Naruto: The Unwoven Threads of Fate

Flashback

"So I owe you three questions." I idly start to flick some bubbles around. They're so much fun to mess with. "Ask away."

"Any questions that I want?" She asks me for clarification.

"Yep. You now have two left." I smirk at her as her face scrunches up in anger. "Just joking! You should have seen your face, it looked like someone stole your catnip."

"If you mention catnip again I will hurt you severely." She sends her best glare at me. I've seen better.

"Yeah yeah whatever. Just ask your questions already." I easily wave of the pitiful glare. Seriously, Iruka of all people has her beat. Iruka. The Academy teacher.

"I've found my interest peaked, you were originally a Konoha shinobi." She seriously starts setting up for her first question. It would be more serious if we weren't in a bubble bath. "One of the softest - if not the softest - of the shinobi villages out there."

"Do go on." I sassily encourage her. "Keep telling me things that I already know, you seem to have a talent for it."

She doesn't let my sass get to her.

"You abandoned it. Left it. Became a missing nin from arguably one of the best villages to be a shinobi." Her entire face has hardened. I can't read anything from her right now. "Why did you leave Konoha?"

"Now isn't that a complicated question." I stall for a brief moment. She's definitely picked a challenging question. Too bad for her I'm an asshole that will purposefully skirt around giving her a satisfactory answer. "I left Konoha for one reason. I was asked to by someone who I was unwilling to abandon."

"The Uchiha." She smirks in victory, breaking her moments long facial facade. "You left the softest shinobi village for the Uchiha. I knew it."

"If you already knew it then why did you waste a question on it?" Crafty kitty. I won't be making that mistake again.

"I felt like it." She idly shifts, rising up minutely out of the water and inadvertently showing a great deal of her chest, nothing truly… let's say interesting was revealed thanks to the abundance of bubbles in our shared bath but it is much more than she seems aware of.

Or is she trying to distract me, the person she thinks is a hormonal teenage boy, by using her body to knock me off my A game? I did call her hot plenty of times, she could be trying to take advantage of me. Crafty kitty indeed.

"Because you felt like it." I snort in amusement and don't react at all to her actions. "Careful Yugito, that sounds like something I would do. I might be rubbing off on you. Wow that was a bad choice of words. How about we just move to the next question?"

"Why Otogakure?" She doesn't hesitate to ask. "You and the Uchiha could have gone anywhere. Except for Suna since you two did play a major role in defeating them during the Invasion. Hell I would wager that even Iwa would welcome you both with open arms, Onoki would love to steal two of Konoha's promising shinobi. You both literally could have picked anywhere but you traded the softest village for the harshest."

"Why Oto indeed." Not like I can tell her the whole truth here but I can definitely put my own personal spin on it and still make it truthful. Just not completely truthful. "For some context you'll need to know one piece of information about me, more specifically a dream that I have. I wish to be considered as one of the strongest and most influential shinobi to ever walk this world. I wish to be counted among the best of the best, be placed at the pinnacle of shinobi. I want my name to be whispered by my friends with a sense of great respect and my enemies with unconditional fear. I want to stand among the numbers of those who bear the title S-rank shinobi. That, dear Yugito, is my longest life dream."

"You ask me why we picked Oto. We chose that village because we both knew that we would grow at an abnormally fast rate under the tutelage of Orochimaru. Look at me, I'm only thirteen yet I could hold my own against you. One of Kumo's top shinobi, a person who stands near the summit of her own village and has nearly perfect control over her bijuu. Don't you see how absurd that is? Otogakure is undoubtedly the harshest and most unforgiving village of all yet Sasuke and I have thrived while there. Just imagine how far I'll progress in the future."

"Oto is harsh. Oto is cruel. Oto is a place full of suffering and sadness and torture. We were tossed into hell and came out the other side covered in blood and leagues better than we were. But it has hardened us. Quite simply we couldn't have asked for a better village. The fact that Orochimaru considers me a child is only a bonus."

Despite the warm water we're lounging in a chilly silence falls between us both. She's contemplating my words, trying to rationalize how anyone could possibly want to go to Otogakure. The cold silence stretches on for an unreasonably long time.

"I don't understand it." Yugito has given up trying to rationalize my words, trying to figure out my personal motivation. "You went to achieve a dream? That seems… out of character."

"Believe it or not, either way it is true." I assure her but what she has picked up on is that there's more to it than just fulfilling a dream. "What is your final question."

"Have you died before?" She conversationally asks me.

Present

"Alvarcus how did she find out?" Orochimaru has a new emotion playing around in his eyes, one that no one associates with the crazy shinobi. He is the one who experiments on the living to satisfy his curiosity, he is the one who ruins live on the smallest of whims, he is the bringer of horror. But the tables have turned on Orochimaru because he's experiencing what all his victims have.

Fear.

True unadulterated terror. It's taken over his entire being. No longer is he impatiently waiting for me to share the part he wants to hear, now his mind is running on maximum. He's plotting and planning how to make sure that my secret doesn't spread farther.

"No, it is irrelevant for now." Orochimaru rises up from his desk and starts pacing back and forth before the map on his wall. "First we must eliminate her, she can't continue to breath and know that. This could mean war with Kumo and her allies but it is a risk I am willing to take to keep you safe. Alvarcus your training must be put on hold in favor of... on the job experience. As I am now I doubt I could defeat her alone, so you will accompany me as we slay the jinchuuriki."

"Calm down!" I shout at him. "I've got this-"

"Calm down? CALM DOWN?" Orochimaru whirls towards me in rage. "Alvarcus the Edo Tensei is an imperfect jutsu! There are ways around it! There are ways to send the summon back to the Afterlife! There are risks! I will not have my child taken from me! Least of all by something I've left open for others to exploit! We must act swiftly and with extreme force! The question is not if she will die, it is when will she die!"

"Will you just shut the fuck up for ACK!" My sentence remains unfinished because my throat is being crushed while I'm forced against a wall. The bloody chair is long forgotten, toppled to the ground in Orochimaru's emotional outburst.

"You will remain quiet and listen." He harshly whispers to me. "You fail to grasp the severity of this situation. You still think me untouchable, but that is hardly the case. Alvarcus I have my own weaknesses, no matter how few and minor they can still be exploited. But my biggest weakness right now isn't something as petty as my arms failing me. It isn't even my inability to use jutsu. It isn't my degrading body. My biggest weakness is you."

"I… what? Me?" There's no way I heard that right.

"Has that magnificent mind of yours stopped working?" He drops me to the floor and I expertly land on my feet. "You. Are. My. Child. You are my shatter point. Until you are capable of standing as an equal with me, until you have achieved your dream, until you share the title of S-rank you will forever be my biggest weakness. I will not lose you, not if I can stop it."

"I… I don't know how to respond to that." He would risk war with Kumo just to keep a piece of information about me secret? That's huge. Mind boggling. Unfathomable. Incomprehensible. I don't even have the right words to describe it. "I'm going to push that to the side for now in favor of the more pressing conversation. About Yugito, I handled it already. She won't say a word."

"How can you possibly be certain?" Orochimaru resumes his fear induced pacing. "A shinobi's word is meaningless, we are creatures of opportunity. Our promises are easily broken or exchanged for a better one."

"Because you were right, I have a magnificent mind." I cockily smirk at him. "One that is excellently suited to squirming out of tight situations."

His eyes narrow. "Explain."

Flashback

"Have you died before?" She conversationally asks me.

I lock up. Every single joint becomes rigid, my muscles coil and my senses are kicked into overdrive. How does she know that? How could she possibly have guessed that? There's no way that she - Matatabi. The fucking nekomata, the god damn bijuu that's a cat!

That explains why when we first met she look at me with pity. She stood before the Heart Thief and stared at me in sorrow. The person who just recently destroyed a base full of shinobi, the one who earned his title by violently ripping out his enemy's hearts, and most of all Orochimaru's child. Despite that impressive resume she had the sheer audacity to look at me with sad eyes.

That was when Matatabi told her. It has to be.

So she's known since we first met. Perhaps that was also a factor of her holding back in our spar, subconsciously she limited herself to spare the kid she was fighting more pain. At least until I showed her that I'm a freak of nature, then it was open season.

"I want to hear your answer." Her calm voice pulls me out of my thoughts. "Matatabi told me. I don't believe her. So I figured I'd find out for myself. Have you died before?"

"Yes." The word rasps out of my mouth, it's spoken quietly. As if I don't want to admit it to myself and not just her. "I have."

"How did it happen?" She softly and tenderly asks.

The sun was blazing brightly in the sky. Three large fluffy clouds dotted the otherwise empty horizon. Refreshing air filled my lungs with every breath. The view from up here is simply amazing.

"No." I snarl out. I don't want to remember. I've forced that memory away for so long, I refuse to let it come back now. "You've used all three of your questions. Not to mention severely soured my mood."

"How were you brought back?" She doesn't heed my warning, opting to ignore it in favor of pressing me for more information. Lucky for me this suits my own plans.

"There's a technique known only to a select few." I start to weave the twisted story. "This jutsu is considered forbidden, a jutsu that under no circumstances should ever be used out of fear. Fear that the person who was brought back from the dead will be tainted, stained by their experiences on the… other side."

"The Edo Tensei." Yugito cuts in. "The jutsu of the Second Hokage, the one Orochimaru used to bring back the dead during the Invasion."

"Incorrect." It is my turn to cut her off. "Did you really think that there is only one jutsu designed to resurrect the dead? The Edo Tensei brings back a zombie-like being at best, there's a time limit to how long an Edo Tensei can survive directly proportional to the amount of chakra used in the jutsu. Not to mention that the Edo Tensei brings back a shell of the former shinobi, after all there is no way the Third Hokage could stand against both the First and Second at the same time."

"There's more than one ressurection technique?" She pointlessly asks. I just told her there was. "Orochimaru knows multiple jutsu that can bring back the dead?"

"Of course there are more than one you idiot." I snort out in an indignified manner. "And no, he doesn't. It wasn't Orochimaru that brought me back. It was a Suna shinobi that he blackmailed into resurrecting me. There's a jutsu designed by the upper echelon of Suna's puppet masters, one designed to breath life into a puppet. The idea behind the jutsu was to raise an army of puppets to march on Suna's enemies. Picture it, a practically limitless supply of soldiers ready to leap into battle. Soldiers that have no need for petty things like food or sleep. Soldiers that don't fear the cold or the heat. It was a marvelous plan, but it had one glaring flaw. Unfortunately, to breath life into another costs the user their own so in the end the jutsu was considered a failure."

"How did Orochimaru convince someone to give up their life?" Yugito asks me in morbid curiosity. The phrase 'curiosity killed the cat' comes to mind for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why.

"It was very easy." I menacingly stare straight into her eyes to completely sell the severity of the situation. "By threatening to brutally torture his daughter. By promising to tear apart his son. By guaranteeing to grind his wife to tiny a chunky paste. Orochimaru threatened everyone he held most dear in his life with a single ultimatum: save me or let them all die horrible deaths. In the end there wasn't a choice. There is very little that someone won't do for the people they truly care about."

"And with a father like yours there is nothing that will keep you from him." She stares off into the distance with a forlorn expression. "He will not even allow Death to take you from him. Perhaps that is the scariest thing about you, the simple fact that should anything actually harm you the perpetrator will bring down the wrath of Orochimaru. Is there anything he wouldn't do?"

"That, dear Yugito, is an excellent question." I rise up from my seated position and step out of the bath. I don't care that she just saw me naked. In fact it suits my plan well, I need her distracted to slip away. Seeing me casually rise up in total disregard to social norms will do that to just about anyone. Not to mention seeing me in all my glory.

The scars and masks you perverts. She's seen dicks before but she hasn't seen anyone else with anywhere near as fucked up a body as mine.

"I believe I've had enough of your pleasant company." With an exaggerated flourish I swing the robe I entered with over my frame, covering my war torn body. "I need that back."

I gesture to the hilt that she's still holding.

"O-oh. Right." She holds it out to me.

"And Yugito?" I firmly grasp the hilt but don't pull it out of her hand yet.

"Yes?" She looks at me in bewilderment.

"I looked. You have a fantastic ass." I let a lecherous grin worm its way onto my face. "The freckle only makes it better, don't let anyone tell you different."

Her eyes go wide in shock and fury.

"Now if you'll forgive me, I'll be taking my leave. I get the feeling that you want to severely maim me." In the next moment I'm gone and in my place is a mop and bucket. Yugito is firmly grasping the mop as the water in the bucket sloshes around from being used as a replacement.

"I will never understand that kid." Yugito releases the mop. "After what he's been through it's no wonder he's insane."