“Aright boys-”
I break off midsentence, eyes widening incredulously. Kakashi comes up behind me and I hastily clamp my hand over his mouth to keep him from saying anything. He peers in and then shakes his head, stepping out.
“They better not come to us saying they’re gay.” He huffs as he walking away.
I stifle a giggle and stare at the scene before me. Whether they know it or not, my darling sons are currently lip-locking in their sleep. Sakura sleeps a couple feet away, twisting away from the scene, and Naruto is snoring softly. I’m amazed that Sasuke hasn’t woken up yet…
Sighing, I really do hate to interrupt such a beautiful relationship in the waking, I take a couple of steps back and barge forward, leaping onto the bed. All of my kids scream loudly, Sakura face planting into the wall she’s facing, and Sasuke and Naruto scream even louder when they realize they were just kissing.
I cackle wickedly, desperately wishing I had taken a picture, and fall back on their bed.
“Mom!” Naruto shouts, crawling on top of me. “What was that for!”
Sasuke and Sakura soon join them. Naruto sits on my stomach, Sasuke my legs, and Sakura on my feet. I go to move, but then realize I’m trapped.
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.” Naruto cackles evilly, looming over me.
“KAKASHI!” I scream, squirming beneath them, trying to flail wildly.
My husband appears in the doorway, lazy orb smiling at the sight before him. I scowl at him and continue to flail. “Help me!”
Kakashi sighs loudly and I can see him debating on if he should help me. I shoot him a really dark look-silently threatening no sex for the rest of the damn year if he doesn’t get his ass over here-and he seems to sense that threat because he steps into the room and shoos the kids off.
I sit up triumphantly. “VICTORY!!!”
And then, before the kids can climb back on, I leap off the bed and start running. I hear the bed creak under their weight as they jump off and race after me. Minato looks up as I enter the room and smiles sleepily in greeting. Kushina pokes her head around the door to the kitchen, laughing when I skid to a stop in front of the couch and sit down like a civilized, proper person.
“You cheated.” Naruto announces as he enters the room. “You can’t use Dad like that!”
“The hell I can’t!” I stick my tongue out at him and cackle evilly as he climbs onto the couch beside me and Sasuke sits on the other side of me, as far away from Naruto possible. “How’d you sleep, hon?” I ask him, brushing a few strands of black away from his face.
“Fine.”
Such an Uchiha. I shake my head and smile crookedly, turning to Naruto and Sakura. “What about you two?”
“Fine.” Naruto grimaces. “Until I woke up.”
I snicker. “You’re so lucky I didn’t have a camera.”
“Mom!”
Sakura rolls her eyes and flips on the television. “I had an awesome dream.” Her eyes glaze over with a fangirlish tint and she glances over to Sasuke dreamily. She giggles and blushes several shades of red.
Kakashi walks in and I stand to join him at the table. After some useless, err useless on my part because I’m too busy oogling at my husband to pay attention, conversation about where the lady is and how to get to her little art store in the village, Kakashi decides that he’s going to take me out for breakfast.
“Be good kids.” I skewer them with my eyes. “If you’re any trouble, I will kill you. And it will be slow and painful, got it?”
“Yes mom.” They all three answer in unison.
I smile sweetly and look to Minato and Kushina. “Feel free to clobber them, especially Naruto.”
“Hey!”
I giggle and Kakashi pulls me out the door.
“Thank you, love.” I smile and take his hand. Breakfast was sweet, a little restaurant on the edge of town that’s classy enough to still have fresh flowers as a center piece of each table. Kakashi squeezes my hand and presses a gentle kiss to my temple.
I grin and he smiles. “It’s been a while since it was just the two of us.” He ponders aloud, trailing off suggestively.
“Is that why you dragged me out here?” I smirk, stopping and twisting around to face him. I step forward and lightly press my hands against his chest, fingers slowly trailing up and down. “So we could take advantage of our new ‘babysitting service’ for the day?”
“Mhn.” He nods and leans in, lips pressing small butterfly kisses down my nose and to my lips. “Besides, you owe it to me.”
I giggle. “How so?”
Instead of pecking my lips like I was expecting, he tugs his mask down and starts to nibble on my neck-instantly finding my weak spot. I mewl softly, eyes fluttering shut, and my back presses against a tree I never even knew existed.
“You see,” He trails his kisses back up my neck, over my chin, and then hovers over my lips. “You destroyed my books. And so now, for your punishment, you have to act out my favorite scenes with me.”
My face flushes several shades of red.
Kakashi smirks and dips in. His lips press against mine harshly, hungrily, and I cave. My arms reach up and wind around his neck, fingers tangling in his hair, and his body presses against mine. His knee slides up, hoisting me up off the ground, and I wind my legs around his torso-a mixture between a growl and a moan ripping past my lips when I feel his hardened member against my upper thigh.
All rational thought evades my mind.
And I like it.
“So do two people really fuck in the middle of a forest against a tree in one of your books? Because I don’t remember seeing that in there.” I tease lightly, bumping my hip against his.
He smirks, visibly satisfied with himself. “No. But we had to adlib with what we had.”
I giggle and shake my head. “Horny little bastard.”
Within a blink of an eye, Kakashi reaches down and sweeps me up into his arms. I squeal loudly-gaining the attention of several people passing us-cling to his neck like a wet cat. “What was that?” He grins evilly, playfully.
“I didn’t stutter!” I grin and lick his nose.
“Did you just lick my nose?”
“Do you have a problem with that?” I snicker.
Kakashi pauses for a moment and then smiles sheepishly. “I’d rather you lick something else.”
I blush a good twenty different shades of red. Burying my beat red face into the crook of his neck, I cover his mouth with my hand. “You’re horrible. Now how am I supposed to go in there like a normal civilian?”
His lips press against my head. “Well, we could go back to the forest.”
“Kakashi!” I swat at him. He laughs whole heartedly and lowers me to the ground, but he doesn’t let go. Hugging me tightly to his chest, he buries his face into my hair to stifle his laughter.
“Okay, okay, I’ll stop.”
“Buttmunch.” I scowl at him.
Kakashi chuckles and presses his lips against mine, roughly, a silent reminder of earlier. I try to wipe the blush off my face and fail miserably, which only makes him laugh again. Sticking my tongue out at him, I start walking off towards the shop and leave him fumbling behind.
Minato said she owned an art shop-which doesn’t surprise me in the least. From what I heard last night, she’s a really old woman who’s been around forever and is a master at evading questions.
I push open the door and take a small step inside. I hastily shut the door behind me and flip the lock, smirking deviously when Kakashi tries to open it and gives me a dirty look. Pressing my thumbs against my temples, I wiggle my fingers and make a face through the glass. Once I’m finished, I unlock the door and step further inside.
She sits on a small lounge chair, directly across a small mismatching loveseat, looking fairly amused.
“Amaya.” I breathe softly, eyes widening.
I know her, because she is me. As strange as that sounds, it’s the only way to describe it. She is a part of me, inside of me, and I can hear a voice inside the back of my mind second my thoughts. Energy floods around my arm and I look down. My dragon mark is shining brightly, a strange coiling black mist seeping off of it and into the air.
Looking back up to Amaya, I realize she sees it too.
“I’m surprised you found your way back.” The woman sits back slightly in her chair and gestures to the loveseat in front of her, motioning for us to sit. Her long brown hair-streaked with gray-is coiled up into a high messy bun. Her face is soft, heart shaped, with a small nose and pouty lips like mine.
I take Kakashi by the hand and we sit down across from her. Amaya smiles slightly at out intertwined fingers and then reaches out her arm.
Her own black dragon shaped tattoo shimmers up at me.
The mist has stopped seeping out of me, and I feel strangely lighter, as if someone’s removed a weight I hadn’t even known I was carrying from my back.
“Do you understand where you are? What is going on?” Amaya looks down and I see the black mist settling into her arm. “Do you know who I am?”
I nod. “You’re Amaya. The first Artist.”
She smiles. “Is that all?”
My brows furrow. There’s more?
Amaya smiles softly and clasps her hands together in her lap. She seems almost a little nervous, finger fiddling and picking at each other, and she glances away before she speaks again. “I am many things to you, though you may be unaware of it. There have only been two true Artists in existence-Artists with dragon energy inside-me and my daughter.”
My eyes widen at the last word. What?
“When you were five, I had a vision.” Amaya settles back against the chair, arms resting on the armrests, blue eyes distant. “It was horrible, gruesome, and it helped me realize that we would not survive the impending war.”
Her eyes settle on me. “And I couldn’t do that to you, my darling girl.”
My breath hitches in my throat. The cold, unbearable truth settles into my bones. I can’t deny it any more, the similarities are there. Her hair, my hair, her eyes, my eyes, our face. The only differences are that my eyes aren’t slanted and I’m smaller, more petite, while she’s thicker and stronger.
“So I sent you away, using a mixture of my Kekkei Genkai and the energy the dragons gave me when they departed, to a place where I thought you’d be safe. You were reborn into that world with a small portion of my soul deeply embedded into your mind to guide you back when time came.”
“But…my mother.” A sudden rage swells up inside of me. I could’ve avoided that, my mother, the pain, everything!
Her blue eyes become eerily frosty and I fall silent-raging on the inside.
“She was a fool. I do not wish to talk about her.”
Outraged, I go to stand up but Kakashi holds me back, squeezing my hand tightly. Amaya seems to defrost after a few moments of silence and she blinks. “Now that you are back, I have guided you here for a reason.”
She stands gracefully and takes several steps to her right, behind the checkout counter. Stepping up onto her tiptoes, she pulls a small, antique looking box out from the shelf behind the desk and then turns back to us. Amaya lightly pads back over to us and hands me the box.
I take it bitterly.
It sits in my lap gingerly. I can feel the power buzzing around inside, like a jar filled with buzzing flies.
“That is the scroll. You will need it for the future, to help you and Naruto bring peace back to this world. Do you know why the dragons left?”
I scowl at her. “No. You’ve been pretty vague.”
She almost smiles. “That is because nothing is set in stone.”
“But the past is.” My eyes narrow.
“Not completely.” Amaya shakes her head, making several more strands of brownish silver fall out of the bun and frame her face. “You’ve witnessed how easy it is to travel to the past for us and you know how much we could affect the future.”
“But, despite this, I will tell you about the dragons and why they left.”
She sits back down in her chair and settles in. After a few moments of staring silently, she sighs softly and continues on.
“The dragons roamed the earth like gods. They were creatures of immense power-with abilities to control nature and life itself. When I was young, I was the only one in my village who wasn’t terrified of them. Who didn’t hate them. And I befriended them, easily.”
“Everything has it’s time. Soon, even humans will be banished from this world and shifted onto the next, reborn into savage wildness and expected to find peace once more. The dragon’s knew their time was up, and thus in gratitude of my friendship and tolerance, gifted me with their power. I was shifted onto the next world as an immortal being, where humans already had divided themselves up into different villages. The world I am from was destroyed. Even now, I cannot go back to it.”
“I had you ten years after I came here. You were two when Konoha was established and ten when I sent you away, just before the Third goes into battle with Tobi.”
My eyes widen. “Wait…how?”
“Artists age very slowly. You are roughly three hundred, and yet look to be seventeen.” Amusement enters her features. “I am over three thousand years old, and yet look to be a fifty year old woman graying prematurely, right?”
I swear my eyes are going to pop out.
“I dyed my hair gray so that the villagers won’t notice me not aging as they do. Few know my status as Artist, and even fewer know my true age and abilities.”
I touch my long hair gingerly. “Why am I a neko? And you aren’t?”
To this, Amaya falls silent. A soft sense of sadness enters her eyes and tugs her features down. Her eyes find Kakashi. “Your father was a neko.”
I fall silent. “Who is my father?”
“An unnamed merchant in history.” Amaya answers stiffly. “He died several hundred years ago.”
I flinch and nod. My fingers trace over the small box in my lap, over the engraving of a dragon etched into the top and the strange pattern that borders the edges. “I came here to learn about my Kekkei Genkai, but instead, I’m learning about my life story.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted? I thought you wanted answers.”
My head shoots up with surprise and I nod quickly.
“What else do you want to know?”
I glance back down at the box. “Why are we called Artists? What do we do? What are the limits?”
“We are called Artists because of the way we manipulate our chakra. By carving a design into our bodies, we are able to bring to life that design and manipulate it against our will. For example, when you fought Zabuza, you brought a dragon to life and commanded it to attack. That dragon is still there, inside of you, waiting to be commanded to attack again, and same with anything else you carve into your body. Your Kekkei Genkai is the ability to travel back into time and through dimensions. You cannot go into dimensions that have been destroyed and certain time periods are blocked by emotion. Other than that, your power is limitless.”
“Any other questions?”
“Am I immortal?” My brows furrow.
Amaya shakes her head. “No one is truly immortal. I use the term loosely. We all die someday, even I will, and we can be killed. You spill blood easily, no?” She nods towards my neck.
My hand lifts up and lightly touches the scarred skin there-where Kakashi slit my throat.
“I just mean we age slowly, to the point that we seem to be immortal.” Amaya’s head snaps up as a small bell jingles, signaling that someone has entered the store. She stands, shoots us one long last look, and then waves her hand in front of my face.
“I release you now. You may remember.”
As her hand pulls away, a dark blackness clots my vision and drugs my mind. Amaya steps back and looks to Kakashi. “You might want to take her home now. That is all I have for you.” Is the last thing my hazy mind hears.