Chapter 10: TenChapter Text
TEN
Now that Naruto had other friends to keep him entertained and Kanna to keep an eye out for him, Sansa steeled herself to finally do something she'd been putting off since her first disastrous attempt; warg into an animal in Konoha. Pretending to be napping in the corner of the playroom, she fluttered from mind to mind of a sparrow, a stray cat, another stray cat, and a hawk, until she found a pigeon. After fluffing her feathers, she quickly took to the sky with a few quick flaps of her wings. This time she was careful to keep to the skies, staying away from the buildings and instead focusing on orienting herself in the village.
Sansa was used to having to memorise the layouts of large keeps, castles and towns, and Konoha wasn't the largest village she'd had to memorise. She'd once spent six moons at Casterly Rock after Galladon Lannister, Brienne's son, had inherited it and invited her to visit. Casterly Rock and its surrounding lands dwarfed Konoha; though, to be fair, Casterly Rock dwarfed most castles and keeps.
It was clear to her that the streets of Konoha were built to be purposefully misleading and confusing. To an invader or non-native of the village it would be difficult to navigate. This was a common enough strategical decision that Sansa could recognise the basic pattern to it. Enough that she believed she wouldn't get horribly lost. After an hour or two of flying, Sansa finally veered over to the one structure of the village she had been avoiding: the mountain with the carved faces.
Looping slow circles in the air, Sansa gazed down upon the serious face of the Yondaime Hokage. Her father. The man who had torn Kurama in half, who had sealed one half in Naruto, his son, and one half in her, his daughter. Sansa wasn't sure what it was she felt, as she gazed upon his visage. Was it grief? Anger? Frustration? Disappointment? She wasn't sure. She just knew that it wasn't love. And it wasn't forgiveness. Her father had sacrificed her, and even more unforgivably he had sacrificed Naruto too, to what he believed to be a demon, trapped beneath their skin. He had sentenced them to a life of hate, for a village more precious to him then his own family.
Love is the death of duty, Jon had told her once. But duty had been the death of Minato's love.
It wasn't that Sansa didn't understand. She did understand. She was a Queen. She had ruled for decades longer then any woman had ruled before. She had begun a dynasty. She had birthed legends. She understood sacrifice. But she had never sacrificed her family. Everything she had ever done, everything she had ever sacrificed, she had done for the sake of her children. She had shaped the world into one where they would never have to suffer how she had suffered. Love no one but your children, Cersei had told her. It was one of her many lessons, one that Sansa carried with her until her death.
Tiring, Sansa fluttered over to the carved face of the Shodaime Hokage, landing on the brow of the man Kurama had called Senju Hashirama. The man who had been married to her great-aunt, Uzumaki Mito. The man who had captured Kurama's siblings and sentenced them to an endless existence of suffering with no thought or care for their sentience.
She did not hate Minato for what he had done, for though she could not forgive him, she did understand him. But Senju Hashirama? Him, she could– and did– hate. Not just for sealing Kurama's siblings, but for founding Konoha in the first place.
From her perch on the Shodaime's head, Sansa looked over the village she hated one last time before leaving the pigeon and returning to Naruto.
~
Time passed quicker now. There was always something to do, whether it was playing with Naruto and the other children or Lady and her litter-mates, exploring Konoha in various animal forms until she knew the village as well as she'd known Winter Town, doing small chores around the orphanage, or helping Kanna hide Naruto away from those who meant him harm. Sadly, this was a longer list of people then Sansa would have liked. Sansa had hoped the altercation with Jin would be an isolated incident. It wasn't. And, as she would come to learn, it wasn't just Naruto who would be targeted.
About two weeks after the incident with Jin, Sansa woke up unable to breathe. She immediately panicked, thrashing about like a wild thing, but her tiny body wasn't able to do anything when faced with the much older girl kneeling over her, pressing a pillow down over her face– not that she'd been aware of those details at the time. All she'd known was that she couldn't breathe and she'd been gripped with the terrible, frantic, primal fear of any dying creature as she slowly suffocated.
And then, suddenly, her attacker was ripped off her and thrown across the room with enough force that she hit the opposite wall and crumpled against the floor. Sansa gasped for air, her heart thundering as her small chest heaved desperately. Around her the other orphans were starting to stir, finally noticing that something noteworthy had occurred while they'd been sleeping. Sansa didn't notice them; she only had eyes for her saviour. Crouched before her, black-clad and mask bone-white, was Inu. Shaky and frightened and feeling so terribly vulnerable, Sansa felt tears well up in her eyes. It was a natural reaction to what had been a terrifying experience and she couldn't stop herself from reaching up, in the universal signal for 'please pick me up'. "Inu," she whimpered when he didn't move, which caused him to flinch slightly and she reached for him again, insistently. She just wanted to feel safe, to feel comforted, just for one moment.
"Captain," murmured another one of the masked guards, "here, let me–" the woman wearing a doe mask knelt down and tried to reach for Sansa, only for Inu to snarl, guttural and deadly. The woman flinched, going prey-still and silent.
"Don't touch her," Inu warned, the snarl still in his voice. Sansa bared her sharp teeth at the woman, not wanting the stranger near her and certainly not touching her or holding her, not when she was barely holding herself together, not when her heart was a fluttering, frightened little bird trying to escape her chest, trapped only by the pale-bone cage of her ribs. She edged closer to Inu until she could grab onto his closest hand with both of her small ones, ignoring the woman's bitten off hiss of warning and Inu's automatic tensing.
Inu was wearing a strange leather glove that didn't have fingers but did have metal indents along the knuckles. It smelled like blood, old and fresh, but he didn't pull his hand away, so Sansa held tight. The closest she could get to feeling secure, Sansa turned her gaze to the room, searching for a familiar golden head. She found Naruto looking anxiously over at her from Kanna's arms and gave the green-haired girl a thankful look. Kanna just nodded, looking wide-eyed and shaken up.
And then the girl, the one who had tried to smother Sansa, stirred from where she'd been left in a crumpled heap, sitting up with a groan and rubbing at her head. Sansa felt Inu stiffen as she spotted Sansa and her face turned livid with hate, hands balling into fists at her sides as her mouth twisted. "Why can't you just die!?" She screamed, staggering to her feet. "You freak, why won't you just fucking die! I tried all the poisons they gave me, but nothing worked! You're not even human, you're both monsters! You killed my parents! You're dem–"
Inu moved too quickly for Sansa's eyes to even follow. One moment he was standing beside her, as she clung to his hand, watching wide-eyed as the girl screamed her hatred, the next moment he was beside the girl, holding her limp body. She was still alive, Sansa could see the rise and fall of her chest, but she was unconscious. "Suru, take her to T&I," Inu ordered, and there was a truly chilling edge to his voice as he looked down with cold eyes at the unconscious girl. "I'm curious to know just who it is that's been supplying her with poison."
"At once, captain," the woman from earlier, the one in the doe mask, said, flitting forward to take the unconscious girl from Inu and then disappearing.
Naruto was whimpering from Kanna's arms and Sansa's heart was breaking for him. He didn't deserve to hear such hateful things being spat at him. Traitor's daughter, she still remembered hearing, over and over. She's a traitor's daughter. It had followed her everywhere in the Red Keep, even in her dreams, a constant battering at her heart that left it bruised and bleeding. And she knew it wouldn't be the last time someone called her and Naruto monsters or demons.
This was the life their father had condemned them to. This was the fate he had sacrificed them for.
Sansa didn't even realise she'd let out a soft whine, more reminiscent of the sounds she let out when she was sharing Lady's body, until Inu had crouched down and lifted her ever-so-carefully into his arms. He was clearly not used to holding small children, she could tell by the awkwardness in his movements, but he still held her securely and she could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. He smelled like blood and leather and wet fur.
"Go to sleep, pup," Inu whispered and Sansa sighed, rubbing her cheek against the cheek of the dog-mask just like she would with Tsukiko or Naruto before curling up against his vest and closing her eyes, letting herself relax, confident in the knowledge that Inu was here and Inu could keep her and Naruto safe. At least for tonight.
When Sansa woke in the morning, she was curled up with Naruto in a small room she hadn't seen before with Kanna's arms wrapped around them both. When Kanna woke– which was about the same time as Naruto woke; her brother was many things, but quiet wasn't one of them– she explained that the matron had decided that the three of them would share their own room at night. The room was locked and only Kanna and the matron had a key.
"'Course, that won' stop someone from pickin' the lock," Kanna told them, "so we gotta stick sommat in there before we go ta sleep, 'kay? We can't forget. Lock picks can't git in if there ain't no room for 'em," she explained. Sansa nodded solemnly, while inwardly despairing. She was really going to have to reveal her ability to talk soon, or otherwise Naruto's main exposure to the language was going to be Kanna's street slang. A son of Uzushio should not speak in street slang.
Masa's, as Sansa later learned the girl's name was, attempt on their lives was the first but it wasn't the last. It seemed that Masa wasn't the only child in the orphanage who had been orphaned by the Kyuubi Attack– which should rightfully be called the Uchiha Attack, in her opinion– and because Minato had sealed Kurama in her and Naruto, those orphans somehow equated them being the Sacrifices to being responsible for their parents' deaths. And some of them? They wanted revenge– the bloody kind.
A week after Masa's attempts, a nine-year-old boy who was enrolled in the ninja academy had smuggled home one of the funny-shaped knives they used to practice hitting targets and tried to stab Naruto. Kanna had managed to deflect the strike and the masked watchers– ANBU, Kanna later informed her they were called– appeared and took the boy, Genku, away.
Sansa didn't see Genku around again.
Two-and-ten year old Ochiyo was next to try; she hit Sansa over the head with a ceramic pot. It had shattered to pieces and the result had been painful and bloody. Sansa spent two days in the white place Naruto had been taken to twice while Kurama tried to slow down her accelerated healing long enough for the maesters to pick the pieces of ceramic out of her wounds before her skin grew over them and they had to cut her back open (later Kanna explained that the white place was called a hospital and the maesters were actually called iryo-nin– Kanna was a blessing and nothing anyone said could convince Sansa otherwise)
Ochiyo disappeared too.
So did Isamu and Chiyuri and Riku after they tried their luck.
Sansa was torn between feeling uneasy about the fates of the orphaned children and enraged about their attempts on her and her precious brother's lives. She and Kanna were getting tense and Naruto was picking up on their unease which made him whiney and bad-tempered. Inu and the other ANBU stayed closer now too Sansa noticed as she carefully tracked their chakra, along with the chakra of everybody else within her vicinity. She didn't care about the headaches anymore, not when it gave her advanced warning of possible attempts on her or her brother's lives.
The next attack was on Naruto. Sansa felt the flicker of intent in one of the chakras she was tracking moments before it happened which gave her time to tackle Naruto, just like she did when they were playing 'wolves'. Naruto giggled, giving a playful little growl as he squirmed beneath her, the sound just slightly too animalistic to be fully human. The little claws she'd noticed he grew sometimes weren't quite human either, but she never made a big deal out of them and neither did Kanna when she noticed them.
The boy who'd lunged at Naruto was, unfortunately, better trained then those who'd previously made attempts on their lives. About five-and-ten with short green hair, he had one of those funny knives in his hand and even as Kanna screamed out, "Kenta, no!" he lashed out with his foot, catching Sansa in the chest with his foot. Her chest exploded with pain as she was thrown back with a meaty crunch. She could hear Kanna scream again as she landed and she couldn't even move, she was in so much pain. She couldn't even breathe; it felt like her ribs were grinding together and she could taste blood. Blood and desperation.
'You'll owe me for this, little vixen,' a dark, familiar voice rumbled at the back of her head, and she swallowed back a scream as it felt like someone had carved her open and poured wildfire into her bones. The pain in her chest vanished, the shattered bones knitting back together, and when she heard Kanna scream, "don't hurt him!" she easily flowed to her feet, took in the sight of Kanna shielding Naruto with her own body and Kenta standing over them, and roared, corrosive, burning chakra flowing out around her like a cloak of fiery crimson.
Before anyone in the yard could react, Kenta made a sudden choking sound and looked down. A long, scarlet-wet and dripping blade emerged through his chest and for a few, stunned moments all anyone could do was stare. Then the blade was pulled back with a wet, slick sound and Kenta's body tumbled to the ground, revealing Inu standing behind him. Kanna screamed again, crawling forwards and sobbing wretchedly, bending over Kenta's head. Their hair, some part of Sansa vaguely noticed as she hurried over to Naruto's side and frantically grabbed her brother who clung to her just as desperately as she clung to him, was identical in colour.
Holding his bloodied sword and surveying the frozen children in the yard with a blank, impassive stare, Inu started prowling forwards, his gait every bit as predatory as he was. Not one of the children moved under the weight of his presence as he made his way over to Sansa and Naruto, stopping in front of them and Sansa let the crimson shroud sink back under her skin as the familiar feel of Inu's chakra washed over her. "The next one who tries to hurt Uzumaki Naruto or Fuyuko," Inu said, and there was no mistaking the deadly threat in his low voice, "I'll kill slower. Understood?" The pressure in the yard increased until some of the children fell over and others released their bladders, the smell of urine pungent to Sansa's nose.
Abruptly, the pressure disappeared and so did Inu.
One of the older children ran inside to get the matron and Sansa and Naruto were locked in the bedroom they shared with Kanna while everything was "sorted", whatever that meant. Sansa hugged the sobbing Naruto, who didn't understand what was happening but hated being locked in small rooms and wanted to be outside and sang him 'Snow Beast', his favourite of the old Northern lullabies, until he dozed off into a fitful sleep in her tiny arms.
'Snow Beast' had been Raya's favourite lullaby too. Raya, her third and final child. Her only daughter.
All her life, Sansa Stark had known that as a Lord Paramount's daughter, her womb was the most valuable part of her. More valuable than her beauty, more valuable than her riches, it was the best weapon and bargaining tool she had. And yet, all her life, she had also known that her womb would never truly belong to her, as no woman's womb ever did. It belonged to men; to fathers or brothers, who may sell her off, and to future husbands, who would use a woman's womb to create heirs to his titles and lands.
Even when she was queen, her womb was not truly hers. Her womb was a tool to be used to forge alliances and claims and debts. Torrhen and Robb had given the Starks a claim to the Six Kingdoms and the Free Folk. Raya had given them Dorne; after all, in Dorne women could inherit.
With the Martells destroyed by the wars and infighting, the prince they managed to find lest Daenerys turn her eyes further South and decide to be the first Targaryen to truly conquer Dorne was a green-boy, one easily taken in by beauty and warm smiles and sweet promises. Sansa did intend to fulfil her promises and she had; opening trade between the North and Dorne may have seemed a foolish, costly endeavour, but it had paid off, as she knew it would– Dorne and the North were startlingly similar in their ways, for the distance that separated them.
Sansa had wedded the prince, who became Prince Consort Olyvar, with the understanding between them and everybody else that she would keep her name and he would never have any say over how she ruled the North, nor she over how he ruled Dorne. He agreed, of course he did the poor boy, and she made sure she was with child before returning North, while he stayed to rule Dorne with the additional understanding between them that paramours were acceptable so long as they were discrete. She didn't want Olyvar doing something foolish out of unsated lust, as men were wont to do, and she had grown fonder of Tormund then she had expected to.
Raya Martell, her darling Raya, was born with her father's copper-toned skin and thick, ebony hair, Dornish to the bone except for her deep blue eyes and the wolfsblood in her veins. She was beautiful, especially dressed in the sapphire blue Dornish silks she wore when she was crowned Princess of Dorne with a pretty smile that hid her sharp mind. After all, Sansa and Olyvar had agreed that Sansa would never have any say over how Olyvar ruled, but they never had any such agreement over Sansa's influence on their child's reign.
Raya may have spent half her childhood in Dorne, so as to learn their customs and become ingratiated within the court of her future subjects, but she had learned the game of thrones at her mother's knee alongside her brothers, and she knew just what it took to survive as a woman in a world such as theirs. Just as her Torrhen and Robb did, she knew her duties and she took them on proudly. Family, Duty, Honour.
It was no mistake that family came first, and honour came last. There was no place for honour when it came to family. Family was everything. That was why she couldn't bring herself to feel any true regret that Inu had killed Kento, even if he was Kanna's brother or cousin. Yes, she wished it had been someone Kanna didn't love, but something had needed to be done. An example had to be set, or the attacks would have continued. All rulers understood this. There had been times where Sansa had made similar decisions, as Queen of the North, and while she may have wished such decision were unnecessary, she never regretted making them.
Kanna didn't come back to the room for hours. Sansa had honestly half expected her to not return at all. She wasn't sure if she would have been able to– not unless she was forced. But to her surprise, Kanna did.
The green-haired girl looked tired and wan as she locked the door behind her after entering the room then turned to face them. Sansa tensed and tried to move in front of Naruto as her stirred, noticed Kanna and then reached his arms up to her. "Ka!" he said, his words lisping slightly. "Ka, up!"
Kanna's face crumpled and she dropped to her knees, pulling them both into her arms. Naruto went easily, but Sansa tensed, ready for violence. Kanna didn't seem to notice, instead burying her face in Naruto's mop of golden hair. "Ya ain't demons," she whispered, voice hoarse and scratchy like she'd been crying for hours. Sansa would know. "Ya ain't." She gave a quiet, wet laugh. "Yer puppies, not demons."
Finally relaxing, Sansa let the tension ease from her muscles and she leaned into Kanna's arms. "Not puppies," she said softly, and Kanna jolted, sucking in a shocked breath at hearing her speak, but one show of trust, of faith, deserved another. "Not puppies– wolves."
Kanna pulled back slightly, so she could look at them both. Sansa smiled, revealing her sharp little fangs, while Naruto reached up impatiently to pat her arm, wanting more hugs and unintentionally showing his little claws in the process. "Not puppies," Kanna agreed, obliging Naruto and pulling them back into a hug. "And not foxes," she added, softer then a whisper, so soft that Sansa was sure they were not supposed to hear. "Wolves."