Chapter Text
To die for the Uchiha is an honor.
The coffin is small but if Kaname—Izuna, it's Izuna now, or at least it will be when he opens the lid. If Izuna thinks of playing hide-and-seek, he has hidden in smaller places, so it's alright. Hearing the crackle of fire and feeling the heat consuming the pyre beneath the coffin is less okay, but nii-san—Madara—taught him the fire-walking technique, and made him practice until he could do it in his sleep. These funeral whites are the special fire-resistant material of a battle coat too, which helps.
It helps less when the heat and the smoke get into the coffin and make his eyes burn. Kaname—Izuna has been told that the heat from fire feels a lot like the sharingan when newly awakened or overstrained. He hopes that's not true, because he doesn't like this at all. It hurts, and it feels like his eyes might be damaged soon, and that's the scariest thing in the world.
Izuna is halfway through the handseals before he remembers wait until the drums go quiet and makes himself stop, even with the heat and the smoke and his stinging eyes. The drums haven't stopped yet. He can't hear the funeral chant over the flames, but he can feel the drums, and he needs to wait until they stop. Until then he has to lie still.
(Later, while treating his burns, Izuna will remember that it's only leaving that he wasn't allowed to do yet; he could have used the fire-walking jutsu as soon as he liked. So long as he had the chakra for it, of course.)
Izuna squeezes his eyes shut. They still sting, and he can feel the heat and smell burning hair, and he reminds himself not yet, not yet, not yet—
The coffin is hard beneath his back, like lying on the floor, except when it shifts a bit beneath him. The teeth of the special bone comb in Izuna's hair are caught between the wood and his skull, edges of unfamiliar pressure. Izuna presses his arms to his sides and his legs together, for that tiny bit of extra distance from the coffin walls, to shield as much of himself as he can. His whole body is beating with the drums. His lungs feel scorched and the flames are too close to his shoulders, his legs, his back, like he pulled heated metal out of a fire but he can't let go, he can't, not yet, not yet—
Mother did it, so Izuna can do it too—not yet—
The drums stop.
Izuna's hands are too clumsy from adrenaline to fly through the seals like they should, but Madara made him practice and practice and practice, and even clumsy he can still do it. It's still hot when the jutsu works, but it's hot like summer, the dry and scorching days that mean you have to drink as much as you can all day so you don't pass out, and try not to do too much while the sun is high.
It's much easier to bear than the fire. Izuna's eyes are still watering and he can still smell burnt hair, but he's able to sit up, and knock the lid off the coffin. The breeze feels cooler, and he's able to scrub away the tears that escaped from under his eye shroud—mostly salt now, already dried by the heat—and open his eyes.
Despite the gauzy shroud, everything looks sharp from within the heat haze of the fire. Colors are more vivid; the sky is bright blue like Izuna has never quite seen before, and every pebble on the ground casts hard-edged shadows. There are tears on some of his clanmates' faces as Father begins the next chant.
Not—not his clanmates. Not Father. Not anymore. There are tears on some of—some of the Uchiha faces, and Izuna isn't—he can't call them—
Izuna swallows hard, like he took too big a bite and didn't chew it enough, and stands up instead of paying attention to how much it feels like he's choking. There's nothing to choke on.
It's fine. He's fine. He asked for this. He is merely carrying out his duties as son of the head family. It is an honor. He's honored.
He sways a little as he gets to his feet, but once he's up he feels steady, other than being a little lightheaded. That's probably because of all the chakra he's using for the fire-walking jutsu. Izuna bites his lip to remind himself not to try to join the new chant, and then the tip of his tongue instead so that no one will be able to see, and steps out of the fire.
Kaname is dead.
Izuna walks out of the Uchiha compound, chin held high, alone.
Father had brought Izuna to the Spring House a few days before the ceremony, so he would know where to go after walking out of the Uchiha gates. It isn't far from the compound, a mere fifteen minutes on foot. Twenty when stumbling after nearly burning alive.
It's a nice house, too big for one person because there have been times when more than one yomotsu-shikome was needed. It's walled, good solid stone to keep out the fires during fire season, embedded with similar security seals as the Uchiha compound and main house. Izuna's eyes and lungs are still burning as he pushes the large gate doors open with his entire body and stumbles through.
Past the gate is a courtyard with a small garden and a pond. A few short stone stairs go up to raised platforms which lead to the house and shrine. Father and Madara had been here in the morning to place the sealing array for a new yomotsu-shikome, and now it waits in the middle of the courtyard, the ink glistening red from the sinking sun.
Izuna falls ungracefully to his knees in the center of the array. He takes the special bone comb from his hair and uses the hidden sharp edge to nick a fingertip. Blood wells up, bright and jewel-like, even against his ashen hands.
"Oh, Blessed One," Izuna recites, eyes screwed shut to recall the words. "The gods have seen fit to part us. However, for love of you, I go to the Lord of the Dead. I will plead with him to allow us to return together."
He turns his hand and lets the single drop of blood fall to the array before his knees. The array flares red from the center out, across the ground and up the walls. The gate slams shut. What chakra Izuna has left pours out of him like emptying a bucket and he gasps. His heart feels like it’s seized up; he can barely say the last words.
"Our bargain is sealed."
Izuna claps his hands together in prayer, head bowed. The light of the seals fade, and Izuna can feel… something settle on him as his heart starts beating again, like a sheer silk veil from head to toe, like a genjutsu. He isn't maintaining any genjutsu; he feels floaty, empty. He replaces the comb in his hair, his hand shaking, and….
He intends to get up, but he just tilts sideways. The stones of the courtyard are sun-warm even in the gathering dark and comfortable. Very comfortable. His eyes feel so heavy….
Izuna shivers so hard he wakes up. It's the middle of the night, and the heat has long gone out of the stones. Kaname would never have been allowed to fall asleep outside like that back home. He can almost hear Mother or Madara or any one of the aunts scolding him and telling him to go home and sleep in a proper futon before he catches a cold.
What Izuna actually hears is insects, a quiet rustling breeze, and a fish owl calling for a mate. None of them tell him anything. None of them care what happens to him. None of them would even notice.
Izuna has to be able to take care of himself. He must be able to, or Father wouldn't have let him do this, and Father is almost always right.
He just… needs to figure out how.
Moving hurts. His muscles ache from lying on the ground at odd angles, and his skin pulls where the flames got too close too quickly. He catches the faint smell of burnt hair when it falls over his face before he finishes sitting up. When his hair falls back behind him, the scent vanishes.
No one else is coming to help him, and sitting still won't make anything better. Izuna sniffs, scrubs an arm over his face to stop the tears that want to well up, and then realizes the eye shroud is missing.
It's on the ground, must have fallen off while he was asleep, but Izuna feels a tiny bit more awake once he's snatched it up and tied it back on.
It's not an improvement. He can feel his burns crack open with the movement and start to weep fluid again, and Izuna thinks: no fire jutsu. Not when he's fighting the Blessed Sacrifice, at least; Izuna would never forgive himself for hurting a Sacrifice like this. Maybe he can learn wind jutsu instead. They sound gentler.
Izuna stands up. He feels slow and worn out, but steadier than standing up in the fire. The moon lights the courtyard in soft white and gray. He can easily find the spring that Father showed him a few days ago, and use it to wash off Izuna’s burns. The water is cool, but not enough to numb them. He grits his teeth as the running water washes away the blood and ashes, and when he’s clean enough, he sits on the engawa, swings his legs up and stands to step into the house.
The inside of the house is dark, but candles are easy to find. Izuna has to resort to lighting them with matches because he doesn't have enough chakra to light them on his own right now, but at least there's no one around to see.
The house is simple, small, like one of the lower houses in the clan. The main room has a fire pit, and in the back there are a couple of bedrooms, one of them already set up. There's a bathroom. Izuna has no idea where he's going to get the water, or how he could heat the bath and be in it at the same time, but there is a bathroom.
There is a small weapons room, the door cleverly made to look like the other wall panels at a casual glance. Along the left wall are large weapons: giant shuriken, nodachi, ninjato, yari, kama. Weapons Izuna doesn't know the names of. One third of the back wall is taken up by shelves of scrolls and books; the remaining two thirds are filled by shelves with small boxes of drawers for small weapons and other equipment like poisons, wire, and more scrolls. All-white battle coats hang in a row on the right wall, too high for Izuna to put back unless he jumps, and next to them hang a collection of masks and veils and other things which the yomotsu-shikome before Izuna must have used to conceal their faces.
He doesn't want to tear any of the veils or break anything by jumping to take them off their hook, so Izuna takes the nearest mask he can comfortably reach. It's a red hannya mask, familiar from the many plays and festivals Izuna has seen and loved. He's always wanted to try one on but never had a chance to, so despite how bone tired and hurt he is, he eagerly lifts it to his face. Its red lacquer is smooth under his fingers, and the back of the mask is comfortable when he tries it on, even though it's too big and he can't get the string to sit right. He eventually gives up trying to adjust it, but it's strangely comforting and he takes it with him as he closes the weapons room for the night.
The medicine cabinet is in the main room. Izuna lights more candles and places them carefully nearby, but almost everything in it is unlabeled. The labels that exist are faded and blurred by age, and Izuna can only make out two of them. He recognizes neither. One of the very first lessons of field medicine is: if you don’t know what it is, don’t use it. An unidentified medicine is just a poison, far more likely to hurt than help, so Izuna puts them back.
Nearly every medicine the Uchiha clan makes is colored and scented, specifically so that they can be identified more easily. The only exceptions are the ones that would be ruined by the process. That should make it easier, but somehow nothing matches: if Izuna recognizes the scent, the color is wrong; if the color is right, the scent doesn’t match.
One by one the medicines go back in the cabinet, until finally Izuna finds one he recognizes: grandfather rabbit burn cream, with a weirdly sweet scent and tiny dark flecks in the off-white ointment. There are two burn creams that are most common and popular among the Uchiha, and of the two, this is the inferior one: Madara said it leaves more scars, and Father’s nose always wrinkles when he smells it. But Izuna knows it, and he shoves the remaining medicines back into the cabinet with relief.
The texture is off; when Izuna digs a finger into the smooth surface it crumbles like wax instead of the smooth cream it should be. But Izuna knows the reason for that: it’s the mission version. It’s more expensive and more time consuming to make, but it lasts longer, and endures changes in temperature or humidity better. It’s also more potent, able to be mixed with up to three times its volume of oil or fat and still be used, in case a mission goes really badly.
Izuna doesn’t want to go looking for oil, so instead he takes small pieces and works them between his fingers until they’re soft, then flattens them into the thinnest sheets he can manage before laying them on his burns and wrapping bandages over them. His burns are mostly on his sides, his shoulders, and the backs of his legs; they’re awkward to reach, but not very bad as burns go. Izuna has given himself similar burns lots of times while practicing fire jutsu, and at least these aren’t on his mouth or hands.
He puts the burn cream and the bandages back in the cabinet, and then… doesn't stand up. His eyes feel heavy again, and his head, and his whole body.
It's late. It's so late; Izuna should be asleep right now. Madara and Father will be here in the morning. What if he doesn't wake up in time? Izuna usually wakes up because Madara did, because he tripped over something or yelled at his hair for refusing to obey him and the sound carried through the wall between their rooms. How will Izuna wake up now? What if he sleeps all the way until lunch?
Would Father and Madara even know he got here?
Izuna can meditate. He's so, so tired—but he slept some already, out on the ground, and he's been learning for years. Once he gets the sharingan Izuna will have to meditate a lot of the time when he wants to sleep anyway, so it will be good practice. And he won't miss the morning.
Izuna blows out all the candles and drags himself to the bedroom.
Meditating feels more dreamlike than it should. He feels like he's watching his own memories of the day over and over again: pushing the lid off of the coffin and standing in the fire, walking out of the compound and through the forest, cutting his finger and completing the ritual at the Spring House. Standing in the coffin, walking out of the compound, cutting his finger. The fire, the forest, the ritual. Sharp details, vivid colors, silence.
It's eerie. Izuna hopes the memories will fade soon, but all they do is repeat themselves, over and over for the rest of the night. He watches them and waits.