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1. Konoha was full of a private darkness, haphazard alleys that wound through the backs of shops, covered with a thatch of telephone lines, hanging laundry, string stretched between tin cans. Curtains drawn over the doorways of late night noodle shops revealed only sandaled feet, red and green neon signs created stereopticons with customers passing, forwarded along to intimate thoughts and rendezvous. Camera obscura. Fugaku was familiar with this time of night even after years off of the shift; it was an old friend, sticky lipped with cooking oil turned syrupy by the temperature, and wearing a perfume of close steam, thick noodles, cloudy broth but she was reliable; the only time he could have meet Shisui and asked him this.
He puts his chopsticks down on the rim and lines them up.
Shisui laughs quietly to himself, "You don't know anything about him at all, do you?”
“He’s going to ruin his life, as a father I have a duty--"
“You're an idiot."
“No family wants their son to grow up to be a killer.”
“Ours does.”
“You mean it then—what you said.”
“Yes.” he ground the bone chopsticks together in the bottom of the bowl. “And the doujutsu doesn’t work on him, well at least not to the extent of things like that. I would have done it already”.
“You told me you could make me dance naked in front of the council.”
“Strong Sharingan users have some resistance,” there’s a tense silence between them, then “You should have seen him more in action, his taijutsu—is perfect. Genjutsu--art.”
“I read the mission reports."
Shisui snorts and looks away, licks his lips like he’s going to say something else. Instead he calls the waitress over and orders another bowl of noodles, the broth steams between them and Shisui adds hot sauce just because he knows Fugaku hates the vinegar smell of it. The soup turns red and after a moment Shisui says, “I’ll do it, but not because you’re asking. Because I loved him and looked out for him for all the years growing up, me.”
“How do I know you’re even loyal?”
He sneered "I'm not going to live under the yoke of our mutual fiend in the forest, or anyone else. Nor am I going to spend the rest of my life rounding up the 'drunk and disorderly' and being spit on. I have my pride" he looked at Fugaku, "it's family trait I'd say." It is the same smile he’d worn at eight years old, Itachi six, the challenge in it. He rises and then after a pause, "You can pay the bill too considering how much you're now in my debt, Oji-san."
He lit a cigarette, breathed in. The deep inhale made his bad eye water, he put a hand over it and made his way home.
2. He walks to the Nakano shrine, lifts the seventh tatami mat on the right, and sits for a long time in the room beneath it. He’d spent a lot of time here in his late twenties after he’d almost lost his eye.
In Ame a missing nin catches him with the backswing of a Kusarigama. The blow fractures his ocular orbit and the pain is incredible. He's lays in the muck for hours expecting the attacker to come back and finish him with a blow to his exposed neck, but it never comes. Blood oozes from his eye into a pool in front of him, the throbbing pain there matching his breathing in his ears shallow pants. The muscles in his stomach spasm over and over with the pain. He vomits endlessly and thinks he's going to die horizontal against a slate sky, far from home.
The wound heals cleanly, which is nothing short of a miracle, but it leaves him with a blind spot and the occasional double vision. Tsunade tells him there’s a possibility he might lose sight in the eye later on in life, that the nerve damage had been irreversible. As a consequence he’s stripped of long term mission duties or covert intelligence gathering.
In the few months after his injury his dreams the attack over and over: The downward arc of the stroke. The blue-black chain rubbed with beeswax so it would swing cleanly. The heavy ceramic swirl of the attacker’s mask.
It is at this time while tearing apart the practice field that a man had appeared in a yukata tapping a folded fan against his palm with a sound like applause. It might have been the pain; he had been driven close to madness by the fracture and the ever present headache that would follow him to his grave, but it also gives him clarity of vision and he knows within that first glance that it is Uchiha Madara. Recognizes him from his statue at the valley of the end. He isn’t tall, but smooth and tan like some worked exotic wood. His mother had sometimes told him stories about an Uchiha hermit that came and went in the woods of Konoha, that his presence was a marker for brilliance. Growing up Fugaku remembers those tissue-thin aspirations, imagining a hunched figure, few teeth and long scraggly beard entering the clearing, re-affirming his own dreams. Madara is none of that; it seems impossible that he would still look the same, but Fugaku staggers to the man and drops at his feet in the same position that his son will take years later at the throne of Orochimaru.
Madara reaches down to cup Fugaku’s broken face.
"What a shame" he says frowning and running his thumb in a long line over his zygomatic arch—a tenderness--and down across his cheek pausing at his mouth, "I was sure you were going to be the one."
And Fugaku feels it, his own inadequacy.
“We'll have to make sure you marry well; your children should be geniuses. It doesn't mean you've become useless” he leans close and licks the salt tear from the corner of his eye. At twenty Fugaku shudders at that voice, at the promise in it "Remember a Tengu is Heaven’s Dog, but no one else's."
3. Four years later he sees Mikoto’s face behind a screen door in passing. She hadn’t been meant for him, had just been setting up for the omai after his own, but it didn’t matter. Mikoto's body is soft and white as milk underneath her clothes and he forgets all about the man in the forest until Itachi is born.
The night of his son’s birth Fugaku dreams of his own beheading and wakes up sweating. A figure like a mirage is crouched at his window. Three months later he takes Itachi into the forest to see Madara like some sort of christening. Madara smiles at the baby when he sees him and Itachi, who is a quiet baby smiles back. They talk quietly and mostly about his father who had been one of the most celebrated shinobi in three generations, but at the end had gone crazy and had to be kept at the shinobi hospital where he had shrunk to a skeleton of a man. Visiting that place had always made him sick, and in the last days his father’s body under the sheets had been a pile of rotted sticks, and his mind elsewhere fighting numerous and insubstantial enemies.
During his life, his father had been obsessed with keeping the peace between the Uchiha and the Council. It had been he who nailed the wood panels under the seventh tatami down on orders of the council, cowed to Danzo, agreed with the clan leaders to the forced economic isolation of the Uchiha compound.
Fugaku had been the one to go back, pull up the nails and open the room under the Nakano shrine. He crouches for a long time above the hole he’s made when it’s done. He can tell without looking the room has that peculiar underground cold, a place never warmed by the sun. The dry dust and wet mold miasma that drifts up to him; it was the smell of mortality. Underground ambitions, root-cellar memories.
He had been here as a child the last time here was here. Remembers the tengu mural on the walls and how much he'd loved the thick black outlines of the vegetable dye; he rubs his old hands against them before he leaves, enjoying the clean-cut borders, the ease of delineation, looking for that same innocent pleasure. The pigments rub off on his fingers, powdery blues and reds.
Occasionally he walks out to look at the memorial stone. The second name on the stone is Uchiha Izuna, and the story goes it was by order of the second hokage that it had been carved. Apparently he had known him briefly during his time as a hostage in the Uchiha camp during the treaty negotiations; the first name on the stone is, of course, Senju Hashirama. It’s a phantom slight. His father had told him to bear it. To eat his sorrow, hold his tears.
At 21 he goes back to the Nakano, pulls out the manuscripts and studies them late into the night, It takes years to get through the chicken scratch of it, but passages stand out: Two brothers are auspicious, if a child has no brother let him have a cousin for a friend. The power of the Mangekyo Sharingan can only be awakened… He weaves his own life into this pattern that has been set down for him. When his son is born he finds that one of his second cousins has a precocious two year old that runs everywhere and hates to wash. They become friends.
For years his nights are spent at the Nakano shrine the smell of incense heavy on his clothes so that when he comes home Mikoto will not ask where he has been. Children who shed first blood in battle will manifest the Sharingan earlier. It explained Itachi and Shisui's generation perfectly.
Other truths rise to the surface, other stories he’s heard only as retellings fill with meaning like an empty glass. Before an alliance was even discussed the Uchiha and Hyuuga were at constant war as eye-jutsu users. Uchiha children were planted inside the walls as spies. The byakugan would manifest in adolescence years after the Sharingan, which was not limited by time and depended only on shedding blood in battle. Mothers were doujutsued into replacing their own infants, and children burdened with subconscious instruction were left as time bombs in other compounds to finally be welcomed home as heroes if they completed their mission. As a young man these stories had spoken to him about sacrifice, the necessity of evil, but now with his own small sons he can’t even imagine. He wonders more often if his own father had made the same choices. Wants to ask him, but can’t get a word in beside the ranting. He feels time gnawing at him and he is aware—more than ever—of his old man’s fatigue. The comfort in warm drinks before sleep, how unfair it was for Sasuke to have an older father. More than that he wonders about the plan he’s setting in motion, and deep down he wonders about someone like Madara who has never aged, never watched his sons grow, how he could understand the sacrifice of what they were about to do. Sasuke still sucks his thumb occasionally and if it had been Itachi he would have told him to stop, known him capable of understanding that command, but Sasuke… Sasuke is so oblivious. The openness of his face, his recitation of child obscenities, puffed up chest at his own achievements.
Looking at him after he is just born Fugaku marvels at his small small hands and tiny nails like glass beads.
4. As a father he’d drawn a hard line. Never bought him sweets during festivals, pushed him to excel, honor his elders. Once when Itachi catches a goldfish he lets his disapproval be known; when it dies a week later he’s unsympathetic. But Shisui was always there the next morning stubbornly holding a goldfish in a bag, dango wrapped in paper, laminated kites. And as they grew older their relationship changed only a little.
“He got in a fight” she says rubbing the dirt off his face and out of the cuts on his fingers and knuckles with the damp nap of the cloth. He’s seven and his hair is already long. Fugaku’d tried to persuade him to cut it but Itachi displays a stubbornness that would become more familiar as he grows older. He remembers that scene so well, and the bruise later--plum-black. Itachi’s face had been blank for the whole process and they hadn’t been able to get out what had been said. After Mikoto had finished he’d thanked her, and gone out to the garden where Shisui smirking curls a lock of hair around his finger and tugs. Itachi inclines his head, bending just a little toward the other boy, smiling.
He catches Kakashi giving Itachi the once-over during the ANBU induction ceremony, and much to his annoyance the other man uses Icha Icha Paradise to block the disapproving “V” of Fugaku’s eyebrows. Kakashi who has gotten more than his share of flak from the Uchiha figures offense is a good defense, “I don’t think I’m the one you should be worried about.” Shisui’s laugh starts up too loud and Fugaku winces, feels the noise penetrate to his bad eye.
“You get it too, don’t you.” Kakashi asks fingering his hitae headband “At night with the temperature drop, and then right before storms?”
"Mah, Oji-san do you frown so much because it’s hard to see with that blind spot?" Shisui had asked when he’s eight years old. Itachi's body had gone rigid and Fugaku realizes that not only had they both known it existed that they had already appraised him as an opponent, and Shisui at least viewed him as an equal. He remembers Shisui's smile as he stood in the doorway holding Itachi's hand, the challenge in it. What they whispered or communicated in sign language in front of him took on another meaning besides childhood gibberish and underlying that is the fear his own son.
His eye aches in its socket, he claws at it.
The next day he throws Shisui out of the house. Shisui blocks the doorway with his body, setting his nails into the door jam and spitting with rage “I could kill you. I could make you kill yourself or dance naked in front of the council, you old blind fuck.”
“Stay away from this house.” Is what he says, but Shisui is looking beyond him to where Itachi is standing in the entryway, “And you—you know. Not your father, or Ma—or anyone is going to get in my way. You know I’m the only one.”
5. They’re standing in the portion of the forest called the "Hokage's brow" but which he knows kids nowadays call "Make-out paradise". It’s his favorite time of night, warmer than the night he’d meet with Shisui and Madara, dead or no, has a fine sheen of sweat over his body.
"Did you know that Hashirama moved the trees here in order to protect the village? I thought it was a stupid at the time but one wonders how the village would have been different because of it.”
He’s wondered for some time now how Senju could ever have resisted such a creature; if he had even wanted to. It’s no secret Uchiha Madara has loved Hashirama; one of the oldest papers in the shrine archive is a letter written in a business-like hand:
"Love is all a matter of timing.
It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late.
If I'd lived in another time or place......
my story might have had a very different ending. "
For a long time Fugaku wonders what the expression on Hashirama’s face as he turned away could have been. Anguish? Or more likely the cold resolute expression that would have forced a man like Madara to build that cell underneath the shrine, to seek out the same manner of coldness. If he had said yes, or had never said anything at all, had not turned his head when Madara alone and sixteen had seen him. He wants to ask Madara all these things, if history could change on the turn of a head. If he had not seen Mikoto’s shadow behind the painted screen, or had seen the ball-and-chain weight come down at him how his life would have been different.
Passing through the village the Nakano carried out a sea of regrets and lost loves, along her tributaries. Ghosts clustered still-born under the surface smooth and polished as river stones.
Madara makes a noise in his throat and gestures 100 meters ahead of him. Itachi is just on the edge of fourteen. The collar of his shirt is pulled down and Shisui is nuzzling his collarbones. Itachi’s eyes are almost closed, and underneath his pupils are flat black and blown.
He closes his eyes and turns away, and in doing so he misses the unconscious communication between the other three. The triangle of sight that excluded him: Shisui’s eyes flickering to their position. Madara’s eye lingering on the white arch of Itachi’s body, and Itachi head lolled to the side opening his eyes long enough to drink in Shisui’s face like a drowning man.
Behind his eyelids his wonders are that of a father in regard to a son. Simple, paternal. He wonders if they had reached somewhere pure and clean, somewhere that he had forgotten about in his age. He has a vision of his father, old and senile cowed by his own disability. The white hair in his eyebrows, body diminished to nothing, upset whenever he left the compound, when the world became unknown again. If soon Itachi would look at Fugaku’s own body with distaste.
Days later he also misses the wet footsteps on the seventh tatami of the shrine. The shape is that of a man leading away, unsteady.
6. It seemed to him now he was living in a dream, a dream where his faults were lined up on a long street ahead and behind him. The world around him with its distractions and colors rushed by in great swashes of color and that here he was under the scrutiny of all those he had met, and most of all his son who watched him from far away. Shisui doubled a mirage at his shoulder, and Madara is a shadow behind him as if someone had cobbled together some dark homonculous, the grace that Mikoto's genes had given him stretched and framed his body, and the fear of it of the monstrosity. His son's dark expansive eyes that watched him out of the dark.
He'd seen the heavy lead weight of the kusarigama come down on him a split second too late to put his hands up maybe catch the blow on his forearms even though it would no doubt shatter the radius. The heavy blue-black wrought iron gleam as it swung down on an arc at the end of which hung the rest of his life, he felt it smash the weight of the centrifugal force bearing down on him. The chain spun out uselessly until his attacker drew it taunt again, waiting to see if a second strike was necessary. He knows the feeling of lying in the mud waiting for the killing blow.
Because of this he is no stranger to waiting for that executioner’s blow, even if that executioner is his son. Itachi touches his face with the edge of the blade, tapping his cheekbone as patiently as Madara had shut the fan into his palm all those years ago.
Itachi seems to be waiting for him to speak, but after a moment his face closes. He wants to ask why. But his tongue isn’t working. He feels the flesh of it move in his mouth. Fugaku had never wondered till then what other soldiers must have felt encountering him when he was a child, or all those killed on assassination missions that he had read the reports for. His son’s was the last human thing they saw, and it was barely that; their tone could never have conveyed the face he saw before him: lead white and blank like things kept behind glass, hermetically sealed against outside influences. It is the face of all their accumulated hates, and petty grievances, their selfishness and animosity placed upon him; the difference a man with a grudge could make in history.
In this movie of his life, playing unceasingly his actions become the stuff of scrutiny. His smallness, the tiny clockwork of his decisions, the small hatreds and unkindness, the meanness of his position in the grand scheme of things is suddenly in his awareness, and like Shisui had said, he had never understood. Couldn’t have possibly, vision narrowed as it is.
The last thing Uchiha Fugaku sees before he dies is blurred figures, red-eyed, bearing down on him.
His last thought: I’ve never seen--