Chapter 13: ThirteenChapter Text
THIRTEEN
"Obviously," Sansa said, "it means something."
"You don't say," Kurama replied sarcastically, tails slashing from side to side. Sansa had gotten quite good at reading Kurama's moods by the slightest twitch of a single one of their nine tails, but she didn't need to be an expert to see how frustrated they were. "The gods are cryptic bastards at the best of times," Kurama muttered, more to themself then to Sansa. "But Inari is the worst."
"It's still something we have now that we didn't have before," Sansa offered then sighed, sitting down in the snow. It wasn't cold to touch, which just felt odd to her. She ran her fingers through it, feeling the consistency. It was too light, too fluffy, like it could all just blow away in a gust of wind. Sighing again, Sansa turned back up to Kurama. "Are you sure Mito is dead?" She asked.
"She did not survive my extraction," Kurama confirmed. "It is possible for a Jinchūriki to survive the extraction under the right circumstances, but she was old and weak. She had more years left in her, but Konoha wanted a weapon of war, not an old woman."
"Then what did she mean, she would not 'rest' until her mistake was undone?" Sansa asked, frustrated. "Are we even certain the mistake she was referring to is the creation of the first Jinchūriki?"
Kurama's tails stilled for a moment and Sansa frowned. "Kurama," she said slowly, "Mito was the first Jinchūriki, right?"
"There was one before her," Kurama said after a moment, "But I will speak no more of it."
Sansa nodded, even as her mind spun with this new, surprising information. "That is your right, of course," she said. "But if Mito's mistake wasn't the creation of the first Jinchūriki, perhaps it was sealing you and assisting the Shodaime in hunting down and sealing your siblings? That is a horrendously big mistake to have made."
"She never once expressed any regret to me," Kurama said bitterly.
"It can be difficult, to face the reality of our mistakes," Sansa said quietly. "One of the worst mistakes of my life happened when I was very young. I trusted the wrong person and as a result my father was executed before my eyes. My betrothed made me look at his head on a pike as it rotted, along with the rest of our household staff and guard, all the faces I'd grown up with." Sansa closed her eyes, unable to forget the haunting sight, even so many years later.
"He kept taking me up there until there was nothing left of them but skulls," she murmured. "For weeks I was forced to look at the wretched magnitude of what my mistake had cost me and so many others. It was a harsh lesson, and one I never forgot. I couldn't hide from my mistakes, not when the price was so high. But it is far too easy to hide from your shame, your guilt. It's harder to face it and admit your fault. And some people... some people spend all their life running and hiding from their mistakes, too afraid to face what they have done."
"I will never forgive her," Kurama said darkly.
"And no one is asking you to," Sansa told them. "Even if someone apologises, even if they feel guilt or remorse, you don't have to forgive them. You don't have to forget that they did wrong by you. That is and always will be your choice to make."
Kurama was silent for a long moment. "I have never met a human quite like you before," they said, finally. Sansa smiled.
"Oh, just you wait until Naruto is old enough to meet your counterpart," she said.
"The whelp?" Kurama asked, looking unimpressed.
"You're going to love him," Sansa said confidently.
"And you, little vixen, are biased," Kurama said, looking faintly disgusted at the very thought. Sansa just laughed.
"Oh, I bet you a gold dragon you're wrong," she said. "Ah, currency in my old world," she clarified, when Kurama looked confused.
"I'll take that bet," Kurama decided. "Loving a human– that will never happen."
Sansa thought of her bright little brother, with hair like sunshine and eyes like the ocean and chakra like a storm, and could only smile.
~
The twins third name-day arrived with Sansa and Kurama no closer to deciphering the cryptic dream Inari-sama had sent her. Sansa had dreamt the same scene eight more times since and they had continued to puzzle over the details.
Tora came to collect them again on the eve of their name-day, this time accompanied by a woman in a butterfly-mask. Unable to stop herself, while Kanna packed a change of clothes and the book of kanji that they'd made pitifully little progress through Sansa looked up at Tora with eyes she purposefully widened to look pitiful and pleading and asked in her sweetest voice, "is Inu-san alright?"
Sansa felt Tora react more then she witnessed any outward change. His chakra twisted into something she was beginning to recognise as a combination of fear-worry-anger and that told her everything she needed to know. If Tora was worrying about him then Inu– or rather, Kakashi, the silver-haired boy who'd called her and Naruto pack, who'd tried to adopt them, who had wanted them– had to be alive for Tora to worry about.
"Inu's fine, Fuyuko-chan," Tora said, leaning down to squeeze her shoulder. Clearly he'd been watching her enough to know how much she hated having her hair touched. It reached her mid-back now and she braided it every morning– which certainly helped improve her finger dexterity. She'd braided it in milkmaid braids that morning, a style that kept her hair off her neck and close to her scalp, because she felt paranoid around the anniversary of Kurama's unwilling attack. Paranoid and afraid, for herself and for Naruto.
Even though hare-mask and frog-mask had scared her the previous year, with their social inept idiocy in just snatching her and Naruto from Kanna's arms, she was thankful to the Hokage for his foresight in removing her and Naruto to a safe place during the festivities where people drank and grieved. Tora had mentioned the things getting out of hand and Kanna had later whispered to her about angry mobs and vandalism and Sansa had seen the destruction of Inari's shrine, she had witnessed the rage, the terror of Konoha's populace.
Angry mobs was a fear that would never leave Sansa. It had been decades since the bread riots in King's Landing and she'd been in what were arguably far more terrible situations in the years since, but the emotional scars left from that day ran deep. She had just seen the septon torn apart by the mobs' bare hands and she'd been convinced those men were going to rape her then brutally murder her. She had been a child, alone and terrified and expecting to die horribly and one had grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled, panting over her asking, "you ever been fucked little girl?" and–
–and as she said, the emotional scars ran deep. It was terrifying, to be small and vulnerable and know that people wanted to hurt her, to kill her, and there was next to nothing she could do about it.
(Not yet.)
The day after their name-day, Kanna surprised both her and Naruto with presents. Sansa was delighted with her hair ribbons in blue and silver and white satiny material. Naruto was just as excited with his stuffed toy wolf, which he named Inu-chan. No amount of explaining that 'Inu' meant 'dog' could get him to change his mind.
Having the hair ribbons reminded Sansa fondly of how she used to embroider hers, back in Westeros. It also made her think of the seal in Inari-sama's shrine, the one embroidered on the silk ribbon, so she approached Kanna and asked the older girl if she could locate her a needle and thread and some old fabric to practice on. Kanna was surprised– Sansa supposed it was an unusual request– but she promised to look around for some. It took her a few days but she managed to find a lovely bright blue spool of thread, an old bit of grey fabric and a perfectly serviceable sewing needle.
Threading the needle took longer than Sansa was used to; Sansa had excelled at sewing and embroidery, it was something she took a great deal of pride in and she found it quite demoralising to struggle with something so simple. Her small fingers were simply unused to such a task. Nevertheless, she persisted and after a few tries, she managed to thread the needle.
Smiling, she started with an easy stitch, simply hemming the fabric in a pattern that suggested a wolf's teeth. The first twenty or so were shaky and uneven but by around the hundredth 'tooth' they were as tight and even as any other stitch Sansa had ever sewn. Pleased, she tied off the end of the thread expertly then cut the thread with one of her sharp teeth.
Next, she put her embroidery skills to the test. While she'd have liked to start with a wolf, she went with something simpler– a winter rose. Her father had always hated them; she'd always thought it was because of the crown of winter roses Prince Rhaegar crowned her Aunt Lyanna with. Now though she knew it was because her Aunt had bled to death in a room overflowing with the blooms. Still, even if the winter roses were never displayed in vases in Winterfell, they still grew out on the grounds and a young Sansa had woven more than just one wreath of them for her brothers to crown her Queen of Love and Beauty when they were playing Knights and Ladies.
The embroidery was harder without a hoop or frame but Sansa was experienced, even if her hands weren't. The result was a clumsy rose, but still a rose. The second winter rose looked better, the third better still. By her tenth rose, it was almost as good as it would have been with a hoop and she was almost as satisfied with her small hands as she was going to get.
Also, she was out of thread.
When she asked Kanna that evening about getting some more thread, the older girl asked what had happened to the spool of blue thread. Sansa showed her the fabric with the wolf teeth hem and rose embroidery and Kanna went very quiet for a moment, looking at the fabric thoughtfully before asking if she could borrow it for a night. Sansa agreed.
The next morning Sansa was approached by the matron in the playroom. She was frowning down at Sansa and she was holding the fabric Sansa had given Kanna the previous night in her hand.
"Kanna said you did this," the matron said, waving the fabric about. Sansa nodded, easily slipping into her little dove mask; sweet, pure-hearted, a little dim, and easily frightened. It was surprisingly easy to do, even with the sharp teeth. "Hmm," the matron looked thoughtfully down at her. "You're good. Very good. That sort of talent shouldn't go to waste. We send a lot of clothing off to get mended, if you mend it for us you'll get a small allowance." Sansa's eyes widened slightly in true surprise even as she nodded hurriedly. The matron smiled and it softened her hard face slightly. "Come along, girl," she said, "the sheets won't mend themselves."
Sansa eagerly followed after her.
It was hard work, but even as it made her hands ache and her fingers bleed until they formed familiar callouses, Sansa was proud of how her body began to instinctively remember what her mind already did. Her fingers still lagged behind slightly, but as the moons passed by Sansa got quicker and stronger, advancing from mending sheets and blankets to fixing buttons and clothes.
Naruto didn't like that she was spending half the day away from him and started crying every time she left, but Sansa remembered when her lady-mother had had the same problem with Rickon. She did the same thing with Naruto that Catelyn had done with Rickon; she kissed him on his tear-stained cheek, promised him that she would return, then left without looking back over her shoulder, even as her heart hurt to hear his cries.
As well as her sewing and her continued efforts to teach herself to read the characters that the Elemental Nations used as their letters, which was slowly but steadily progressing, Sansa found herself with another self-assigned task– hunting down Inu.
After she'd finished any mending she'd been assigned and she needed a break from learning her characters because they were all starting to blur together on the pages, she'd pretend to nap in the corner of the play room and warg into the various stray animals and wildlife of Konoha.
Incidentally, that was how she found out about the forest full of oversized, man-eating beasts located far too close to the village proper for comfort. Warging into a sixteen-foot tiger was a shock she hadn't been expecting. Finding herself face to face with a three-foot-long insect hadn't been much better. Realising that both the tiger and the insect had quite strong chakra had been enough for Sansa to flee with a great deal of haste.
Mostly, she liked to stick with birds. Perhaps a little ironic, considering Sandor and Cersei's old pet-names for her, but she was no caged bird; she soared through the skies with the wind beneath her wings and the world stretched out below her like little toy buildings. It almost made her problems feel smaller, being up in the sky.
She wondered if this was how Daenerys had felt, how Aegon and his sisters had felt, flying over Westeros on the backs of their dragons. If it was, she could almost understand their arrogance. Everything below her seemed pitifully small and insignificant from such a height.
Of course, her search for Inu was conducted at a much lower height. She mostly flitted through the streets as a common sparrow, searching for the feel of his chakra. It wasn't efficient but she didn't have any other way of searching for him and it helped her gain a better understanding of the inner workings of Konoha too. People talked in front of little birds, after all. It was an interesting way to find out the gossip from chattering housewives, information about trade routes, profits and taxes that the merchants swapped with each other and which businesses were worth investing in bankers shared during lunch.
Sansa also learnt, much to her surprise, not all the villages in this world were shinobi villages. Some were simply normal villages, like Winter Town, and there actually was a higher power that the Hokage reported to– the Fire Daimyo. He was either the equivalent to Lord Paramount or King, Sansa wasn't quite sure, she was just relieved that the Hokage didn't have absolute power– just close to it.
Still, interesting and informative as her information gathering was, and certainly something that would be useful to her in the future, it didn't help her find Inu and she was beginning to think nothing would. She considered trying to spy on the Hokage himself in his Tower but eventually decided against it; she didn't know what strange bloodline gifts the people here may have and the last thing she wanted was to appear suspicious and alert the shinobi of the village to the presence of someone able to spy on them through the eyes of the overlooked and often forgotten strays and wildlife.
"I just don't know what to do," she told Tsukiko, frustrated. "I don't know how to find him, but I can't just give up on him– he's pack."
pack/never leave behind/together/love Lady agreed. Tsukiko looked down at her thoughtfully.
"You are young," she said, and Sansa wasn't quite sure where the she-wolf was going with this, "but I believe you are ready. You are as much wolf as you are human; you and Kita are two halves of one whole and she pines for you when you are apart."
miss my sansa/pack/should be together Lady whined and Sansa wrapped herself warmly around Lady's presence, until they were so closely entwined they were, as Tsukiko had said, one whole.
"That is why," Tsukiko continued, "I think you are ready." The she-wolf looked down at Sansa with large, unblinking golden eyes. "It is time for you to sign the Wolf Summons Contract. And with Kita at your side, perhaps you will find your missing pack "