Ocean Soul

A/N: The word 'clit' may become meaningless to you after reading my eyeball-stabbingly horrid first attempt at a heterosexual sex scene. :x

Kushina Uzumaki had long red hair and soft blue eyes and sang of the ocean. Minato Namikaze had thick gold hair and dark blue eyes and told Naruto stories while Kushina hummed, holding him against her chest. The stories and the songs were the same, but they were from different places.

“And the fisherman took the selkie’s skin so that she was bound to his side forever, unable to change back into a seal and return to her home, the ocean,” Kushina said, voice heavy with sadness. Naruto thought of the selkie and how unhappy she must have been, far away from everything she loved.

“What happens to the boy selkies?” Naruto asked, staring up at his mother. She made a funny face and squeezed him close.

“Silly, there aren’t any boy selkies,” she said. Minato chuckled and ran his fingers down Kushina’s arm.

“There are where I come from,” he said, with such a funny look in his eye that Naruto wondered if maybe his father was one.

“Daddy, are you a selkie?” he asked, thinking about the way his father would stare out the window whenever they drove near the sea.

Kushina laughed and deposited Naruto in his father’s lap. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got his sealskin hidden in the house so he’s mine forever.” Naruto would have been alarmed if Minato weren’t so close and warm and safe behind him.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, Kushina,” Minato said, his voice rumbling against Naruto’s back.

--

She was in the sea, floating lazily after a meal, when something came up fast and loud behind her and very nearly took her head off, and so she swam away as fast as she could and by the time the horrible grinding sound was gone and the water had lost the taste of oil-metal, she had lost her way.

She could swim back in the direction she’d come, but she’d rather be lost than come across that thing again. So she set off in the opposite direction.

She swam for miles and miles and miles and miles with nothing but the open ocean for company. She stopped and floated and ate some more. She swam on.

She swam and the water turned to ice floes, which reminded her of home. She stopped, she hauled herself up onto one and almost, almost felt safe again--then the ice broke, and she realized everything was melting slowly. It wasn’t safe here either.

So she kept swimming, and she cried and she cried for want of home.

She swam for days and weeks and months and skirted shores where the humans hunted her kind for fun, even the babies. She was barely adolescent and had no interest in being beaten to death with one of those horrid picks, so she kept on.

She kept on and kept on until the days turned to weeks and months and surely thousands of miles. She floated, she ate, she swam.

She found a coast that was sandy and nice and soft and mostly empty, and she wriggled herself onto the sand and curled up in a nook and slept.

She slept and she slept and she slept and she slept, exhausted from her journey and feeding off the fat she’d stored from the fish she’d eaten on the way. It was nice and warm here, and for the time being she was safe.

--

She woke five days later to the sound of human speech. She flashed back to the oil-metal taste, the glint of hunting picks, and her heart nearly stopped beating when she realized she didn’t have time to escape into the sea before the human was upon her.

She tore off the seal-skin and tucked it behind the rock she’d been curled under and waited.

It was a boy. His human fur was yellow and thick and flopped over his face. His eyes looked like the tropical water she’d seen once as a pup. He was wearing a big, orange cloth draped against his upper body, and another in black tucked closely around his legs.

Right. Clothes, the humans called them, and she didn’t have any. That might have been why the boy looked so frightened of her; humans were threatened by nakedness.

“Whoa, hey,” the boy said, kneeling in front of her. He pulled off the orange cloth, another tighter black one under it. He wrapped the orange cloth around her shoulders, gingerly, then pulled back a little as if he was waiting to see if she’d bite him.

“Hey,” she repeated. The orange cloth was warm and pleasant against her bare, wet human skin. She tugged it snugger around her body, tucking her knees against her chest. The boy reached out and rested a large, warm hand against her shoulder, and that heat felt so good she couldn’t help but nuzzle into it a little.

The boy looked startled at that and she remembered that humans didn’t nuzzle, so she pulled away from him with a little pout.

“Hn,” she said. Oddly, the boy got a look on his face like a mother looking at her pup, and he reached for her again, nestling her into his arms.

“It’s okay,” he said, and slid strong, warm arms underneath her awkward, human knees and around her skinny, human back. The orange cloth fell to her mid-thigh, hiding the parts of her that humans were especially afraid of showing. He was careful to make sure the cloth didn’t slip as he stood up--stood up with her in his arms and against his chest.

Stood up with her in his arms and started walking and her skin was still behind the rock. She didn’t have the words--didn’t know how to tell him to put her down right now, didn’t have the words to tell him to go back because she needed that sealskin. So she cried and squirmed, reaching behind his shoulder. There. Take me back there.

He stopped and she buried her face in his neck to show her gratitude.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to take you to a doctor,” he said softly into her hair, and kept walking. Away from her skin and away from her home.

He had her. She was trapped. And she couldn’t speak to tell him so.

--

The boy’s name was Naruto, and he took her to a hospital that made her throat hurt every time she breathed in with the smell of something sharper than oil and lighter than metal. They asked for identification. She didn’t have any. They stuck tubes in her arms and forced nutrition and fluids into her body and she felt better, physically, but her heart ached for the sea.

She realized that Naruto had stolen her skin when she saw it peeking out of that bag-thing attached to his clothes on the bottom. She screamed and tried to leap off the bed, reaching for it--give it BACK, she wanted to say, but she didn’t have the words--and the men and women in white clothes pinned her to the bed and put poison in her veins that dulled her mind and made her sleep.

When she woke up, they checked the part of her that most humans were afraid to look at and said “no trauma” and Naruto’s shoulders relaxed. He must have wanted her a virgin. Pure, some humans said.

A man and woman came with Naruto to see her every day. The woman was tall and commanding and it seemed that all of the fat in her body had concentrated around her breasts. The man was smaller, fat more evenly distributed, and gave her funny looks like maybe he wanted her too. Naruto, the boy, hit the older man playfully for staring at her and spent as much of every day as he could curled up next to her, stroking her hair.

“I’ll give you your skin back as soon as you’re healthy,” Naruto said, and she didn’t believe him. Human men didn’t return sealskins by choice.

“Saki sounds kind of like selkie,” Naruto said, and that was how Saki got her name.

--

The more time she spent with Naruto, the more sure Saki became that he had no intentions of returning her sealskin and letting her go back to the sea.

She was released from the hospital and into the care of Naruto and the woman and man, Naruto’s guardians but not his parents. Naruto’s parents were dead; they had driven their car off a cliff and into the ocean. Naruto was afraid of the sea because of that, he said, and that was why he was reluctant to let Saki go back when it was still storm season.

“The waves are too high,” Naruto said, face dark. “You’d be smashed against the cliffs if you tried to go back. Just a few more weeks.”

The hospital told her to come back every week and talk to a nice young woman with dark hair and eyes not quite as deep as Saki’s. Her name was Shizune and she asked Saki questions she couldn’t answer and scribbled scribbled scribbled. Saki was to be supervised at all times. Saki was not to be medicated because nobody knew what was wrong with her, and the side effects could prove disastrous.

Neglect, Shizune said, lack of human socialization, Shizune said, but that didn’t explain the lack of physical trauma. Maybe the abuse had been entirely mental, Shizune said.

“She’s helpless,” Tsunade, Naruto’s woman guardian, said. “She needs us.”

“You need us,” Naruto said quietly, in his bedroom in the dark, stroking her belly through one of the new cloths they’d bought her. Shirts. They were called shirts. “I promise I’ll sneak you out as soon as I can, but you’re still too sick to go back into that ocean. It’s dangerous this time of year.”

“I know,” Saki hissed. “I grew up there.” She was getting better and better at speaking the more time she spent with Naruto.

She knew how it worked. His lies were pretty, but they were still lies. She relaxed because it was the rule and rolled over, burying her face against Naruto’s chest. His hand moved from her belly to her back, and if she closed her eyes and concentrated on the smell of his skin, the feel of the embrace was almost pleasant.

--

She learned to cook like she was supposed to and she learned to clean like she was supposed to and Shizune and Tsunade and Jiraiya, the man guardian, all approved because she was ‘using her mind’ and ‘learning new things’. They told her she was fourteen and she barked out a laugh that sounded too much like a seal’s yelp. That’s almost true if you’re counting in months. Her thoughts were getting more and more complex the more time she spent around humans. They told her she was smart, brilliant, and that made her preen a little.

But in human years she was fourteen, and so was Naruto. Teenagers. Teenagers who couldn’t be trusted together because one afternoon Tsunade walked in on Saki straddling Naruto on the couch, trying to figure out how to unbutton his pants. She hadn’t gotten the hang of zippers quite yet.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Tsunade said, pulling Saki off Naruto and wrapping her in an embrace. Her chest was suffocating and Saki tried to pull away and finish doing her duty.

“It’s the rules,” she protested. “I have to.”

Tsunade was very, very, angry with Naruto for allowing Saki to do what she was compelled to do. “You didn’t think for one second that she acts that way because she was abused sexually?” Tsunade hissed. Saki could hear them through the walls of the new separate room she’d been given. “Naruto, I thought we’d raised you to treat women with respect!”

“I couldn’t help it!” Naruto complained. Saki rolled over. “She pinned me down, granny! I have no idea what got into her!”

Pretty, pretty lies. He said he was unwilling, but there was no other reason for him to be holding Saki’s skin hostage. She muffled a wail in the pillow and let herself cry until she was too tired to stay awake any longer.

--

They told Saki that she was traumatized, that she had been sexually abused and had repressed it so she didn’t have to deal with the pain. She stopped speaking entirely for a week and a half, which had the opposite intended effect. Naruto told her they were going to put her back in the hospital if she didn’t start talking again soon and she learned very fast how to pretend to have a screaming, sobbing breakdown.

“Yes,” she howled in Shizune’s office. “I don’t want to remember.”

They seemed placated by her acceptance of the condition that wasn’t real, and she started teaching herself how to act as well as become a good wife for Naruto. If she pretended she was what they said she was, it was much easier to focus on the important things--following the rules.

Naruto was a very very good hider, and she’d given up looking for her skin after seven weeks of searching. It could have been worse. Naruto was kind and seemed to genuinely think her beautiful and precious. He didn’t beat or rape her. He didn’t give her orders.

She thought she could survive here in this world, with Naruto, but every time she caught a glimpse of the ocean she nearly cried out with homesickness.

--

“I have a present for you,” Naruto said. Saki was fifteen today, her human birthday, and her need for the ocean was softening every day until it was barely a warm, irritating buzz in the back of her head. She raised an eyebrow in the way that made Naruto laugh, his whole face lighting up sunny and gentle.

He handed her a bag. “Happy birthday,” he said. “Open it.”

Inside were three pieces of cloth held together by string in a pretty scarlet color. She lifted one from the bag. Triangular, attached to another the same size--close to the width of her palm. The material was sort of slippery and thick.

“What is it?” Saki asked, holding it up by one of the strings. Naruto laughed again and it softened the buzz in her head a little more. He took the cloth from her and walked around behind her, holding the pieces against her body. If she weren’t wearing a shirt, the two triangles would cover her breasts, and the strings looped around her neck and her ribcage.

“It’s a bathing suit,” Naruto said, lips brushing against her ear. “You wear it swimming. I’m taking you to visit the ocean with me, if you’d like to go.”

Saki’s heart lurched painfully into her throat. The buzz grew louder and louder until it drowned out everything else.

She turned around in Naruto’s arms and curled her fingers against the cloth of his shirt.

“Put it on me and take me now,” she gasped, burying her face in his chest.

“Just a visit,” Naruto repeated, one broad hand coming up against the back of her neck to smooth down the soft hair there. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around his waist, the closeness of his body taking the edge off the painful need throbbing through her.

“Don’t care,” she muttered. “Now.”

Naruto’s chest moved under her cheek, the breath making a heavy, sad noise as it came out. He pushed her away and gripped the bottom hem of her shirt, and for a second before the cloth covered her eyes, he looked like his heart was breaking.

--

Heaven was the first five minutes of sliding back into the water, Naruto with her, and going under for the sheer pleasure of coming back up again. She laughed and wrapped her arms around Naruto’s neck and for a little while, it was perfect.

Then she looked out towards the open ocean and something reached into her chest and crushed her heart into a bleeding mess, and she wanted so fiercely she started swimming deeper. Hell was Naruto wrapping his arms around her and carrying her to the shore, ignoring her choking, screaming sobs.

“Please,” she begged, her entire body wracked with grief. She clawed mindlessly at Naruto’s arms, chest, anywhere she could reach. “I want to go home!”

Naruto pulled her closer against his chest and she screamed, resisting the gentleness with everything she had. She howled wordlessly. She clawed at his face and bit at his neck.

“I’m taking you home, Saki,” Naruto said just loudly enough to be heard. People on the beach were starting to stare. She screamed louder, sobs interfering with the clarity of her words. “I’m calling granny to pick us up. You have therapy in an hour.”

He sat down with her on one of the arranged rocks in the parking lot and held her strong enough that she couldn’t get away, stroking one maddening hand up and down her spine as he rocked her slowly.

“I knew this was a bad idea,” he muttered into her hair. “I said soon, okay? Just not yet. You’re still too sick. And even if I let you go now,” he pressed the tips of his fingers into the muscle at her neck and massaged in slow circles, “you’ll just drown. You’re still human, you know.”

Naruto’s words were truth and that hurt too much to handle, so Saki went completely limp in his arms. Everything hurt, from the warmth of Naruto’s hands on her body to the slow, weak sobs still catching on her breath.

They stayed there for a fifteen-minute eternity. At one point, a young man came to them and asked in a threatening, quiet voice if everything was okay, if Saki was safe, if they needed to call someone.

“I hallucinate,” she said. “My boyfriend will take care of me.” She slipped her hand into Naruto’s and twined their fingers together for realism. If she and Naruto were separated, she’d never get her skin back.

“I love you, you know,” Naruto whispered when the man had left. “I just want to protect you. It’s riptide season out there.”

Saki bit his collarbone, light enough not to leave a mark beyond teenage flirtation but sharp enough to relay her burning hatred.

“Pretty lies,” she muttered, Naruto’s sun-gold skin between her teeth.

--

Saki hated Naruto and didn’t speak to him for five straight weeks after the disaster at the beach. He made a point of holding her as often as he could, and sometimes she just went rigid until he let go, and other times she screamed and howled and bit until he let go hard and fast and stayed out of sight until she’d calmed back down.

In the end, Naruto was her only choice of easing the painful emptiness in her gut, and so after five weeks she slipped out of her bed in the middle of the night and slipped into Naruto’s room. It was a hot August, and so he was sleeping in his boxers with no blanket.

Easy access, Saki thought, which was something one of Naruto’s friends liked to say about girls in skirts. Saki didn’t like Kiba at all--he was forceful and crass and made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Naruto was much softer and more gentle, and for that she was lucky.

Saki was sleeping in her underwear too--a loose camisole and soft, cotton panties. She knelt on Naruto’s bedspread and swung one leg over his hip, settling down onto his stomach. She didn’t weigh much. He’d live.

She leaned forward and started to press sucking kisses against his neck, pulse fluttering under her lips. She bit. Naruto got hard when she bit him. He got hard when she scratched him, too, so she raked her nails down his arms just hard enough to leave little white lines.

Naruto groaned underneath her and pushed up with his hips, pressing his erection against her. She squirmed and rubbed back against it, already wet. To ensure she’d do her duty to the best of her ability, she’d experimented for an hour or so in her own bedroom, figured out how to bring herself to orgasm once, but mostly just teasing until the heat gathered and pulsed enough that the experience would at least be a mildly pleasant one.

She moaned into Naruto’s neck and pressed back harder, shivering a little at the pleasure tightening in her lower belly. Naruto stirred again, his hips rocking up harder, and Saki ground back down against him. His eyes fluttered open.

“S-Saki, whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, catching her arms and trying to push her off. She rolled her hips in a hard circle, arching her neck and letting a breathy, needy moan slip from her throat, and Naruto’s hands fell from her arms as he thrust helplessly against the friction.

Perfect.

“Miss you,” Saki whined, pulling off him, her legs trembling. She rested one hand on Naruto’s chest to keep him from getting up and pulled off her camisole with the other, pushing out her chest a little. Naruto’s mouth fell open a little, eyes fixing on her chest. She took his hand by the wrist and brought it up, curling his fingers around the swell of her breast.

He brought his other hand up of his own volition, pressing lightly at first, then palming harder, brushing his thumbs against her nipples. She keened and pushed her chest into his hands, kneeling to pull her panties down and off.

The air was hot, but she was hotter, and the sudden current against the bare, wet skin of her sex felt icy in comparison. She shivered and straddled Naruto again, this time pressing against his stomach and rubbing back and forth. Naruto moaned and squeezed her breasts once, then slid his hands around to her back. She reached behind herself and yanked his boxers down off his hips, and he dropped one hand to help, breath hitching.

Once they were off, Naruto brought his hand back to Saki’s hip, thumb rubbing against the soft skin of her belly. She pushed forward, sighing at the slick rub against Naruto’s tense abdomen, then back. Forward again, and this time Naruto shifted underneath her. Back, and back over the patch of blond hair at Naruto’s crotch and farther, until she was sliding against his cock.

Naruto tightened his grip on her waist and tipped his head back into the pillows, biting his lip around a tight, needy groan. Saki rubbed back and forth once, twice, heat pulsing hungrily between her thighs, and then brought herself up onto her knees and guided the head of Naruto’s cock to her entrance.

“Flip me over,” she whispered as she sank slowly down, the firmness of Naruto’s cock intense and nearly overwhelming. It stretched her open farther than she’d been anticipating, even having practiced with three fingers; it hurt, a little, but she squirmed until he brushed against the spot inside she’d found earlier, and that was enough to keep the heat pulsing in her belly.

Naruto stayed still for a moment, trembling, then rolled over until Saki’s back hit the sheets. She wrapped her legs around his waist to pull him closer, and that movement pressed his lower belly against her. Pleasure washed over her, hot and insistent, and she muffled a gasp in his shoulder, rocking up against him to increase the sensation.

He slid one hand up her ribs to palm her breast, the other moving downward to trace her cunt, gathering some of the wetness there. He pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her neck at the same time that he started circling the round little bump outside she’d explored the most, the pressure teasing and slick and something close to perfect. She fisted one hand in his hair and whined, pressing up against his hand.

“More,” she gasped, and Naruto rubbed harder, heat swelling inside her.

“Ready, baby?” Naruto breathed, and Saki dug her heel into the small of his back.

“Now,” she demanded. “But don’t stop rubbing--with your hand.” Heat pooled and ebbed in her lower belly, Naruto’s circling fingers manipulating her to bliss.

He chuckled softly against her neck and started to rock his hips in time to the circles. “You mean your clit?” He changed the direction of the circles and added another finger, making her squirm against him and arch her neck into the pillow.

“Don’t care. Keep touching it,” she insisted, pushing her own hips up to meet him. He shifted a little and the angle of his thrusts was a million times better, pressing directly against that spot inside.

“You were so wet,” Naruto whispered. He started to speed up on his rocking, breath hitching a little every time he pushed in. “When you started out, even.” He added a different pattern to the slow circles, rubbing in vertical lines that made Saki bite down on his shoulder to muffle a scream, clit throbbing. She had started out wet--hadn’t expected to enjoy this, hadn’t expected Naruto to pay such attention to her body and her needs, and he had her close enough to whimper. The tension crested and ebbed and flowed and pushed like the tide and in that moment, she needed it more than the sea.

“Please let me--” she gasped into the hot, still air of the room. “I want--I want to--oh, fuck, I’m almost--” She didn’t know the word for it. Naruto buried his face in her neck and sped up rapidly, pressing his fingers almost hard enough to hurt.

“You wanna come?” he breathed. There was a teasing note to his voice that barely registered against the sudden, intense onslaught of pleasure, leaving Saki only slightly jarred as she arched greedily into Naruto’s hands and hips, so, so close--and right there, right before she felt that thunder roaring up inside her and crashing over her like a hurricane, Naruto took his hands away and stopped thrusting.

Her nipples, her cunt, especially her clit ached fiercely, screaming for the stimulation Naruto had taken away. He was still inside her, and she felt herself spasm around him, Naruto’s face tensing a little with it. Indignant, she clenched down around him as hard as she could.

“Why did you do that?” she hissed, reaching her own hand between her legs. She managed one quick brush against her clit--bliss, almost-- before Naruto grabbed both her wrists and held them over her head.

And oh, she thrashed at that, trying to force her hips up so she could rub against Naruto’s stomach, forcing the cry she wanted to make into an angry whine. Naruto pulled out of her completely, leaving her empty and sore with want and dripping wet.

Then, Naruto shifted so he was holding both her wrists in one hand, and brought the other down to her pulsing sex. He slid his fingers against her lips, teasing; slowly, slowly, and maddeningly lightly, started to circle her clit again.

“Promise me you won’t try to go back until I give you the sealskin,” he said quietly, almost inaudible over Saki’s desperate whimpers. She pressed against his hand and he rubbed twice more, enough for her to arch up and tremble with being pressed so, so close to the edge, then pulled away again. This time, she had to fight down a scream.

“Let me come,” she snarled, bucking against the hand keeping her down. Naruto pressed his free hand against her mouth, the smell of her sharp on his fingers.

“Not until you promise,” Naruto said. She tried to squeeze her thighs together, entire body quivering for relief, but he slid his knee between her legs and held them open. “Because I fucking love you, and I will never forgive myself if you drown.”

He removed his hand from her mouth and laid it gently on her upper belly. She twisted against the sheets, hot and roiling with need--it was still riptide season, and Naruto was kind and treated her well, and if he fulfilled this promise, maybe he’d fulfil the first one, too.

“I’ll go when you give me the sealskin,” she whispered.

Naruto was silent for a long enough moment that Saki almost screamed, but he leaned forward and kissed her desperately, letting go of her wrists to spread her thighs and sink back inside her, groaning into her mouth. He thrust once, then his hand was back and rubbing her clit hard and fast as he moved. She locked her ankles around his back again and arched almost off the mattress, crying out over and over into his mouth as the pleasure built and built and finally crested, spasming through her core, so much sweeter for the wait.

Naruto pulled out and fisted himself rapidly, whimpering as his cock went rigid, then spasmed, white liquid spurting out over his fist. Some of it landed warm and slippery on her belly, and she dragged her fingers to it, bringing it up to her nose to smell.

“Bitter,” she murmured, voice rough and sleepy from coming. She licked it and made a face at the taste, more intensely bitter than the smell.

Naruto gave her a goofy, slightly sheepish smile. “Sorry, baby...if you ever go down on me, I won’t make you swallow.” He pulled a tissue from the box next to his bed and wiped up the rest of it from her stomach, then crumpled it up and threw it in the general direction of the trash can. He lay next to her and wrapped an arm around her stomach, nuzzling into her neck.

“I love you,” he whispered, leaning up and kissing the underside of her jaw. She stroked two fingers down one of the bite marks she’d left on his neck, the words familiar but still strange; she knew what they meant, but she hadn’t figured out where to put them.

“I know,” she said, and didn’t worry about saying the words back. Naruto knew not to expect them and seemed content to nuzzle against her and drift off. It was nearing early morning, so Saki decided to shut her eyes and let him make her feel safe as she followed him to sleep.

--

Saki stopped bleeding after that, and after missing it twice Tsunade insisted on taking her to the hospital again.

“The walls in this house aren’t that thin,” she said, her hand firm against Saki’s back. “You really couldn’t have stuck with oral? Or at least asked me to buy you some condoms?”

They were nuances that Saki didn’t get, but she knew Naruto had been avoiding her eyes for the past few weeks. She didn’t say anything and sat in the waiting room until she was called into the office, and they drew blood from her arm and took it away to be tested.

They all waited in the office and Naruto still wasn’t looking at her. She ached without the distraction of his smell. She’d been aching a lot more lately.

She made it twenty minutes before reaching out and grabbing Naruto’s wrist. He froze for a minute, and Tsunade caught him in a fierce glare.

“Hold her, you brat,” she said, her voice slow and dangerous. “This is your fault. The least you can do is give her your goddamn support.”

Naruto slipped his arms around Saki’s waist and pulled her head against his shoulder, fingers slowly, soothingly stroking her hair, and she rubbed her nose against his neck. Something was missing. Tsunade knew what was wrong with her and seemed to assume she would know, too--but all she could pinpoint was that something was off. Something was different.

“I’m sorry,” Naruto whispered into Saki’s hair, and the fact that he was apologizing unsettled her. Then the doctor came back and took the seat Naruto had vacated to hold Saki.

“I’m not sure if this is a cause for celebration or despair,” the man said, “but either way, you’re pregnant.”

Saki went numb. Tsunade just nodded. Naruto tightened his arms around Saki’s back and whispered muddled apologies in her hair, over and over.

--

“Why can’t I? The sea is safe again! This is the calmest time of year! I need to go home!

“Because that’s my fucking baby, Saki! That’s a human baby you’re carrying--not a seal pup! What the hell do you think is going to happen to it if you switch back now?”

“I hate you. I hate you. I wish you were dead.”

“I’m sorry. I really am. I know how much it hurts, but it’ll only be eight more months. I’ll raise the kid by myself, okay? Is that what you want? You never have to fucking think of us again.”

“Pretty. Fucking. Lies.”

--

Saki’s instincts hit her like a ton of bricks, and every fiber of her being screamed for her to return to the sea. She craved fish, her body ordering her to stock up on fat for the nursing fast, and broke a lamp when Naruto informed her it was bad for the baby to have fish more than once a week. She screamed and cried and locked herself in her room, then came out ten minutes later needing Naruto’s arms around her more than breathing.

He was patient, but he was firm. He took excellent care of his pregnant, human girlfriend, cooking the best meals he could that fit her nutritional needs and snuck in as much fish or seaweed as he could manage, trying to soothe her cravings. He massaged her back when it ached and carried her when her ankles started swelling and let her spend almost all of her time in hot baths--even that little bit of water took the edge off, but every day was darkened by her need for the ocean.

He rubbed his hands over her swollen belly and kissed it and talked to the child growing inside, and loved it so much he almost made her love it, too.

In early June, she started to cramp up like she had during monthly bleedings. They came and went, some more intense than others, and lasted for three days. False contractions, the doctors called them, that would prepare her body for labor. Then the contractions came and ebbed and flowed and got more and more intense, until she was struggling not to scream with her hands clutched tight in Naruto’s.

“Old man, I think this is the real deal,” he said shakily, and so they hurried to the hospital. It was real, it was time, they said, but she wouldn’t need to push for another few hours. They told her to keep moving, so she walked in circles around her hospital room and up and down the hall when that got boring, Naruto at her side, massaging the locked muscles in her lower back.

It hurt, and it kept hurting, until finally it hurt enough for her to lie down and for the doctors to come in. Naruto sat with her and massaged her shoulders and Tsunade stayed at the foot of the bed and rubbed her feet. Jiraiya waited outside.

“You’re doing so well,” Tsunade praised. “You are so strong and so beautiful, and you’re doing such a good job, sweetheart.”

It kept hurting, worse and worse and worse until every wave of pain brought with it a scream from her throat. Naruto stroked her hair and apologized over and over and told her she was beautiful, and she hurt and hurt and hurt.

“Push,” the doctor said, and she buried her face in the pillow and screamed.

“I can’t,” she moaned, her entire body seizing with the next contraction. It was instinctual, but it was too much--she shouldn’t be like this, on her back with her legs in the air. It was wrong, but they wouldn’t let her sit up. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can, baby,” Naruto whispered into her hair, squeezing her hand in his. “You have to push. You can do this.”

The contraction wracked her body and her sobs rose to another scream, her body bearing down against the thing trying to force itself out of her body.

“Let me sit up,” she tried to say, but the sobs garbled her words and no one listened to her. They kept telling her to push, over and over, and she tried, but she couldn’t on her back like this--crouching was the right way, the natural way. She hated humans for warping this until it hurt her so much she couldn’t see. She screamed her throat raw and forced herself to push and push and push, and everything was wrong and everything hurt until she didn’t know any other sensation. The contractions, Naruto’s lips against her forehead, Tsunade’s hands on her ankle--everything was agony.

“Almost there--”

“Good girl, almost--”

“Crowning, I can see dark hair--”

“Come on, baby, you can do this--”

“One more big push, come on, sweetie, you’re doing great--”

And she was still screaming, but something else was screaming, too.

Saki collapsed onto the bed and hurt, too exhausted to scream anymore. “It’s a boy,” someone said, and someone else laid the warm, bloody child on her belly, and she reached for him to nurse, but just as quickly he was being lifted off and taken away. She tried to scream, reaching after him, but nothing came out except silent, exhausted sobs.

Naruto was there, his arms around her, and he was crying too.

“You did it, baby,” he murmured. “I’m so proud of you.”

She wanted her son and they wouldn’t give him to her. Her body ached from the unnatural labor, and she didn’t have the strength to cry anymore.

--

Naruto named the child Minato after his father and Saki didn’t fight, didn’t ask for her skin for the first month. She didn’t have the energy. She was worn out and unsettled at the falseness of it all--making her lie on her back, taking her son away before he could even eat, giving him back and peering over her shoulder and lecturing her on the position of his palate. Babies knew how to suckle. They were born with it. And mothers knew how to nurse.

“Seals don’t take classes on how to feed their babies,” Saki muttered once, sleep-deprived and cradling Minato against her chest for the millionth after-midnight feeding that week. “And you humans wouldn’t need to either if you didn’t spend all your time squashing down instinct.” There was a fork in her mouth, and on the other end of it was a piece of mackerel. She glared at Naruto as she chewed and swallowed.

“Yeah, and seals don’t eat while their kids are nursing either,” Naruto pointed out. “But humans do. If I didn’t force-feed you, that damned instinct of yours would let you starve to death.”

Minato squirmed away from Saki’s breast, scrunching his face in preparation for a good long howl. Saki all but shoved him into Naruto’s arms and lay back down, tugging the blankets over her shoulders.

Cloth shifted behind her, and Minato’s indignant wails quieted.

“Shh, that’s my boy,” Naruto murmured. The sound of rhythmic patting should have calmed Saki enough to settle into sleep, but her body was anxious and taut. Naruto finished burping Minato and got him settled in his crib, then curled against Saki’s back, draping one arm over her waist.

“Goodnight, beautiful,” he whispered into the back of her neck. “I love you.”

Naruto’s breathing evened out as he fell asleep, but the buzzing in Saki’s head was back and kept her awake.

--

It had gone exactly as it was supposed to.

Naruto found Saki on the beach, a woman, and stole her sealskin so she couldn’t return to the ocean. He took her to his home and kept her there, her sealskin hidden. Saki still had no idea where it was, years after coming into Naruto’s life. He didn’t marry her--they were too young for that--but she bore his child, and at some point he fell in love with her. He clearly had no intention of ever setting her free.

She turned eighteen and the child turned two and Naruto moved them to a central state, as far away from the coast as he could get them. Saki protested, screamed and hollered and Minato screamed with her.

She took care of her son, even when the new neighborhood got angry at her for nursing him in public. That hadn’t happened on the coast.

“Baby, people get pissed about that sort of thing,” Naruto soothed. “The coasts tend to be more open about it, I guess. But we’re here now, so you’ve got to make the best of it and not let them get to you, right?”

She longed for the sea.

She turned twenty-three and the child turned seven and Naruto decided it was safe to visit Minato’s aging grandparents, rather than ship them all the way out to the center of the country. Saki could call herself happy with her son and the husband she hated less with every day.

She saw the sea and her heart broke into a thousand pieces.

Minato curled his hand into hers and looked out at the sea with her.

“Mama, why are you sad?” he asked, and his voice began to piece her heart back together.

She turned to him and knelt, looking into the dark, dark eyes so similar to her own.

“Minato, has Daddy told you the legend of the selkie?”