12

Chapter 12: TwelveNotes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

TWELVE

Finding the shrine was easy. Sansa, Naruta and Kanna had been let out of the room in the Hokage Tower after the promised twenty-four hours and instead of returning to the orphanage after been left at its door, Kanna hoisted a twin up on each hip and started what was for her a familiar trek.

"There woz prob'ly a bigger, nicer shrine, for th' more civ'lized people," Kanna explained as she wove through the streets. They were surprisingly empty and Sansa supposed the villagers must be weary after celebrating the "defeat" of the Kyuubi. "But us sinners, we lot had our own." She grinned down at them, all crooked teeth and good cheer. Sansa wondered again, how Kanna could understand that she and Naruto weren't responsible for the victims of Kurama being controlled when the rest of Konoha couldn't. Kanna had lost her mother to Kurama, and later lost her brother when he tried to take vengeance, yet she could still smile at them.

Kanna led them out of the village proper, veering around the edge of what she told them was one of the training grounds for shinobi and making her way to a winding river. To Sansa's surprise, as they followed the river they came across some sort of strange wooden structure; a set of two wooden pillars with rope tied between them that followed alongside the left of the river. The pillars had clearly once been painted a lustrous fiery red, but the paint had faded and was peeling and some of the ropes looked badly frayed. Still, sets of these pillars and rope continued along beside the river until it curved out of sight, not far ahead.

Sansa turned up at Kanna and gave her a pleading look, silently begging for an explanation. Kanna laughed. "They're torri," she explained, "they're gateways– they mark the change from th' normal world ter th' sacred, 'n tha' rope is shimenawa– sacred rope. It marks a pure place." She then sighed. "Looks real bad, huh?" she muttered, before stepping up to the first torri. She put them both down on the ground and showed them how to stop at each torri and bow twice then clap before moving on. As they copied her, Sansa could feel the hair on her arms raising as the air around them seemed to shiver.

They rounded the curve of the river and Kanna let out a horrified gasp that Sansa echoed. "Oh no!" the older girl moaned, while Sansa could only stare in silent shock. The deep red shrine was still standing, the sacrilege hadn't reached the point of total destruction, but all the fox statues lining the overgrown, cracked stone pathway had been smashed to pieces.

"It looks even worse," Kanna moaned, before bravely moving onward, Sansa and Naruto following after. Kanna paused to bow twice and clap before entering the shrine and Sansa followed her lead, prompting Naruto to copy her. Her brother giggled, seeming to find the whole thing to be some kind of game. Ahead of them, Kanna moaned again at seeing all the damage inside.

It looked as if someone had taken some sort of heavy, blunt object to the inside of the shrine and swung it about in a fit of wild abandon. Sansa hugged one of the trembling Kanna's legs, while Naruto– who appeared to have realised that something was wrong, by the alarmed look on his face– flung his arms around Kanna's other leg and squeezed tightly.

"Mama would hate this," Kanna choked out, "I 'ad 'oped some'un would 'ave come an' fixed it, but they jus' left it, Ko-chan! They abandoned it!" She looked at Sansa with wet eyes and Sansa's heart ached with understanding at the loss she saw there. 

"Then we'll fix it," she said. Kanna looked blankly at her.

"'Ow the bloody fuck are we s'posed ta do that?" she asked. Sansa wondered when exactly it was that Kanna had forgotten Sansa was supposed to be two years old– she never spoke to Naruto like this. She rather hoped, though, that Kanna never remembered– she preferred it this way.

"Well," Sansa mused, looking around, "let's start with getting all the rubbish out. Then we're going to need cleaning supplies and paint. Lots of paint."

The look on Kanna's face was slightly shifty as she suddenly grinned, sly as a fox. "I reckon I know a place ta get my 'ands on some paint," she said.

Sansa noticed and dismissed the fact that Kanna never said anything about buying the paint. So long as she didn't get caught, her methods for acquiring their supplies was ultimately inconsequential.

"It's going to take time," she warned, "lots of time, and effort too. But if there's one thing we all have, it's time. It's not like the matron is going to notice three of us missing in a whole house of us."

Actually, that might not be true considering just who Naruto and Sansa were, but nobody but the Hokage and a handful of other high-ranking officials were supposed to know that secret. And considering they consisted of a set of two-year olds and one three-and-ten year old with a very limited selection of supplies, it was going to take them at least three or four turns of the moon to get the place in working order. But Sansa was running out of options for helping Kurama and requesting aid from a fox god to help a fox seemed like the logical next step, and said fox god would be more likely to help her if she'd earned his favour.

But even if she wasn't trying to win Inari-sama's favour, Sana thought that the way Kanna's face had gone bright with hope would have convinced her to help regardless.

"Let's get started," she said, and Kanna beamed.

It didn't take them long to run into their first obstacle, however. Namely, the honden.

At Sansa's request, Kanna had explained the shrine lay-out to her while they sat down and discussed what work needed to be done. The part of the shrine were in was the haiden– the hall of worship. This part of the shrine was open to everyone and was positioned in front of the honden. And the honden was where things got difficult, because Kanna was reluctant to go inside it despite Sansa pointing out the necessity.

"I dunno," she kept saying nervously, hesitating before the entrance to the honden at the back of the haiden she'd reluctantly let Sansa drag her to, Naruto on her hip. "We ain't priests, only priests 'n kami are s'posed ta go in there."

Kanna had explained that the honden was the most sacred building in the shrine; no worshippers were allowed inside, only the priests. It was intended only for the use of the enshrined kami. It was the heart of the shrine– and the location of the go-shintai, the sacred object worshipped as a repository within which a kami may choose to reside.

"I understand, however we must," Sansa said firmly. "We wish to restore this shrine for Inari-sama and it was you who told me that the first and foremost duty of a shrine is to house and protect its go-shintai and kami. Is that not correct?"

"Nah, yer... yer righ'," Kanna said miserably. She took a shaky breath, awkwardly bowing twice balancing Naruto on her hip and clapping her hands. Naruto clapped too while Sansa copied her movements and then Kanna took another shaky breath and reached out to carefully open the door. She then gasped. So did Sansa. Naruto just made an excited sound.

"Foxy!" He cried out, delighted.

Foxy, indeed, Sansa thought.

Around the room, jewelled eyes gleamed from where they were set in the faces of carved fox votives. Some of the foxes had multiple tails, like Kurama did, some as few as two or as many as eight. There was no damage here, no desecration; it was if the honden was untouched and perfectly preserved in time. A braided shimenawa hung over the doorway, silk mural paintings depicting Inari-sama and foxes with multiple tails– including one that looked suspiciously like Kurama– hung from the walls, and in the centre of the room, high on a wooden pedestal, was a tightly rolled scroll of old parchment edged with gold.

Despite all the art and colour around it, the scroll was what caught Sansa's eye. At each end of the scroll was a gold rod topped with gold finials carved to look like fox tails. The gold-edged parchment was then rolled up and tied with a golden silk ribbon upon which was embroidered the most complicated, intricate seal Sansa had seen yet, the flowing twists, curves and lines of the kanji so immaculate, so perfect, they were nothing short of divine. She had no doubt that the scroll was the go-shintai, not when just looking at it made the breath catch in her chest.

Beside her, Kanna had dropped to her knees, hugging Naruto tight in her arms. "Inari-sama 'as not abandoned th' shrine," she breathed, her face shining with joy and hope, before she turned to face Sansa, eyes bright with determination. "We 'ave to restore it," she said. "I don' care 'ow much work it takes, or 'ow long, we 'ave to do it. We're gonna fix this shrine." 

~

It was fortunate that Kanna had decided she didn't care about the effort or time required to restore the shrine because it appeared that Sansa's newfound youth had made her an optimist. Three to four moons had come and gone with a blink of an eye and they were still working on restoring the shrine to its former glory– or at least to the closest approximation to it they could manage.

They could get away from the orphanage to the shrine about three or four days a week, and they'd spent the entire first two turns of the moon cleaning out animal leavings, clearing the shrine of all furnishings and items ruined beyond salvation which they then had to carry to the village's waste plot, nearly a half hour's walk away, and digging holes to bury the ruined fox statues, because none of them were strong enough to carry the stone all the way to the waste plot, nor did they want to be seen carrying them.

To Sansa's relief, the water damage inside the shrine was minimal and none of the flooring or the roof had rotten through. She wasn't sure what they could have done if that had been the case. She remembered overseeing the rebuilding efforts of Winterfell, both after the Boltons had finally been defeated and after the Long Night. It had been a long and difficult process, particularly replacing the wooden floors where they had rotted through or where insects had burrowed inside and destroyed the integrity of the wood. She, Kanna and Naruto simply weren't equipped with the necessary knowledge or skill to successfully complete a task of that nature.

After clearing out the shrine of waste, the next step was scrubbing it within an inch of itself. Naruto had a blast, playing in the soapy bubbles and throwing his sponge everywhere. Kanna and Sansa had significantly less fun with their wood varnish and bleach and other cleaning chemicals Sansa had never even heard of before, let alone touched. There had always been maids to do this sort of work, even during the worst of times, and Sansa found herself honestly humbled to be rolling up the sleeves of her old, second-hand dress and getting on her small knees to scrub the floor clean of mold, droppings, dust and unidentifiable slime, amongst other things. She suspected she may be having a sort of epiphany.

After the cleaning came the painting of the inside of the shrine. Kanna warned them to be careful of the paint fumes, though Sansa suspected with Kurama's ability to heal them of poisons she and Naruto would be fine. She listened to Kanna's warnings anyway, though– there was no reason to test such a thing, especially so far away from help. 

The painting was a difficult ordeal considering none of them were particularly tall– especially her and Naruto– and they gave the roof up as a lost cause, though by making a human tower of Sansa standing on Kanna's shoulders and then Naruto standing on Sansa's shoulders they managed to get most of the highest parts of the wall. They also managed to get a lot of paint on themselves, but Kanna had made them strip to their underwear only before they started painting and they jumped in the river afterwards to clean off, Kanna holding them so they didn't drown. 

They didn't just have the inside to fix, however, they also had the outside. Just to start with, they had to tackle the wildly overgrown weeds that had taken over. Naruto quickly discovered a love for gardening and started crying when they pulled out the weeds he kept planting back in the soil. Kanna had to promise to "buy" him some seeds for him to plant and explain how weeds were evil and strangled other plants to get his tears to stop. After weeding, they did their best to fix the cracked stones of the path, but there was little they could do there other than collect smaller rocks from around the area and place them in the cracks to fill it up.

Painting the outside of the shrine was even worse then painting the inside. They'd had to make a human tower again to have any hope at all of reaching the higher parts of the shrine and they'd given the roof up as a lost cause from the beginning. They also had to paint the torri, again using a human tower, and look into replacing some of the shimenawa. 

Unsurprisingly, shimenawa weren't easy to find and the sacred ropes were one thing that Kanna was reluctant to steal. In the end, they'd just had to reinforce the more frayed braided ropes with wire Kanna had found on one of the shinobi training fields– which were technically forbidden to civilians, Kanna had added to her explanation with a wink– and hope it wasn't too sacrilegious.

It wasn't until nearly eight turns of the moon that they'd finished enough of the repairs and restorations that they could turn to decorating the shrine. Unsurprisingly, none of the shops or market stalls in Konoha sold fox statues in any shape or form. They'd been stumped for a few days on what to do, but in the end it was Naruto who came up with a solution for them– he drew them a picture. Of an orange blob, actually, but he drew it and said it was a "foxy" for their "'nari shrine" and Kanna's eyes lit up.

Kanna, it turned out, had a skill for something she called 'origami'. It involved folding colourful squares of paper into little sculptures– including little orange, red and white foxes that they could use as a replacement for statues. She only ever folded her origami foxes in the shrine, doing her best to teach Sansa and Naruto the more simplified versions. Sansa's tiny, still-clumsy fingers struggled with some of the finer folds but she persevered. Naruto gave up halfway and happily continued drawing his "foxys" to stick on the walls with sticks of coloured wax.

Once they had a sizeable collection of the origami foxes– and even a few kitsune, as Kanna had finally explained to Sansa foxes with multiple tails were called– they threaded them onto a length of Kanna's ill-begotten shinobi wire and carefully attached the wire so it ran along the left, right and far wall of the haiden.

As the final touch, Kanna very carefully pinned two of the origami foxes to the outside of the shrine with long, thin, sharp pieces of metal she called senbon– incidentally, the same weapon once used to kill the bird that Sansa had been warged into– that she'd found in another shinobi training ground. After all, every shrine needed a pair of shinshi to guard its entrance.

"We did it," Kanna said, the disbelief strong in her voice.

Sansa felt a great deal of disbelief too. Even Naruto, little as he was, was looking up at the shrine with wide eyes.

"No more fix?" he asked sounding bewildered.

"No more fix," Kanna confirmed.

"Whoa," he said, sounding amazed. Then he pouted. "But it nice here!"

"Just because it's fixed, doesn't mean we won't be coming here," Sansa told him. "After all, we'll have to make sure it stays fixed."

Kurama and Tsukiko wouldn't be happy if it fell into disrepair again, after all. They'd both been following the efforts to restore the shrine closely and had always sounded pleased whenever she reported their progress back to them. 

Kurama had been particularly enraged to hear of the desecration to Inari-sama's shrine. They'd ranted about humans for a solid hour, their burning, corrosive chakra scouring her skin, even through the protection of the weirwood cage. Tsukiko's anger had been a quieter, icier thing. "The humans of Konoha are good at placing blame where it does not belong," she'd said coolly. Sansa could not have agreed with her more.

"Let's go pray," Kanna said, and if her eyes were wet, well, Sansa remembered how she'd felt the first time after her lord-father's execution that she'd knelt before the heart-tree in the godswood of Winterfell, or the first time she'd entered the restored sept in Winterfell where her murdered lady-mother had once prayed.

Inside the haiden, Kanna reached into her pockets to pull out three slightly squashed inari, three sticks of incense and a box of matches. Lighting the incense, she passed one stick and one inari each to Sansa and Naruto. Naruto tried to eat his inari and Kanna had to promise there was one waiting for him back at the orphanage to stop him. "Wave your incense around your face and tell Inari-sama your heart's deepest wish," Kanna told Naruto, "but say it in your head, because it's just between you and Inari-sama."

"Okay," Naruto said, screwing his face up adorably as he thought about it. Sansa watched how Kanna waved her incense around her face and copied the older girl's movements.

Inari-sama, she prayed, please guide me. I need to know how to free Kurama, the Nine-Tailed Kitsune, from their prison inside my brother and I– but without harming the Sacrifice, for I love my brother dearly and he is but a babe, not even three, and I wish him to live a long, happy, healthy life. Please, Inari-sama, guide me on how I can achieve this.

~

That night, Sansa dreamed.

She dreamed of a woman, porcelain fair with hair as red as the Inari shrine piled atop her head in two rolls secured by hairpins from which hung two sealing scrolls. The woman's hands were splattered with ink and blood and she knelt before a white-furred fox. 

"Forgive me," the woman said, "I had no choice"

"We always have choices," the fox replied, "you chose to let them bind you in chains of your own making."

The woman bowed her head. "I know," she whispered. "I know." The fox sighed, leaning forwards to nudge her with their nose.

"Oh Mito-chan," they said, "We cannot forget and it is not Our place to forgive, but We ask you now– what will you do?"

The woman– Mito– was silent for a long moment, before she finally lifted her head. "I will not rest," she said, "until my mistake has been undone."

The fox made a churring sound. "Do you give your Word, Uzumaki Mito, that this will be so?"

Uzumaki Mito raised her chin high. "I give my Word, Inari-sama."

"Then let it be done."