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The Canalized River	By : susanna Category: Naruto > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 944 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
Spoon:
Thanks again! I begin to fear that I overdid... In the original,
Naruto's senseis are quite nice and understanding after all. But,
well, that's my story.

Lexjamandme:
Thanks for your review! I only got it this morning so that I don't
have time to answer it with this chapter.

Chapter
Nine: Only Some Old Legends

Leaving
Suigetsu and Juugo to set up their camp, Sasuke had taken Karin with
him to a nearby hill to look whether someone was near.

Ten
days ago he would have avoided at all costs to be alone with her, but
now he did not mind any longer. She had changed, he thought. She had
become more silent, less impulsive, more sensitive, less annoying,
and sometimes even agreeable. She had ceased to attempt to seduce him
whenever she saw an opportunity, or to molest him, as he preferred to
call it.

He
had always hated it, not only with Karin, but also with Sakura or
Ino. He had always wondered why they would continue to try and touch
and embrace him, though he never responded to it, or encouraged them
in any other way. Sakura had never got that he was not interested in
her as a girlfriend and that he did not enjoy her embraces, Ino had
never got it, and Karin had not got it even though he had told her
explicitly and repeatedly to leave him alone.

Completely
insensitive, all of them, but they would claim that he was the one
without any social or emotional intelligence. (He never remembered
the correct term.)

„You
just have to allow yourself to be loved“, they would say. „You
just have to open up to other people and overcome your fear of
intimacy.“

Now
at least Karin had understood... Sometimes he thought that he saw
glimpses of vulnerability in her, a vulnerability that she normally
kept hidden below the surface of a tough woman who knows what and
whom she wants. In such moments he thought he might like her. He had
even got the impression that Suigetsu had become more polite to her
than he had been before.

While
he had been thinking, Karin had performed her jutsu that pushed her
sense for chakra, much above the average even without the jutsu, to
its highest level. He looked at her intently, waiting for her to
announce what she had sensed. But when she turned to him, she did not
even have to speak.

„Nothing“,
he said.

„Indeed,
nothing“, she answered, sounding irritated. „Disappointed?“

„A
bit.“

He
was not sure when and how he had betrayed his feelings. He knew what
he was supposed to feel: Relief that they were not pursued any more,
and he was of course relieved, but there was something else as well.
He had to come to rely on Naruto's unshakable friendship. He had to
come to rely on the fact that Naruto would not stop pursuing him, no
matter what he did. Maybe he should not have punched his shoulder
with the chidori. Maybe even with Naruto there was a point beyond
which he should not go. Maybe when he kept hurting him and pushing
him away, one day Naruto would give up on him.

He
was a nuisance anyway, he tried to convince himself. And yet he could
not avoid stiffening and freezing at the thought of losing him
completely. He felt his heart ache, as if something was torn out of
it: A source of warmth that he had always kept there, tiny as it
were. A source of warmth that had had helped him to survive the years
at Orochimaru's place, that had helped him to live there and remain
human and not become all cynical. Without it he felt that he would
really become the fighting-machine he pretended he was. Without it,
after he had killed Itachi, there would really be nothing left for
him than to die himself.

„No
trace of your brother“, Karin continued.

He
had misunderstood her. But Itachi was not what was really on his mind
now. He knew where to find him.

„What
about Konoha?“ he asked.

„Nothing
either. She smiled at him knowingly. So now he had really managed to
betray himself.

„Are
you sure?“ he asked, not caring whether he gave himself away
even more.

„Yes. Your friend's chakra is very strong and rather peculiar,
and as if this was not enough, there is another kind of chakra hidden
below it. Most of the time it is covered by his own chakra, but
sometimes it leaks out.“

„That
would be the chakra of the demon fox.“

„The
demon fox?“

„The
nine-tail. It lives inside Naruto, and he can use his chakra. I
understood about it only a few months ago.“

They
had descended from the hill now and were heading towards their camp.

„I
have always thought that it was only a legend. My grandmother used to
tell me stories about it when I was a child.“

„In
Konoha it is not legend, but history. It assisted at the foundation
of the village. Nowadays, however, the story is kept secret.“

He
had only learnt about it when he had followed Itachi's directions and
gone to the secret hiding-place of the Uchiha clan and read about the
original purpose of the Sharingan.

They
had arrived at the camp and sat down with Juugo and Suigetsu.

„Nothing“,
he told the two of them. „No traces of Itachi, no traces of
Konoha.“

„So
they have given up on you“, Suigetsu said. Sasuke hated how he
seemed to be able to see through him.

Karin
was in thoughts.

„His
friend's a jinchuuriki, you know?“, she informed the other two.

„What's
that?“ Suitgetsu asked.

„The
nine-tailed demon fox is living inside him“, Sasuke explained.

„He
is a being from old legends“, Karin explained further. „My
grandmother told me about it, and I still cannot believe that her
stories might be true. She knew a lot of them, and those about the
demon fox all ran along the same lines: Some person, or some town or
village would make a deal with the demon, so that it would support
them with its superhuman strength, either in battle or in some great
task that was beyond their own capacity: building a bridge from one
mountain top to the next one to impress their neighbours, raising a
castle in one night because their crazy prince demanded it, or making
a ship go through a tornado because they were too proud and too
impatient to wait for the storm to calm down. The demon would help,
but it would also ask a price: A human soul. Sometimes a grown up,
normally the leader who was the driving force behind the crazy
endeavour, would offer to sacrifice himself, but in other stories
they promised a newborn infant. In most stories they chose a child no
one much cared about because it was an orphan or because its mother
or even both parents only saw it as a burden, be it because it was
born out of wedlock, or because they were simply too poor or too
uncaring to want to feed another hungry mouth.

„So
the person who had sacrificed himself or who had been sacrificed
would act as a medium for the demon, channeling its enormous power
and thus aiding his town, but when the task was done, the demon would
inevitably claim its price: The jinchuuriki's soul.“

„So
what would that mean?“ Sasuke asked.

He
felt uncomfortable: For Karin these were stories she loved to listen
to without really believing in them, but for him the kyuubi was real,
a part of his village's history, a part of his clan's history and,
because of Naruto, a part of his personal history. He tried to fit
what he knew about Naruto into Karin's story, but having no memories
of the kyuubi's attack on Konoha when he was a few months old, and
never having been told anything about it because of the taboo imposed
on that story by the Sandaime, he knew too little about it to make
any sense.

„Death,
Madness, eternal damnation“, Karin answered to his question.
„My grandmother never went into details.“

„Worried
about your friend?“ Suigetsu said.

„Yes.“
This time Sasuke did not care to hide his feelings behind the words
„a bit“.

„He's
your age, isn't he?“ Karin asked. „Then there should
still be a lot of time left. In the stories the demon rarely claimed
its price before the jinchuuriki was in his thirties or even
forties.“

„But
what then? Is there a possible reversal?“

„Most
stories my grandmother told ended tragically. The jinchuuriki who had
offered himself as a grownup would have to die, or lose control over
the demon and become a ghost without a body. The jinchuuriki who had
been sacrificed as a child would go crazy and turn on his own
village. They were moral stories, and their moral was that you should
not make a pact with a demon to achieve what humans are not meant to
achieve...

„Yet
there were some stories where the villagers, or the jinchuuriki
himself would manage to outwit the demon. I particularly loved one
where the demon's task was to build a dyke that would run exactly on
the coastline and protect all the land. The demon did so, but when he
had finished, people pointed out to him that there was still land
outside the dyke. It was new land; sand that had been carried to the
shore by the sea and had already been settled by the first plants,
but the demon did not know that, so he admitted that he had got it
wrong and built another dyke. But the same happened with this new
dyke, so that he had to build a third one, and so forth, gaining more
and more land for the villagers and never realizing how they were
making a fool of him. The demon, though cunning, is not very
intelligent after all. In the end the jinchuuriki died from old age
when he was ninety, and the demon had to leave without its price.

„But
don't forget that these are only stories. There may be a true core to
some of them, but they are not meant as a manual on how to get rid of
demons. You'll have to work out yourself how you can help your
friend.“

Sasuke
had indeed been thinking about this, but when Karin mentioned it
explicitly, he shook off the thought.

„Itachi
comes first.“

But
when all this would be over... in his dreams, if he had been alive at
all after killing Itachi, there had been Naruto, waiting for him,
returning with him to Konoha. Now another dream appeared on the
horizon: Naruto was waiting for him, and he, Sasuke helped him to get
rid of the demon, showing him that he was his friend after all, that
he cared for him and was worth his perseverance.

Only
that Naruto seemed to have abandoned his pursuit. Why would the only
person whom he wanted not to give up on him turn away?
- 8
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The Canalized River