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Chapter 4: FourChapter Text

FOUR

The first few weeks following Sansa's traumatic rebirth passed in a haze of confusion and despair. Considering the bizarre and quite frankly traumatising circumstances of it all, she wasn't ashamed to say she withdrew into herself quite completely, bewildered and distraught, barely able to comprehend the impossibility of what had happened to her. She almost wondered if it was all some sort of bizarre fever dream, only it was all so far beyond what her imagination could have created that she knew it must be true. Sansa wasn't sure how long the haze lasted, or how long it would have continued to last, had it not been for the attempt on her and Naruto's lives drawing her abruptly back to the present.

She smelled the salt first; tears, she would later realise. Their would-be murderer had been crying when he slunk into their room. At first, she thought nothing of his presence, just as she'd thought nothing of all the other men and women who'd come in and out of the small room she and Naruto had been left in that very first day and hadn't left since. She was simply too distraught and distracted to care for what was happening in the world around her. That was, until rough hands tore Naruto from her side and a flash of metal was followed by her baby brother making a terrible gurgling sound in the man's arms.

Sansa reacted instantly, letting out a high-pitched shriek of fear-fury-horror-terror that surprised even her. Even through the haze, she hadn't forgotten Kushina's last words to her; You and your brother, you will be the last of our clan, the last of the Uzumaki, her new mother, just as red of hair as her last mother, had told her with her dying breath, you'll need to protect each other... love each other... because you'll be the last...

Sansa was used to being the last; for so long, she'd thought herself to be the only Stark left in the world, a lone-wolf with a slaughtered pack. And oh! How ferociously she had clung to her returned family, her still-living pack, when she'd found them once more! There was very little Sansa would not have done for her family, and now Naruto was her family, the very last of her family. He was her pack, and she would fight with every weapon she had, to her very last breath; for Naruto, for Kushina, for the Uzumaki Clan, and even for herself.

Not that there was anything she could actually do, not in this frail, unresponsive form; she was defenceless, helpless, the same way she'd been as a little girl, held back sobbing and screaming as her father's head was hacked from his body in a merciless swing of the executioner's sword. Her father's blood had been so very dark and red that day, just as red as the blood gushing and spurting so alarmingly from Naruto's small neck.

The attacker cursed at her loud, sudden scream, and carelessly dropped Naruto's small, bleeding form back in their shared cradle so he could reach for her, wet blood and gleaming silver in his hands. The iron perfume of Naruto's blood was overpowering to her poor nose, the thick red of it quickly soaking through the blankets. In that moment, looking up at the man, Sansa was entirely convinced that she was about to die alongside her brother. And, in that very same moment, she realised, for the very first time since she'd opened her eyes in this strange, awful, new world, that she did not want to die. She was a Stark, she was a survivor, and she wanted to live.

The sharp-toothed wolf that had been slumbering deep within her as she was lost in her grief finally reared its head, awakened by her resolve and ferocity, and Sansa's screams changed in pitch, from high-pitched and shrill, to something deeper, something rage-filled and snarling. A burning, scouring heat filled her, as the rage-hatred-fury burned ferociously in her stomach; she bared her fleshy, aching gums at the man reaching for her, and tasted the salty-iron of fresh, hot blood that started to drip down her throat as the pain in her gums spiked suddenly.

The acrid stench of fear filled the air, suddenly; Sansa wasn't sure why, wasn't sure what was so terrifying about a babe, barely more than a newborn, but the man leaning above her let out a strangled sound, staring at her with wide, horrified, terrified eyes.

And, most importantly of all, for a few brief, precious seconds, he froze in place– and that was enough time for the animal-masked guards to finally appear.

The appearance of the animal-masked guards was a relief to Sansa, but barely so. The attacker was torn away from them by the guard wearing the bear-mask, but her brother was still dying by her side, his blood dying their thin blankets a dark crimson. The rage-hatred-fury she felt faded quickly, replaced instead by horror-fear-grief as she wailed at the sight of the weeping crimson line drawn deep along Naruto's tender neck, carving open strawberry-pink flesh and leaving her baby brother to drown in his own blood.

This was how her mother had died, Sansa realised, distraught and not able to stop herself from showing it, not that she cared to hide her grief in this terrible moment. This was how Catelyn Stark had died, her throat cut so deeply that flashes of bone were visible through the thick gushes of red. And now, this was how her brother would die too.

The guard wearing a rabbit mask placed their hand over Naruto's neck, over his slit throat, and Sansa shrieked her fury, desperately trying to reach for Naruto, cursing her small, useless limbs that flailed about so uncooperatively. The rabbit-masked guard's hand lit up with eerie green light and Sansa's panic swelled as Naruto stopped gurgling. Except... to her utter astonishment, when the guard moved their hand away, the terrible wound scored across her brother's fragile little throat no longer looked quite so terrible, and his little chest seemed to be moving easier, as if he could take in air again.

Gasping, trembling, Sansa actually dared to– hope.

(And oh, and what a terrifying, terrible, treacherous thing hope was!)

Perhaps, just perhaps, Naruto would survive this yet. Whatever strange, unnatural magicks these foreigners used, perhaps it could heal the terrible wound. Perhaps she wasn't about to become a lone wolf once more.

Before she got the chance to get a better look at Naruto's throat, her brother was scooped up into a set of arms, these belonging to a woman– judging by the figure– in a rooster mask. Sansa cried out in protest, but just moments later she was lifted too, by the man in a striped, cat-like mask who clearly had no knowledge of how to properly hold a babe in order to support the weak neck. Before Sansa could let her displeasure at the inadequate handling be known, the man moved, and the world blurred unsettlingly around her.

Her stomach rolled with displeasure and Sansa tried to summon the breath to cry out, to scream, but couldn't manage it against the pressure of the air. She could only gasp, tiny, soft sounds of shock, and cling to the dark vest of the striped-masked man with weak little fingers.

And then the man stopped moving, to her utter relief, and she realised she was back in the room she and Naruto had first been taken to on that first day, after they'd been taken away from the cave with their dead parents. It was the room where the white-haired man, Jiraiya, had examined the marks on her and Naruto's stomach, 'seals' he'd called them, and named them to be perfect. It was also where Jiraiya had apologised to them but had still prioritised the village– Konoha, Sansa thought it was called, from what she'd managed to track of the conversation– over them, and she wasn't sure how to take that. As a Queen, she understood the necessity of sacrifice; as a helpless, newly orphaned babe, she was enraged that he would break his vows to her and Naruto's parents and abandon them.

It was in this room that she'd also 'met' the old, tired-looking man with eyes tight with grief, Hiruzen, who had given Jiraiya his orders– clearly, he was the ruler of this village– a sharp-tongued elderly woman, a silent elderly man with the glasses and beard, and a clever-eyed, bandaged old man, Danzo, who had enraged Jiraiya so, and who had looked over at her and Naruto with the sort of greedy hunger she recognised.

Oh yes, she certainly recognised that look of his; that desire to possess, to manipulate, to use, as if she and Naruto were little more than pieces on a cyvasse board. Valuable pieces, yes, just as Sansa Stark, Key to the North, had been a valuable piece to the greedy, covetous players around her, but still just a piece to be played nonetheless. Sansa had taught all those who'd seen her as such the depth and breadth of their mistake; she was no piece, but a player in her own right, one who had learned from the many successes and failures of the masters of the great game; Cersei, Margaery, Olenna, Petyr, Tyrion. When you played the Game of Thrones, you won or you died; Sansa had outlived them all. Even in this helpless body, in this strange, horrible world, she would never again be treated as a playing piece to be moved by her 'betters'.

Jiraiya, this absent godfather of hers and Naruto, had protected them from Danzo; that, at least, he had done for them. Still, she couldn't help but wonder as she watched from her perch in the striped-masked man's arms while a series of oddly-dressed men and women hovered over little Naruto where he was laid out on a bed with white-sheets that were rapidly staining red, snapping out strings of words she didn't understand, such as 'hypovolemic shock' and 'organ failure', their hands glowing that same eerie-green as the bird-mask woman, if this would have happened to Naruto if they'd been in Jiraiya's care.

The wolf inside her rumbled darkly, enraged at the man who would abandon his helpless pups, and Sansa wasn't sure she could ever forgive him, not even if Naruto lived.

And if Naruto died… if Naruto died, well, there would be nowhere in the world that the man could hide from her wrath, even if it took years for this frail, helpless body to grow old and strong enough for her to take her revenge.

The strange men and women worked over her brother for a long time, with their strange magicks, odd bags of blood that they fed into him with a length of strange, clear piping, and another clear length of piping, no thicker than a quill, that they'd inserted into his lower neck through a small incision they'd made below the much larger wound– Sansa suspected, from its placement, that it was meant to help air reach Naruto's lungs, though she was bewildered as to how it worked to do so.

Sansa made sure to stay silent the entire time, watching with a sharp focus that she knew would not go unnoticed, but did not care in this moment to worry herself over. That could come later, when she knew Naruto would live. The one time the striped-mask man tried to move away, to carry her from her brother, she had shrieked her rage, baring her gums at him... only, they weren't just an infant's gums anymore, and she wasn't sure who was more surprised– her or the striped-mask man, who had stopped moving immediately at the sight.

Sansa remembered the sudden sharp pain and the mouthful of blood as she'd bared her gums at the attacker, back in those terrible moments when she'd thought Naruto was dead and the man was about to kill her too, but she'd been so distracted by Naruto and her own imminent death that she hadn't noticed what it meant. Not until now, when she snapped her mouth shut and cautiously probed at the gums with her tongue.

Teeth. Sharp, pointy little teeth. Wolf-teeth.

Sansa had to restrain herself from peeling her lips back and smiling.

"What a terrifyingly protective little creature you are," the striped-mask man murmured, so quietly she barely heard it. He stopped trying to move, at least, and Sansa was able to stay and watch as the men and women in their odd uniforms fought to save her brother's life.