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Birthright	By : sadfascist Category: Naruto > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 3578 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own NARUTO, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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BIRTHRIGHT
THE SLAVE’S TALE: “Sins of Blood, Part One”
I remember the first time Father takes me to see the tapestry under Uchiha Castle. I’m only three, and I don’t want to be there, it’s so cold and all I want is to stay in bed and eat rice cakes and listen to Mother sing me a song.
But I can’t tell Father that.
If I tell Father he’ll be angry.
Father’s like a demon when he’s angry, Mother says. Sakura doesn’t agree. Sakura says that Father eats demons and then shits them out afterward, no easy task, which is why he spends so much time in the privy. I ask Sakura what a shit is, but she only laughs and pokes me in the forehead. A secret, she’ll whisper. Don’t you know, Itachi? That’s what big sisters are for. Sakura is my big sister, but I don’t think she’s much good for anything.
“Itachi!” Father yells. I know I haven’t been paying attention to what he’s been saying. I look guilty.
“Itachi!” Father says again. “What is this?”
I try to concentrate. In front of me there’s this big, old piece of cloth hanging on the wall. I know it’s old because it smells like my grandmother, before she went away in the spring and never came back. There are funny scribbles all over it, connected by slanted lines. I guess it sort of looks like a sideways tree, all the branches growing from right to left. The thought of a tree falling down makes me giggle.
“Itachi!”
“Sorry, Father.”
Father is angry. I’m scared he’ll hit me again, but he just frowns. “This is the tapestry of the Uchiha clan. The history of our family. Do you understand, Itachi?”
“Yes, Father,” I lied.
“Thirty generations of Uchiha, stretching all the way back to the founder of our clan, Uchiha Madara himself. Thirty generations of glory!” Father points with his fingers at the scribbles on the cloth. “Madara, the first Shogun of the Birthright Empire, my namesake. His son Sasori, Shogun after him. Sasori’s daughter Kurenai the Lark, who married the Emperor. And on and on, Shogun after Shogun, then, after the fall of the Empire, Warlord after Warlord. And now, my son, all the way to you.” Father points to a squiggle at the very end of the cloth. “There. Go on, Itachi. Touch it. That’s you.”
The squiggle is a woven thread of gold, cold and scratchy beneath my fingers. It’s nothing like me. But I know it’s important, and I want to say something nice. “It’s pretty.”
Father is angry again. “Pretty? It is your destiny. It is your name, my son.”
I don’t understand. “My name is Itachi.”
“No!” My father seizes my shoulders suddenly. “Not your chosen name. Your bloodname! The name of the Uchiha. Do you understand? The blood that flows through your veins, the blood of Warlords and Shoguns and even of the divine Emperors. This is who you are, this is your destiny. Your birthright. And one day, my son and heir, it shall all be yours. You shall be what was denied to the Uchiha these many years. You shall be the conqueror of all the world.” Father’s voice is as rough as a saw on stone. “One day you shall be Emperor.”
Father is staring at me with dark green eyes. I guess I should say something, so he won’t be angry, but I don’t know what.
Just then there’s a sound behind us. Father turns. “What are you doing here, slaveboy?”
It’s Naruto. My slave. My first slave, Father says, given to me on the day of my birth. And his birthday, too, which makes him the same age as me. Naruto lowers his head, so I can’t see his face, only his bright red hair and the big twisted cross slaveseal on his forehead. “I… I’m sorry, Master Madara.”
Naruto is smart. He knows Father’s angry, too. But that doesn’t stop Father from slapping him, so hard the boy stumbles and falls to the stone floor. Naruto cries in pain. Father picks up Naruto by his hair. “Why are you here?” he asks again.
“I… I was following you…” Naruto gasps. “Master Itachi… he said you were gonna take him somewhere special…”
“I see. And you wanted to go, too. You wanted to be like Itachi. Is that right?” Father slaps Naruto again, this time into the far wall. “It’s past time you learned, Naruto. You’re a slave. We are your masters. We are the Uchiha! And you will never be like us. Come to this place again, boy, and I’ll break every bone in your body before I feed you to the ravens.” Father’s gaze turns on me. I’m standing in the corner, frightened and feeling bad. “Take care he learns his lesson. We’re finished for the day.” Then he turns and walks up the winding stairs, back into the gray stone halls of Uchiha Castle.
I walk over to Naruto. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I tell him.
Naruto stands up, rubbing his bruised cheeks. His eyes are wet but he’s not crying. “I know.”
“It’s just a stinky old cloth, anyway.”
My slaveboy stares at the wall where the huge cloth hangs. “No. It’s the tapestry of the Uchiha clan. It’s your history, Master. It’s why I’m a slave… and you’re not.”
I think about that. But Naruto is too smart for me. “Whatever,” I shrug, laughing. “Let’s get out of here. I’m hungry and the cooks can make us rice cakes!”
******
I’m not an idiot. Not like everybody says. It’s just sometimes I’m dense and I don’t notice stuff.
But even I can’t miss it when Sakura comes out of the birthing room with a pale face, white and still as ice. And that’s when I know my baby brother is dead.
Haku, Mother named him, after the great Uchiha Shogun. But Uchiha Haku is stillborn, he’s born too early and never takes his first breath. “It was not his time,” Sakura says to us. “Haku has returned to the mountains beyond the clouds.”
Father is in an rage.
“It’s that slavewoman, damn her!” he shouts. “I should have slit Kushina’s throat when I had the chance.”
“Kushina is the best midwife in all Sawara,” Sakura says. “It was not her fault. Father, I beg you—”
“I shall feed her to the ravens, as payment for my dead son. Perhaps I will give them Kushina’s son as well.”
Naruto is Kushina’s son. I’m six, old enough to understand that, and that my father is going to kill him for no good reason. Naruto is my slave, Father says, but he’s also my best friend. We go everywhere and do everything together. I start to cry.
Sakura is crying too. Sakura is twelve, twice as old as me, but she’s already a woman. I know that by the way Father and Mother look at her and listen when she speaks. She speaks well enough that Father decides to spare Naruto’s life. But for Kushina he won’t change his mind. Kushina must die.
She will be sacrificed on the day of Haku’s funeral. Mother is still too sick to get out of bed, so Sakura is the one who works through the night to prepare the ceremonial offerings, which no slave is fit to do. I watch her as she wraps the rice cakes with one hand, fingering back her long silver hair with the other. I think she looks like the moon, pale and beautiful and so far away.
Kushina looks like a mad dog, when the guards drag her from the dungeon and stake her to the temple ground in front of Uchiha Castle. It’s cold there, right by the sea with the dawn wind blowing in my face, and I don’t like it. I like it even less when Kushina starts to scream. She is a fierce woman, with red hair and even redder lips. Sakura tells me that Kushina used to be a high blood lady, before I was born. A matriarch of the Kaguya clan, with her own country and her own slaves. But my father came with his great army and destroyed the Kaguya clan and Kushina became a slave.
Naruto, when he was born, became a slave too.
Kaguya Kushina is screaming for her son. Naruto isn’t there. I think Sakura ordered the servants to keep him away so that he wouldn’t have to see.
I don’t want to see, either. I want to look away, but Father won’t let me. He is hard and cruel and he wants me to be like him. Like a Warlord, like an Emperor.
I hate him. If this is my birthright, then I don’t want to be Emperor at all.
Kushina is stripped naked and the guards pour honey over her. The ravens are already circling above the waves of Fire Fan Bay, and now they come down in a swarm. They cover her body in black wings. They start to eat.
It takes far longer than I expected.
Afterwards the Zen monks come and burn my dead baby brother on a pyre. The smell is horrible. Then the fat monk Maito Gai says the funeral words. I try to look at him and not look at the white bones of Kushina which are still scattered on the rocks:
Fleeting alas are moments,
subject to rise and fall.
Having begun, they cease;
their subsiding is bliss.
My father comes forward, my sister, leading me by the hand. On the rocky bluffs of Uchiha Castle we grab fistfuls of ashes and fling them outwards over the dark water, into the Endless Sea.
******
Our family is never the same after Haku’s death. The doctors tell my mother that she can never have a child again. She doesn’t talk about it, but I can see that she is very sad. Her hair goes pale gray and she doesn’t sing to me anymore.
My father becomes angrier. “You are my only heir,” he says, “you will always be my only heir.”
I know this means that I disappoint him. I’m not clever, like him. The tutors teach me about history or battlefield tactics and my mind ices over. I’m no good with books.
I’m better with swords, though I don’t like them, either. With my strength and height I do okay in sparring matches. But not up to the standards of the great Warlord Uchiha Madara, my father, who slew five men in single combat when he was as old as me.
“You are my heir,” he says to me again, “because I cannot prove that you are not mine. You look like me, sure enough. Right down to the lines on my face. But you have your mother’s soft heart, her woman’s weakness. Itachi. You have not the killer instinct of a man.”
It’s true. I like to play pranks, to steal rice cakes and hide Sakura’s makeup in the castle statues so that she’ll shout at me. I like to make people laugh. I can fight okay, but I can’t kill. Blood makes me sick, even the blood of the chickens and pigs that only the outcast slaves are allowed to touch. The blood of men is too much for me. I wonder if this is why Father has never taken me on any of his wars.
“It doesn’t matter,” Naruto tells me. “One day you’ll be Warlord, Master Itachi. Then you can do whatever you want.”
I’ll only be Warlord if my father is dead. I’m not as smart as Naruto, but this I understand.
“And you can do what you want, too,” I say. “I’ll free you. You won’t be my slave.”
Naruto doesn’t look at me when I tell him things like that. He lowers his eyes and I can only see the tangle of scruffy red hair which curls all over his face. So unlike my straight silver hair. So like his mother’s.
Kushina’s execution changes Naruto, too. He never laughed much before, but now he barely laughs at all, try as I might to amuse him. With me, he still speaks his mind, but around everyone else he’s so careful, even Sakura. He acts like a perfect slave. I think he’s scared of being killed.
He’s scared of Father.
One day Naruto tries to run away.
He doesn’t tell me. He steals a horse from the stable and tries to ride off along the Sohkaido Road, the main road between Sawara and Yayoi, the desert city at the other end of the Blood Country. In the desert there’s freedom. But Naruto doesn’t get far before he’s caught. He’s only nine, and the slaveseal on his forehead gives him right away.
Naruto is brought back to the castle in chains. He’s angry, struggling, but when Father appears all of Naruto’s strength goes away. We all know the punishment for slaves that try to escape. I plead for Naruto’s life, but Father doesn’t listen. Father takes Naruto by the chains and drags him down into the dungeons.
I don’t see him again for weeks. It’s an unexpected sight: I see Naruto walking down the steps from my father’s bed chambers. I expect to see him covered in bloody bruises, but it’s not so. His bony frame is thinner than usual, his hair even more tangled, but he’s not injured.
Only he’s crying. The first time I’ve ever seen him cry.
“Naruto! What did he do you do?” I ask.
My best friend, my slave, only shakes his head. He whispers. “One day, Master Itachi, you’ll be Warlord.”
******
Every night, as long as Father is in Uchiha Castle, Naruto goes up to Father’s room and doesn’t come down until it’s very late. I don’t know why and he never tells me. My father doesn’t hit him, but sometimes I see bleeding down his legs.
Sakura knows, but she won’t tell me either.
One winter Sakura takes us both on a trip to the lakes of Caiaden up north, where it’s warmer. Father is away in the Wood Country on a campaign against the Senju clan, our enemies. He’s away more and more now because the war is going badly. Me and Naruto are both thirteen, and Sakura is a woman grown. Everyone says that she is very beautiful. My silver swan, our mother calls her. And sometimes, when Mother thinks I don’t hear, she says, fly away, Sakura, fly away and never come back.
Sakura has been to Caiaden before. She takes long walks along the forested lakes with her friend Rin, of the high blood Misain clan. There’s a lot of sun and they like to twirl little paper umbrellas to keep their skin white. I like to steal the umbrellas so they can’t find them.
Naruto is not amused. “You’re so childish, Master Itachi.”
“Am not!” I say back.
“You act like you’re still six. You’re old enough to marry now. To lead a war.”
“I know that.”
“You’re a child because you don’t know what you want.”
“I want to be Warlord. I want to be the Emperor. The greatest Emperor!”
Naruto looks away so I can’t see the slaveseal on his face. We’re sitting by a long rainbow colored lake, dipping our toes into the cool water, making ripples on the surface. I don’t know what to say to him. We used to play hide and seek, samurai and pirate, we used to run all over the castle giggling. Even after his mother died. But Naruto doesn’t like to play games anymore. Sakura taught him to read, and all he does now is study books.
We look a lot alike. Not our hair, but we’re the same height, the same weight. On our last birthday, when Mother prepared a special jar of sake for me, Naruto got his own little sip of sake, too. We looked at each other then. I looked into his face, and it was like looking into a mirror. A mirror with a slaveseal.
“How can you be Emperor,” Naruto says, “if you’re an idiot?”
Suddenly I’m angry. “Don’t underestimate me! Everyone does—Father, Mother, even Sakura. Not you too. You’re supposed to be my friend!”
“I’m not your friend.” Naruto’s green eyes are bright as the overhanging leaves. “I’m your slave.”
“Not to me.”
“We were born on the same day, but Master Madara only held one of us in his hands. We eat at the same table, but I’m the one who fetches the meal and I’m the one who waits for you to finish before I can start. We sleep in the same room, but I’m the one who wakes up at dawn to light the candles and lay out your clothes. For what? For a bloodname you have and I don’t. Not for any other reason. Not because you’re smart, or strong. I’m smarter and stronger than you, Itachi. If we’d been switched in the cradle, if you were born in the dungeons instead of me, I would be the pride of the Uchiha, and you would be nothing. Mistress Sakura told me so.”
I hit him.
He doesn’t dare strike back. No slave would ever do that. Naruto just cups a hand to the side of his face, where the bruise is growing. Then he begins to laugh.
******
Later Sakura says that the two of us shouldn’t fight.
She tells me, “Naruto’s just upset. Rightly so. It’s all very hard on him.”
“He said that I should be his slave!”
We’re sitting in the cottage’s reception room, surrounded on three sides by screens of white and pink flower blossoms. Through an open sliding door I can see the lake shimmering outside. A breeze blows in the scent of clean water and fresh fallen leaves.
“Oh, little brother. He didn’t mean it. You must have noticed that Naruto is not like the other slaves. Father allows him to stay close to our family.”
I frown. “So what?”
“So there’s a reason. Do you understand, Itachi?”
I don’t.
Sakura sighs, before she smiles. “Perhaps it’s for the best.” Then she pokes me in the forehead.
“He’s coming!” a high squeaky voice calls. It’s Misain Rin, poking her head through the door. Peacock feathers are arranged in her dark brown hair like a rainbow halo. They catch the sunlight, and Rin glows.
But I’m wrong. Rin is just a shadow of the man who enters the cottage next.
This man is a torch.
He’s a huge man, almost seven feet tall, twice my height. His skin is bronzed and his large eyes are burning gold. As golden as his thick hair drawn back in a braid. He’s dressed in a brown tunic and pants, like a low born hunter, but I know that he’s not. I know this is a man of great power.
I’ve never seen anyone like him.
Sakura stands up. She smooths her red robes and her flowing silver locks. “Itachi, I want you to meet someone very special to me. We met at Caiaden last year.”
The man’s voice is a deep wooden drum. “My name is Hagoromo,” he says.
The words don’t register on me. But then another sound comes from the stairs. “A name without a bloodname is no name at all.” It’s Naruto, stepping down into the room. “A slave name. I know you, m’lord. You are Otsutsuki Hagoromo. Senju Hagoromo.”
Hagoromo looks back at him with golden eyes. “Yes, boy. I am here to change the world.”
Next: THE SLAVE’S TALE: “Sins of Blood, Part Two”
- 9
- 10
- 11
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Birthright