Chapter Text
She doesn't know where she is. She had been in Kumo. Had been fighting two bickering shinobi. Akatsuki. She remembers fighting. Exploding tags, smoke. Blood. Then silence.
Afterwards, agony.
She was being cleaved in two. Matatabi was there, screaming. Digging her claws into her and filling her with sharp blue beast chakra. They loved each other. They wanted each other to survive. Yugito let go as Matatabi held on. The bijuu would survive this cleaving. Yugito would not. She would not force her friend to die with her.
Yugito let go.
They ripped her out of her. They put her into a stone demon. They left her there to die.
She waits, on the edge of life and death, choosing life, chasing the ounce of it left in her. She crawls into the wilderness, somehow a survivor. Her stomach is a mess of blood and chakra, and seal work torn apart from her battle and left to fester as they tore her out of her. She cannot hold herself together. But she can crawl. And so she does. She can use one arm and both feet. She inches out from under the eye of the demon above her. She pulls herself into grass.
Cats will hide themselves when they feel their ending. Yugito just wants to go home.
She feels she must have been moving for many years. It has been minutes. Then there is a voice, and then a shadow, a hand against her cheek. She freezes, tries to fight as she is rolled onto her back. There is so much pain, it becomes non specific. She is not in agony. She is agony.
Then green. Green hands, green eyes. Green smells. Wet leaves. Peaches. Then sleep.
She wakes in a cocoon of softness pressing in at all sides. She does not crack open her eyes. She wiggles her fingers, then toes. Opens her mouth. Tastes only sweet things. She is not bleeding anymore. She feels small, like a child. She has not felt like a child for some time.
She is alone in her mind. Matatabi is gone. It is too quiet. She cries.
She wakes up under green eyes, under green hands. She is alive.
She tries to ask who? "Emissary." She tries to ask why? "Emissary." She tries to ask how? "There was life still in you. It was too stubborn to go out." What did you do? "I encouraged it." Why? Why? "Because I made a promise." To who? "To her sister, and her sister's children." Whose? Whose sister? "Matatabi's."
The woman with green hands stays with her for days, coaching life back into her.
Yugito doesn't know how long they travel. She had chased those shinobi, had cornered them, had trapped them away from the heart of Kumo. But had they taken her somewhere? They must have. After Matatabi was torn out of her (hissing, screaming, and bleeding, god above and below, Yugito had never known the cat inside of her could bleed) she had crawled on grass and hard, cold earth. Had it been raining? She - she isn't sure.
The woman with green hands feeds her water and broth when she can stomach it. Yugito isn't sure how she manages to make the food; they seem to be traveling all the time. But the woman props her up against her own body, and Yugito is grateful for the warmth, for the stability. She feels paper thin, as if she might blow away if someone so much as sighed in her direction. But the woman with green hands, the emissary - she is firm.
She has pink hair, Yugito notices. And a purple flower on her forehead. Yugito does not know of any goddesses with pink hair or purple flowers, but she thinks if this girl is not Izanami for bringing her back to life, she must be a spirit of some kind. Yugito doesn't know what she's done to incur the favor of a spirit of such power, but she's grateful to whatever good deed she must have done in her past to warrant it.
She feels Kumo before she sees it. Feels the way the barrier seal around the village buffets against her to welcome her back inside. Yugito tries to flare her chakra to identify herself, but her reserves feel like a scar with new skin stretched too thinly over it. It hurts. It hurts.
Izanami gives her a gentle squeeze. Yugito is strong enough to be held on her back now, and the goddess has her arms wrapped around her thighs. Yugito finds it funny that a deity would come down to earth and give herself the body of someone much smaller than herself. Izanami is the size of a young woman, no older than seventeen, but she has the strength of someone at least five times her age.
"I'm sorry," the goddess says, "that I could not do more."
It is cold, so cold. That is how Yugito knows it is home. It is cold in the mountains, when the clouds brush against your hands, slip past your cheek. Izanami has carried her to the village gates, a plateau surrounded by large red walls at the base of the mountain on which Kumogakure rests. There are stairs beyond those gates, red stairs that will take Yugito up, up, up back into her home.
Home. Yugito's chest hurts. Will they have searched for her? Did they miss her? Did they worry for her?
She thinks of Bee and his teachings when she was younger, and did not understand. She thinks of A, and his unwavering strength. She thinks of her genin team; Hie, Kikyo, and Ichigo. She wonders who's been teaching them while she's been gone.
"Your people will be able to take care of you," Izanami says.
Yugito's back is on the hard packed ground. Her head lolls, and she watches Izanami. There is a man behind her, many leagues behind her. He is a Hyūga. Yugito can tell.
"They're approaching," he says to Izanami.
Gods can wear whatever forms they desire. Yugito wonders if this is Izanagi, or Raijin. There are few others who followed Izanami and her orders faithfully.
"I know," the goddess says.
She takes Yugito's hand in hers and gives it a gentle squeeze. There are guards, she notices belatedly. The sentries who are posted at the village gates. She didn't feel them, hadn't been able to sense them. But she can hear their footfalls, can hear it when they demand that Izanami let go of her, to state her business.
Yugito wants to shout at them to show their respect. Here is Raijin, their patron, without him they are only clouds bearing neither lightning nor rain. And here is Izanami, who gave them all life and who can eat them in the space between one blink and the next.
But Yugito does not have her strength, and so she is silent.
"Listen to me, cousin," Izanami says, squeezing her hand.
Izanami called her cousin; how funny. Perhaps it was Izanagi who ought to call her his child. They were sister-wife and brother-husband; Yugito was both Izanami's niece and her daughter.
"Stay in Kumogakure," the goddess says quickly. "Do not leave for anything. Tell your brother to ask Gyūki about Saiken's little brother. That is how they will find me again. I will need their help to save us all."
Yugito blinks, and everything feels slow. Izanami is staring down at her, green eyes blazing with purpose. Yugito forces herself to remember. Ask her brother about Gyūki's Saiken. Saiken's little brother. Ask Gyūki. Her brother. Yugito didn't have any brothers. She had been an only child. Her mother had been one fourth Uzumaki. Her parents had born three children before Yugito; she was their second daughter. All of her siblings had died when Matatabi had been forced into them. Yugito hadn't.
She opens her mouth to say this, but Izanami is still speaking.
"I'm sorry I couldn't save her, too," she says. Yugito had never seen a goddess cry. "But I will release her. And she'll be safe once I do."
"We need to move," Raijin says. "Now!"
The sentries are upon them then, but Izanami is swift. She has already let go of Yugito's hand. In half a breath, she is by Raijin's side, and then the two of them are gone.
Yugito sees a wall of grey cloth and blonde hair and thinks - Samui. Then on either sides of her face are a pair of brown palms, and she's looking up into Karui's bronze eyes.
"Name, age, and rank," she says, voice hard.
Yugito tries to open her mouth to form the words, but finds that nothing will come out. These fools just ran Izanami herself away from Kumogakure. How could they?
"Name, age, and rank, Yugito!" Karui barks.
Yugito licks her lips. Samui and Karui aren't the only ones there. At least three squads of ANBU have touched down near her, creating a perimeter around her prone form. Some are shouting orders to pursue Izanami and Raijin. Yugito wants to scream at them.
"Nii Yugito," she says, finally. "Twenty-nine. Jounin. Identity number C-L-five-three-two-two."
Something in Karui seems to soften at that. A squad of the assembled ANBU disappear into the wilderness after the goddess and her god. Yugito can still feel her scream bubbling at the base of her throat.
"Oi!" Karui shouts. "Get us a stretcher! We've got one wounded!"
Someone brings the stretcher. Karui eases her onto it. Samui watches. Yugito leaves her eyes on the pale blue sky over her head and prays to the goddess for forgiveness. She prays that Raijin will be merciful to those who attack his mother, or that Izanagi will only maim those who try to strike his sister-wife. She prays Izanami does not bring death down onto Yugito's fellow shinobi.
But Izanami is a goddess who wields creation in one hand and death in the other. It would be equal if she saved Yugito's life and took the life of those pursuing her.
Yugito prays that she leaves the world imbalanced as it is.
They take her to the hospital. She sleeps for thirty-six hours.
When she wakes, they tell her that she has survived the impossible. Matatabi has been completely removed from her body; there are no traces of the bijuu's chakra left inside of her. Yugito looks down at the gnarled skin where her seal used to be and she does not weep. Not until she is safe, tucked away, where no one can hear her wail.
"You are in perfect health," a doctor says to her, chart firm in his hands. "That is a miracle in and of itself."
Yugito sits in her hospital bed, hair loose around her shoulders. Her clothes are in a tidy pile beside her bed; her hitai-ate is on top of the pile. The hospital gown she wears is white and it chafes. She does not feel at home in her own skin. Matatabi is not there beside her.
"Unfortunately - ,"
Yugito's world has already coalesced into silence. She looks at the doctor. She has survived the impossible. She can handle whatever it is he has to say.
"Your chakra coils could not be preserved."
And that just seems - cruel.
Matatabi had been torn out of her through every tenketsu on her body. The result had been a magnificent blowout of each tenketsu, of her chakra coils themselves. She was supposed to have had fourth degree chakra burns all over her body, if whoever had healed her had not done so. The scar on her stomach, the wound she had taken from that strange black-and-white skinned shinobi who called upon a god called Jashin, it suddenly aches.
He tells her that she will never be an active duty shinobi again. That her reserves are that of a civilian child now, and it's possible that they'll never expand to where they would have been even if she had never been a jinchuuriki. He credits her Uzumaki blood for even that much.
If she takes her rehabilitation slowly (rehabilitation she only gets because she is privileged, because of her sacrifices, of her lifetime of loyalty, of her three dead siblings) she may be able to perform D-rank jutsu by the end of the year.
Yugito feels hollow. She has been a shinobi all her life. She has never considered life outside of this line of work. It occurs to her, in the blasphemous part of her mind, that she should curse Izanami for letting her live. Yugito squashes the thought as soon as it arrives. If Izanami let her live, it must be because she still has a purpose on this earth. And - it may be hard to see now, but it's there. She just has to be patient.
Yugito can be patient.
Interrogation Corps comes one hour after her doctor leaves.
They send Samui, which is a small comfort. She is a steely woman, a dangerous woman; she's someone that Yugito would trust not only in front of her but behind her as well.
"Walk me through it," Samui says.
"Akatsuki," Yugito begins. "One with purple hair and a medallion, a triangle inside of a circle. He had a three bladed scythe. The other wore a full cowl, but his eyes were green and lacked pupils. He had stitches on his face."
She breathes. Compartmentalizes. She explains.
Samui listens through the story, eyes narrowed as Yugito walks her through it. Yugito knows that there are at least three ANBU assigned to her room, and that at least one of them is memorizing every word that she says as she says it.
"How did you get back?" Samui asks.
Yugito falters.
"Someone, a woman," she says. "She brought me back."
"Why?"
Samui crosses one leg on top of the other, arms still folded. They're the same age. Sometimes, Yugito wonders why exactly Samui wasn't the one to have Matatabi sealed inside of her. One eighth Uzumaki or not, Samui was just as capable, if not more so, of housing a bijuu.
Yugito shakes her head. "I don't know."
Samui doesn't believe her. She's right not to.
"Did she say anything?"
Yugito licks her lips. Samui pours her a cup of water from the pitcher at the bedside table. Yugito takes it and holds it between her hands.
"She called herself an emissary," she begins. "She said she saved my life because she made a promise."
"A promise to whom?"
Yugito takes a sip of water to have a moment before she answers.
"She told you something," Samui says instead of waiting for her. "It sounded like gibberish. 'Ask Gyūki about Saiken's little brother'. And she told you to stay in Kumo."
Yugito nods. She's abruptly aware of Izanami - or, the emissary's request of her. She isn't sure of how to do that. She'll be under observation for a while before she can get to Bee, and she doesn't have Matatabi inside of her anymore to get a direct link to Gyūki in Bee's mind.
"She might have done this to you on purpose," Samui says, voice light.
Yugito doesn't grind her teeth. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't even hold her breath. She's been a shinobi since the age of two. Since she could toddle. She gives nothing away.
"Why would she save my life after the extraction only to heal me into a glorified civilian?"
It goes unsaid. The woman, whoever she was, could have killed Yugito if she had wanted to. She was useless now, as a soldier for her village. It could have been a power play, returning a discarded jinchuuriki back to their village. Nobody outside of a full blooded Uzumaki could survive such impossible odds; Yugito was one in a million.
But if the woman had been an enemy of Kumo, she wouldn't have sent her back at all. She would have let her die in the wilderness.
"Do you know how long you've been gone?" Samui asks.
Yugito shakes her head, but she knows it's been days.
"You've been missing for ten days."
A little over a week. That couldn't possibly be right. Yugito had been crawling for days, she remembers. And she had waken up and fallen back asleep so often when she had been with the emissary; it had to have been closer to a month. Not ten days.
"We had nine ANBU search and rescue parties combing Kumo for you."
Yugito's grip on her cup gets a little tighter.
"What we're all dying to know," Samui says, still poised, not moving a muscle, "is how this woman found you when none of our best trackers could."
Divine intervention? Perhaps. Yugito locks her jaw and stares Samui in the face.
"I don't know," she says plainly. "I couldn't tell you."
Samui believes her because not too long after that she leaves. She doesn't press about the promise the woman made to Matatabi's sister, and her sister's children but Yugito knows that the ANBU heard her lack of an answer. Someone will be back to question her soon. A is too smart, to paranoid to let something like that (something like her) fester in his village walls.
She'll be monitored for days, for longer perhaps, after she leaves the hospital. Yugito takes a deep breath and deals with it. She can be patient.
She's tugged her hair over her shoulder, is working it into a braid when someone clears their throat at the doorway.
Yugito feels so off-guard. Along with her chakra and her ability to mold it had gone her ability to sense it. And she's grateful to have her life but she wonders what Izanami could possibly have in store for a girl like her. A girl who shouldn't really be alive.
But when Yugito looks to the door, her heart swells in her chest.
Hie is there, with his dark skin and bright orange eyes and spiky red hair. His fist is clutched around a Get-Well-Soon card. Ichigo is clutching a small vase of marigolds, pushing her long black bangs out of her red-brown eyes so she can see inside. Kikyo is leading them, her own white hair pulled into two braids behind her, brown lower lip wobbling as she enters and sees her sensei.
Yugito hadn't thought they'd let her genin team come to see her.
They're dressed in their civilian clothing, meaning A had put them on lockdown in case the person who came for Yugito came for her team as well. Yugito's parents were long dead, and the only people alive that she gave more than a rat's ass about were the three genin in front of her.
Kikyo is on the verge of tears, and when Yugito waves them into the room, she nearly starts bawling. Ichigo carefully places the marigolds on her bedside table, and Hie puts the card down beside it.
They're a little awkward, a little distant, as if they're afraid to touch her. Like she might break or disappear again if they get too close.
But Yugito did not crawl out from underneath the eye of death to see her students (her kits, Matatabi had called them) cower before her. They can't all sit on the bed even though they all clearly want to, but they do crowd around her. Yugito runs her fingers through Hie's hair, she taps at a smudge on Ichigo's glasses, and pulls Kikyo in tight when the first tears spill over her soft cheeks.
"They told us you couldn't be our sensei anymore," Hie says after some time in silence.
Yugito nods. Ichigo worries a marigold petal between her fingertips. Kikyo is looking at the ground.
"Probably not," Yugito says. "But you three are close enough to chuunin anyway that you wouldn't need much more of my training."
Ichigo looks absolutely horrified at the thought. Kikyo looks pleased, but the warmth on her face cracks in the next moment.
"If you make a case," she continues, "to the Raikage that I could oversee your training with a supplementary sensei, I might be able to stay on the team."
Ichigo perks up at that, pushing her glasses high up on her nose.
"You'll need someone who can sense chakra better than I can, which will be nearly anyone at this point," Yugito says. "If your case is strong enough, Yondaime-sama might grant it."
She knows the ANBU outside will notify A of this proposed request. Knows that the idea alone of a civilian training a genin team is laughable. But the fierce hope in Ichigo's eyes is enough to make Yugito promise what could never be done.
Her genin team stays in her room until visiting hours end, working out their plan of attack. Yugito says goodbye to them, and each promises to come back day after day until she is released.
When she is sleeping, a shadow passes over her face. She has been training too long not to wake up when a person so boldly announces their presence.
Yugito is a shinobi of the highest caliber. If she wanted to (and she does, she desperately does) she could be a taijutsu specialist only, could hone her kenjutsu until she was just as awe inspiring with Matatabi as she was without her.
She's got a kunai aimed at the throat of her intruder when she realizes who it is.
"You put the whole village in a tizzy, little lady, gettin' snatched up for ten days by somebody shady."
She drops the knife. Bee catches it. He twirls it, then puts it back into her empty hand.
"Big man Gyūki says you shouldn't be alive, so what's the word, Yugito, how did you survive?"
She pulls herself up into sitting, places the kunai on the table by the marigolds.
"A woman," she explains for what feels like the first and yet the hundredth time. "A woman who calls herself an emissary. I don't know to where, or for who."
Bee rubs at his chin. Yugito wonders if he got in through the window.
"Akatsuki took me," she says, "but the emissary brought me back. I thought she was Izanami."
She feels foolish even as she says it, but if she can't say something as silly as that to Bee, who can she say it to?
"She told me to find my brother, and tell him to ask Gyūki about Saiken's little brother," Yugito says. "But I don't have a brother. You're the Hachibi's jinchuuriki, but we aren't blood."
Bee folds his arms and looks at her like she's said something absurdly foolish.
"Blood isn't what makes a sibling a sibling. You should know by now that family is a feeling."
Yugito thinks of Hie's tangle of red hair. How Ichigo hasn't saved up enough money yet from meager D-ranks to get a new pair of glasses with a better fit. Kikyo, their fearless leader.
Yugito's parents were a memory that was not fond. She only remembered the old priests and priestesses. They had taken care of her after Matatabi was stored inside of her. She wonders if they will take care of her now, if she can make good use of herself protecting the temple where she was raised. The priests, the priestesses, they had been her teachers. The Raikage had entrusted them with Yugito's education, and they had not failed. But many of them could not use chakra; she feels better as she thinks of this, this home of hers that she had only just thought of as home again.
"Saiken is the six tails to Gyūki's eight," Bee says, "but there ain't no twelve tails from what he relates."
Yugito furrows her brows. There are nine tailed beasts. Of course there was no twelve tails.
"Could 'Saiken's little brother' refer to the Sanbi or the Ichibi?" she asks.
Bee shrugs and shuts his eyes behind his black sunglasses.
"All the tailed beasts are as old as one another," Bee murmurs, "no such thing as a big or little brother."
Yugito fists her bedsheets in her hands.
"She said that's how you would find her," Yugito says. "I don't know what else to say."
Bee tilts his head at her and rubs at his chin again. Yugito presses her hands to her temples and thinks.
"When I was still in and out, she told me she healed me because she made a promise to Matatabi's sister, and her sister's children," she says, looking back up at Bee. "Do you know what that means?"
Bee shakes his head. They lapse into silence as each of them tries to work through the puzzle that the emissary has left them.
"She had pink hair and a purple flower on her head," Yugito says after a while. "It might have been a seal, but there were four of them. Like the Godaime Hokage's seal."
Bee's eyebrows lift almost comically.
"Four Byakugō's? That's no joke, bro."
"It's what I remember."
It had been hard, giving up that description of the emissary-slash-Izanami to Samui. She hoped the woman was far out of Lightning Country by now, and safe at that. Recognizing Raijin's form as a Hyūga had only made Yugito feel twice as guilty describing him to Samui. He hadn't picked the best body to create for himself in Kumo. Not even a little bit.
"Tsunade can summon great slugs in battle," Bee begins. "Saiken is a slug, do you think that matters?"
Yugito bites the inside of her cheek. She and Matatabi had been close because of Yugito's upbringing. Her education at the temple ensured her that she knew how the natural world worked, how chakra flowed through every living thing, and which gods or goddesses she had to thank for it. Matatabi had corrected her every once in a while about who to thank for what. She had told her that a being called Kurama had mothered the kitsune, and that she herself had given the bakeneko to the world.
She had never thought to ask about Matatabi's siblings. After twenty-seven years of having the creature living inside of her, she had just assumed that even though the bijuu was one of nine, the others weren't her siblings.
Yugito's hand drifts over the scar on her stomach, and she wishes that she had thought to ask. That she had bothered. That she had cared.
"Maybe," Yugito says softly.
Bee nods brusquely and takes a step away from her bed.
"I'll ask Gyūki to give Saiken a call. When I have more info, I'll tell you it all."
Yugito nods. She feels grateful, to have someone like Bee at her side. It's possible that A will turn her out, or won't even allow her to return to the temple where she was trained. It's possible that she'll just - have to learn a trade and live out her days in the civilian quarter. Bee would probably sooner whisk her away to some strange place with turtles as big as her skull. It was nice to have someone like him who respected her, someone who thought she was worthy.
He was right; family was a feeling.
He leaves after that, and Yugito is left alone again in the dark. She goes back to sleep.
Neither she, nor the doctors notice the seal inked in pale white slime and blood on the heel of her left foot. It is an intricate thing, delicate, and hidden to the eyes of those who do not need to know it is there, or do not need to use it.
Yugito dreams of a forest that is full of color at night. She dreams of trees that block out the sky. She dreams of fat purple fruits and her bare feet beneath the grass. She dreams of ghosts, pale yellow spirits bouncing against her shoulders. She dreams of a valley and of purple flowers that all point in the same direction. She dreams of a stone pool, and one thousand eyes watching her. She mouths the name of this wondrous place behind her eyes in her sleep.
Yugito breathes, "Shikkotsu."