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And were You – saved –
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not –
That self – were Hell to Me –
-Emily Dickinson, “I cannot live with You (640)”
―
At sunrise, Kurama wakes with Naruto; Sasuke does not.
There is hardly time to register it. Shortly after, others arrive: The pink-haired girl, Sakura, and Naruto’s teacher―who Naruto calls old man , and Kurama sees as little more than a pup―Kakashi. A flurry of activity follows.
From just beneath the surface, the fox watches it unfold.
Sakura is weeping, but efficient. Determined. Together with Kakashi, she hauls Naruto to the other side of Sasuke.
“A pulse,” the girl breathes, her ear to Sasuke’s chest. “Naruto, his heart is still beating. Do it now. Make the sign.”
Naruto pivots towards her, struggling against Kakashi's grip. “Heal him first.”
Slowly, she shakes her head. Softly, she says, “The sign. Make the sign. Kaka-sensei will help you.”
The cage Kurama has paced for seventeen years is no more; neither is the hatred of his vessel, the bloodlust that once sustained him. He no longer wishes to drag the boy inside, to devour him, to escape him.
If he were not so weak, having slept through the night for the first time in a century in a body that has suffered more blood loss than any human should survive, it would still happen now. He feels himself rising in Naruto’s blood, his chest, his head―he hears his own voice in Naruto’s mouth.
“Heal him first.”
Sakura turns her head away, choking on a sob. In the end, it is Kakashi who shapes Naruto’s hand for the seal; Sakura slots Sasuke’s stiff fingers into place, already cold. Her other hand peels open his left eye, deep purple and still sluggishly spinning. Kurama had not seen such eyes in thousands of years, since the Sage ripped him away from his brothers; now, he has seen half a dozen of them in two days. All of them in the sockets of dead men.
What little blood Sasuke has left is pooling in his fingertips, turning them almost black. Naruto struggles against the sign, still growling demands― heal him. If you don’t- I won’t- I won’t do this without him-
Kurama’s affection for this boy has not changed his nature. His bone-deep hatred of humans―borne from equal parts innate disdain for a weaker being and earned distrust―remains.
Kill her, he whispers, if she does not heal him, we will kill her. He knows that Naruto has heard from the way he jerks in place, his fingers clenching around Sasuke’s from the pure shock of it.
The sign is complete. The red moon fades from the sky.
―
Human machines keep Sasuke alive for another month, in the most technical sense of the word.
His bruises fade and his cuts knit together; but he does not breathe on his own, and his hair, though it grows longer, is dull. Coarse, under Naruto’s fingers.
There had been a time when Kurama despaired of that black hair, and his vessel’s foolish desire to put his hands in it without even knowing why. When he was young, he thought he wanted only to pull it, to yank it out by the roots as they sparred. Kurama knew better, of course. By then, he had watched this dance from inside of two other humans.
Sasuke’s heart still beats, slow and irregular; Naruto sleeps in the hospital bed with his ear to the other boy’s chest, listening. The sound of it floods Naruto’s body, reverberating through Kurama’s own head in a deafening roar that stirs the water around his paws.
On the rare occasion that he’s left alone, Naruto pours chakra into Sasuke until the room is bright with it and Kurama himself grows woozy.
It changes nothing.
Kurama, who has always been more spirit than animal, has known it since he woke on the floor of the valley: Sasuke, the essence of him, is not coming back.
Others know it as well. After a month―only when they think that Naruto is sleeping―there are hushed discussions of what to do with Sasuke’s body.
After that come the discussions with Naruto. For a week, each one ends the same way: Get out. Get out. It ends in Naruto curled around Sasuke with his teeth bared, his claw-tipped fingers carefully avoiding the tubes and wires that narrowly separate Sasuke from true death.
The first visitor is the older woman.
Tsunade. Granny.
She cups Naruto’s face gently, but stares at him hard. She does not flinch when he jerks away.
“It would be a kindness.”
Nartuo snarls at her. Kurama feels himself being called to the surface, unwittingly sharpening the boy’s teeth. “A kindness? For who?”
Tsunade nods toward the bed. Sasuke is thin to the ribs. A corpse already.
Naruto sends her away, splays his hands across those jutting ribs and pumps chakra into them until he cannot keep his eyes open.
Sleep, Kurama whispers. Sleep now.
He does, for an hour or two, a cocoon of pulsing red chakra still surrounding the bed and the bodies in it.
Others come in quick succession. Sakura and Kakashi and Shukaku’s boy, Gaara. A parade of visitors, more than Kurama can even recall, stream in and out of the room. For seventeen years, loneliness scraped this boy hollow, a hollow that Kurama burrowed into and made his home; but suddenly, Naruto has no shortage of loved ones.
He sends them all away, will not hear reason or pleading or demands.
“I spent three years waiting for Sasuke,” he tells Gaara―who frowns deeply the entire time, arms crossed tight over his chest and not meeting Naruto’s eyes. “It’s barely been a month, and now they think I’ll let them kill him.”
Finally, Iruka-sensei comes. His was one of the first names Kurama learned, many years ago.
He bought me ramen. No one’s ever bought me ramen before.
There is ramen now, too. A steaming bowl that smells of meat and those other, human frills that Kurama has come to enjoy―garlic and miso and scallions. Iruka places it gingerly on the table, settling himself on the edge of the bed. He rests a hand on Naruto’s calf.
“You’re getting skinny on me,” Iruka says, voice deceptively even. Kurama can feel that his fingers are shaking, has eyes sharp enough to see the wobbling of his chin. Naruto must sense it, too.
“The food here’s no good,” Naruto replies. Maybe he doesn’t notice Iruka’s trembling, after all; his eyes never leave Sasuke. “Thanks for the ramen,” he adds, and does not move to eat it.
“Eat,” Iruka urges, pushing the bowl towards him. “It won’t stay hot forever.” He squeezes Naruto’s leg again, his hand firmer now. “I’ll watch him for you. Just- sit up for a moment, and eat. And straighten your back. You’re all hunched.”
Naruto scoffs at that. “Still on about my slouching, eh?”
“You may be a hero,” Iruka says, producing a pair of chopsticks from his vest and pressing them into Naruto’s hands, “but you were my student first. You always will be.”
For a while, the only noise in the room is Naruto’s slurping and Iruka’s shuffling. First, he brushes Sasuke’s hair back from his face; Kurama can see the moment he thinks better of it, realizes it only makes it that much more clear how gaunt he’s become. Carefully, he smooths it back into place. He wipes his chapped lips with a damp cloth, and tucks the bed sheets tightly under his remaining arm.
Naruto watches it all from the corner of one narrowed eye, still perched on the edge of the bed. Kurama can feel the fear in him, coiling in his gut and already rearing its head back, ready to spring if Iruka’s hand drifts too near the tubes in Sasuke’s nose and mouth.
Once Iruka has settled, Naruto asks, “Is Sasuke still your student?”
Iruka sucks in a breath, then blows it out again―sharp intake, slow exhale. He does it several times. Kurama senses his fear, too.
“I…feel for Sasuke.” Another breath. Naruto sets the bowl of ramen down, barely half-finished. “I feel for Sasuke, very deeply. And when I see you two, together―I’ll always see those little boys, chasing one another. You yanking his hair, him kicking the back of your chair. It was impossible to separate you two.
“You’d beg me to put you in another class. Every year, you told me you would be a top student if you didn’t have to look at stupid Sasuke all day. I asked you, more than once, why don’t you just stop looking at him? ”
Iruka swallows, his throat bobbing. His hand finds Naruto’s knee and squeezes.
“And every time, you looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head. And you'd tell me, Iruka-sensei, I can’t. ”
At that, he starts to cry. In the past month, Kurama has seen enough of tears to last the rest of his long, long life.
These tears are the first to move Naruto. The first to make him straighten his back, extracting his only arm from beneath Sasuke to wrap it around his teacher’s shoulders.
He slips off the edge of the bed, almost into Iruka’s lap; Iruka catches him, cradles him, crushes him to his chest.
A rare sensation, in this body. A body so rarely touched with tenderness, almost never held. A body that has spent the last month stubbornly curled around a cold, motionless one in a hospital bed.
Naruto collapses into Iruka’s arms and wails like a child, with a force that kicks up tidal waves in the water around Kurama’s feet.
―
When the machines are finally cut off, Naruto is eerily calm.
Since his sensei’s visit, there have been no more tears. No waves buffeting Kurama’s feet; no boiling rage to draw him out.
There is only a cold, terrible resolve.
If others sense it, they do not say so. The staff in the room today are no one Kurama recognizes: A kindness, most likely, to Sakura and the handful of other kunoichi who have shed tears over Sasuke this past month. They move efficiently around the room, disconnect each machine from its place in the wall, and do not linger.
Naruto removes the apparatus in Sasuke’s mouth himself, freeing it with a gentle tug. With the power supply gone, he has already stopped breathing.
Naruto smooths his thumb over his eyelids, traces his face. Whispers things that Kurama tries, for whatever reason, not to hear.
It’ll be alright. I’ll be there soon. You won’t be lonely.
Resolve. Terrible resolve.
―
Sasuke is buried intact. Tsunade suggested, gently, that it may be best to preserve his eyes. It was Kurama’s voice that told her no; Naruto’s that said, after taking a moment to collect himself, no one touches Sasuke’s eyes.
He is buried with his parents, in the too-large section of the cemetery dedicated to the Uchiha.
Kurama is very rarely surprised; all humans react badly to grief, and shinobi are more intimately familiar with it than most. He fully expects Naruto to collapse onto the freshly-turned dirt. He steels himself for a night, or many nights, of listening to him weep and curse and beg into it.
Naruto will crumble, now. He will realize that Sasuke is lost to him.
But one day, he will have to go home. He will have to bathe, and sleep in a proper bed, and eat food that he does not truly taste.
When he least expects it, he will begin to feel again―something other than pure anguish. Kurama may even find himself lulled into complacency, unneeded for years at a time.
The vessel before the boy’s mother had lived to be an old, old woman; she lost brothers, and children, and a husband. Each time, her grief pricked his ears. It kept him alert, hoping to pounce on her weakness and rip free.
It never lasted, and she never gave in.
Kurama is surprised when Nartuo rises from the graveside and things go dark.
―
He wakes in the valley, again. This time, the night is moonless.
The boy is with him already, kneeling.
“Sorry to knock you out,” he begins, shrugging. He does not sound sorry. “I was trying to disguise my chakra so they wouldn’t chase after me.” He clears his throat. “I’m not too hot at it, obviously. I could barely drag myself here.”
Kurama rests his head on his paws and considers the child in front of him.
“And what will you do, now that you are here?”
Possibilities flash through Naruto’s mind, slipping into Kurama’s a moment later: A body plummeting from a great height, a head held underwater by force, an abdomen sliced open by kunai.
But then, a face. Pale and dark-haired, though not the one that has been a constant in his vessel’s mind since childhood.
“The snake-man?” Kurama asks.
“If anyone can do something,” Naruto says, bristling, already defensive, “it’s him. He owes Sasuke; he owes me . Both of us.”
The whole world owes you, Kurama does not say. Go into it, and take it. He realized long ago that the whole world, when weighed against Sasuke on a set of scales, matters very little to Naruto.
He wraps one tail around Naruto, yanking him to his feet. A journey may be good for him. Fresh air, woods and streams and strange towns to pass through, must be better for any human than wallowing over a grave. Kurama will allow him this dalliance, this flight of fancy. He suspects that Naruto already knows that it is hopeless.
“Onward, then. But do not put me to sleep again, fool.”
―
“I don’t want an edo-tensei,” he growls, again. Kurama paces, awaiting the inevitable summons. Naruto and Orochimaru are separated by a low wooden table, covered in beakers and scratch paper. It would be as easy as breathing to flip and shatter it, to send Orochimaru flying into the far wall. Kurama would not even have to lend him an ounce of strength. “I want Sasuke.”
Orochimaru clicks his tongue. He has answered this question many times, since Naruto arrived; and the answer does not change.
He is a difficult human to read. He flickers between a strange glee at Naruto's request, and what seems to be genuine remorse that he cannot fulfill it.
Now, he rounds the corner of the table, arms raised as if he would comfort Naruto, embrace him. “No one would like to restore our Sasuke-kun more than I.”
Our Sasuke. These are the words that finally pull Kurama out, claws and red eyes, and Orochimaru retreats.
“Your Sasuke,” he backtracks, not without smirking. “I remember that you were always quite…possessive.” He shuffles a sheaf of papers, leafing through them as if unbothered; but his slitted eyes do not leave Naruto’s hand until it returns to normal. “I do not think he minded half as much as he said he did.”
“You didn’t know him,” Naruto snaps, automatic.
“Not as you did, dear. Not as you did.”
―
Once it is clear that Orochimaru has no miracles to offer, Naruto does not want to stay a single night. Kurama growls his protest: They are tired, and dirty, and half-starved. They have been all of these things for nearly two months.
Naruto relents, though not completely―he accepts a single onigiri from Orochimaru, and directions to a nearby hot spring. He eats as he hikes, only to wretch it back up into the bushes.
He strips and sinks into the springs until just his nose and eyes remain above water. Kurama remains alert, convinced he’s only agreed to bathe so he can do something idiotic, like drown himself.
After a moment, the boy is in front of him.
Without preamble, he says, “I’ve been seeing him.”
Kurama does not ask who. For better or worse, Naruto’s eyes are his eyes, Naruto’s thoughts his thoughts. When he sees what is not there, Kurama does as well. Flashes of dark eyes and darker hair, peeking out from between trees and staring at them from the other side of a campfire.
“He needs me,” Naruto continues, and this is what Kurama has dreaded. “He’s alone. I told him I would never- that I wouldn’t let him be alone. And now…” He trails off.
Kurama forces out a pulse of chakra, snapping Naruto’s head back up above the water and forcing him to breathe deeply.
Naruto crashes back in, cursing.
“I need to talk to you, god damn it.”
“I know what you are going to say.” Kurama flicks his tails, not hard enough to knock him over but enough to push him back, away. “And I will not allow it. I cannot.”
“You’d be free; you could go home; I mean, you could go wherever you wanted-”
“And so could you, fool. But you would go to your death?”
“To Sasuke,” Naruto corrects, his hand curling into a fist. He is kneeling, still, with his eyes downcast; but this cannot be called begging. Kurama has seen him beg―felt snow envelop him as he pressed his forehead to it and begged for Sasuke’s life to be spared. “Kurama, I can feel him. He’s alone, and he’s scared, and he needs me.”
“He is not the only one.”
Unwillingly, Kurama remembers Sasuke’s words: My one and only. He knows that Naruto is thinking of it, too, from the way his face contorts, his lips quivering.
The fox makes an effort to be gentle. He nudges Naruto with his nose, presses against his abdomen as a mundane dog might. Softening his voice, he says, “That boy’s whole clan was there to receive him.”
“Then why is he still here?”
“Maybe he is not. Maybe you see what you wish to see.”
Naruto pushes to his feet, glaring. He will not hear reason; not tonight, with the hopes he’d pinned on Orochimaru so freshly dashed.
Kurama keeps his head above the water; guides his feet and hands as he dresses and lays out his bedroll on the forest floor; and, when sleep does not come naturally, eases his eyelids shut.
―
They walk for days. Naruto does not bother entering his domain anymore; he speaks aloud, and Kurama answers.
They have a near-constant companion in Sasuke, forever on the periphery, just out of reach. When Kurama turns his eye on him, he darts away―as if he is shy, or embarrassed at being caught. He does the same to Naruto, who swings wildly between chasing and cooly ignoring him, between sulking and pleading.
He is a reluctant spectre, it seems, with a desire to observe rather than truly haunt. But Kurama must admit that he is beyond what even Naruto’s imagination could conjure, his presence somehow tangible―cold and heavy, as his chakra was in their last clashes.
“Why don’t you just come out here?” Naruto whispers. Red eyes glint from the treeline, catching the light of the dying campfire.
“Stoke the fire,” Kurama interrupts. You will catch your death, he does not add, because Naruto will smother the fire without even blinking.
Absently, Naruto pokes at the smoldering logs with a stick. His eyes do not leave Sasuke’s, which have moved no closer.
“I’m trying to get to you,” Naruto continues, raising his voice as if that is the solution, as if Sasuke simply can’t hear him over the wind. “Kurama’s being a real bastard about it, but I’m beating him down. I’m good at that, y’know. Of course you do.”
Sasuke does not move; does not speak. Naruto’s hand twitches, and he drops the stick in favor of twisting his hand in the fabric of his pants. He is thinking of grabbing Sasuke. Of what he would do, once he got a hold of him. Of all the things he did not do, all those times before.
Kurama lets it wash over him. The regret. One moment, it tastes bitter.
Then, it tastes like the only kiss this body has ever received. A human’s mouth, flesh and spit and the stinging mint some of them use to freshen their breath.
And then, blood. Blood in the mouth, blood from split lips and dozens of cuts. Severed arms.
How Naruto had wished it was Sasuke’s blood in his mouth, how he had wanted to swallow him whole and keep him there, keep him safe, so no one could hurt him―and then, he had hurt him. He had killed-
“You torture yourself,” Kurama tries.
“You torture me,” Naruto snaps. “If I slit my throat with this kunai, you’ll just stitch it back together. Won’t you?”
“And if you jump into the river, I will take over your body and steer it to shore again.”
“I’ll give you to Orochimaru. I’ll let him rip you out of me and do whatever he wants with you, I’ll let him turn you into a thousand tiny wimpy kyuubi, I’ll let him use you to-”
“You won’t.”
Kurama knows this for certain, because Orochimaru had offered it as they were leaving.
It will surely kill you. But you do not seem…opposed, to such a thing.
Naruto flatly refused. I won’t make Kurama anyone’s slave. I’ll find my own way back to Sasuke.
And so on, strings of threats and curses, Jiraiya-sensei was right about you, you fucking bastard-
Then, at the last moment, the strangest thing of all―another attempted embrace. Orochimaru raised his arms and took Naruto by the shoulders; he very nearly sank into it, before shoving away.
You took him from me first. And now you can’t even give him back.
“I’ll sell you to the highest bidder,” Naruto grumbles. He jabs at the fire again, sending up a shower of sparks. “Some of those Akatsuki must still be kicking around, planning world domination. They’d definitely wanna kill me . ”
“Sleep,” Kurama commands. He tires of this conversation, of this endless staring at a ghost who moves no closer.
“Stop doing that! You’ve been knocking me out, you sneaky bastard. If you want me to shut up so bad, you know what to do.”
Kurama could rip his way through this boy like paper. There is no seal keeping him here, no cage. No will to live, even―when the boy’s mother was dying, that had held him back for longer than he cared to admit. The brute strength with which she clung to life, and the squalling child in her arms.
And now, that child would die. Slit his throat in a forest and leave his body to the animals, never to be found. As if he is an ordinary, worthless human and not the closest thing to a god Kurama has seen since his creation at the hands of another one. To let him die like that, in some lover’s suicide, like one of those melodramas his past vessels were so fond of―would be unthinkable.
Kurama lets his own eyes drift shut.
―
The boy’s patience wears thin; Kurama’s wears thinner. He wrenches back control a dozen times a day, hurling kunai into the brush and urging feet back from the edge of sheer drop offs.
“There are things I need to tell him,” Naruto insists. “Things I never even let myself think about.”
He is lying on his side, shivering, having refused to make a fire. Kurama pumps chakra through him, cloaking him in it and shutting out the cold.
“I don’t know how it works for you kyuubi, but…were you ever in love? With, I dunno, a lady fox?”
He actually smiles, then, though it is nothing compared to what Kurama grew used to in their years together. The smile that split his face and showed every tooth, nearly painful in its intensity―Kurama has not felt it in a long time.
“No,” Kurama answers, and it is not quite a lie. He has felt love through his vessels, witnessed consummation and conception. He loved his brothers, before their separation, and his master. But he has no great love of his own.
Naruto sighs. “I was in love with him. I still am.”
Kurama has known this for many years.
It was the current that flowed under every impulse, every desire to tug black hair or come out on top in a spar or share a bento. It was in every tear shed for his absence, every gasping sob muffled into the fabric of a scratched headband―a headband that he knows is tucked into Naruto’s pack even now.
Sasuke, Sasuke, Sasuke. Only Sasuke, until Kurama grew to despise the name.
One, and only.
“Yes,” he says, for there is nothing else to say.
―
Snow, ankle deep, covers the forest floor and does not melt with the sunrise. It soaks through Naruto’s inadequate, thin clothes and freezes his exposed feet in ratty sandals.
His hair grows longer. He cuts it, when it is too tangled for his liking or hangs too much in his eyes. It is the only time Kurama allows him to hold a blade; a few times, thinking himself clever, Naruto brings the knife down in an erratic swipe from the hair at his temples, onto his neck, his throat, the bundles of veins and arteries there.
Kurama knits him back together, staunches the flow of blood, and lets his curses fall on deaf ears.
―
Kurama has never cared much for his vessels’ waking thoughts, let alone their dreams. In the past he did his best to shut them out; with Mito and Kushina, it was possible. He lived in blissful silence, near-perfect darkness, for weeks at a time.
The foolish connection he’s fostered with Naruto has robbed him of that. Each twitch of the boy’s fingers is felt in his own paw; each sob pricks at his eyes; and each dream, frightening or blissful or otherwise, trickles into his own mind.
In this dream, they are still in the forest. But the snow is long gone, and the sun is high.
And he is there, of course. Naruto is saying his name, over and over, a mantra, a prayer.
Sasuke, Sasuke. Always Sasuke. Alive and intact, with two arms snaked around Naruto’s neck and a light in his eyes that Kurama cannot recall ever seeing. Naruto has both arms as well, and makes good use of them.
Kurama feels the need to avert his eyes. The act itself is nothing new to him―he has borne unwilling witness countless times, even on the very night of Naruto’s conception.
It is the relief, plain on Naruto’s face, as he shakes and sobs into Sasuke’s open mouth. The unmarred right hand that he tangles at last in Sasuke’s hair; it’s soft, as he always suspected it would be.
So soft. So beautiful. You’re so beautiful, Sasuke. Sasuke. Sasuke. Sasuke.
Kurama wants to look away because he knows it will not last.
After a few minutes of fumbling and rolling together, the doubt trickles in.
It is too warm here, too bright. Sasuke’s eyes are the deep black of their childhood, with no spinning purple Rinnegan. And their arms―their arms. Naruto had pinned both of Sasuke’s above his head by the wrists, squawking with triumph as if he’d won a spar.
He wakes gasping, sputtering, still saying, “Sasuke.” But it is different now; desperate and frightened, like a lost child calling for their mother.
Eventually, Naruto hauls himself upright, staring fixedly at his remaining hand. He lays it on his lap, open-palmed. Empty.
There is still a kunai strapped to Naruto’s leg from cutting through the brush this evening. There is a frozen lake a short hike away, with weak spots in the ice. This deep in the forest, there are a hundred deadly things just out of sight, some mundane and some as old as Kurama himself.
There are red eyes in the tree line; they may be the most dangerous thing of all.
Kurama yanks Naruto under before he can do something that they will both regret, come morning.
Naruto offers little resistance. He curls onto his side, unaware of or unbothered by the water. He has grown accustomed to sleeping outdoors, waking up in clothes soaked through by snow―he refuses inns and the spare futons of well-meaning villagers, even though they are far enough from Konohagakure that these people are offering shelter to a lost, dirty child and not a war hero.
Kurama made it clear, even before winter came, that he would not tolerate attempts at starvation.
I will take over your body and make you eat grubs, he threatened. Three days later, he did just that.
Since then, Naruto at least accepts eggs and onigiri and jerky, when offered; the rest of his supplies are from convenience shops much like the one that sustained him through childhood, brightly colored packages of dried ramen and other salty, fatty things.
“Kurama,” he croaks, barely audible, “please.”
He does not dignify Naruto with a response. Instead, he sweeps his tails under the boy’s body, lifting and dragging him until he is dry and secure, cradled against the fox’s body. Sleep, he urges, with every pulse of chakra. Sleep now, and do not dream.
Stubborn as ever, Naruto drags himself upright. “Kurama.” Then, his mouth set in a thin, hard line: “Nine-tails. Demon fox. There’s gotta be some part of you that still wants to- that still hates- ”
“I will always have my hatred. But not for you. You made sure of that, fool.”
“If you cared about me, you’d let me do this.”
It is true that, for his century of imprisonment with them, Kurama still knows very little of humans. He had spent much of his long life avoiding them altogether, slaughtering any that came too close.
But he knows that they, like most creatures, abhor death above all. If they were to find him, Kurama is certain that Naruto’s human comrades would do much worse than feed him grubs and smack blades from his hands.
The fox heaves a sigh. It was Naruto’s strangeness that endeared him so in the first place, whittling away the pulsing rage at his core to reveal a heart. And his unflagging devotion to the Uchiha, with his foul chakra and monstrous eyes, was perhaps the strangest thing about him.
“Even he would not ask this of you.”
Naruto scoffs. “Of course he wouldn’t ask. He’s too goddamn stubborn. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t need me.”
“To what end?”
“He’s alone.”
“Many are alone. You have been much alone, nearly all your life.”
Furiously, Naruto shakes his head. “He was there. He was always there.”
Kurama would like to argue this point. There were so few moments of joy, of what the humans call camaraderie. Tears shed outweighed laughter shared tenfold.
But Naruto knows this―he knows this, and has deemed it worthwhile. He is willing to stake a life and afterlife on this boy, when he could have his pick of the world for a companion.
He is looking at his hand again, flexing it helplessly against empty air.
“I was holding him. Before I woke up. And it was- the happiest I’ve ever been, maybe. The only thing that even came close was meeting my parents, or…that last time, at the Valley of the End.” He swallows thickly. “I was happy. I was ready. For- for whatever was going to happen.”
Because of him. The fool cannot be satisfied with chasing him to the ends of the earth, at the cost of his dignity and his sanity and a limb.
Kurama presses his snout against Naruto’s still form, pushing an image into his mind: Himself as an old man, gone gray and wrinkled, surrounded by blonde-haired children and grandchildren. A kettle whistles in the distance―his wife, still lovely in her old age, making tea. The littlest child tugs the hem of his robes, begging tell us about the war, jiiji. Tell us about becoming hokage. Tell us about the demon fox.
This would have soothed him, once. Such fantasies staved off the loneliness on a hundred cold winter nights. Kurama, stewing in his cage, had always found them pathetic. How disgustingly human, to wish away your youth.
He feels a flare of that old disgust now, when Naruto’s only response is to roll away, curling in on himself further. Kurama would like to open his great jaws and tear him in half―of course, that would be to give him exactly what he wants.
He tries again, another angle this time―Naruto much like he is now, young and strong. His face carved in stone on mountainsides and painted on the walls of temples. Hailed as a hero, nearly a god, in every hidden village. Revered. Flocked to. A hundred handsome, dark-haired youths who would gladly give their life for a single-
Naruto’s voice cuts through the vision, this time. “I want him. If you can’t give him to me, or take me to someone who can, you’re wasting your time.”
Wasting my time, Kurama muses. He will live for a thousand years yet. He will see Naruto’s name become legend; see it twist and change shape; see it fade and be forgotten.
Even if it takes a decade for his grief to ebb, it will be little more than a blink of the fox’s eyes.
“These are the darkest months of the year,” Kurama starts, nudging Naruto upright. “Survive them. Watch the snow melt and swell the streams, watch the birds return and roost and hatch. Feel the sun on your skin again. Then, and only then―if you still are not at peace, if you remain resolute in your desires―we will speak further of this.”
Naruto exhales shakily, deflating as he does. He slumps against Kurama, wrapping his puny arm as far around one leg as he’s able. Kurama feels more than hears the words, makes them out by the movement of Naruto’s lips and the breath that stirs his fur: “Thank you.”
―
“Tell me about my mom,” Naruto says.
Mito was his first vessel, her body the cage he railed against for nearly half a century; Kushina came just after, a slip of a girl who bit clear through her lip to keep from crying during the transfer ritual. In truth, Kurama held no particular affection for either of them. But there had been respect, however grudging. It was forged over time with Mito, as she weathered great loss after great loss with an unbending spine, without creating even the barest crack for him to slip through. With Kushina it began that very first day, tasting the blood from her mouth in his own.
He watched her grow, felt time and age change her body as war and loss and love changed her heart. When she spoke to the child growing inside of her, Kurama had no choice but to listen as well.
You sure do kick me a lot. Landlords evict tenants for less, y'know. I’ll evict you soon enough, won’t I?
As many shinobi do, she died young. It would be a lie for the fox to say he was not glad of it, when it happened. At the time, a hundred human lives paled in comparison to a single breath of the open air, vessel or no.
He settles for, “You kicked her―hard, and often. I think it delighted her, in a strange way.”
“What about before me?” Naruto asks, apparently unsatisfied. He has stopped walking, his arms crossed tight over his chest.
He is not yet restored to his old self; but since the promise they made a few weeks ago, to revisit the topic of Sasuke come spring, he is more talkative. The time once spent keeping him from destroying himself is now spent entertaining him, answering childish questions.
“She was headstrong, like you. Loud, also like you. When she was angry with your father, her screams rattled the bars of my cage.”
Naruto gives a hmph of acknowledgemnt. After a few moments of silence, rocking in place against the cold, he asks, “The village she came from―was it Uzushio?”
Kurama grumbles his assent. Uzushiogakure and their accursed sealing techniques had been the downfall of many tailed beasts.
“Could you take me there?”
They are somewhere in Wind Country, trekking aimlessly through the mountains. It is at least two weeks’ walk to the coast and what was once Uzushio.
Perhaps it will be good for him. The humans call the salt air bracing , and seem to believe it imbued with healing powers for the troubled soul.
Mito was sent there once, after the death of her youngest son. Sent home, to be soothed and cared for by her mother and sisters. It relaxed her so thoroughly that even Kurama grew fond of the place, found himself lulled into near-complacency by the cry of gulls and the slap of waves against his vessel’s feet.
She was loath to return to Konoha, and cried bitterly the whole carriage ride home. In all their time together, it was the closest Kurama felt to freedom.
Kushina had longed for it, too, during the long lonely nights of her childhood and the last, painful weeks of her pregnancy. When the child made her sick, she sometimes put the kettle on and poured it over a cup filled with salt, breathing it in until her stomach calmed.
Of course, Naruto does not share these inclinations. His idea of home was bound up in other memories, other sensations―sunlight filtered through a thick canopy of trees; a steaming bowl of noodles; a boy's barely-there smirk.
Perhaps the salt air will do him good as well. Perhaps it will help him to forget.
Wordlessly, the fox steers the boy’s feet south.
―
When the trees thin and the snow gives way to cold, wet breezes, Kurama knows that they are approaching the coast.
When there are more ruins along the road than houses, he knows that they are approaching Uzushio.
What was once the village gate stands partially ajar, the walls on either side reduced to piles of rubble. The swirling Uzumaki crest decorates the gate itself, twisted into the wrought iron.
Naruto pauses for a moment, tilting his head back to take it in, before pushing through.
Uzushio was flattened in the third war, targeted for the very sealing techniques that bound Kurama to their Uzumaki women. For all Konoha’s talk of partnership, of sister cities, they did not move to save it. They already had their jinchuriki. Kushina was young, and strong, and all but guaranteed to birth several replacements in the coming years.
Kurama remembers her screams, how she pounded on Minato’s chest with her claw-tipped hands: “My mother. My father. My sisters. All of them?”
Minato had seized her by the wrists, and said only, “Yes.”
Kill him, Kurama whispered to her. Kill them all.
“Get away from me,” she croaked instead, yanking out of Minato’s grip and stumbling backwards. She shoved the heel of one hand into the seal on her stomach, as if to push Kurama down; with the other, she jabbed her fingers towards the door. “Just get away .”
Later, Minato would agree to give their children the name Uzumaki, as if it were a sound replacement. One child, maybe two, for an entire clan. Parents and sisters and cousins, babies whose names she’d only learned from letters―all of them, gone.
Her home, the home she was ripped away from as a little girl. Her grandmother's whitewashed cottage, the fish market she still strolled in her dreams.
Gone. Crushed, in the great grasping fist of the shinobi world.
Now, decades later, her son picks his way through the ruins. What Kurama knows of the village was filtered through Mito and Kushina's memories and dreams―by the end, with the bulk of their lives spent in Konoha, their recollections were fuzzy at best. He does his best to guide Naruto’s feet along familiar paths, through the city center into what was once the Uzumaki clan’s district.
Kushina was the youngest daughter of the clan head, and spent her childhood in what should have been a spacious house, nearly a mansion.
Instead, it was packed to bursting. Her father’s parents lived on the lower floor; and her sisters, all older, brought their husbands and children home to roost rather than moving away. Often, a cousin or two or three shared her bedroom while waiting for work to be done on their own house or licking their wounds after a fight with their husband.
She had been so happy here.
Kurama pushes these fuzzy memories into Naruto’s mind. Dozens of red-haired children, chasing one another through these streets. Weaving in and out of the various houses and market stalls, skittering under the adults’ legs. Women with baskets of vegetables, men haggling over fish.
He does not say, outright, you could have this. Naruto would only bristle.
Naruto stops walking. They’re in front of the clan head's house now, badly damaged in the war and stripped down to a skeleton by time. A tree has shot up in the center of what was once the main room, tall and spindly, growing straight through the roof beams.
Quietly, Naruto says, “They’re all dead.”
Something flashes in the corner of Kurama’s vision: Sasuke, ever-present, has found his way into the house.
If there are other ghosts in Uzushiogakure―and, by all rights, there should be―they have not shown themselves.
Sasuke passes, half-transparent, in front of a shattered window; Naruto needs no further prompting. In a few long strides, they are in the house’s entryway. A solitary cloth slipper remains on the floor, clearly moth-eaten but otherwise undisturbed.
“We’ll sleep here tonight,” Naruto declares, shoulders square and voice firm as if expecting an argument.
Even with three of the four main walls collapsed, it will be easier to keep him from freezing to death here than in the forest.
―
For a few weeks, Naruto is occupied by combing through the ruins of Uzushio. He chases crabs along the beach and dives for fish, and hikes to nearby markets when those efforts are fruitless.
Kurama continues to share his limited memories from Mito and Kushina―mostly houses of favorite cousins; stalls that gave them free sweets when their mother’s backs were turned; a pine tree Kushina fell out of as a child and broke her wrist, still standing in the back garden of the Uzumaki house.
Naruto sits beneath it for a long time, fingers buried in a pile of shed needles. There’s been a gloom hanging over him all afternoon, since he finally managed to stun and catch a fish. The rush of victory quickly gave way to a swirl of memories Kurama could barely parse.
Of course, it was the same person at the center as always―standing on a riverbank this time, much younger, saying we’ll need more than that.
“Kurama,” he says, finally. “It’s warm today.”
With a start, Kurama realizes that he is right. Naruto typically left the water with his teeth chattering, his lips and fingertips blue. Today, he shook his hair out, dog-like, and stripped off his wet shirt to dry in the sun.
The fox bites back the urge to pull him under, subdue him immediately. It has been a few blissful months since they’ve danced this way; but he will wrestle away the lead, eventually. He has never failed to before.
Nonchalant, he replies, “It is. You ought to cook that fish before it spoils.”
“I should leave it for the birds. Like that hawk.” Naruto tilts his head back, jerking his chin to indicate the speck of a bird overhead. “It’s been circling for hours. Wonder why.”
Naruto squints up at it, frowning―they both know why.
If they suspected Naruto was in real, imminent danger, Konoha would have tracked him down and dragged him home long ago.
Jinchuriki have always been a costly investment. If the other kage keep their promise and do not seek new vessels for the other tailed beasts, one of the last jinchuriki in the world is more valuable still.
A jinchuriki that has saved the world is, of course, unheard of.
And, beyond practicalities, there are those in the village who care for Naruto, the boy. Worry for him.
If they linger in one place long enough, patterns emerge: Men who trail behind them at every market stall, as if their tastes are an exact match; women who hawk sloppily-made bouquets without seeming to care if they sell or not, and who none of the locals seem to recognize.
Up til now, there have been no attempts at direct contact. Someone has taken note of their long stay in Uzushiogakure and is growing uneasy.
“If you hold your arm out, it’ll land. There’s a message tied to its leg.”
Naruto continues, as if he hadn’t heard. “Winter’s over, I think.”
The same dance as always. Kurama will say it first, if only to beat him to it. “So now, I ought to let you die?”
Naruto twists a pine needle between his fingers. “That was the deal, right?”
“The deal was to speak of it. My answer remains the same.”
“So does mine,” Naruto snaps. He drops into the fox’s domain before Kurama can summon him, landing with a thud.
“You will live,” Kurama rumbles, drawing himself up to his full height, towering over the foolish boy in front of him. His tails thrash behind him―were he outside of this vessel, they would whip up cyclones, raze what remains of this fallen city to the ground.
As he is now, they only push Naruto off of his feet, sending him sprawling with a mighty gust of wind.
“You will live,” he repeats. He looms over Naruto, now, crowding him so that he has no room to stand, or turn away. “Even if I must drag you through it.”
Once, men’s hearts stopped simply from beholding the holy, horrible form of the demon fox. Crops and cattle and children were offered in hopes of appeasing kyuubi.
Knocked flat on his back, Naruto still dares to glare at him.
“They’re gonna come looking for me soon. And when they find me, they’ll force me to go home. I’ll be a prisoner until they’re satisfied I won’t run off again. There’ll be someone breathing down my neck for the rest of my life. Even if I’m hokage. Especially if I’m hokage.” His chest heaves with each ragged breath; his hand is fisted tight in the front of his shirt, clenching and unclenching. “And you’ll help them? You’ll let them keep you prisoner, too? What kind of life is that, Kurama―for either of us?”
“It is a life, ” he bites out.
Rapidly, Naruto shakes his head. Between increasingly-rapid breaths, he stutters: “I don’t want it. I can’t- I won’t-”
Kurama nudges him with his nose, urging him upright. Would that he could snatch him by the scruff like an unruly pup, give him a good shake. “Your breathing, fool. Slow your breathing.”
Naruto sucks in a long, shuddery breath. Blows it out and labors through another, and another, until he stops outright shaking.
When he speaks, there is still a quiver in his voice.
“It’s not a life. This is barely a life.” He makes a sweeping, all-encompassing gesture, indicates himself and the fox in turn. “I’ve never known what it’s like to not be a- a monster. To walk down the street without being glared at, or worse. Now, they’re gonna cheer for me. Or maybe they’ll pity me, whisper about me. About Sasuke.
“They already did that, you know―when I was looking for him. They couldn’t help themselves; they couldn’t understand it. I could barely understand it. I just knew I needed him to come home, and I needed to be the one to bring him back. I needed to be the one who made him realize that he could be…happy, if he’d just let me- if he would just let me in.
“And then I did it. It didn’t matter that I was bleeding and out of my mind, and so was he, because he was…” Naruto trails off for a moment, sniffling. He scrubs across his eyes with the back of his hand. “He was smiling at me. He was laughing. I think he might’ve cried, or maybe both of us did.
“I thought it was just the beginning. I thought I had all the time in the world.”
Unable to bear it, Kurama turns his gaze outwards. The only movement in the otherwise-still landscape is a pair of red eyes, watching from afar. He has kept his distance today more so than usual, as if sensing Naruto’s mood, but unable to truly leave him alone.
For years, Kurama has cursed his existence, his whole wretched bloodline. It has never been enough to keep him away. He has accepted, after months of this shy, silent haunting, that nothing ever will. Sasuke is, and has always been, as inexplicably drawn to Naruto as Naruto is to him. Devoted, in love or hatred or some confounding mixture of the two.
It will be a lifetime of this. Acting as a cage from within, as a pair of blinders, as a wall―whatever is needed, to keep them apart. To keep Naruto’s gaze fixed ahead, on the glorious future he was meant to want, off of the gaping hole where Sasuke will never be again.
Kurama turns inward, back to Naruto, who has dragged himself into a kneeling position.
When the fox speaks, he is startled by his own voice―how choked it is. “There are others who love you. One day, you may-”
Naruto cuts in, already shaking his head: “Not like this. Not like him. Never like him.”
Kurama lowers himself to the floor, so that their eyes are nearly level. He presses a massive paw forward, soft as he is able, until it meets Naruto’s bent knees and the boy slumps forward, leaning into him.
He is so light, to have borne such burdens. The whole of his weight against Kurama’s outstretched leg feels like little more than a feather.
“If you were to meet him again…what is your…” Plan? Wish? Hope? Kurama does not want to give too much, even as he feels his resolve weakening. “What is your desire?”
He feels as much as hears Naruto’s breath catch in his throat. A full-body shudder follows, passing through him before he speaks.
“I wanna tell him all the stuff I never got to.” Naruto drums his fingers against Kurama’s leg. “And touch him, of course, if he’ll let me.” He sighs, sounding almost wistful. “Smell him―I miss how he smelled. I’ll take him everywhere he never got to go, like Mount Myobuku. Turtle Island. Here. I think he’d really like it here.”
Naruto is very nearly smiling. Kurama looks away.
“So you would be content as a wandering spirit?”
“For a little while, yeah.” Naruto ducks his head, hiding his face in Kurama’s fur as if suddenly bashful. “If we come back, I don’t think we’ll be shinobi. I’d wanna be…” He trails off, humming thoughtfully. “A farmer’s kid. We’ll grow radishes or something.”
Humans are strange; Naruto is the strangest he has ever met. To spend so long pining for Sasuke like this―the way he’s thought of him, let alone what he’s dreamed of him…it is not what Kurama would call fraternal.
Still, Naruto is conversing with him. There is a brightness to his voice, after months of hollowness.
Carefully neutral, Kurama asks, “You’d like to be brothers, then?”
Naruto whips his head up, nose wrinkled in disgust. “Ugh, no―that kinda defeats the whole purpose. He would be my neighbor, or something. He’ll watch me pick radishes until we fall in love.”
His cheeks color. He has only said it out loud once before, whispered it in the dark, snow-smothered forest.
“And you would be happy, with such mundanity? Toiling in the dirt, without power or glory?”
Kurama means to goad him. To shake him from this worthless daydream and back into reality, into the mind and body of a boy whose dreams are all, finally, within his grasp.
It comes out much too soft for that.
Naruto sighs again, resting his cheek against Kurama’s paw. “As long as I’m with him, yeah. I’ll be happy.”
―
Kurama has pried his way free from a vessel once before: On the night of Naruto’s birth, for one glorious moment, he tore through Kushina's weakened seal and burst into the world.
He has never left a vessel that is pliant, willing. Lying flat on his back in the center of an abandoned house, with his eyes closed and his single arm folded across his chest as if he is already dead.
The seal is weak, if it can still be called a seal at all. Already, light streams in from all sides. For the first time in a century, a breeze ruffles his fur.
“It cannot be undone,” he says, again.
“I know,” Naruto replies, the same as he has every time. He nods, his fingers drumming impatiently against his sternum. “I’m ready.”
“I am not,” Kurama admits, barely a whisper.
Naruto’s fingers still. When he opens his eyes, they are face to face. He takes a few steps forward, closing the distance between them, and presses his forehead against Kurama’s snout.
“I’m gonna miss you,” he says. He does not look, or sound, like a boy who is about to die. He stands taller than he has in months. It is Kurama who hunches inward, shaking, like a dog who knows its master has tired of it. Somehow, Naruto understands this. He continues, speaking softly, “But I won’t forget you. Not even when I’m just some radish farmer. I’ll find ways to bother you for my next hundred lifetimes. I swear, Kurama.”
Without warning, the boy presses his lips to the tip of his nose. It is close-mouthed and quick, lasting just long enough to be intentional.
In the thousands of years he’s lived, it is the first time the demon fox has been kissed.
Before he can react, Naruto is speaking again. “I’ll miss you. I’ll really, really miss you.”
Finally, the walls that surround them begin to fold inward, collapsing. Naruto holds fast to him. He shows no signs of pain, though Kurama knows that he is being ripped apart.
The fox squeezes his eyes closed; but the light is blinding now, seeping through his eyelids. He rocks back on his haunches, gathers all of his strength, and pushes towards it.
―
There is a new story that the people tell, now. The story of how, after a century of containment, kyuubi broke free near the coast.
He was never captured again. But he did not whip up cyclones with his great tails, or topple cities as he did before.
When he emerged, kyuubi only wept.
For a year and a day, the demon fox crawled his way up the coast, dragging himself inland. In his wake, he left lakes and streams and rivers of salty tears. Villages sprung up around them; trade routes were redrawn; until, at the end of that year, kyuubi disappeared.
There are people who think he lives in one of the lakes. Others insist that he retreated to Mount Myobuku to live among the toads, or to eat them.
In a small farming village a few hundred miles north, they believe that kyuubi lives in the forest, near a pond they say formed from his tears. They light incense for him during festivals, and burn offerings during droughts. Expecting mothers leave crude, wooden charms of babies for protection during childbirth―the villagers heard that kyuubi had a child, once, with a human woman. A boy with whiskers, as silly as it sounded. A great hero, who died too young in battle―some people say that he was who kyuubi cried for.
Kyuubi has not used his real form in a long, long time; it has been even longer since he heard his true name on the lips of a human.
Kurama keeps to his temple, invisible for the most part, watching from the rafters. He eats the tastiest offerings, once the humans have gone; hoards the wooden babies in a hole in the wall, to satisfy the superstitious mothers; emerges once in a blue moon in the form of a stark-white fox, mostly to frighten mischievous children.
Two such children have stumbled into his temple today. He hears them before he sees them―or, rather, hears one of them.
A boy’s voice, squawking, “C’mon, don’t be scared. I’ll protect you from the nine-tails.”
His companion replies, much softer, so Kurama must strain to hear: “You’re the scaredy-cat. You’re stalling.”
There’s a scuffle, just outside the temple door; they crash in one after the other, still arguing and swatting.
Kurama peeks at them, then, from his position up above.
If he were not a spirit, made up of air and chakra, he would lose his balance and plummet to his death.
The soft-spoken boy’s back is to him, lighting a stick of incense. He’s slight, dark-haired. Though there is something almost familiar about him, he is not who draws and keeps Kurama’s attention.
It is his friend, strutting around the perimeter of the temple with both hands folded behind his head. Clearly feigning bravado, as if his companion and Kurama both cannot see that he is shaking.
That in and of itself is not unusual―Kurama has scared away his type more times than he can recall.
What draws and keeps the fox’s eye is the boy’s bright, blonde hair, the likes of which Kurama rarely sees in this part of the world. He has not seen it at all, really. Not for many, many years.
“You should light one too,” the dark-haired boy says, jabbing and incense stick towards his friend.
The other boy takes it, not without grumbling.
“Or what? He’ll eat us?”
“Just you. I lit mine.”
“You’d save me. Don’t make that face, you would. Imagine how much you’d miss me.”
Before he can think better of it, Kurama descends. He does not even want to scare them, really; he would just like to take a closer look. To see if what he has never dared to hope for is actually here, before his eyes, having stumbled into his rundown temple.
He takes the form of a white fox, as always; but for the first time in this temple, he allows himself to be seen with nine, swishing tails.
Both boys see him at the same time, and drop to kneeling positions without consulting or even looking at each other.
There are some advantages to this smaller form. Chief among them is the ability to approach humans―and get quite close to them―without crushing them beneath his paws.
Kurama circles them, sniffing. Searching.
They are not shinobi; he can tell from their clothes, and the way that they carry themselves. Only the barest hint of chakra clings to either of them, practically undetectable and certainly unusable.
But he recognizes it, on both of them. He knows it very well. On the blonde boy, the chakra pulses with an energy that’s nearly indistinguishable from the fox’s own.
He knows that his name is no longer Naruto. That he would not answer to it, were it called by Kyuubi’s booming voice. He would only run away, frightened.
Maybe he would return the next week with an offering of fishcakes, thinking that was what the fox wanted.
Tentatively, Kurama nuzzles into his side. The boy flinches, but doesn’t run.
Quietly, through gritted teeth, he asks his companion, “Should I…pet it?”
“If that’s what it wants,” the boy hisses back.
Kurama accepts the petting with as much dignity as he can muster; he feels a dog-like urge to roll onto his back, to show his soft underbelly.
Instead, he stares intently into the boy’s eyes―blue in this life, too―thinking all the while it’s me . You know me.
Eventually, the dark-haired boy reaches over to scratch under his chin as well. They fawn over him in silence, trading awed looks when the fox never moves to snap their fingers off.
“We should’ve brought food,” the blonde boy laments.
“Next time,” his friend says, running his thumb across Kurama’s ear. “We can bring him some fish.”
“What if he wants dango?” the other boy argues, receiving a disbelieving tch in response. “Not everybody turns their nose up at it like you do, loser. We should bring something good. I bet he got bored of fish a thousand years ago.”
There are certain human delicacies Kurama grew quite used to. Though he never ate them directly, they brought such joy to the body he inhabited that he may as well have.
He would like, very much, to eat them again. He butts his head against each boys’ hand in turn, hoping to signal agreement.
The blonde boy snickers. “Told you.”
Eventually, the shadows grow longer, and the sun begins to sink. The boys leave the temple, still bickering about what offering to bring.
They leave with their arms draped around each other, Kurama notices. Pressed so close that one cannot take a step without moving the other forward, too.
The sky outside is black before the fox sheds his physical form and retreats to the rafters above. Through a hole in the roof of his temple, he spots twin stars blinking overhead. For a moment, they are brighter than all the others by far.