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Birthright	By : sadfascist Category: Naruto > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 3579 -:- 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
- 19
- 20
BIRTHRIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY: “The Promise”
The storm ended as Naruto cradled Sasuke’s corpse.
First the rain stopped. It ceased in a single moment, as if the clouds above had been emptied of any water that remained. Then the wind died down, and the black clouds began to break apart. They floated away, dissolving into dazzling immensity. The sky was full of stars. Gleaming pinpricks stared down upon the world like innumerable tiny eyes. Naruto raised his face to the clear cold night, and saw the moon. It was perfectly round, larger than he had ever seen it. His bloodline power made the moon seem like a mirror, as if he stared into that white surface long enough, he would see the reflection of his own eyes back at him. All in Uchiha Castle was silent, except for the soft patter of waves lapping at the shore below.
The day came slowly.
A gray haze rose from the east, behind the castle ruins, washing out the stars inch by inch. The first light before daybreak, casting the world in formless shadows. Naruto knelt in the damp earth, Sasuke’s body stiff and icy in his arms. From the black marble dais, Naruto could see over the walls of the throne room to the rest of the battlefield. Heaps of corpses stretched from horizon to horizon, so jumbled together that even he could not tell which had been Blood soldiers, and which had been the Kiyome invaders from across the sea. Fire Fan Bay was calm, a sheet of overcast glass. The smoldering remnants of Sawara loomed over the water, wisps of smoke painted black against the gloomy sky.
Gray became blue, and then yellow, soft red. The sun was just visible through the holes in the castle walls, a sliver of brilliant light. Dawn streaked across the sky. The day was cloudless. Only the moon was left, and the ravens. The ravens wheeled above the waves of Fire Fan Bay, a swarm of dark wings. They flew past the pale moon and, squawking, dove down upon Uchiha Castle to feast upon the bodies of the dead. Naruto could count them all. There were six ravens to every corpse, one for each appendage, tearing at human flesh with their sharp beaks. A stench of meat reeked through the air, mixing with the ash, the scent of fresh-fallen rain. Thick clotted blood ran down into the wet spring grass.
There had been a poem about that, Naruto thought. What was it, how did it go?
Countries may fall,
But their rivers and mountains remain.
When spring comes to the ruined castle,
The grass is green again.
When Naruto looked up, Senju Hagoromo was walking toward him along the beach.
The Sage of Six Paths was more radiant than the sun.
It was like looking into the very heart of a golden flame. Naruto blinked, and could not hold his gaze for long. Chakra, he knew. This man had more of it than he could ever have imagined. The chakra oozed from the pores on his skin and flowed down his limbs like a blinding fog, it billowed behind him like the gilded folds of an imperial robe. When the man strode forward, shimmering light lingered upon the place where he had stood. Naruto could see the trail of golden footsteps, stretching back from the beach, across the water itself and then from the mouth of Fire Fan Bay.
Had Hagoromo walked all the way across the sea to Sawara? What kind of power must he have had, to do that?
There were others with the Sage, a thronging retinue. Naruto saw them very clearly. Sougon Sawar was there, sharp slitted eyes as black as the skin of his smirking face. Misain Rin was there, peacock feathers in her hair like a rainbow halo, smeared lipstick glistening red in the dawn. More he did not recognize, men and women in strange clothing, not robes but pants and shirts, not scale armor but suits of silver plate. Yet all of them wore the white headband of the Sage of Six Paths.
And when Senju Hagoromo entered the throne room of Uchiha Castle, he entered alone. The others stopped by the broken gates. Only a boy tried to follow, perhaps a few years younger than Naruto, but Hagoromo held up his hand, and the boy backed away with a frown. The boy was very powerful—Naruto could see it. Glowing chakra seemed to fill his body almost to bursting, and wherever he stepped, life grew around him from the earth, leaves and flowers and small wooden stalks. Hagoromo’s son, Senju Asura, born from the love of a princess across the sea. Sasuke had told him there was a son, but he had not said how different he was. Asura looked nothing like his father. Plain dark hair, beady dark eyes, stocky and thick, the ugly face of a dog.
No, Naruto thought.
His father looks like me.
The man who walked toward him was a bronzed giant. His robes were of the purest white cotton, and in his right hand he carried a long prayer staff, gold rings clinking softly as he lifted it. Six rings, like the six red magatama beads he wore around his neck on a chain of white silk. The man’s braided hair was lustrous yellow, his face pale and smooth. He stepped onto the dais, towering over the kneeling Naruto like a burning colossus.
Thirteen years ago, Senju Hagoromo’s eyes had been gouged out in this very room. Now he had returned, and his eyes were a fathomless purple, concentric ripples that poured away into the blinding golden light at their center.
The Rinnegan.
The eyes of a god.
“My master is dead,” Naruto told him. “Sasuke is dead.”
The man called the Sage of Six Paths spoke, and his voice echoed across the ruins of Uchiha Castle.
“Yes. I returned from across the sea to bring Kindness At All Cost. Yet the wake of my coming has left only death. Uchiha Sasuke was like a son to me. As for the Warlord of Blood, the man who named himself Uchiha Itachi… no matter his crimes, he shall always be my precious student. May their tormented souls rest in peace.” The Sage of Six Paths stared down at Naruto. “And you, my child. You have been born again.”
“My eyes,” Naruto said. “This power.”
“It is my power in you. My blood. Yet you have awakened it, you have made it yours. A sight beyond sight, a power to see through the illusion of the world to the hidden truth. Born in the pain of infinite feeling, cursed until the end of time by the wheel of fate itself. The Mirror Wheel Eye of the people of Indra. The Sharingan. This is your inheritance and your legacy, Naruto without a bloodname. This is your birthright.”
“I understand.” Naruto rose to his feet, gripping Sasuke’s body in his arms. “Just one last thing. A name without a bloodname is a slave name… but I am a slave no longer. And I have found a bloodname to call my own. It was passed on to me by Uchiha Sasuke, the last of his clan, to continue it… I am Uchiha Naruto.”
“Uchiha Naruto.” The Sage of Six Paths stared at him with swirling purple eyes. “I will remember. Go then, my child. Go, and be free.”
Naruto carried Sasuke’s corpse from the silent battlefield.
The sky was a startling blue, marred only by the smoke. Dawn light filtered in slats from the horizon. The landscape was bleak and desolate. Naruto held Sasuke close against his chest, trudging through the spoils of war. The spoils were everywhere, dead bodies and ravens and pieces of broken bone and trampled muddy grass. In the distance, beyond the Haunted City, the capital of the Blood Country was no more. Sawara was a city of paper and wood, and the fire in the night had razed it all. The imperial palace was a husk of blackened bricks. Next to it Shinjukame Temple toppled over sideways, like a dead snake. Everything else had been completely leveled. The high city, the low city, Madara Square and Sawara Bridge and the Street of Beggars. Even the Outcast Districts, even the Godswood and the Floating World almshouse. They were all gone.
Only the Haven River was left. Bright gleaming water gushed into Fire Fan Bay, just as it always had. The river seemed to be cleansing itself. A steady current pushed southward, carrying whatever wreckage remained in the bay out to the Endless Sea. In a few days there would be no way to tell that a battle had ever been waged there. The same shall happen to the city, Naruto thought. Sawara had been razed by fire before. Yet it had always been rebuilt, in time, even more glorious than it was. The world changes slowly, if it ever does.
No—
What had changed were themselves.
Humans beings had changed. The Sage had not just brought religion to the shores of the Blood Country; he had brought magic. He had brought bloodlines. You can use spirit energy to create any kind of energy. The Sage and his ninja that he had trained, they held a power within their bodies that was nothing short of godlike. They had used that power to destroy slavery. They had used it to conquer in the name of peace. But what came next? What would these ninja do now, how would they remake society in their own image?
Where would it end?
The Age of the Ninja had just begun.
Naruto felt suddenly very tired. He looked down at Sasuke, resting gently against his chest. Sasuke’s face was turned upward, toward the sky; with his eyes closed the other boy almost looked like he was asleep. He was so pale, white skin and white hair. Only the slaveseal on his forehead had any color. The twisted black cross stared at Naruto accusingly.
It was all my fault. Sasuke had sacrificed himself to save Naruto’s life. Naruto had not wanted it to happen like that. He would have given everything to take it back, but he did not have the power. His eyes had the power to engulf the world in flames, but they could not resurrect the dead. The power to destroy, but not to heal. Even when that was all he wished for.
In another life he would have laughed at the irony. He would have stamped his feet and raised his fists to the heavens and cursed fate. What did it mean, this existence? Why had he deserved to suffer so much? What had he done to anger the gods, that they would torment him so, and who gave them the right?
But life was not so simple. Naruto felt the truth of it come down upon him like a great weight. It was as if he were seeing his own life anew, as if he were waking from a dream of mist. Life was a story, he thought. It was a narrative that people told themselves. And it was the moments, the memories, which made up that story, which gave that story meaning. There were so many memories. The stinging light as strong arms picked him up out of a pile of corpses. Hunting foxes in the Wood Country. Waking up in the dungeons after disobeying his master. Training with a sword in the gardens of Birthright Keep. The thrill of battle, the heat of the blood on his face as he killed an enemy samurai for the first time.
And two memories most of all.
The first one was always the same. It was the first time they had sex, that night under the full moon, in the soft dewy grass in the clearing in the woods. Sasuke had climbed up a tree, excited by the beauty of the night, by the moon. He had tried to fly and Naruto had caught him in his arms. Afterwards they had laid together, feeling the beating of each other’s hearts. Naruto clutched at Sasuke with a desperate strength. “I love you,” he whispered. That moment, that pure, innocent moment, was the happiest memory that Naruto ever had. It was the moment that made his life worth living.
And then the other memory, the worst one. It had happened only hours before, but Naruto knew it would haunt his dreams every night until he died. The fight with Itachi, his master driving a sword of deadly bone toward his chest. Sasuke jumping in from nowhere, taking the fatal blow. Naruto screaming. And then cradling Sasuke’s body in his arms, the blood gushing out of his lover’s heart, the light going out of his fading eyes…
And the words. The final words, that he would never forget.
“Naruto… listen… my bloodname… the Uchiha clan. I’m the last… but I want… a new beginning… do ya promise?”
“I promise.”
“Don’t leave me… Naruto…”
But in the end it had not been Naruto who left.
He never would.
He saw that, now. Naruto saw himself as he was truly was. What had Sasuke called him? A good little slave. That scar on ya’ forehead ain’t a brand of evil, for you… it’s a brand of kindness. Sasuke had never understood that. He had never grasped the reason why Naruto would be loyal to his master.
Master Itachi had never understood it, either. Not truly. Do you love me? he had asked, not expecting any other answer than no. Slaves should not love their masters. But Naruto was not like other slaves, he was not like the boy his master had once been. So who was he? Was he just a tool, a perfect weapon? Perhaps it had seemed for a fantastical moment that he could be something more. A person, a free person, with his own choices, his own dreams. The dream of making a new life for himself, with—with the boy he loved…
But that moment had passed away long ago. There was only the dream of his master which remained.
Both of his masters.
He was not a slave any longer. There was no one to order him around. And yet he could not run from his past. He was Naruto. His master had given him that name; it was who he was, it defined his existence. He could no more abandon it than he could his own life.
But Sasuke had given him another name, as well. Another dream. Both of them were his now.
They were both his birthright.
I will, Sasuke. I’ll make a new beginning for the Uchiha clan, in your name. And in the name of Master Itachi. I shall make the world kneel before us.
That was the promise.
A faint sound shook Naruto from his reverie. He looked up; a crowd of Kiyome soldiers was ahead of him, by the eastern bank of the Haven River. They were singing. At first Naruto could not quite make it out, but then a breeze picked up from the north, carrying the soldiers’ voices toward him. The rhythm of the chant was much like the ancient Zen hymn, the one about fleeting bliss, but the words were different:
There is not even a moment of calmness
In the heart of this passing life
The wind is already blowing
Through the hollow of our bones.
Oh, God, we yearn for Kindness—
Kindness at all cost.
It was the funeral prayer of the Sage of Six Paths.
The soldiers were gathered in a circle, their backs turned to him. As he walked closer Naruto saw that they were using shovels to bury their dead in earthen graves. A southern custom, not like the pyres common in the north. But it did not matter. The feeling behind the act was the same, they honored their dead as they wished to be honored. Dawn light gleamed upon rows of carved wooden tombstones.
They stopped when they saw him. Naruto walked straight through their ranks, and the Kiyome soldiers moved aside to let him through, parted as if by an elemental force. They were all looking at his face, at Sasuke’s body in his arms. For a time nobody said anything. The wind blew softly over the river, rippling the sunlit water.
At last someone dared to speak. “Kindness at all cost,” a solider whispered, a turbaned man with a red tattoo on his face.
And then suddenly it was if everybody had taken up the cry at the same time, all at once, spontaneously, instinctively—as if for one impossible moment all that had happened in their lives, all the pain and the suffering and the joy and everything, everything, had been captured in those four words, in that desperate funeral prayer. The song of their combined voices filled the sky like rolling thunder. Only Naruto walked on in silence, only he stared straight ahead. “Oh, God, we yearn for Kindness at all cost. Kindness at all cost. Kindness at all cost. Kindness at all cost—”
“Kindness… at… all… cost!”
The bloody eyes of the Sharingan burned in the dawn.
END
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Birthright