Child Of Hate

Chapter 10

(Day two. Five days left)

This time it was Naruko's turn to cover her brother protectively. The tears on her cheeks had dried up but still left a visible track down her dust and grime covered face. The girl had her arms wrapped around her older twins form as he lay on her abdomen, shivering like a leaf in a storm and his skin a motely grey colour with splashes of green under his eyes and on his fingernails. The boy was curled up in himself, his eyes painfully wrenched shut and shaking like he was in the middle of a terrible blizzard. The female twin sobbed and hugged her brother closer but didn't get any movement in reply.

Like she was trying to warm up a vibrating statue.

Today had just been Naruto's turn. Their godfather had drawn a Nature Funnelling seal in the middle of his back, a seal that had nature chakra in the nearest vicinity pass through him, wreck their havoc because he wasn't a sage and leave at his fingertips and toes, which was why they were green. The effect of this was the colour leaving the six year old boys skin, turning it an unhealthy, sickening shade of grey due to the dangerous natural chakra taking more than they could ever give him.

Orochimaru had placed him in a coffin six feet in the ground in the middle of a lush meadow in grass country, a haven for natural chakra if there ever was one. The worst part was that however violently the natural chakra ripped apart his chakra system and his nervous system the Kyuubi chakra in him found a way to fix it, though always depleting the infinitesimally small resources in the little boy's body. The sadistic snake man had said that the natural chakra would rip apart their nerve endings and conditioned Naruto to never feel pain again. He still had three more weeks of the same torture scheduled and their godfather looked forward to each and every day.

For now the seal had been removed but would be re-administered by sunrise.

Naruko sniffed and rocked back and forth, her dirty brown dress rustling and the chains connected to suppression collars around their necks clinked and clanked against themselves. The slave area was deathly silent as those near their caves watched the little girl with mournful eyes try to rock her shaking brother to sleep. The little red haired girl swallowed and tried humming a song she could barely remember, something from a memory she didn't remember ever happening, but it came out broken and tearful. Naruko stopped trying and merely tightened her hold on her brother as a Sound ninja passed by, baring her teeth at the wide smile he sent her before he left.

Naruto's shaking didn't lessen. He coughed weakly and his feet forced his body to shuffle closer to the tiny speck of warmth, about the same size as him, but his immobile arms could not move to wrap around the source to comfort her. Naruko felt this and a fresh wave of tears began falling down her large, bright purple eyes.

"Sis…are you there…?" he couldn't feel much under his body but the familiar warmth that wrapped around to caress his dying body. His nervous system was pretty much dead but the Kyuubi chakra was fixing it all up again.

The female twin bobbed her hair and gently rubbed her brothers back. "I'm here, bro."

The male red head heaved in a deep breathe, trying and failing to fight the terrible shaking of his body. "Do…do…do you think mother will…love…us?" it was a great mystery the twins had been hoping to crack one day. Their father hated the very air they breathed, but they never once knew the presence of a mother or their mother. Minato never once mentioned her without saying that they were the reason she was where she was. They didn't know Kushina had lost her mind after losing the Kyuubi, but they were still children.

How could they know that when it was never said to them?

They still hoped and hoped and hoped that they would have at least one person in the world that would love them. During their time in Konoha the siblings never went out of their way to make friends because the people gave them a wide berth. Love was a foreign term for them that they only knew for each other.