123To Restore a Clan
A Naruto crack thing
By
EvilFuzzy9
Rating: T (for now?)
Genre: Humor/Parody
Characters/Pairings: Sasuke U., Karin, Sakura H., Naruto U.; [SasuHarem, NaruHarem, crack]
Summary: There was no such thing as a Clan Restoration Act, to Sasuke's disappointment. But that didn't mean it wasn't technically possible to have multiple women give birth to his children. It was just... a bit more complicated. [SasuHarem, NaruHarem, crack]
"So the village is under attack."
"Just our friggin' luck."
"Don't complain, Suigetsu!"
Team Taka, sans Sasuke, were gathered in what should have been a quiet, uneventful part of Konoha. There were a couple small bookstores, and pawn shops, and a street vendor selling what might have been sushi. It was a gloomy corner of town, little frequented save by those who wanted to avoid the more well-trodden paths. It should have been peaceful.
'Should have been' being the operative phrase.
"Whatever. Why aren't you sitting at home knocked up with one of Sasuke's bastards, yet?" Suigetsu muttered, looking askance at Karin.
She glowered.
"We aren't married yet."
"I did say bastards, didn't I?"
"Eyes forward," said Juugo tensely.
It was more of a suggestion than an order, but Suigetsu and Karin could recognize the necessity, so they complied.
A man, ginger haired and studded with many facial piercings, rotundly built, stared at them with eyes of rippling gray that had no clear distinction between iris and sclera. His voice was deep and nearly monotonous when he spoke, and his face was stiff and nigh expressionless. He wore an Akatsuki cloak, black with a pattern of red clouds.
"Where is Naruto Uzumaki?"
Taka did not respond to this question. They stood in a reverse chevron, Karin in the rear and middle while Juugo and Suigetsu stood ahead and a little to either side.
"Who is this freakshow, anyways?" muttered Suigetsu, looking at the large, cloaked man before them. "Gives me the creeps."
"He's probably with Akatsuki," said Juugo.
"No duh." Karin rolled her eyes. "We can see the cloak. But who is this guy, seriously? I thought I knew of most of the surviving Akatsuki members, besides the leader."
"Tubby here doesn't look like he could lead a dog on a leash without trying to eat it," quipped Suigetsu.
Karin snorted, ostensibly unamused by the crass remark.
"He's dangerous, though," Juugo said. "I can feel it."
"Yeah. Brrr..." Karin shivered a little. "He's cold as ice, isn't he?"
The man took a step forward, causing them to stiffen in redoubled awareness of threat.
"Where is the kyuubi jinchuuriki?" he said in the same tone he'd used before. There was no sign of him losing patience. "Where is Naruto Uzumaki?"
"I'd tell you if I knew," Suigetsu said, gesturing apologetically. "I'm not exactly with these Leaf village guys, yeah? They're kind of just holding my sword hostage. No hard feelings, mate. I don't plan on getting in your way."
Karin punched his arm. The limb broke apart in a splash of water before almost instantly reforming.
"You're overselling it, jackass," she said angrily. "And, hey! That's my clan head, you know? Have a little tact, for once!"
"Screw you!" said Suigetsu. "What do I care about your stupid clan? I'm just looking out for number one."
"Guys," said Juugo. There was a hint of trepidation in his voice.
The unidentified Akatsuki took another step forward.
"Where is Naruto Uzumaki?" he said. "You say he is your clan head. You must know where he is."
Suigetsu gave Karin a withering look.
"Way to go, loudmouth. Now tubby definitely won't leave us alone."
Karin flipped him off, adjusting her glasses.
"Oh, just go and kill him!" she said irritably. "You have that stupid jutsu of yours to take him out, don't you? Sword or no."
Suigetsu sniffed indignantly.
"It isn't stupid," he said. He raised a hand, pointing an index finger at the stranger. "It's a specialty of my clan." He cocked his thumb. "And it won't do shit at this range."
"Then get closer, dammit!"
"I will, dammit!" Suigetsu snapped. "Just give me the time to get ready! Geez!"
"Guys!" Juugo shouted.
The stranger had body-flickered to right in front of Suigetsu. A meaty fist was raised, his exposed arm intermittently pierced with unsightly black rods, and his expressionless face inches away.
"Oh, shi—"
Suigetsu was knocked flat on his ass by the punch. There was a crunching sound, and he let out a grunt of pain, reflexively raising a hand to his nose.
"Fug!"
Karin tamped down an instinctive feeling of schadenfreude, watching Suigetsu clutch his nose. It took her a moment to realize the significance of what had just happened.
She raised her head just in time to see the same fist, now marked with blood on its knuckles, coming up quickly. For a moment, she thought he was going to uppercut her. But then his hand slowed, unnaturally quickly, and he opened his clenched fist to seize her by the collar.
Then the man lifted Karin off the ground, staring into her eyes.
"Where is Naruto Uzumaki?"
For a moment, Karin was afraid. Then her mood hardened into a fierce resolve.
"I'll never betray family," she growled, a look in her eye so ferocious that even the Blood Red Habanero would have smiled on her with pride.
Karin kicked, then, swinging her feet to beat on the chest and belly of her captor. He was sturdy, though, and didn't seem to react with pain. This was vain. Slightly less vain was the kunai she retrieved, using her kicks and defiant glare to distract him while she lowered a hand to her holster, before bringing it up and digging the tip of the blade deep into the joint of his wrist.
She expected either to make him drop her in pain, or to sever crucial tendons and break his grip. In this regard, the attack was a failure. Hardly any blood came from his wound, and his expression did not change, not except for the slightest hint of surprise. Neither did his hand seem affected.
Then Karin felt a faintness pass over her, and she grew dizzy. It was like she had moved too suddenly into a standing position after long sluggishness.
It took her a moment to put two and two together.
She sensed his chakra, which was increasing, and she felt her own chakra slipping away where he held her. This guy could absorb chakra, and probably negate ninjutsu. That must have been how he managed to hit Suigetsu. He could absorb chakra.
He was absorbing her chakra.
He grabbed her hand and yanked the kunai out of his arm. The wound closed, healed by her chakra.
"A li-little help, guys?" Karin said hopefully.
Suigetsu sprang up and grabbed Gakido, the Preta Path of Pain, from behind.
"Dis is for by dose, budderfugger," he growled, holding a finger to the side of Gakido's head. He cocked his thumb and shot, hand rearing up from the recoil of water discharged with force sufficient to punch through steel plate.
It splashed on the side of the man's head as harmlessly as a child's water gun.
Gakido grabbed Suigetsu with his free hand and threw him onto the ground, holding him there by the throat.
"If you do not tell me where Naruto Uzumaki is," said Gakido. "I will have to kill you. God is merciful, but He is also just."
"Heh... who says I believe in your god?" said Suigetsu, ironically managing to speak more clearly now that he was being all but throttled. "He can't do a thing to a nonbeliever."
"So says a branch that disbelieves Fire," said Gakido. "But when the time of burning comes, it will be consumed all the same."
He tightened his grip, causing Suigetsu to choke for real.
"Suigetsu," said Juugo. "Maybe you shouldn't get into a theological debate with a ninja who is strong enough to invade a hidden village."
"Yeah? AND MAYBE YOU SHOULD HELP!"
A beat.
Gakido looked up just in time to see a gray, scaled fist coming right for him. And having time to see it, he had time to drop Karin and catch the fist. He squared his stance, putting a foot on the redhead's midsection, and he wrenched his grip to twist Juugo's arm, breaking it with a snap.
He absorbed his attacker's chakra. The dark growths that had emerged now began to recede, and Juugo went still.
But so did the rotund Akatsuki, who showed his first and final hint of true reaction as his body distorted and his flesh turned to stone. Eyes went wide in dismay, and a jaw slightly dropped, before he was silenced forever.
A moment's peace descended upon them.
With desperate strength, Suigetsu smashed the stone hand that had been strangling him. He took a deep, greedy breath of air. Together with Juugo, who used his remaining good arm, they lifted the man-turned-statue off of Karin, who rolled away and stood up, swaying a little in her daze.
"Okay... The hell was that about?" said Suigetsu, looking at the former Akatsuki. "Why'd he turn to stone like that?
"I don't know," said Karin. "I sensed him absorbing Juugo's chakra, and suddenly..."
They both paused and gave Juugo disconcerted looks.
"...what?" he said.
Karin and Suigetsu inched nervously away from him.
Then they turned and looked once more at the petrified Akatsuki member.
With almost identically vindictive expressions, the pair sprang on Gakido and began smashing him to pieces.
Juugo watched this, bemused, absently nursing his broken arm.
"And they say I'm the crazy one..."
"Will you accept these flowers, m'lady?"
Konan looked sourly at Sasuke, who stood before her in a dapper outfit. He was groomed to perfection and pleasantly smiling, bowing low and presenting her with a most impressive bouquet. She was wearing her usual outfit, sans Akatsuki cloak. Despite this, Sasuke was being a perfect gentleman and not leering at her faintly obscene manner of dress.
Or at least, he didn't let it look like he was leering. But this was an illusion, a genjutsu of the highest level. Who could say what the real Sasuke was doing, if he was even in here at all? Maybe he had left her lying, confident that his spell would hold her. So far, Konan had to admit that this confidence would be well-founded—she had yet to make this illusion so much as hiccup, and she had tried every genjutsu dispelling trick in the book.
But if Sasuke was here, still attending to the illusion, then Konan could only assume that time was being dilated. She knew enough about Itachi's tsukuyomi to suppose that this might be the case. Yet according to her information, this dilation of time required the caster's ongoing attention to the illusion, and that was taxing. Besides, making time pass faster inside the genjutsu did not keep her incapacitated for any longer in real time.
The only practical reason to employ this aspect of tsukuyomi—for tsukuyomi this clearly was—would be to extract information from her. But it had been several hours, maybe, and so far all Sasuke had done was subject her to intermittent periods of flirtation and solitude. He'd spend a quarter hour flattering her, complimenting her skills and her looks and her wit, then give her a half hour to stew in silence. The offensively inane small talk to which he subjected her seemed decidedly worse than any amount of silence.
What was he after?
...
It had been twelve hours. Sixteen times Sasuke had talked to her and presented her with illusory gifts. A small pile of dolls, jewels, flowers, and chocolates had built up by her feet. Sixteen times also he had left her to silence, to a world of utter emptiness aside from his presents and the memory of his face and his words.
Konan stared into the abyss. Each time he left, she found herself wishing a tiny bit more that he would stay, if only so she could hold onto the anger and defiance. As long as he was there, she could think of him as an enemy to resist. But this cycle of absence and presence, this unbroken rhythm of flirtation and peace, was already building within her a sense of habit and expectation.
She was growing accustomed to it.
Every time he appeared, he ended the fifteen minutes by asking if she wanted to go on a date.
So far, she had said no with perfect conviction every time.
A half hour had passed since Sasuke's last appearance. He did not show up. Ten minutes late. Twenty minutes late. An hour late.
Konan felt herself grow restless at first. She started to feel anxious.
It wasn't because she wanted him around, so much as because she knew how dangerous solitude was—and because she had no idea how long Sasuke might be able to keep up this illusion.
But two hours after his sixteenth visit to Konan, Sasuke finally reappeared, smiling and pleasant as ever. He brought her a small meal, modest but delicious looking.
"I don't need to eat," she told him. "This is all an illusion."
"You don't need to eat in here," Sasuke agreed. "But your brain thinks more than half a day has passed. It's telling you that you're hungry, isn't it? Hungry and thirsty."
He produced a bottle of water.
Konan turned up her nose.
"I wouldn't accept food or drink from one who keeps me prisoner," she said, "even if I needed it to live. But my mind is deluded, in here. I am not truly hungry."
"If you say so."
Sasuke set the food down, and left. He did not flirt with her this time.
Konan was relieved by this, for the most part. But a tiny disappointment niggled at the corner of her mind.
A week had come and gone. Konan had to admit she was impressed. From what little she knew, Itachi was usually limited to maintaining tsukuyomi for three illusion-days at a time—three seconds in real time. But it wasn't a hard limit. She knew it was possible for tsukuyomi to be used longer than that. She also knew it was incredibly taxing to uphold the genjutsu.
After that two hour absence and the presentation of that meal without flirtation, a new schedule had formed. Sasuke would flirt with her for ten minutes, then leave her alone for fifty minutes. Increasingly she found herself growing listless during those times of lonely silence. The gifts of Sasuke's that she had at first stubbornly ignored, she now turned to in order to give herself some form of diversion from the silence.
He knew when she did that. No matter how stealthily she fondled this necklace, or how furtively she nibbled that chocolate, or how discreetly she eyed such-and-such card or flower, he would know, and he would comment on it with a smile when he reappeared. He was pleased by it, or he acted pleased, when she enjoyed his presents, and for a while he would bring her extra gifts whenever he saw her using the ones she already had.
But after the fifth day, he'd stopped bringing gifts altogether. Now two days had passed since then. While Konan was a woman of great mental discipline, being housed in a featureless void with nothing to concentrate on but some score of small objects found her starting to grow restless.
"Are you lonely?" Sasuke asked her at one point. "I'll stay with you, if you are."
Konan had to bite her lip to keep from answering.
The second week passed with the intervals of solitude getting unsteadily longer. It went from sixty minutes between visits to sixty-five minutes between visits, then eighty minutes, then ninety minutes, then ninety-five minutes, then two hours, and so on. This increasing only stopped when it got to five hours and fifty minutes between each ten minute visit.
The third week was spent with Sasuke visiting her for ten minutes at a time, four times a day. He continued to flirt and pay her compliment and solicit her attentions, but he brought her no more gifts in all that time. Every visit, he ended by asking if she was lonely.
At the end of her twenty-first day in Sasuke's tsukuyomi, Konan asked him to stay a while longer. He did so. They shared a nice meal, and they didn't talk about much of anything.
The visits grew longer, but also less frequent. Now he would see her for three hours at a time, twice a day. Each time they would eat together, and drink, though neither of their bodies had need of, or could obtain, sustenance while inside the illusion. There was less flirting from Sasuke, or at least less flattery and solicitation. But he still asked her, every time, if she would go on a date with him.
At the end of the first month in tsukuyomi, Konan finally said yes.
After a half hour of real time, and almost five perceived years of courtship, Sasuke popped the question. Konan gleefully accepted. With that, the tsukuyomi ended, and Sasuke fell atop Konan in a satisfied swoon.
She didn't mind that his face landed in her bosom. Indeed, she hugged him quite warmly to her chest.
"Darling..." she crooned, sighing dreamily. "I love you."
She had almost forgotten about Akatsuki, save for a dim memory of her past as a freedom fighter in the Land of Rain. She barely remembered the criminal organization secretly led by the man who called himself Madara Uchiha. And what she did remember, she hardly cared about anymore.
She was a changed woman.
Five years, and falling in love, could do a lot to a body.
So she held Sasuke tighter, hardly caring when she felt the pressure wave of Shinra Tensei fall upon them both, and upon all the rest of the village.
A nearby building fell atop them.
"Mom? Dad? Itachi?"
Sasuke saw his family sitting around a fire in some dark and featureless wilderness. For a moment he thought he was back in the world of tsukuyomi.
"Sasuke..." said Fugaku, looking at his son.
Mikoto averted her face, wiping a tear from her eyes.
"To think it turned out this way..." she said regretfully.
"It isn't over yet," said Itachi. "I don't think Sasuke is long for this world. He doesn't belong here, yet. He hasn't become truly solid."
"You're right," said Fugaku. "He's still just a ghost."
"Am I... dead, then?"
"The answer to that inquiry is a matter of considerable difficulty, incarnate of Indra," spoke a voice from behind him. "Yea, I might say, and also nay. Both would serve in their part, but to deny that one must be finally true and the other invalid would, I think, be fallacious. Yet in another sense, whether you live a while longer or die at once, you will inevitably be dead, finally dead, with no hope of rebirth before the world's ending. But that is a high matter, and very hard for one so young as yourself."
Sasuke blinked and looked behind himself.
"So I'm dead, then?"
"At least until you're revived," said Hagoromo Otsutsuki, the Sage of Six Paths.
"Revived?"
"Oh, but of course. I had forgotten that you would still perceive time as a linear progression. How narrow must existence seem to the living!"
Sasuke turned to look at his family, bemused by this strange old man's talk.
"How long until I have to leave?" he asked them.
"A little while, as you see it," said Fugaku. "But I think there are some things we should discuss, first. You deserve to know a few things."
"What about?" Sasuke said. "The coup?"
Fugaku, Mikoto, and Itachi all gaped.
"Yyyeah. I found a secret compartment in the room under Nakano shrine when I came back home. Really shouldn't have hidden your contingency plans inside back issues of Playninja, dad."
Fugaku and Itachi colored. Mikoto gave her husband a stern look.
"So... you know, then?"
"Well, I do now." Sasuke shrugged. "So let's not bother with the ugly matters. How about... how about we just share some time together, as a family? If everything goes well, and I actually return to life... then I hope it will be another eighty or ninety years before we meet again."
"You're still thinking in terms of linear time," Itachi said. "Isn't that right, Sarada?"
The form of an elderly woman with short, white hair and a face lined by many past smiles appeared beside Sasuke's family. Next to her was a balding, elderly man with electric blue eyes and a contented expression. They held each other's hands, looking like a happy old couple. Then they disappeared back into the mists and shadows.
Sasuke supposed they were distant relatives who had died before he could meet them.
Then he felt a tug.
It seemed he was being revived.
Hagoromo placed a hand on Sasuke's shoulder.
"Before you go..." he said. "I think there are some things we would all like to discuss."
A/N: Lots of reviewers wanted Konan paired with Naruto. I pair her with Sasuke. Lots of reviewers want this to be treated as an earnest harem fic. I continue to write it as a parody. I'm not even trying to be contrarian, but these are things I'd decided on from almost as soon as I started the fic, and no amount of demanding or entreaty will change my mind.
:P
On another note, I'm fairly pleased with how the Taka vs. Gakido fight turned out. It isn't quite like my original conception—that one put more emphasis on Gakido being kind of a natural enemy to Suigetsu and Karin, and would have maybe worked like an absurd cat-and-mouse. But I like the effect of this fight, which illustrates how dangerous even just one of the Paths of Pain can be, while also still letting Gakido get jobbed because of his inability to handle sage chakra.
Updated: 4-4-17
TTFN and R&R!
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