Iteration

‘Iteration’ is part of the space saga that began with ‘In the cold of space you find the heat of suns’ and continues in ‘Tales in Tarrasade’. There is also a one-shot ‘Silver Leaf Tales: Tying the knot’.

Thanks to Small Fox for being my beta. For this story he has also been my muse, suggesting a number of the ideas that have evolved to create this arc.

Thank you to those readers who have written a review and particular thanks to Anon, v, meow-ku, lonelylulaby, prettypurpletiger, Prism0467, sadie237, kanazerosukenaru, Moonmoore and Darling425 who reviewed chapter 51.

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

This is posted in the Naruto/Sasuke section because it is part of a Naru/Sasu/Naru space saga. However, it does feature many other pairings (and a few threesomes). Apologies to those who are expecting Naruto/Sasuke or Sasuke/Naruto every chapter.

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Chapter fifty-two: Pursuit

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Sasuke did not want to wake but, if he had to, he would choose to be woken by Naruto grooming him. The systematic stroking, licking and nibbling of every part of his body was as comforting as it was erotic.

A hand lingered on his morning erection, offering release. Sasuke kissed him. “Not now, sweetheart,” he admitted. He did not think that Naruto was disappointed. “You?” he checked.

Naruto shook his head. “Bath or shower?” he asked. “And you must find time for Rin to see your feet.”

“Shower,” Sasuke decided. “My feet are fine but, yes, I will make sure Rin checks them today.”


He set the spray to be hot and powerful but did not linger. Soon they were both on their way to the playroom, hoping that Kiba would forgive them for disturbing the schedule.

The children stopped what they were doing immediately and ran to them. Sasuke sat in one of the rocking chairs in the old playroom with Ryuu on one knee and Hikaru on the other. Kiba sat in the other with Kuuya. Naruto sat on the floor with Yuki, Keizo and Hoshi.

“The bad men have taken Yo-chan, Ya-chan, Ka-chan, Ha-chan and Shika-san,” Sasuke told them. He knew they already had been told, but they felt it was important to acknowledge the reality. “We are working to get them back.”

“What if we can’t get them back?” Yuki asked.

“We will get them back,” Sasuke assured him. “It may take a long time but we will do it.”

“Will the bad men hurt them?” Hikaru asked.

Sasuke steadied himself. “I do not think so, but it will upset them to be away from us. Just as it will upset us.”


They shared their midday meal with many of the crew but not the children; Kiba would take them to the galley after most of the adults were in position for the next phase of the operation.

When the enemy ship jumped, Sasuke instigated the activities that they did not wish the enemy to see: linking a mini-gate this side to the one they had left on the other side and launching a probe to watch over the system.

They jumped one hundred and one minutes after the enemy ship.

There were sixty-nine pods. Sasuke deployed the ships and the crews began checking each of them. It took just over three hundred minutes and they finished about four hundred minutes before the enemy ship was due to jump.

Like the pods in the system before, not one contained a child.

With anger deepening into rage, Sasuke broadcast a message. He said, bluntly, that unless he received some indication that the enemy intended to keep their word he would have to consider other courses of action.

The ships made their way home. The Silver Leaf made it in time for Naruto to help Kiba and Sasuke put the children to bed. It was hard. Sasuke was taunted by the four empty bunks.


The enemy ship jumped out of the second system and into the third during ship’s night. As before, they followed after one hundred and one minutes.

Sasuke had known that the two holes were close together in this system, so he was not surprised that the enemy ship had already gone.

They had left ninety-two pods. Everyone worked as fast as they could. Even the Oak retrieved some of the pods.

One of the pods contained Kazuki. When Sumaru brought his pod onto the Snow Willow, he had only fifteen minutes worth of air remaining.

Confirmation that the oxygen supply in the pods was restricted brought Sasuke perilously close to losing his temper.

He could not afford to do so. Others were relying on him. They managed to check every pod, deploy the mini-gate and the probe yet still jump one hundred and one minutes after the enemy ship.


The enemy ship had increased its speed; the gap between it and them had increased. It was now travelling at a velocity that the Oak could not match.

Sasuke contacted Itachi on the Dart and ordered him to close the gap. If he, Kisame and Kamatari were lucky enough to find a child then they were to keep him with them. What was essential was to jump into the next system exactly one hundred and one minutes after the enemy.

Itachi assured him that they would check as many pods as they could whilst achieving that objective.


In this system, the fourth, there were fifty-eight pods. When they were about halfway through checking them, about midmorning, Kiba brought Kazuki to the control room so that Sasuke could hold him.

Sasuke hugged him tightly, scratched behind his ears and kissed his forehead.

“The others aren’t back yet,” Kazuki told him, gravely.

Sasuke hugged him again. “I know, Kazu-chan, but you are back and that makes me very happy.”

Kazuki looked at him with Naruto’s eyes. “They called me it. They said I wasn’t human.”

Sasuke stroked his ears and his tail. “They are stupid,” he declared.

Kazuki perked up. “Stupid?” he queried.

“Stupid,” Sasuke insisted. “And ignorant. And very, very wrong. You are Kazuki Uchiha and you are just perfect.”

Kazuki fluffed his tail, straightened his ears, twitched his whiskers and lifted his chin. “I am Kazuki Uchiha. I am a fox-human hybrid like my To-chan and I am proud of it.”

Suddenly checking over two hundred empty pods was irrelevant. Sasuke’s anger drained away. All that mattered was that he had one of his children home safely.

All fifty-eight pods in that system were empty.


The Dart jumped to the next system just after midnight, one hundred and one minutes after the enemy. The Oak was two-hundred and eighty-six minutes behind. That system, the fifth, contained forty-seven pods.

Checking the pods was becoming routine. Sasuke hated that the bizarre ritual had become normal. He loathed the fact that he expected Haru’s bunk to be empty and that he already thought about consulting Kakashi rather than Shikamaru.

But one of the forty-seven pods in the fifth system contained Yasushi. He was found by Inari, Tatsuji and Moegi, who were using the high power to mass ratio of the Cherry to check the furthest flung of the pods. All the other pods had been checked by the time the Cherry had reintegrated with the Sakura and the Sakura had docked. That meant that the Silver Leaf was docked and both Sasuke and Naruto could be waiting in the docking bay.

“I have been hugged and kissed a lot,” Yasushi informed them when Naruto plucked him from Iruka’s arms.

Sasuke could imagine. Even so, he had to have one hug and one kiss. Yasushi hugged him back; apparently hugs from his Papa and his To-chan were different.

“How much oxygen was there?” he asked Inari as Naruto bore Yasushi away to join the other children in the playroom.

Inari frowned. “Over another five hundred minutes,” he admitted.

That was odd. It was as if Kazuki’s supply had been limited to give them a scare; to ensure they prioritised checking the pods. Or, perhaps, they really did think of Kazuki as not human; Yasushi might be a hybrid but he did not have fox ears and a tail.


They jumped into the sixth system in the afternoon of the fifth day. The Dart was five hundred and eighty minutes ahead of them. There were eighty-two pods but no child.

The seventh system would be where the situation became complicated. It had two alterative exit holes. One had been discovered by the original space hopper thousands of standards before and headed Inwards. The other, much more recently mapped, allowed ships to cut across the Fringe.


The Oak jumped into the seventh system on the cusp between the sixth and seventh day of the pursuit. Waiting for them were over a thousand pods and the wreckage of a ship.

For one dreadful moment Sasuke thought that the wreckage was the Dart and that they had lost Kisame, Itachi and Kamatari. Then they detected the Dart lurking near the hole sideways.

Sasuke set a course for that hole and went ahead with undocking the ships to check the pods. “Is there anything from the Dart?” he asked Shino.

There was a message from Itachi. It was audio only and coded.

“Itachi here. The wreckage was there when we jumped in, along with the pods. It is the ship we have been following. We analysed the radiation patterns at each hole. They are the same, there has been recent activity at each. My guess is that they scattered the pods and then sent high speed vessels containing our people to each of the holes. Then they destroyed the ship. Other ships jumped in briefly and picked up the small vessels

“The chances of those ships being tagged are very low because the pods will have soaked up the tags.

“There is also a message from the enemy. It is low intensity and can only be picked up close to the hole. I am relaying it to you.

“We have started checking pods.

“Message follows.”

The tone of the voice changed to the one the enemy used.

“This is a message for Sasuke Uchiha. One of your children has been left in a pod on the other side of this hole. He is in stasis and will survive indefinitely. The pod is rigged to explode if anyone comes through the hole. With your impressive capacity for finding routes, we know you can find another way to the system, reach the pod and disarm the explosives.

“Or your children may be in two of the thousand pods in his system, unconscious and with a limited oxygen supply.

“There may be another booby-trapped pod containing a child in status on the other side of the hole Inwards.

“Or there may not.”

Sasuke’s fists tightened. They would have to check every pod. They could not risk jumping through either of the holes. The enemy had managed to avoid being tagged.

They had got away.


They concentrated on retrieving and checking the pods as quickly as possible while Sasuke sorted out routes by which they could check the two holes from the opposite sides.

To his surprise, Yoshimi was in the three hundred and sixty-first pod they retrieved. He was found by Naruto, who was operating the harpoon from the Silver Leaf’s airlock.

They checked the other six hundred and seventy-four but found no sign of Haru. It was disappointing but not unexpected. They would check the holes from the other side. Perhaps they would find booby-trapped pods but Sasuke doubted that they would find Haru.

Haru was the enemy’s leverage for making Shikamaru do as he was told.

He sat in his office, waiting for news that the Silver Leaf was docking. Some of it did not make sense. Why had they returned Yoshimi? Their declaration that the booby-trapped pods contained a child would have been much more convincing if they had kept Yoshimi as well as Haru. Why had Yoshimi and Yasushi been provided with generous amounts of oxygen?


He was in the docking bay to greet Naruto and Yoshimi. Yo-chan was clinging to Naruto as if he would never let go. Sasuke steeled himself to settle for a kiss but Yoshimi called “Papa!” and reached for him.

Sasuke stood for some time just holding him.

Then they walked to the playroom with Yoshimi holding both their hands. As they approached the door Yoshimi broke away from them and ran towards Kiba and his siblings.

When Sasuke entered Yoshimi had his arms around Kiba’s neck and his legs around his waist. Sasuke watched him sit down on a stool so that the other children could cluster around.

Soon Yoshimi was with Yasushi, as usual, investigating some toy.


Sasuke was about to go when he realised that Hikaru was watching him. He went over and sat beside him.

“Hi-chan?” he queried.

“Haru is not coming home,” Hikaru stated in a small voice. “The enemy gave us Yo-chan, Ya-chan and Ka-chan so that they could get away with Ha-chan and Shika-san.” He looked at Sasuke. “I thought you would make them give Haru back.”

Sasuke’s gut twisted. “We will keep looking for them,” he insisted. “Shikamaru-san will keep looking for a way for him and Haru-chan to escape.”

Hikaru’s face was crumpling. “Sometimes I wanted Haru to go away,” he admitted and started crying.

Sasuke had him held close within a moment. He carried him from the room, hoping to prevent an outbreak of sympathetic weeping.

Once in the old playroom he sat in one of the rocking chairs with Hikaru in his lap. He stroked his hair.

“You thinking that did not make it happen, sweetling,” he told him. “The bad men made it happen. It is their fault, not yours.”

Hikaru calmed a little. “Would they have kept me if Sumaru had not stopped them?” he asked.

Sasuke was not sure how to respond. “Maybe. They think purebred children are more valuable than hybrid ones. Which they are not,” he added.

Hikaru stopped crying. “To-chan is a hybrid and he is the best,” he declared.

Sasuke hugged him tightly. “Your To-chan is the best,” he agreed.


Once the Dart docked, Sasuke called a strategy meeting but included Itachi, Jiraiya, Iruka and Naruto.

“The business of the rigged pods is a bluff,” Jiraiya insisted. “There is no way they would waste Haru that way. Once we had Yoshimi it was exposed as such.”

“By that time they already had too much of a lead,” Itachi pointed out. “Also, there is a good chance the bomb is there, even if Haru isn’t.” He frowned. “It would be like them to warn us. They are hesitant about killing our people, even though they throw their own away.”

“Shikamaru’s long-short message mentioned clones,” Sasuke observed. “And the descriptions of the men who were on the surface suggest that each squad was remarkably similar. Maybe they think that clones are disposable.”

“But clones are just people with the same genome,” Iruka argued. “Like twins from the same fertilised egg. They think of themselves as individuals, like the kits do.”

Sasuke recalled that Shikamaru had mentioned ‘mindprint’. He decided to think more about it later and, perhaps, to discuss it with Neji and Kakashi.

“They don’t think of hybrids as people,” Neji observed. “Which they obviously are. Maybe they have a similar prejudice about clones.”

“Can we stick to the point?” Kakashi asked. “They have got away with Shikamaru and Haru. We are not going to jump through either hole without checking for a bomb from the other side. We need to do that and we need to investigate their possible routes.”

“I have the routes projected,” Sasuke told them and activated the display. It showed two separate networks. “I am working on intercept points. I have worked out routes to the other sides of the holes.” He projected another diagram. “We can check the sideways hole within two divs, but the one Inwards will take the better part of a standard.”

“Not worth it,” Jiraiya declared. “Stick a warning beacon on this side,” he suggested.

“I agree,” volunteered Itachi. “If they went that way it is going to take them a long time. Find the other end of their route, the next branch point, and set up a watching post.”

“We should concentrate on the sideways route,” Neji agreed.

“We need more ships like the Dart,” Naruto observed.

“We may have them,” Sasuke suggested. “Shikamaru had various communications triggered to be sent if he was captured. One of them was to Klennethon Darrent. There is a good chance he will talk Chaaruzu-san into lending us Tennyo One, Two and Three if we ask for them. I have done so.”

“We trust him?” Kakashi asked.

“Shikamaru trusts him,” Sasuke qualified. “And we need the advantage he can give us.”

They decided to set the warning beacons. They then selected their first two routes and chose a crew for the Dart. The routes were in common for three jumps, back to the fourth system from the planet.

“We will stay together until then,” Sasuke decided. “Sending the Dart ahead will gain less than a day and we will benefit more from the time together as a crew.”


After the meeting, Sasuke checked for incoming communications, helped put the children to bed and presided over the evening meal. Afterwards he lingered in the galley and then the shared area, determined that Neji should spend some time with him.

Neji watched him set up the board for a game of Go. Sasuke could see him on the edge of refusing.

“I could dress up as a girl,” he suggested.

Neji was startled into a smile. “It would not work now,” he observed. “You are too broad in the shoulder and too muscular.” He took the chair opposite and placed a white stone.

“That time, it was what we did, you, me and Haku, that brought us home,” Sasuke reminded him, placing a black stone.

“You were never in enemy hands,” Neji reminded him, adding his second stone.

“Not even Haku has one hundredth of Shikamaru’s ingenuity,” Sasuke argued, placing his piece.

Neji looked at him. “I have had enough of talk, Sasuke-sama. Could we just play?”


Neji annihilated him, which was hardly surprising as Sasuke rarely played and Neji occasionally beat Shikamaru. Sasuke watched him retire to his obsessively tidy room instead of the messy one he usually shared with Shikamaru.

“You tried,” Naruto whispered, rubbing Sasuke’s back as he put away the board and the stones.

“Haku says he needs to look after someone,” Sasuke replied. “That is how Shikamaru persuaded him into the relationship. He revealed his vulnerability so that Neji would feel needed.”

“Maybe one or more of the children,” Naruto suggested. “I will think about it.”

“It may be standards,” Sasuke said suddenly. He looked at Naruto, horrified that the thought that had been echoing though his mind for days had managed to find its way out via his voice.

“It may be standards,” Naruto confirmed. “We have faith in Shi-chan to help bring Haru back to us,” he added firmly.

“Yes,” Sasuke decided. “We do.”

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