To be the Man who Walked a 1000

[permetaform]

To be the Man who Walked a 1000

.o0o.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto and am not making money off this.

AN: Brain was eaten by crack. Pure, utter crack. XD

Warning: NaruKaka, KakaNaru, het, hijinks, strangeness, omfg Sasuke XD. READ TALES 4 AND 5, else this would really, really not make sense.

.o0o.

Sasuke loves his mother and thinks she's wonderful, even if she kind of embarrasses him sometimes, like with her constantly calling him cute even though he's fifteen and with reading her trashy novels and with his name. Who the hell named their kids something Japanese when their last name was O'Harris? The story was apparently that they'd had their honeymoon in Japan and they got him and Sakura out of it. He is still deeply unamused and is convinced that it was all his father's doing. Partially because he refused to inflict Hjálmtýsson onto his children and took his wife's last name, so Sasuke can't even hide behind people tripping over his last name and has to get stared at while people say, "But you don't look Japanese."

"That's because I'm not." He always grits out; one day it will stick, he thinks.

But while his father is imminently annoying and kind of stupid and clearly doesn't deserve his wife (Sasuke refuses to admit that he's supposed to grow out of that phase), he still makes her happy. So Sasuke spends alot of time thinking up the perfect anniversary present. Year fifteen is supposed to be crystal if you're going traditional, or watches if you were going modern. But his mother hates watches and his father is hard on everything he wears. So it'd have to be crystal. Sakura's getting them one that looked like a cherry blossom tree, but he finds that just a bit egotistical. He picks one of a wolf pack.

He's confused though, at the large banquet while the presents are being opened, because while about a third of them were crystal and watches too, and a great deal were completely random, a large portion were china and platinum.

"I thought that china and platinum were for the twentieth year," he asks his half-brother Ian.

"Foolish little brother," Ian flicks at his forehead, pauses, then narrows his eyes, "There are no set gifts between fifteen and twenty. Most likely they looked at the wrong row on the anniversary tables."

The large man in the very black suit next to his brother bellows with laughter and slaps at the table. "That's what I did!" And grinned shark-like. The other dark-suited men at their table chuckles and nods, while everyone else just smiles or ignores them for their own conversations.

And Sasuke narrows his eyes. The ones who laughed or smiled all brought platinum gifts too. In fact, thinking back, they'd always made mistakes in giving anniversary presents. They were, and he strains, thinking hard, always about five years off, if the past three years were any indication. Five years, his brain pokes at him, and he remembers that Ian is five years older than he is.

They never talk about who his half-brother's father is, and Sasuke had always assumed that the guy was a douche-bag who'd left his mother. Sasuke's father, when he was in high school, had babysat for Ian so often that he pretty much raised his older brother. That's how his parents got to know each other, or so the story goes.

You and your half-brother look so much alike!, people would say.

They take after their mother, his father always chuckles and rubs at his head, like he does when he's sheepish or nervous.

Ian, when he happens to smile, has his father's smile.

"We're brothers," he states, a revelation.

"Of course we are," Ian says lightly, and drags him out of the seat, hand as gentle as polished steel, "Come, we should give them our congratulations."

Their tablemates mostly pay them no mind, one or two raises their glasses and tells them to send their hellos. Sasuke can't seem to escape from Ian's grip.

"Father," Ian greets when they arrive, and smiles just the smallest smile. Sasuke wonders if he'd cultivated it that way, so the resemblance would be less.

"Ian! Sasuke!" Their father rises and gives them both warm smiles and large hugs as their mother watches from the table, slouching against the chair and looking very bored. They usually hid her books when there was a major event that she didn't much care for because while she could be focused, she also didn't give a rat's ass about most formalities and had a tendency of reading even in front of diplomats. Not like she doesn't have one in her purse even now, but she takes their effort in hiding her books as a sign that they Mean It.

"Congratulations on your anniversary, Father, Mother." Ian bows and hands them a present.

Their father takes the gift slowly and glances at Sasuke, their mother straightens ever so slightly from her slouch, "Thank you Ian, would you like us to open it at the table?"

Ian tilts his head.

Sasuke had never seen his brother give them a present before, and had thought that he didn't care for giving them. Their parents didn't seem to expect it of Ian which Sasuke had attributed to Ian's absent father. So he hadn't realized it may have been that Ian's been giving it to them out of sight; they look more surprised at Sasuke being there than at the proffered gift.

Their father hands it to his silver-haired wife and then scoots his chair close, he'd been banned from opening presents that year because, well, crystal and his enthusiasm didn't mix. Neither, for that matter, did china, Sasuke thinks numbly as he watches his mother lift out a plate printed with a lovely portrait of their parents curled up and napping in a field; it was a candid shot that Ian had taken during a picnic.

"Oh," their mother murmurs, stroking the edge of the plate with a finger, she clears her throat, "This is very nice, thank you." Then her eyes flickers at Sasuke and his father's follows her glance and narrows, briefly.

"Ian! It's an awesome present!" he gestures broadly, and their mother deflects his arm before it smacks his water over with the ease of long practice, "But we can't leave right now and we're up to our necks in gifts and shit, think you and Sasuke could haul some of them to the coat room before I break anything?"

"We could."

"Great! I'll send someone with the rest if you can't carry them all."

Sasuke's brain is inadvertently doing the math, had in fact been doing the math even before they'd left their table but it'd kept choking on the numbers and sailing down Denial. If Sasuke's father is Ian's father, then when his father was fourteen- and the part of his brain that hoarded law and legalities cried statutory rape and he couldn't think that of his mother. And he. He finds his arms piled with presents, many of which were china or platinum, and finds himself being dragged down a hall.

The coat room is empty of people and full of coats, and boxes that'd been prepared for the presents, and they set their armfuls down in them before Sasuke is inexorably led to an empty bathroom. Ian checks the windows, then locks the door.

"He's your father." Sasuke states.

Ian nods in agreement. But they'd always called Sasuke's father, Father, and that could mean anything.

"I mean, your biological father."

Ian nods again. Sasuke had always found it surprising his brother wasn't more curious about his birth father, and more angry. He supposes this is why.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Sasuke roars and is throwing a fist into the mirror when he finds it grabbed and twisted up behind him.

"Would it have mattered, foolish little brother?" Ian asks calmly, "Would you have kept silent?"

Sasuke opens his mouth to agree but then that part of him that'd been studying to be a cop since he was five, that part of him that saw things in black and white, shrieks that it doesn't make sense, his mother should be in jail. And then he gets strangled by his own thoughts and wonders how the frikken hell could he wish for his mother to be in jail. And then he wonders—

"But we're friends with cops." He remembers them being around ever since he was young.

"We are."

"But you're a cop."

Ian shifted. "Am I?"

"I thought you were training to be one..." Sasuke thinks of all the firearms practice Ian's put in with him, and the hours at the gym and at the dojo, but then he remembers that Ian never cracked open the books and the protocol manuals that he did.

Ian releases him and Sasuke spins around to stare him in the eyes. They're steady and unflinching.

"I would do anything to protect my family," Ian says. "So would our father."

The locked door clicks open. Sasuke tenses.

"Hey, it's me." The man opens his wallet and slips his lockpicks in.

"Fin," Ian replies flatly. The large man grins even as he turns to lock the door again.

"Checking to see if you needed any backup. Also we've set up a perimeter in case things get loud."

"We?" Sasuke spits out.

They watch him. And Sasuke realizes from the way the fabric of the coat shifts that the man was packing.

"What the hell Ian?"

"We are family, Sasuke." Ian says, with weird emphasis.

"Yes, I know, but what is Fin doing—"

"We are Family," Itachi interrupts, and Sasuke hears the inflection this time.

When Sasuke was small he used to be pissed off a lot at his perceived injustices and ran away from home often. His father hunted him down with reassuring regularity, even that one time when he managed to get three states away. His father had just laughed and bounced him on his hip and said how proud he was for Sasuke getting and using his mother's genius brain. He'd said this while they were driving back in a dark car, with dark suited men, who were laughing and chuckling along with him. The one with fish eyes gave his father a thumbs up and congratulated Sasuke on his youthful determination, while the one with the even stranger eyes and long prissy hair was shutting off his laptop and collecting GPS and headsets from the rest. It was not unusual for them to appear whenever Sasuke runs.

He realizes, in hindsight, who those men were.

The door clicks open again. Their father and mother enter, his father sticking something into his pocket.

Sasuke could barely wait for them to close and re-lock the door before he bursts out, "You're in the mafia? How could YOU be in the MAFIA? You're so," he flails, "so... Are you even an accountant? And I thought Mother was a lawyer and did human right's work? And why are you in the men's bathroom?" The last he directs at her.

"Is there a problem?" she asks with an air of being deeply unimpressed.

"Sasuke," his father says, laying a hand on his shoulder. "I was fifteen, and my parents were starting to catch on and make noises about age-of-consent issues. I didn't want to take the chance that they would disapprove enough to call the cops on us, without a backup plan, so I protected my family by going to the people who knew how to get around the law. I was not going to let your mom go to jail. I was not going to let Ian be taken away and raised by some stranger."

"I'm a lawyer though," his mother said mildly, "I could have at least—"

"You may be awesome in court," his father interrupted, "but I didn't want it to go there, and neither did you. And while I was willing to sneak around, I wasn't going to totally stop seeing you, or sleeping with you, or raising Ian."

Sasuke reflexively stifles his cringe of horror at the idea of their parents having sex. Blargh.

Then he narrows his eyes. "You say you were fifteen." He challenges, "But you're getting anniversary presents for your twentieth year. And you're thirty four."

"Yup, he got me pregnant when he was fourteen and proposed the same year," his mother says easily. "He finally convinced me a month before Ian popped and we did it in Cancun with a bunch of friends. It took his parents awhile to catch on."

"I still wear the chain the ring stayed on before I was legal." His father grinned and pulled it out of his shirt, and from it dangled the fake dogtags crafted from steel that Sasuke had made for each of them, for what he'd thought were their eleventh anniversary. He's pretty sure they were wearing each other's and not their own.

"Well, it had to stay on a year after that," his mother corrected dolefully, "Tamora insisted we had to 'date' for awhile before we could officially marry."

Aunt Tamora was in on it too, Sasuke thinks, what the hell.

"I liked our dates," his father pouted.

"We could have had sex in places other than ramen eating contests."

"But you didn't mind the—"

"STOP." Sasuke tries to glare his father into submission. The blond was only slightly cowed, which was not nearly enough for his taste.

The lock clicked.

"WHAT NOW." Sasuke shouts at the door.

"Geeze, keep your voice down," Sakura mutters, and closes and locks the thing again.

"You also knew?" he grits out. And does *everyone* except him know how to pick locks?

"Well, yeah, I figured it out that time you ran away from home for three weeks, and they confirmed it. And frankly I don't blame them for not telling you 'cause you were all on your justice kick and reading up on laws and tattling on everyone in school," she takes a deep breath, "And you kept running away from home whenever you felt 'discriminated against' and 'misunderstood', and never talked to me about any of it. Thank god dad's mafia friends got me into boxing. And into the Family, no thanks to you."

And punches him in the gut, both metaphorically and literally.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he wheezes out, feeling betrayed.

"What part of how you stopped talking to your twin sister do you not understand?" She cracks her knuckles, "God, I've been wanting to do that for years. How do you NOT take your twin with you when you run away from home? Honestly."

"Of course I couldn't, you were too weak. You might've been—"

"'Weak', your sorry little delicate white ASS!" She's reaching towards him as if to strangle him bodily and Ian's hauling him backwards even as Fin's trying to trip him forwards and their mother's suddenly between them, and there's no fucking room to move, when their father raises his hand for silence and presses on his ear with the other, "Fuck. Are you sure?"

Everyone except for Sasuke goes very still. He yanks his shoulder away from Ian and untangles his feet from around Fin's.

"Guys, we need to move, mercs from Uchiwa Inc. just crashed the party."

"The food company? Hiring mercenaries?" Sasuke scoffs. His mother's already at the window and peering at the street and his father follows her, still talking softly, hand at his ear.

"Don't diss them, they're intense," Fin pulls out a freaking huge machete from somewhere and is sighting down it's edge. Ian's silently passing around extra clips.

Sakura nods and agrees, "Power follows money, and they're a huge company. But why would they come here?"

"I did some pro bono work with a civil suit against them for misleading health labels and irregular variants of sweeteners that encourage overeating." Their mother's eyes sag almost closed, "I didn't know they would be that pissed."

"It's lost profits," their father shrugs, and scratches at his head, "And ah, I may have shifted their funds around."

"'May'." She states flatly. "What have I said about your going at things alone?"

Their father coughs, reaches up behind his back to pull out a gun, "To not do it? And it was sorta with the Family?"

"You're my partner; you don't leave your team behind." She smacks him upside the head then reaches into his pants, and Sasuke's about to hyperventilate because she's groping his dad in semi-public, again, but she pulls out a gun too. So instead, he chokes on his own spit.

He watches his calm, silver-haired mother check the safety and the clip with an air of confidence and long practice, and it was only a little less strange watching his red-headed sister do the same with the one she'd pulled out of her purse.

"If you didn't have to bring your book, you could've done that too," his father grumbles, nodding his head at Sakura's purse.

"But I like sticking my gun in your pants," his mother replies playfully. His father coughs and turns red.

Sasuke does not want to know.

"I thought you were going into medicine," he says at his sister desperately, while he grabs his own gun from his ankle and checks it.

"I still am, but the Family needs more than one doctor on call because sometimes there are situations where Aunt Tamora gets swamped." She's grim. "You weren't there for most of it."

"I didn't run away from home that much," Sasuke mutters defensively as they slip out the window into the courtyard.

"You don't count the summer camps and the winter festivals as running away? How about the half-year exchange programs to Europe?"

"Hn." He never knew his sister was so bitter about that. "You could've gone yourself."

"That's not the point."

"Children, be quiet."

"Yes mother." "Yes mom." "Yes dear."

"I wasn't talking to you." She eyed their father, unamused.

"But I like saying 'yes dear'." He squints at her in a smile. Then his eyes fall open, "Apparently they're staying away from the banquet hall and are targeting either you or me specifically. They've done shit with our car and Neil's doing a tug-of-war with their network guy over surveillance. North and East are open, but there's very little cover."

"You want to punch through their center don't you?"

"It demoralizes their ranks and sends a message to their leadership. Besides, I think I can get through to the head honcho. I have the charts all set up!"

"Only you," she mutters and follows him into a small patch of cover.

"Charts?" Sasuke asks his siblings as they crept towards the South entrance darting from their own bits of defense. Fin went solo since his bulk precluded partnering. Sakura shrugs and mouths, "Accounting and cost/benefit tables."

"It's actually how he'd rose up be section Boss," Ian says quietly. "He'd restructured their entire money intake into techno-theft operations and disassociated the group from prostitution and extortion schemes."

"Boss?" Sasuke hisses, thinks, then asks, "Wait, that works?"

"Profits are up, costs are down." Sakura shrugs. "And dad tries to hit the more dubious big companies."

"Hn," Sasuke grunts, "That actually..."

"Makes you feel better?" Sakura peers at him from the corner of her eye, "Are you still freaking out over their age thing? Or the legality thing?"

"I...", Sasuke likes things to make sense, he likes knowing who's in the right and who's in the wrong. And it was technically statutory rape no matter what state you were in.

Ian is very carefully not looking at him.

"It...", Sasuke likes feeling that he can see things clearly. And clearly the mafia is organized crime, with criminals.

Sakura is staring at the horizon and fingering her hair.

"You...", Sasuke hates and hates being lied to. Then he feels himself being pushed away. Then his father is leaning against him and bleeding and Sasuke feels it like a punch right through the lungs.

Ian moves like a hunting bird and their assailant is on the ground and dead before they could blink. There are more gunshots in the distance. Sakura's already picking out the bullet from their father's shoulder to the sound of his hisses and their mother's shredding their father's shirt into strips. And Sasuke.

And Sasuke can only.

"Dad." Sasuke chokes out. And his father tilts his head to meet his eyes and a smiles spreads across his face like sunshine.

Quietly, "You've never called me that before."

I haven't been— I'm still not— okay, with everything, yet, he tries to convey.

Take your time, his dad's gaze replies.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, small. And he feels his siblings as if they'd somehow curled in closer with his words.

"It's okay," his father acknowledges. His mother ruffles his hair.

I promise I won't run anymore.

I believe you.

.o0o.

end.

.o0o.

AN: POOR TRAUMATIZED SASUKE. You just can't win Sasuke, YOU JUST. CAN'T. WIN. But! On the upside, no massacre. I'd originally got slammed with the idea that Sasuke would be totally wtf at being raised by Naruto and Kakashi and would keep running away from home, and then my brain piped up with the statutory rape laws, and then the idea of the mafia stuck it's head in.

And here we are.

fyi: The foxwife this time was Sasuke's family, and, sorta, Sasuke.

And um... is my sense of humor too strange for people? x.x I'm getting hits but very few reviews in proportion.

Deep thanks to Accounting no Jutsu by daniel-gudman for some inspiration. XD

Again, if you have a request for a KakaNaru (or NaruKaka!) one-shot either in this universe or in another, give me a prompt/idea and I'll see what I can do with it. This actually helps me write! And while it may take some time before the idea fully percolates, they do get written! I'll credit the idea to the person who gives it to me in the Author's Notes.