Budding Limbs

Rough, uniform textured cloth sat bunched up all around him. Electronic beeping that should have sounded much fainter than it actually did flooded his hearing.

Then, his eyes shot open and he was met with the harsh sensory overload of Konoha’s hospital- the shinobi recovery unit, to be specific.

The next thing to hit him was the roughness in his throat. A dry sensation so heavy that it felt like he’d never had a sip of water in his entire life.

His entire body ached in a numb sort of way that led him to figure that he was probably doped up on some very good pain killers.

Voices outside that were too close to his door to just be random passersby clogged his eardrums, but his head was still too fuzzy to try and figure out who the voices belonged to or what they were saying.

What was going on? Why was he here? And why did his heart feel like it was about to hammer itself out of his chest and make a run for it?

He tried to lift his head off of the lumpy pillow that the hospital had provided but found that large leather ties reinforced with sealing parchment were wrapped around his chest, torso, knees, feet, elbows, and wrists. He couldn’t shift enough to even move his neck, and the nausea of having moved after presumably a while of being sedated forced him to lie his head back down.

Just what had happened?!

They’d never restrained him like this before- not even when he kept trying to escape to go after Sasuke after Orochimaru had stolen him.

Wait.

Sasuke.

A bright flash of Sasuke’s sword and cracked purple tiles painted itself across the alpha’s mind. He felt his eyes go wide as the realization hit. The mission debriefing- Sai breaking away from the group- the explosion. It all came crashing back to him.

He remembered Sasuke taking his hand and knowing that the wayward Uchiha was agreeing to come back to the village with him. But then Orochimaru had shown up, and for a reason that Naruto couldn’t understand, he’d lost it. He’d lost himself for a split second, and that was all it took for the Kyuubi to take over.

Everything after that was a fuzzy mix of rage, but there were bits and pieces that he could put together if he thought really hard. Like Sasuke falling and Captain Yamato using his wood style to restrain one of the chakra tails.

“Well, glad to see you’re awake. You gave us quite the scare, kid.” Master Jiraiya’s voice carried over from the now wide open doorway. Beside him stood Kakashi sensei and Grandma Tsunade, both of whom looked mildly put out.

“Sas..” Naruto trailed off after the painful scratch of his dry throat burned even more, but he pushed through because Sasuke was important and he needed to find out where they were holding Sasuke, “Sasuke…where is Sasuke?”

He didn’t miss the shared look that both of his senseis shared while Tsunade cleared her throat to respond, “The two of you are separated for now.”

With his body still trapped beneath the restraints, all he could do was watch as she adjusted her bangs and moved forward to take a look at what he presumed to be his medical chart.

“Despite the ordeal, it would seem like you’ve only sustained basic injuries. With your accelerated healing, a broken arm and a sprained ankle shouldn’t be too much of a concern. How are you feeling?” She asked, all business.

The young alpha scoffed, “Like I’m a prisoner in my own hospital room.”. To make a point, he gestured with his chin down to the leather fasteners that had roped his body down.

Kakashi leaned against the wall, near the window so the light cast a dark shadow over his face. “I’m afraid you have me to thank for that. You kept trying to escape and get to Sasuke, so we had to restrain you to treat your wounds.”

Again, Naruto asked, “Where is Sasuke?”

As if they were all taking turns, Master Jiraiya was the one to answer his latest question, “Forget about Sasuke for a second kid, he’s probably giving whoever’s looking after him hell right about now-”

Naruto smiled a loopy, half drugged half fond smile in agreement. His Sasuke was like a prickly cactus when under the care of people he wasn’t familiar with.

“-ut lets talk about you for a minute.”

The grogginess came back with full force, the energy he’d used to speak and pay attention had dwindled, and whatever medicines he was on weren’t helping his awareness come back to him.

“Hey..I feel- I feel weird.” he murmured dizzily after a moment of silence had fallen on the room.

Tsunade leaned over him, pale eyebrows furrowed, but whatever she’d said had been lost on him.

The next time he woke up, the first thing he noticed was that the restraints were gone. The second thing he noticed was that Jiraiya was still sitting in the chair beside his bed, calmly leafing through the rough draft of his latest novel.

“You’re up.” the old man hummed as he turned a page and jotted down something in the corner. The scene was an almost familiar one. One that reminded him of countless evenings when it had been just the two of them, master and student.

His head felt clearer- enough so that he let out a sound of confusion.

“Turns out the sedatives weren’t completely out of your system yet, kid. Tsunade went to check on another patient, she’ll be back later.”

“Why was I sedated at all?!”

His sensei looked at him with a painstaking look, like Naruto just wasn’t seeing the full picture. It wasn’t unkind, though.

“When your squad had gotten you back within the leaf village’s borders, you were still coated in the nine tail’s chakra. You attacked any nursing staff who came near you, you attacked your teammates- Sai getting the worst of it, and kept trying to go off and find Sasuke. You were delirious with rage and it became a detriment to your safety as well as everyone’s around you.”

His sensei was never one to sugar coat things when it came to the demon inside of him.

Naruto fisted the blankets that someone- probably Kakashi sensei- had tucked him in with. It wasn’t his fault! He couldn’t control it! No matter how much he’d tried to train, there was always something that came up and he had to interrupt his training to control the Kyuubi!

“You don’t have to lecture me like I’m some monster, you know.” the injured boy frowned.

It didn’t matter that there were tears in his eyes, or that he didn’t remember any of what he’d done while not in control of himself. It never mattered. Everyone looked at him with that thing in their eyes regardless. They didn’t understand that there were two beings fighting for dominance within his soul. They didn’t understand that sometimes, Naruto was too weak to win that fight.

They didn’t understand that he was human too, and that humans sometimes made mistakes.

“You’re far from a monster, kid. And for what it’s worth, we don’t blame you. You’ve got a hell of a team, I’ll give you that. That Sakura girl sure knows a thing or two about healing jutsu. Reminds me of Tsunade back in the day. And Sai- he’s weird, sure, but even with two broken arms, he was still trying to help you.”

He didn’t deserve Sakura. Or any of his senseis. They were all too good to him for the monster that he could be.

“I didn’t..” he tried to find his voice, “I didn’t hurt Sasuke on the way back, did I?”

He looked up, ignoring the tears that had formed small ravines down his scarred cheeks, and let his eyes pierce into the sage’s with a desperate hope and a fearful acceptance.

Jiraiya closed his rough draft. He sat it on the bedside table that housed flowers with a note attached that looked like it had been written in Iruka sensei’s handwriting. Then, with the weathered ease of an old man whose life had aged him well beyond his years, he stood and walked to peer out of the window. With his back turned to his pupil, Naruto couldn’t brace himself for what he was about to say.

“You didn’t hurt Sasuke on the way back.” His teacher gruffly stated, like the words were hard for him to say for some reason.

Relief flooded the blonde in ocean waves. He didn’t hurt Sasuke. That was good news!

“The mission, it was a failure. We were unable to retrieve Sasuke. In the chaos of getting the nine tail’s chakra under control, Sakura recounted seeing Orochimaru disappearing with an unconscious Sasuke.”

And, just like a starving fish who’d found food that was tied to the end of a fishing pole, Naruto’s hope had been ripped from him once more.

~~~

Sakura heaved a sigh that could rival the hokage mountain in weight as she pulled her key out of the lock and opened the door to her apartment. She was glad that she’d gotten the chance to shower earlier at the hokage’s living quarters while she and Lady Tsunade were trying to scour the old omega’s extensive library of medical journals to find anything that might have caused the Kyuubi outbreak in Naruto.

Sadly, jinchuriki were rare, and even rarer were they keen on allowing people to study them for medical or otherwise purposes. People like that creepy Orochimaru had ruined it for the rest of them, she supposed.

Her knees, strained from having hefted the weight of a nearly comatose Naruto for over fourteen hours on the way back to the village at a running pace, nearly gave out on her as she trudged towards her small kitchen table to take a seat.

She could have slept, like Sai was probably doing right now, but Sakura was no stranger to sleep evading her after anything happened to her best friend. Despite their tumultuous history, that’s what she and Naruto were. They’d been through things together that no one in their year could understand, and Kakashi sensei was too haunted by the skeletons in his own closet to truly connect with them. It had been just her and Naruto for so long.

They’d hoped, desperately against reason and even fate it seemed, that the two of them would have turned back into the three of them after their mission. But, like most things, Sasuke was just out of reach.

The pink haired alpha scrubbed a worn hand over her face, momentarily thinking that later, she would need to apply more lotion if she wanted to prevent any skin cracking. The harshness of missions didn’t quite allow for shinobi to keep to a reliable skincare routine, and Sakura had always had dry skin.

Her bathroom door swung open, startling her, but she didn’t bother to turn and look at the cause of the loud noise in the otherwise silent home. She’d spotted Rock Lee’s sandals by the rug at the entryway.

“I thought you’d be out on your mission, still.” She murmured softly. The hair on her neck had bunched up against the collar of her shirt. Sakura had been meaning to cut it.

His voice was like a rejuvenating swim in a lake, somehow putting her at ease but also livening her soul, “We finished earlier than expected.”. She just knew the older alpha was grinning triumphantly from the way he emphasized ‘than’.

Rock Lee and his team had left for an A rank mission three days before team seven had left for their own.

Red hued her cheeks despite her glum mood when she felt him come up behind her and place a sweet kiss to the top of her head. Up close, despite her having freshly bathed and smelling only of the sterile soap that Lady Tsunade kept in her spare bathroom, he could get a small lungful of her scent.

For years, she’d despised how strong her natural scent of cinnamon was, often taking to diluting it with vanilla perfumes, but Lee had loved it, and so, she’d learned to love it too.

He broke away after a moment and passed by her chair to begin flitting around in their kitchen to get started on lunch. After many weeks of failed attempts at basic Konoha household meals, the couple had decided that Lee would be the one to do the cooking.

It had been the wise choice, especially after he’d had to have his stomach pumped because she’d accidentally made the most inedible and surprisingly deadly takoyaki known to man. After hearing about it, Tenten had asked Sakura for the recipe, so that she could add the takoyaki to her weapons arsenal. The entire ordeal had been very embarrassing.

“So it went well, I take it? Did Tenten get to try out her new crossbow?” she asked to distract herself from the mortifying memory.

She always made sure not to ask any specifics of the mission, as every shinobi couple was well aware that there were things that happened in their partner’s lives that they simply could not divulge. But the little things- those were fair game.

The older alpha hummed from where he was crouched. The lower cabinet door shielded his face from her as he peered into the dim cabinet to search for whatever pan he was looking for.

“The mission was splendid! Gai sensei and I completed not two, not three, but four hundred jumping jacks in the middle of battle! I can only hope that we will be able to beat our current record with five hundred jumping jacks on the next one!-” he broke off as a loud clang interrupted him.

Sakura smiled half heartedly while she massaged her wrist. When Naruto had been possessed by the Kyuubi, one of the tails had slammed her into the jagged crater walls and she’d landed poorly on her wrist after her fall.

“My apologies!” Lee exclaimed, kicking the cabinet door closed after retrieving his desired pan with a little too much force to be considered nonchalant. They both hated that cabinet.

“Tenten did not get to use her new crossbow- but on the way back, she was able to find a legendary blacksmith who Neji challenged to a duel in order to get the blacksmith to forge Tenten a new sword!”

Gai sensei’s team never had a dull moment, it seemed. “I’m glad she was able to add to her collection!” Sakura responded.

Lee passed by the table in order to gather what he needed from the pantry, but on the way back, Sakura caught his wrist, stopping him. She pulled him down gently, stopping him only when her face was mere millimeters from his, “And I think a congratulatory kiss is in order for you breaking your previous record.”

Sakura didn’t give him a chance to respond before she was closing the distance. Rock Lee, her sweet and compassionate boyfriend, melted into the kiss as he always did, but unusually, he kept the kiss chaste, sensing her low mood.

He knew her, she realized, and the epiphany both melted her heart and broke it. Because, for a moment, she knew exactly what Naruto was missing out on, and what he’d been so desperate to cling to with Sasuke.

“Your mission did not go well, did it?” His lips brushed against hers. The sensation was as if small butterfly wings were dancing against her lips, magical and special and warm all the same.

It was then that she pulled away and the pain in her wrist came back to her. “No, it didn’t.”

And they left it at that. Rock Lee went back to cooking, and Sakura began to heal her wrist with what little chakra and willpower she still possessed. She knew he wished to ask her about it, and maybe, years later when certain files became declassified, she would tell him. But that day was still far, far away, and the furthest thing from Sakura’s mind right now was reopening wounds.

In fact, it was the opposite. She wanted to heal. She needed to heal. Because, if she was in any way going to help Naruto past this road block, she needed to be whole and steady herself. And right now, she wasn’t.

But that was okay, because she had Rock Lee, as strong and patient as iron. She had friends and mentors. She had a life for herself, one that she’d made painstakingly, but was all the better for it.

“You know, you really should be resting.” She spoke up after a moment of watching him cook. He was as skilled in the kitchen as he was with everything else. Truly, a master of all crafts.

“Me? You only just got back yourself- shouldn’t you be the one resting?” He fired back as he stirred the rice.

“I am resting, see?” she did a little scoot in her chair to emphasize her point, “Besides, you wayyy over do it on your missions.”

He gasped, “I do no such thing!”

She smiled brightly, “Whatever you say, Mr. I’ll-do-four-hundred-jumping-jacks-in-the-middle-of-battle”

The green hue of chakra faded away, so she tested the once injured wrist with a few light stretches to make sure it had completely healed. Sprained wrists were a pain, but she was more so glad that it hadn’t been broken. That would have required a certain level of energy to fix that she was too exhausted to handle.

“Training stops for no man, my beautiful blossom!” he declared with his back to her still.

Whatever he was cooking began to smell so good that it made her stomach rumble. She felt bad that he was cooking after having only been back in the village for a few hours while she just sat around.

So, with much strain to her poor knees, she stood and went to hug the older alpha from behind. Lee didn’t startle, knowing that this was something that the two did often. What he didn’t know, though, was that she was using the position to scope him out for any injuries.

Rock Lee had a penchant for not actually letting on that he was in any pain, and Sakura had a penchant for sneakily making sure that he wasn’t in any.

“Thank you.” she murmured against his back.

When they’d first moved in together, it had been quite the adjustment for her to see him in his ‘leisure’ attire instead of his trademarked green jumpsuit. In fact, the day she’d walked in from a twenty seven hour shift at the hospital to find someone dressed in a giant white t-shirt and loose purple sweatpants, she’d assumed it was an intruder and attacked him.

Of course, Rock Lee had waved off her apologies with the reassuring notion that “he had enjoyed the surprise bout of training.”. How she’d managed to find the world’s most patient, yet insanely resilient guy in the world to date, she had no idea, but she would count herself lucky every day.

Rock Lee hummed in response, his shoulder blades shifting beneath her cheek as he began to plate the food he’d prepared. Softly, because he knew what her appreciation had been for, he responded “I had a feeling that you would need my company more than I would need a nap.”

When she said nothing, and his task was done, he twisted in her hold so that he was now able to hug her back. His latest growth spurt had been no surprise to anyone, but still caught her off guard sometimes, in moments like these, when her cheek rested against his chest instead of his shoulder. It was a change she was oddly unprepared for.

“The mission was about Sasuke, wasn’t it?”

The way she clung even tighter to his lean frame was all the answer that Rock Lee needed.

~~~

His eyes shot open faster than his heart had been beating. It was like as if he’d been doused in a pond of ice water, waking him from a pitch black, almost death like slumber.

What he saw as his vision cleared and the dizziness set in had his eyes fluttering closed again, if only to pretend it was all a dream.

Instead of the purple tile of his bedroom in the hideout, or the chipping blue of Naruto’s apartment- or even the inhumane whiteness of a Konoha hospital wall, Sasuke had glimpsed the acidic grey limestone walls of Orochimaru’s laboratory.

He didn’t wait for his vision to fully clear of his grogginess before he attempted to move from the table he’d been stationed on. Only, the sharp tug of two iron restraints against his wrists stopped him dead in his tracks from attempting his escape.

To his horror, Sasuke realized that he was trapped.

Panic set in. His battered heart began to hammer away in his chest so harshly that if there had been any other occupants in the room, they might have been able to hear it. The acrid smell of his own distressed scent clogged his nose, making it even harder to breathe.

There was something in the back of his mind that felt important. But, try as he might amid the frantic bubble in his chest, the wall of forgetfulness wouldn’t let him remember what it was. His curse mark was no help. Every second that ticked by, the nonconsensual seal began to flare before it quickly faded away.

The sting of the curse mark was a rapid pulse, racing in time with his actual pulse. It bit into the flesh around the junction of nis neck and shoulder harshly, and for once, his scent bond had been silent. The revelation alone struck a fear into his heart that he’d never felt before.

What had happened after he’d passed out? Had Orochimaru captured Naruto as well? Had…Had the genjutsu worn off?

A terrible shiver ravaged his body as his mind finally caught up to him. The baby.

He lifted his head as much as he could, despite the strain on his neck muscles and the awkward angle. In a cruel, possibly the cruelest thing to ever happen to him, punishment, his hands did not have enough room to touch his stomach with how tightly the restraints were fastened.

Sasuke couldn’t feel his baby. He couldn’t see anything other than the cavernous ceiling that invited a damp chill to fester in the lab, the heartbreaking swell of his stomach that was just out of reach, and rows of equipment that had never felt more terrifying than in this moment.

Why couldn’t he feel the baby? It had taken after Naruto in the sense that it was clearly uncomfortable with staying still for long. Where were the small kicks to his rib cage?

What if-

What if Orochimaru had done something while Sasuke was unconscious?

“My, my, Kabuto, please make a note to locate some scented candles to get rid of the stench of desperation.” His captor’s voice cut through the air cooly as the door to the left opened.

Sasuke snarled, the sour scent of distress turning to the suffocating aroma of protective rage that maternal omegas were known for.

“Release me snake, or you will live to regret it!” he raged, showing more unbridled emotion in that one threat than he had in the last three- nearly four years.

If Orochimaru was surprised by the outburst, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed amused, as if Sasuke were just being theatrical and not silently making it a blood oath.

“Pray tell, dear Sasuke, why would I do such a careless thing? From the looks of things, my disciple has been naughty. Kabuto, don’t naughty children deserve punishment?”

That wretched, spineless alpha stopped what he was doing to smirk diligently at Orochimaru, “Yes, Lord Orochimaru. They do.”

Still, the beta sighed, as if bored with Kabuto. Madmen and boredom, Sasuke knew, were a recipe for disaster.

The ex-omega sat down at one of the metal desks, hiding a cough behind his frail and nearly green skinned hand, and Sasuke let his eyes watch him unnervingly.

“I see my talented apprentice has been busy these last few months…really, a remarkable ability your sharingan has…” Orochimaru licked his lips hungrily, “To hide a pregnancy with genjutsu is a fascinating talent, wouldn’t you agree? So innovative- resourceful. It would require such precision, so much chakra and dedication. I feel I must congratulate you, Sasuke.”

Kabuto leered at Sasuke from behind Orochimaru like a wimpy lion that stood proudly over his kill of a sickened, elderly lamb. The omega’s gut twisted in disgust and anguish. How could he have let himself become something as pitiful as that metaphorical lamb?

“What do you want, snake?”

Sasuke made sure to sound as unbothered and arrogant as he always did. Orochimaru would take any opening he found, and Sasuke had already given the abomination enough room to abuse him as it was.

“My, how testy we are in the mornings. I’m almost hurt. You’ve known me for several years now- shouldn’t you be able to tap into your genius to complete the puzzle? It’s no secret that I’ve been training you to groom you as my next vessel but imagine my surprise when you’ve given me another gift- another vessel to use after your body has been used up of its purpose. Really, I should thank you.”

Then, the beta was out of his chair, and standing directly next to the table that Sasuke was fastened to.

Those wickedly slitted eyes gleamed with horrific desire as his cold, bony hand came to touch the swell of Sasuke’s stomach. Sasuke couldn’t hide the tremor of rage that soared down his spine, nor could he hide the deep, gut-wrenching snarl that broke free from his lips as he felt his baby shift away from the touch in his womb. Even the unborn child had enough sense to try and keep out of Orochimaru’s reach.The touch was enough to set off an instinct he wasn’t aware he had like a switch that had been suddenly flipped on somewhere in his dark and twisted mind.

He let the chakra tendrils that he could feel pool in his hands, ready to make them burst into lightning that he would aim at Orochimaru, but it fizzled out before he could direct it.

Kabuto rolled his eyes as Sasuke’s confusion bristled, “Really, Sasuke, how stupid do you think we are? You see those seals on the walls? Well, probably not because you’re too fat to see over your own stomach, but those seals were designed to specifically target whoever’s blood is used to make the seal. It essentially dampens chakra levels before they get to the point where the individual can produce a jutsu.”

Orochimaru cut in with a sharp look to the smug alpha, “I hope you don’t mind, Sasuke, but we used your blood while you were sedated. Really, we should thank you again, after all, we specially designed that seal with you in mind. We weren’t confident that you would be a compliant little patient, you see.".

When were the rugs going to stop being ripped out from under him? First his brother was actually a bloodthirsty maniac all along. Then he presents as an omega instead of an alpha, which no one had even seen coming. Then his soulmate’s sensei wanted to strip Sasuke of being a shinobi, and Sasuke had no choice but to find a home with Orochimaru of all people. Then his toxin training messed with his birth control, and he ended up pregnant, and then Naruto took months to come to his aid, and when he finally did, all hell broke loose and Sasuke ended up captured by the very beast he was running from with no chance of escape.

Sasuke’s heart stuttered for a moment, before the realization of his joke of a life set in, and he broke. He broke like never before. He kicked and thrashed. He slammed his head left and right and up and down in any way that he could in hopes of damaging his body so that Orochimaru’s ‘perfect vessel’ would be ruined.

“Where are the others?” he ground out amid the struggling, as if he were in any position to make demands.

“Others? What others?” Orochimaru asked, amused little twinkle in his dead eyes unnerving the confined omega.

Kabuto cut in then, with an awful sort of glee, “You mean the people that abandoned you and retreated?”.

Sasuke’s blood ran cold with betrayal.

If his chakra wouldn’t work, he’d go about things the old fashioned way.

Orochimaru laughed as he watched the frantic omega renew his struggling with even more force. His entire body ached and the weight of the baby on his organs made it hard to breathe, but he didn’t pay any of that any attention as he stubbornly tried to flare his chakra into a jutsu that didn’t require a hand seal, even with the knowledge that it wouldn’t work. Some things were just hard to train a shinobi out of.

Orochimaru continued to laugh like he was a spoiled child at a zoo watching caged animals perform tricks. He continued to laugh as Kabuto furiously wrote something down on a piece of paper. He continued to laugh as he yanked Sasuke’s sleeve away from his wrist and injected something into his veins that Sasuke had barely felt the sting of in his blind rage.

It was that very haunting laughter that sang Sasuke into a dark, restless sleep.

~~~

Ino had just finished tying her long hair into a bun when she bumped into someone with a book in their hands. It hadn’t been intentional- she was always bumping into people if they were facing the side of her vision that was habitually covered up by her half-curtain of bangs.

It was something that Choji teased her about often, but she didn’t mind. Especially not now that Choji himself had begun to grow his hair out and had to deal with bangs getting in the way every now and then, which Ino never let an opportunity to miss teasing him about.

“Sorry, sorry! Here, let me get that for you!” she rushed, hastily bending down to retrieve the fallen book and dust the dirt off of it. The cover was a bright blue made of leather, and the blonde omega sincerely hoped that it hadn’t been messed up in the fall.

“It is alright.” A familiar, mortifying voice met hers.

She paused, forgetting the book for a split second, forgetting that she was nearly late for her shift at the Yamanaka flower shop as well. Her sole visible eye slowly shifted upwards to be met with the sight of Sakura and Naruto’s weird new- who to be fair, wasn’t so new anymore- teammate, Sai.

He blinked at her monotonously.

“Uh- heyy, Saii.” She awkwardly held out her hand with the book for him to take, but Sai continued to stand there, and she realized the faux pa she’d made when she noticed the bright white casts on each of his arms.

“Hello. Ino, was it?” the dark haired alpha smiled his usual smile.

She fidgeted with her hair, not knowing how to continue the painfully awkward interaction without rudely walking away. But- wait, hadn’t Sakura said that Sai didn’t understand social cues? Maybe she could just walk away, and he wouldn’t be offended at all because-

No, that was mean. Despite his… oddities, Sai was a fellow shinobi, he deserved at least cordial respect.

Up close, she could see a purplish black bruise just under his eye, and she felt bad. It was no secret that Sai had no friends, and even his own teammates were unsure of him still, although they were beginning to warm up to him.

“Yes, that’s right.”

The alpha finally took his book back, and Ino was unable to look away from the title once she’d noticed it. ‘Caring for Others: a guide.’, glared at her in big, purple lettering.

Was there someone he was trying to take care of? Interesting.

“I’ve been told that in situations like these, the correct procedure is to create small talk based on the other person’s interests. Ino, how are you enjoying your new status as part of a pack?”

Ino refrained from giving away her surprise at the knowledge that Sai had seemingly been keeping himself up to date on Naruto and Sakura’s friends. Instead, maybe just a teensy bit flattered that someone as out of the loop as Sai took the time to know things about her, she responded, “It’s really great. It helps that we’re all on the same team and everything. Shikamaru’s taken to it like water.”

He really had. Ever since Asuma sensei’s death, something had changed in Shikamaru. He’d grown up. The cloud watching slacker was still there, but there was a determination in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

“Interesting. I would imagine Shikamaru was having a tough time being the only alpha in his pack. He does not seem to care about such things. I am surprised that two omegas would be pleased with this arrangement. Studies have found that omegas do not typically like lazy pack alphas-”

Irritation surprised her as she bit out, “You don’t even know him! Shikamaru’s not lazy he’s just-” she stopped, because Shikamaru was lazy, but Sai didn’t need to know that, “He’s just relaxed! Yeah, relaxed, that’s it!”

Sai looked at her for a long moment, and she hated that she couldn’t read a single ounce of emotion on his face. “I see.”

The conversation stopped there, and now, Ino was glad for it.

“Well, anyway, I have to get to the flower shop. It was nice seeing you.” She rushed, desperate to get away from the awkwardness.

“Well, it is funny you should mention the flower shop. That is exactly where I am headed.” Sai smiled.

Kill her. Kill her now.

~~~

Naruto ignored the shadows of the anbu that had been assigned to trail him in favor of entering his apartment. Jiraiya had bought him lunch before he’d come home and tried to console him on the whole Sasuke thing. The old man had dropped wisdom bomb after wisdom bomb, but unfortunately, Naruto hadn’t had much energy to listen.

He’d just sat there and chewed his ramen robotically, and even when Jiraiya had hugged him goodbye and joked about going to conduct more research to try and get a halfhearted chuckle out of the blonde, Naruto had only been able to manage a slight puff of air to humor his sensei.

The walk back to his apartment had been frustrating. Old lady Tsunade had assigned anbu to watch over him in case the kyuubi caused any more problems while he was still recovering. It was a necessary evil, he knew, but still, the knowledge that a bunch of strangers were going to be watching over him didn’t sit right with him. It reminded him of being a small child in a big, empty apartment fresh from the orphanage and someone wearing all black except for a dog mask covering their face helping him brush his teeth because he couldn’t reach the bathroom sink by himself.

His keys were thrown on the rickety kitchen table no sooner than his eyes zeroed in on a very official looking envelope lying on his counter. The crisp corners and pristine white backing with the Konoha record office symbol caused him to take in a sharp breath. A pressure alleviated in his chest, and for once in a few days, he felt a tiny, miniscule shred of light in his heart.

The envelope was the approval for his pack formation request with Konohamaru. It had to be.

Naruto’s hands itched to tear it open and find out the answer to the question that had been plaguing him for a couple weeks now, but he refrained. He didn’t want the memory of good news to be sullied by his messy hair and the gross feeling in his mouth.

He needed to shower and brush his teeth and change into clean clothes. He needed to close the curtains to his windows so that his moment to read the announcement didn’t feel like a personal viewing party for his new anbu babysitters.

Naruto needed to get the scent of fresh lightning and milk out of his head.

No longer feeling quite so sluggish, he rushed himself through his shower. The water was so cold that it made his teeth chatter, as expected. Years ago, when he was still a fresh little genin, he’d discovered that his water bill would be cheaper if he didn’t turn on any hot water.

The familiar suds of his non-branded shampoo had stung his eyes a little bit, but all in all, he’d deemed himself reasonably clean in no time. The alpha had jumped out of the shower, shaken his wet hair out like a dog instead of with a towel because he hated doing laundry and wanted to preserve his stash of clean towels for as long as possible.

Once he was clothed, he exited the bathroom, only to be startled out of his skin by the figure that was perched on his bed.

“AHG- Konohamaru, don’t scare me like that!” Naruto shouted, but there was no real heat behind it.

Konohamaru harrumphed and continued pulling at the threads of Naruto’s sheets. The alpha’s heart sank.

Konohamaru knew already, then. The kid was smarter and way more skilled at his age than Naruto had been. He’d probably found a way to eavesdrop near Tsunade’s office when Kakashi or Sakura had done the mission report.

“He’s not here, is he?” the unpresented boy asked with the worst kind of hope there was glimmering in his eyes: the hopeless kind.

Suddenly all Naruto could focus on was the bright blue scarf that was no longer so overwhelmingly large on Konohamaru’s frame. It was a staple in the kid’s wardrobe, and it was also the only thing Sasuke had scented before he’d left.

Naruto knew what Konohamaru had meant to himself. He was like an annoying little brother that he loved to tease and who loved to tease him right back. But Sasuke? Sasuke had been the ‘Iruka sensei’ figure in Konohamaru’s life.

He meant so much to him, and Naruto had failed them both.

Naruto was kneeling with the palms of his hands almost bruisingly face down on the hardwood floor in front of his bed’ barely a foot away from where Konohamaru sat within the blink of an eye. “No.” Came Naruto’s sorrowfully wet reply.

He couldn’t bring himself to look up at the little boy he continued to fail, but that didn’t stop his lips from trembling with despair as the scent of a pup in distress slapped him in the face.

“But you tried, right?” came the tiny reply.

“Always.” the blonde felt the word tumbling out of his mouth before he’d even fully processed the question.

Short, noodle-y arms grasped at Naruto’s shoulders, startling the alpha. He hadn’t expected Konohamaru to hug him. The pup in question buried his face into Naruto’s scent gland, tickling the blonde, despite the action being a fairly common occurrence.

“I’m gonna train,” Konohamaru declared, pulling away with determination aflame in his eyes, “I’m gonna train and get super strong and then I’m gonna go with you to get him back!”

Naruto’s impossibly broken heart shattered even further. He didn’t want that for Konohamaru. To be like Naruto- to live a life of desperate promises and endless determination- that wasn’t a life.

It wasn’t the life that Konohamaru deserved. Sasuke had even said as much long ago, during the first Festivus that Naruto had ever spent properly. Konohamaru had still been asleep between them, drooling away. It was after the blonde had asked Sasuke what it felt like to have a family, after the rain had begun to pelt the window even harder.

Sasuke had looked down at the pup, and Naruto had never seen such a fierce love in the Uchiha’s eyes before in that moment, and he’d said that Konohamaru couldn’t follow either of them down the paths they were walking in life.

Naruto had wondered at the time what he’d meant by that, but as the years passed, as Sasuke’s absence grew larger and larger, Naruto had begun to understand.

It was because of that understanding, that want for something better for Konohamaru, that Naruto didn’t respond to the boy’s decree. He didn’t egg him on, or pat his head proudly.

Instead, he redirected the conversation entirely. “Hey, I got something that’ll cheer you up.”

It was the tiniest hint that the boy wasn’t fully grown up yet, but Naruto still memorized it and kept it close to his heart, the way Konohamaru’s eyes widened just a little, even though he tried to play it off.

“Remember how I applied to start a pack with you and Sakura?”

Konohamaru nodded, feeling the anticipation in the air.

“Well, I got the letter today. It’s sitting on the table. You wanna open it together?” he smiled his signature smile.

Konohamaru lifted himself away from the alpha’s crouched figure and began to yank him towards the kitchen. “Well what are you waiting for?! Come on!”

The Uzumaki allowed himself to be led to the table, but snatched the letter before Konohamaru could get his grubby little hands on it. The boy in question snatched at it, but Naruto was too quick. He held it high in the air, higher than Konohamaru could easily reach.

“Nuh-uh, what’re the magic words?” He taunted.

“Lemme read it! You suck at reading anyway!” Konohamaru demanded excitedly, hands grabbing for the letter that Naruto still held above his head and out of his reach.

“Aw come on! In what universe would those be the magic words?!” Naruto complained, only mildly insulted.

Konohamaru’s response was to stick his tongue out at the blonde and begin to climb him like a tree to get at the letter. Naruto bit the inside of his cheek when Konohamaru’s foot accidentally dug itself into his ribcage.

This time, Naruto did let the pup ‘steal’ the letter from him, though he played it off as Konohamaru getting the best of him. The brunette tore into it, ripping the document from its crisp white confines and little eyes frantically skimming the letter.

Naruto’s smile was starting to hurt from how big it was all plastered over his face, but he couldn’t stop. This was the one good bit of news in his life in such a long time. It felt like a treasure all for him and Konohamaru and Sakura to share-

The burning, soiled scent of a distressed pup clogged his lungs, causing him to freeze. Konohamaru’s knuckles had turned white from how hard he was holding the paper.

“Konohamaru-” Naruto wheezed, anxiety surging in his veins, “Konohamaru what does it say-”

The wail he got in response was haunting. “You promised!”

Naruto began to splutter, mind not fully able to catch up with how his heart was hammering in his chest. What did he mean? What did Konohamaru mean-

“Konohamaru, lemme see it.” he grasped desperately at the paper in the shorter boy’s hands, but the pup wrenched himself away from Naruto’s grasp.

“You promised!” the little boy repeated angrily, fists balled and little face that wasn’t so little anymore all red and blotchy. His eyes were watery with betrayal, a look Naruto was too familiar with. “You promised you’d bring him back and you said we’d be a pack and you lied!” Konohamaru sobbed.

The pup’s tears felt like earthquakes to the blonde as they made contact with his only table.

Naruto took the chance to rip the paper away from him to get a look for himself. His eyes had never moved so fast in his life as he read paragraph after paragraph of a bunch of fancy, mocking words that may as well have been full of empty meaning. Until he got to the last two lines on the page that is.

‘The Konoha records office regrets to inform you that your application to begin a pack has been denied. Furthermore, any attempts to appeal the decision will be denied upon request.’

He should have read the letter first, was all Naruto could think as despair rang in his ears. Maybe it wasn’t despair, maybe it was just the sound of Konohamaru’s betrayed wailing.

The letter tore in his hands while he’d tried to keep his own emotions in check for Konohamaru’s sake. Stunned, hurt, and at a loss for how to move forward, both boys grieved a future that seemed impossible to achieve.

~~~

Iruka didn’t even blink when Kakashi climbed through his window without notice. It was an occurrence that had nearly doubled over the years as Naruto had grown up.

His fellow omega had been so unaccustomed to pups and their chaos, that the poor ex-anbu had fallen to Iruka for support and guidance more times than the instructor could even begin to recall.

Now, though, he could sense that this visit would be much more important than the ones centered around convincing an eleven year old Naruto that toothpaste wasn’t a healthy snack or that Sasuke wasn’t going to murder him for making him a best friend bracelet.

He eyed Kakashi without bothering with discretion from where he stood over his kitchen sink, dirty, soapy bowl frozen in his hands. The older man was distraught, if the haphazard way he’d climbed through the window was anything to go off of. Usually, he did it with such a finesse that sometimes Iruka didn’t even sense his fellow omega’s presence until the older man purposefully made it known.

Iruka breathed out evenly. Kakashi wouldn’t come to him this late if it wasn’t about something important. Whatever it was, it was about Naruto. It had to be.

“Sit, I doubt you’ve taken the time to eat anything today.” The tan man offered. He sat the bowl he’d been cleaning down to reach for his sponge while Kakashi took a seat.

Automatic questions wouldn’t get him anywhere. If he wanted to coax Kakashi into talking, he had to lull him into a sense of security.

Of course, that meant boiling water for some tea and setting up a few soundproof barriers around the apartment just in case anyone had decided to tail Kakashi and listen in. While the dumplings he’d been planning to fry for dinner were being cooked, Iruka dried his hands and went to do exactly that.

He could feel Kakashi’s visible eye on him as the older man sat quietly. Iruka made sure to cover his window with a curtain before he prepared the hand seals for the sound barrier jutsu. He couldn’t sense anyone nearby, and he highly doubted that Kakashi’s preferences were anything other than the older omega simply being paranoid, but as his friend and platonic co-parent of Naruto, Iruka couldn’t begrudge him of the extra precautions.

There were things that Kakashi had lived through that Iruka wouldn’t find even remotely possible surviving through. Paranoia was a small burden to bear, all things considered.

Later, when the dumplings were plated and the tea had been poured, Iruka sat down across from Kakashi at the small table and peered at him unblinkingly.

Kakashi clearly got the signal that Iruka’s hospitality came with a price, as he usually did, but put off telling the younger man what was on his mind by taking a long sip of his tea. He winced when the hot liquid burned his mouth, and Iruka couldn’t help the triumphant smirk that graced his face. Served him right.

“I don’t imagine you decided to welcome yourself into my home to drink all of my tea.” Iruka leaned his elbow on the small table. It was crowded with cups and plates and reminded him of nights from when Naruto was younger and the boy would knock on his door hungry and lonely, and Iruka had never even imagined turning him away.

Kakashi cleared his throat, mildly embarrassed, “No,” he agreed.

Silence fell upon them until Kakashi spoke up again. “Naruto received word back from the record office-”

Iruka’s eyes lit up, and he couldn’t help himself when he interrupted, “And? What’s the decision?”

Kakashi’s body sagged. Any hope or joy Iruka had felt in that small second was instantly siphoned from his soul.

“His formal request was denied due to his status as a jinchuriki. Additionally, he’s been barred from reapplying.”

Iruka’s mouth fell open in shock. Barred from reapplying?! That was unheard of! A denial in itself was rare- too rare to not be a direct insult to the person who’d applied to start a pack.

“How..” he trailed off, hoping his words would find him, “How did he take it?”

Even with the mask still covering the lower half of his face, Kakashi’s grimace could be seen from a mile away. “Not well. Not well at all, especially with Konoha’s failure to bring Sasuke back all in the same week.”

“Well, what are we doing here?! We need to go comfort him! We need- Lady Tsunade! That’s it, we need to go and have Lady Tsunade reverse it and-”

“If we get the hokage to reverse a decision like this, not only would it be a direct overstep of the hokage, but it would also have Naruto’s pack not seen as a true pack in a social dynamic. The pack would be outcasted.”

Iruka bit at his fingernail- a nervous habit that he was not pleased to have picked up, “Then what do we do, Kakashi? It can’t just end like this. It can’t.”

It had been no secret that Naruto had been asking those closest to him about whether or not they would like to join his pack if his approval went through. He’d only even considered starting one because of little Konohamaru Sarutobi, who wasn’t so little anymore. Naruto had even asked Iruka, but out of professionalism from a teaching perspective, had been forced to decline.

Most people in their circle had also known that he’d asked Sakura, who’d agreed, as well as Kakashi. No one had known Kakashi’s response. Even Naruto had been tight lipped about it.

The grey-haired man sighed so heavily that Iruka could almost feel it in his own bones. The food on their plates remained relatively untouched, and by now, the tea in their cups had stopped steaming.

“I had denied Naruto’s offer before.” the other man confessed, not surprising Iruka in the slightest.

After the death of Kakashi’s soulmate, he’d trembled with disgust at most types of bonds. Pack bonds included.

“And you feel guilty now?” Iruka tried to guess where this was going.

“No,” the other paused before continuing, “I had declined because I didn’t want Sasuke to come back and feel as though we’d moved on without him.”

Oh. So it was Kakashi’s projected sense of rejection that had kept him from joining. Iruka couldn’t help feeling for Kakashi. He’d been the closest thing to a mentor that Sasuke had ever had. The closest thing to family. And, in a way, if things had been different, Kakashi would have actually been family to Sasuke in a way.

Maybe it was his sense of duty to his dead mate that had Kakashi so closely attached to Sasuke.

“You didn’t want to leave him behind.”

Kakashi’s silence was all the confirmation Iruka needed.

“I worry that everyone- Jiraiya, Tsunade, you, me- all of us- worried so much about Naruto in the beginning that we let Sasuke fall through the cracks. I didn’t want that to be repeated.”

Iruka sensed a ‘but’ coming.

“-but,” Kakashi continued, “I think maybe this time I have to put Naruto forward. He’s not doing well at all, and the longer I stay neutral between the two, the longer they both stay lost to us.”

Iruka stayed silent this time to allow his fellow shinobi to gather his thoughts.

“I found a loophole. It could get Naruto the pack he wants for Konohamaru, it could solve everything.”

Iruka put his chopsticks down from where he’d been pushing his food around on the plate in front of him. “Kakashi, I know what you’re thinking, but breaking into the records office and altering the document isn’t going to-”

Kakashi startled him when he cut him off, “It could work if I put the application under my name.”

Iruka stared at him. His ears felt foggy, like he’d misheard his fellow omega. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I don’t think I heard you right.”

Kakashi repeated himself, and Iruka nearly flipped his lid.

“Kakashi you’re an omega! You can’t be a pack alpha- the records office would laugh you out of the building!”

The grey-haired man shrugged, “My dynamic has been kept confidential since Lord Third’s second stint in office. Most people think I’m just an alpha anyways. Five people know I’m actually an omega. You, Lady Tsunade, Anko, Gai, and Jiraiya. Everyone else who knew are dead.”

Iruka countered that with an exasperated plea, “But you can’t seriously want to keep pretending to be a different dynamic for the rest of your life? Kakashi you don’t-”

Kakashi cut him off again, “The rest of my life could be just another hour or another week. The life of a shinobi is not typically a long one. Besides, even if I do die an early death, Konoha can’t interfere with the inheritance rights of packs. I could simply pass the title of pack alpha down to Naruto when the time comes.”

Iruka closed his eyes for a moment. There was a reason Kakashi was telling him all of this. But why?

Iruka hummed after a long pause, “You knew you’d do this long before coming here- why did you come to me?”

The dam inside of Kakashi cracked just a hair, but enough to let a few of his tightly sealed emotions slip through the cracks. “Tell me I’m doing the right thing.” His words came out in a rush of jumbled, depleted oxygen from desperate lungs and an even more desperate man.

Iruka refilled Kakashi’s teacup, “I can’t tell you what you’re doing is wrong or right. All I can tell you is that you deserve a life without secrets, but you know yourself best. You know what you can live with- what you already live with.”

Iron settled in the older’s visible eye. “I’ll do it. I’ll get all the paperwork done in the morning, and in a week, we’ll be a pack. One that you’re welcome to join, by the way.”

Iruka smiled sadly, “When I took my oath as an omega shinobi instructor, I swore to not put anyone above my students. I knew what that meant then, as I do now. As much as I would love to, I love my students more.”

Kakashi nodded in understanding. The air settled with finality and knowledge that soon, Konohamaru and Naruto would have a pack to take care of them eased something inside of Iruka that he hadn’t known was there before.

Later, when the table had been cleared of its contents and after Iruka had nagged Kakashi into doing the dishes, Kakashi ducked his head back through the window to say his goodbyes.

“I may be his pack leader from here on out, but you’ll always be his mother.”

Iruka didn’t bother to hide the tears in his eyes as he waved goodbye to the other omega. Considering who Kakashi’s sensei had been, those words coming from him meant more than what they would have been from someone else.

~~~

“Again.” Naruto ignored the way his vision swam as he demanded another round.

Captain Yamato and Kakashi sensei shared a look between them, a long standstill that was really only over as quickly as it’d begun. A bird cawed in the distance, probably looking for food.

Food. That was something Naruto hadn’t thought about in a while. He’d been too busy training to gain better control over the Kyuubi to even entertain the idea of stopping long enough to cook something or spend a couple hours at the ramen stall.

“Naruto, Yamato and I think it’s best that you take a few days to relax before continuing.” Kakashi scratched the back of his head awkwardly, like if the roles were reversed, and Naruto were trying to stop the jonin from training so diligently, he wouldn’t want to hear the lecture either.

“Kakashi’s right,” Captain Yamato uncrossed his arms to gesture in the air as he talked, “Pushing yourself to such extremes will only hinder your training. If you want the best possible results, you also have to take care of yourself.”

The rumble of his stomach came to a crescendo right as his looming headache began to override his nervous system and make the hot-cold sensation spread all throughout his spine. Though, that could have also just been from the anger that bubbled just under his skin.

Captain Yamato was the one who had spooked Sasuke. He was the one who didn’t listen to him and brushed off Naruto’s extensive knowledge of Sasuke as ‘biased information’ and instead chose to treat it like just any other mission.

Sasuke wasn’t just some other mission, though. Captain Yamato should have understood that.

He respected the man. But he did not like him. There was no reason why Pervy Sage and Kakashi sensei couldn’t be the ones to oversee his training. There was no reason why Kakashi hadn’t been the one on their mission in Yamato’s place.

“-and in taking care of yourself, I hope that you also try to mend a few rifts that’ve sprung up on team seven since the mission.” Kakashi added.

Naruto tried to remain respectful and not roll his eyes, but the urge to do so was overbearingly strong.

His anger at Sai wasn’t unjustified. He’d broken away from the team. He’d pursued Sasuke head on, he’d caused the explosion. He’d been the reason that Kabuto and Oroimcharu had shown up in the first place.

Sure, Sai had thought he’d been doing things the better way, but thinking and knowing were two different things.

Captain Yamato made a sound, “Yeah, the kid’s arms were broken. I think he’s made up for what happened.”

The leaf in Naruto’s hand crumbled, but it wasn’t due to the chakra he’d been trying to tear it with. No, it was due to the fist that had formed out of scorned frustration.

“He’ll make up for it when Sasuke’s back and takes his rightful spot on team seven where he belongs!”

Kakashi looked at him gently and closed his book. It did nothing to assuage the flipping of stomach acid in Naruto’s stomach from the lack of nourishment he’d had lately. His vision felt red, causing the alpha’s heart rate to pick up.

He took a breath to calm himself. Naruto thought of soothing blue fabric and an electric aroma permeating his lungs.

When he opened his eyes, Captain Yamato had the grace to look away.

“Naruto, take a break. Three weeks at minimum, that’s an order as your sensei-” Kakashi walked forward to place his hand on Naruto’s aching shoulder, and surprisingly, the young alpha didn’t shake it off, “And a request from your friend.”

~~~

There was no natural light, nor any clocks or calendars in the laboratory where he was kept to give him any idea of the passage of time. It had to have been days, at least, because Orochimaru’s tests were routine, and Sasuke had counted four examinations in total, excluding the one he was currently in the middle of bearing.

“Fascinating..” Orochimaru murmured with a wicked sort of reverent disgust as Kabuto continued to rattle off a bunch of medical information that Sasuke had no idea how to make heads or tails of.

For what little it was worth, Sasuke was glad that Orochimaru always accompanied Kabuto when it was time for the examinations. It had to have been from the fact that Orochimaru was once an omega like him and knew the dangers of being so vulnerable to an alpha in a position of power.

Sasuke glimpsed the beta licking his lips as he stared at Sasuke’s stomach.

Or maybe Orochimaru was just too greedy to let anyone else get their hands on his ‘pet’ for long.

“And how are you feeling, Sasuke?” Kabuto asked, eyebrow raised. No doubt, he was hoping that Sasuke would act up so that he could threaten his pup some more when Orochimaru was out of ear shot.

Sasuke had always hated jealous alphas, and Kabuto was the poster child for such disgusting people. The omega knew deep down that Orochimaru was only a science driven monster, not a cruel man who enjoyed depravities such as stripping Sasuke of his pride by possibly allowing an alpha to abuse his weak, barely clothed state. Kabuto was a completely different matter.

Sasuke shifted as much as he could in an attempt to adjust his flimsy robe that he’d been given. Well, given was a string word. He’d been sedated one day and had woken up in the annoyingly thin garment the next. Sasuke hadn’t allowed himself to wonder who had changed him.

“Like I’m being held captive.” Sasuke retorted anyway. His throat felt scratchy, but he was too proud to ask for water and prove to Kabuto how pitiful he was.

“Sasuke, don’t think of it as captivity!” Orochimaru hummed as his hand got dangerously close to the swell of Sasuke’s stomach, “Think of it as your contribution to the future of science!”

Even Kabuto cringed at that.

The examination finished up a while later and Kabuto took his leave. Orochimaru, as omniscient as he was, noticed the omega’s palpable relief at seeing the alpha exit the door with a final promise to be back to check the IV in a few hours.

An angry, vengeful part of Sasuke hoped that he died before that happened.

“I know. Rooms often do feel more relaxing in the absence of alphas.” the sanin murmured. He busied himself with adjusting the variously labeled jars of dubious contents that sat on the shelf near where Sasuke’s ‘bed’ was.

“Wouldn’t you agree?” the beta continued, not at all bothered by the harsh, rebellious eyes that followed his movements.

Sasuke continued to keep his lips shut as he glared unblinkingly.

It only served to amuse the madman, “Oh, come now Sasuke, I know this wasn’t ideal, but what did you expect to happen? Surely, you didn’t think you could kill me and your brother with a baby suckling on your bosom, did you? That you would ride off into the sunset with that blonde alpha of yours and be a happy family?”

Sasuke finally understood what Itachi had meant all those years ago about fostering his hatred and letting it make him strong. With the anger and rage he felt at Orochimaru in that instant, Sasuke thought that he too, might have been able to slaughter an entire elite clan in a single night.

Suddenly, his body didn’t feel so heavy. His lungs didn’t feel so depleted from being kept on his back. Despite the seals on the walls siphoning his chakra away from him, he felt a spark.

Only, the spark of chakra was both familiar and unfamiliar all at once. While Sasuke’s chakra felt enormous and overwhelmingly blue in his mind’s eye, this felt small and precise and the palest, softest of greens.

The baby.

The seals were tailored to Sasuke’s chakra presence, not the baby’s.

It was the baby’s chakra he was feeling. He toyed with it for a split second, seeing if the chakra energy would interact with Sasuke’s chakra points, and was both amazed and relieved to find that it did.

All these months, he’d grown accustomed to sensing the baby through its chakra signature, but it had been so faint for so long, that Sasuke had only assumed that it would begin to actively grow once the pup was born, not while it was still safely housed inside of the womb.

“I don’t have an alpha.” Sasuke grit his teeth to play the part of a disgruntled captive. He couldn’t let Orochimaru know that Sasuke had an idea, a slight hope.

Orochimaru sized him up for a moment, cold eyes lingering for seconds that felt like molasses on Sasuke’s tortured scent bond, and huffed, “No. I suppose you don’t.”

He knew that the ‘beta’ had no idea what he was speaking of, but still, for a split second, his hormones got to him. He didn’t in all technicalities. Sure, he had a weird scent bond thing with Naruto, and they were a rare case of soulmates that also had a child on the way, but there was no bite on his scent gland.

A fact that his instincts had not let him forget for the entirety of the pregnancy.

“Well, regardless,” Orochimaru picked up conversation once more, “It won’t matter for long.”

That piqued Sasuke’s interest.

“I’ve had Kabuto working on a technique to speed up the pregnancy. I would rather ascend to a less…crowded vessel, you understand, don’t you? Besides, I am quite curious to meet my future pet project. I’m sure you know that feeling quite well, Sasuke. After all, you did keep this gem hidden from us for quite some time, surely you were looking forward to meeting it as well?”

Sasuke refused to give the sanin what he wanted. Orochimaru tortured his test subjects, but because of his delicate condition, the beta was reduced to mind games only. What he didn’t realize was, Sasuke had been subjected to multiple forms of mental torture thanks to Itachi, and that by now, the omega was a pro at compartmentalization.

The Uchiha shrugged. “Keep talking, one of these days, you might actually say something intelligent.” He snarked, bitterly loving the way Orochimaru’s eyes flared with insulted rage.

He was all about knowledge and learning and being better than. If Orochimaru wanted to play a pissing contest, well, Sasuke’d had a pup stomping on his bladder for four months now. There was no way he wasn’t going to win.

The sanin’s insulted frown turned into a hacking cough. The sound was jarring in the laboratory after so many days of barely broken silence that at first, the noise had almost startled the seventeen year old. Wheezing echoes ricocheted off of the walls, followed by a loud thump as Orochimaru’s hand slapped itself down on one of the tables to balance himself.

Good. He was weakening and judging by the way his hand had flown to his mouth, blood had come up again as well.

If Sasuke had to guess, he’d be bedridden for the next few days, giving the omega plenty of time to finalize and hopefully execute a plan.

“I believe that will be all for today, Sasuke.” Orochimaru’s voice was hoarse, but both pretended that it wasn’t.

Sasuke watched as Orochimaru disappeared through the exit with mild difficulty, leaving him alone to ponder his revelations and celebrate his small verbal victory.

If he could manage to manipulate the baby’s chakra just enough to break the seals on the walls, Sasuke would be able to break free and end this once and for all.

With no time to waste, Sasuke got to work.

~~~

He should have done the dishes. Or folded his laundry. Probably should have gotten around to showering and sharpening his ninja tools too, but instead, energy seemed to have evaded him for the last few days.

Ramen cup containers littered the small table next to the couch that he’d been hunkered down on like a beached whale, unable to move and barely able to make himself inhale the next puff of oxygen for his disturbingly numb lungs. The alpha didn’t fully remember making that many cups of miso ramen.

Jiraiya sensei had been gone for so long now. He’d left two days after Naruto had been discharged from the hospital. Sakura was busy with her medical training, and Iruka sensei was busy trying to prepare his students for their graduation exams. Naruto had been avoiding Kakashi since he’d effectively banned Naruto from training for a bare minimum of two weeks.

He’d forgotten just how lonely life was. He’d been promised that he would never be lonely again.

Obviously, promises were broken.

Naruto sluggishly blinked his eyes and stifled a lazy yawn. He’d slept so much lately that his bones were starting to ache from how he’d stayed locked in his curled position on the cheap couch.

He’d been so proud of himself when he’d bought it with his first ever earnings from his genin missions. Now he wished he’d saved up for a couch that had less lumps. Or maybe even less stains. It hadn’t been a brand-new couch when he’d bought it, but it was new to him at the time of purchase, so that had been all that mattered.

Now nothing mattered very much to the Uzumaki. Sleep? Oh well, what else was new. His plants that he’d gotten specially from Ino? They’d long since wilted. Going out with friends? They were all either busy or doing normal things, like hanging out with their packs or going on dates.

Maybe that was why he was so startled to hear the rapid knocks on his chipped door. He hadn’t expected anyone, and no one that would come here to inform him of anything important wouldn’t have had nearly as much energy put into something as simple as knocking.

He groaned, not wanting to move from his curled-up position. But, the knocking persisted, so he really had no choice but to sit up for the first time in hours and force his legs to trudge towards the door to see who it was.

He opened the door, about to snap at whoever was there and tell them to go away, only to stop in his tracks as soon as he saw who it was.

In front of him, dead center and clearly the one to have been knocking on his door, was Rock Lee. On either side of him were Shikamaru and Kiba, with Sai, Shino, and Neji taking up the rear.

“Long time no see, Naruto!” Kiba smirked, flashing his signature smirk and giving him a thumbs up.

“It is us, your loyal and youthful friends!” Rock Lee exclaimed, going as far as to giving Naruto a hug, but pulling back awkwardly and trying but failing to hide the wrinkle of his nose after accidentally inhaling some of Naruto’s funk.

Yeah, maybe Naruto should have showered yesterday after all. Or the day before. Or the day before that.

“Ah geez, we’re blocking the hallway, you gonna let us in or what?” Shikamaru remarked, arms crossed lazily as he glanced up at the crack in the ceiling.

Naruto turned his head to spare a glance at his apartment and cringed. “Uh.. sure, come on in.”

Energy spurred by embarrassment surged through him as he rushed to at least clear off enough space in the living room for the others to sit comfortably. They filed in, one by one, to watch his frenzied and unprepared cleaning. Rock Lee had the decency to look supportively unaware of the state of the apartment, while Kiba’s sensitive Inuzuka nose was giving away his disgust, though he really did try to hide it.

Naruto didn’t blame him. His whole apartment was basically begging to be cleaned.

Once everyone was situated in the living room around the small, worn coffee table, Shikamaru pulled out a few sake bottled and passed them around the table.

“Choji couldn’t make it?” Naruto piped up after looking around and realizing he was missing.

“He was sent on a last-minute mission.” Kiba replied, shrugging off his leather jacket and laying it across his lap. Was it hot in his apartment? Naruto never really noticed the temperature because his landlord had cut the air conditioning system from flowing to his apartment when he was eight and Naruto had had no choice but to adapt.

“Oh? Is Ino with him?” Naruto only asked because it was almost unheard of for one of the Ino-Shika-Cho trio members to go on missions without at least one of their other teammates.

Shikamaru shrugged after he leaned back against the arm of the couch from where he sat on the ground, “Nah, Choji’s flying solo with Tenten and some guy named Riku.”

Naruto cocked his head to the side, “That’s weird. You guys have a fight or something?”

Naruto had kinda stopped keeping up with those three after he’d found out they’d started a pack of their own. Call it bitterness or jealousy, but the knowledge that he was being passed up by his friends achieving normal life goals once again had left him so incredibly hurt that he’d needed space away to process it for some time.

“No, Choji’s just trying to hide from his mom lately. She’s been hounding him to go on a bunch of blind dates with her friend’s kids.” Shikamaru huffed.

“Poor Choji. I remember when Sakura’s mother would do the same to her. It was not pleasant.” Rock Lee murmured as he helped Kiba arrange the deck of cards for the game they were going to play.

That, Naruto knew about. It had been hard for Sakura’s parents to accept that she liked alphas and was planning on moving in with her alpha boyfriend, Rock Lee. Her mother had tried to get her to go on dates with countless omegas from civilian backgrounds, and it had only created a permanent rift between Sakura and her parents.

“Pft, I don’t know why parents keep pushing that stuff onto their kids. Love is nothing more than a waste of time.” Shikamaru rolled his eyes. Sai smiled, and nodded his head approvingly, but Sai was Sai, so no one paid him any mind.

Wasn’t Shikamaru dating Gaara’s scary older sister?

Kiba guffawed, “Oh yeah? Tell that to the kazekage’s sister. I’m sure she’d love to hear that her boyfriend thinks that.”

Shikamaru sighed and failed to meet their eyes, “I broke up with her.”

Even Neji seemed surprised by the news. Rock Lee was the one to actually voice his concerns though, “What do you mean?! When did this occur?”

The genius alpha huffed and shrugged again, clearly meaning that there was a reason that he would never speak of, even to his friends. “The long distance was a pain.” he said, and while Naruto didn’t believe that for a second, he let it be.

Who was he to demand answers about someone else’s love life when most of his and Sasuke’s was rooted in betrayal, secrecy, and mission related violence?

“Shall we begin, then?” Sai spoke up. Naruto was surprised he was here, given one of his arms was still in a sling and Naruto’s apology to the emotionless alpha had been beyond half-assed.

They all began to look at their hands of cards, some having the perfect poker faces like Neji, Shino, and Sai, while others gave away their hands almost immediately like Kiba and Rock Lee.

Round after round, Shikamaru won. Neji and Shino gave him a run for his money, but ultimately, in a game of strategy, they all knew who was winning. Naruto and Kiba were always the first two out, and Kiba had gotten so frustrated that he accused Akamaru of helping other players cheat off of his cards. Akamaru had admitted to it, but that was because Kiba hadn’t given him treats in the whole time they’d been playing, so really, who could blame the dog?

Once there was a break between rounds of the game, Shikamaru took the opportunity to strike up some conversation. “Hey Shino, how’s your chakra-infused larvae research going? It’s the talk of the town these days.”

Kiba snickered under his breath, “If the ‘town’ is Konoha’s research and analysis corps that is.”

Naruto hadn’t known that Shino was researching anything at all. Another shortcoming of his, apparently.

The quiet alpha in question adjusted his sunglasses in thought before speaking, “It is going well. The Aburame clan has been slowly inching their way to this research for decades. If all goes well, as the data is suggesting with the early trials, we will be able to successfully train insect larvae of multiple breeds to aid other shinobi without needing host bodies to store them-”

“Yeah, they won’t shoot all out of people anymore.” Kiba cracked another joke, mimicking the bugs coming out of his body in jarring, rapid motions. He good naturedly threw his arm around Shino’s shoulder afterward, sensing Shino’s very mild exasperation. If Naruto had been in a better state of mind, he probably would have laughed.

The Aburame began to lecture Kiba on the proper, respectful decorum while everyone politely ignored the two. Neji seemed happy enough that he wasn’t having to scold Rock Lee on proper behavior for once, and likewise, Shikamaru seemed glad that he was flying solo tonight and there was no Ino in sight for him to have to stop from punching someone that insulted her.

Sai’s usually dead eyes perked up in interest as Shino continued his impromptu lecture at Kiba. Dread filled Naruto. He knew that look on Sai’s face. It was the look he got right before he said something embarrassing.

Time slowed for the blonde as Sai opened his mouth to speak. “How do your insects work, Shino?”

That…. was relieving. Naruto exhaled with relief before taking a large gulp of the sake they had brought.

Shino began to explain that, essentially, his clan offers their bodies up as hosts for the insects in exchange for being able to command them at will.

Sai nodded, bringing a pale hand to his chin in thought and smiled, “I see…. Do your insects ‘shoot’ out of every hole of yours? That must be awkward during ruts.”

Shino fell silent in shock.

“Good grief.” Shikamaru muttered, taking an entire bottle of sake and downing it in one go.

“Wha- SAI! You can’t just say that-” Naruto began to yell, but he was cut off by Rock Lee choking on his drink, needing Shikamaru to pat his back to help him.

Neji side eyed Sai, though remained regal in his seated position. His cards were splayed out in front of him in a beautiful fashion, kind of like a fan.

While everyone recovered from the startling question, Naruto began to think to himself. Not about Shino during his ruts, because that was weird and Naruto did not swing that way, but about his own ruts.

He hadn’t had one in nearly nine months. Maybe it was time to let Sakura take him to the doctor.

Kiba cracked a joke that Naruto didn’t fully get and Rock Lee yelped in defeat not even a minute into their next round of the card game.

Later, around an hour or so, everyone began to feel restless. Shikamaru had been yawning for about fifteen minutes at that point, and Kiba had a mission in the morning, so they’d decided to call it quits fairly early into the evening.

Rock Lee stretched as he stood up and smiled. “Today was a good day, friends. Shall we make this a regular occurrence?”

Naruto watched as his group of friends shared a look between them, and it had been more apparent than before that they’d done this get together just for him.

“Yeah, we probably should.” Shikamaru yawned again, already walking to the door. He narrowly avoided a pile of dirty clothes that Naruto just hadn’t been able to make himself clean.

“I agree. It would be wise to allow ourselves some fun once in a while.” Neji murmured.

“Hey.. guys?” Naruto spoke up, moved.

They all stopped what they were doing to give him their attention.

Naruto swallowed a harsh stutter before continuing, “Before you all go-I just wanna say thank you. I think you’re all aware by now that I’ve been struggling to tame the nine tails lately. So, thank you for not being scared of me.”

It was Shikamaru who spoke up, “Ya know, judging people for stuff outside of their control is kinda a drag. Not really our style.”

“I must agree with Shikamaru! You are our friend, Naruto! We would not leave you behind for any reason!” Rock Lee thrust his fist in the air, his signature stamp of devotion.

Sai, the one that Naruto needed to apologize the most to, smiled something akin to a real smile this time, “You showed me what it was to be loyal and make friends. Now, it is time for me to show you that same loyalty.”

“Guys- you really mean it? I mean I lost control and that’s the reason I couldn’t bring Sasuke back and Sai- I broke your arms! All I do is mess up!”

Shikamaru groaned, “This wouldn’t even all be an issue if Sasuke hadn’t left in the first place.”

Neji made a sound of agreement, “If I recall correctly, Sasuke is stubborn. Do you remember when he used to train with Hinata? And he fought me, demanding to continue her training after her father had decided to put her under my tutelage? He is a fighter. If he wants something, he will fight for it. He will come back to you.”

Shino, who as quiet as he’d been, had probably been taking everyone’s words in before finally adding in his own, “It is true that the nine tails obstructed your goal of reaching Sasuke. It is true that you could not gain control of it. But it is also true that it is not your fault. Why? Because it is not logical to blame someone who has no master to guide them in the ways of the fox demon. There are no previous jinchuriki alive in the leaf village that you can reach out to for guidance.

Additionally, we are your friends regardless. As your friend, I must warn you that loneliness is a powerful deterrent to reaching your goals. You and I share a deep relationship with loneliness, I admit, and I have learned that it is what you do with that loneliness that makes or breaks you. You can let loneliness destroy you from the inside out, or you can use it to better yourself- your relationship with yourself- so that you are never truly alone ever again.”

“Sheesh Shino, way to talk his ear off.” Kiba stage whispered as Naruto reflected.

The blonde was speechless. He had no idea that his friends really cared about him to this extent. He thought it was just Sakura or Sasuke and his senseis that he had this deep of a bond with. He stood there, taking all of them in.

Neji, with his neutral frown but strictly relaxed body language. Rock Lee with his big, expressive eyebrows and even bigger heart. Shikamaru, perpetually tired and even more tired of beating around the bush. Kiba’s wild but loyal energy. Shino’s quiet but solid supportive stance. Sai with his…Sai-ness.

These were his friends. Even if he felt like he had nothing, no family, no pack, no Sasuke, he still had them. And… yeah, maybe that could be enough.

“You guys..you really mean it?” He whispered,

They all looked at him like he was the dumbest guy in the world, and well, yeah, maybe he was, because they’d never done anything to prove otherwise.

“You dope, of course we mean it. We wouldn’t be here playing games and drinking sake with you if we didn’t.” Shikamaru reminded him.

And for the first time in a long, long time, Naruto believed it.

After they’d said their goodbyes and the door was shut with a thud of finality, Naruto got to work. He swept and opened the windows to air out the apartment. He did his laundry- even going as far as to folding it too! He threw away all the trash he’d accumulated and made his bed. He showered and brushed his teeth and ate something to fill the stomach he hadn’t noticed was rumbling for quite some time.

It was time he bounced back.

~~~

Sakura prided herself on her stubbornness at times like these.

“Naruto! A checkup won’t kill you!” She yanked the back of his jacket to pull him away from the exit that he’d been trying to sneakily inch closer to.

Her friend struggled for a moment before realizing the futility and gave up, instead choosing to plop down in the waiting room chair next to her and cross his arms grumpily. “You don’t know that, Sakura! What if they tell me I have lung disease and have two weeks to live? That will literally be killing me!”

Sakura also prided herself for her immense restraint, truly she did. Especially in moments like these where they were in public and she couldn’t unleash her anguished common sense upon her teammate in a poetic, albeit slightly violent fashion.

“No, the lung disease would have killed you, the checkup would’ve just made you aware of it, bird brains!” She hissed but quickly changed her tune when a nurse she’d worked closely with during a surgery two weeks ago walked past the two and waved at her. Sakura smiled sweetly as she returned the gesture, offering a nod of acknowledgement.

Just as the nurse rounded the corner, Naruto began to tap his fingers furiously against the chair arm.

Rotten oranges wafted into the air, disturbing her. Was he really that uncomfortable with being in a hospital? He’d been stuck in them plenty of times before.

Although now that she thought about it, Lady Tsunade was always the one to oversee his treatments.

She wouldn’t be on the staffing roster to oversee something as simple as a routine checkup. Maybe that was what had Naruto so freaked out?

She leaned over and stage whispered, “Do you want Lady Tsunade to look over you instead?”

The drumming stopped and he instantly relaxed, and Sakura didn’t even have to look at his face to know that he was nodding with relief filled eyes.

“You stay here, I’ll go make the arrangements and track down Tsunade sensei.” She smiled gently. Naruto nodded at her and hugged his knees to his chest as he watched her leave the waiting room.

~~~

Around an hour later, Naruto found himself in one of those flimsy and embarrassing hospital gowns, despite his ten minute long protest that he was fine taking the exam in his normal clothes.

Sakura had done as he’d wished and gone to badger Tsunade into being his doctor, but she’d accidentally interrupted a meeting between the hokage and Pervy Sage in the process, so he’d ended up coming along too. Mainly it was because he hadn’t seen his student in a long while, but also because since Naruto was a jinchuriki and Jiraiya was the most knowledgeable one of the seal on Naruto’s stomach, he would be able to help Tsunade should they find anything wrong with the seal.

Which was also why Naruto’s hospital room was feeling very crowded, with Sakura, Tsunade, and Jiraiya there.

“Aw come on guys! I’m starting to feel like a freak show here, can we hurry this up?” He whined, crossing his arms petulantly in the process.

“Kid, have I ever told you that you’ve got the patience of a drunken toad?” Jiraiya quipped.

Tsunade cast a look over to where Naruto was seated on the weird medical bed thing that he couldn’t remember the name of and then turned back to her work. She had Sakura going over his medical chart while she prepared her equipment.

They didn’t know what to expect, so she’d set up everything from an MRI machine to a bunch of different and scary looking things like needles.

It took probably around ten minutes for everything to be prepared, to which Naruto let out a relieved sigh. Finally, they could get to the bottom of this once and for all.

“Okay,” Tsunade sighed, sitting down in a rolley chair with a clipboard and pen in hand, “Why don’t you start with any symptoms you’ve had.”

Naruto thought back on it. He hadn’t really had any ‘symptoms’, his ruts were just.. gone. He should have had at least two by now.

“Uh..none? My ruts are just gone.” Naruto answered honestly.

Tsunade looked to Sakura for confirmation, who agreed with his response.

“Okay, so we’re gonna have to do this the long way, then. When was your last rut?”

“I dunno, maybe nine or ten months ago? I was still on the road with Pervy Sage.”

The man was oddly quiet, and looking just a little pale, but no one paid Jiraiya any mind, too busy with their discussion.

She jotted something down on her clipboard, “Okay… So delayed ruts can be caused by a number of things. They’re not uncommon in the shinobi ranks, with things like stress and malnutrition being common factors. You eat like a small but mighty village is trapped in your stomach, so I’ll rule out malnutrition. However, I do think stress could be a factor in all of this. Shikamaru Nara informed me that you’d had a depressive episode this month for starters.”

Naruto bowed his head in shame and avoided Sakura’s concerned hand rubbing a supportive circle on his back. “Yeah.” was all he said.

“Additionally, with the scent bond and you and Sasuke having reached maturation age, the bond will have played a part in your cycles, causing heats and ruts to be harsher and to sync up as well. The stress on the bond from the distance and lack of a mating mark could be the cause, but without Sasuke to answer these questions as well, I’m not entirely sure that this is the cause.” Tsunade hummed thoughtfully.

Sakura joined in with her own thoughts, “If I’ve done the math properly, Naruto should have had a rut right before the mission to Orochimaru’s hideout. Naruto got close enough to Sasuke to be able to scent him, maybe there were lingering heat pheromones on his skin still to be able to determine if the scent bond is or isn’t the cause?”

The old omega woman smiled proudly at her protege, “Good thinking Sakura!”

They all turned to look at Naruto expectantly, but his stomach turned at the idea of openly discussing something so personal as the way Sasuke smelled to other people. Sasuke was a private person, he wouldn’t want Naruto to betray him like that.

But now that he thought about it, Sasuke hadn’t had even a trace of heat pheromones on him when they’d encountered each other. He’d smelled like lightning and tiny traces of oranges because of the scent bond, but mostly, he’d smelled like milk and a hint of electricity due to the chidori he’d created minutes before.

“No,” he spoke the accidentally damning words, “All Sasuke smelled like was lightning and milk. No heat pheromones.”

Before either of the women in the room could open their mouths, Jiraiya finally broke his silence asking frantic questions that made little sense to Naruto, “What did his chakra presence feel like?! How did you feel around him?”

Tsunade’s pen had frozen in her hand, hovering just above the clipboard.

“Uh,” what *had* his chakra presence felt like?

Naruto recalled the way Sasuke’s chakra signature had felt so full and lively, so familiar and strong. But, as he thought back to it, he also noticed something off. Sasuke’s chakra felt blue, it always had, but there was a tiny glimmer of green, something impossibly small that Naruto would have almost missed it.

How had Naruto felt around him? He’d felt hopeless love once Sasuke had unsheathed his sword. He’d felt an overwhelming need to stay close to him. He’d been uncharacteristically angry at Sai and Yamato for provoking Sasuke, and the need to keep Sasuke safe from Orochimaru and Kabuto once they’d shown up had been so overwhelming and aggressive that he’d let the Kyuubi chakra slip.

“To me, when I’ve sensed Sasuke’s chakra, it always felt blue in my mind. Overwhelming amounts of it, crackling through the chakra points with a steady strength. But, when I sensed his chakra this time, it was like his chakra was wrapping itself around more chakra. And, the weird thing is, this chakra was kinda green? And soft and tiny?”

Jiraiya’s face grew sterner and sterner, and Tsunade’s hand dropped the pen entirely.

The toad sage pressed further, alarming the blonde, “But how did you feel around him?”

Naruto thought long and hard and came to his conclusion, “When Orochimaru and Kabuto showed up, I felt like… I felt like I’d set the world on fire to make sure that no one got close to Sasuke.”

The longer he talked, the wider Sakura’s eyes grew, and the more ajar her mouth became.

Sakura’s hesitant voice entered the conversation next, though it seemed like she was talking more to herself than anyone. “Naruto was more aggressive to everyone once Sasuke was there. The nine tails chakra unleashed right as Naruto made eye contact with Orochimaru-”

Was something wrong? Did-did he have a disease? He was only kidding about the lung disease earlier! Oh god, it was the scent bond, wasn’t it? It was killing him and Sasuke, wasn’t it? That was why Sasuke’s scent had changed and his chakra was changing. It had to be!

He had answered all of the questions dutifully, but what he’d said had seemed to upset Tsunade, because instead of bothering to respond, she rose and crossed the examination room swiftly, and wrenched open a medicine cabinet faster than Naruto could blink.

Only, once it was open for all to see, they discovered that it wasn’t a medical cabinet. It was a booze locker and had been purposefully disguised as a medical cabinet. Jiraiya laughed next to him, but Sakura hissed under her breath, “I knew she had it hidden somewhere.”

The old omega popped the cork off of a bottle and began to chug.

“Uh- Careful there princess, don’t choke-” Jiraiya started forward awkwardly before he caught himself.

Tsunade flipped him a rude hand gesture.

Naruto felt like he was missing a key element to the equation.

Sakura looked as green as her eyes were.

“Uh… there’s something wrong with me right? I’m dying- Sasuke’s dying too, isn’t he? It’s the scent bond- I knew it!” he struggled to wrap his head around it.

No one answered. Tsunade burped after she tossed her now empty bottle of liquor into the waste bin near the door. Jiraiya was staring at Naruto like he had grown five heads, and Sakura was petrified from where she stood next to him on the examination table.

“Uh.. guys?” he asked a little more forcefully.

“Genjutsu…of course it was, that’s why my head felt fuzzy. He had us under a genjutsu.” Sakura muttered, blinking sluggishly.

That didn’t make any sense at all. Naruto didn’t dabble in the arts of genjutsu, so she couldn’t have been talking about him.

“Who? What are you talking about Sakura?”

Tsunade chimed in before Sakura could respond, “I’m quitting. I’m no longer the hokage, I’m now just a wayward spirit that will travel the world and live far, far away from this mess.”

Jiraiya puffed out a dark chuckle, “Pff, and leave who in charge? Shizune? I’m sure Anko would be thrilled.”

Sakura began to mumble to herself, but even Naruto’s above average hearing couldn’t pick up what she was saying.

As he watched three of his most trusted people go through varying stages of distress induced insanity, Naruto’s anxiety shot through the roof. Was he really sick? Was it something genetic or something he’d contracted on a mission? Was that why he’d been losing control of the nine tails chakra lately? Is that why they were asking about his senses around Sasuke? To see how his instincts were perceiving things? Or was it the scent bond, and something was really, really wrong?

Naruto suddenly remembered the weeks before Sasuke had left the village, and they’d discussed severing the bond. Tsunade had said something about having three years until they couldn’t operate- was that because the bond would kill them?

Fear induced irritation was the cause of Naruto crying out, “What’s wrong with me?!” and halting everyone in their tracks.

Tsunade’s back straightened, and Naruto didn’t miss the way Sakura was wringing her hands. It was a nervous habit of hers, one that only really showed itself when she’d gotten very bad news. Jiraiya, the one who always seemed to be the one to actually meet Naruto on his level and talk to him, sighed and shared a look with their hokage before he shifted in Naruto’s direction.

Jiraiya clapped him on the back, jolting Naruto forward with the force of it, “Congratulations kid, you knocked up Sasuke.”

Naruto’s heart stopped.

Tsunade shrieked, “Naruto did?! It wasn’t some experiment of Orochimaru’s?!”

Sakura vomited into the trash can by the bed Naruto was seated on.

Jiraiya scrubbed a hand over his face, suddenly very much looking and acting his age, “Right before Naruto and I traveled to the sand village, he disappeared for a couple days. I was in town, conducting research and hadn’t noticed his disappearance because he was supposed to be setting up camp, but apparently, he’d run into Sasuke and their cycles had synced up.”

It was Sakura’s turn to be outraged, “You had Sasuke in the palm of your hands and let him leave after the heat?!”. She threw an accusatory glare the blonde’s way, but he deflected it with his own rage.

“What kind of person would I be if I captured an omega right after their heat? That’s not a fair fight, and it’s sick! I had to let him go- None of you understand how much I had to, okay! Sasuke would have never come back and stayed if I’d kept him!”

A baby. Sasuke was pregnant with his baby. The Uchiha hadn’t even told him. Sasuke was pregnant and Naruto wasn’t there but Sasuke was pregnant and hadn’t told him but how could he have told him to begin with-Sasuke was pregnant.

“You didn’t have ruts for MONTHS, and didn’t once think it could have been because of you and Sasuke sharing your cycles?!” Tsunade yelled, already opening another bottle of sake.

“I didn’t think it was possible! He and I aren’t mated!” he defended.

Sasuke was pregnant and had been willing to come back to the village. Naruto had to-no, he needed to go get him. Sasuke was- Sasuke was gonna have a baby. A pup.

Their pup.

The room stilled. “Naruto…who told you where babies come from?” Tsunade asked evenly, although the now empty bottle in her hand was proof of the very opposite.

“Well…a few years ago, I read one of Kakashi sensei’s porn books to get advice on how to be friends with Sasuke..and one thing led to another and-”

Sakura knew instantly what he was referring to, “For the last time, Kakashi sensei’s porn books are not textbooks!”

“Well I know that now!” Naruto snapped.

It wasn’t like he’d had family members to teach him about that stuff when he hit puberty. The third hokage had basically only told him that abstinence was key, but at the time, Naruto hadn’t even known what that word had meant!

Naruto gulped. A baby. A little mini-Sasuke. Oh Kami, he’d just found out and he was already so in love.

He was in big trouble.

~~~

After what Sasuke estimated to be four days, he set his plan into motion. It was a pitiful one, one that would embarrass him dearly if he ever had to recall it, but it was the only card he had to play while Orochimaru made sure that the rest of the deck had been stacked against him.

If it was a baby they wanted, then a ‘baby’ they would be getting. He’d already had the plan underway last night when he feigned a pain in his abdomen, but had pretended to stubbornly ignore it to put on a brave face for his captors. Kabuto had thought himself a genius at seeing through Sasuke’s ‘attempts’ at hiding the pain.

The omega, all the while, had been using the miniscule amounts of chakra he could absorb from the baby to harness it and create small damaging but nearly invisible blows against the seals in the room.

With their own arrogance, Orochimaru and Kabuto hadn’t ever even spared the seals a glance in all the time Sasuke had been held here. Their reasoning? Sasuke would have surely broken out already if the seals were defective.

The seals had been defective two days ago. He’d spent the remaining time reestablishing his chakra levels and allowing Kabuto’s stupid vitamins and iv drips to get him back to feeling up for what he was about to do.

If all went well, he would surprise attack Kabuto when he next entered the laboratory by himself, defeat him, and then get rid of Orochimaru on the way out of the hideout.

Then, he would be free. He would be free to seek out Naruto and wrap himself in the blonde’s arms and never leave.

The good thing was that Orochimaru was supposedly bedridden again, too overcome with sickness to come gawk at Sasuke. That should make it relatively easy to defeat the sanin. All he had to do was out whit the man and bait the sanin into losing his grip on his sanity. All things considered, that would be a piece of cake.

The door opened, and in walked Kabuto, as promptly and slimy as ever. Wherever the alpha went, the stench of poisonous decay followed him. It stunk up the laboratory, causing Sasuke to scrunch up his nose. His nose had only gotten more sensitive as the pregnancy had progressed, and his bitch face only got bitchier too.

“Sasuke, I see you’re as joyful as ever.” Kabuto mocked as he sat the tray of food down on the counter.

It would be the same thing it always was, gross weird soup that Kabuto spoon fed him- after wrenching open his mouth that is. Sasuke thought it gave Kabuto a scary sort of pleasure to hold that much power over Sasuke.

The Uchiha smirked inwardly. The tables were about to turn.

Sasuke glared in response. He made a subtle show of tensing his jaw, like he was in pain.

When the alpha approached him to check his IV, Sasuke decided that enough was enough.

The omega whimpered pitifully, allowing his scent to go haywire with faux panic. Kabuto watched carefully, not fully convinced yet.

So, to seal the deal, he began to struggle against his restraints and let out a few, well timed but equally harsh cries of “No! Not here- not like this!”

Kabuto snapped to it, checking the monitor to be sure, and Sasuke could not have been gladder that his heart was racing so that his “labor” looked legitimate.

As soon as Kabuto’s back was turned to him to look at medical charts, Sasuke slyly broke himself out of his restraints.

Then, suppressing his groan, he eased himself down from the lab table, ignoring how weak and gelatinous his legs felt from days of disuse, and summoned his chakra to pool into his hand.

Right as Kabuto placed his hand onto the metal lab table next to the documents he was looking over, Sasuke smirked.

“Chidori!” He yelled as his chakra shifted into a ball of furious blue lightning. It was bigger and brighter and more electric than he’d ever made before.

Kabuto turned, caught by surprise, but his hand never left the metal table. Instead of throwing the chidori at Kabuto directly, something the alpha would have deflected easily, he threw it at the table.

“YOU BITCH!” Kabuto screamed as he was electrocuted.

Sasuke didn’t even bother to look offended. He simply watched in a darkly gleeful way as rivulets of electricity raged through the alpha’s body.

The omega was so happy when Kabuto collapsed, out cold for probably a day at best if Sasuke didn't outright kill him, that he failed to recognize the building pressure in his abdomen.

It was only after he’d snuck through the winding, dim hallway system and confronted his bedridden, twisted sensei with words of rebellion and arrogance, did he realize that he was actually in labor.

~~~

The hours it had taken him to reach Ms. Namura’s shop had felt like years. Wave after wave of cramping and shallow breaths as he’d raced along to the best of his abilities had taken any energy he’d maintained after captivity and his battle with Orochimaru.

His heart raced with adrenaline as he narrowly dodged getting smacked in the face with a rogue shop sign. The omega didn’t like how sluggishly alert he felt. Nor did he like the fact that his water had broken roughly two miles prior to arriving to the underhanded village that Ms. Namura’s shop resided in.

The frantic teen didn’t waste time banging on the back door to the familiar establishment, instead, he broke the glass with his elbow and unlocked the door from the inside handle.

Delirious with another wave of pain, he stood there, oddly transfixed for a long moment by the shards of broken glass that littered the ground with small, incremental rivulets of his own blood.

He was about to give birth yet it couldn’t have been farther from his mind as he vividly recalled a similar sight of spilled Uchiha blood and window fragments littering a wooden floor that he hadn’t thought about in eight and a half years.

“Is there a reason you’ve decided to break into my shop and stand in the hallway like a zombie?” Ms. Namura’s voice broke him out of the horrible trance.

Sasuke was so startled that he almost apologized.

“Orochimaru’s dead.” he declared instead, like he wasn’t actively in labor, and his elbow wasn’t covered in rivers of blood from his freshly self-inflicted wound.

Her hair was grayer than the last time he’d seen her. It was probably because of the stress he’d given her.

“Good riddance.” she muttered with fire in her eyes, but before she could add on to what she was saying, Sasuke cut her off.

“Also I’m in labor.”

Perhaps he should have had better tact, but he was Sasuke Uchiha, his self-awareness was as lengthy as his social battery was, which was to say, almost non-existent. How was he supposed to know how to communicate effectively?

“Sasuke!” She yelled, right as he doubled over with another contraction.

His uninjured arm sought out stability by pressing onto the wall near his side. Sasuke had a slight out of body experience as the contraction rose to a crescendo. Suddenly, his mind was floating away from his being, and was instead watching the scene unfold from a third person perspective.

Sasuke thought he looked insane. His hair was parted every which way yet also somehow as flat as a board from all those hours of being forced to lie on that steel lab table. His cheeks were flushed, one was slightly swollen from his battle with Orochimaru.

Sasuke looked insane, and young, and tired, and so, so not ready to have this pup.

“Lead with that next time!” she huffed, tying her hair up into a bun hastily as she briskly rushed to his other side to help him move.

“I really, really hope there isn’t a next time for this scenario!” he gritted through his teeth.

Perhaps the out of body experience was actually a concussion, because he hadn’t quite comprehended her yanking him away from the broken glass and pulling him up the stairs.

The omega took shallow breaths, his knees not prepared for the sudden bout of stairs after having been so abused by his earlier struggle at the hideout.

Later, after she’d bandaged his elbow and extracted the fragments that remained nestled in his flesh, and after she’d rubbed him down with a damp, but clean cloth, she demanded answers.

Sasuke’s inner omega felt at peace under her concerned glare as his back was propped against the soothingly worn pillows of the couch in her living room. She’d tried to nag him into moving to the bedroom, but Sasuke’s instincts had screamed at him to stay where he was. So, the old woman had brought the bedroom to him. Blankets galore and pillows upon pillows littered the area he’d made himself home in.

A nest, she’d declared, would help keep the anxiety at bay. Sasuke hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his worries were too great to be soothed by a few fabrics and rattily loved pillows. She’d said she’d helped omegas give birth before, when he’d asked her months ago, so she knew what she was talking about.

“Start from the beginning,” She’d instructed calmly after checking his dilation.

Birth, Sasuke had learned, was grotesque and embarrassing. To have someone seeing the innermost parts of himself? While those parts were under such torturous duress? The great and mighty Sasuke Uchiha, exposed and open for someone to shove their hands inside of his body and yank a tiny person out?

Sasuke’s stomach rolled with nauseous shame, but he swallowed it down in order to answer her.

“Naruto came to bring me back.”

Her eyebrow raised, but she continued to run her hand through his messy locks regardless, “Your alpha?”

Sasuke cringed. He didn’t know whether or not it was from her very traditional wording, or the fact that he was almost certain that the kid was going to rip him in half.

“...yes.” he sucked in a sharp breath as another cramp rolled through him. They were getting closer together, and maybe Orochimaru was right and being an omega was a cruel twist of fate because giving birth really felt like a punishment for something he’d done in a past life, “Things didn’t go to plan. His team extracted him and left me behind.”

“Orochimaru and Kabuto got in the way, didn’t they?”

Sasuke wouldn’t betray Naruto’s secret about the nine tails, even to someone he could trust so deeply as Ms. Namura. So, he let her believe that Orochimaru and Kabuto showing up were what caused the tables to turn.

“Yes,” he hissed, though it wasn’t aimed at her, “They figured it out. Decided to try and keep me in one of the labs for a couple weeks to study me. Orochimaru was close to needing another body, and he wanted mine, but didn’t want to be pregnant, so he and Kabuto were working on a solution to ‘speed up’ the pregnancy.”

This time, his wince wasn’t due to the contractions, “They wanted to use the pup.”

If she was surprised, she didn’t let on. “So, knowing you, you found a way to escape, defeat them, and made your way here.” She filled in, probably sensing that his energy for conversation was quickly dwindling.

He nodded feverishly, clutching whatever fabric-y material was bunched up in his hand like a lifeline.

She patted his shoulder comfortingly, almost lovingly. Hell, maybe lovingly. They’d grown pretty close these last few years. Or maybe Sasuke was just delirious and was seeing things that weren’t even there.

“You kept your pup safe, bottom line. Not many people could do that against such a foe, alpha or omega. Especially alone with no help. You did well.” She murmured as Sasuke began to lean into her touch.

Not that he would ever admit that he did to anyone.

Later, it must have been hours later judging from the dying sun in the sky outside the window, Ms. Namura had finally allowed him to begin pushing.

Push after push, he gritted his teeth and dealt with the pain because he’d never allow something like childbirth to win out over his mulish stubbornness.

“Oh” She muttered after his last push, giving Sasuke enough pause to become frantic.

“What-what is it?!” He demanded. He couldn’t feel anything below his chest, everything was sluggishly on fire. That last push had felt different, like his muscles were protesting.

Her voice was clinical, like it wasn’t new to her at all, “The baby’s a breech. The feet came out first-”

“How do they normally come out? What does that mean?”

“They are supposed to come out headfirst. Breech babies run the risk of choking or the umbilical cord getting tangled.”

Sasuke could faintly feel a grotesque and nauseating movement of two legs that were not his own coming from down there. Sasuke wanted to vomit.

“What do we do?” He felt himself say, though the sound of his voice didn’t quite reach his ears. The omega couldn’t lift his head to look down at the probable horror scene. Instead, he let himself go lax, focusing on his strangled, gasping breaths instead.

Was it normal to feel like he was floating?

“I’m going to have to surgically remove the baby. It can’t come out the natural way.

He swallowed harshly.

“And if you don’t?”

“The baby will get stuck, suffocate in the birth canal and die, and then you’ll get all kinds of infections and diseases and die if the blood loss doesn’t already kill you.” Her voice trembled minutely but remained firm. Whether it was out of fondness for him, or something else, he didn’t know and in the moment he didn’t care.

Sasuke could die from blood loss either way. He’d been cut open before, he’d nearly bled out countless times before. Really, there wasn’t much of a choice. If Sasuke was meant to die here, then at least only Ms. Namura would know the true identity of his pup. Naruto would probably track him down some day, somehow, and raise it. Maybe Naruto would kill Itachi for Sasuke, in honor of his memory.

But there was no way, under any circumstance, that Sasuke was letting anything happen to his baby. He’d not wanted it at first, thought nothing more of it than some ill-gotten parasite.

But this baby was his. Sasuke felt the baby’s chakra bloom and blossom and knew he would never love something as much as the tiny human inside of himself. It felt like spring rain showers and fresh blankets under a starry sky. It had the potential for peace and love and joy.

If Sasuke chose selfishly, and ripped all of that away, then he would be no better than Itachi. Maybe even worse. Itachi had murdered their clan- their parents, but Sasuke would have been the cause of his own child’s death. His own tiny, precious little clan, in a way.

“Do what you have to do.” He gasped, searing pain jolting through him the longer he held off pushing.

The urge to bear down again was becoming unbearable. It was only his ninja training that had forced him to have complete control over his muscle reflexes that saved him from making the situation worse.

“Okay. Okay, let me just get some equipment- Do not, under any circumstances, let yourself push.” He didn’t even notice her leaving after she said that, too wrapped up in concern and panic for his child.

A thought struck him. It was less a thought, actually, and more a realization of a deep, internal need. He wanted Naruto.

He wanted the idiot to be cracking jokes to try and lighten the mood. He wanted him to oversee their pup’s birth and to promise the omega that no matter what happened, their pup would be cared for to the nth degree. He wanted the alpha to reassure him, to go on another one of his long rants about never giving up and to ‘believe it’.

Sasuke needed Naruto in that moment like the moon needed the sun to shine. The scent bond seemed to agree, too, because it stung so furiously that Sasuke thought his shoulder had been stabbed, at first.

Ms. Namura reentered the room with a bundle of towels, and a small, clearly used before, but clean surgical kit. The hair that was sticking to his tacky skin began to itch, but Sasuke paid it no mind as he watched with desperate, hazy eyes while she pulled out a precise, but menacing looking tool.

“You’re going to want to bite down on something, I don’t have any anesthesia to give you, so I won’t lie and say this will be a cake walk, but Sasuke, I promise you, you and your pup are going to be just fine. I just need you to work with me here, okay?” She eased out, her bun having countless fly aways now and the front of her apron had various fluids on it that Sasuke wasn’t ever going to try and comprehend.

A cloth was shoved into his mouth by his uninjured hand, and he didn’t even think the worst of shinobi opponents would begrudge him from having to look away as she cut the incision into his abdomen.

He keened a low, pitiful whine, instincts begging for Naruto to magically appear and make it all better. His jaw ached and she wasn’t even done cutting him open, if the tug of his skin was anything to go off of.

His pup. This was for his pup. He had to bear it because this was for his child.

The tugging stopped, but his mind only began to feel more sluggish after that. It was like there was water in his ears, but fog in his eyes. Anywhere he glanced, all he saw was red. Red cloth that once was white was draped and bunched up all around him. Sasuke couldn’t see what was happening near his stomach region, Ms. Namura had made sure to block it all off from his view.

He hadn’t felt this wistfully drained since he’d been bitten by Orochimaru and given the curse mark.

Time didn’t exist. The world didn’t exist. There was nothing other than him, the baby, and Ms. Namura in that cramped little room. And, despite it all, Sasuke felt at peace.

Not even the now frantic woman’s desperate call of his name could have stopped him from drifting off. Was this how the prodigious Sasuke Uchiha would die? Not in battle, but in childbirth? Something ordinary and common, hundreds of miles away from the man he loved, his pup’s father.

Oh, how cruel fate was. To rip him from this world before he could truly make his mark on it. Before he could finally reunite with his soulmate and raise their pup together.

In his dwindling state, maybe the universe was trying to be kind as it dealt it’s final, ruthless blow, because he no longer felt the pain of Ms. Namura digging around in his body. Everything was a muted, sluggish sensation, like his entire body was stuck in a half-baked paralysis jutsu.

Sasuke Uchiha felt weak. There was no Naruto there to give him strength.

“Sasuke, talk to me- don’t go to sleep!” He vaguely heard the woman in the room yell, but it was too late, the harbinger of unconsciousness was almost upon him.

The only consolation to the omega as his breaths became faint in his rattling chest, was that he could almost see his parents reaching out to him. Oh, how he’d longed for their touch for nearly a decade now. Mikoto Uchiha’s gentle, ghostly caress of his sweaty cheek made him feel as though almost, he was at peace with this. His mom was there, and mothers always made things better for their pups, no matter how old they were.

His father was there too, just behind the beautiful, inky haired woman that had inadvertently given Sasuke his looks. He wished so sincerely that her beauty would be passed down to his son, in honor of her. His arms were crossed, not reaching out to him even after all this time, but he was speaking to Sasuke, and the omega, still not quite parted with that deeply wounded child within his soul, struggled to listen attentively.

“It’s okay son, you can stop now. I’m proud of you regardless.” he said, a rare but firm tone of warmth radiating in his words.

Sasuke felt himself begin to sob, then. The burden was off of his shoulders, he was weightless in the universe, no tether in sight. Sasuke was free.

His only wish before his eyes sluggishly closed was that the baby would have Naruto’s eyes. Bright blue, not a hint of darkness in them.

~~~

To say that Naruto was odd to Sai would be the equivalent of stating that the sky was blue. He was hard to understand. His loyalty did not ever seem to have ulterior motivations, nor did his heart seem to possess any malevolent emotions.

However, lately, his fellow alpha’s shift in personality had been cause for mild alarm, if the friendship guides he’d checked out from the Konoha public library had been anything to go off of.

Sai hadn’t understood it, and from the way things seemed, neither did any other close ones of Naruto’s. Shikamaru Nara, the Nara clan’s resident genius, couldn’t even make heads or tails of what was going on in Naruto’s mind these days. He’d said it was depression, before they’d all gathered themselves to go spend time with the unbathed recluse.

Sai hadn’t fully understood what that had meant though, so back to the library he’d gone.

What was even stranger, though, was the bond that Naruto seemingly shared with Sasuke Uchiha. They were soulmates, a rare case, that much was obvious. Yet, where one led, the other did not follow.

They clashed more than they got along, if the reports were anything to go off of. They had almost fantastical chemistry when it came to battles, so Sakura and Kakashi Hatake said. But, one talked loudly and the other was quiet. One preferred no attention and the other sought it out. One had dreams and goals rooted in prosperity and a peaceful future, and the other sought only vengeance and righting the wrongs of the past.

Their ideologies were fundamentally different.

Perhaps that was why his friend was so tortured by the last Uchiha’s departure. Because, to be certain of his inevitable return back to the blonde, Naruto had to at least have a steady foundation of trust with the Uchiha. And, it would appear as though that foundation did not exist.

With a measured sigh, the alpha opened the door to Naruto’s hospital room.

He’d collapsed during training with he and Sakura and Kakashi. It was a seizure, one that had puzzled the medical staff of the Konoha hospital.

The hokage, the famed and old omega woman known as Tsunade, the slug sage, had burst onto the scene and commanded everyone that was not herself, Kakashi, or his teammates to vacate the entire hospital wing.

No one was to know of this incident. If word spread, she’d made sure to inform the cowering staff that heads would roll.

Sai had been puzzled at first, as there was no poison in his system and the records that Danzo had provided him when Sai was still in service of the foundation had not spoken of any epilepsy diagnosis.

But, then, Sakura had explained that Naruto’d had a seizure before- three years ago, when Sasuke Uchiha had left the village. Not a lot was known on paper of what had happened between the two once Naruto had caught up to him, and the only witness testimony given was from Kakashi’s perspective.

It all had made sense then. Naruto would continue to have these seizures every time the Uchiha was in a life threatening situation that caused his body to shut down. It was the scent bond, coupled with the bond of soulmates, that caused his body to react in such an extreme way.

Sai only wondered what life threatening situation could Sasuke Uchiha have found himself in. From the haunting terror of the last time the quiet alpha had faced that man, Sai could not imagine a threat so sinister that it caused that level of damage to the famed Sasuke Uchiha.

“Oh Sai, it’s you.” Naruto greeted, still very clearly not having bounced back yet from the seizure.

He was leaned up against three large, overly fluffed pillows. The wound on the side of his head from when he’d fallen was perfectly wrapped too. Sakura must have stopped by earlier, then.

Sai smiled, an attempt at a real one this time, not a rehearsed one, “Hello, Naruto. I am glad you are not dead.”

Naruto squalled, “Wha- That’s not something you say to someone in the hospital!”

Sai cocked his head to the side, “Then what is?”

The harsh lighting of the hospital made Naruto’s wild blonde hair look like it was a glowing, nauseous yellow. Sai would need to remember the exact shade for later, when he was mixing his own paint colors again. It was a shade of yellow he did not recall seeing before.

“Gee, I dunno, how about ‘hey Naruto, how’s the injury? How are you feeling?’, something like that!”

Sai sat the flowers he’d purchased from the Yamanaka clan’s flower shop on the bedside table, making sure that they were in the line of light streaming from the window so that they wouldn’t wilt as quickly. Ino Yamanaka seemed to be pleased with his interest in botanical gifts, if her constant talking was anything to go off of.

Perhaps Sai had made another accidental friend.

“I already know how your injury is, from the bandage on your forehead and the way your pupils are not abnormally dilated, you did not seem to be suffering from any serious effects. Why would I ask about it?”

Honestly, Naruto could be very slow sometimes.

“Because it’s a normal thing to ask!”

Interesting. Sai hadn’t known that.

Dutifully, the pale alpha reached into his pocket and retrieved his notepad. He’d taken to carrying it around to write down valuable information like the advice Naruto had just given him. If he was to become more adept at socializing, he needed to heed the words of the most social person he knew: Naruto Uzumaki.

“My apologies.” Sai hummed as he wet his brush in his travel ink kit to write down the information, “How is the injury?”

Naruto huffed, “What injury?! This?” he pointed at the bandage that housed a nasty bruise and a mid level scrape, “This is nothing!” He puffed out his chest in faux bravado.

“But you just said-”

Sai sighed. Naruto was insane, he’d learned that a few weeks ago when he was badgered into team bonding in the form of shopping with he and Sakura, and Naruto had spent all of his money on neon colored toad shaped house slippers.

Sai was glad that the offensive shoes were strictly house bound, otherwise he would have had to conveniently dispose of them.

A comfortable silence fell upon them. Sai wasn’t a talker, that much had been made clear from day one. But Naruto was. He talked when he was tired, when he was excited, when he was nervous, when he was sick and lost his voice he still found a way to make noise.

So, judging from the context clues, Sai deduced that Naruto was thinking about Sasuke. Likely, he was worried, if the seizure aftermath was anything to go off of. Or, at the very least, the wilted tinge to the blonde’s scent.

“You are worried about Sasuke.” Sai stated. He crossed one leg over the other from his seated position in the visitor's chair. The rustling fabric of the sterile sheets caught his attention, causing him to glance at the blonde again, who’d shifted to presumably a more comfortable position.

Naruto flinched at the mention of the omega’s name, “Yeah.”

An unreadable look flashed across his face, and not for the first time, Sai wished he understood what it was.

“It is because he is pregnant with your child.” Sai supplied.

Naruto startled, neck snapping at an unholy speed to stare at him, baffled, “How do you know about-”

Sai shrugged, “You had mentioned weeks ago that you had missed a rut. That, coupled with your over reaction on the mission to retrieve Sasuke, it was not hard to put together.”

Sai kept the fact that he’d noticed a fault in Sasuke’s genjutsu right after he’d fainted in the crater a secret. If he’d noticed a fault from that distance, then Orochimaru definitely had when he’d grabbed Sasuke. Reminding Naruto of such would not be a good idea.

“Oh,” Naruto looked down at his lap, “So I guess everyone knows but me, then.”

“To be fair, I do not think that the kazekage or people who live in the village hidden in the rain know.” Sai offered, trying to be helpful.

He must have said something wrong then, because Naruto threw a pillow at him. Sai caught it, easily, but found that he did not want to throw it back at the blonde. His friend was already down, it would likely not bode well to kick him while he was down, so to speak.

Sai glanced at the clock on the wall, just beside where the door was located. It’s ticking was slightly behind the movement of the hands on the clock.

“I just… What if something happened with him and the baby? Orochimaru still has him- anything could have happened.” Naruto vented, tugging his knees to his chest.

Sai pondered it for a moment. Orochimaru was known for human experimentation, and he’d made it known that Sasuke was to be his next vessel.

However, it was also noted that Orochimaru was fascinated by the sharingan. Sai doubted a man of that caliber would be able to pass up the chance to teach and manipulate the next generation of sharingan users.

Sasuke and the child were likely fine under Orochimaru’s captivity. Hurting Sasuke would mean hurting his vessel and future plaything.

“I do not believe that this has something to do with Orochimaru. Sasuke’s body is his intended vessel, and the child is too valuable to someone like him to cause harm so early in development.” Sai explained.

Sai was beginning to grow annoyed with the ticking of the clock on the wall. Did the hospital staff not know that the sound was exactly half a second behind?

Naruto cast his downtrodden blue eyes at him, but a weight seemed to be lifted from his shoulders.

“Thanks Sai. You always know how to be reasonable.”

Sai thought about it for a confusing moment. Maybe there were perks to having no feelings after all. Maybe he would stop by his new friend Ino’s house to ask her advice on the subject.

Later, after he’d bid his goodbyes to a worried Uzumaki, Sai made a promise to himself that he would help his friend find his soulmate and their child. In fact, the alpha was so dedicated to the cause, that he began to make plans of his own.

~~~

When his eyes opened, he felt the touch of a woman’s gentle hand caressing his face. His bleary, sluggish eyes could only make out the warmth of love in her eyes and the soft smile on her face.

“Mother?” He whispered, shocked but elated to find her presence beside him. So many years, he’d missed the warmth of her hand. The kindness of her soul.

And then it hit him that this wasn’t his mother, because Mikoto Uchiha was dead, and Sasuke should have been dead as well.

“Afraid not, kiddo.” Ms. Namura murmured. Her caresses never stopped, although the touch moved to his hair instead. Sasuke hated how badly he’d needed the touch.

“Why am I alive?” he asked. The roughness of his voice didn’t surprise him, but it seemed to jog her memory of something because she let out a small huff of remembrance before she promptly shoved a glass of water at his cracked, pale lips and told him to drink.

Obediently- a rare occurrence for Sasuke- he drank, feeling infinitely better as the refreshing liquid poured down his raw esophagus, cooling some of the dry burn.

“A retired medic nin from the grass village used to live about five doors down from here. Real sharp fellow, supposedly, he poisoned all of his squad mates by replacing their food pills with arsenic on a mission.”

At Sasuke’s mildly alarmed look, she laughed, “Point is, he taught me a thing or two about healing before he moved away about ten years ago. When you passed out, I was able to stop the bleeding and restart your heart. Don’t look down yet though, I haven’t gotten around to healing the incision site, so your stomach area kinda like a fileted fish.”

The baby. Where was his baby? Did-did the baby make it?

Furious panic set in. The scent of smokey lightning poured into the room, anxious in its rolling, invisible waves. He looked around as best he could, but his sluggish body was uncoordinated against his efforts to shift. The baby wasn't there.

“My- the pup-” he started to try and sit up, but she pushed him back down.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood. Try and keep from moving around too much. The baby’s asleep in the other room.”

Now that Sasuke was awake enough to take in his surroundings, he realized that the sheets and blankets had been switched out for clean ones. She seemed to have moved him around a little bit so that he was actually lying on the couch horizontally. It was high enough so that she didn’t have to crouch down too much with her arthritic joints, but low enough so that the window didn’t allow the sun beams to smack him directly in the face.

With how strong the scent of his own blood was in the room, it made sense that she’d moved the pup to a different location. Pup’s noses were incredibly sensitive the first few weeks after birth. It was theorized that this was because of the survival mechanism to bond so intimately with their parent’s scents, a trait left over from more turbulent times long, long ago.

His chest heaved when the door to Ms. Namura’s bedroom creaked open, and he gained his first glimpse of his child. All wriggly and small, bundled up in a blanket that Sasuke could tell was so cozy and soft from just one look.

Unconsciously, Sasuke let his scent fill the room with full force to try and over power the tangy iron of his own coating the air. His sweet little pup needed his mother’s scent.

Ms. Namura held the newborn born with practiced ease, like this was far from the first baby she’d cared for under these circumstances. Maybe it was for her, but for Sasuke, this was the first time, maybe the last time, and so he took it in with a hungry sort of love that ensured he would never forget this moment. His fingers itched to rip the pup out of her arms, instincts screaming at him that the baby wasn’t safe in anyone’s arms but his, but his own insecurities and rational trust of Ms. Namura held him back.

“There you go,” the older omega hummed softly as she came closer, gesturing with her head for Sasuke to take the baby.

Only, he panicked. Sue him, okay, he had never held a baby before in his life! He didn’t want to drop the pup, or hold it in an uncomfortable way. His baby deserved only the most comfort possible.

“I-I can’t.” he wheezed. What if the pup was only in danger as long as he was around Sasuke?

Oh, if only his enemies could see him now. Terrified and whimpering like an idiot over something as simple and straightforward as holding his own newborn.

“You can.” She urged gently, already placing the pup in his arms, “You won’t hurt him. Babies are resilient little things. Far more resilient than us grown ups, anyway.”

Him. Sasuke had a son. A little baby boy.

With a brave, shuddery breath, he poked out a sole finger and nudged the baby’s hand. He latched on immediately, gripping his mother’s finger with a strong little fist. Sasuke would never regret the proud tears that sprang from his tired eyes. Not ever.

“He’s..” Sasuke gulped, almost too scared to ask, “He’s okay?”

She smiled a knowing smile at him as she fluffed a pillow behind him so that he could sit propped up. He owed her so much that he would never be able to repay. “He’s perfect, he takes after you.”

He heard her quietly exit after a few more moments of making sure that the pup and new mother were fine. The omega was grateful for the time alone. It was just him and his pup, cuddled up together, with no looming threat of evil hanging over Sasuke’s neck.

The wriggling infant was a miniscule mass in his arms. Compared to the heavy, bone crushing things he was used to lifting with ease as a shinobi, his son was almost weightless. All those months, he’d never been quite sure what to expect, but he hadn’t been prepared at all for how small his pup would be.

The baby’s head was a hair smaller than the size of the palms of his hands, and the rest of the child’s body barely made it to his elbow. Sasuke’s sword was heavier and thicker than the baby. Did that mean something was wrong with him? He’d gone out of his way to make sure he stayed healthy, but what if it hadn’t been enough and he’d hurt his own baby with his lifestyle choices? What if he had been better off defecting back to the hidden leaf, back to Naru- no.

Sasuke couldn’t afford to think that way. Not with Itachi and his cult of psychos becoming more of a threat with each passing second now that word had surely spread of Orochimaru’s demise at his own student’s hands. It had been at least a day since Sasuke had downed the sanin, and word traveled fast when all of the captives of a madman were finally released from their confines.

Sasuke was no fool, he knew that somehow, Orochimaru would find his way back to the land of the living again. It was not a matter of how, but of when, and the sooner Sasuke was away from here, where Orochimaru knew he would be, and had distance between himself and this wretched place, the better.

Ms. Namura had always been someone he could rely on in a pinch, but she was not company of the lasting kind. Sasuke would stay here for another few days, and then he would be on his way.

It was safest that way.

Still, a small pang of lazy desire cast itself across his mind the longer he sat there, sticky with sweat and grime and exhausted beyond belief, as he held the whimpering newborn against his chest.

Would it be so bad if he stayed? Changed his name, found a small home in this dark place where no one asked names and no one stayed for long, for fear of whatever the townspeople were running from catching up to them. He could hide himself away from the world, and everyone would think he’d died in his confrontation with Orochimaru with time.

He could keep his son safe, he’d never have to grow up in the malevolent chaos of the shinobi world. Clan politics, training, missions that never ended, senseless destruction and useless cruelty would be a stranger to the boy. He could be free and happy, and with his watered down Uchiha blood, there was no guarantee that he would ever be capable of unlocking the sharingan.

His baby could be free from all of the burdens that had plagued Sasuke his entire life if he stayed here.

The omega watched as his son opened his eyes for just a fraction, minuscule little muscles in his eyelids so underdeveloped that it was all he could probably manage for now. The omega didn’t hold back his shocked gasp, nor did he begrudge himself of the tears that welled in his own dark irises.

The baby had Naruto’s eyes. Bright, electric yet honest blue irises stared up at him lazily. One of his son’s tiny hands spasmed in an uncoordinated motion that had Sasuke’s supposedly cold heart melting like an ice cube on a hot summer day.

Maybe the universe wasn’t so cruel after all, the omega thought as he continued to marvel at his son’s tiny form. Wild black hair that sat on his son’s head like a regal crown of mischief had the omega chuckling. Scrunched little and tiny fingers that Sasuke couldn’t stop himself from caressing gently, and three small, but familiar scar marks on each cheek reminded Sasuke so much of the absence of Naruto that he began to weep from both overwhelming love, and unbridled sorrow.

His son didn’t even have a name yet, but already, he was the center of Sasuke’s world.