Title: October Tenth
By: Midnight Unicorn

Disclaimers: not mine, no money.

I didn't understand as I watched my mother struggle to bring a baby into the world, watched between two heavy velvet veils. This was important, that concept I grasped, and it was tearing mother apart, that I was able to infer, but I didn't understand the gravity of it.

I didn't understand why this handsome blond man was so sorrowful his head had almost disappeared between his shoulders as it sunk lower and lower as my mother brought to life my baby sibling. I distantly knew that he was the reason my mother was so sad about something that should be good…after the painful birth part, that is.

A handful of men wearing masks like ghouls from a fairy tale and armed with swords like the heroes or assassins of my nightmares stood guard outside this massive tent. In the distance I heard the shouts of battle. Even across the distance I smelled the ever present stink of death and blood and fire.

It'll be over soon, the handsome blond man murmurs. I don't know if he's talking to me or himself.

I know, I reply. Just then a wail breaks the tense air. I'm about to leap through the curtains to lay eyes on my new sibling but the blond man stops me with a heavy hand on my shoulder.

Please stay here, he instructs quietly. His somberness is irritating and unnerving me; I pout when he goes through the curtains. The baby quiets and I listen intently to the low mutter of conversation. The next cry is my mother's and I dash in but the man is gone and so are the guards. My mother is weeping my baby, my baby.

Fury surges through me. He stole my mother's child, my sibling!

With a determination to see reddish work by my hand this night I dash out of the tent, heedless of my mother's warning and pleading. I'll get our baby; I call though she can't hear me over the noise.

I am a fool. I run towards the yellow-red glow in the south. It is uphill. I scramble across the grass; I slip in dew…I hope it is only dew. I keep running and don't think about it.

I stumble on my ascent; I'm clever enough not to follow my gaze to the hand that ghosted out of the night to trip me. There might not be more than a hand.

I reach the top of the hill and I scream. Not the idea on the horizon, the charred aftermath with only the smell clinging until the rain pounds it into the earth there is a battle below me, pausing as the enemy, the monstrosity of nature, is absorbed in the tiny yellow flash at his feet.

And he pauses and even across the distance I know it is the handsome blond man and in his arms is my new sibling with only an old kimono haphazardly embracing him. So I run.

I am a fool. The shinobi are slow to react, stunned that anyone would move closer, and only distant shouts are extended to impede my progression.

And then the fox demon screams. It's like a human scream and not, like a dog that's been tainted with realization or a man tortured to his base instincts. It shatters my rage, absorbs and overwhelms it and I tumble to my knees in horror and a strange kind of sympathy although this monster deserves none. Because at this very end he is afraid for all his power and age and cruelty, he is a creature of instinct, and is left with only that.

He's collapsing, like an origami squeezed between dirty little fingers, but where paper remains crumpled and misshapen in a soft palm, nothing remains of this demon.

I am the first to move, I think because I am the only one who has reason to move close. The handsome blond man has crumpled as well and he remains like a tattered scroll, still and unmoving. I do not wonder if he lives or not.

I go and kneel beside the baby who screams and screams and screams for comfort and there is none to be had. It is a boy; I have a baby brother. I move to touch his round cheek but my finger blisters at the contact. A black spiral is blazing on his tummy, convulsing with screams.

Unmindful of the heat, I pick him up; my sleeves blacken but his tiny body is cooling. I smile and rock him and slowly he calms. He has a shock of golden fluff. If he lets it grow it may be a mane like mine. There are three slashes on each of his cheeks, stretching as he yawns widely. Then his lips begin to move, pulling and push, in and out around his gums.

I laugh very softly as I realize he is hungry. I carefully rearrange him in my arms and wipe my index finger on my pants and offer it to his sucking lips. He latches on eagerly, frowning when it yields nothing but still he tries.

People are moving around me now, but I ignore them, absorbed in the baby…my brother.

And then there are nimble hands drawing him from my tender grasp. I snatch him back and glare at the man; his face is masked but mismatched eyes watch me oddly.

Give it to me, he commands.

No, I snarl, as vicious as the Kyuubi itself. He is my brother.

The man's eyelids lower in a narrow-eyed warning. You would do well to keep that to yourself.

And it was then that I understood, though I wish so very much I didn't. My baby brother was the key to entrapping the Kyuubi that had terrorized this Land of Fire for too long.

They lost a beloved shinobi. I lost my only sibling. The man took him from me and I raged and cursed and threw anything I could grab at his retreating back and the shinobi left me there except one, an old man with tired eyes.

When I finally fell, he came to me and gathered me in a hug. I did not know who he was, nor did I very much care, but I cried into his black shirt.

Promise me, I whispered brokenly into the silence. He'll be alright? Please…

He'll be just fine, the old man replies and I believe him.

I lost my mother that day, too. When I ran out of that tent I left her alone and she died because there was no one to make sure she lived.

I was absorbed into one of the orphanages that sprang up in Konoha in the wake of the Kyuubi. I met a boy named Iruka; he had lost his parents. I never forgot what that masked shinobi said, and I never told anyone, even Iruka that the demon vessel, Uzumaki Naruto, the forsaken child of the village was my kin, my brother.

I did push the Sandaime to enroll him in the academy class, and various medic-nins to heed their ethics and check in on him. I listened to the whisper about the dunce, the fool of the Academy declaring he would one day be Hokage and the oaths people murmured should he ever be Hokage.

I prayed his dreams came true, observing my brother from the shadows, and never told anyone.