In the cold of space you find the heat of suns

Apologies if the characters have grown differently in their new environment.

Please read the author’s note at the bottom.

Spacer crews travel the Far Borders and the Fringe of occupied space, trading. Spacing is an ancient and honourable profession carved out by millenniums. Most spacers start out as fourteen-year-old boys seeking a future. Few survive a decade spacing.

42. Household

Sasuke sat at his desk in his office. It has been his father’s desk and his grandfather’s and numerous Uchiha leaders before them. The office had been the easiest room to furnish. He had requested a different colour for the walls, thick rugs for the floor and more comfortable chairs. Otherwise everything had been moved from his father’s office. He had left Neji to decide how the room should look and Shino to update the technology. Delegating was one of Sasuke’s strongest qualities as a leader.

The result was very satisfactory.

“How is it going, dobe?” he asked.

Naruto was sitting cross-legged on one of the rugs. Sasuke had wanted the rug because people had insisted on kowtowing to his father and the floor had been so hard. Sasuke remembered ancient men who could barely walk kneeling on that floor. It was a bonus that Naruto liked the rugs so much.

Naruto considered. “Iruka-sensei is very stressed,” he answered.

Sasuke had not meant it as a serious question but he immediately focused on Naruto’s answer. He must resolve Iruka’s problems with a few of the elite fighters. It was cowardly of him to delay. “Do you think you could persuade him to come here and share tea with us?” he asked Naruto.

“Leave you here alone while I get Iruka-sensei?” Naruto queried.

“I know it is bigger, Naruto, but the household is like a ship or a unit. Only those we trust, only the equivalent of crew, are inside. The security is as good as it was on the ship or at the unit. It is fine to leave me alone.”

“I know that, teme.” Naruto complained.

Sasuke came out from behind the desk and crouched down next to him. “You know it here,” he said, touching Naruto’s forehead, “but it hasn’t sunk in here yet.” He touched Naruto’s chest.”

Naruto scowled at him. “Teme.”

Sasuke smiled in return. “Dobe.”


Sasuke made tea in the small kitchen off the office. That, like having the rug, was something his father would not have done. His father would have ordered tea from one of the many servants. He thought about what he had learned from looking through his father’s personal records, which, like those of all previous Uchiha leaders, had been in the desk. He shuddered.

“You summoned me, Sasuke-sama,” Iruka stated, his voice like ice.

Alarms sounded in Sasuke’s head. It was a long time since he had heard that tone in Iruka’s voice. It reminded him of Genma, which was upsetting. Naruto looked unhappy, which made it worse. Sasuke placed the tray on the small table at the other end of the room to his desk. “I apologise for interrupting you, Iruka-sensei. I should have come to find you myself or made an appointment.”

Iruka nodded and settled into one of the chairs. Sasuke poured him tea. Naruto sat on the rug. Sasuke went to his desk, took something from one of the drawers and placed it in his pocket. He then sat opposite Iruka.

“I know it is strange,” Sasuke admitted. “We are a crew but we have no ship. I have tried to pretend that this is just another unit,” he gestured to indicate their new home, “but what went before makes it different.”

“We are more than a crew, we are a family,” Naruto said firmly.

Sasuke and Iruka looked at him.

“That was what Uchiha was,” Naruto continued, “before it got big and powerful. I asked Shi-chan. He showed me how to use the new information bank. Uchiha started with a crew who decided to be a family. We were a crew and we are becoming a family.” He looked at Sasuke. “When we swore to Uchiha, it was like being adopted.” He smiled. “For Iruka-sensei it was like promising yourself to someone because you love them and discovering you have got all his weird relatives as well.”

Iruka started to laugh. “True," he admitted. "I fell in love with Kakashi, who never told me that he was anything more than an ordinary spacer, and I ended up here.”

Sasuke took a deep breath. He could do it. “Iruka-sensei, I need to tell you more about my mother. She agreed to run the Uchiha household. She agreed to raise the Uchiha children. She never loved my father. She was never intimate with him. He was incapable of having a loving relationship with anyone. He occasionally fucked men.

"She also agreed to give half her chromosomes to a child. I, like all children who were born Uchiha, was grown in a gestator. I exist because my father asked the Hyuga who was working for him how to get an heir who was not flawed like Itachi. My mother was his solution.

“You are finishing what she began. It was like I went into cold storage when she died. It was only when I met you and Kakashi-sensei that I started to grow again.

"You have stood in her place and I would be honoured if you would continue to do so. I cannot give you her ring, because it has become Naruto’s love ring to me, but I found this.” He took the ring from his pocket and placed it on the table. “It was worn by my great-grandfather’s partner, who was the last male to run the Uchiha household.

“Please, Iruka-sensei, please run the Uchiha household.” He shut his eyes, unable to risk seeing a negative reaction on Iruka's face. “Please finish helping me become the man I can be and please help us raise any children we decide to have.”

“Please, Iruka-sensei,” Naruto echoed.

Iruka stared at the ring and then studied the two young men in front of him: Naruto’s blue eyes so full of love and hope and Sasuke’s white face, pinched with his fear of rejection. “I will have to speak with Kakashi first,” he told them.

Sasuke’s eyes flew opened. “That isn’t a no,” he stated. His expression was more than a little desperate.

“It is not a no,” Iruka confirmed. “It is a ‘you don’t go making life-changing decisions without consulting your partner’ which is something both you and Kakashi could learn, Sasuke-kun.”


Iruka had to go into the elite fighters’ home territory to find Kakashi. He found him in the small room that Asuma had assured them was only there as a symbol. Iruka saw what he was doing through the open doorway and slowed. He was looking through a chest. Iruka’s throat tightened. It was not difficult to deduce that the chest contained items from before Kakashi had gone undercover, from before Iruka had entered his life. He knocked on the doorjamb. Kakashi looked over and, seeing whom it was, shut the chest.

“I need to speak with you,” Iruka told him. “Maybe in our room?”

Kakashi smiled at him, “You came to find me. It must be important.”

Iruka checked that no one was within earshot. “Sasuke just asked me to run the Uchiha household.” He decided Kakashi should know. “He and Naruto asked me to help raise any children they decide to have in the future. I think they are assuming that that you will help raise them too. That was certainly the flavour of the conversation.”

Kakashi sat on the bed and beckoned Iruka to sit beside him. “They are very young. This whole venture is still precarious. The future they imagine will probably never happen.”

Iruka smiled at him. “Believe me, Kakashi, I would be happy if you and I ended up running a bar on some space station somewhere. However, we have to be willing to play our part if it happens. We have to be willing to raise his children while he and Naruto are off with Shikamaru and Neji. If he gets himself killed, we would have to start again with another child.”

“We would clone him,” Kakashi told him. “Cells are taken from every Uchiha embryo and placed in stasis. Itachi didn’t destroy the tissue bank. He tried but there were too many safeguards.”

Iruka blinked. “You could have told me you had it all planned.”

Kakashi had the grace to flush. “I didn’t mean ‘we’ as ‘you and me’. I meant ‘we’ as ‘Uchiha’.”

“There is no longer any difference between the two,” Iruka told him. He imagined raising a baby Sasuke. It gave him strange fluttery feelings. “So you agree that I should say yes?” he asked.

Kakashi looked at him in horror. “You didn’t say yes? You left Sasuke without an answer? Have you any idea how hard it must have been for him to ask?”

“Yes, yes and yes,” Iruka answered. “He knows I am talking to you.”

Kakashi was up. He had Iruka by the hand. Iruka found himself having to almost run to keep up.


When they arrived Naruto was in one of the chairs with Sasuke in his lap. Sasuke was curled against his chest and Iruka was reminded of how young he was. Naruto stood up and placed Sasuke on his feet, an unconscious demonstration of his phenomenal strength. They looked at him; Naruto in expectation and Sasuke with hope.

“I am honoured to accept,” he told them.

“All of it,” Naruto checked. “Even the children bit.”

Iruka deduced that it was that part that meant most to Sasuke. “Especially the children bit,” he agreed.


To Iruka’s relief it made a difference. Once the ring was on his duty finger even the most difficult of the elite fighters obeyed him. The strangest change was in Jiraiya, who was now content to treat Iruka as his superior despite never having accepted his authority as queen on the Silver Leaf. Iruka had an office, a master key, a budget, authorisation for two of the Uchiha accounts and, of all things, a seal.

The first time he worked in his office, Shikamaru turned up at his door asking if he could talk to him. When Iruka nodded, Shikamaru slipped inside, shut the door behind him and sat down. Shikamaru was anxious; Iruka could see that. He waited.

“Iruka-sensei, six hundred and forty-three families have offered us babies since Sasuke did the interview,” Shikamaru told him. “I have tried mentioning this to Sasuke but he refuses to listen.”

Iruka was horrified at the number and worried that Sasuke would not tackle resolving the problem.

“We have to do something,” Shikamaru continued. “We have to work out what to say to those families and we have to discourage families from doing it in the future. If we don’t, they are going to resent us. Neji agrees on that. The consequences of not doing something and not doing it soon are very bad.”

Iruka had learned to listen when Shikamaru said ‘very bad’. It could mean anything from system failure to the death of thousands but it was always dire and significant. “Fetch Neji,” he decided.


He placed the draft letter on Sasuke’s desk. “It would be better from you, Sasuke-sama, but I will write them, sign them and dispatch them otherwise. Each family will receive a compressed holographic image. Those families that are close enough will also receive the original and where that is not possible the original will be placed in the archive.

Sasuke read the first line and then looked at him. “I said to leave it and Shikamaru went to you?” he asked coldly.

Iruka folded his arms and stared him down. “Shikamaru often comes to me for advice. This was the first time it was about an Uchiha matter. You would not listen to him when he told you that the situation was acute and urgent. That was wrong of you. You should not have called him the voice in your ear unless you meant it.”

Sasuke flushed slightly and finished reading the letter. “You have been kinder to them than I would have been, these people who are so willing to give up their children.”

“Many of them think they are sending them to a better future,” Iruka told him. “Will you sign them?”

Sasuke picked up his pen and made a few alterations. “We have a pantograph. I will need to write the letter once and then each name. It will produce letters that are indistinguishable from handwritten. I will then sign and seal each individually.” He looked at Iruka. “In return, we will discuss staffing the household.”

It was Iruka’s turn to flush.


They scheduled their discussion for when the copier was producing the first batch of letters. As they were in Sasuke’s office, he made and poured the tea.

“Neji has calculated that you need another four people to run the household,” Sasuke began.

Iruka tensed. He could and would not put up with four strangers.

“Choza-san has asked for a change in role. At his age and with his physique he is finding it difficult to maintain the level of fitness required of an elite fighter. He is hoping that you will agree to have him work for you.” Sasuke smiled. “Of course, he is hoping that you will allow him to be Cook.”

Iruka relaxed slightly. “I am honoured that Choza-san would want to work with me. We would all benefit if he were Cook.”

“I have been wondering about Kurenai-san,” Sasuke told him. “She is very competent. She has had many jobs involving administration. Her experience as a mother may be invaluable later. She could look after the household when we are spacing. We could adapt the accommodation so that the children could be with us during the day. That would be good for us. It would help us be a family.”

Iruka wondered when Sasuke was going to suggest babies. He guessed that Mikoto had possessed a huge maternal instinct, which would have been one of the reasons she had been selected to be Sasuke’s mother. Perhaps Sasuke had inherited the urge to have children from her. Iruka gave him a standard, no longer, despite his frequent assertions that he was too young to be a father. “Kurenai-san would have to swear to Uchiha,” Iruka pointed out.

Sasuke frowned slightly. “Yes. I thought that I would offer her the alternative of swearing to me personally, like Naruto and Haku are sworn to me personally. If we decide to ask her, I thought that you and I could meet with her and Asuma-san.”

Iruka agreed. He admired Kurenai-san. Her love had made Asuma strong.

“Hiruzen-sama wishes Konohamaru-kun to cat with us. Konohamaru wishes it also. I have explained to them both that Konohamaru would have to be sworn to Uchiha but they do not see that as an obstacle. Konohamaru is almost as thoroughly trained as I was, although considerably less competent.”

Iruka suppressed a smile. Konohamaru was the closest Sasuke had to family. Then he thought of the boy as cat. “He would need to off-limits to some of the elite fighters,” Iruka warned.

Sasuke nodded. “We will not be a Traditional crew, so we can set our own rules.” His lips quirked. “Haku is brilliant with them.”

Iruka smiled in return, shaking his head at some of the images: Fu’s girly boy and the geisha and the wide-eyed lad, never mind the roles that he had insisted Haku restrict to the confines of the elite fighters’ crew room.

“Then I thought we would look for one or two other cats. It did me so much good having Naruto to compete with. Obviously Konohamaru and Haku aren’t going to be like that.”

“We should promote Haku,” Iruka said suddenly. “He deserves it and there is no problem with his fighting skills. Have we had any applications from youngsters wanting to cat?”

In response, Sasuke went to a cupboard and pulled out a large box full of the tiny cassettes that were the only standardised format for communication in the Fringe. “And another eight hundred and seventy odd electronically,” he told him. “I thought you, Kakashi, Ibiki and Jirariya could work down to a short list of five or six.”

Iruka stared at the box. “I think it will take more of us than that, Sasuke-sama. That is if you want us to have a second cat before Konohamaru is crew.”

---

Author’s note

When I first posted this chapter (15/02/2010) I asked readers for help identifying possibilities for Naruto characters that would make good cats. I had a great response. Some were emailed but you can read many of them among the reviews. It certainly helped me make my decision and opened my mind to other possibilities for later in the story. I decided to go with one of the possibilities I had mentioned, which had been popular with many readers and another than someone made and I followed up. I also got my head around how to introduce more females.

Thank you for all your help.

---