those bootlaces? – and then sliced the cord as Rin tenderly draped the wool blanket over Tsume's body.

"There you are!" Tsume sang, her face relaxed and free from pain as her entire world shrank down to only include her little bundle of joy. "I am so happy to finally meet you, my darling little Hana. Do you have all your fingers and toes?"

Obito counted out loud, halting at five when Rin smacked the back of his head again.

"Not done quite yet," Tsume said, using Obito's clean underwear to clean the squalling infant's face. She lifted her backside by straightening her knees beneath. "I still need to pass the placenta. Don't yank on the umbilical cord, Rin. Gently, dear. Pull gently."

Sasori pressed his face into Komushi's head once again, not opening his eyes even when he heard Rin's declaration of the placenta finally being free, and Tsume's demand to inspect said placenta to make sure it had come out, intact.

"Oh! Oh! Did you know you can cook this?" Tsume asked. "The placenta is very high in iron, protein, and vitamins."

Her suggestion was met with a chorus of gags and Namikaze's stern reminder that Konoha nin do not casually engage in cannibalism, no matter what the current propaganda from Ishagakure claimed. The ninken quickly dug a deep hole to bury the placenta before Tsume could talk anyone into trying it.

Sasori was wondering if it was safe to emerge from his safe space when he felt the whisper of breath across his scalp, and he froze, fingertips glimmering blue with chakra.

"Is it done?" the small voice asked behind him. "Is it over, yet?"

Sasori eyed the hunched child hiding behind him. "I think so." Two small dark gray eyes, so similar to Tsume's in shape and color, stared back, pleading. "I have never, in my entire life, witnessed anything so ludicrous." The second-hand embarrassment was also completely foreign to Sasori, so he wasn't going to focus on that. "Is your entire family like this?"

The eyes shifted away, but not before Sasori caught a glimpse of embarrassed shame. The small chest heaved with a deep sigh. "Yeah… yeah, every one of them."

"What are we going to do for diapers?" Namikaze asked.

Tsume, high off of oxytocin and a potent cocktail of other hormones, drew her little bundle of joy to a nipple. "Eh. I can rig something up with ninja wire and underwear. Obito packed extra, right?"

("Why does everyone want to use my spare underwear? We all packed spare underwear!")

"Oh good," said Kakashi, seemingly eager to bond with Sasori as the only other normal human being present, "Aunt Tsume took the nipple rings out. I knew she wasn't going to be able to breastfeed with them."

Sasori was wrong. There were no normal humans present.

oOoOoOo

Kakashi had actually made himself useful in his so-called patrol. He had caught and gutted several salmon from one of Waterfall's many rivers as they recently started migrating northward to their breeding grounds. With a roaring fire in place, he proceeded to dress them with bulbs of garlic and slices of lemon (where had he gotten those?), liberally seasoned them with rosemary and salt, and roasted them on a cast iron skillet that he laid on the flame, alongside the cleaned stack of cattail roots that Tsume had gathered earlier in the day, although it felt like a lifetime ago.

Apparently, Kakashi had taken a page out of Tsume's book when it came to a well-stocked camp kit. Sasori wondered if the delicious smells from a cooking fire increased the risk of enemy nin finding their campsite and ambushing everyone, and then realized that he would happily love to see the entire cohort of Konoha nin slaughtered because of their insistence of eating delicious food while on a mission. (What mission? He had no idea. Team Minato was very careful in not revealing anything to Tsume, at least within Sasori's auditory range, on why they were secretly camped out half-way in a country that had taken a page out of the Country of Iron's book, and firmly opted to maintain its neutrality during the Third War, having no qualms in using the Seven-Tails jinchuuriki to win any arguments with anyone who felt otherwise.)

"Is it normal to bleed that much?" Namikaze asked as Tsume, only half-covered with the blanket that Rin had draped over her, shoved another one of his shirts between her legs with no regard to how uncomfortable everyone felt as they witnessed her movements.

"With a vaginal birth? Oh yeah. And I'll probably keep bleeding for the next six weeks., although the bleeding eases up after the first week or so."

"Huh. No wonder you practically salivated over the iron in your placenta."

"Ichi can still dig it up–"

"No, Tsume."

Namikaze offered to use the same Hiraishin jutsu to transport Sasori, Tsume, and little Hana to Konoha. Tsume adamantly refused, clutching Hana to her breasts. "She's too little, Mooncalf! You'll turn her stomach inside out worse than mine!"

He sighed. "Well, I certainly have no idea what the pressure passing through a space-time ninjutsu would do to a newly born infant, but we don't have the supplies that you need. We don't have pads, we don't have diapers – Obito is going to run out of underwear here by tomorrow. Furthermore, you and your Suna foundling," he raised the volume of his voice to drown out Obito's protest about how Bakashi had also packed spare underwear, why can't they use his instead of Obito's? "don't have clothes suitable to this climate. Neither of you even have a pair of shoes!"

"It's not the first time I traipsed through Waterfall without shoes, and I got by just fine. And Sasori doesn't have feet. I think you'd make him feel bad if you got him shoes."

Namikaze pinched the bridge of his nose again. "Tsume, I was there the first time you 'traipsed' through Waterfall. You wore seven pairs of socks, and rode me like a pack mule, using my hair to steer. Look, I can bring Sasori separately to Konoha, and fetch someone to keep you company. My team and I have our own mission – we can't go with you back to Konoha."

Namikaze dodged another foot to his face, and then scuttled out of the reach of Tsume's feet. "Oh no, you aren't, buster. I promised Sasori I'd take him, and I'm going to do that. You're not separating us."

Sasori contemplated Minato's offer. On one hand, he would be better served with getting more immediate care with the Konoha medical system. On the other hand, Tsume was the only one to give him his parents' puppets. In the end, Sasori decided to keep his mouth shut and not contribute his opinion, one way or another.

("Yeah, sensei. Tsume-san just told you about the importance of bonding with newborns. I think that includes adoptees, too."

"Dumb ass."

"What, Bakashi?"

"Sasori is clearly too old to be Yamato."

"Wait – that's not Yamato?"

"Yamato is five and not a Suna nin.")

Eventually, Kakashi grew impatient with Tsume and Namikaze's argument, which kept circling back to the same problem that Namikaze wanted to separate Tsume and Sasori, and Tsume adamant that she absolutely wouldn't be separated from Sasori.

"Minato-sensei, if you can't take Aunt Tsume and Hana-chan to Konoha, and Aunt Tsume won't let you take Sasori, why don't you just bring Konoha here?" At Namikaze's blinking confusion, he added, "Why don't you just go to Konoha, pack her a bag of what she needs, and bring that back with some Konoha company?"

Namikaze gave this suggestion considerable consideration. "I can bring back Aunt Natsumi to keep Tsume in line."

Kakashi shook his head. "Aunt Natsumi's presence would violate multiple international treaties."

"I thought she wasn't banned in Waterfall."

"After she finagled the Seven Tails into signing up as her own personal summon, two years ago? She is banned for life, and there's a restraining order in place to prevent her from trying to utilize the Seven Tails summon."

What. (How?)

"Oh. I forgot about the Hokage's restraining order. There just aren't many nin left in Konoha who have the availability to help Tsume, though, especially for traveling cross country back to Konoha. Well, there's Aunt Bashira." Kakashi winced at the suggestion as Tsume blew a raspberry to express her dislike for that particular suggestion. "I might be able to find a retired ninja, as long as travel isn't too fast." A soft smile crossed Namikaze's face as he traced a finger across Hana's foot. "I can't imagine how fast you would be able to travel with a newborn."

Sasori silently marveled over how, or even why, anyone would talk an unpredictable, demonic construct of evil, as resentful as it was powerful, into a being a personal summon. His own experience with the One-Tail was the one reason why Tsume's gouka inugami ranked as the second most terrifying things he had ever seen in his entire life.

And then, once realizing that Inuzuka Natsumi and Inuzuka Tsume were probably the only living two summoners of gouka inugami in the entire world, Sasori marveled at how it was possible that these two morons managed to survive without two functioning braincells and any sense of self-preservation. Huh. Grandmother was right. The capricious, sadistic gods truly did have a soft spot for idiots. Either that, or the gods had so few sources of entertainment to occupy their amusement through eons of existence that they naturally blessed such sources…

"Hey, the Inuzuka Clan has a half of millennium of experience under our belts, hauling infants and pregnant women across the continent."

"What about…" Kakashi squirmed. "What about… dad?"

A shadow of sorrow darkened Namikaze's face as Obito and Rin's expressions fell.

Tsume shook her head. "Kakashi – no. That isn't even worth considering. Involving Sakumo would be almost as bad as bringing Aunt Natsumi into Waterfall."

Rumors of Hatake Sakumo's disgrace were dark and varied, ranging from Sakumo being tossed into a locked mental facility after attempting suicide to being stowed away in a T & I containment cell. Sasori didn't know what he wanted to believe, but he was pretty sure that if Sakumo had to accompany Tsume and Sasori, Sakumo would never reach Konoha alive. There was no way Sasori would be able to hold himself back from his vengeance in the long, lonely distance between here and Konoha. (The story about Orochimaru's recent defection from Konoha, with a bulletin Bingo Book insert that was so new that the ink was still damp when it arrived via messenger hawk two weeks before Sasori left for the oasis, was even darker, briefly detailing treachery and illegal live human experimentation. As a fellow experimenter on humans – granted, Komushi was dead when Sasori experimented on him – Sasori desperately needed to know more details.)

"Minato, look." Tsume rested a hand on Namikaze's. "Sasori and I don't need anyone. Hanzo is too far out of the way between here and Konoha, and with my nose, we'll be able to evade enemies, no problem. We can ride Ichi and Ni. You don't need to find us a babysitter."

Speak for yourself, moron, Sasori thought as he chewed his salmon. It really was delicious. And the roasted cattail roots were horrible. (He spit out his mouthful when none of the humans were looking in his direction, although Ni, who also hadn't eaten a single roasted cattail root, looked at him like a judgmental sand cat who found much to be desired. "Shut up," he whispered to her, covering up the cattail root flavor with another bite of salmon.)

"You might not need a babysitter, but I can't have a random Suna nin turning you into a puppet."

Tsume waved her hand, casually dismissing Namikaze's well-founded concerns that Sasori had no compunction whatsoever against killing Tsume and transforming her worthless corpse into something truly priceless. "He said he'd give me beautiful red hair. It's fine. He promised he wouldn't do it until after he gets a new set of legs, anyway, and his promise smelled genuine."

The look Namikaze sent Sasori very clearly indicated how little faith he had in any promise Sasori had given Tsume, whether or not he meant to keep at it at the time he voiced it.

"Why do you only have half your ninken?" Namikaze asked. "You're never separated from Kuromaru. And you never did explain why Kushina had to lop off Sasori-kun's legs."

"Oh, I totally forgot to tell you all about what happened!"

"You were kinda busy," Kakashi muttered.

oOoOoOo

There were no words that could adequately explain how incredibly lacking Inuzuka Tsume's ability was to concisely and coherently provide a meaningful report of any sort.

Sasori had lived and had been conscious and aware throughout their entire misadventure, and even he struggled to make heads or tails out of Tsume's rambling, out-of-order tangents. She vacillated between not enough detail, and way too much detail, constantly interrupted herself with rabbit trails of opinions that meandered away from the main point, and then frequently backtracked to mention something she forgot to include earlier, which only led her down another rabbit trail. It was infuriating.

"How can you stand it?" he asked Kakashi, whose gaze had gone blank about twenty minutes ago when Tsume managed to somehow bungle up his parents' puppets with Hanzo's salamanders, and then raved at length about all the hidden compartments and stores of poison that she and Kakashi had discovered when they were eleven and one and a half years old, respectfully.

"Maa. Aunt Tsume? You get used to it." Kakashi roused himself long enough to fetch some warm water and a spare shirt for Sasori to clean himself of the dried clay, as well as Rin's tube of ointment for his half-healed blisters.

No. No. He refused to spend enough time with the blasted moron to get used to her thought process. Sasori wasn't even sure Tsume could think. He should be appreciating the majesty of their picturesque surroundings, with white-capped mountains burning gold in the setting sun and the bright blue skies darkened into an ombre of burnt orange fading into a deep purple, and instead, he had no choice but to focus on Tsume's mindless ramblings just so he could correct her once he could successfully butt in.

"Your parents' puppets are cool," Kakashi said during Tsume's animated rave about what an amazing puppet she would make and how her poisons would be even more deadly than Hanzo's, and how nifty would that be, Mooncalf? "The scorpion was my favorite. Your father's work is incredibly detailed and proportionate."

Sasori instantly squashed the warm, fuzzy feeling when Kakashi voiced acknowledgement for his parents' legacy and said nothing as he wiped his arms clean. He couldn't. The combined damp skin and cold air being enough to make him shiver so hard that his teeth rattled.

oOoOoOo

"I," Sasori told Namikaze once Tsume finally finished her tale, yawning while she waddled off to attend to some toiletries after handing a bundled-up Hana to Rin, "could've told you everything in fifteen minutes. Not two hours." He was huddled close to the fire, desperately trying not to experience hypothermia for the first time in his life.

Namikaze was far too smug with Sasori's visible ire. "Ah, but it wouldn't have been half as entertaining, and thrice as dishonest."

He wanted to choke Namikaze.

Namikaze turned away, a clear dismissal. "Kakashi, do you think you can keep Sasori from running off while I pop on over to Konoha and look for a volunteer brave enough to put up with him and Tsume?"

Kakashi looked pointedly at Sasori's bandaged stumps. Sasori wanted to choke him, too. "I don't think he's going to be running any time soon, sensei. We're supposed to be allied with Suna anyway, right?"

Namikaze huffed with laughter. "Ah, but we know exactly where we stand with Suna nin, allied or otherwise."

"Far away from them and their poisons with our backs facing in the other direction."

"Exactly."

Grasping that strange and, frankly, impractical three-pronged kunai, Namikaze briefly said his goodbyes to Obito and Rin, and then disappeared. Sasori rubbed his aching stumps, which only made them burn like the exposed nerve endings had been doused with acid, and ignored Rin's offer to look them over.

"Can I help with anything?" Obito asked Sasori.

Sasori studied Obito for a moment, and then shrugged. "All right. You can scratch my left big toe."

"Weird, but sure." And then Obito's brain caught up to his mouth. "Wait… you don't have a big left toe anymore."

"And yet it's itching something fierce."

"But… but you don't have a left big toe." Obito floundered as Kakashi palmed his face in exasperation. "How can you feel it itch if it's attached to a disembodied foot a thousand kilometers away from here?" He whirled around to Kakashi. "Shut up, Bakashi! I can hear your brain calling me a dumb ass, loud and clear!"

oOoOoOo

Tsume was snoring loudly, comfortably wrapped around her sleeping infant and nested within her fort of seven pillows, three blankets – one of which she had commandeered from Namikaze's pack, since he wasn't present to refuse her – two ninken, and a half-suffocated Obito (who, apparently, as an Uchiha, ran warmer than the average human being, and therefore was the perfect substitute for a hot water bottle), when Namikaze returned, alone, but with a large sealing scroll and an empty backpack tucked under his arm.

"Do you have a two?" Sasori asked Rin. The combined brightness from the overhead full moon and the Milky Way on breathtaking sparkling ribbons overhead, reflecting off the surrounding snow-clad mountain peaks, lit up their little clearing up almost as bright as an overcast day. The otherworldly light made it easy to play cards with only the needed addition of the low fire they sat next to.

Rin didn't even look up from her hand of cards. "Go fish," she told Sasori.

He pulled a card from the stack into his hand with the use of a chakra thread without having to move from the cocoon of Rin's bedroll. The card he drew didn't match any in his current hand.

"Got a two?" Kakashi asked Sasori, eyes gleaming in amusement.

Sasori felt his eyebrow twitch. With carefully applied chakra, he could turn the two of spades into a weapon that would disembowel Kakashi, but it probably wasn't a good idea to showcase such skills with the return of their jounin sensei. And it was also impolite to get blood on Rin's bedroll, since she had insisted that he take it when she noticed his desert-bred intolerance for the cold. Desert nights were cold, but it was a dry cold. The cold in Waterfall was a wet cold that somehow managed to bypass Sasori's soft flesh to sink icicles into his bones.

"Well, I'm glad to see none of you are playing poker or blackjack," Namikaze said, evidently pleased to see that Sasori was still present and that the remaining Konoha nin were alive and intact. He set the storage scroll and backpack next to Tsume's nest.

Obito weakly waved his hand. "Sensei, heeeeelp."

Tsume snorted and cuddled closer, clutching Obito to her exposed bosom with Hana sandwiched between them. "Shhhh, my little hot water bottle."

"Not right now, Obito. Tsume, Aunt Bashira sealed an entire wardrobe of warm clothes for you and Hana, enough diapers and wipes to keep the Konoha orphanage stocked for a decade, a nipple shield – and please don't ask me what that is – a baby wrap, burp clothes, some extra harnesses for your ninken, your spare camp kit, additional food, kibble for Ichi and Ni, some clothes for Sasori, three fully-stocked first aid kits, dry firewood, a large tent, a squeeze bottle, some laxative suppositories, and plenty of pads for your bleeding."

Tsume grinned. "Aunt Bashira has embraced modern living, but knows exactly what a traveling Inuzuka mother needs to be comfortable."

"That she is and she certainly does. I still don't understand why you and Kakashi always complain about her being bitchy. She also knows it's unreasonable for you and your ninken to carry a footless Suna nin back to Konoha, so I'm returning to Konoha in the morning to get your babysitters."

Tsume squawked. "I don't need a babysitter!"

"Oh, I'm sure you'll enjoy these volunteers. Anyway, why don't you and Hana get dressed while Obito and I set up a tent for you? With the clear night sky, there's going to be a hard frost tonight."

Sasori was trying to figure out which of his opponents was hiding a matching queen (and secretly trying to figure out how he could safely steal Namikaze's Hiraishin jutsu tonight when the man was asleep) when as Tsume wandered off with the squeeze bottle filled with water, an armful of pads, clothes, and the laxative suppositories. Obito volunteered to dress Hana, although he and Rin had to argue over which cute outfit Hana should wear first.

"I'll share my tent with you," Kakashi told Sasori, securing Rin's cards so Sasori couldn't sneak a peek with carefully placed chakra threads.

As an unclaimed Inuzuka son, Sasori suspected that Kakashi had a nose nearly as good as Tsume's. "You know I have every intention of smothering you in your sleep."

Kakashi shrugged. "You can try, but you'll never actually be able to get away with it. Attempted murder will also earn you one of Aunt Tsume's lectures, and you don't want her lectures. They're even worse than her reports."

Sasori shuddered at the memory of Tsume's reports, and decided he could wait to murder Sakumo's offspring until after he had turned Tsume into a puppet.

Tsume: Sasori is a perfectly normal boy. I'm safe to travel with him.

Sasori: *plots to kill everyone and turn them into puppets*

Minato: Tsume, you think that your soul-eating hell hounds are adorable and take them for picnics. You have a proven track record for being an abysmal judge of characters. And a terrible habit of collecting little murder-goblins.

(also Tsume, two months previously, having been on the clean-up crew for Orochimaru's hideout after he got chased out of town)

Tsume: I shall call him Yamato, and he shall be mine, and he shall be my Yamato. Come here my little Yamato.

Yamato: *panics and nearly skewers the scary lady with even scarier hair with the Moukoton*

Tsume: oh, aren't you the most cutest little murderous scientific subject.