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Love Me When I'm Gone	By : KittenCobra Category: Naruto > Het - Male/Female Views: 1971 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto (the manga or anime) or any of the characters included within it. I only own the original characters in this story including the main character Utako Mizuke. I do not make any form of profit off of this story.

Chapter List
- 53
- 54
- 55
54. Good News
Gaara stayed at my bedside all day, all night, and into the next day. I haven’t been eating actual food for a long time, so it was difficult to find a way to convince Gaara to truly eat and take care of himself while he was there for me. Finally, after a ton of complaining on my part, he was willing to send Kankuro to go get ramen from the shop Naruto recommended all those months ago. I was able to sip small amounts of the broth with Tsunade’s permission, and Gaara was willing to eat the rest. He wasn’t willing to talk about it but I know he’s only been eating enough to stay alive. His stress had killed his appetite long ago. He also hasn’t been sleeping much more than he did when Shukaku was still within him.
Then in the early afternoon, Gaara was forced to leave and return to his office to deal with something that couldn’t be put off any longer. I felt bad because the separation didn’t bring me pain the way it did for him. To him, I have finally returned after an endless nightmare. To me, I am just waking up from a short and somewhat whimsical dream. He is at least comforted that his fears about me being trapped somewhere in the dark or never coming back were unnecessary.
After he is gone, Tsunade sent everyone else out by force. Temari threatened to kill her a couple of times, but I told her I honestly needed time to hear the full account of my injuries on my own. She was finally willing to agree and now I lay here waiting for Tsunade to let me out of this infernal machine. She releases an endless amount of levers and eventually the entire shell pops open. I am surprised to find that many of the tubes going into the machine are actually truly implanted into me. She explains as she removes them, that I was undergoing serious IV therapy to keep my tissues healthy despite the coma.
She helps me to sit up and hands me a hospital gown to slip on. I am shocked also by how much larger my belly is now. I’m not even sure I could hide this if I had too.
Good God! This baby must be 15 pounds! Is that what’s going to kill me?
Suddenly the door in the back of the room opens. I react in panic, slamming my illusion into place quickly in every mind I could locate. My head screams in pain and I grasp it in my hands.
“Release the illusion Mizuke!!” Tsunade shouts, grabbing my hand. “You are safe!”
“But…!” I scream, gasping as the pain begins to settle into a steady burn.
“They know your secret! Drop it!” she orders again.
I drop the illusion – collapsing immediately back against the table. I moan against the pain and can feel tears leak from the corners of my eyes. This is going to be a big problem…
“You should have warned her we were coming!” It’s Michiko’s voice that I hear scolding Tsunade like a child. I am so happy to hear her voice. My guardian. She wouldn’t let anyone come with her that wasn’t safe for the baby. She runs over to me and strokes her hands gently against my face, wiping away my tears.
Michiko helps me to sit up again, and I turn to see the rest of the room. To my surprise, there is an entire small group of people who came in with her. How many people know my secret now?! I scan the faces and see Tsunade, Kakashi, Sakura and… Shikamaru?!
“What the hell are you doing here?!” I screech at him, vainly covering my ridiculous belly with the bed sheet.
“Oh calm down,” he whines with a shrug. “It’s not like it was that hard to figure out. Based on how Temari said you were acting, and then them stuffing you in this big tin can…”
“Shikamaru approached me just after you fell into a coma and I had you put into the machine,” Tsunade explains. She narrows her eyes at him in frustration. “He simply walked up and asked when I was planning to tell the Kazekage that his dead wife was pregnant.”
“Dead?” I choke. “What do you mean dead?!”
“Perhaps we should discuss easier matters first,” Kakashi suggests. He leans casually against the wall with one of his romance novels in front of him, pretending to read it. His full attention is truly on me, with concern lacing his thoughts.
“No!” I contradict him and put forth my best sarcastic tone. “I’m obviously not dead now. Am I some kind of a zombie or something?”
“Of course not,” Tsunade chides me. “But your condition was very serious. Your body was obviously still alive… but for a significant period of time you were medically brain dead.”
The bottom drops out of my stomach. Brain dead? “What does that mean?” I ask through a now shaky voice.
“It means that according to our scans, you had no brain activity at all,” she explains. “We hooked you into the machines as quickly as possible. With no brain activity, your heart continued to beat on its own – it doesn’t really need your brain. This machine was telling your body to breathe and conduct other necessary functions. Normally we wouldn’t keep someone who is brain dead connected to machines like this, but we had to figure out what to do about the pregnancy. We wanted to use the safety of your body to help it grow for as long as possible. To be truthful… I’m not even sure it can be removed unless you’re alive to deliver, not without extreme measures.”
“Why wouldn’t you normally keep someone connected?” I ask in a hoarse whisper.
“Because they don’t normally come back,” Kakashi’s says solemnly as he walks over to sit down on the edge of the chair Gaara had been using earlier. He takes my hand gently in his. Michiko hovers just over his shoulder. It’s odd – like watching parents I never had try to console me. “You should know that we told Gaara you were simply in a coma so we had time to come up with a plan for moving your body and trying to save the… pregnancy. That’s around the time Shikamaru confronted Tsunade. In reality, you were not in a coma until later. You had no brain activity at all. We truly believed you were gone.”
I watch a single tear roll down Michiko’s face. Kakashi’s face is relieved but sympathetic.
“When did I…” I struggle to find the right words, “When did my brain activity come back?”
“About a week ago,” Michiko shouts in before anyone else can answer. Her tears are growing thicker. “They were going to try to move you, to see if Gaara would let you be moved… and all of a sudden alarms started going off on the machines. It was… like you knew somehow. I didn’t want them to move you after that. It felt too much like a sign that you should stay.”
“Do you… remember anything from when you were sleeping?” Sakura hedges from the background in the room. She is terribly curious about what it must have been like, but wants to be sensitive to my fears. “Don’t worry. I breathed for you until a breathing machine was available. I don’t think it harmed the… baby.” I am awed by her simple statement about saving my life, but her tone distracts me.
“Why does everyone keep hesitating when referring to my baby?” I ask, suddenly afraid. Everyone diverts their thoughts immediately to everything from the weather to inanimate objects in the room. What the hell?
“Do you remember anything?” Sakura attempts to redirect me.
If something is wrong with my baby… I don’t think I can bear it... I decide to follow along with her diversion. “I don’t know how much of what I remember was real, and how much was just a dream,” I hedge.
“Then you do remember something?” Shikamaru asks, his own curiosity growing.
“Well… yes,” I try to find a way to explain the strange sensations and feelings. I describe to everyone in as much detail as I can what I remember about panicking in the dark, being pulled into the light, and the interactions with my son. “I know it must sound crazy. But it was like… he found me somehow and helped me… come back. He was actually the one that alerted me to Gaara’s rage just before I woke up.”
“That makes sense,” Michiko mumbles. “The babe has always been able to feel his father’s presence… He gave you so much grief before.”
“He doesn’t mean to!” I rush to defend the little life inside me. He showed me such love in my dreams. “He just… he gets frightened when Gaara is not with us. I wish I knew why…”
“The kid must definitely have inherited some of your mental talent then,” Shikamaru mumbles. He is crouching on his feet down by the floor with his hands in a strange shape in front of him. It’s the posture he uses when analyzing a problem or puzzle.
“Why do you say that?” I ask. “It could just be because he’s inside me right? We’re… connected either way.”
“Your descriptions from your memory would argue otherwise,” he counters. “and the timing of events is too accurate to be coincidence. You only registered brain activity AFTER we had been discussing moving you. We were in this room. I would bet that somehow the child detected our intentions and sought you out. You described him pulling you out of the dark right?”
“Yes. I don’t really know where I was before that… if anywhere,” I admit.
“Did the kid ever try to… motivate you to stay around Gaara?” Shikamaru asks, turning the puzzle over and over in his mind. I can see where he is going with this… and it makes sense.
“Oh my God, you’re right.” I mumble. “Over the last several months he got pretty bad. He’d kick me if Gaara left. It was making it impossible to sleep. He would switch wildly back and forth between being frightened and angry. It was similar in my dream – the switching I mean. Except… he was switching between being cuddly and loving, to distant and… aggravated, I guess.”
“Right,” he agrees. “If the child is motivated to stay with his father… finding your consciousness and pulling you into awareness could have been an attempt to get you to make the scary people stop talking about taking you away. All of which would indicate that he can perceive thought independently from you. Then… later when Gaara was about to lose it… he obviously acted again to tell you there was a problem.”
“That is amazing!” Sakura crows. “It explains so much!!”
“Based on what you’ve told us so far,” Shikamaru continues, looking up into my eyes with a smirk on his face, “there is also an easy explanation to what you perceive as the kid’s mood swings.”
“Yes, in this case I would agree Shikamaru,” Tsunade adds, pausing to put her hands on her hips with a wide grin. “It’s quite amazing. This eases my worry about the pregnancy’s progress considerably. Mizuke, I would like to do a physical exam. May I touch your belly?”
“What?” I mumble, confused. Shikamaru has halted his thoughts practically mid-sentence, and my mind hurts to do anything more than a surface scan. “Have you not been able to before?”
“No, with the machinery in the way by necessity, we haven’t been able to check them until you awoke,” she explains, pressing and prodding all over my belly’s surface. “I was beginning to think we’d never be able to.”
My mind suddenly freezes. Them… them? I can’t breathe…
“Place your hand here,” she orders gently, moving my hand for me. There is a solid round lump directly below my hand. “Right there. Do you feel that? That’s his head.” I can feel a smile break across my face at the discovery. “Now… give me your other hand. Place it here. Do you feel that?” My other hand is a significant distance away and down low. There is another lump here, but it feels slightly… squishier.
“That’s his behind,” she continues. She takes a deep steadying breath. “Now… do you see where MY hand is?” Her hand is on the complete opposite side of my massive stomach. “This is another head.”
“Oh my God!” I scream in sudden understanding. “Are you saying I’m carrying twins?!”
“So it would seem…” Kakashi chuckles.
The room erupts in a quiet cheer. Sakura hugs Michiko, who squeezes Kakashi’s shoulder gently. Shikamaru rubs the back of his head with a lazy smile.
“Told you,” Shikamaru says, “You people worry too much.”
I think back to my time in the meadow and the jarring transitions – what I interpreted as mood swings before – make so much more sense! My baby wasn’t flipping wildly between two different… personalities. There WERE two different personalities. I was only detecting one at a time. Suddenly my heart feels so full I think it might burst. I let my tears fall freely. I am not going to give Gaara just one child with my sacrifice, but two!
“Why were you all so worried?” I ask, suddenly concerned.
“Well,” Tsunade begins to explain, “without being able to do an exam, we tried using the machine to check on them. However, just like before… the sand has caused constant interference. Your belly may as well have been a black hole. We had no way of knowing if you were growing so large because you were carrying twins… or if you were growing because something was wrong… or if the baby was just too big. Either of those options would have been serious problems.”
“Well,” I say, still giddy from the news. “I don’t even know what to say. This is so great!!”
“Not to be a downer,” Shikamaru cuts in in a more solemn tone, “but I don’t see how your situation has improved much. Has anyone figured out how to get them out? Tsunade’s explained the situation to me, and honestly… I’ve got nothing. I can’t find a solution that works.”
“The same option that’s always been viable,” I say sternly. “I carry them until they decide to be born. I hide them to give them every possible chance and… when the time comes. I deliver them. I die.”
I wrap my arms around my stomach, radiating love to the little lives within me. I can still feel mild fear and anger from them – after all Gaara is gone. But somehow… the love overrules everything else for now. Perhaps the angry one is beginning to see me as important too. I can only hope. It is obvious that the other child, the one who hummed to me for so long, adores me. The thought brings more tears to my eyes – happy tears.
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Love Me When I'm Gone

54. Good News