The following morning, Naruto was brought out of sleep by an odd scratching sound. He refused to open his eyes however and did not react save for a slight twitch of an eyebrow, being far too comfortable at the moment.
A few more minutes of the odd sound preventing him from falling back asleep caused him to deeply inhale the scent of his wife from where he had his nose buried in her hair and twisted around to take a look at what was going on.
Akitsu was sitting in front of a canvas, looking even more sleepy than normal, making the offending sound by dragging a pencil across the aforementioned canvas.
"Akitsu?" He questioned in confusion.
The Ice Sekirei started at the sound and made a noise of distress as the twitch caused her to make an unintended line on the canvas.
"What are you doing?" He asked curiously.
"Drawing." She replied quietly, apparently focused on correcting her earlier mistake.
"You can draw?" he pressed further, now sounding impressed.
The Ice Sekirei colored slightly at his tone, but was spared from having to answer due to Xanna doing it for her.
"Apparently so. She got bored of doing math one day and started doodling in the notebook we gave her until she ran out of space, at which point she stopped." The horned woman murmured, pulling Naruto back down to keep him from leaving the bed to take a look at the unfinished picture. It was still dark outside and there were several hours of cuddling yet to be done.
"Why would she do that?" Naruto wondered.
"Embarrassment." Was the flat answer, making Akitsu pout slightly behind her canvas.
"O...kay." He said uncomprehendingly. "Can I see what you're making Akitsu?"
Akitsu pinked again at the idea of it, nervous about what he would say. Xanna had said that it was pretty good, but she couldn't help thinking that it really wasn't and didn't want to be criticized. She wouldn't have even been drawing in the open like this if Xanna hadn't more or less told her to get a hobby.
Xanna sighed in minor irritation, seeing that they wouldn't be getting back to the cuddling until her husband's curiosity on the matter was satisfied. "Bring it here."
The command giving her no real choice in the matter, she did so and then shuffled nervously behind the drawing while they inspected it.
It was obviously still incomplete, but there was enough of it done to see that it was a drawing of the two of them sleeping, with Naruto spooning Xanna, the sheet just below their waist and their hair splayed everywhere. There was even the start of what seemed to be moonlight coming in through the balcony.
It was a bit rough around the edges, giving the impression that Akitsu still hadn't figured how to properly draw certain things, but Naruto barely noticed that. After all, his last attempts at art had been a dick carving and a smiley face that he'd left for Ra to find.
The thing with Bastet's temple didn't count, because he'd cheated to make that.
"That's really good." He complimented, grinning at her pleased/embarrassed blush. "Did you do all of this just now?"
Akitsu nodded happily and swayed around a bit with her hands clasped behind her back, pleased that he liked it.
Xanna on the other hand frowned in thought as she looked at the drawing. It looked like the work of at least a few hours. "Akitsu, how long have you been working on that exactly?"
"Ah...since you fell asleep?"
"And how did you know when we fell asleep?"
"..."
"Akitsu, have you been listening to us have sex so that you could start drawing when we stopped?"
"Maybe?"
Naruto sniggered into Xanna's hair, more than a little amused by Akitsu's antics. It would certainly explain why she looked so sleepy if she'd been up the whole night, first doing her creepy stalker eavesdropping and then drawing them in their sleep.
"Why?" Xanna pressed relentlessly, paying no mind to her easily amused husband.
"Full moons...good light." Akitsu offered as an explanation.
Xanna looked through the open balcony that let in a pleasantly cool night breeze and saw that both moons were indeed nearly full, offering considerable illumination even during the night. Having both of them full at the same time was something of a rare event actually, but not extremely so.
"You could have simply asked." She pointed out.
"...You were busy."
It was Naruto that frowned this time, detecting a note of melancholy in her tone, probably feeling left out but trying to hide it. He could tell that something had happened while he'd been gone and he'd get the full story later. For now it would be enough to make the Ice Sekirei get some of the sleep she'd missed out on, as well as some attention.
He made a come hither gesture with his hand towards Akitsu, causing the Sekirei to be pulled towards them. Her silk kimono suffered the same fate as several hundred of its predecessors as it was ripped to shreds before she was allowed into bed with them.
She ended up with her face nestled in Xanna's breasts due to the horned woman being determined to get back to the morning cuddling and this way she got it from both sides. Tired as she was, Akitsu fell asleep quickly.
"I see you've had a talk with her." Naruto murmured into his wife's ear once he was certain that Akitsu was fast asleep.
Xanna hummed confirmingly but said no more. It remained to be seen whether Akitsu could develop some personality from this or if she would backslide into being a living accessory. For the moment she just wished that Naruto would stop talking already.
Deciding to drop it for now, Naruto started talking about another interesting event from the recent past.
"You'll never guess who dropped in on me on Ratania..."
With a small sigh, she answered. "It was that Oma woman wasn't it?"
"Okay, so you'll easily guess who it was, but you'll never guess what happened."
"You slept with her." Boring! Now shut up already.
She kept the thought to herself, but if he didn't stop talking soon that was going to change.
"Oh no, this is going to be much better than just sleeping with her."
Interest finally prickled in the horned woman's mind at his tone, which was that particular conniving pitch that Naruto always used when he was planning to do irreparable harm someone's way of life or world view.
"You sound so deliciously devious." She purred. "Whisper your evil plot into my ear...slowly."
Naruto went quickly started getting hard at her tone, and finished getting hard even faster when he felt her hand wrap around the hardening member and start stroking in an encouraging manner.
He'd been intending to tell her everything anyway, but he certainly wasn't going to complain about the extra incentive, so he used his lowest, sexiest rumble to reveal his intentions towards one Oma Desala, being more loquacious about it than originally intended.
Akitsu ended up being woken up shortly after that and ended up even more exhausted than before, but she did eventually get some sleep.
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Months later.
After shaking off the latest case of Naruto induced frustration, Oma had showed up again to help him and Xanna start up their empire as agreed upon. She had no intention of being present on a constant basis, but would pop in from time to time and offer advice to help things along.
Naruto had indeed been correct in his suspicion that she intended to attempt planting the seeds of some more ethical behavior if possible, but she was well aware that the chance was fairly remote. Power did tend to corrupt after all, which was one of the reasons that the ascended secluded themselves away from mortals, removing the temptation to tell them how to run their lives. That at least she did agree with the others on.
Not everyone had always believed so. Oma in particular had argued strenuously in favor of removing the Goa'uld from power since it was their own leftover technology that allowed them to gain it in the first place. It had taken a long time before she had convinced enough of the others to agree to it that they had to be heard by all of the ascended.
An attempt had been made to give the Jaffa the means to overthrow the Goa'uld on their own and the Sodan Warriors had been created, a faction of Jaffa free of Goa'uld influence. They could have conceivably been able to overthrow their former masters with minimal ascended interference.
Unfortunately, the Jaffa as a people were highly spiritual and their culture had severe religious leanings thanks to the Goa'uld. They had abandoned the Goa'uld yes, but they had taken the Ascended as their gods from then on, worshipping them and looking to them for leadership no matter how much they argued against it.
The Ascended had been appalled and stopped interacting with mortals almost entirely, the parallels to the Ori being too great to sit well with them. They did not want to remove the Goa'uld as masters of Avalon as they called this galaxy only to replace them like a mirror of what the Ori had done in their home galaxy.
The interventionist faction as it was called among the Ascended dispersed almost entirely after that abysmal failure. She had been the only one that had still wanted to try doing something about the Goa'uld instead of letting things happen as they would.
Of course, her later blunder with Anubis had only confirmed their belief that they should leave well enough alone. Truth be told, even Oma had started thinking that and had stopped interacting with mortals save through the caretakers of the handful of sanctuaries scattered across the galaxy.
Naruto and Xanna were a different matter though. They were clearly going to do whatever they wanted no matter what the Ascended thought of it, so she might as well try to offer advice that would nudge them along as positive a path as possible. Hopefully, They would be shaped by the civilization they built just as they shaped it.
So she had taken a metaphorical deep breath to brace herself for what would probably be another incredibly irritating interaction with two horned beings.
Rather shockingly, it proved to not be particularly irritating at all.
She had certainly been put back into a physical body, the same young one that Naruto always used, though this time he had fortunately not inflated her breasts. To her relief, she'd also been given clothing that was much better than the previous leather outfit that was somehow even worse than being naked. Instead of that, she'd found herself wearing a light blue silk blouse with matching pants.
They were far more modest than the leather vest and skintight leather pants, even though the neckline on the blouse was still a bit on the low side. They were also exceedingly comfortable.
Oma had expected that they would get to the business of making plans on how to advance their society right away, but they had refused to talk about it then, insisting that it was time for dinner.
Much to her boundless relief, there had been no meat brought out. Oma wasn't entirely certain that she would have been able to keep her stomach from heaving if she had to see the butchered and cooked remains of dead animals brought out to be eaten.
It had been millions of years since the last time that an Alteran had eaten meat, enough time that they had mostly lost the ability to even digest it. The body that Naruto had created for her could undoubtedly do it, but the deep revulsion she felt at the very idea would have never allowed her to keep it down.
While bodiless it was fairly easy to look at things from a dispassionate distance, to understand that just about any species that reached sentience inevitably became omnivorous due to sheer necessity as a single food source became insufficient to sustain it, but being put into a physical body also forced her to experience the involuntary reactions of said body to powerful emotions.
Try as she might, she could not discern the cause of their insistence for joining them for a meal. If Naruto had done so only to place the cooked flank of some animal in front of her to watch her go green, that she would have expected, but they had clearly steered clear of any kind meat or eggs for her benefit. She didn't even question how they might have known her feelings about such things. For all she knew, Naruto had smelled her discomfort when he'd said she was wearing leather during their last meeting and drawn the correct conclusions.
Despite her initial apprehension of what the reason for their insistence on having her join them for dinner was, it was quite the relaxed affair.
Relaxed in the sense that the horned duo had all the table manners of a rampaging Unas. They grabbed at the food with their hands or sometimes even with their tongues and fought over pieces of food for the sheer sake of fighting over them. Though they somehow managed to keep both themselves and the surrounding area clean through some means that escaped Oma's understanding.
In sharp contrast, the fourth person present, the subdued and perpetually sleepy looking Akitsu was eating at a more sedate pace. She took small bites and chewed carefully, occasionally drinking from the large glass of fruit mulch that she seemed to be particularly fond of and seemed utterly unbothered by the chaos unfolding next to her.
"Are they always like this?" Oma asked her quietly.
"Ah...no." Akitsu answered slowly, blinking slowly at the guest. She had to wonder if Naruto had purposefully made Oma's blouse so thin that her nipples were visibly poking through it. She decided that he probably had, it would be just like him after all. He'd probably been hoping that the sensation of silk rubbing against them would make them get erect. "They're holding back because of you."
Holding back? Oma thought to herself with no small amount of incredulity, seeing that Xanna had just pulled a metal spike out of somewhere and tried to nail Naruto's hand to the table with it.
Eventually, she did start eating, finding that the thick vegetable sauce was actually very tasty.
Seeing as her two hosts were busy fighting over the abundance of food like a pair of starving animals, Oma decided to try getting to know Akitsu instead. The subdued woman might be able to offer some additional insight into their character. She hadn't dared come close enough to learn anything about Akitsu beforehand, so she would need to rediscover the skill of getting to know a person through conversation again.
"How did you meet them?" Oma asked, nodding her head at the warring married couple.
"Ah...Naruto found me in a park and took me home, then he took my virginity." Akitsu answered in fond remembrance.
Of course he did. Oma thought to herself, somehow not very surprised even if she was sure that there was a lot of missing backstory to it.
"Did he take your virginity too?"
Oma accidentally dumped the food on her fork(a metal one that was rather beyond the current ability of their fledgling civilization to make) down her cleavage at the innocent sounding question.
"No, he is much too late for that." She answered while using a cloth to clean the food from herself, feeling amused by the question in spite of herself. The subdued woman was rather endearing with her innocent forwardness.
The conversation died at that point, Akitsu having gone back to slowly emptying her plate(ceramic plates, which were once again beyond the local civilizations ability to produce.) and smiling fondly at the horned couple whose fighting seemed to finally be winding down.
Despite the quality of the food(and it really was very good), Oma was glad that the dinner was coming to a close and that they would presumably get to the point of her visit soon.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Oma had been quite mistaken in her presumption.
After dinner, Xanna had insisted on a massage session and hadn't really asked so much as declared that it would be happening.
Oma had tried to protest but been flatly ignored. She'd been relieved of her clothing and told to lay down on the massage bed while the servant girls brought out the oil.
Strangely enough, Naruto had not so much as leered at her or made a single sex driven comment while this was happening, baffling Oma considerably. She knew that it wasn't because his wife was present, knowing that the horned woman cared not at all who her husband bedded.
Not to mention that he flirted with the massage girls the whole time.
Xanna hogged the vast majority of said massage girls, having more of them working on her at a time than the rest of them combined, mostly due to the writhing mass of tails extending from her tailbone.
Seeing Xanna's ten tails up close had at least been interesting and given her the chance to once again ponder them.
From an evolutionary standpoint, having ten tails was completely redundant. Genetic clutter. That wasn't mentioning how it was even possible to have ten of them apparently connected to a single tailbone. Even an animal wouldn't have evolved to have so many useless appendages, much less a bipedal sentient. They should have atrophied long ago, but were instead impossibly long and powerful looking. Then again there were a lot of things that didn't make sense about Naruto and Xanna, so Oma figured that they probably weren't a product of evolution and were only present for aesthetics, which would neatly fit with the horned woman's personality.
That in mind, she focused on just getting through all this pointless hedonism.
Akitsu had been making quiet sounds of pleasure for a while at the pampering and then suddenly let off a little snore that sent Naruto into a round of snickering along with a few of the massage girls. Xanna merely gave an amused smile.
Oma didn't react to it overmuch, because she was finding herself in a similar situation. Despite her disdain for such self indulgence, she had to admit that the way her back and legs were being kneaded felt very good.
That, in combination with the food she'd consumed earlier, left her feeling terribly drowsy. There was no sleep for an ascended being, only meditation, which would not have really helped her stay awake.
She never even realized when the battle was lost and she started snoring right next to the Ice Sekirei.
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