Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

~Izumi~

The air smelled of disinfectant.

She could hear the familiar sounds of rushing hospital workers, quiet arguments, people worrying about their loved ones, whispers about all the dead…

Uchiha.

Her eyes slowly opened to see the familiar dim white of the hospital’s ceiling in the darkness, though not from an angle that she was used to.

The lights were off. Still night then, or the next night maybe. It was hard to tell.

She hadn’t dreamed.

There was also an odd lack of any aches within her chakra pathways or the weakness within her limbs that she had been told to expect of chakra exhaustion.

Izumi had definitely run dry on chakra that night.

She flexed her hand-...

Only her left hand gripped the fabric beneath her.

The other was gone, she could feel bandages around the stump that remained.

Izumi closed her eyes, hoping to escape from the world back into the dreamless sleep that she’d awoken from…

All that greeted her closed eyes was imagery of her mother’s desecrated corpse, a compound full of bodies in varying conditions, the shattered remains of Shisui, her long dead father’s crushed legs, Itachi’s eyes filled with pain and regret just before she’d carved through one of them with a chakra scalpel.

Her eyes opened just slightly, enough to stare at the white ceiling instead of the images of the past that her mind conjured up.

The door of her hospital room slid open near silently, then closed just as quietly.

She didn’t react, too despondent to care.

The footsteps that approached her hospital bed were too slow, too close to silent to be a medic. There was the noise of a sword being drawn from a sheath, a standard tanto from the sound of it, just as quiet as the rest had been.

The sounds had been quiet enough for most to miss, but rang as clearly as any other to her well trained ears.

Whoever this assassin was, they were either uninformed on her abilities or incompetent.

Or perhaps they had expected her to be incapacitated and unable to meaningfully resist, and the quietness had been for those outside her room rather than for her.

Through the corner of her barely opened right eye, she could see the blade of the tanto shift in preparation to stab her.

Most likely through the heart, as many members of her clan had died recently.

It would be so easy to let it happen, to simply do nothing.

But that had been how she ended up in this world, or how Harry had ended up in this world, by choosing death.

The next world could be worse, though it was hard to fathom such a thing.

The assassin’s tanto shot towards her heart in a professional movement with all the speed of an average elite, the movements and skill of a junior ANBU operative to match the mask that she could now see he wore.

Her left hand caught the sword with ease, her thumb and pointer finger squeezing either side of the blade to hold it in place as if she were sparring with a child rather than foiling an assassination.

Sharingan eyes flashed in the dark of the hospital room as Izumi met the man’s gaze through the holes of his mask, and he swayed on his feet before falling.

On his way to the ground, Izumi tossed the ANBU operative’s tanto back to him.

It pierced his heart before he hit the ground.

What a joke, sending a junior operative to kill her. The attempt would have failed even if it had been a Captain, but it would have at least shown some effort.

More points towards the theory that whoever sent the poor fool had expected her to be incapacitated, then.

Izumi shifted to sit up, the movement made awkward when she attempted to use a right hand that didn’t exist. Still, she managed and swung her legs off the side of the bed. Her eyes turned to examine the ANBU operative that had tried to attack her more closely.

The mask wasn’t one she recognised, nor was the man’s general appearance or the sounds of his movements when he’d still been alive.

Unless he’d graduated ANBU basic training the day before (quite a first mission if that was somehow the case) or she had been asleep far longer than she’d expected, then the man wasn’t a regular member of ANBU.

Either way, he was dead now.

It felt odd how little the act had bothered her.

Just another in a long line of the dead.

She lowered herself to the floor, walking over to a storage cupboard that she knew would hold what she needed. After a few moments, she pulled a small scroll from the cupboard and walked back to the corpse.

With the practiced hand of an ANBU medic, she stored the body away in the stasis scroll and went about cleaning the blood from the scene.

No need to leave a mess for the medics to clean up.

Or to leave evidence behind.

She looked down at herself. She was wearing a hospital gown, as patients generally did. After several seconds of consideration, she briefly checked under the gown with her hand.

‘Oh, good.’

They hadn’t taken her underwear.

She hadn’t expected them to be gone, wouldn’t have been necessary for any of the wounds she had suffered, but medics could be very particular and…

Strange, at times.

She tucked the stasis scroll into her bra, the only thing resembling a pocket out of everything she was wearing.

Izumi stepped over to the window of the room and looked it over briefly. Only simple locks and seals designed to keep people out. An alarm seal for if the window was opened from the outside and an alarm seal for if the window was opened from the inside.

The alarm seal for the inside would only truly serve to inform the medics that the room was now vacant, while the one for the outside would send an actual alarm to the corresponding seal.

The seals were designed to keep people from sneaking in, not to keep people from leaving.

It wouldn’t be conducive to a good hospital environment to keep antsy shinobi trapped inside, and if they felt well enough to leave then they didn’t need to be there.

Izumi certainly didn’t need to be there.

She opened the window and stepped onto the wall outside, closing the window behind her awkwardly with her one hand. Then she jumped to a nearby roof.

The full moon still hung in the sky overhead, though it had shifted to a different position. It was… the same night? Judging from the position of the stars and the moon, it was now around midnight.

It had been a little after 20:00 when she had returned to the compound, and the entire encounter there had lasted maybe half an hour at the most.

‘Only four hours? Less?’

Maybe the assassin expecting her to be incapacitated made sense, actually.

She certainly should have been. For all that her chakra reserves felt low, they weren’t empty and she lacked any of the effects of chakra exhaustion.

Her whole family, most of her clan dead and here she was, right as rain.

Izumi frowned to herself.

She needed to stop thinking, just for the night.

Izumi dropped into the street in front of a bar, one that she knew catered primarily to shinobi, and ignored the looks of the people loitering outside.

She was probably a terrible sight, she knew. A short girl dressed only in a hospital gown, no shoes, one arm ending in a stump. The skin around her eyes was probably still reddened from tears and she had made no effort to make herself presentable after everything she had been through that night.

She didn’t care.

Izumi pushed open the door of the bar, noting without comment how the room seemed to quiet just slightly as she entered before the previous volume resumed.

The people who frequented this bar were shinobi, trained professionals. Chances were they had seen people in worse shape than she was.

Though certainly not after similar circumstances.

It was a place she had heard about during her time in ANBU, the bar was a frequent haunt for some of the village’s best. ‘The Broken Kunai’ was quite the clear name for a bar that served shinobi.

Everyone in the establishment was older than she was.

She sat at the bar.

The barman eyed her, seemingly noting the off white hospital gown she was still wearing as well as how young she was. He had a strong build, and too many scars to have been a civilian. A retired shinobi then, perhaps even the bar’s owner. She had heard that the place was owned by one.

“Something strong.” Izumi stared back at the man challengingly, daring him to refuse.

She’d break the damned bartop between them if he did.

It was technically illegal for her to drink at her age, but it was not illegal for a bartender to serve a shinobi who was underage. If it was, there would be a lot more violence and theft in bars from underaged shinobi when they were refused service.

There were no police left to arrest her anymore, anyways.

The man sighed and shook his head, to himself more than her it seemed from his body language. He picked up a cocktail shaker and got to work making her a drink. “I really shouldn’t serve you, you know, Uchiha-san. It will only bring you trouble. Today, tomorrow, a few years from now...”

She looked away. “I know.”

But she needed to forget, at least for a while.

The man poured her drink, and she took a sip.

Citrusy. Sour and sweet, with only a hint of alcohol. It tasted more like a candy than it did like alcohol.

It reminded her of Shisui… and Itachi.

She finished the drink far too quickly. “Another.”

Maybe if she drank enough, she’d only be able to remember the good times.

She woke up to a splitting headache, on an unfamiliar couch.

Memories of the bar were blurry, hard to remember other than some parts that were in crystal clear clarity. She’d drank for a while, hours without moving from her stool, she was pretty sure.

At some point more people had shown up, looking as in need of a drink as she had been. They’d been surprised to see her, she remembered. Then they had joined her in drinking, a few of them talking with her.

She remembered dancing at some point…

Dancing? In a hospital gown? She flushed at the memory, embarrassed in hindsight.

She might as well have danced in her underwear for all that the gown would have covered her while moving like that.

Her eyes, which had been drifting around the room she was in, landed on a man who was reading on a nearby futon. His lower body was covered by a blanket, his upper body in a dark undershirt and his face in a simple facemask. He had silver hair.

She flushed more deeply as her mind filled with possibilities she didn’t like and her hand felt over her body to check on the state of her clothes.

Everything was still in its place, including the scroll in her bra, though the hospital gown was in a twisted mess under the blanket.

She sighed in relief, and the man looked up.

Kakashi eyed her for a few seconds, probably noting her lowering flush and the way she was staring at him in embarrassment.

“Nothing like that. Just took you home, since you had nowhere to go.” The man shrugged, looking back down at his book.

He had been drinking as heavily as she had, she dimly remembered. She also clearly remembered being carried by him, staring up at the moon above with barely open sharingan eyes, so she also hadn’t walked to his apartment with him.

Izumi eyed the man. “You realize that’s not gonna stop the rumors, right?”

People had seen them leave, people might have seen him carrying her through the streets even.

The silver haired man’s eye abruptly shot to her, widening drastically.

After a few seconds, he looked down. “Fuck…”

‘Fuck’ was the right kind of reaction to have, especially for him. It wouldn’t really matter that much to her, people would just think she’d been taken advantage of. For Kakashi?

She didn’t think ‘Kid Fucker Kakashi’ would be a nickname he would happily add to the list of his unfortunate nicknames.

Izumi hoped, for his sake, that those rumors were overshadowed by everything else that had happened the previous night. They probably would, honestly, especially since they’d been at The Broken Kunai.

It was frequented primarily by the elite among shinobi, after all, the sort of people that knew better than to spread that kind of rumor. Lesser shinobi were generally too intimidated by the crowd that frequented the place to go there.

If Kakashi had the good sense, even while drunk, to make his way home without being seen by anyone then he would be fine.

He’d still get shit about it from the people who knew, though, she was sure.

Kakashi had probably come to the same conclusion she had, judging by the mildly annoyed look in his eye as he resumed reading his book.

‘Icha Icha, huh?’ Quite a book to be reading in front of a guest.

“You have any old clothes lying around?” She asked.

Izumi would certainly be far too small for anything he wore these days.

The man had like thirty centimeters of height over her.

~Hiruzen~

Hiruzen rubbed his temples, trying to relieve the slowly building headache.

After a few moments, he picked up his pipe and began frustratedly stuffing tobacco into it, before lighting it and drawing the comforting smoke deep into his lungs.

He was too old for his position. Too old to be going without sleep, to be making hard decisions, to be handling disasters. He felt too old to even be doing the more simple parts of his job, mission requests and security reports and signing for basic laws.

But there was no one who could succeed him.

When Minato had died, the next best candidate had died the same night.

In the years since, every feasible candidate or future candidate had either left the village, died, refused the position, or become too broken by their own hardships to carry the village’s on their back.

Every time he felt he was getting close to having a successor that could take the job from him, something happened to take that possibility away.

It felt sometimes as if he had been cursed to serve as Hokage until the day he died, as every Hokage other than the first had before him.

And the job only seemed to get harder with every year that passed.

He eyed the massive scroll on the left side of his desk.

One thousand, eight hundred and fifty six.

That was the casualty total that had resulted from the Uchiha Massacre. Well over ninety five percent of one of the village’s founding clans, killed in a single night.

The same night that he had been planning to resolve the tensions between the clan and the village.

It had been a good plan, or good enough to possibly work at the very least.

For years, the Uchiha clan had been uncooperative. In the year and change leading up to Uchiha Shisui’s death, the clan had withdrawn further and further from the village to the extent that Fugaku began outright avoiding meeting with him.

The clan head had made it as subtle as he could, of course, but Hiruzen was not so easily fooled.

He had seen the building dissatisfaction in the clan, had seen the slowly building signs of resentment and where exactly that resentment was leading. It would have been hard not to with how closely the Uchiha Clan had been being monitored.

So he had made a plan.

He had met with his son’s student at one of his yearly physicals, offered her a place in ANBU that he knew she wouldn’t refuse, and then he had informed her of the basic components of his plan.

She would return to the clan with the details of his physical, the same details that he’d already noticed her copying with her sharingan. He hadn’t seen the sharingan itself of course, she had been facing away rather intentionally, but he had known.

Izumi would work to slowly manipulate the details of the coup, shaping it into a quiet affair that would occur during one of his physicals. A kidnapping that would ideally go unnoticed by the village as a whole, even after the affair was over and done with.

His shadow clone would be brought to negotiate with the clan instead of his real self, giving the clan the illusion of the upper hand they would want to have in any negotiations with him while still avoiding putting the village’s leader in direct danger.

And then he would grant their demands, mostly at least.

The majority of their demands were simple, understandable even. Just the righting of mistakes he had been pressured into making while he was too busy with the aftermath of the Kyuubi Attack to truly register what his trusted advisors were pushing for.

The only one he would not grant in full was their demand for Fugaku to become the Hokage.

Fugaku had anything but the right mindset for a Hokage, was too easily bent by the whims of his people even when those whims were self-destructive.

No, he would not have ever allowed Fugaku to be the Hokage.

He was not truly prejudiced against their clan however, not in the way his remaining teammates were or the less severe way that his sensei had been.

His wariness of the clan had been driven purely by the involvement of an Uchiha in the Kyuubi’s Attack.

But he would have allowed them an Uchiha Hokage, and would have named any of the three worthy candidates in their clan as his successor.

He had his preferences of course, but each of the three prodigies had a decent mindset and could have been taught the necessary skills to perform the role with enough time. He had even agreed to Shisui’s plan to try ending the coup before it happened.

If the boy had been able to pull it off without the plan Hiruzen had put together, that would have shown negotiation skills on its own that were worthy of a Hokage. It wasn’t as if Shisui could warp minds with his abilities, Kotoamatsukami only gave an unbreakable order as far as he was aware.

He would have even publicly named the boy as his future successor within days of his success to ensure the peace’s longevity.

But then Shisui had died, murdered from what he had been able to piece together, and the coup plans had been delayed with his death; pushing back Hiruzen’s plan by a good bit.

The following year had been tense.

His first choice of possible successors within that clan had died, and the other two had been shaken by the loss.

But they had not been broken.

The day of the coup grew closer, his plan growing nearer to completion.

And then the day had arrived, and Itachi had killed nearly his entire clan on Danzo’s orders.

He had immediately removed Danzo’s position as a councilor, advisor, and his legal authority to lead Root on the same night, though he was under no real illusions that the man would truly disband the organization.

And he would not be forcing the man’s hand, despite his own personal wishes to do so.

Danzo and his organization were too valuable to Konoha for anything of the sort to be done, especially in the wake of losing nearly the entire Uchiha Clan. The loss of Danzo or his organization would get out if it were to occur, and it would make Konoha look even more vulnerable than they already were.

No, the slap on the wrist would have to do for now.

He sighed before taking another draw from his pipe, his thoughts returning to the Uchiha clan and his failed plan.

It would have been better to involve all three prodigies in hindsight, rather than only the most low profile of the three who was also in the right position to directly assist with his plan. Even if it might have led the other two to act out of character for themselves, to act in a way that might be suspicious to their clan, it still could have led to a better outcome in the end.

He had even almost expected young Izumi to inform the other two prodigies of his plan, or at least the basics of it. But she had dutifully followed his orders, avoiding having anyone learn of the plan even until the very end.

Hiruzen’s plan had seemed perfect at the time, if it had worked. The Uchiha would have felt like they had won, the village would never know a ‘coup’ had occurred, and Hiruzen would have had a worthy successor in place.

Now one of the three prodigies along with most of the clan were dead, another of the prodigies a missing ninja, and the last was probably mentally broken and definitely missing a hand.

When he and his ANBU finally arrived on the scene of the massacre, far too late, Izumi had been staring up at the sky with tears flowing freely from her eyes and a mad laughter escaping from her lips.

It was like Kakashi all over again, except far worse.

Hiruzen could feel her chakra entering the Hokage tower now, burning with anger. He had been able to feel her powerful energy approaching for minutes, even from halfway across his village.

It was not so overflowing with rage and pain as it had been the night before, but he could tell even as she stormed up the stairs that his meeting with the last living Uchiha shinobi of Konoha would not be a pleasant one.

His guards seemingly stopped her for a moment before both of their chakra signatures abruptly went passive and lowered to ground level. Knocked unconscious, most likely.

One of the doors to his office slammed open, impacting the wall and nearly breaking its hinges. Izumi glared at him as she slammed the door closed.

He looked down at the massive scroll on his desk, and the two smaller scrolls that rested beside it. His hand pressed the seal beneath his desk to activate the privacy seals.

Izumi crossed the room, sitting in the chair before his desk without prompting.

She was still glaring at him.

Hiruzen was only surprised that it wasn’t the sharingan staring him down, but simple black eyes.

She was wearing an ill-fitting long sleeved black shirt. An attached cloth mask hung loosely at her neck and similarly poorly fitted shinobi pants covered her legs.

They looked like… Kakashi’s old clothes?

That was odd, why would she have-

“Who ordered it?” His thoughts were interrupted abruptly by Izumi’s words, sharp and angry in tone.

He didn’t answer. She would demand revenge if he did, and the village couldn’t afford to lose Danzo. Not now.

She glared at him. “The look in Itachi’s eyes wasn’t the look of someone who broke under the pressure like the rumors say, I can read him like a book. Now, who ordered it?” Her hand slammed into his desk, and the wood creaked under the force of her strength.

If she was anyone else, anyone less dangerous than the girl who could drive Itachi out of the village, she would have received a reprimand for her demands and no explanation.

But Izumi knew where she stood in the village, just how far above the average shinobi she truly was, and there was no chance of such tactics working on her when she was as filled with anger as she was.

If she was more stable, unbroken in the face of all she had seen the previous night, she would have been the perfect successor. Already powerful enough to hold the title at only twelve years old.

But he had seen what had become of her mother.

What had driven the dark madness that still lingered in her eyes.

Hiruzen still couldn’t answer her question, he knew what she would demand if he did. He was all too familiar with the type of building darkness in her gaze.

Instead, he pulled one of the two smaller scrolls over to the middle of the desk and unsealed its contents.

~Izumi~

A puff of smoke covered the desk as the Hokage revealed his distraction.

And that was all it was, a distraction.

It wouldn’t matter in the end anyways, Izumi would kill everyone who had been involved in the attack with or without the Hokage’s approval. She already knew who had ordered it, had been able to guess that much after the Root ANBU tried to kill her at the hospital.

To say nothing of all the times that Itachi had visited Danzo’s home in the year leading up to the Massacre.

She had only wanted to have approval if she could get it, not having it meant little to her beyond legality.

Itachi, the masked man, Danzo?

They would all be dead before she was done, every last one of them and more.

She eyed the Hokage’s little distractions. Three sheets of paper, a short stack of more papers and a brand new flak jacket; the slightly darker kind that was issued to jonin. Jonin weren’t required to wear it outside of war time, but it was of higher quality and had slightly heavier armor than the chunin flak jackets did.

The three papers were a little interesting, a choice of sorts.

The first was her retirement paper; she could sign it if she so wished and leave Konoha’s military service. It was her right now that she had a very clear disability. The choice would serve her well in giving her autonomy if she picked it.

The second was, of course, the paperwork for a jonin promotion. She met the requirements, had for years at that, but she wasn’t sure it was worth doing.

The third paper was, in a way, linked to the second paper. It was a registration paper for a new clan head of the Uchiha, and the stack of papers beside it were the identification papers of the remaining members of her clan. The Uchiha Clan Head was required by clan and village law to be a shinobi, though the paper itself would only register a new clan head with the village.

According to clan law, she was already the new Clan Head.

A new Uchiha Clan Head had to both be a shinobi and have the approval of at least half the Uchiha shinobi in order to qualify. The rule had been put into place after the defection of Madara, a way of ensuring that the Clan Head always had the best interests of their clan at heart, at least in theory.

That hadn’t stopped it from being a mostly hereditary position anyways, but it had been the thought that counted at the time.

Hell, the previous line of Clan Heads had ended up being directly descended from Madara anyways after his only daughter had married the son of the clan head that replaced him.

Even now, the trend wasn’t really broken.

As the last remaining shinobi of the Uchiha Clan, she was the Head by default.

And Uchiha Kagami had been the lone son of Izuna.

Chapter Text

~Sasuke~

They were staring him down, the other kids.

He wasn’t looking at them, but he knew even as he stared towards the floor at the foot of the chair he was sitting in. They hated him for what Itachi did, for what his brother had done.

He was surrounded by members of his own clan and he still felt alone.

An angry, feminine voice broke through his thoughts. “Why are you still here? Go back to your room, clan traitor.” Sasuke looked up at the girl standing over him, hurt but no real surprise building in his chest.

None of his clan members wanted him, not after what Itachi had taken from them.

The girl above him was Uchiha Nanna, the oldest among the Uchiha in the secure wing of the hospital. She was only ten, but she looked so much older staring down at him with her pair of hateful one tomoe sharingan.

Sasuke could remember the faces of hundreds of adult Uchiha. Some of them were the parents of the kids surrounding him, but they were all dead and gone just like…

Like his own were.

The medics had told him, with careful and gentle voices.

It hadn’t made the words hurt any less.

He looked away, there was nothing he could say to make anyone feel better, to get them to forgive him. 

He almost felt like he deserved it, a little bit.

A fist abruptly impacted his cheek, throwing him from the chair.

“Don’t ignore me, you scum.” Nanna’s rageful voice again, the same one who had probably punched him. There were noises of support, jeering and hateful whispers. No one stood up for him.

Sasuke stared up at the girl, pain and anger building in his heart.

“What do you want me to say?!” The words came out in a shout, angry and hurt and confused. He’d said sorry already, so many times he’d lost count. It hadn’t meant anything to any of them, his brother had killed their families.

His brother and that other man, but he’d been told not to talk about him when the Hokage showed up that night.

It wouldn’t have made a difference to what any of them felt about it anyway.

The girl glared down at him hatefully, cruelty in her eyes. “Maybe you should just die. Die like my parents did, like my big brother did, like everyone else!”

Sasuke’s breath caught in his throat at the first sentence, and he stared at the girl in shock as the rest of her rageful words came out.

None of the other children spoke up to disagree.

He was alone.

“Maybe I should just do it myself.” A vengeful smile, as angry as everything else, crossed the girl’s face.

Nanna’s foot reared back, and he knew that she was going to start trying to go through with her threat. He squeezed his eyes shut, unable to move in the face of his clan’s righteous hatred.

Maybe they were right.

Maybe he should have just died in the attack.

There was no one left for him in this world.

The door of the ‘recreation room’ they were all in abruptly abruptly opened with a bang, and the kick never came. Sasuke’s eyes snapped open to see what had happened, and he saw her.

The girl who he had only ever seen with his brother.

The one that Itachi looked at with such care in his eyes that Sasuke had been jealous.

Izumi, the girl who had been his brother’s best friend for as long as he could remember, until she suddenly wasn’t.

The kunoichi who had tried to kill his brother after Itachi had…

After Itachi had tried to kill him.

Sasuke had refused to believe it in the moment, couldn’t believe it, but the memory was as clear in his mind as if it had only just happened.

Itachi, tears and pain filling his eyes, running at him with his sword aimed for Sasuke’s heart.

And then abruptly he had not been there anymore and Izumi had been in his place, sheathing a sword that had sent Itachi’s flying up into the air.

Just like that night, Izumi was glaring at the one who had attacked him. “Did I give permission for violence between the members of my clan?”

Her clan? What did that-

His eyes caught on the kimono the woman was wearing, a style that he had seen so many times on his own father. The Clan Head’s casual kimono.

The style was simple, practical. His clan was a noble one, but they were a shinobi clan that valued functionality above all else. Their Head did not generally dress in a way that would impede their abilities.

A more formal kimono style existed for the Uchiha Clan Head, but it was rarely used outside of important political and cultural events.

A childish part of Sasuke wanted to protest, wanted to say that the Clan Head position was supposed to go to him, or to Itachi…

But there was no way such a thing could happen, not after what Itachi had done.

And Izumi was clearly defending him with her position, daring the other Uchiha children to speak out of line to their new Clan Head.

One of them did, of course. A boy a year older than him, named Keigo. “ Your clan? I know who you are, you were his frien-”

The boy’s words were cut off as the feeling of Izumi’s chakra abruptly appeared where it had been nonexistent before, almost seeming to blanket the senses in a, to Sasuke, comforting and familiar weight. This was the chakra that had saved him twice in one night, though it lacked the overwhelming feeling of rage that it’d had then.

It felt more irritated than anything, now.

Most of the other children seemed to stiffen in the presence of her chakra, seeing it as the threat that it clearly was.

After a few seconds, the pressure lessened drastically.

Izumi gazed over what was left of the clan, a hint of sadness entering her eyes.

“Yes. My clan.” She said, and there were no further arguments against her words.

~Izumi~

Children.

'Each and every one of them is a child.'

She had hoped, prayed even, that at least one adult had survived. Someone who could help her take care of her clan, who could be there when she inevitably needed to be gone. Someone who she could give some of her burden to.

But it had not been meant to be.

Even amongst the civilians of the Uchiha clan, the vast majority had been retired shinobi of some rank. Trained basically from birth to defend their home against any threat, against any odds.

So they had all died.

And she was left to pick up the pieces.

Most of the surviving Uchiha children were between three years old and nine years old. Old enough to listen when they were told to hide and be quiet, but not so old that they thought they could fight against the threat that scared their parents so much.

She looked down at her chest as she walked, forcing an attempt at a comforting smile onto her face despite her splitting hangover as she lightly bounced the one year old girl that rested there bundled in a sling with her arm.

The only surviving baby of the Uchiha clan, her name was Uchiha Kasumi.

And here Izumi was, playing at being a mother as a twelve year old.

The rest of the children were following behind her as she walked the path from the hospital to their home.

Not their old home.

A new one, though the building itself wasn’t particularly new. It had existed before the Kyuubi Attack, and it was familiar to Izumi herself.

She had been surprised to see the apartment building on the list when she’d demanded properties that were away from the compound from Hiruzen, but apparently her old home from before that first disaster had always been owned by the Uchiha clan.

It was also mostly empty, conveniently. Partially because in order to live there a person would have had to rent from the Uchiha clan, who prior to the Massacre were widely regarded as all but clear enemies of the village.

The other reason was that Naruto apparently lived there, free of charge.

There had been clan records of his presence in the building in Fugaku’s office, that he was renting from them at no cost, she had checked when she was there finding a Clan Head kimono in (close enough to) her size. She wasn’t sure what would have motivated such a decision on the late Clan Head’s part, but it was convenient for her purposes regardless.

She’d always thought that Naruto didn’t have enough people in his life, ever since she had met him.

He’d fit right in with the clan of orphans she was moving into his building.

The building itself was fairly nice, a four story apartment building that was built in an interesting layering pattern. The top floor was the smallest, the middle larger, and the bottom two floors even larger than that.

The top floor had only two apartments including the two bedroom apartment that Naruto lived in. From what she’d seen in the paperwork the second bedroom had apparently been converted into a study for the boy at some point, though she had some doubts about whether he made good use of it or not.

Naruto even had a small private balcony of his own.

It wasn’t luxurious outside of the view it had, but the apartment had good amenities.

The other apartment in the top floor of the building was a four bedroom apartment, and it was also the one Izumi planned on living in personally along with some of the more vulnerable children she’d agreed to take under her care when she’d accepted her position as Clan Head.

The rest of the children would live in the apartments on the second and third floors, while Izumi planned to leave the bottom floor empty. She would likely make some renovations and changes to it at some point, turn it into a communal sort of area for all of them.

Sasuke would be one of the children living in her apartment, she had decided that as soon as she’d walked in on what had happened at the hospital.

The others would be the two three year olds who would share a room and the two four year olds who would do the same, along with the baby that would sleep in Izumi’s room.

The rest of the children, though young at between five and ten years old, were self-sufficient enough that she could just have some shadow clones keep an eye on them and help when they needed it.

She wasn’t looking forward to the endless memories of raising children that such a practice was going to force onto her, but she also wanted to ensure that all of the children had some sort of consistent ‘parental’ figure in their lives.

When she arrived at the building and led the children she was going to be personally living with to their new home (Her shadow clones leading the rest), she was happy to see that it had already been furnished in exactly the way she had requested (demanded) when she’d been discussing the topic with the Hokage that morning.

Each bedroom other than her own had a comfortably sized bunk bed in it, large enough to be comfortable even after the children had grown.

She had decided on having the children share a room with one another as a way to force them to be close to at least one other person; they would need some sort of support between each other in the short and long term after what they had been through, and Izumi had decided they would get that support regardless of whether they really wanted to.

She planned at some point to give the children their own rooms if they wanted it, there was enough room in just the top three floors for all thirty four of the remaining Uchiha to have their own, but that would come later.

Sasuke’s bedroom also had a bunk bed since she hadn’t been planning on him needing to be separate from the other children, she wasn’t sure whether she would keep it or not.

The boy seemed to find the concept fascinating though, staring at the bed like he’d never seen anything like it.

That made some sense, she supposed. He had spent his whole life living in what was basically a manor estate, after all.

An obnoxious series of knocks sounded from the front door of the apartment, interrupting Izumi’s observations about the former spare heir. After a quick walk to the door, she opened it to see Naruto’s familiar face.

“Hey, what’s goin on wi- Izumi-neechan!” The boy’s attempt at questioning, probably to do with all of his sudden neighbors, was aborted the moment he recognized her face. “Are you moving in here? That’s so cool! What happened to your-”

The last question stopped in its tracks as the boy stared at where her hand used to be, seemingly realizing that the question he had been about to ask in his excitement and curiosity was probably extremely rude.

Still, she smiled down at him anyways. It was hard for her to be upset with the boy after all the months she’d spent training with him, she knew that he was just excited to see her and rambling.

“Yes, I’m moving in along with the others you probably saw, Naruto. It’s for the same reason that my hand is gone. It’s a sensitive topic, so… Avoid bringing it up for now, okay?” She reached over with her left hand, squeezing the boy’s shoulder to reassure him that she wasn’t upset. He still looked a little worried.

Naruto awkwardly scratched at his cheek with a finger, just over the odd whisker marks that decorated it. “Oh, umm, okay. I’ll try not to. You’ll tell me later?”

She nodded in response to his question, before patting his shoulder lightly. “Want to come in?”

The worry melted off of the boy’s face as he grinned at her offer. “Yeah!” The boy rushed into her new home, looking around with wonder. “Woah, it looks just like mine does, except cleaner!” 

He rushed down the hallway away from her excitedly, not wasting any time in his excitement to explore. Izumi heard his voice echoing from down the hall. “Bastard?! How come you get to have a bunk bed!?”

Izumi sighed, plopping onto one of the two couches that made up the living room’s furniture.

She pointedly ignored the argument that was building between the two boys.

They’d get over it.

The first clan head meeting that Izumi attended was… decidedly boring for the most part, at least as far as she was concerned. She would have rather been doing anything else.

The most interesting part of the whole thing was the council’s existence itself. It was a council of mostly hereditary positions, with the only exceptions being those who were specifically selected by the Hokage to have a seat at the table. In theory, they met to discuss laws and actions the village needed to take in order to provide guidance to the Hokage.

Guidance only, of course. The Hokage was, at the end of the day, a dictator.

The council existed more as a sort of advisory board than anything. Honestly it didn’t feel all that important to Izumi, just a way of making the various clans feel like they had a voice in the village’s affairs.

At the end of the day the final choice was the Hokage’s, even if he generally went along with what the council wanted.

Maybe she’d just send a shadow clone to the next one…

Most of the discussion was related to the shifts and increases of work for the village’s shinobi in the wake of the ‘Uchiha Massacre’, as the rumors she’d been overhearing called it, though those present seemed to be dancing around actually naming the event with her present.

When discussion of the police force was brought up, her opinion was naturally asked as she was the clan head of the clan that had traditionally been responsible for the force ever since the Second Hokage had entrusted them with it.

“I trust the village to handle it for now, there aren’t any other Uchiha shinobi remaining and I have no interest in police work. Reintegrating the Uchiha Clan into our traditional roles within the force can be brought up at a later date, if necessary.” Her dry answer seemed to satisfy the Hokage and the other clan heads, so discussion had shifted towards how the police force would be handled in the meanwhile.

When the discussion shifted into a debate about who would be entrusted with leading the police force, and the choice was between a jonin member of the Akimichi Clan and a jonin member of the Hyuga’s Branch House, Izumi naturally put her support behind the Akimichi Clan Head’s suggestion.

She wasn’t caught up on the Uchiha Clan’s previous politics and relations with the other clans with the village quite yet, she was still working her way through the writings that remained in Fugaku’s office, but she was well aware that her clan had decent relations with the Akimichi and decidedly poor relations with the Hyuga.

Izumi certainly understood her predecessors’ position on the subject, and definitely agreed with the Uchiha Clan’s general disdain for the Hyuga after what she’d been able to learn about the clan’s… practices.

The Hyuga Clan Head took exception to her support of the Akimichi, fixing her with a cold stare that she was sure might have worked on someone else. “Are we to treat this child as if she is our equal?”

There was an eruption of noise at Hiashi’s clear words of disrespect, a mix of surprised, disapproving, and agreeing chatter audible through the din of noise for someone with ears as well trained as her own were. She could recognize a political attempt to strip away any support she might have in the council when she saw it.

The sound abruptly cut off as Izumi’s chakra rose to the surface and pressed into the senses of those present within the room, a move that she was rapidly growing tired of having to make.

Her chakra wasn’t enough to truly scare those present, of course, nearly everyone present in the room was a shinobi at least jonin level in skill. It was more than enough to add a clear wariness to those around her however, and that was all she really needed.

‘This is the power that defeated the clan killer’ some of them were likely thinking, the same sort of words as the rumors she heard oh so clearly when she showed herself in public earlier that day.

Izumi didn’t feel like she had really ‘defeated’ Itachi.

She had forced him to flee, sure, but she had nearly died in the process.

Regardless of how legitimate her supposed victory had been, it was still useful in the reputation it had given her at the very least.

She stared coldly at the Hyuga Clan Head. He didn’t look intimidated, but a wariness had still entered those all seeing eyes of his. “You can view me however you wish, Hiashi. It does not change the fact that I will not have the police force, traditionally led by my own clan, controlled by one of your slaves. ”

Hiashi’s jaw tightened at her words, his gaze sharpening into a harsh glare. “How dare you? The Branch House is-”

A new voice, one which had previously been quiet through most of the meeting, abruptly cut him off. “Yeah, we get it. The caged bird seal is a traditional part of your clan. Anyways, how about we hold a vote?” The almost animalistically wild Clan Head of the Inuzuka grinned at Hiashi as if challenging him to contradict her.

He didn’t, instead staring at Izumi as if he was planning out her murder in his head.

She ignored him, and the vote unsurprisingly ended with the Akimichi jonin being selected by a wide margin.

Izumi noted internally that a surprising portion of the other Clan Heads in the meeting seemed to treat her with an extra dose of respect after what she had said to Hiashi. She wasn’t entirely sure whether that was due to what she’d said, how she’d said it, or who she’d said it to.

It didn’t really matter, she supposed. The extra respect would serve her well either way.

Inuzuka Tsume started to look bored again at about the same rate that Izumi was beginning to lose interest. The discussion had shifted into talking about how they were going to go about recruiting for the new police force, and Izumi just did not care at all about the subject.

The rest of the meeting continued along the same lines, going over the various changes and adjustments that needed to be made now that the Uchiha were gone.

There was a question about what would be done with the compound now that the Uchiha Clan weren’t around to use it anymore, but Izumi just stated that the subject would need to be discussed at a later date.

There were quite a few homes to go through before she would even consider the possibility of opening the clan compound to outsiders.

Even at that moment a shadow clone of her lingered in the compound, working through the files and writings in Fugaku’s office and keeping an ear out for any… unwelcome intruders.

So no, she was nowhere near ready to entertain the possibility of any outsiders living in the compound her clan had died in.

The other Clan Heads seemed more than willing to drop the subject at her refusal, though one of the Hokage’s advisors seemed as if he wanted to protest. It did not escape Izumi that Danzo wasn’t present in the meeting, that the man had been removed from a similar position to the one that the Hokage’s advisors held as councilors.

She had already been sure of his involvement in the Massacre, but the absence made her even more certain.

Regardless of the councilor’s dissatisfaction towards her answer, the meeting continued and only grew more boring from then on.

Izumi really didn’t need an excuse to plan on going to the bar after the meeting, but the sheer boredom that was building within her would have been enough to drive her to drink even if she’d been planning not to.

The boredom led her thoughts to wander, and wandering thoughts led her mind to dangerous places.

She would need help forgetting the imagery her mind wandered to.

Izumi decided to be a bit more responsible when she went out to drink again that night.

Not in the amount she drank or how she behaved afterwards, but she did at least go through the effort of creating a shadow clone with as much chakra as she could possibly give without running out before she wandered off to drown her thoughts at The Broken Kunai.

The clone wouldn’t get drunk when she did, after all, so she could take care of all her responsibilities while she went to be irresponsible.

The shadow clone did not seem appreciative of the tasks she had burdened her with, but still went off to perform them anyways.

For all that her shadow clone was essentially the same as her and still wanted to drink just as much as she did, she was also still her and understood that the responsibilities she held needed to be handled.

The baby in her home probably wasn’t going to feed herself.

Izumi wasn’t sure how to feel about shadow clones a lot of the time, it often felt as if she was forcibly conscripting a copy of herself to perform tasks that she didn’t want to do when she used them. She even remembered the way they felt after she did so, irritated but understanding that some tasks simply needed to be delegated to a clone.

Using one just so she could drink felt like a blatant misuse of the technique.

She frowned down at her drink, before lifting it to her lips and downing the whole thing.

Just another thought to drink to, honestly.

When she woke up the next morning with a splitting headache and very little memory of just what exactly she had been up to the previous night, it was to the sight of the tired looking shadow clone of herself sitting in the chair beside the baby’s crib.

The clone eyed her with a wary, odd sort of look on her face. “Are you feeling better?”

She nodded, sitting up and grabbing the glass of water that was helpfully resting on her bedside table, before taking a nice long drink of it.

Izumi set the glass down. “Yeah, just a headache.”

“Good.” The clone responded, and then dispelled.

The memories that rushed through her mind were as mortifying as they were painful to have entering her mind while she was hungover.

First of course were the series of memories involving taking care of the children under her care, nothing too bad but she could remember the mild annoyance lingering in the clone’s mind as she took care of the children at the thought of the original Izumi drinking her sorrows away while she toiled at home.

Then she could remember the memories, these ones from a separate clone that had been made by the first clone to keep an eye on her, of herself drunkenly leaping from rooftop to rooftop on her way home, before landing on the balcony that was just outside of her bedroom. The rooftop jumping while drunk seemed rather dangerous to her, and that clone too had been annoyed with her.

Then she had stumbled into the bedroom, looked her clone dead in the eye, and offered to ‘reward’ her for all of her hard work.

Her clone had thankfully given her an embarrassed “No” before flashing the sharingan on and putting her to sleep with a genjutsu.

The clone had spent the rest of the night, outside of when the baby had woken up and needed to be lulled back to sleep, split between pondering the implications of having been drunkenly propositioned by herself and actively trying to avoid thinking about it. There had been a lot of embarrassing and upset feelings involved.

Izumi decided to do the second of those two things and avoid thinking about it.

She needed to avoid drinking so much that she blacked out in the future.

After several seconds spent trying to memory hole that particular line of thought, the cry of a baby suddenly made Izumi wince as her headache decidedly did not agree with the noise. Despite the pain from her head at the noise, however…

‘Thank fuck, a distraction.’

Izumi immediately walked over to try and remedy the baby’s troubles. The process ended up taking well over twenty minutes, a small adventure that involved checking if the baby needed changed, offering the baby formula, making sure the baby didn’t have any rashes, and a variety of other attempts at calming the tiny girl’s troubles.

In the end the baby only seemed to calm when Izumi’s sharingan accidentally activated in her panic over trying to figure out what was wrong, when little Kasumi stared at the spinning tomoe of her new guardian’s eyes.

Izumi sighed, staring gently at the suddenly soothed baby. “You’re just missing your parents, aren’t you?”

She was too, she imagined many of the children under her care were.

Many of those parents rested in Izumi’s room, securely sealed away in the massive stasis storage scroll that the Hokage had given her the previous morning. Her clone had worked diligently through the night despite her distractions, working on figuring which of those sealed in the scroll were directly related to her charges and compiling a list.

It would be necessary for when she was preparing funeral services in the coming months.

Her charges would likely want to be there for the final rites of their loved ones.

It was one of the many things that were weighing on her now, one of the many weights that she had taken onto her shoulders when she had agreed to the Hokage’s promotion offer rather than retiring into the easy escape that he had offered her.

Izumi also had to learn the various traditions that her clan held, the ones that she didn’t already know at least, and decide which ones to keep and which ones should be… conveniently forgotten.

She had to look through the Uchiha’s various properties and assets, decide what to sell and what to rent.

She had to look into the clan laws and determine if any needed changing.

Her most important responsibility was of course taking care of her various charges and helping them figure out what they wanted to do in the future.

This village would likely want most if not all of them to become shinobi, but Izumi had no intention of encouraging anything of the sort. She had seen how being a shinobi could twist people, how killing in the name of the village warped the mind and soul, and making such a thing an expectation for the children under her care would not be happening.

If anything, she would be heavily discouraging such a life path.

Even the more peaceful paths that a prospective shinobi could walk easily diverted down a deadly path, as hers had.

When the time came though, in the end, it would not truly be her choice.

She could prevent the children from attending early, such a thing required the permission of a guardian, but the actual choice to join the academy was one that was legally made by the person choosing to attend.

Izumi personally thought that it should really be within her ability to prevent the children she cared for from going to war, but the immoral practice was just one of the many ways that the village ensured future generations of shinobi would populate their forces.

She would still do her best to prevent it, to offer alternatives.

The Uchiha had a long tradition of craftsmanship, smithing and tailoring skills that dated all the way back to their more self-sufficient days back in the warring clans era.

Perhaps she could convince some or preferably all of the children to pursue that kind of path instead of the dark and bloody path that she was walking.

Little Kasumi yawned, and Izumi abruptly realized that she had been staring into the baby’s eyes while she thought.

She smiled and lifted the baby to rest on her chest.

Kasumi would have a peaceful life if it killed Izumi.

'Just try not to let it.'

Chapter Text

~???~

Consciousness slowly returned, greeting him with the painful ache in his wrists where ropes held them suspended above his head. The similar ache in his ankles, rubbed raw by the ropes that bound them, confirmed that they too were tied down.

Somewhere in front of him there was the sound of metal on stone, someone sharpening a weapon.

His eyes slowly cracked open and to his surprise, they were uncovered and able to clearly see his surroundings.

The sound of weapon maintenance came from a brown haired girl several feet away, sitting in a seiza position on the tatami mats that made up the floor of the room as she sharpened the knife in her hand against a whetstone that rested on her thigh. Braziers behind her cast a soft light across the room.

A leather roll was beside her, containing a variety of other tools and sharp instruments.

The tools, the knife, they were not weapons. Not really.

They were instruments of torture.

“You should really just tell me what I want to know.” The girl’s voice echoed through the room, deceptively soft and gentle in nature.

“What do you want to know?” The information would be useful to him, to his lord, when he escaped.

The girl’s gaze shifted from her knife to him, bloody red sharingan eyes meeting his own. An appearance that had been almost unremarkable, so hard to place at first, was made clearly recognizable by the eyes that the girl stared coldly at him with.

“You know what I want.” She stated, and he did know.

But he couldn’t say, even if he’d wanted to, and he now knew that he almost certainly would not be escaping.

Uchiha Izumi would not allow such a thing, not allow him a chance to report back to his lord, not after he had been granted such a clear look at her.

He would die in that room, but only after she futilely attempted to force answers out of him.

And he would not be the first to do so, not based off of the recent disappearance reports.

An uncanny grin slowly split the face of his captor as he realized his fate. Visions danced behind his eyes of those who had come before him, screaming in pain as they were tortured, kept alive for longer than they should have survived by the girl’s expert use of medical ninjutsu.

She wasn’t interested in his answers, he realized.

The girl already knew he couldn’t tell her.

She just wanted to make him suffer for her clan’s fate.

~Izumi~

Another Root operative slowly tortured to death, no information of interest acquired.

She was beginning to think that there was something stopping them from telling her anything, perhaps the seal that she kept seeing on their tongues when she broke their trained stoicism and finally made them scream out the musical notes of the pain within. The way they sometimes oddly stiffened at her questions made her think the seal must be working correctly.

Though, perhaps ‘beginning to think’ wasn’t quite the right word choice.

She had been fairly sure since the first operative that she had kidnapped.

‘Then why do you keep doing it?’

Adding new desecrated, screaming corpses to her memories helped her avoid thinking about the one that mattered. It gave her images to conjure in her mind over the ones that her traitorous mind showed her, images that didn’t hurt her the way Hazuki’s body did.

She knew it wasn’t healthy, couldn’t possibly be.

But still she continued to do it; hunting down ANBU operatives in Konoha that weren’t recognizable to her, knocking them out with a (to her) simple application of sharingan genjutsu, and carrying them stealthily to the secret little room beneath the Naka Shrine after making sure they had that identifying little seal on their tongue.

Izumi had long since disposed of the hidden cameras within the compound of course, they had been a gross invasion of privacy in the first place.

There was no chance she would keep them around to stare at what was left.

An odd translucent mist still seemed to linger in the clan compound, drifting about without the guidance of the wind.

Izumi didn’t like the shapes of the mist.

Reminded her too much of people.

Made her think she was seeing ghosts, though the mist was nowhere near that clearly defined.

She tried to ignore it when she was there in the compound, but the mists often seemed to follow her. It followed her to Fugaku’s office, to the various homes she looked through for things that needed to be stored away, to the secret room beneath the shrine.

The mist seemed to like gathering there, beneath the shrine.

Izumi could almost feel the dead eyes of her clan when she was there, watching as she brought vengeance to those who had caused their deaths.

She hoped they appreciated the show, if they were real.

After what she had seen when she examined the bodies, she believed that they did.

She was certainly beginning to take a sort of enjoyment out of it, a way to channel her frustrations into the violent butchering of Danzo’s little private army operatives.

They’d been growing harder to find in recent weeks, more wary when they were within Konoha’s walls. Root had grown aware of the disappearances, she supposed.

It was good in a way, it made the hunt more interesting.

But it was also bad, it meant that she had to go longer between having a convenient target to vent her frustrations on. She might start resorting to drinking herself half to death again if she didn’t keep having something to occupy her mind late at night until she was tired enough to pass out without effort.

It had started ‘innocently’ enough, just a kidnapping of a Root operative to try and gain information, same as she still half pretended.

She had not expected to begin enjoying the process, to seek it out for the simple action of torturing that man’s agents rather than just to gain information.

Old words echoed in her mind, words from another life as another person, oh so long ago now. “...there are strange likenesses between us, Harry Potter. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by muggles. Probably the only two parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself. We even look something alike…” 

Harry Potter had not been much like his enemy in the end, shaped by his circumstances and the people he grew close to into a much better person than he might have been in Tom Riddle’s shoes.

Izumi had not thought of that past life in quite some time, the experiences that had shaped her into who she was early on in her life and who she had become from there, but still those words came back to echo in her mind.

Harry Potter had wondered if he was anything like Riddle, feared becoming like him.

Izumi knew that she was much more like Tom Riddle than Harry ever was, now.

She feared, like Harry had, that she would become more like him with time.

Those fears seemed far more real than Harry’s had been.

The funerals were a grim affair, from beginning to end.

Izumi was dressed in a traditional black mourning kimono, as were her charges as she took one after another to the funeral grounds to watch the traditional cremation by fireball that she performed on the corpses of their loved ones.

She held child after child, allowing them to cry on her and add tear stain after tear stain to the fine silk of her formal funeral clothes.

She didn’t tell them what she had found, that some of their parents and cousins and grandparents had had their eyes stolen from their corpses.

Didn’t tell them that some of those bodies had had their eyes replaced with suitable black eyes that were not their own.

She kept those hard truths to herself, another burden to bear on her shoulders.

Another sin for which to punish those responsible, when the time came.

Another reason to make each of them suffer when they died.

‘It doesn’t need to be so excessive you know, Zumi.’

She shook her head, willing the familiar voice and its disapproval away.

An easy death would be too good for those who had done this to her clan, to her family. A long line of examples would need to be made of those who had hurt her loved ones. The dark memories that lingered in Izumi’s mind, the ones that she covered with other dark memories that were less painful, demanded that of her.

She would protect the remaining children of the Uchiha from such memories, would make sure they didn’t become like her.

They deserved that much.

Settling the children into their new home had been difficult at first. It had been hard for some of them to understand that they couldn’t go back to their old home, that they couldn’t linger in a place that was so empty and cold and full of the dead.

Izumi didn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a place so soaked in blood, so mired in tragedy.

She certainly wasn’t going to be bringing children there any more than necessary, even if she had made sure to get the important belongings from her charges’ former homes.

The homes of their families would also remain empty, even if she eventually agreed to allow outsiders within the compound.

Her own former home had yet to be entered by Izumi since the Massacre.

She didn’t want to see what was within, regardless of whether the blood had been cleaned away like the blood that had coated most of the compound, the teams of ANBU that had collected the bodies on that night having pulled double duty in cleaning up the mess.

There were still stains where blood had soaked into carpets and wood, but the operatives had done what they could in the time they’d had.

Izumi’s home would have such stains, she knew.

There had been more blood than she had ever thought possible in that room.

When the time came for the funeral of her own loved one, the private ceremony that Izumi held for herself and herself alone, it was between her and a closed coffin.

The wounds that Hazuki had suffered before her death were impossible to cover with funeral clothing alone.

Unlike many of the other bodies that she had handled, however, Hazuki’s eyes had still rested within their sockets when Izumi used medical chakra to examine the corpse with her own eyes closed tightly shut. Her mother’s secretive nature in life had protected her from such a fate, the active status of the sharingan within her eyes unknown to nearly anyone alive other than herself and her daughter.

The masked man that had killed her had not doubted her lack of a sharingan, then.

Not like the Hokage and his advisors once had, when they had considered Hazuki a suspect in the Kyuubi Attack.

It must have been him back then, too. He was the only suspect from outside of the village, and he fit the profile with how violent he had been in the Massacre.

He had killed both of her parents.

Izumi would find him.

She would make his death extraordinarily painful, far more so than the others responsible. Izumi would tear his eye or eyes from his head and shove them down his throat before she tortured him for far longer than he’d tortured her mother.

The way he’d phased through her attack in that fight had to be a Mangekyo ability.

Making sure he couldn’t use it anymore would only be sensible.

Forcing him to scream until her own ears rang and more would not be so sensible, but she was certainly looking forward to doing it.

Her eyes burned red with emotion as she breathed fire onto her mother’s remains.

‘Take care of yourself, Izumi.’

No promises.

Izumi was laid out across the couch, balancing little Kasumi on her hand and lifting her up and down while making silly faces at the baby. Kasumi giggled happily at her, far more easy to entertain now than she had been two months earlier.

And then Kasumi was startled and began crying as yelling sounded from down the hallway. “Bastard! Give that back, I was looking at it!”

Izumi sighed, lowering the baby to rest on her chest before making the half seal for the shadow clone and sending the copy of herself to go solve the problem. She rubbed the baby’s back comfortingly as the argument continued down the hall.

“No, it’s mine. I can have it all I want to.” From Sasuke’s voice, she could easily imagine the faux superior look down his nose that he was probably giving Naruto.

“That’s not fai-!” Naruto’s voice cut itself off, probably as he saw her clone in the doorway.

After a few moments, the two boys’ voices sounded in unison. “Sorry Izumi/Izumi-san…”

Then her own voice responded. “Share, dumbasses.”

Izumi briefly pinched her nose in exasperation. Her clones kept censoring themselves so much less than she did around the children. She was not looking forward to her rapidly approaching colony of potty-mouthed kids.

Whatever, there were worse things than cursing.

Her clone dispelled and she sighed, rubbing the baby’s back again.

Really? An argument over a Go board? The game was literally designed to be played with two people, how did they manage to fight over it? She didn’t even understand why the two still fought so much. It was pretty clear that they didn’t really dislike each other, at least anymore.

If they did, Naruto wouldn’t be knocking on the front door so much and Sasuke wouldn’t be inviting him inside every time that he did.

She also wouldn’t be walking into a room with Naruto passed out on the bottom bunk and Sasuke sleeping up in the top bunk at the end of the day, and yet that kept happening. The fighting was getting annoying, it was childish.

‘It’s good that they’re still kids, not like we were.’

She shook her head, chasing the ghost away from her thoughts with a small stab of anger. He wasn’t even dead.

The words were right though, maybe she shouldn’t be so surprised.

Fighting over a Go board was still ridiculous, though.

The bedroom door closest to the living room cracked open, a pair of tired eyes peering out. It was one of the three year olds, a little girl named Emiko.

‘Blessed child’ was, perhaps, appropriate for the little girl in a few ways. She was a kind soul, deeply caring and soft spoken even after all that she had been through months earlier. Emiko almost reminded her of how she had once been, except with an even softer heart.

She was also one of the children who had awakened the sharingan in the attack, another thing that many Uchiha of the past would have viewed as a blessing.

With those red eyes staring at her, looking as if the little girl was about to cry, Izumi did not consider it much of a blessing. The girl wasn’t even trained enough in the use of chakra to deactivate the dojutsu by herself most of the time.

Emiko had needed careful monitoring the night after the Massacre according to her file, her own eyes having drained much of the chakra from her body. One of Izumi’s clones had needed to carry the little girl from the hospital when she’d moved the children into their new home, as the girl had not been able to walk on her own from the effects of chakra exhaustion.

She lightly beckoned with her hand and Emiko scampered over to her.

Izumi lightly poked the girl on the forehead, a deceptively complex use of chakra deactivating the sharingan in the girl’s eyes, before she wrapped her arm around the girl and pulled her up to lay on the couch with herself and the baby. While her hand was still missing, she had grown used to using what was left of her right arm in the last few months to hold the children she cared for close.

She tried her best to ignore the now quiet argument in the other room about how Sasuke was ‘cheating’ as the three year old slowly fell asleep with her head on Izumi’s shoulder.

It wasn’t too long before Izumi joined the two much smaller girls that were resting on her in sleep.

One of Izumi’s smaller problems, though one that still regularly caused her problems, was the onset of the various effects associated with puberty on her body.

There really hadn't been a more inconvenient time for her body to decide she needed to physically mature, but there was little she could do to stop it outside of a highly medically discouraged use of medical ninjutsu.

Stopping puberty in its tracks could apparently cause a variety of negative effects on the body, and Izumi really didn’t want to deal with any of those.

Especially not when she would eventually have to go through puberty anyways.

So, she had to deal with it.

It had actually started several months before the Massacre had even happened, but some of the more difficult to deal with effects had only really started to bother her in the months since.

Periods were, surprisingly, one of the easier parts for her to deal with. She was a medical professional who was entirely capable of just making them pass quickly and mostly painlessly with her skills, and cramps were an issue that she simply didn’t have to deal with when she could just throw some more medical chakra at the problem.

The breast buds were more of a problem, really. Mostly because they would start aching unexpectedly and were becoming more and more sensitive in ways that she wasn’t sure whether to carefully avoid thinking about or to try… exploring.

‘It’s natural, Izumi. You shouldn’t shame yourself for it.’

She knew, from her medical work, that it wasn’t something she should be ashamed about, but it was hard to avoid feeling shame about the subject.

Her first life had been shockingly puritanical in hindsight, and the way that women’s desires were viewed in that world seemed almost laughably inaccurate with her more recent… feelings to shed light on them.

And those were really the crux of the issue, those feelings.

She didn’t know how to deal with the new interest in more sexual topics, honestly, especially in her own circumstances.

Izumi knew that, in Konoha at least, it was far from uncommon for people around her age and older to begin exploring their interest in sexual things, or even to seek sexual relationships. It was culturally encouraged, even. Shinobi often died young, they’d generally had that sort of relationship similarly young as well for most of the Elemental Nations’ history.

The issue with that was really that Izumi didn’t exactly feel her own age.

She didn’t feel the combined ages of her two lives worth of experiences either, but that still left her feeling more like she was in her mid to late teens while her body was significantly younger.

It was a distinctly awkward position to be in while her body was throwing strong desires her way.

Anyone her own physical age would make her feel like a predator to be with, and anyone closer to the age she felt she was would have to be a predator to be with her.

She could use a transformation if she wanted, but she also really didn’t like the idea of tricking anyone into that kind of thing.

In hindsight, she could almost understand the proposition she had made months earlier while drunk out of mind. She had wanted to reward her clone, had clearly known subconsciously about her own frustrations in that area, and had naturally sought out the only person who could possibly understand what she was feeling… Herself.

Honestly, if her clone hadn’t been in such a terrible mood if might have even wor-

‘Probably not a great line of thought to go down.’

…

But was it? 

She spent some of her nights torturing men until their brains broke, then killing them. Worse, she enjoyed it . What was fucking herself in the face of that?

Just a form of masturbation, really, which she already did on occasion. Maybe a somewhat unhealthy form of it, but in the face of everything else she’d been up to lately it seemed downright innocent.

Izumi eyed her own bed thoughtfully.

Izumi entered the clearing like a falling star, her fist swinging down and impacting the raised arm of her target with force great enough to crack the ground beneath his feet.

A single black eye stared at her, irritation visible in it as the man crouched beneath the kick she launched as a follow up. “Is there a reason you’re interrupting me?”

She hopped over the sweeping kick the silver haired man sent as a counter with a casual ease that betrayed the balance and skill required to perform such a maneuver, using the momentum of the upward jump to spin herself and use the leg she’d jumped off of to throw a kick towards Kakashi’s head.

The other jonin just threw himself backwards to avoid the attack, but it was worth the attempt just to train her balance and flexibility. She landed on the foot she’d thrown the first kick with, arresting her momentum into a one legged crouch before standing back up. “Just wanted to get some training in, I’ll get out of practice if I don’t.”

Like herself, Kakashi had retired from ANBU after the Massacre, though he had done so by choice. She could only assume it had something to do with his former ANBU teammate (and her former friend) slaughtering her clan.

Izumi’s ANBU retirement had been a thinly veiled demand in the form of a jonin promotion.

‘You needed it.’

The silver haired man raised his visible eyebrow. “And why would I want to spar with you? Genma still gives me grief when he sees me over the last time we met, you know.”

She eyed the memorial stone Kakashi had been staring at when she’d arrived, before shrugging. “Beats talking to ghosts? I doubt anyone written on there would want you wasting away in front of it.”

Kakashi stared at her for several seconds, an indecipherable mix of emotions in his eye.

“I’m going to start throwing ninjutsu at you now.” The man stated, the look in his eye changing to a half hearted glare.

“Good.” She responded simply.

Izumi needed to retrain in dealing with ninjutsu anyways, she couldn’t use half the ones she used to counter other ninjutsu with now that she was missing a hand.

Getting Konoha’s foremost expert on the subject to ‘help’ would only make that training more effective.

That positive spin on things in her head did not make avoiding Kakashi’s arsenal of ninjutsu any easier.

It was still fun though, in a dangerous sort of way.

November and December had been far too busy for Izumi to really start working on any solutions to her missing hand problem, but she’d had plenty of time to think on it at the very least.

Prosthetics were a surprisingly underexplored area in Konoha’s medical corps.

Shinobi tended to retire far more often than not when they lost a limb, and medic ninja were generally more focused on the needs of the active duty shinobi of the village than on those who were retired.

The hospital still served retired shinobi, of course, but their needs were not the focus of medical studies.

As a result it wasn’t a field that Konoha had a lot of expertise in.

Their current tentative ally to the southwest however, Suna, was supposed to have quite a bit of expertise on the subject. Prosthetics and their puppetry techniques basically went hand in hand, after all.

There was even a large overlap between the medics of Suna and the puppeteers of Suna, actually. The two specialties both required good chakra control and knowledge on poisons to perform as a shinobi.

The issue there was that for all of their supposed ‘allied’ status, the two hidden villages weren’t exactly sharing techniques with each other.

Suna’s expertise did indirectly help her with her problem, however.

Konoha and Suna had been enemies in the past, before they’d become allies, and Konoha had built up a small collection of their puppets as a result of those past conflicts.

Those puppets had ended up in the care of the ‘Konoha Ninja Tool Research Facility’, a chronically underfunded and understaffed facility near the edge of the city that still called itself a ‘hidden’ village.

Izumi had, naturally, gone there and simply took the things that she wanted from the place. She ignored the ‘Don’t touch that’s and the ‘You can’t take those’s in her pursuit of her goal. It wasn’t like anyone there could stop her anyway.

‘You know, that’s definitely illegal.’

Hiruzen would get over it, she was sure.

The puppets were more useful with her than they were gathering dust in a research facility they’d been in for a decade.

It wasn’t like this was the only illegal thing she was doing.

‘You shouldn’t be doing those things either.’

‘Okay, stop me then.’

The ghosts didn’t know what was good for them.

Chapter Text

~Izumi~

Izumi wiggled the polished wooden fingers of the puppet hand in front of Kasumi, watching with a small smile as the little girl stared at the hand in fascination. Little Emiko was sitting on the other couch with Sasuke, who the little girl had convinced to read a book with her. Or to her, really. Emiko was still working on her reading.

The hand couldn’t feel like a real hand did and wasn’t really a suitable replacement for her old one, but it would do for now at the very least.

The use of chakra strings from the end of her right arm to manipulate the hand was an interesting bit of chakra usage that she was still working on, but nothing unmanageable. It would take at least a few months to get used to since her only real reference points for where the hand was and what it was doing were sight, the feeling of the chakra strings, and proprioception.

She also needed to find a more reliable method to make the hand stay on her arm, rather than simply holding it there with her chakra. Fuinjutsu of some sort would probably do, sticking something to something else probably wasn’t all that hard to pull off with seals.

She forgot the hand was there sometimes, and then it would fall to the ground.

It would take some time to iron out all the details, but at least the hand suited her arm well enough. It was from a puppet designed in the shape of a woman about the right size to fit her arm after some adjustments, though it wasn’t the right color to match Izumi’s own pale skin and was clearly comprised of wood and metal rather than flesh.

The visible joints made it fairly obvious.

Kasumi tried to grab at one of the fingers, but Izumi pulled it away before the girl could reach. She replaced it with one of her actual fingers before the baby could get upset, allowing her to do as she wished with it.

Izumi gave a deeply unserious sigh as Kasumi inevitably ended up pulling the finger into her mouth to teeth on.

What a terrible fate, her finger would be all pruney for her meeting with the Hokage that evening.

“I cannot imagine why you think that is a good idea.” Izumi stated, eying Hiruzen like he was insane.

The old man folded his hands over his desk. “I think you can.”

She frowned. “What, do you want me to meet people my own age or something? I’m pretty sure they’re not going to relate to ‘My former best friend killed my whole family and clan.’”

“I want you to pass on your skills and, yes, to interact with people close to your own age in an atmosphere that isn’t you acting as their parent.” The Hokage gave her a serious look.

Izumi crossed her arms. “And if I say no?” 

The last thing she needed was yet another responsibility. Realistically speaking, what she needed was therapy. For the level of trauma she had experienced, unfortunately, she was fairly certain that all the qualified therapists were mind readers.

Given her recent spree of kidnappings and torture, she didn’t exactly want anyone poking around up there.

The previous life was a smaller issue by comparison.

‘I suppose we really are a smaller issue, now.’

Izumi did not think that the voices were a small issue.

Hiruzen sighed, stuffing leaves into his pipe for what seemed like the hundredth time in the years she had known the man. “Then I suppose there would be little I can realistically do. You’ve already shown a blatant enough disregard for legality in a number of areas, I doubt you’d balk at failing to fulfill your jonin obligations. There are those who wish for me to have you imprisoned, you know.”

The old man looked resigned, and had caved far too easily.

She knew why he hadn’t punished her for any of the things he actually knew that she’d done, of course. Underage drinking and stealing a few puppets were hardly capital offenses to begin with, she could likely get away with much more than that due to her value in the village as the one who had driven Itachi away.

It had given her quite a reputation, one based on information that she was sure Hiruzen had intentionally leaked to the public.

Izumi’s name had even made it into a number of foreign bingo books right next to Itachi’s, the S-Rank kunoichi of Konoha that had driven out the clan killer.

She existed as a deterrent to other villages, one that was necessary after the Uchiha Massacre had drained Konoha of over a full percentage point of its total shinobi forces and a larger percentage of its chunin and jonin.

The Hokage almost certainly viewed her as a loose cannon as well, but one he was trying to reign in and one he quite simply couldn’t afford to just let go.

Not unless something truly forced him to.

It was a similar situation to the one the old man was in with the two remaining ‘loyal’ Sannin, though to a lesser extent and with the exception that Izumi was actually fine with staying in the village.

But… she was probably making things a bit too hard on the old man, too much of a challenge to justify. She hadn’t even been attending to her actual work at the hospital in the last couple months, not even the reduced amount that she’d been given due to her status as a clan head.

Izumi sighed. “Alright, can I see the list of teams then?”

A jonin sensei gig would have its own benefits anyways if there was a team worth teaching. It would give her a nice excuse to be out of the village from time to time, putting out feelers for where Itachi and his masked friend might be.

There would be other advantages too, such as having an actual excuse to not be going to work at the hospital anymore. Jonin senseis only had mission requirements to worry about, and even those would stay at the drastically reduced level expected of a clan head rather than that of a normal jonin.

Well, the missions and training a team of kids into killers.

At least they were older kids, and they’d be trained regardless of whether she did it or not. Not taking the responsibility would just mean someone else training whatever kids she would have had, would maybe even mean that those kids would be less prepared and possibly die earlier than they would under her care.

Those and other justifications for training child soldiers.

Such was the world she lived in now.

‘It’s never been a pretty one, but it’s the one we have.’

Hiruzen, who had given her a frown at her request before rifling through his drawers for a bit, pulled out a file and pushed it across the desk to her. “You’re not supposed to be shown this and you’re definitely not supposed to have a choice in who you’re given to train, but…”

Izumi flicked the file open, taking a look at the first team on the list. A Yamanka, a Nara, and a civilian born boy. Nothing about them stood out to her too much, and she wasn’t exactly specialized in capturing opponents. “But you know I’d just fail or otherwise refuse any team I don’t like, and you want me to pass whichever team it is I get?”

The Hokage smiled slightly, but she could tell it was fairly halfhearted. “Yes. And why am I doing that?”

She examined the next page, which seemed to be the rookie of the year and dead last combo that the academy did with its graduates sometimes. She pointed at it briefly. “This combination is stupid, by the way. Always dysfunctional.”

“My team was one such team.” The Hokage didn’t comment on how she hadn’t answered his question.

“Exactly, and what a dysfunctional group that became.” Izumi flipped to the next page and examined it for a few seconds. “As for your question, you’re probably doing it so you can look as if you’re reigning me in. That and you’re hoping it’ll double as therapeutic for me and more leadership training, I guess.”

She was fairly sure of the Hokage’s previous plans for her, though he’d never told her outright. Even now he still wanted her to be better, and knew that she enjoyed teaching from her previous experiences with the academy medical students. There had been more signs of what Hiruzen wanted from her than she could count before the Massacre, really.

The heavy diplomacy he’d had her engage in with the clan had probably been the largest sign.

She didn’t plan on giving him what he wanted, even if things changed.

Hiruzen finally lit his stupid pipe, taking a breath of the smoke in before exhaling. “I’d appreciate if you stopped creating so much trouble.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she pushed the still open folder across the table. “No promises. I’ll take this one.”

The old man eyed the team she had selected. “That will do.”

Izumi stood. “We’ll see.”

And then she left, not waiting for an actual dismissal.

The sky rumbled above, light flashing from within the thunderclouds as if some vengeful god was threatening to strike those below.

Izumi could feel the energy within the cloud, rumbling and churning and easy to sense in a way that chakra had never been to her. It felt, too, like the energy of an angry god, stronger and more wild than even the most powerful shinobi.

She could certainly understand how myths could be born from such a phenomenon.

The rain of the storm had long since soaked her to the bone where she was sitting atop the Hokage Monument. There had been a time when she had enjoyed storms, when the sounds of the rain on her roof and the crack of thunder had been almost comforting to her.

Izumi had found Shisui’s body in a storm like this one.

All storms did was remind her of him now, and not the happy memories.

She stood, walking forward to where the edge of Minato Namikaze’s stone hair hung over the village that he had once, briefly, led towards what most had seen as a bright future. But he had died, in the end, and left his village in the hands of an aging old man.

Her remaining hand rose into the sky, her chakra calling out to the storm above like a lightning rod.

It was a foolish thing to do, one that countless aspiring masters of lightning release had tried and failed in, dying in the process.

‘Stupid girl…’

Death didn’t scare her, if anything it would be a welcome and deserved release from the world she lived in.

A great crack of noise sounded, the storm above lighting up like a flare with energy, and then the power of the storm shot at her in a flash of thunderous might. She made no attempt to get out of the way, allowing the lightning to impact her hand with all the force of the wrathful god so many cultures associated it with.

Her chakra had called the storm to her, however, and it still had influence over the natural electricity in the palm of her hand even as the overwhelming might of the storm seared her flesh and pushed at her chakra in its urge to tear through her body to the ground below.

When that failed to work the power of the storm poured away from her hand in great arcs of light, jumping from raindrop to raindrop on its path to the stone below.

The lightning tore into the stone of the Fourth Hokage’s head behind her, leaving gouges and burns where it entered the earth.

And then the lightning was gone.

All of that within the space of the barest fraction of a second, faster than many shinobi could have even reacted to.

Izumi lowered her hand, eying where the lightning had impacted her flesh. Her palm was a mess of blackened flesh, cooked so thoroughly by the energy of the storm that she could only partially feel one of her five fingers.

But she hadn’t died, at least.

Medical chakra flooded into her hand, focusing on repairing the fried nerves first and foremost. Thankfully, feeling returned to each of her fingers.

Unfortunately, the returning feeling included the extreme pain that signalled the severity of the injury. It was nearly enough to distract her, but she focused on healing the seared muscles and blackened bone of her hand even as the heavy wince crossed her face.

When she was mostly successful in that as well, she focused her chakra on healing the less important flesh and skin until the wound was as healed as it could be.

Her eyes trailed over her hand, examining the scar that the storm had left behind. Nearly the entire palm was coated in the red of fresh scar tissue, the scar extending further in jagged lines to the end of her fingers and down a little past her wrist.

A literal lightning bolt scar…

‘It’s like you were cursed or something, mate.’

Hopefully this one wouldn’t become as famous as the other one had.

Maybe she should start wearing gloves? Or a glove? The fabric would get caught in the joints on her false right hand…

Wearing one glove might look silly, but she was still tempted.

…Was this why Kakashi wore gloves all the time? Did he have a similar scar?

Now she was curious.

~Kakashi~

‘Beats talking to ghosts? I doubt anyone written on there would want you wasting away in front of it.’

Obito’s niece found new and interesting ways to irritate him nearly every time he met her.

First it had been her presence in ANBU, and how she had managed to fool him for so long into believing that she was her own mother. It had only really been made clear to him that Doe being Hazuki was impossible when he had been the one to find her body…

What was left of it.

He hadn’t liked the woman, had thought of her as a horrible sister to his dead friend and a possibly equally bad mother to the daughter that had joined the shinobi forces so young. He knew exactly the sort of pressure that was put on prodigies, it was why he had tried so hard to help Itachi in ANBU.

And he had failed in that, too.

No one deserved the fate that Hazuki had received. He couldn’t imagine what could have possibly driven Itachi to do that to his own friend’s mother. A mother that her daughter had clearly cared deeply for, judging by the condition he’d found the girl in later that night.

And then he had drank his sorrows away nearly as much as she had, before taking her home to let her sleep off the alcohol in one of his less intelligent drunken decisions.

‘Take any new young ladies home lately, Kakashi?’

Genma was irritating as well. If he hadn’t retired from ANBU that same night, Kakashi would have made sure the man suffered for his jabs.

At least Genma didn’t do things like stealing his old clothes and running off to the Hokage tower in them, like the other irritant had done.

And then she’d said those damned words, months later, as he was standing in front of the memorial stone just as he was now. The words were correct, of course, but that didn’t make them hurt any less.

Obito, Rin, Kushina and Minato wouldn’t want him to punish himself the way he kept doing.

He knew his sensei wouldn’t want him to. The man had gotten on his case about it once or twice when he’d still been alive, back when Kakashi had been going to the stone for Obito and Rin alone.

But it wasn’t that simple.

His feet drew him to this place almost unconsciously and his mind locked him into thought after thought about how he could’ve been better, should’ve fixed things.

He didn’t really have anything else.

Everyone he still cared about was just a relative of his ‘ghosts’, as Izumi had put it.

Even when he tried to care for someone, build a bond that could maybe one day be closer to friends than comrades, something would go horribly wrong.

Like he had tried briefly with Itachi, before the boy had murdered nearly his entire family and clan.

Something lightly touched his right wrist.

On instinct, Kakashi turned and swung his left fist full force into the cheek of whoever had touched him. As they flew into the air from the force of the blow, he dimly recognised the airborne person as exactly the same girl that had prompted his thoughts.

He also noticed that his right hand was… missing the glove that had been there?

Kakashi gave a confused stare at where Izumi had landed feet first on the side of a tree and was now crouched on it and staring back. “Is there… a reason that you’re trying to steal my gloves?”

Obito’s niece dropped to the ground, her eyes seeming locked onto his hand for some reason. He looked at it briefly in confusion.

Same as always, just his hand.

“Guess it wasn’t that one, then.” Izumi’s voice said, and he still had no idea what she meant.

He tilted his head at her, feeling like something was off, and then his eye caught on her remaining hand. A recent scar covered the appendage, clear electrical damage from the look of it, and severe electrical damage at that.

…She had tried to catch lightning.

“I’ve never tried to catch lightning.” He had cut a bolt in half once with the chidori, but that had been a spur of the moment thing during a stormy battle. He wasn’t quite suicidal enough to seek such a thing out.

Now the girl gave him a confused look. “Then why did you put it on that list you gave sensei?”

Sensei?

He racked his brain for a moment, trying to remember who exactly the girl’s sensei was. When he remembered who it was, it all clicked into place. Monkey. Sarutobi Kanpu. The list he’d given, assuming that the other jonin would read the last instruction as the clear joke it was.

Kakashi sighed. “I really should have asked what he wanted that list for.”

Izumi raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t know?”

The girl wasn’t stupid though, she would have looked into the previous disastrous attempts at shinobi trying to catch lightning. The storm generally didn’t like it, or maybe liked it too much, it would send far more energy than any normal bolt of lightning to where the calling lightning chakra was gathered.

If she had tried it anyways…

He eyed Obito’s niece.

It would only go horribly wrong.

But it already nearly had anyways.

“Did you want to spar?” He ended up asking.

Maybe he could try again, one last time, to support someone else. Internally, Kakashi tried to ignore that he’d had similar thoughts about another prodigy only a year and a half earlier.

~Izumi~

Izumi sighed, leaning on the railing of her balcony.

Another exhausting day taking care of more than thirty children by herself. At least the older ones didn’t require too much from her most of the time now.

Only one more day until she’d have more children under her care. Genin students, but children under her care nonetheless.

Tap tap tap tap tap. The sounds of little feet on the floor.

Naruto and Sasuke kept running around the apartment, too. She’d told them several times to stop being so damn loud, that the younger kids were napping, and yet they continued. It was nice to see Sasuke looking more positive than he had before now that he had a friend, but it was exhausting putting the little ones back to bed when they inevitably woke up again from all the noise.

There was the sudden sound of insect wings, the scent of burning insects, and then in the space of a thought she was standing in front of her would be assassin, staring into his eyes with Mangekyo Sharingan full of a fiery excited hatred.

The tiger masked ANBU abruptly collapsed under her gaze, falling like a puppet with his strings cut.

Just another toy for her to play with.

‘People aren’t toys…’

Some people deserved to be.

Really, attacking her at her home, where the kids she took care of lived?

If it were anyone else, she supposed they would likely be off guard in such a place. She had been, even, until a shadow clone had dispelled from its position on the roof of her building and made her aware of the assassin in the shadows.

Perhaps that was another reason her home had been chosen, it was perhaps the only place in Konoha that truly had good odds of containing the real her, especially when she arrived home and the clone that had been caring for the little ones in her absence dispelled.

She was out of this assassin’s league, though. Probably even a very bad match up for him with how easily she had heard the sound of his insects moving into position. 

A simple enough use of fire for an Uchiha had killed most of the insects before they could even get close to her.

Even had they reached her before she vanished, she had been prepared. A thin layer of chakra had been across her skin, a medical ninjutsu designed to prevent medic ninja from catching the diseases of their patients, strengthened enough to prevent something like the stinger of an insect from penetrating her skin.

Izumi could even hear the insects inside of Sugaru , the very same agent who had once spied on Itachi for Danzo.

So yes, an extraordinarily bad matchup for the assassin.

A clone landed beside her, handing her a jar that contained several still living insects before dispelling.

Good, that meant she could boil the other insects while they were still inside the operative and still have some left over to examine later.

‘That’s… You can’t do that, Harry. That’s wrong.’

But Izumi could, and she would.

~Itachi~

“...has left the organization, we’ll need to…”

Pain was talking about something, but Itachi wasn’t really listening.

His hand felt along the long scar that crossed his face. Down his forehead, over his eye, down his cheek to his jaw where the scar was the thickest.

The slash had carved all the way into the bone of his brow, cheekbone, and jaw.

The deepest part had been at his jaw, and the slash had left a hole in his cheek before it had been rather poorly healed. Just enough to close the wound.

He could still feel the scar on the inside of his cheek with his tongue, if he tried.

Above all else, even the difficulty that came with the loss of his eye, the scar was a constant reminder of what he had done. Itachi saw their faces in his dreams and in his waking hours, all the members of his clan that he had murdered with the cold conviction that it was necessary.

It didn’t seem so clear, now.

Itachi didn’t have many connections within Konoha, but the crow summons that had once belonged to Shisui still answered to him and he had assigned several to keep an eye on the situation there.

What they told him had seemed impossible, incompatible with what he believed to be true.

In the wake of the Massacre, the remaining Uchiha were gazed upon by the village with sympathy and were led towards what seemed like an almost bright future by a new clan head.

The animosity that had once existed between the clan and the village was all but gone, like it had never been there.

Their new clan head was viewed with respect, seen as the girl who had driven out the ‘clan killer’ and as a great protector of Konoha.

He had examined the village’s view of the Uchiha closely and vice versa before what he had done, he was sure of it, and nothing he had seen had indicated any chance of positive relations between the two in the future.

The memories were sharp, as his memories always were, nearly as sharp as a memory recorded with a sharingan.

Itachi had looked into it and determined that what was happening now in Konoha wasn’t possible.

And yet it was clearly happening anyway.

Had anything he’d done that night even been necessary?

Could the same results have been achieved with less death?

With no death?

Had a peaceful solution not been a pipe dream?

Itachi had already felt like a monster for what he had done, had tried to do, even when he had believed it was necessary.

He’d killed his own parents, his clan, had tried to kill his brother and his closest friend.

And it might not have even been necessary?

Izumi should have killed him, that night.

Chapter Text

~Izumi~

Izumi stared straight forward, keeping her eyes open for the examination.

“You know this isn’t exactly my specialty, Izumi.” The man examining her eyes shifted to a different position, moving the microscope setup with him.

“I’m aware of that, sensei. I don’t need perfection for this.” She trusted Kanpu to be discreet with anything he learned from the examination, which she couldn’t say for any of the actual eye doctors. The examination was more to double check while she was there than anything.

The man frowned after a few seconds. “Alright, I’ve seen everything I’m going to be able to see. Would you like me to examine them with medical chakra, or do you want to do that yourself?”

“Already done. Nothing major to note.” Izumi lied, and Kanpu could probably tell based on the skeptical look that he gave her. The same sort of deterioration she had once seen in the chakra pathways and nerves leading to Uchiha Fugaku’s eyes now existed in her own, though to a significantly lesser extent.

The damage was a result of overusing the Mangekyo Sharingan, she now knew.

Kanpu finished writing down his observations and pushed the papers over to her. “If you say so. This is everything I was able to observe from what you had me do. I didn’t notice anything worrying, though I am again; not an expert.”

Izumi glanced over the page briefly, noting that everything matched with what she’d expected. Her eyes remained above average in every way, significantly sharper than any normal person’s vision. There were no notable deficiencies that could be observed with the examinations Kanpu had performed.

And yet her vision was worse than it had ever been in this life. Where once she had seen more sharply even than most among her clan, now she barely saw any more clearly than an average person could.

The sharingan briefly flashed in her eyes, memorizing the contents of the examination. Then she lifted the paper into her left hand, watching as it burned to ash from the simple fire technique she was performing on it. “Thank you, sensei.”

Kanpu sat down on a nearby chair, entirely unphased by her burning of his work. “It was no problem, Izumi. You’ve been avoiding the hospital lately, it was good to see you again.” And avoiding him to some extent, though he might not know that. She hadn’t wanted to see him, had known he would probably try to help her and hadn’t been ready for it.

She didn’t deserve help.

Izumi responded to one of the unsaid questions that came along with the words her sensei had spoken. “I’ve been busy lately, taking care of the children from the clan. It’s been going… well enough.”

It had been going well enough, the children had begun to settle into their new lives and most needed much less direct attention from her than they had before. She would have preferred to give them each a consistent parental figure in their lives, but there was only so much she could realistically do under the circumstances without both burning herself out and causing worse problems with the village than she already had.

Her status as a deterrent in the village towards other nations would only continue to be relevant if other villages believed she was still a threat and still served her village. Staying in Konoha taking care of her clan’s orphans full time would weaken that image significantly, especially since she was only really known outside of the village for an incident that had occurred inside of the village.

The Uchiha Clan’s current status in the village depended on her image, the village would be less forgiving and more forceful in the long run if she didn’t maintain her leverage with them.

Izumi hated Hiruzen for planting the seeds of political thought in her mind.

Her sensei sighed. “And yourself?”

‘Yes, ‘Uchiha’, how are you doing these days? Worse than I ever did, that much is clear.’

Izumi frowned, ignoring the words from that spiteful, ignorant voice. “I’m doing as well as I could be, under the circumstances.”

The words were really just a nice way of saying she was doing horribly, but she doubted Kanpu expected her to be feeling anywhere close to positive after what had happened.

It took longer than was normal for her nearly forty year old sensei to speak again (How odd that was to think about, that her sensei would be turning forty in only a couple months), and when he did the words were careful. “Have you considered… therapy, Izumi?”

She gave the man a sharp look. “I have. For the children, at least.”

The Uchiha clan’s children were scheduled to begin regular therapy sessions the following week; she had arranged it before heading to the room they were in. Izumi didn’t think she had made the right choice in waiting so long, but it had felt too soon to go back to the hospital in the last few months, too much like going back to ‘normal’.

Her sensei returned her sharp look. “You are a child, Izumi.”

It was true, sort of. Months earlier, if he had said such a thing to her, it might even have convinced her instead of just angering her. She had painted her soul with blood since then.

Izumi stood, not responding as she walked to the door of the examination room the two were in. She paused with her hand on the door handle. “I’m not, not really. This village took that sort of innocence away from me, you know that.”

She left, not waiting for a response.

Izumi sat atop the training stump, staring down at the students she had been assigned, or rather assigned to herself.

Two of them were familiar to her, while one was not.

Hyuga Ko was a tall boy, significantly taller than she was with short, spiky hair. He was a member of the main house of the Hyuga, she knew, and part of the reason she had chosen the team was because she thought Hiashi might hate the idea of one of his clan members being directly under her instruction.

Inuzuka Hana was taller than she was as well, though only by a little bit. She still looked mostly the same as Izumi remembered the Inuzuka heiress being when the girl had interned at the hospital, though she seemed to have tamed the spikes of her hair a bit.

The real oddball of the group was the third, however. Ichiraku Ayame was not a girl that Izumi had ever expected would have an interest in becoming a kunoichi, and she could not imagine what had happened to make her decide to.

The girl was the same height that she was, and looked similar enough to herself that they might have been able to pass as siblings to anyone who didn’t know better. The biggest difference between them was that Ayame had lightly tanned skin that still made Izumi feel a little jealous in comparison to her own naturally pale complexion.

Well, that and the passably groomed hair. Izumi often didn’t take care of herself as well as she should anymore, and her hair was a mess of tangled spikes whenever she didn’t have anything important to show up to.

Even then, sometimes she didn’t bother to show up so she could avoid the effort. If she could get away with it.

Each of the three genin had seemed shocked when she’d shown up as their assigned sensei and ordered them to meet her at the training grounds in the morning, probably because she was the same age they were.

The three were also staring back up at her.

Ayame seemed the most nervous of the three, but she was also the first to speak. She had an odd admiration in her eyes, which were also easily readable in the same way that Izumi had always been told her’s were. “So, sensei, what are we going to do first?”

“Well, I’m told this is the part where I give you some sort of test.” Izumi responded, one leg dangling lazily off the stump and her arm wrapped around the knee of the other.

‘Sounds boring, no wonder you don’t plan on doing it.’

More of a pointlessness kind of thing than a boring thing, but that too she supposed.

Ko spoke after that, looking as stoic as any Hyuga. She’d break him of that eventually, stoicism only got in the way of communication. “What will the test be, then?”

Izumi dropped from the stump in one clean motion. “Run with me.”

And with that, she ran off into the woods at a (for her) extraordinarily light pace. It was an old habit for her, one she had done for what felt like most of her life at that point.

Whenever she hadn’t been too busy, at least.

The genin caught up to her after a few seconds, which wasn’t too surprising. She had only been running at around an average traveling speed for a genin.

“So… just running?” Her past and current student, Hana, asked with less boisterous energy than Izumi remembered her to have. Perhaps she’d calmed somewhat in the years since Izumi had known her.

“Maybe.” Izumi increased her pace, noting that the current pace was too easy for her students.

That made sense, all three of them were noted as being ‘above average for a graduating genin’, a note that Izumi imagined had grown more common since whenever it was that Konoha had set a minimum graduation age instead of just graduating genin whenever they happened to be ‘ready’.

‘Twelve is no age to be considered ready for war.’

The right age to kill a basilisk though, apparently. Thanks, old man.

“Could you repeat that, sensei? I couldn’t hear what you said.” The voice came out somewhat out of breath, from the only student of hers who was civilian born.

She looked back at the three genin, confused. Of her students, only Hana was giving her a strange look that was somewhere between surprise and resignation that signalled she had heard whatever Izumi had accidentally said aloud.

She turned back forward, focusing on running. “It was nothing, just keep up. I’m increasing the pace again.”

And so she did. Izumi kept her genin running even after all three of them seemed dead on their feet, pushing them harder than she imagined they’d ever been pushed. Her students would be pushed similarly hard in every part of their training. They would need to be far better than they were now for what she had planned.

~Hana~

“Thanks, old man.”

The words that her new sensei had muttered were bitter, angry. They hadn’t sounded thankful at all, but rather like the words of someone who had been given a responsibility they didn’t want. Under the circumstances, it seemed like the old man was the Hokage and the responsibility was Hana and the rest of her team.

It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing a genin wanted to hear on the first day training with their new sensei.

The long distance, high intensity cardio that had followed had only seemed to reinforce the notion that the Uchiha Clan Head did not want to have students. She’d made them run until even Hana herself had struggled to stay on her feet, and the Inuzuka clan focused heavily on physical fitness in their clan training.

The other two had looked like they were dying and Hana had felt like she was.

And then Uchiha Izumi had pushed them further, demanded more from them.

The jonin was trying to get them to quit. Hana wasn’t sure why her sensei had even bothered with all the effort, she could just fail them if she really didn’t want to be a sensei.

When Hana had returned home, visibly exhausted, her mother had grinned sharply at the sight of her. “Worked to the bone, huh? That’s no big surprise. Your new sensei probably doesn’t know what normal training looks like, what with who she used to train with.”

Who she used to train with?

After some thought, it came to her. ‘Itachi.’ She’d been in the same class as the clan killer for her first year at the academy, had even sat directly beside him in class. Hana remembered that he had seemed to like her somewhat, though he wasn’t exactly talkative. It was little things, really. He’d sat beside her at class of his own volition, had talked with her a bit about his brother before class and then later about her own brother when she brought it up.

The love in Itachi’s voice when he’d talked about his brother… She couldn’t imagine him trying to kill his own family.

But she had only known him when he was seven.

Going by her young sensei’s general demeanor and small but vicious collection of scars, knowing the boy longer would not have been a positive experience.

Hana remembered working under Izumi as an intern at the hospital and how the other girl had always been kind to her, though still strict when necessary. Hana had really needed the strictness back then, she hadn’t had the wildness inherent to her clan members under control at that point.

That such a warm and kind girl could become so cold and closed off in only a few years time…

Hana could only hope that Izumi wouldn’t pass down whatever could cause such a change to her students.

~Ko~

Ko’s new sensei seemed a poor match for him in a few ways.

The most important of them was his clan’s clear disapproval of the girl. His own father, a strict and formal man who was rarely straightforward with his wishes, had all but ordered him to be wary and distant with his sensei.

There was little to be done about it, however. The Hyuga Clan Head had apparently brought his disapproval to the Hokage and the conversation had gone nowhere, so now Ko was stuck with the clearly deranged and dangerous older girl as his sensei.

Uchiha Izumi also seemed like a poor teacher for a taijutsu specialist like himself. The girl was missing a hand, and while she had a replacement it seemed unlikely to perform even half as well as a regular hand would in hand to hand combat.

That was what he had thought… until he found himself sparring with the jonin during his second day of training under her.

The girl moved around his strikes like she was dancing, her prosthetic hand intercepting the strikes of his gentle fist whenever necessary. The chakra strings that made the hand move should have been easily severed by his attacks and they were indeed at first, but the hand stayed attached even as parts of it went limp and the chakra strings were simply remade. As the spar continued, the strings began to shift to avoid the severing chakra of his gentle fist and he felt more and more like he wasn’t making any progress in fighting the Uchiha. The jonin wasn’t even moving any faster than he could, she was simply that much more skilled than he was.

The spar seemed to go on for hours and by the end of it he was laying flat across the grass where he’d been knocked to by a surprise low kick from the girl, exhausted and demoralized. His sensei crouched beside him and opened her mouth to speak, and Ko expected something akin to a kick while he was down to leave her lips.

Instead… “That was good, Ko. We’ll have to work on finding ways for you to deal with people who won’t fall to your gentle fist. What do you think?”

He stared at her for a few seconds, not sure how to respond. Members of his clan rarely used abilities outside of clan techniques, but it wasn’t entirely unheard of. Perhaps somewhat looked down upon, but he had enough leeway as the only child of a main house elder to not really have to worry about that. And his sensei was an Uchiha… “Ninjutsu?”

The Uchiha Clan Head nodded. “Ninjutsu. We’ll start on it next week, go rest and meditate for now. Watch my spar with your teammate if you’d like.”

With those words, the jonin stood and walked towards the other side of the clearing where both of Ko’s teammates were meditating atop the slowly flowing stream that was there. They both seemed soaked to the bone, so they had likely fallen in more than once while he’d been sparring with their sensei.

He’d been almost surprised to find out that both of them already knew how to tree walk and some level of water walking, but it made sense since both of them were specialists in areas that required good chakra control.

Hana was a medic after all, and Ayame had been attending the academy’s sensory ninja classes for years from what he knew.

Ko wasn’t particularly familiar with either of the two, but they seemed dedicated enough to their work for him to be fine with being on a team with them. It was an unusual setup, having three girls and one boy on a team. Their class happened to have more kunoichi than average however, and the luck of the draw had given them a kunoichi sensei their age as well.

He didn’t particularly care, though he’d been able to see that some of his male peers had been jealous of him for it.

Something to do with romantic aspirations, no doubt. Ko would one day be part of an arranged marriage of some sort, he knew, so there was no reason to concern himself with such things.

~Ayame~

Being on a team with two clan ninja, one of them the heiress of her clan, was nerve wracking. Ayame was just the daughter of a ramen vendor, she often felt distinctly out of place even just attending the shinobi academy. Being on a team with two members of her class that seemed so skilled, practically born for shinobi work, only made her feel more out of place.

Who her sensei had ended up being only made that feeling more intense.

She’d known Uchiha Izumi for years, distantly, or at least known of her. She’d first met the other girl years earlier when Izumi had visited Ichiraku Ramen as a genin, and it had shocked Ayame to her core when it had happened.

A girl who looked so much like she did, a kunoichi?

She couldn’t help but see herself in the other girl, what she could be one day if she tried hard enough, even with how upset Izumi had been at the time. So she’d talked to her dad about it repeatedly and eventually she’d managed to wear down his worries and protests about the prospect with all the possible benefits and how much she really truly wanted to become a great kunoichi one day.

Her father had caved after enough pressure, and Ayame had managed to get accepted into the academy that very month. There had been a lot of remedial courses she’d had to take that year and she’d been over a year older than the vast majority of her classmates at the time, but she’d worked herself to the bone in her single minded pursuit of her new dream. By the end of her third year at the academy she was nearly a full year ahead of the students in her class, and so she’d been moved into a class filled with students her own age for her final year.

She was far from the best in the class, but she managed to keep up and do well enough to graduate just barely outside of the upper half of the class rankings.

So when she saw the girl who had inspired her path towards becoming a kunoichi, dressed in jonin fatigues and seeming so much more experienced and dangerous than she had before and there to teach her own team personally, Ayame had been filled with a quiet sense of awe.

She hadn’t seen Izumi in years before learning that the other girl was going to be her sensei, though her dad had told her about how the Uchiha girl had been visiting the stall with Naruto from time to time while Ayame was busy training and catching up with the academy curriculum.

There were things that worried her about her new sensei, how cold and angry she seemed at times for reasons that were invisible to her, but there was an intense amount of something like care and worry that sometimes welled up in the jonin’s eyes as she pushed Ayame’s team in training. Besides, Izumi wouldn’t have been trusted with a genin team if she was a danger to her students, would she?

Ayame didn’t think so.

In spite of her feelings of not being good enough for the team she had ended up on, the team that was led by a clan head, Ayame had resolved to put her all in every day. It was honestly easier in some ways, having a sensei push her to train for hours on end rather than having to push herself. Izumi didn’t seem to care what her limits might be, however, and that often ended in Ayame being practically unable to move when she got home for the day.

The soreness that would come the next day wasn’t any better even with the stretches she did. At least her sensei seemed to understand the concept of rest days, though, and would just lead them around on relatively low exertion D-Rank missions on Tuesdays and Thursdays to let their protesting muscles recover somewhat.

Weekends were designated as free time for them by her sensei, though Ayame ended up seeing the other girl anyways on Saturday when Izumi brought a gaggle of younger Uchiha and Naruto into Ichiraku Ramen for lunch, where Ayame had decided to spend much of her recovery day helping out at.

Saturdays were busy and her dad appreciated the help, even if Ayame was taking it easy.

Her greeting of, “Good afternoon, Izumi-sensei. What can I-” was naturally interrupted by a shocked Naruto.

“Izumi-neechan is your sensei?! How? She’s always at home!” Naruto stared at her expectantly, as if she somehow knew the answer to how Izumi was able to do both things.

Izumi answered for her, naturally. “Shadow clones, Naruto. Sometimes at home, sometimes with them. Depends on whether I need to be there personally.”

“What’s a shadow clone?” The boy asked, and Izumi fell into a detailed explanation for the boy in the same moment that she pushed over a piece of paper to Ayame. The paper contained a list of the orders for all the children Izumi had brought along, though Ayame wondered how the girl had written it all without her noticing.

Maybe she had written it beforehand?

Ayame was still able to listen to the explanation as she handed the list over to her dad and went about doing her own parts of preparing the orders, years of working in the ramen shop had given her that kind of gossip gathering skill. Especially since it had seemed like a good skill to develop while she was planning on becoming a kunoichi.

The shadow clone seemed interesting, though Izumi was quick to stress the limitations of the jutsu and how ‘most people’ couldn’t use it the way she did.

What was different about Izumi that let her abuse the jutsu to such an extent? What made her able to maintain a constant presence in at least two places without facing the repercussions of having too many memories entering her mind every day?

The other girl seemed very serious about the limitations though, so Ayame would at least be careful with the technique if she ever learned it.

The rest of the visit went without much interaction between herself and her sensei, since Izumi spent most of the time keeping an eye on the children she’d brought along and Ayame exchanged several friendly little interactions with the kids in between the work she was doing to prepare meals for them.

One of the younger ones seemed a little confused, she kept calling Ayame ‘Zumi-chan’ and seemed to not understand why she was behind the counter instead of with them.

Only a little over half an hour after they arrived, the group of Uchiha and Uzumaki children left the stall.

Izumi seemed like a good caretaker, Ayame decided. Though it was weird seeing a girl her age leading around half a dozen children like she was their mother.

A girl younger than her, actually, she had learned.

Izumi’s birthday was in late July, whereas Ayame had been born in February.

It felt somewhat strange that she had looked up to a girl younger than her for so long.

~Kakashi~

He ducked under the high kick and slammed his hands into the ground, turning the earth to thick mud beneath his opponent’s feet rather than sweeping her other leg from under her like she might have expected.

To Kakashi’s surprise, the girl actually tripped as her foot sank and fell sideways into the mud rather than countering it cleanly in some way like he had expected of her. Izumi had been fighting more sloppily than normal for the whole spar, but he’d still expected her to be able to keep up.

After a few seconds of just laying there in the mud, Izumi rolled over onto her back and stared tiredly up at him. The left side of her face was partially covered in mud along with a lot of her body and hair. “...this is going to be a pain to clean off, you know.”

He shrugged, before sitting down cross legged on the more stable ground that was beneath him. “Should’ve avoided it, then.”

Izumi reached down and pulled a flask from one of her pouches, taking a sip from it. He briefly hoped that it was a water flask, but his sensitive nose helpfully informed him that it definitely wasn’t.

She returned the flask to her pouch. “Could I ask you a favor?”

“What favor?” He wouldn’t give blanket acceptance of course, he wasn’t that foolish.

Izumi stared up at the stars overhead. She’d ambushed him into a spar when he was near the end of the time he usually spent at the memorial. In hindsight, he realized that she’d probably already drank a decent bit before she’d arrived in the first place.

It definitely wasn’t healthy, but neither was his habit of spending hours staring at a name covered stone.

“I’m going to be leaving the village on missions again soon. Can you keep an eye on my kids… my clan for me while I’m gone? Send a nin-dog or something, maybe? Just want to make sure nothing happens.” The girl’s voice was tired, exhausted, maybe a little slurred. The sound of it alone would have been enough to indicate that she was stretched thin even if he wasn’t able to visibly see it in the weariness of her appearance.

The circles under her eyes were so dark that they had probably been there for weeks at least. He remembered similar ones existing the last time he’d seen her.

Kakashi himself was extremely underworked at the moment, technically speaking he was on leave and had been since the massacre had occurred. He’d all but demanded as much when he’d retired from ANBU.

Even with having been on leave for over three months in a row, he still had another three months left that he could use if he wanted to.

Not using any leave days for his over a decade of service had led to him having an abundance to spare. Though, even if he went over the limit he would probably still be left alone for a good while. His reputation had granted him an exceptional amount of leeway in the village.

“I can do that.” He eventually stated. It wasn’t too hard to send a nin-dog to keep an eye on the kids, they all lived in the same apartment building and he was sure there would be babysitters around to do all the actual work.

“Thanks for that…” The girl responded, her eyes locked on the sky above as if it held all the answers to the world.

There were also ANBU on shift there to keep an eye on Naruto, the Hokage’s most trusted, but he certainly understood Izumi’s worries.

In addition to that, the building itself was only a few buildings down from the eastern ANBU outpost of the village, it was an arrangement that had been made between the Uchiha Clan Head and the Hokage shortly after the Kyuubi Attack occurred if he remembered correctly.

He’d been one of the ANBU assigned to take care of his sensei’s son until the boy could take care of himself, so he had learned of the boy’s status through experience in addition to his information gathering.

Kakashi had wondered, privately, if Fugaku had come to see the arrangement as made under false pretenses in the years after it had been made. He hadn’t known the reasoning behind the arrangement specifically, but it had seemed like a gesture of goodwill between the village and the clan to some extent that had been broken within the year.

The goodwill, that is. The Uchiha Clan never made any attempt to remove the village jinchuriki from their property as far as he knew.

He eyed the at least mildly drunk girl that was still laying in the mud he’d created.

Had she known how strong a political move it had been to move her whole clan into the same building that held Naruto? How much influence and power that symbolized?

How much of what she’d been doing over the last few months was intentional?

She’d claimed a team that held two significant members of Konoha’s clans, and the pushback from the one of those two clans that had actually cared had been all but ignored. The Hyuga Clan Head, leader of one of the noble clans of Konoha, treated as if his opinion on the matter was irrelevant by the village’s leader.

Just how much leeway did the girl have?

More than most, more than him even. It was for the same reason that he had so much freedom, he was now nearly sure, combined with the sympathy from her clan’s recent tragedy.

The Hokage wanted a successor, and they were on the list.

Whether anyone on that list would ever take the job was another matter.

Kakashi certainly didn’t plan to.

Chapter Text

~Ayame~

There was fire.

Everywhere she looked there was more fire. The screams of the dying echoed through the camp where there had once been a relatively thriving, if clearly illegal and immoral, band of bandits. Several feet away from her, the half melted corpse of a man was barely recognizable. The smell of cooking human flesh, not too dissimilar from the smell of some meats she’d eaten in the past, filled the air.

Ayame threw up against her own will, coating a small bush in her bile.

“You will learn the realities of the shinobi lifestyle on our next mission. It won’t be pretty. People will die in brutal, senseless ways, and you will be asked to bring that death to them. You need to be ready for this, even though I do wish that you didn’t.”

Her sensei’s words had made sense, she had understood them, but she had not been ready for this.

Uchiha Izumi’s mad laughter echoed over the screams as she hunted more bandits further into the camp. She sounded almost like she was… enjoying herself. It was sickening, made it hard to recognise the girl she had looked up to. Still looked up to?

How could she look up to someone like that ?

“On this mission, you will likely see a side of me that is ugly and disturbing. It may scare you. People cope with the horrors they have seen in many ways, a lot of them unhealthy, and I have seen truly terrible things.”

The words had been said quietly, dosed with a hint of self hatred, and she could see why.

Ayame’s eyes found a body on the ground a short distance from herself, a kunai cleanly penetrating the dead man’s heart. Another small pool of vomit already coated the dirt beside the deceased bandit.

“You will have to kill on this mission, unfortunately. If you do not do so this time, you will freeze up in the future when your life depends on it. It is my duty to ensure your safety to the best of my ability. I am sorry.”

She had thought she knew what it meant to kill, at least to an extent.

They had been taught about it in the academy, they’d even been sent to butcher farm animals to help them learn about what it would be like. It had been horrible, she remembered.

Now Ayame felt like she’d committed a crime against humanity. The man at her feet could have been someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s uncle, someone’s friend, someone’s lover. He meant something to people who still lived, probably, people who would mourn his loss.

And she’d killed him at the order of her sensei, like his life meant nothing.

“Are you sure? The life of a kunoichi… it is a dark one, you understand? The things shinobi have to do can be terrible. There are good shinobi, of course, but… it isn’t a fair world for those with kind hearts, like you have. I just don’t want my only child to get hurt…”

Her dad had been right from the beginning, he always had been. She’d been foolish to push past his warnings.

Ayame should never have chosen to become a kunoichi…

But it was too late now.

She stared at the dead man as the screams slowly died down and the smell of burnt flesh continued to assault her nose. She was dimly aware of the fires continuing to rage on until, all at once, they died like they’d been robbed of air. Her eyes still stayed on the corpse, almost unintentionally committing his face to memory.

A hand landed on her shoulder and she didn’t react.

The hand pulled her into a careful hug, her face pulled into the shoulder of the person holding her to make her look away from the body. Tears began to escape Ayame’s eyes, her body shaking with sobs.

“I’m sorry.” A familiar voice quietly told her.

A voice that she looked up to.

A voice that, minutes earlier, she had heard laughing in a sadistic sort of pleasure as its owner violently butchered people.

She wanted to push her sensei’s comfort away, but she hid her face in the other girl’s neck instead.

It felt terrible.

~Izumi~

Her team’s progress was going well, better than she had expected.

Including the recovery in the aftermath of their first C-Rank mission, though the mission itself had been very messy.

Izumi hadn’t known as much before she became a jonin, but it was tradition for genin to get their first kill on their first real mission. The missions were specifically chosen with intel that suggested possible or likely or outright necessary combat with low risk targets in mind, depending on what happened to be available at the time. It explained a lot about her own first C-Rank.

What had happened to be available when Izumi had decided to get her team’s first C-Rank had been a bandit extermination mission. Those types of missions were rare, especially inside the land of fire where bandits knew shinobi would likely be hired, but they were also high priority.

No one wanted bandits in their backyard for long, and bandits moved quickly in their attempts to avoid shinobi and samurai.

Izumi had relished the opportunity to spill the blood of those who seemed to deserve it, but in hindsight had gone a little overboard when she’d finally arrived at the camp and her team’s first kills were out of the way.

Her overwhelming bloodlust had blinded her to the fact that her students, frankly, hadn’t been ready for the level of violence she had unleashed on their targets. All three students had grown significantly more wary of her after what they had seen on the mission.

That didn’t matter too much to her overall, they were all still functional and hadn’t broken under the pressure. She’d encouraged them to speak to others about what they’d experienced, even. Izumi didn’t particularly care if she developed a bloodthirsty reputation.

What mattered was that they weren’t broken and still seemed ready to listen to her orders despite their wariness of her.

In Ko’s case, the boy only seemed more ready to follow her orders. He had thrived on the mission, killing four bandits on his own with a ruthless efficiency. Izumi suspected that his wariness was from the… instability that her laughter and methods had shown.

Hana had done well too, though she and her dogs had avoided killing beyond what was necessary and she had seemed disgusted by Izumi’s actions. That, too, was fine. Izumi did disgusting things on that mission, it was only rational to feel that way about them.

It was Ayame that she was really worried about.

The older girl had frozen up at her first kill, vomited, twice even. She’d remained in shock even as the rest of the bandits were slaughtered, and had stayed as such even as Izumi tried to comfort her. She had only started to come to her senses halfway back to Konoha, when she’d already spent an hour being carried piggyback by Izumi herself.

Izumi probably should have had a clone take the girl away from the camp after she’d gotten her first kill, but she hadn’t been thinking particularly clearly at the time.

It… horrified Izumi, how she had been too focused on bringing suffering to even recognise that one of her students needed help.

What was she becoming, that she prioritized causing pain over helping those under her care?

A flash of red eyes filled her mind, eyes from another life.

‘Strange likenesses between us, Potter, now more than ever. Even our eyes aren’t so different now. Our real eyes, anyway.’

But… she was better than him, wasn’t she? Still more good than him, at least? Izumi wanted to think so, but it was a hard concept to believe in. She felt herself slipping even as she tried to take care of what mattered to her.

“I’m better than you…” Her hand abruptly tightened into a fist, and the bottle in her hand promptly exploded into a shower of milk that coated both herself and little Kasumi. That was enough to break her out of her thoughts, thankfully, and she lifted the baby to rest against her chest as she started crying.

Some very light rubs on the back as she walked towards the bathroom helped to calm Kasumi. They both needed to be cleaned now.

Herself more than the baby girl.

Izumi was stained down to her core. She wasn’t even sure she could even trust herself around her own… around the Uchiha children anymore.

They weren’t hers. She wouldn’t deserve them even if they were.

She believed that she would be worse than he had been before she was done.

And then she would…

Izumi had begun to teach her students some useful and basic ninjutsu, the ones she considered essentials first of course. Hiding-like-a-mole technique, water prison, sealless shunshin, stuff like that. Nothing too extreme (for her standards).

Ko had learned the Hiding-like-a-mole technique easier than the others and Hana had learned the water prison with a similar ease, so their elemental affinities seemed pretty obvious, but she’d acquired chakra paper for her team anyways.

Ko’s paper crumbled into dust as expected at the same moment that Hana’s paper dampened with water. The wildcard, as was becoming familiar, was Ayame. The now slightly withdrawn girl’s paper had split cleanly down the middle. A wind affinity.

What an odd team she had, Izumi realized. Four Konoha shinobi, each with a different elemental affinity, and none of them had fire.

In Konoha. Fire Country. The country where more than half the population had a fire affinity (according to Konoha’s data, which only included tested shinobi, but still).

It was an abnormality for certain, and one that required her to put in extra work to find resources for her team, though really mostly for Ayame. Izumi didn’t actually know any wind ninjutsu. Of course, she had the perfect resource to get just what she needed nicely and easily.

So she walked right up to that resource with an easy grin on her face. “Hiya ‘Kashi!”

The lone eye of her resource shifted from the stone that it had been staring at to look at Izumi in an unimpressed stare. “You’re doing nicknames now?”

She scratched her cheek in mock-sheepishness, though she doubted her face sold the image well. “Should I not?”

Kakashi turned back to look at the monument. “I don’t really care.”

Izumi followed his gaze. Members of her clan existed on the stone, those who had died in war or defending the village from the Kyuubi, but no such memorial existed for those who had died in Itachi’s Massacre. She’d been curious, mostly, whether the village would ever take the initiative to offer such a thing, but it had never happened. The leadership had been too concerned with recovering their strength and image on the international stage to make such a gesture for a people that had died for Konoha’s mistakes.

She would have to make the request herself. Her clan had been a wronged people, just trying to right the wrongs that had been forced onto them. Perhaps in a way that was, itself, wrong, but that didn’t change that they were the wronged party in the whole situation.

Just another thing to add to the list of issues she had with the village. Too busy covering up their mistakes to right them.

‘Hardly a rare thing in this world, Izumi.’

Her eyes found one name in particular on the stone. ‘Uchiha Obito’ . Perhaps the same name that Kakashi was looking at, her uncle who had died in a time that felt simultaneously like it both was and wasn’t part of her own life. Kakashi had Obito’s eye, she knew, though he kept it covered most of the time.

Maybe… “Hey, ‘Kashi. Want to make a trade?”

The man kept staring at the stone, nothing about his posture shifting, but he did respond. “Still doing that, huh. What sort of trade?”

“You write down some wind ninjutsu for me to hand off to my student, and I will help you with your… eye problem.” She punctuated the last two words by tapping Kakashi’s forehead protector.

A hand snapped up and tightly grabbed her wrist as Kakashi turned to give her a viciously sharp look. “And what, exactly, does that mean?”

Izumi shrugged, not too bothered by the man’s aggressive attitude. Sure, he was probably one of the only people within a hundred miles of her that had a chance at killing her, but he wouldn’t do so. “Well you can’t turn it off, right?”

The grip on her wrist loosened slightly. “Yes. It’s impossible to deactivate.”

“Half true, it’s impossible for you to deactivate it the way an Uchiha would. I could help you learn another way, if you’d like.” She would have almost certainly been forbidden from sharing the kind of knowledge she’d decided to if Fugaku were still the clan head, but he was dead now and Izumi was in charge.

She didn’t really care about sharing that kind of knowledge with a… friend? Was Kakashi a friend? An acquaintance? Didn’t really matter, honestly. Either way she would keep her interactions with him as limited as she had so far, no need to drag too many people down with her towards where she was going.

The grip on her wrist released, and Kakashi turned back to stare at the stone again. This time, she was sure he was staring at Obito’s name.

After several seconds, Kakashi responded. “Alright.”

Only a minute later, she was kneeling beside where she’d had Kakashi lay in the grass. “Alright, I’m going to lift the forehead protector now.”

Kakashi just kind of glanced at her in acknowledgement before his gaze returned to the sky above. Her hand and her fake hand found the cloth of his forehead protector and, honestly, Izumi had to resist the urge to betray the man’s trust and pull his mask down. It was right there and she would be lying if she said she wasn’t at least a little curious. Maybe another time…

She lifted the headband and Obito’s eye opened to look at her briefly before staring up at the sky like the other eye.

Oddly, the chakra of the eye felt dimly familiar, as if she’d felt it somewhere before. She was really only able to sense chakra from up close to any real extent, but she was certainly adept at it from the range she was at now. It had been a necessary skill to learn for disguising her chakra signature.

She couldn’t place where she had felt the chakra, though. Maybe the one time in her life that she’d met her uncle? Maybe the mixing of Kakashi’s and Obito’s chakra in the eye was confusing her? Izumi really wasn’t sure.

Her left hand came to rest over the eye, and a fairly simple application of medical chakra allowed her to close the chakra pathways between the eye and the rest of Kakashi’s body.

Most medics would highly recommend against what she had done, as separating an eye from a chakra network even for a limited time could severely impact the eye’s ability to function properly, but most medics also didn’t have much knowledge about Uchiha eyes.

The sharingan (and most dojutsu, if she had to guess) was infused with its own chakra and did not need chakra from the body for the eye to remain functional. The only thing that separating it from the body’s chakra did was deactivate the sharingan and make the eye work like a normal eye.

Members of the Uchiha clan actually had different chakra pathways leading to their eyes than what a normal person had; they could turn off or reduce the flow of chakra to their eyes at will. A normal person could increase the chakra flowing to their eyes if they wished (There were actually techniques involving that to allow more precise vision, though they were rarely used due to how sensitive eyes were), but could not reduce it the way an Uchiha could. Izumi had a theory that the Hyuuga clan was similar and that an Uchiha could use the byakugan to the same degree that a Hyuuga could (and vice versa), but such a thing had never been tested.

The Hyuuga clan was just as touchy as the Uchiha were when it came to their eyes. There were village laws that forbade any medics from examining the eyes of any member of either clan, actually. Unless the medic was from said clans, of course, along with some other exceptions.

Those laws were laid out in the treaty between the Uchiha and the Senju that had formed the village, so it had clearly been a big deal for a very long time.

And Izumi was casually spitting in the face of all that careful secrecy. She was sure Kakashi knew how to keep a secret though, so it probably wouldn’t matter. Her hand lifted from the man’s eye.

Uchiha Obito’s deactivated eye stared up at her, perhaps a shade darker than Kakashi’s natural eye.

“It worked.” Kakashi stated, his eyes staring up at her with genuine surprise.

She nodded. “I wouldn’t have offered if I believed it wouldn’t. You’ll have to learn how to do it yourself, but it isn’t particularly complex.”

“And you’ll help with that?” There was an odd look on his face, something approaching wonder, and she realized that he was probably adjusting to suddenly having depth perception again without having to worry about his chakra being drained dry. Suddenly having such a thing back after losing it for so many years was probably a shock.

Actually, it was even more amazing just how impressive a shinobi Kakashi was now that she thought about it. One of the most renowned and feared shinobi in the world, and he’d forged most of that reputation while not being able to have depth perception without using an eye that would suck up his chakra like a storm drain.

Not being able to adjust the chakra going to his eyes like an Uchiha could also meant that he couldn’t use the sharingan with the reduced drain that an Uchiha could as they grew more skilled with it. The sharingan would be active at full power the whole time he had it activated, not just when it was really necessary.

And he’d used an eye that did that to him to become more feared than nearly any actual Uchiha the village had had to offer. Giving him depth perception back was like sharpening one of the village’s most dangerous weapons, in a way.

But he was more than a weapon, and she owed him for keeping an eye on the Uchiha kids while she was gone. He’d done it personally, which had been a surprise. “Sure, we’ll trade scrolls for our deal.”

~Hana~

Her eighth C-Rank mission was a simple and low risk one, just as the previous six had been. A delivery mission, just bringing a package from a city in southern Fire Country to a northeastern Fire Country border town on the edge of the Land of Hot Springs.

Simple, easy, within Fire Country and low combat risk. That was how their missions had been since the first one.

It was as if her probably deranged sensei was avoiding the chance of what had occurred on their first mission occurring again. What Izumi had done on that mission… Even the jonin herself had seemed to realize immediately afterward that she had gone overboard, lost herself to bloodlust.

The bandits had been killed brutally and painfully, cooked by fire while they still lived among other methods.

It was a sight and a smell that would linger in Hana’s mind, probably forever to some degree, but she recognized it as exactly what her sensei had described prior to the mission.

“People will die in brutal, senseless ways,” Izumi had said, and then she had shown that to them. Worse things happened in war, Hana knew, but was it really necessary to show them such things so early?

She didn’t think so.

One of her dogs let out a whine that Hana recognized as being in warning.

“Oh! Let’s stop here real quick. Find a table, I’ll order.” Her sensei said, and then ducked into a little cafe. They followed her in of course, as she’d expected them to, and it was as Hana passed through the doorway that she noticed a familiar scent; probably what her dogs had been worried about.

Izumi held a black cloth out to her, a long sleeve shinobi shirt from what she could tell like the ones ANBU wore. “Memorize the scent on this, alright?”

Hana took the shirt from her sensei and held it up in front of her nose, breathing the scent in. It was… familiar to her, but it took her several seconds to recognize it. It had changed in the last few years as the boy it belonged to grew older. The scent was subtle, but she looked at Izumi. “...Itachi?”

The other girl nodded. “I want you to know that scent in case you ever need to. If you smell that nearby and I’m not around to tell, it would be best to abandon whatever task you’ve been assigned and flee. If Itachi is where you are, chances are he has different goals than you do. He won’t hesitate to kill you if you just happen to be in his way. If you’re around me and you notice it, let me know and I’ll decide on the best course of action.”

“Understood.” She said simply, fully intending on following those instructions to the letter. She’d share the scent with her nin-dogs as well, just to be safe. It wouldn’t do to end up on the wrong side of an S-Ranked shinobi if she could help it, even if it was one she had a mixed history with.

The scent was days old at least, but it was unmistakable within the cafe. It had likely been trapped within the cafe due to the doors being generally closed to ward off the early summer heat. A window AC unit at the back of the cafe had probably let a lot of it out, but there remained just enough for her to notice with her exceptional nose.

She sat down at a table just as Izumi had asked, there was no sense in making a big scene over a days old scent. A minute wouldn’t make too much of a difference.

Her teammates sat with her, and Ayame gave her a searching look from across the table, she’d probably noticed that something was off with Hana’s body language or something. Hana just held up a finger to signal that she’d talk in a minute when their sensei got to the table.

Hana wasn’t entirely sure that she trusted Izumi with the information that Itachi had been there, not after what she’d seen the other girl do on that first mission, but the jonin was definitely the only person present who could do anything about Itachi if he might be anywhere nearby.

Izumi joined them at the table after a few moments beside Ayame, a plate containing an overwhelming amount of sweet baked goods held in her hands that she set on the table. “There’ll be tea in a minute or three.” Her eyes found Hana, and her look shifted to the same questioning gaze Ayame had sent her. It was eerie at times how similar the two very different girls could unintentionally look. “Is something wrong?”

Hana nodded. “At least a few days ago, maybe a week…” She paused for a moment to make sure that sunk in, hopefully it would help avoid any impulsive actions. “Itachi was here.”

Izumi’s gaze abruptly sharpened at the mention of her old friend’s name, but she didn’t immediately respond. After a moment, she ate one of the sweets as if nothing was wrong. “Alright. We’ll leave once we’re done here then, get nice and far away from the border.”

Hana nodded, thankful that Izumi was capable of being rational about a situation like this. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Itachi was a subject that made the other girl fly off the handle, given the previous signs of instability that she’d noticed. “Understood, sensei.” Though… she was curious. “You think he’s avoiding Fire Country?”

Izumi took a few moments to respond, as a waitress stopped by to give them their tea. Once the young woman left, Izumi nodded. “I’m pretty certain that he is.”

‘Pretty certain, huh?’ That sounded more sure than Hana had expected, honestly. How would Izumi have so much confidence…

It took a little bit for her to puzzle out while she sipped her tea and ate her sweets. (She also managed to find a few that she was sure were safe for dogs, and she sneakily passed them to the Haimaru triplets.) When she did figure it out, she was actually upset.

All of their missions so far had taken place within Fire Country, and Izumi had given her Itachi’s scent shortly before the first one. Each had taken them to different parts of the country, enough that in only eight missions they had already covered a majority of the area within the Land of Fire that would be needed for an Inuzuka’s dogs to see if a scent was present.

Izumi had been using her to gauge whether or not Itachi was still in Fire Country.

Hell, if the rumors were right then Izumi chose their team herself, probably specifically to sniff out where Itachi might be.

Was her whole team just a tool to the Uchiha Clan Head?

~Izumi~

The jonin meeting was going about how she had expected it to, nothing to really stir the pot.

Though, that was what she was there to do. As a moment of quiet occurred, Izumi spoke in the gap. “I’m nominating Team 4 for the Chunin Exams.”

It wasn’t phrased the polite way, as a sort of request like the other Jonin who had nominated their teams had done, and from the way Hiruzen was staring at her it was clear that he didn’t appreciate it. “Are you certain, Jonin Uchiha?”

‘Jonin Uchiha’ rather than ‘Lady Uchiha’, as was tradition even in meetings such as this. He was returning her disrespect. She gave an open smile, enjoying every second of what she was doing. “I am certain, Lord Hokage.”

‘A disrespectful brat as always…’

‘Lord Hokage’ likely seemed a respectful way to address the man to those in attendance, and it certainly was from a less nuanced perspective, but in this case it was a way of jabbing at the Hokage for not using the proper title towards her. The official way of addressing the Hokage in a jonin meeting like this one was ‘Hokage-sama’, though ‘Lord Hokage’ was technically more respectful overall.

The Hokage certainly caught it, but it didn’t show on his face. “Very well, Jonin Uchiha.”

One of the instructors from the academy spoke up in response. “Are we certain that they are ready? Her students graduated only four months ago, are they really ready for a foreign Chunin Exam?”

It wasn’t necessarily unheard of for Konoha genin who had graduated the academy to go to the Chunin Exams that same year, but when it occurred it was generally a Chunin Exam that was being held within Konoha. Sending fresh genin to a place like Suna, where the exam was being held this time, was generally considered reckless.

But that was one of the things that she had trained her team so extensively for, and she had no intention of waiting any longer. She stared at Hiruzen, daring him to try refusing her ‘request’.

“I’m certain, thank you for your concern. I understand that they briefly trained under you.” The Hokage evenly stated to the instructor, and that was the end of that line of conversation.

Izumi smiled.

Chapter Text

~Itachi~

There was the sound of water flowing through the forest, a sound that was at once familiar and comforting as well as unsettling and guilt inducing. It reminded him of years spent with his only friends, countless sparring sessions and quiet talks beneath the stars, blood and death and betrayal.

And yet he remained drawn to places such as this, a connection that he simply couldn’t sever.

It made him think back on the Massacre, how he had fought one of the people he cared most for to the death and hadn’t been able to defeat her. If he had been fresh, at his best and with a strong will to fight, he would have bested Izumi. She had been strong, stronger than he would have ever imagined she could be, but still somewhat weaker and less refined than he had been.

Until she had taken his eye, that is. The loss of an eye for an Uchiha was a much greater injury than the loss of an arm. He had no doubt that she was stronger than he was now even if she hadn’t been able to manifest a Susanoo where he could not.

One day she would find him and she would kill him, but Itachi had important work to accomplish before that happened.

There was a man in Akatsuki, one who was complicating his plans further than he would have preferred. He seemed almost half plant and he felt like one to Itachi’s senses as well. Even to Itachi’s sharingan the man’s chakra looked like a plant’s. It was difficult to maneuver effectively when such a man could be watching at any time and had good reason to be watching him specifically.

Itachi had determined a way to detect the plant man, but it required him to learn a skill that he had previously dismissed as both unnecessary and too much of an investment. Like everything else in his life it seemed, it came back to her.

The enhanced hearing technique. Such a simple name for such a complex bit of chakra manipulation. The technique took weeks to learn the basics of and between months and years to master, and the entire duration of learning came with a large risk of ruptured eardrums.

Itachi wasn’t sure what Hazuki had been thinking when she had taught her seven year old daughter the technique that was meant for experienced sensory ninjas, but it was good that he’d learned most of the details on how it worked from his years of training with Izumi.

He winced as the sound of the stream below him abruptly became deafening, before cutting the technique.

~Ko~

His sensei passed a clipboard over to each of her three students. “Go ahead and sign these. We’re going on a little vacation in a few days.”

Ko, not one to just sign whatever he was told to, briefly examined the paper that was on the clipboard. Then he looked up at his sensei. Out of the corner of his eyes, he noticed that the other two students were doing the same. “These are for the Chunin Exams.”

Uchiha Izumi smiled, and it was a smile that expected compliance. “Sure. You’re more than ready, I trained you hard enough to be sure of that.”

If they didn’t sign the papers, they would be going against whatever plans she had. He could tell that much even with his limited information; there was more to this than just the Chunin Exam. If they didn’t sign the papers then she would ensure that they suffered for it.

So, naturally, he signed the papers just like the other two did.

The Uchiha Clan Head was not a person to refuse, unless absolutely necessary. Ko could only hope that they were truly prepared for whatever was coming.

~Hana~

The way to Suna was harsh, the sun beating down on them as their feet sunk into the sand with each step. The Haimaru triplets had similar struggles, their paws struggling to find footing in the loose sand. She would have rather gone to the Chunin Exams anywhere else.

Her skin felt raw, the sand on the wind rubbing against where she wasn’t covered and the sun beating down on them from above. Even in the places that her clothes covered, Hana could feel sand that had made its way under the cloth. Every night when they stopped, Hana found herself healing sunburns on both herself and her teammates.

Uchiha was having no trouble of course, and Hana refused to call her anything more respectful than that in the privacy of her own mind. The seemingly mad girl was walking atop the sand like it was solid ground, her shaded goggles over her eyes protecting them from the sand and the bright sun. After a while she seemed to notice that they were having trouble. “Oh, this is actually a decent learning opportunity. You can walk atop sand in a similar way to water… or walls? Something in between, really. You three will figure it out, I’m sure.”

She’d seen Uchiha’s attitude as almost whimsical once, but she knew better now. The girl was so nonchalant and relaxed with them because they weren’t important to her.

Her advice was at least usually accurate however, so Hana got to work figuring out how to walk on top of the sand.

Being able to walk normally would be nice, at least.

~Ayame~

Ayame didn’t feel safe with Izumi, not anymore. Not after what she’d seen the girl do.

She knew in theory that her sensei wouldn’t allow harm to come to her if she could avoid it, but that didn’t make her feel safe when the person she was scared of was Izumi herself. Especially when she isolated them from others in some way, as was the current situation.

They had left the village a full month before the Chunin Exams were supposed to take place and made their way straight towards Wind Country.

There had been a period where they had walked through the desert sands and she and her teammates had needed to learn how to walk on sand, but eventually their path had led to a river that flowed into the desert from River Country. Ayame hadn’t even known that such a thing could even happen, but Ko had told her when she quietly asked about it that the river flowed into the desert until it reached a lakebed that the water would eventually evaporate in.

Even without that information, just the area around the river was shocking to her.

She hadn’t known that so much green could be surrounded by the sand of the desert, but the river was lined on either side by greenery and even farmland. They had made their camp under some strange trees near the river, and they had been there for a couple of weeks since then.

Izumi would spend the mornings teaching Ayame and her teammates about desert survival tactics, then she would give them each something to work on for the day around lunch before disappearing until after dark.

Ayame didn’t know what Izumi was getting up to, and she did not want to know.

~Izumi~

It did feel good when a plan began to come together.

Her students’ Chunin Exam was already underway and with it the hour of action rapidly approached. The first exam had been trivially easy for her team, a test on information gathering skills was all but a free pass for a team that had literally been brought together as a tracking team.

The test had been about learning and finding the location of the second exam, and a pass only entailed arriving at their destination.

Even if Ayame (who Izumi had taught the basics of the enhanced hearing technique) had not been able to overhear the location of the second exam from one of the other teams that had figured it out, they definitely would have noticed when other teams began to leave Suna’s walls.

Either Ko’s eyes or Hana’s nose would have made sure of that.

The trek through the desert had been simple enough for her genin after that with all she’d taught them about the subject in the last month or so.

When her genin arrived at the second exam they were in for quite a treat, honestly. Izumi was a little jealous. Suna’s second exam was to take place about a day and a half’s traveling pace to the northwest, in the ruins of the Hidden Sand Village.

The former Hidden Sand Village, that is. It was a truly fascinating historical site. The small city in the desert had been abandoned early on in the First Shinobi War, after Senju Tobirama had used Hiraishin seals that had been planted within the city to wage a guerrilla war against Suna.

There were no records on when exactly those seals may have been planted, but Izumi guessed that it had likely occurred when the Second Hokage had visited the Sand Village shortly after his inauguration to ‘renew and revitalize’ the alliance that had existed between the two villages. If she was right then it had been a truly shrewd (if cold and deceptive) move by the man, since the war had erupted only a few months after that visit.

Suna had never forgotten that incident, and as a result the Fourth Hokage had been refused the opportunity to visit the other Hidden Village. All the negotiations that the two villages had engaged in over the Fourth’s short term had taken place within Konoha’s walls or at a neutral location in River Country.

Her perfect memory of the history texts she’d read also allowed her to remember that the other Hidden Villages had all given Namikaze Minato the same treatment. No one wanted a wielder of the Hiraishin within their village.

The practice wouldn’t have stopped regular jonin from sneaking seals in when they visited for things like the Chunin Exams, but it was considered far easier to find seals that had been hidden by a jonin than seals that had been hidden by a Kage. Izumi wasn’t sure how true that was, but it seemed to be the perception.

It probably had something to do with the fact that Tobirama’s Hiraishin seals had never officially been found in the ruins of old Sunagakure to that very day.

Of course, mistakes had a way of repeating themselves.

~Ayame~

The ruins of old Sunagakure were a desolate, awe inspiring sight.

Buildings that had been ravaged by war and decades of exposure to the desert winds and sun stretched as far as the eye could see, built in a similar rounded style to what existed in the city that had replaced the one the test was to take place in.

In the center of the city was a massive pile of sand, the shattered walls of what had once been the first Kazekage Tower peeking out as a reminder of just which people had once lived in the ruins. Many of the buildings were in a similar state, but just as many were nearly whole if still half buried beneath the sand that had built up over the decades.

Their goal in the ruins was to recover medallions that had been planted throughout the city. One in the shape of the sun and one in the shape of the moon, of which an unspecified number of each had been hidden. Once the medallions were found, they needed to be brought to the ruins of a sparring arena not far from the former Kazekage Tower within three days of the beginning of the second exam.

A shrill whistle signalled the start of the test, and she joined her team in jumping down from their spot on the half-broken wall that surrounded what remained of old Sunagakure.

Evenly spaced around the city wall, the rest of the genin taking the test would be dropping into the city as well and joining Konoha’s Team 4 in their exploration of the sandstone maze of ruined buildings.

Beside Ayame, Ko had his byakugan active and after a few moments of running through the sand between the buildings he spoke. “The city is booby trapped, we will have to be careful.” Dealing with traps wasn’t anything new for them, not after their sensei had taken to leading them on runs through areas of Konoha’s forest that she’d rigged with prank traps.

Supposedly, the supplies for those had been liberated from a misbehaving Naruto. Ayame personally believed that that could only be half true at most. There had been far too many traps for them to have been taken from the supplies of a single seven year old boy.

Ayame nodded. “I’ll keep on guard for any of the other genin, you focus on finding the traps, and Hana can lead us to the medallions.” The last part of that had been agreed upon before they’d even reached the ruins, as their sensei had shamelessly informed them that the second round of the Chunin Exams was generally a survival test that involved having to find something within a set boundary.

Hana would be able to find anything that had been hidden with human hands in an environment that saw human traffic as rarely as the grounds for a chunin exam.

Ko nodded. “Agreed.”

Less than ten minutes later, Hana stopped at what looked to be a barely intact well. At one point it had probably been connected to whatever water source the city had used to sustain itself, but it seemed doubtful that it was functional in the poor state that it and the rest of the ruins were in.

Hana gestured at the well. “Someone dropped something in there, probably what we’re looking for.”

“I can see it, along with some traps and a worrying number of tripwires. I’ll handle getting the medallion, you two stand guard?” At their nods of agreement, Ko made a single hand seal and sunk into the sand.

His earth ninjutsu (the ones that still worked) were slower in the sand from what they’d seen in training, so they would have to be on guard for a bit. Naturally, the moment that Ko dropped beneath the earth was the same moment that Ayame began to feel foreign chakras at the edge of her sensory range.

She made a ram seal to focus her chakra, then channeled it to her ears to perform the enhanced hearing technique. It was a frustratingly precise bit of chakra manipulation, one that Izumi used with a natural sense of ease that was hard for her to believe.

Ayame could only use it while standing still and focusing, but it was still useful when she did.

“-over there, yeah. Just two of them I think, plus some dogs.” A masculine voice was saying. Her and Hana had been noticed, then.

“Just two? Think they lost a teammate already?” A feminine voice responded.

“It’s possible with those traps we saw. Let’s hurry up and get them befor-” A third voice began to speak, but Ayame dropped the technique before she heard any more.

She made a single hand gesture that meant “Incoming” and Hana nodded slightly in response. The chakra signatures were moving oddly slowly, but that made some sense if they were trying to sneak up on them.

Though their chakras were poorly disguised if that was the case. They did feel pretty weak, so maybe they were trying to hide them at least? It was hard to tell.

When the three genin leapt into the sandy former town square in what was clearly a straight shot towards them, Ayame only felt more confused. They were still moving pretty slow, and they seemed oddly confident in their attack.

The actual fight was really just disappointing, two of Hana’s dogs took one of the genin out on their own while Hana and her third dog took care of another. The one left to Ayame had his attempts at attacking her avoided with an ease that seemed to frustrate him, and within seconds she had knocked the older genin out.

She blinked at the now unconscious genin. “That felt too easy.”

Hana, who was rooting through the pockets of the genin she had knocked out, snorted lightly. “Most genin don’t get training as rough as what Uchiha gives us, you know. I hope you were planning on being a chunin after we get back to the village.”

And that came as more of a surprise. “You were expecting this?”

“Sure. Sensei’s trying to get rid of us, got what she wanted from us.” The Inuzuka was still rooting around in the genin’s pockets, looking for something with an angry sort of look on her face. She flipped the boy over.

Izumi was trying to get rid of them? But… Ayame had heard that she’d picked them specifically from the academy, why would she not want them now?

She must have accidentally voiced part of that last thought, because Hana responded to it. “Was just using us to find her old boyfriend. You remember the conversation at that teashop, right?” Hana stood up, a sun medallion in her hand, but Ayame was more focused on the conversation about their sensei now than the exam.

“You mean about him? ” It was one thing to suggest that their sensei was just using them, that was terrible on its own, but to say that Izumi was interested in one of the village’s biggest traitors in that way was another thing entirely.

Hana shrugged, pocketing the medallion. “Sure, two peas in a pod aren’t they?”

Ayame really wanted to protest that for a moment, but… Izumi’s crazed laughter still haunted her nightmares, the way the girl had cut people down like they were meaningless and she enjoyed their suffering. Maybe Izumi was just like Itachi, she knew the two had been friends to some degree prior to the Massacre.

Maybe Izumi was even another traitor, just waiting for an opportunity.

Ko abruptly climbed out of the sand to interrupt that train of thought, the moon medallion they needed clutched in his hand. “Got it.”

Hana seemed to notice exactly what she had. “Great, then we can just head to the arena and get this over with.”

Ko just nodded in response, and Ayame realized he’d probably already seen Hana find the sun medallion with his byakugan on his way back to the surface.

On their way to the arena as Hana had suggested, they encountered another two teams. The first fell with the same amount of ease as the genin Hana and Ayame had taken care of, and though the second team required more effort they still beat them fairly easily. Ko recovered another two moon medallions from their defeated opponents.

When they landed in the arena, pulling the medallions out, the chunin proctor that was waiting there clicked a stopwatch. “2 hours, 35 minutes, 58 seconds. That’s 13 minutes, 27 seconds past the record for the exam here, not bad. Through the doorway behind me there is an area that has been restored, where you’ll stay until the second exam is over. There should be a room set aside for you and meals at regular times.”

The chunin seemed pretty disinterested in them beyond giving them the basic explanation, so they just went along with the information he’d provided.

It still felt like the exam had been far too easy.

~Hiruzen~

He had always hated visiting Suna for any reason, the worst of which had been to lead wars against the shinobi of the desert. Though, wars were never enjoyable to lead regardless of the locations involved.

Suna’s location in particular was dreadful, however. If it weren’t so defensible he wouldn’t understand why anyone would ever want to build a hidden village in the desert.

The sand scratched at him, the dry air made him cough, his joints even seemed to ache more than they normally did as he made his way through the dunes that lay between himself and Sunagakure. Even the sun in the sky felt more hostile than it did in Fire Country’s similar heat.

Honestly, Hiruzen usually avoided sending his best teams to the Suna exams if he could just so that he might not need to deal with traveling out there. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought his son’s former student had sent her team just to make him suffer. But, as always in his line of work, there was more to it than that.

Izumi had sent her team for a reason, he simply wasn’t sure what it could be just yet.

He knew that she had been training them exceptionally hard. It was possible that she was simply trying to get rid of them by having them all promoted, but something told him it wasn’t that simple either.

Perhaps it was something to do with Suna itself, but even that didn’t seem right. The girl didn’t have any reason to have an interest in the Sand Village outside of perhaps an academic interest.

It was possible, he supposed, that Izumi was planning to assassinate him. If she managed it the location would be perfect for such a thing, as it would be easy enough to pin the blame on Sunagakure without too much difficulty. She would have to get past his personal guard and put him down without any witnesses that Konoha would believe over her, but it was certainly possible with what he knew of her skillset.

Not likely, but possible. He would give her perhaps a thirty percent chance of success if she tried it.

Even that option didn’t seem likely to be Izumi’s reason to him, but there really weren’t many reasons at all that he could think of for Izumi to send her students to a Chunin Exam in Suna of all places. She was too intelligent, too driven to not have a motivation that went beyond seeing her students receive a promotion. With the signs of instability that he had noted in her, it was even possible that his suspicion of assassination was correct.

He would have to be on his guard…

But Hiruzen couldn’t help but feel like he was missing something, some vital piece of information that would explain things.

Izumi didn’t want to kill him , at least he didn’t believe so.

~Izumi~

As expected and planned, her students had passed the second exam with minimal difficulty. Five months of intensive training had paid off beautifully, taking her students from perhaps above average genin all the way into firm upper chunin level territory. The training she’d given her team was similar to what prospective ANBU received to take them from whatever level they happened to be at (usually mid to high chunin) to jonin level combatants.

They weren’t as well rounded as they might have been taking it more slowly and thoroughly, but Izumi had wanted their risk of failure to be as low as possible both for her students’ sakes and for the sake of her plan. Becoming more well rounded could always come later.

Over the month between the second and third exam, her clones had given each of her students individualized training to work on just that along with some more personalized tricks. Focusing too much on being well rounded just made cookie cutter ninja, after all. Rank and file, the type that were predictable and died young as a result.

Now, her students were in the positions they needed to be in and the Hokage was on his way to Suna. He was scheduled to arrive within the hour, and her plan was to reach its next stage in the same time frame.

She pulled her old goggles from where they rested around her neck, storing them away in her travel pack. It felt odd to remove them, as they had rested around her neck almost constantly since the Massacre had occurred and she had left ANBU. Almost like leaving a part of herself behind.

The rest of her clothes followed, and she ignored the narcissistic gaze of her clone as she began to change into her old ANBU uniform. The cloth was tighter than she remembered, especially around her hips and chest. She hadn’t noticed with how busy she had been, but apparently she had grown. She flexed her right hand beneath the glove that covered it, smiling when the joints of the puppet fingers didn’t get caught in the cloth. It had taken a while to get around that problem.

Izumi lifted a mask from her travel pack, staring down at it. It was in the stylized shape of a lizard, not the visage of a doe that she was used to. She settled the mask over her face before pulling a tanto from the pack.

The sword was standard ANBU issue, and a quick examination confirmed that it had the same sharpness as when she’d used it during her time in black ops. The Uchiha-forged tanto that she carried as a jonin was better, but it was best not to be recognizable.

A quick henge made her hair a short and sandy blonde, settling comfortably around her shoulders.

Her eyes burned red behind the ANBU mask, shifting to the Mangekyo she had used so sparingly since the Massacre. A quick glance at her clone, who nodded at her, and Izumi flooded her right eye with chakra.

And then she was gone.

Chapter Text

~Izumi~

~2 days after the Uchiha Massacre~

The Uchiha Clan’s secret meeting place felt far too empty. Just her, the burning braziers that she had lit, and the remains of the assassin from days earlier.

His corpse was unremarkable on the surface, another dead from a sword to the heart just like so many other dead bodies she had seen recently. Of course, this one had been killed by her and wasn’t an Uchiha, unlike the many others.

A closer examination with medical chakra revealed much of the same. Just a young man who had been killed by a single clean sword wound. She could detect evidence of the genjutsu that had been used on him, traces of her chakra lingering in a body that had none of its own remaining.

There was only one point of interest, one abnormality in the body that she could detect. On the corpse's tongue was evidence of a seal that had been there, though the seal seemed to have destroyed itself when the assassin had died.

Chakra still lingered, only so much could be destroyed. There wasn’t much, a small enough amount that only a skilled shinobi who was looking for it could have found it, but it was there. She couldn’t tell anything about the seal with how thoroughly it had been destroyed, but there really weren’t many possibilities when it came to shinobi organizations that branded seals onto their operatives’ tongues.

The assassin had been from Root, just as she’d suspected.

~1 week after the Uchiha Massacre~

Izumi pried the unconscious man’s mouth open before shoving a medical mouth prop between his jaws to keep it that way. The pair of pliers in her hand gripped the man’s tongue and pulled it as far out of his mouth as possible.

And there it was, clear as day. Three complete black bars and two split black bars on the man’s tongue. The same seal that she had felt the remnants of on the dead assassin’s tongue.

She shifted her hand, her fingers hovering over the tongue as she ran a diagnostic ninjutsu on it, poking and prodding with her chakra and trying to feel out what the seal could do. The seal reacted poorly to her intrusion, and after a pulse of chakra from it the man was dead and the seal destroyed itself.

Clearly Danzo considered his operatives just as disposable as she did.

A gaggle of mentally broken assassins could not be allowed to linger, even after she got around to killing their leader.

~1 month after the Uchiha Massacre~

Izumi’s latest captured operative was a young woman, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties. Her arms were suspended above her head, held there by lengths of shinobi grade rope that were looped through hooks in the ceiling.

The woman had been stripped down to her underclothes just like the others Izumi had done this song and dance to. Clothes got in the way of torture, but Izumi had no interest in doing anything sexual to those she captured. Nudity would just be a distraction, even if she did get an odd and uncomfortable thrill out of tying her captees in place and inflicting pain on them.

Speaking of which, a gleeful smile crossed Izumi’s face as her knife slowly inched up the woman’s thigh. She had tried to stifle and hide those kinds of expressions at first, but the hints of shock and fear that sometimes crossed her mentally stunted victims’ faces when they saw them made it clear that she shouldn’t bother.

Extra fear would make them easier to break, after all.

“You are a part of Root, correct?” Izumi asked, and the woman didn’t answer. Wrong answer of course, Izumi cut off her pinky finger.

“You are a part of Root, correct?” Izumi asked again, and again the woman didn’t answer. Still the wrong answer, Izumi flawlessly reattached the finger with medical ninjutsu and cut off a different one.

The female Root operative stared at her in slowly rising fear, the realization that Izumi could literally torture her for as long as she wanted to seeming to dawn on the woman.

Izumi reattached the finger.

“You are a part of Root, correct?” Izumi asked her, and this time the woman’s whole body stiffened.

A grin crossed Izumi’s face, and then her sharingan met the paralyzed woman’s eyes. A series of memories involving the woman’s time in Root flashed through Izumi’s mind as she skimmed the surface of the Root operative’s mind.

Reading surface thoughts was an uncommon skill as far as she could tell, even for an Uchiha. Anyone among the clan who had the ability before her had not made it known, and no records stated that the ability existed. It required mastery of the Hypnotic Eye to the extent that the wielder could outright enter another person’s mindscape. Luckily for Izumi, she had needed mastery on that level so that she could fail to save her mother. Reading minds was a poor consolation prize for her mother’s life.

‘More like me every day, aren’t you Potter?’

She shook her head, forcing the voice away. She wasn’t like him…

Still, no reason to break the illusion of the torture session being about spoken information, the woman’s mind might grow more guarded if she figured out what her captor was doing. Izumi sliced off a thumb.

The focus that the torture brought helped to keep the voices of the ghosts away, even if it seemed to draw the more visual ghosts to her. The imagery helped her to forget the defiled corpse of her mother that her wayward thoughts had brought to the forefront.

And as much as she didn’t want to admit it, she enjoyed the pain that she inflicted.

~3 months after the Uchiha Massacre~

The smell of burnt insects and flesh filled the air of the Uchiha hideout, emanating from the blackened husk of the young man called Sugaru’s body. It had been difficult to break him, to force him to think of information that would be useful to her so she could tear it from the surface of his mind. She had boiled the bugs beneath his skin one by one until he had cracked for her.

Danzo had met with Orochimaru while the Hokage was away for the Chunin Exams in River Country.

It was a convenient time to commit that sort of treasonous action, meeting with Konoha’s greatest traitor. From what she’d been able to tear from Sugaru’s mind before she burnt him to death, the timing was a common one for Danzo to make use of for that kind of meeting.

While the Hokage was away, the traitors would play.

~4 months after the Uchiha Massacre~

Hiruzen had given her a genin team.

It was a baffling, if convenient decision for him to have made. She was not well enough to be leading a team of genin and anyone with a discerning eye who saw her outside of the clan head meetings would be able to see that much. She barely took care of herself and was already taking care of dozens of children. She quite simply shouldn’t be capable of handling a genin team.

But she was anyway, even if it added more mental strain to her already mentally strenuous life at first. Once she’d started going on C Rank missions with her team the mental load actually decreased for the first time in a while.

She still left behind a shadow clone that was pumped full of as much chakra as she could give it before she left on any mission, but all that clone did was meditate to conserve energy and run surveillance around her home. Two sets of memories for each day was far less than the twelve or so that she’d been dealing with while raising dozens of children by herself.

Izumi didn’t like trusting her children to teams of genin, but she couldn’t afford to spend all of her time in the village. It helped that the building had the convenient advantage of an ANBU guard rotation due to Naruto’s presence there, and it certainly didn’t hurt that Kakashi had taken her request to keep an eye on things while she was gone significantly further than she’d expected.

He was often there in person when she was gone, or at least kept a shadow clone of himself there with the three dogs he sent. She was fairly certain that he knew her clone was there as well, scent could only be hidden so much.

The reason he probably knew she was there was the same reason that her team was so convenient, among other reasons. Hana and her dogs were exceptionally useful for her goal of narrowing down where Itachi might be.

It didn’t hurt that it was also a good reason for her to suddenly stop torturing and killing Danzo’s agents so much. The amount that she’d enjoyed doing so had been… worrying. Having a good reason to stop that also probably wouldn’t strike that man as too suspicious was helpful.

~6 months after the Uchiha Massacre~

“At least a few days ago, maybe a week…” Her student paused, as if waiting for her to digest those words specifically. “Itachi was here.”

Izumi gave Hana a sharp look at Itachi’s name, suppressing the urge to demand more. If Hana knew that Itachi had recently been in the little cafe they were visiting, she could track him to wherever he currently was. But… She didn’t need that, and it would only put her genin in danger if she forced the issue.

‘He’s in the Land of Hotsprings.’ And he wouldn’t be moving, not for a while at least. Itachi enjoyed his peace, he wasn’t the type to move around frequently and he quite simply didn’t need to do so. The number of people in the entirety of the Elemental Nations that were a plausible threat to him was in the low double digits, and the amount that he was unlikely to easily escape from was in the single digits. Even among those, none of them had higher than 50/50 odds of actually killing him.

He would move on eventually, of course, but certainly not before he set up a hideout that he could return to. The trick now was just to find that hideout, and she would have all the time she wanted to do so.

There was no rush. Izumi ate a piece off of the mountain of sweets she had ordered. “Alright. We’ll leave when we’re done here then, get nice and far away from the border.”

Like Itachi probably was in Hotsprings Country, though his sweet tooth probably called him to this cafe on occasion. He’d mentioned it to her once specifically, actually, and it was the reason she’d stopped at it.

He’d been right, the cafe had incredible biscuits and tea. Almost reminded her of her previous life.

It was a shame she wouldn’t be able to share with Itachi again in this one, she missed the boy he used to be.

~9 months after the Uchiha Massacre~

Her right eye consumed the chakra that she had given it, and in the next instant she was standing atop a familiar freshwater spring in the woods of Konoha.

It was the first time that she had returned to the place that held so many memories for her since before the Massacre had occurred, but it seemed appropriate for the occasion. An entrance to Danzo’s tunnels was not too far away, the same one that had been installed when the man had assigned Sugaru to spy on Itachi.

‘If only we could’ve dealt with him sooner…’

Izumi grinned viciously behind her mask as she stepped across the water. She would deal with him now, the rest would come in time.

~Danzo~

Danzo glared across the long wooden table of the meeting room, staring down the boy who had dared to come in place of his master. “Why are you here?”

The gray haired boy smiled in response to his glare, his arrogance shining through. Danzo had made the boy everything he was, and yet he sat there like he was the one in control. “I’m afraid Orochimaru-sama is simply too busy to visit, Lord Danzo. I’m sure I can handle or relay all you need, however. Irritation in the arm and the eyes, was it?”

The arm that the Hashirama cells had been infused into along with the eyes that had been implanted both had a persistent ache. The arm performed better than his regular arm, but the ache never went away. The eye that was actually connected to his optic nerve, Shisui’s eye, had a similar situation.

The eyes in his arm could not see with normal vision, they could only see chakra. It was a result of them being connected to his chakra network but not to nerve endings capable of transmitting vision. They were also always active to some degree when he’d had them implanted. If he didn’t have the increased chakra generation from the First Hokage’s cells, they would have killed him long ago from the chakra drain. The suppressant seals on his arm brace helped with that as well.

This boy, however… Danzo didn’t trust him with any of that, not that he truly trusted Orochimaru either. He was supposed to be dead along with the woman who had raised him, he had every reason to have a grudge. He might try to kill Danzo even with the knowledge that doing so would mean certain death.

There was no reason for Danzo to be afraid, he would live regardless of what the boy tried to do. “Yes, Kabuto. I am experiencing irritation in my arm and eyes.”

His former operative pleasantly smiled at him. “Would you like me to examine them? I might be able to see what is wrong.”

Danzo eyed the boy suspiciously, his offer still had all the signs of a trap along with it. An attempted assassination would not stick, however, and all that he would lose was a single sharingan eye. A valuable commodity, but one he was rich in. He nodded. “Examine them.”

The boy stood and walked over to his side, and the medical chakra he began to examine Danzo with was as irritating as always. “Your chakra is always so unwelcoming, Lord Danzo. It hasn’t changed at all in the years since I helped implant the Hashirama cells.”

Danzo had not trusted the boy back then, either, though there was no one he truly trusted. That had been back when he believed the boy to be loyal to him, however, rather than to his current master.

The boy shifted his hands away before speaking, not lifting them to examine the eye in his actual socket. If he had tried, Danzo would have stopped him. “It’s nothing we didn’t expect, just the Hashirama cells spreading. It shouldn’t be dangerous unless you run out of chakra for quite a while, over a decade from what I can see. If you live that long, that is.”

He gave the boy a sharp look. “If I live that long?” It sounded like a threat.

Kabuto gazed down at where he was seated dispassionately. “Your death is rapidly approaching, I’m afraid. Perhaps we might have warned you of it, if you’d bothered to inform Lord Orochimaru about the Massacre ahead of time.”

Not informing Orochimaru of the Uchiha Massacre had been a calculated risk, the danger of the missing nin having unlimited access to the sharingan far outweighing the risk of his resentment. The ‘death is rapidly approaching’ part was more concerning. “What do you mean by that?”

The gray haired boy shook his head. “It’s too late to do anything about it, she is already here.”

“Who-” But at that moment his question was interrupted by the door of the meeting room opening, and Kabuto disappeared in a puff of smoke. A shadow clone.

What appeared to be one of his own operatives was standing in the doorway, but the mask was from one of the dozens that had disappeared in the last nine months and that operative had been a tall man rather than the bloodsoaked girl that was standing in the doorway. The girl stepped forward and removed the mask, setting it on the table between them.

Her face, just as streaked with red as the ANBU chestplate she wore, was unmistakably Uchiha Izumi’s, and the henge that made her hair different abruptly broke to reveal the girl’s unkempt brown tangles.

“Good afternoon, Danzo.” She smiled at him.

He pressed the emergency alert seal beneath the table.

Uchiha Izumi’s eyes held an imposing darkness. ‘Too light by far,’ he had once called her. It would have been better if she had died with that light.

~Izumi~

The grey haired boy disappeared in a puff of smoke. ‘Kato? Why was he here?’ She didn’t have time for that train of thought, not right now. Her eyes locked onto her target.

"Good afternoon, Danzo." Izumi smiled, the expression coming easily now that she was so close to her goal.

The old man reached under the table, probably pressing an emergency seal of some sort. It didn’t matter, just more lambs to the slaughter.

Her smile widened into a grin as she stepped up onto the table, the Root mask cracking under the force of her shoe and the unrestrained power that rolled off of her. The head of Root stood from his chair as she left bloody footprints across the no doubt luxury wood of his long meeting table, and Izumi’s left hand hummed quietly with chakra.

An uncountable number of Danzo’s operatives, each one that had been along her path through the tunnels and the underground base, had died to that hand which held even more deadly cutting force than the sword that rested in her lifeless right hand. The hum of the technique wasn’t silent, but it might as well have been. The same quiet noise that ran through the walls of nearly every home in Konoha rang out from her scalpel.

Danzo abruptly shifted to blow deadly little bullets of wind chakra at her as she walked towards him, but it didn’t matter. In the space of a thought and a flash of chakra to her left eye, she was staring into his shocked eyes as her hand pierced his good shoulder. That such a feeble old man had caused so much harm to her family was almost insulting.

He shook uncontrollably, pain flooding his eye as the electricity from her technique rattled through his body and seared shut the wound she had made.

The sound of shinobi rushing through the door, shuriken and kunai carving through the air towards her. A sealless shunshin got her out of the way of the weapons, and another had her introducing the interrupting operatives to her sword and scalpel. A head severed to spray blood into the room, a pair of arms amputated to bring screams to the party as she kicked the remaining body to the floor. A flash of her sharingan knocked out three of Danzo’s men that had been entering the room, and a handful of kunai ensured that they wouldn’t be getting back up.

The sound and feeling of sudden air pressure approaching, moving too fast for her to shunshin away from. A flash of chakra to her left eye had her on the other side of the room, though the mild irritation in the eye significantly increased from the action.

Her eyes found the source of the air pressure, and rage coursed through her at the sight. Danzo, his right arm uncovered with a series of sharingan eyes opened grotesquely across his flesh. His uncovered right eyesocket, a Mangekyo Sharingan with an unfamiliar pattern resting within. Fugaku’s, maybe?

Her left eye burned more harshly as she crossed the distance between them in an instant, her sword stabbing towards Danzo’s heart. The old man was able to shift to the side enough to evade her intended target, but her sword still pierced his lung and carved a gaping hole into his chest that splattered her with even more red.

That close, even her limited chakra sense was able to recognize the chakra. The chakra she had trained with for years, loved as the family he was to her. ‘Shisui?’ That was Shisui’s eye in Danzo’s skull.

‘He stole it from me.’

That eye didn’t belong to him, and she would take it back.

The sound of more approaching weapons broke through her blinding hate and rage, kunai and shuriken and senbon crossing the air between herself and Danzo’s backup. Another two shunshins and she was carving her way through more people, tearing more threads of life from their mortal coil. They looked young in their uniforms, some shorter than she was, she buried the recognition deep within her mind as she killed the brainwashed children, focused on the vindictive joy she felt from ending those that were associated with her family’s destruction.

She stepped around the air bullets Danzo sent this time, ready for him to be recovered somehow again. He should have been permanently disabled from her first attack, the electricity should have fried his nerves and brought him an appropriate amount of pain.

And yet he was whole, though this time she noticed that one of the sharingan she had seen on his arm was closed. There was another spot on his arm that looked like another closed eye, an ability that sacrificed a sharingan and healed wounds then?

Chakra flooded her left eye and she teleported across the room, unable to avoid both Danzo’s continued attacks and the attacks of his latest arriving subordinates at the same time. A shunshin got her close enough to tear through the latest interlopers with ease.

Most of Danzo’s operatives were low jonin level at best, easy for someone like her to put down like they were fresh genin. Izumi suspected that the training Danzo put them through to deaden their emotions also damaged their will to fight. Most of those that had been stronger had died at her hand before she ever entered Danzo’s headquarters, and none of them had been anywhere close to her level.

The operatives were, however, getting in the way. A single half handseal with her left hand created a shadow clone, and that clone filled the entryway and the corridor beyond it with a stream of fire. The smell of burning flesh filled the air as Izumi turned and walked towards Danzo.

Her interest in history had, not for the first time, paid off. She knew what jutsu Danzo was using to revitalize himself and she knew how to counter it. It had been detailed in the Uchiha clan’s scrolls on its own history, and Izumi had gone out of her way to learn about Izanagi once she’d learned that it existed.

It was a dangerous technique, one that she suspected Itachi or the masked man might be capable of using.

Danzo’s hands were flashing through the handseals that Izumi knew would lead to the Great Breakthrough technique and fill the room with buffeting wind, but he wouldn’t have the chance to use it. He was slower than she was, slower than Itachi was. She raised her left hand, thrust it forward, and just as Danzo reached the final handseal she had crossed the room in an instant and buried her lightning scalpel into his left shoulder.

After only a second of watching the pain in his eyes as her technique fried his nerves, she pulled her hand from his shoulder. Izumi continued staring into Shisui’s and Danzo’s eyes as one of the sharingan on the old man’s arm began to close.

Chakra flooded her right eye, and the eye burned with pain as she linked the first time that she had pierced Danzo’s shoulder with her lightning scalpel to the second time that she had done so in exactly the same location, the first time that Danzo had used Izanagi to the third time that he had used Izanagi.

‘Izanami.’

Sight left her right eye as she used the jutsu that had been named for a goddess associated with death. How appropriate for her.

Danzo’s eyes stared at nothing, pain and anger and more agony flashing through them as fought an endless battle against an Izumi that didn’t truly exist. He was watching her bury her hand into his shoulder, cut down his soldiers, bury her sword in his chest, cut down his operatives and set fire to the corridor, bury her hand in his shoulder. The eyes on his arm that he had used opened and closed repeatedly, the light leaving them and then re-entering them as the illusion repeated itself.

The looping pain and fear was a fitting fate for a man that had brought suffering to so many, and he would never learn his lesson. There would be no escape from Izanami for Danzo Shimura.

And yet…

It wasn’t satisfying.

Her left hand shakily hovered over the man’s head, her chakra scalpel cleanly severing Shisui’s eye from Danzo’s optic nerve in spite of her shakiness. The chakra scalpel shifted and tore through the man’s brain, shredding it into dozens of pieces as his body went fully limp.

Or, it was satisfying… but not as satisfying as she wanted it to be.

It felt good to kill the old man, to bring him pain, to watch him suffer the way he had caused so many others to. It just didn’t change anything, it didn’t solve the pain that she felt in her heart. Revenge was… bittersweet, in a way.

She pulled Shisui’s eye from Danzo’s dead eye socket, a thin layer of chakra over her hand preventing her from contaminating it any more than it already had been.

Izumi raised her right arm, hovering the part of it where the stump met the puppet hand over her blinded eye. It was more difficult to channel chakra through the end of her right arm than her hand, but she didn’t need to be quite as precise with the chakra scalpel that cut the connections her useless eye had to her body.

It was painful even through the carefully practiced numbness of her healing chakra, but she pulled her eye from her own eyesocket nonetheless while ignoring the overwhelming wrongness of the action. It helped a little bit that she used the puppet hand to do it and couldn’t feel with the fingers as a result, but it still felt terrible even through the frenzied haziness of the adrenaline pumping through her veins.

With the most painful and most wrong part of the impromptu surgery complete, it was a comparatively simple matter to insert Shisui’s eye into her eye socket and connect it to her optic nerve and chakra network. It still felt unsettling to do, but much less so than removing her own eye had.

She wobbled on her feet as she reopened her eyes from where they’d been closed as she worked on connecting the nerves and chakra pathways, her vision swimming.

Shisui’s eye saw more clearly than either of her original eyes ever had, Izumi immediately noticed as she held onto the wooden table to steady herself. Her own remaining eye saw less clearly than ever. Red filled her vision as much as any other color, blood soaking the floor and splattered across the walls and the table. The metallic taste of blood seemed to linger in her mouth somehow, and the smell of burning flesh caused a flush of pleasure to rise in her chest.

Izumi loved the pain and death she had brought, and she hated herself for loving it.

She swayed as she let go of the table, her gaze falling on the corpse at her feet and the blood that pooled around him. ‘I let myself become like this… for him ?’

It was… it couldn’t be worth it, the suffering she had caused and the warping of her very soul, all to kill a single shitty man.

‘Oh, but you didn’t want to stop at a single old man, did you? All of those responsible have to suffer, don’t they?’

She stumbled back, almost falling. The voice sounded… happy at her actions and her goals. Izumi didn’t want that man to be happy. She shook her head, eyes locking onto the pool of blood beneath her as her vision blurred out and then back in.

Blood fell from her fingertips, joining the pool beneath her. In its socket, her eye… Shisui’s eye ached painfully even though she was sure that she’d performed the surgery properly.

Drip…

Drip…

Drip…

Her eyes stayed locked onto the red that the blood dripping from her fingertips was joining. It almost reminded her of…

“izumi…?” The voice of one of her ghosts whispered, quietly. The voice was more pained than she remembered it, sounding almost choked with emotion. It was also… clearer. Far clearer than it should have been.

“What happened to you?” The voice was louder, but still low. Still too clear, too real, too scared of her… or for her? Her eyes slowly drifted upwards, towards where the voice had originated from.

She tilted her head, confused. Izumi blinked, expecting the vision to go away, to fade into the odd mist that the other ghosts were always made of. He didn’t.

The boy, though many would call him a man in this hellish world they lived in, looked nearly exactly the same as the last time she had seen him. Shisui was so tall, far taller than her even with how much she’d grown. Though, the last time she had seen him he hadn’t been looking at her like she was the ghost between the two of them.

He’d been glaring at her the last time she’d seen him, hadn’t he?

Seen him alive, that is.

He also hadn’t looked… Somewhere between ghost and flesh, like she could remember Harry Potter’s ghosts being when he had walked to his death, before he had let go of them so he could try and fail to join them in the afterlife.

Instead, he had been sent here, to hell, for his selfish choice to die.

Shisui looked at her with a single eye that was wrong, red where it should have been black and black where it should have been red. It was the same eye that, maybe a minute before, she had transplanted into her own eye socket. The same one that ached as she looked at him.

“Why are you haunting me?” The voice that escaped her lips was cracked with emotion, the pain that she was burying in her chest as she stared at a boy she had failed, the boy she hadn’t been strong enough to help, hadn’t been there to help.

The boy who she had betrayed, who hadn’t trusted her to help him after what she had done without any explanation.

“...” Shisui didn’t respond to her question, staring at her instead, his eye filled with horror as he began to truly see what she had become. She couldn’t blame him. He looked away and his gaze accidentally fell onto the corpse on the ground between them, the body of the man she had killed for what he had done to their family. “You… You killed him…”

There was disbelief in his voice at her actions this time. His eye turned to lock back onto her form rapidly, horror of a new kind in his gaze.

She didn’t immediately react to his statement, her hand instead moving to grab the flask she carried in the pouch at her waist. She took a drink from it, her eyes staying on Shisui even as the alcohol burned down her throat as she swallowed.

“I did.” She stated while staring unblinkingly at the ghost, and an old rage twisted her face. “And he deserved it for what he did to my family.”

Shisui was staring at her like she’d become a monster in the nearly two years since he’d died.

Maybe she had.

~Shisui~

Strange memories surged through his mind as he slowly gained awareness, lacking sound and touch and scent and even sight to an extent. It was as though he was remembering close to two years worth of memories that nearly exclusively contained the sharingan’s ability to see chakra.

His vision slowly swam into focus, his body feeling oddly numb as though it were half sedated. When he was able to see it was through an eye that he shouldn’t have had anymore, with a perfect clarity that had been gone for quite some time.

And what he saw was… worse than he could have imagined. Her hair was matted with blood, longer than he remembered and tangled as if she hadn’t taken care of it properly in weeks at least, her visible skin was as red as it was its natural pale complexion.

Blood dripped down from her clothes, from her hair, from her fingertips, she was soaked so thoroughly that she must have recently killed dozens of people at the least.

It was hard to recognize her as the little girl who had once symbolized his hope, who had been a catalyst that guided him away from the dark thoughts he’d pondered at the waterfall he had eventually died at.

“izumi…?” His voice barely escaped his lips, as unwilling to be heard as he was to believe what he was seeing. 

She didn’t respond, and after a few moments he spoke again. “What happened to you?” Cursed eyes that Izumi should never have had slowly looked up from the blood that pooled beneath her at the sound of his voice speaking a second time.

And yet Izumi’s eyes carried the unmistakable pattern of a Mangekyo Sharingan, her right eye holding an inverted version of his own pattern at its center.

She didn’t deserve the suffering that would have been required to gain those eyes.

Izumi stared at him as though he couldn’t be real, as though he were dead. Shisui should have been dead. The words that left her mouth were appropriate, though they carried a broken sort of emotion to them that hurt for him to hear. “Why are you haunting me?”

It was terrible to see and hear so clearly just how much the world had hurt Izumi since he had left it. He couldn’t imagine that his death had helped, even if they had been more distant than ever when he’d fallen. It was, at least in part, his fault that she was like this.

He looked away, struggling to handle the visual evidence of just what had become of his second closest friend.

Shisui’s gaze landed on the man who had killed him, or the man who had forced his death and stolen his eye at the very least. He was dead now, his corpse as monstrous as the man had been in life. And yet…

“You… You killed him…” Shisui stared at Danzo’s corpse in horror. For all that the man had been a truly monstrous person even from what little Shisui knew of him, for all that he had truly deserved to die, his death would have far reaching consequences. The war that Shisui had died to prevent would only be hastened by the Head of Root’s death.

His gaze snapped back to Izumi, and he saw no hint of regret in her eyes. She reached into a pouch at her hip, withdrew a flask from it, and took a sip as she stared at him with a look that made it clear that she still didn’t really believe he was real. She was probably drinking to make him go away, and when he was still there as she lowered the flask she responded.

“I did.” She said flatly, and a simmering rage began to build in her eyes that Shisui had never seen in the girl before. As she spoke, Shisui slowly began to register what was behind her, the corpses littering the room and the fires that burned in the hallway outside. “And he deserved it for what he did to my family .”

Izumi had done this for personal vengeance, and nothing less. He could see it in her eyes.

“More families will die because of his passing, more people will suffer than he could ever have hurt. It doesn’t end here, Izumi.” The words flowed from his mouth, a plea for her to understand the consequences of what she had done.

The girl stared back at him, the hatred within burning brighter than he would have ever believed it could in her.

“I know.”

Chapter Text

~Shisui~

“I know.” Anger tinged Izumi’s voice as she walked past him towards a door at the back of the room. He scrambled to follow her as her oddly glowing hand destroyed a set of seals that lined the doorway. If he didn’t know better he would have thought she was using a chakra scalpel, but those couldn’t destroy seals the way she was. The technique was meant for organic material, not the stone that the wall was made of.

The sharingan allowed him to remember the seal in its entirety along with the way in which Izumi had carved through it, and his limited knowledge of seals led him to note that she had done it in a very deliberate way. Destroying them in another order would have set off the security seals and whatever those would cause to happen.

It felt odd to move when he followed her, and Shisui noticed for the first time as he did so that his limbs weren’t exactly solid.

He caught up to her as she stepped into what seemed like an office. “What do you mean, ‘you know’?”

Izumi walked further into the office, her eyes carefully scanning the room for traps. She spoke as she worked. “Danzo’s death will embolden Konoha’s enemies once they learn of it. He wasn’t the only threat in Konoha, but he was a significant one both for his own rumored strength and for the strength of the organization he led. It will likely take a while for the news to break internationally due to the secretive nature of his work, but it will happen in time.”

Her words were cold, clinical, as if she were discussing lab results rather than the death of a significant war deterrent.

After a moment, the girl seemed satisfied with her search for traps and approached the desk at the center of the office. A measured swipe of her chakra scalpel dealt with more seals on the desk’s drawer, if that was in fact the technique she was using.

Shisui stared at her as she worked, having trouble believing that she knew all of that and had still gone through with killing the man. “You knew, and you still killed him?”

Izumi glanced up at him irritably as she pulled papers from the drawer, before beginning to speak as she sat down and rapidly flipped through the papers. “Yes. He deserved it for what he did to my and many other families, and even if he didn’t he was still a threat that needed to be eliminated.”

A threat? Shisui’s eye narrowed as he remembered that for all the good things that Izumi had once been, she had also been a clan loyalist. “A threat to who, exactly?”

The girl paused, seeming to recognize the tinge of distrust in his voice. She flipped through several papers she had already examined, finding one and pushing it across the desk. “Look at this.” She demanded, before resuming her scanning of documents.

A brief scan through the contents of the file made it clear that he needed to read it more closely, and so he did. It was a mission report of an event described as the ‘Uchiha Massacre’. It was described as perpetrated by Uchiha Itachi under the orders of both Danzo and the Hokage. In a single night, the vast majority of the Uchiha Clan was killed with no exceptions intended. According to the date on file, it had happened only a single year after the day he had died.

Only thirty four Uchiha had survived, all of them twelve years old or younger. If Itachi was included the total went up to thirty five.

The report had Itachi’s signature. That didn’t necessarily mean that he had actually signed it, there were many ways to forge a signature, but it was there.

Shisui eyed the paper even as Izumi continued to flip through more of them without comment. “You were there?” He asked, though the document clearly stated that Izumi had been the one to force Itachi into fleeing.

“I was, though that description isn’t entirely accurate.” Izumi frowned, a pained look crossing her face before she shook her head and resumed scanning papers with her sharingan.

Shisui stared at Itachi’s signature. “What part of it is inaccurate?”

The frown returned as Izumi continued flipping through papers. “Not the part that you’d want to be.”

Itachi did do it, then. Shisui closed his eye, taking a deep breath to calm himself out of habit even though no air entered or exited his less than solid lungs.

It was an impossible concept to grasp, the boy that he had trusted with his clan and village going on to kill most of the clan and leave the village as a branded traitor. He couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it. He’d trusted Itachi with everything, had known he had similar views and sympathies to Shisui’s own.

Itachi wouldn’t betray him like this, not like Izumi had. His eye snapped open into a disbelieving glare that he directed at the girl who was flipping through papers like she hadn’t just upended everything he thought he knew after forcibly calling his soul back from the afterlife.

He couldn’t remember what he had been doing in the pure lands, just a vague sense of peacefulness, but it was better than this.

“Itachi wouldn’t do that.” Shisui stated, his voice as sharp as his gaze.

Izumi’s fist impacted the desk hard enough to leave an indent and a massive crack along the lines of the wood, her glare holding far more rage and betrayal than his own could have. “How the fuck would you know, Shisui? You died! You died, and you left me behind to solve all the fucking problems your best friend went on to cause. I was the one who found your body in the river, you know, it was almost unrecognizable. Do you know what a death like that looks like? ”

His mouth shut, any response he might have wanted to say dying in the face of Izumi’s grief.

Tears carved tracks through the blood that stained Izumi’s face as she stared at him, and Shisui was reminded not for the first time that she was only eleven… twelve? Thirteen? Thirteen, he settled on. She would have been twelve at the time of the Massacre, and she looked older than that through the blood and filth that coated her body.

Izumi slumped in the chair she was sitting in, her head coming to rest on her hands, which curled into her hair as she shook with tears. “You- you weren’t even the right shape. Your eyes were gone, stolen, I could see your brain . And these stupid fucking eyes activate in response to emotion, so I can’t even forget…”

He never should have died the way he had. It had seemed better, easier for Itachi to just push him off instead of having to see the life leave his body, but he hadn’t even considered what whoever found him would have to see.

And Shisui would have rather had anyone other than Izumi find him like that.

“I… I’m sorry, Zumi.” The words weren’t nearly enough, but Izumi slowly stopped shaking anyway.

After a few seconds, Izumi lowered her hands and sat back up. “It’s okay, just… I can’t break down right now, there isn’t time, so… try not to ask too many sensitive questions right now.”

The girl started flipping through more papers, and Shisui kept quiet as she’d requested while looking at the papers over her shoulder. He wasn’t able to actually read them, but he could get a general idea of what they said and his sharingan’s perfect visual memory would allow him to read them later when he thought back on them. After a few minutes, she stood from the table and walked further into the office, rummaging through Danzo’s cabinets in search of something. When she found what she was looking for, it was as clear as it was terrible to see.

One of Danzo’s cabinets was full of jars. In each jar was an oddly glowing liquid, and floating in that liquid were sharingan eyes. In spite of himself, Shisui couldn’t help asking. “Why… Why are they…?”

Izumi dropped a duffel bag to the ground. Judging by the smoke wafting away, she had just unsealed it. “Sharingan eyes are valuable, unfortunately. If you were asking why they’re in jars, it’s probably because chakra-infused preserving fluids keep organs in better condition than stasis seals do in the long term.”

He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d wanted to ask, but that grim answer was enough.

Izumi began carefully moving the jars into the bag, taking care to make sure none of them broke. The look on her face was as grim as her actions.

“Are you keeping them?” He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. The eyes were a part of the people of his clan, arguably the most important part. They should have been laid to rest with the bodies.

At the same time… they were powerful weapons. It made sense to keep them from a logical and strategic point of view.

His old friend frowned. “I’m not sure. I plan on destroying most of them, at least. I just don’t know if I’ll destroy all of them.” The fact that she might need a replacement, that even if the legends about Madara and the Eternal Mangekyo were true then her left eye at least was still at risk of going blind, went without saying. It was gruesome to keep… spares around, but could be necessary if things were as bad as it seemed they might have gotten since he died.

Once all the jars were in the bag, she closed it and carefully slung it over her shoulder. Then she moved on to the next cabinet, not taking the time to pay any particular respect to the eyes of their fallen. She had said she didn’t have time, but…

“Could you tell me why there isn’t time to talk?” He settled on asking. If it was sensitive, she could just say no.

She continued rummaging through Danzo’s office as she responded. “I only gave my clone enough chakra to last until morning. I need to be done here, cleaned up, and back in Suna before the Chunin Exam finals tomorrow. I’d also prefer to get some sleep, but we’ll see whether that happens.”

He opened his mouth to ask how she was intending to get from Konoha (where he assumed Danzo’s base was) to Suna, but his brain helpfully flashed the most recent memories that his sharingan had seen of Danzo fighting Izumi. She’d been teleporting in that fight, he realized. She was going to teleport to Suna.

But, if the next day was the Chunin Exam finals…

Those always happened on the same two days each year. One in winter and one in summer. From how much she seemed to have aged, he would guess…

“Hey Zumi?”

She closed the cabinet that she had been looking through, shifting to move towards another, but she responded anyway. “Yes, Shisui?”

The timing was a bit dark, maybe, but… “Happy Birthday. Sorry for missing the last two.”

Izumi stopped in place, her head turning to look at him. For once, it was difficult to read the emotions in her gaze, something positive, some surprise maybe. After a moment… “Thank you.”

~Izumi~

It was odd, talking to Shisui’s ghost. He was too realistic, too different from the other ghosts. It made her wish that he wasn’t a delusion.

‘For a freak like you? It’s too good to be true, this world is your punishment.’

She closed her eyes, taking in a deep breath. When she opened her eyes, two fingers of her left hand were lifted to her mouth and she breathed a stream of fire into the meeting room she had just exited. The heat of the flames was so intense that even from outside of the room she could feel the blood on her cheeks drying. It felt good, burning the evidence of her actions,  and the action of burning things was therapeutic in its own way.

The fire would reach the office, destroying everything within to the point that almost nothing remained. She didn’t need to be too thorough, nothing within was too incriminating for her, but it was better to take this measure now than to not do so and be sorry about it later.

Danzo’s office was unlikely to be the only place he’d stashed sharingan eyes, blackmail, and important records, but she had no idea where else he would have hid his secrets. He was a cagy man, he wouldn’t have shared details like that with his subordinates. She would check his manor later on, but she doubted she would find anything there. It was both too obvious and relatively low in security.

Her breath ran out and the fire ceased to leave her lips. She stumbled slightly, but caught herself. The adrenaline that had been coursing through her system had left her lethargic when it left, but she still had chakra left over.

A quick glance around showed her that the room she was in (A sort of main room for Danzo’s underground base) was as blackened with burn marks as the room that she had just torched no doubt was.

Dozens of burnt out corpses and piles of ash and bone littered the main room along with the remnants of standard ANBU armor and weapons, both from before and from after she had entered the meeting room.

Chakra flooded her right eye, and Izumi was standing in a hotel room. It was lucky that her gamble with Shisui’s eye had paid off, because she wasn’t sure how exactly she would have made it back to Suna without her right eye’s abilities. She might have made it anyway, but Suna was a full day away even at her traveling pace and she would have needed to break into the city if she did it that way.

The hotel room was one she’d reserved days earlier to ensure she had a place to stop at and clean up, it was in river country and would have plenty of water available for a long shower. With that tantalizing prospect in mind, Izumi set about removing her armor and peeling off her blood soaked clothes.

“I’ll just… look at this wall.” Shisui’s ghost said, and Izumi ignored him and the momentary surprise she felt that he was still there. It wasn’t as if a hallucination seeing her naked would matter even if he had looked, she was surprised he had even lingered as long as he had. The small amount of embarrassment that she could hear in his voice was amusing though.

She was only a year younger than he’d been when he died, now that she thought about it. That was odd, she was used to thinking of Shisui as being years older than she was. Or herself as years older than him, depending on how she looked at it.

Her views on her previous life’s memories were still wishy washy, both hers and not. They were less clear, they felt like the other life that they were. They had shaped her, formed the basis of who she was, but most of the memories didn’t have much relevance in a new world. It didn’t really matter, Izumi mused as she struggled out of the ANBU pants that were trying to stick to her legs. She was getting closer to the age she used to be anyway.

With a feeling of success, she finally kicked off the blood crusted pants. “Damn, those are gross.”

Shisui’s head seemed to start turning at the sound of her voice, but he forcibly stopped himself and looked back at the wall. She was sure that he must have seen something though, because there was a bit of a flush on his cheeks. Could ghosts blush? That was interesting… She’d think on it later; it might be fun to mess with Shisui if he stuck around, and Izumi hadn’t had much in the way of fun that didn’t involve excessive violence in… a while.

For now, she really just needed to get all the blood off of her body and out of her hair.

When she stepped into the shower and turned the nozzle straight to hot, she let out a sigh of relief as the water hit her skin. It was still cold, but it felt amazing anyway as she started scrubbing the blood from her skin. As the water slowly shifted from cool to scaldingly hot, Izumi made a quiet noise of appreciation at the sensation. Izumi loved hot showers, she thought it might be an Uchiha thing.

The heat felt nice.

~Shisui~

There was no way that she wasn’t fucking with him.

He eyed the wall that was between himself and the bathroom as a noise came from the other side of it. ‘Was that a moan?’ The water couldn’t feel that good.

Yeah, she was definitely messing with him. He probably shouldn’t see it as a good sign that Izumi could go from killing probably over a hundred people in an afternoon to teasing him only an hour later, but it was almost a relief in a way to see that she still at least had that sort of mischievous and tricky side to her.

Shisui couldn’t say that he would have ever expected her to strip in front of him and then make borderline sexual noises in the next room over as a way of messing with him, though.

That was mildly worrying, and led to many lines of thought and questions that he’d expected to never have when it came to her. Hopefully she was just messing with him, things would be easier that way.

Though, it probably didn’t matter even if there was more to it. He was just a weird ghost now, after all…

Actually, that was probably more important to think about. How , exactly, was he now a ghost? He’d assumed on the spot that it had something to do with Izumi’s Mangekyo, but he was pretty sure that her ability was teleportation of some sort. Had she gained some other ability when she took his sharingan to restore her vision and gain EMS? That was supposed to just grant the implanted eye’s ability according to the legends, not cause a new one to manifest.

What could he do as a ghost, anyway? He hadn’t really tried anything yet, could he move things? Could he use chakra? He seemed to have moved with Izumi when she’d teleported to the hotel, would that always happen when she teleported? Was he there permanently, or could Izumi send him back?

He only remembered a sense of peace when he thought back on the pure lands, but even that sounded tempting… Izumi seemed to be struggling though, and he wanted to help. It would be good to go back, but maybe not quite yet.

Shisui walked over to the bed, noting as he did so that he walked as if the ground under his feet was solid to him. He paused and actively tried to push his foot through the floor. It went through without resistance and he nearly fell.

“Okay, so the ground being solid is just a suggestion. Good to know.” He carefully got back to his feet and finished making his way to the bed, ignoring another noise from the bathroom as he did so.

His hands hovered over a pillow, and the idea of picking it up filled him with an odd sense of suspense.

He lowered his hands to the pillow, gripped it, and slowly lifted it from the bed.

It felt oddly heavy, like the pillow was a bag of flour rather than a bag of fluff or feathers. Shisui tried strengthening his arms with chakra, but it didn’t seem to do anything. So he was limited to significantly lower than unenhanced human strength… It seemed like a small limitation in comparison to being fully dead.

The sound of the shower in the other room abruptly cut off and as he instinctively glanced over in response to sudden the lack of sound, Izumi casually walked out of the bathroom while patting her hair with a towel. His eye flicked down against his will, and then he forcefully turned his head to stare at the wall as he felt a flush rise to his cheeks.

“It’s pretty weird that you seem to want to, but I really don’t care if you look.” He could hear the shit eating grin on the girl’s face. She had timed that on purpose , he was sure of it.

“I’ll pass on that one.” He said, idly examining the shitty painting that was hanging on the wall.

“Your loss.” Izumi was amused, he could hear it in her voice. There was the sound of cloth on skin, and he immediately aborted his brain’s trained-in instinctual attempt to imagine what the sound looked like. There were times when he regretted having trained himself to automatically recognize and visualize the sounds of things he couldn’t see.

It certainly helped in combat and avoiding being surprised, but this was certainly not a situation that called for the skill.

“You know, you’re pretty weird for a delusion. I don’t think Shisui’s ever acted like this to me before.” She still believed he wasn’t real then. He wondered what it said about her mental state that she was so quick to believe he was a hallucination of some sort. The sound of shifting cloth stopped and he could hear Izumi walking over to where she’d left the duffel bag when they arrived, so it was probably safe to look now.

He was ready to turn his eye back to the wall as he looked, but Izumi was fully dressed in a standard Konoha shinobi uniform minus the flak jacket. She was cleaning the blood off of the duffel bag, her left hand occasionally glowing as it siphoned blood from the cloth with her medical ninjutsu. For the first time, he noticed that her right hand had been replaced with a puppet hand.

Shisui decided to save that conversation topic for later as it was almost certainly sensitive, and instead he responded to what she had said. “I’m not a delusion, just as any delusion would say. You also never stripped around me or walked around in the nude, so you can consider us both surprised.”

Izumi shrugged. “I’ve changed.”

“Changed how?” He was worried about her, and the more he saw the more worried he became. She was trying to distract him with the teasing, Shisui was pretty sure of that. Izumi didn’t want him to know what she was dealing with.

She stood up, lifting the cleaned duffel bag to rest over her shoulder.

“More than I could tell you right now. More than I would have preferred to.”

And then they were standing in a new room, it looked like a basement. There was no transition, no sensation to go along with the change in location, just one location and then another. It was the same as when she’d teleported to the hotel. There was an almost nonexistent instant in between, but it was so small that even he was only able to notice it because of his sharingan’s enhanced perception.

She walked away from him, going about storing the jarred eyes in a cabinet of her own.

It seemed pretty clear that she didn’t want to talk.

~Izumi~

Her team was down in the arena along with the rest of the genin who had passed the first two exams. They were the only team wearing Konoha’s leaf symbol that remained in the finals, the rest had failed during the first or second exam.

Up in the Kage box Hiruzen sat with Rasa, the Kazekage. The Hokage had hidden it well, but he had been wary ever since he’d arrived in the sand village. He suspected foul play and he was right to, but the foul play had happened hundreds of kilometers away the previous afternoon. There was nothing for the old man to be worried about.

She didn’t particularly like him, but he hadn’t earned her vengeance.

In front of where she was sitting, her latest hallucination was leaning over the railing to peer down into the arena. No one else had been able to see or hear him, unsurprisingly. Izumi knew that she could make people see him if she really wanted to, but she could make people see nearly anything if she cared to do so.

He also hadn’t disappeared after her Mangekyo deactivated, so that only made her more sure he wasn’t real. It couldn’t be a weird Mangekyo ability if the eye wasn’t even active, after all. Those generally required active use to work at all.

“So that’s your team, huh? How do you think they’ll do?” The ghost spoke to her with Shisui’s clear and relaxed voice, oddly deeper than she remembered it to be, not wavering in the slightest. She didn’t understand why he was still there, the voices and ghosts she saw tended to go away when she was in an environment that required some focus, like the one she was in.

Her senses were sharp, she was keeping an eye on what was happening throughout the arena, and yet the vision of Shisui remained.

She decided to indulge her delusion as she stared down at the arena floor. She spoke idly, as if she were just talking to herself. “I’m expecting great things of you three, even two of you facing off in the final match. Hopefully I won’t be disappointed.”

“That good, huh?” Shisui glanced over at her, surprised.

She just dipped her head slightly in a nod. Her students had taken well to her training despite the distrust that she had been able to see in them. Twelve and thirteen were too young for chunin as far as she was concerned, too young to be soldiers at all, but she was a thirteen year old jonin and each of them had the skills required for the rank that she knew would be foisted onto them when they returned to Konoha.

The Leaf needed fresh chunin to replace her dead clan, after all.

As the exam went on, her confidence proved accurate. The fake Shisui continued to make his idle observations as her team made short work of the competition, and Izumi answered him whenever doing so wouldn’t make her look like she was talking to someone that wasn’t there.

The interesting part only started, really, when her students had to fight each other.

~Ko~

“The first semifinal match, Hyuga Ko against Ichiraku Ayame!” The jonin proctor called out as he stood across the arena from his teammate.

Months earlier, he would have been sure of his victory in this match. He had never been particularly arrogant for a member of his clan and even the pride that he had held in his talents had been humbled over the time he spent in close proximity to Uchiha Izumi, but it wasn’t arrogant to notice that you were more skilled than another person.

He had won nearly every spar he had engaged in against the civilian born girl when the team had first begun to train together. That proportion of victory had dropped to as low as two thirds as of only a month earlier, and their current battlefield was not to his advantage.

The sand beneath their feet was tightly packed, but he knew from his previous fight that his earth ninjutsu would be fragile at best and would serve his purpose of cornering his opponent poorly in a fight against Ayame. The fight would likely depend on whether he could close the distance and disable her before she could make use of her long ranged wind ninjutsu to bring him down.

The girl’s eyes were narrowed, a determination shining in them that had been lacking in their first spars.

Ko activated his byakugan preemptively, his vision extending to include the vast majority of the arena and his opponent’s chakra network. “Begin!” The proctor called and he shot across the arena towards Ayame, whose hands immediately came together into a quick series of handseals.

He recognized the seals that she was using and made no change to his plan. Ko reached his teammate just as she breathed in and reached the last seal, and his fingers just barely reached to tap her wrist with the gentle fist as she opened her mouth to release a blast of wind that threw him across the arena.

It wasn’t quite the results he had wanted, but he felt satisfied with what he had accomplished as he flew towards the far wall as a result of Ayame’s great breakthrough jutsu. A single closed tenketsu on the wrist wouldn’t prevent her from using ninjutsu outright, but it would at least slow her use of handsigns.

He landed heavily on the wall, watching Ayame through closed byakugan eyes as the wind blasted sand in his direction. Ko could see why Suna preferred wind as an element, aside from the fact that it was more common in Wind Country than anywhere else on the continent.

It would have been extremely advantageous against any opponent who needed their eyes open to see in this sort of environment. Unfortunately for Ayame, he did not have that kind of limitation.

The moment the wind let up, Ko dropped from the wall with his hands flowing to prepare a jutsu even as Ayame did the same across the arena from him. When he landed, his hands slammed into the ground and an extra thick wall of sand rose from the ground only a moment before Ayame’s technique impacted it.

In that moment of cover, Ko made one additional handsign.

“This ninjutsu is entirely capable of killing you if you overuse it, but you should be fine if you’re careful. Just never use it if you’re not close to full on chakra and only make one, understood?”

~Ayame~

Her great wind bullet impacted the wall of sand, blasting it into countless little grains of sand in a single blow. She could feel the chakra use as Ko performed another jutsu behind the cover of the wall in the moment before it was destroyed, and she could feel as a second chakra source dropped beneath the sand even though it was attempting to hide itself.

It was a clone, one of the two chakra sources, but not the kind that they had been taught in the academy. It felt more real than that, identical to the original to such an extent that she couldn’t tell between the two in the same way that she couldn’t tell between her sensei and the clones that she made when she taught them individually.

It had to be a shadow clone then, but wasn’t that a dangerous ninjutsu? Izumi had seemed to believe so, that day when she’d talked about it in the ramen stand.

It wasn’t something to worry about right that moment, however, and Ayame forced her hands through another set of handseals even as she ignored the numbness in her left wrist. A series of small wind bullets interrupted the charge that Ko was making towards her, and Ayame moved as she shot them from her lips.

The Ko on the surface narrowly dodged the bullets that would have been nearly invisible to anyone else, his movements exceptionally careful to avoid being wounded to the best of his abilities. He was probably the clone then, the real one wouldn’t have needed to be so careful to avoid minor injuries and the risk would have been worth closing the distance.

It was possible that she was wrong and if she was then her next move might cost her the match, but her options were limited. She only had so much chakra, and she had to make the moves that were most likely to bring victory.

Ayame shot towards Ko, pulling a pair of kunai from her pouch to rest in her hands. It was the height of foolishness to engage a Hyuga in hand to hand combat, but adding weapons to the equation made such a thing significantly less lopsided.

The Hyuga boy was forced to put as much effort into dodging her slashes as she had to put into avoiding his fingers, especially since he couldn’t afford to get hit if she was right. Shadow clones could only take a limited number of minor injuries or one major injury before they would dispel, and she was aiming for major injuries.

Their close quarters exchange lasted longer than she would have preferred, each of them narrowly avoiding being hit repeatedly before finally her kunai carved a slash diagonally down Ko’s chest.

His hand tapped her left wrist repeatedly instead of disappearing in a puff of smoke, however, and Ayame’s eyes widened as she kicked the boy away from her.

It was too late, however, and Ayame felt the Ko beneath the sand return to the surface only a short distance behind her. She was boxed in, and the wound that she had inflicted on the real Ko wasn’t debilitating in the short term. The opposite was true of the damage he had inflicted on her, her left hand was fully numb and her right was still sluggish from the first exchange.

If she’d chosen differently and targeted the Ko beneath the sand instead of the one on the surface, she probably would have won. A single Great Breakthrough on the sand would have applied enough pressure to dispel the clone, but it was too large a use of chakra for her to waste if it had been the real Ko.

The risk that she’d taken hadn’t paid off, and the one she hadn’t would have. Ayame raised her hand into the air. “I forfeit.”

Ko gave her a nod as he relaxed his stance, a respectful look in his eye. She appreciated that about him, how he didn’t carry himself with quite the same arrogance that a lot of the clan born ninja she’d met did.

That trait had been to her disadvantage in that fight, though. If he hadn’t taken her so seriously then she would have won.

Medics were approaching Ko to handle the wound she had inflicted on him, but their path was abruptly interrupted as her sensei materialized out of a shunshin beside the boy. She was fast, so fast that Ayame had only seen the briefest flash of movement before the other girl landed beside her teammate.

Izumi almost immediately set to work healing Ko’s wound, but just before she did so she glanced at Ayame with a small smile.

There was pride on her face, and Ayame wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Every sign that she’d seen, especially once she’d discussed the matter further with Hana, pointed to the idea that her sensei simply didn’t care about them beyond being a means to an end.

Why would someone who didn’t care be proud of her?

Why for a match she’d lost?

Those questions and more occupied her mind for the rest of the tournament, even as her two teammates began to fight in the final match. That fight was less interesting than her thoughts, a match between a relatively fresh Hana and a significantly weakened Ko wasn’t particularly close.

Had they been wrong about their sensei? If so, then how much?

Despite how sure she had been before, Ayame couldn’t help but feel the naive part of herself that still viewed her sensei with that same quiet awe of hero worship start to grow again. It wasn’t in her nature to be as distrusting as she was trying to be.

Ayame wasn’t sure what to think.

Chapter Text

~Kabuto~

A simple application of chakra disabled the seals on the door, his preparation having made the otherwise difficult task remarkably easy. The door was the only vulnerability he was sure of, a required intentional hole in the seals that he knew would either cause the room to self-destruct if no one was inside when the breach occurred or set off an alarm if someone was. 

The door opened cleanly, no traps going off at his intrusion.

The room beyond the door was simple, if certainly luxurious in some ways. A sizable bed stood with the headboard against one wall, a comfortable looking blanket draped neatly over its surface. There was a wooden desk of seemingly high quality in one corner, with a similarly tasteful chair included.

A set of shelves was against another wall, a large amount of scrolls stacked on each shelf that were labelled with the kinds of supplies that were held within.

And on the top shelf, beside a set of scrolls that were labelled as holding rations, were two jars. A pair of eyes floated within the softly glowing liquid in each jar.

Two pairs would be enough, but it was disappointing to see.

It made sense, however. The safehouse was doubtlessly not the only one that existed, just the only one that he’d been able to follow a Root operative to several months earlier. The room he was in, the one clearly set aside for Danzo, was not the only one in the small facility. There was also a small barracks room that could house up to twenty people in its bunks and a kitchen area that contained ration scrolls like the ones on the shelf.

The small base of operations also had no conventional entrance, the only way to reach it was to go through the earth between it and the surface. Though the method resulted in a dreary atmosphere, it was a clever way to hide a base, one that made it all but impossible to find without already knowing it was there… or following someone to it.

There was also the ventilation system that could potentially be discovered, but that system was expertly hidden and powered by seals to ensure its silence.

Regardless, the careful practices that had gone into the underground base’s construction had failed to protect the safehouse from his intrusion.

Finding more would require the assistance of what Root operatives still remained, and such measures would be attempted in the coming months. Any longer and the preserving fluids that kept the eyes fresh would lose too much of their infused chakra unless the remaining members of Root continued refilling the seals that fed the eyes (and the ventilation system) as per their previous orders.

Kabuto took the jars and stored them away, before leaving the base and Konoha behind. He couldn’t linger in the village anymore, not now that Uchiha Izumi had seen him in Root headquarters.

It was a shame that she had arrived to kill off Danzo earlier than he had expected, but some things couldn’t be helped.

On a more positive note, at least for him, it meant that his long observation and spying mission was finally over. The early ending wasn’t too much of a change, the plan had already been for Kabuto to leave Konoha within the next year or two. His target had grown too skilled for his observations to bear any meaningful fruit.

And he had already gathered all the information they truly needed.

~Kakashi~

His eyes trailed across the memorial stone, easily finding one of the several names there that he returned so often to grieve for. Kakashi’s visits had become less frequent in recent months, especially since one of his older acquaintances had begun to hound him. He didn’t have it in himself to refuse the challenges he was pressured into, and interacting with the strange taijutsu specialist helped make him feel a little more human.

It was still strange, using both of his eyes without the constant drain that he had grown so used to. It felt good though, allowing Obito’s eye to see more of the world. It was what his friend had wanted, after all.

Another shinobi entered the training ground that housed the memorial stone, their chakra undisguised. They were familiar, so he made no move to change what he was doing. Looking at Obito’s name through Obito’s eye felt odd, not something he had done in the past.

Even with the sharingan inactive, the eye was sharper than his natural one.

The other shinobi stopped beside him. “Captain.”

Kakashi waited a few seconds before responding, chewing on his words before he spoke them. “Tenzo. You shouldn’t call me that, not anymore.”

His former subordinate didn’t need as much time to make a response. “I came to request your participation in a brief mission, so it would be appropriate in this case.”

He frowned, eying the cold stone. Kakashi had no interest in the kind of work ANBU did, the idea of serving his village and trying to make up for his failures in that way had lost most of its meaning to him. “I’m retired from that sort of work, you’ll have to find someone else.”

“It will only be a few hours, and it isn’t dangerous work.”

Only a few hours and not dangerous. There would be no reason for such a mission to require his presence, unless Tenzo was only including him so that he could access the need to know information that the mission would involve.

“Understood. Headquarters in thirty minutes, then?” He asked, and Tenzo nodded.

Kakashi lingered at the stone for a few minutes, before tearing himself away from it to go and get ready.

When he followed his former team into the familiar unsettling tunnels beneath Konoha less than an hour later on what he had been informed was an investigative mission, it was difficult to believe what he found.

He smelled it before he saw it. A horrid stench hung in the air, a revolting scent that he could tell was a mixture of the burnt and rotting corpses that he would find further inside. As they grew closer to what he knew was Root headquarters, he began to see some of the sources of the stench.

Masked and armored bodies of all sizes littered the pathway they followed, many of them with dismembered limbs or heads. From the visible decay, they had been dead for days at least. Dried blood decorated the walls and floors and even ceilings. Kakashi could tell from experience that many of the corpses had died before they had even known that they were being attacked, and from the wounds on the bodies he could tell that they’d almost all been killed by either a small sword or a lightning release technique of some kind.

Whoever had done this had done it alone, or as part of a small group that were all trained in the same style. He was leaning towards the first, as the wounds seemed too consistent even to be attributed to a small group.

But there weren’t many people who could have accomplished what he was seeing without assistance.

Deeper into the underground complex, they found where the scent of burnt corpses had originated from. The main room of Root’s headquarters sported a massive scorch mark in a pattern that was unnervingly familiar to him. The burnt out husks of well over a dozen bodies rested on the blackened ground, and he could see from where he was that the meeting room beyond was similarly burnt.

The use of the specific fire release technique that created burn marks in that pattern narrowed his mental list of possible suspects down to three, and his list of likely suspects down to one if he based the results purely off of the fighting style used. 

The issue with that particular suspect was that she should have been very publicly in another hidden village at the time that the killings would have occurred. Being in two places at the same time wasn’t too difficult, even being in two places as distant as Konoha and Suna wasn’t a truly exceptional feat, but doing so while getting past the security of both villages undetected and killing off a good portion of a well trained organization of shinobi was all but impossible.

And yet he could somehow believe it was possible for someone like Uchiha Izumi.

Highly unlikely, maybe, but possible. The travel distance and security involved would make such a task extraordinarily risky, and Izumi did not strike him as a fool.

No, it was more likely that the methods used had been chosen to make the deaths match Izumi’s usual fighting style. One of the other two options were more likely, and that was all that he would include in his report.

What he wouldn’t include in his report was the subtle scent that his sharp nose had caught beneath the smell of blood and rot and fire, almost unnoticeable due to the effort the source had gone through to hide it. But only so much could be done to disguise a scent, especially a familiar one.

He had seen enough during his career to know that Danzo deserved the end he had received, there was no need to report a detail he could have easily missed. The fact that Izumi had specifically hunted the elder down only served to nearly confirm at least one of his many suspicions about the dead man.

It was unfortunate that the Root ANBU, kidnapped and brainwashed as most of them were, had met such an end, but Kakashi had seen and done far worse over the course of his several years working black operation missions. An enemy operative was an enemy operative, mercy was a risk in their line of work.

They were certainly more justifiable kills than many of his own.

~Izumi~

Her mother sighed. “Just indulge me for a moment, Izumi? I’ll tell you afterwards.”

Harry Izumi frowned, but lifted the glass to her lips to take a sip. The wine was sweet, but not too sweet, tasting of the grapes that it was made from with a hint of raspberry and something else that she couldn’t place. The taste of alcohol was there, but only barely as it was well disguised by the other flavors of the wine. Izumi was glad that she didn’t have to describe the taste to anyone, as she had no idea what words she would use to do so.

She lowered the glass to place it back on the table.

Hazuki lifted her own glass back to her lips, taking another sip before returning it to its place on the side table. “So, how was it?”

Izumi tilted her head at the woman. “Good, but I’m sure you know that.”

Her mom smiled softly at her, but it was a sad smile. “Good. I’m sorry for that, I just… I wanted to feel alive again, to have a normal life experience with my daughter like her first drink rather than just feeling awful all the time and making you take care of me.”

“Kaa-san…”

Izumi felt her eyes tear up at the reminder of Hazuki’s health, but before she could start crying Hazuki abruptly changed the subject. “The people watching your friend and the clan are members of a subdivision of ANBU known as Root, headed by a man named Shimura Danzo. I suspect that the person following you is from the same group, though they seem to have not received the type of training that is typical of Root operatives.”

A familiar woman looked back at her through the slightly fogged over glass of the mirror as the memory faded from her mind, perfectly maintained dark hair hanging loosely around pale shoulders. As was often the case, a small and distant smile graced the woman’s face. Izumi’s hands tightened on the sink as she stared helplessly at the image before her.

The caring look slowly melted off of the woman’s face as it withered from the healthy glow it had once held to the gaunt features of its last months, a scared and pained expression taking the loving expression’s place as thin red lines slowly opened on her arms. But even as skin slowly peeled itself away from flesh, Izumi couldn’t bring herself to look away from the woman in the mirror.

Flesh and bone fell from the woman’s arms in thin slices, each burned so that they wouldn’t bleed. The face in the mirror opened its mouth in a scream that hurt terribly to hear coming from those lips, but she could hear it, and a crack echoed through the bathroom as her grip on the sink tightened.

As new red lines began to stretch beyond the woman’s shoulders, a dead yet clear voice interrupted the vision. “Zumi, is everything alright in there? I heard a noise.”

She tore her eyes away from the mirror, noticing as she did so that her vision was blurred. She reached her hands up to rub the offending liquid out of her eyes. “Yeah, I’m… I’m okay Shisui. I’ll be out in a second.”

It was… strange that he had interrupted what she’d been seeing. Her delusions generally didn’t interrupt her other delusions unless it was to make them worse.

Shisui wasn’t real, and yet he felt more real with every minute that he lingered. His eye ached slightly in her socket, though it had reduced to a minor annoyance in the time since she’d first transplanted it into her head. There were no signs of rejection despite her repeated checks, her body seemed to treat the eye as if it was her own according to her medical ninjutsu.

Such a thing should not have been possible, however. They shared the same blood type and were from the same clan, but his eye was still a foreign organ. She should have needed to treat some level of rejection symptoms even if they were an ideal match and yet they never arose.

His eye felt like her own had, only more clear and with that persistent ache. It was strange, seeing the world so clearly through Shisui’s eye when her own remaining eye’s sight had blurred to the point that it couldn’t make out any details that were more than a few meters away.

Shisui’s eye even showed her the same falsehoods, the same images of the worst experiences of her life. Izumi didn’t want to see her mother in the mirror, and yet almost every time she looked it was Hazuki staring back at her. There had been a time when she was pleased to look so much like her mom, but it felt more like a curse than a blessing now.

It brought back old memories, some good and some bad, but they all spiraled back to the final one she had of her mother.

Still…

“I suspect that the person following you is from the same group, though they seem to have not received the type of training that is typical of Root operatives.”

Izumi had never found the person that had been following her, they had remained expertly hidden from her even as her skills grew. It had seemed as if they had trained specifically to avoid her abilities in what sensory techniques she had access to.

But she suspected something else, now.

As she approached the doorway that served as an exit for the orthopedic wing, she found her path suddenly blocked by a cart full of medical supplies which was being pushed out of an exam room by a grey haired boy a few years older than her. Kato, if she remembered correctly.

“Oh! Apologies, Uchiha-san. Let me get this out of the way for you.” The boy pushed the cart out of the way, but seemed to pause briefly on seeing the paper and scrolls she was holding. “Heading to the library, then? Hope you find what you’re looking for.” The boy smiled at her, and she gave a polite smile back as he pushed the cart out of her way and towards another room.

For years, she had thought nothing of the grey haired boy. He was only a few years older than her after all, and he had started working at the hospital when Izumi had been seven years old. Suspecting a ten year old of working as a spy was not something that would ever have occurred to her. He’d been perfectly hidden, right in front of her.

And then she had seen him in the depths of Root Headquarters.

There could really be no other explanation for a boy she had seen as so innocuous being in a meeting with Danzo of all people. From the very beginning, he had been in the hospital to spy on her. With how long he had been watching… Well, odds were that he knew far more about her and her skillset than she would have preferred.

What she didn’t understand was why he had been watching for so long. The grey haired boy had been present in the hospital even before the mission where she had officially ‘awakened’ her sharingan.

It didn’t make sense. Even a whole year after that point, Danzo had looked down on her. He had called her ‘too light by far’ back then, it didn’t seem like he would have had an interest in her so early. Or maybe he had, and that was why he was so sure of himself when he’d said that?

But then why have the boy linger for so long?

It didn’t make sense, unless…

Unless ‘Kato’ worked for someone else. That would fit with the fact that he had disappeared the moment she arrived and had made no attempt to protect Root’s Head. She just couldn’t imagine who it could be, and she couldn’t remember any files that Danzo had on the boy.

She would have to look into him more later, after she finished the journey back to the Leaf with her team.

For now, she just gave the sink she’d been gripping just a little earlier a glance over. There was a large crack running through it, and it looked almost like it was threatening to fall apart at any moment. A chunk was missing at the rim, where her left hand had crushed it beyond repair. The place her right hand had gripped showed no such damage, another example of just how inferior the puppet hand was to her real one.

The movements of her false right hand were natural and almost seamless after half a year of constant use, but it remained a liability. It lacked both the power and the durability of flesh and bone and chakra. It had been enough, had allowed her the versatility of two hands that she’d needed to take out Danzo and his operatives, but the elder had not been aware of her greatest abilities before she had arrived.

Her other targets would not have the same weakness, they would be ready for her abilities to some extent. Teleportation would not come as a deadly surprise to them, but as an ability that they would already know they needed to be prepared for.

Izumi would have to find a better solution.

“Zumi?” That voice again, far too clear and real. Her auditory hallucinations were generally realistic to a degree, but they would sound the way she remembered them. Her memory was good, but not perfect unless the sharingan was involved and even then the eyes could only record visual information in perfect clarity.

Her memories of voices would inevitably grow warped over time, and her ghosts would sound like those memories.

Shisui’s voice didn’t sound the way she remembered it, the way it had sounded whenever she had heard him before taking his eye for herself. It made her want to hope, to believe, dangerously, that he was real.

“I’m coming out now.” She said, and as her hand touched the door handle she continued. “And I’m not dressed, by the way.”

Izumi stepped out of the bathroom, and was greeted with the sight of her friend’s ghost staring intently at the empty wall. The way he’d reacted the previous time had been funny, but she could resist the urge to tease him in the same way as before.

It wouldn’t be any fun if she wasn’t creative about messing with him, after all.

When Izumi made her return to Konoha, the first place she went was to the hospital. Her intended visit to her sensei’s office proved fruitless, however, as the man was absent.

Naturally, she simply made her way to the Head of Pulmonology’s office instead. She had worked under the woman for years, after all, and they had a friendly professional relationship at the least.

Her knock on the woman’s office door was met with an immediate tired call for her to enter. The tiredness of the voice wasn’t rare for the woman that the office belonged to, but the clear exhaustion and frazzled appearance of Nara Noriko was very unusual.

Noriko stared at her for a moment. “I don’t suppose you’re here to work for once?” Piles of paperwork covered the woman’s desk, far more than what should have been required for one department. It was clear that she was being overworked.

Izumi shook her head. “I just returned from Suna. I’m going home after I’m done here.”

The department head sighed. “Figures. What did you want, then?”

“I was looking for a genin named ‘Kato’, I think. A few years older than me. Gray hair, glasses, about this tall.” Izumi held her hand up about twenty centimeters above her own head, which was annoying to admit. It was unlikely that she would grow too much more, and she didn’t particularly like that even men of average heights still towered over her.

It was useful in some ways, but it still annoyed her from time to time.

Noriko sighed. “I don’t know of any Katos in the hospital, but… a boy that meets that description did disappear a few days ago, right around when our workload increased. His name was Yakushi Kabuto, but that’s all I have for you.”

‘Yakushi Kabuto…’ He was almost certainly long gone, if he had disappeared when Noriko said he did. Unless he was a piss poor spy, which she already knew he wasn’t, she wouldn't find any more about him in the hospital’s files. The files that she’d memorized from Danzo’s office, on the other hand, might have something more worthwhile. She would have to work her way back through her memories of them in search of a file on Kabuto.

For now, it was time to go home.

She missed Kasumi, and the other kids.

~Hiruzen~

Shimura Danzo was dead.

The news had been broken to him almost as soon as he entered his office upon his return to Konoha, and Hiruzen wasn’t sure what to feel about it. On a purely surface level, he supposed he should have been sad. To a certain extent, he was.

Danzo was, or at least had once been, his friend. He wasn’t entirely sure that the same could ever have been said in reverse, whether Danzo had ever truly considered anyone a friend, but Hiruzen had at least once considered the now dead war hawk his friend.

It had been several years since Hiruzen saw Danzo in such a positive light, and his view of the other man had only darkened with time. He should have listened, all those years ago, when Kagami had warned him against giving their shared former teammate so much leeway. He should have listened, again, when Kagami’s granddaughter had brought him her suspicions of Root.

Time and time again, he had been warned of Danzo, and by the time that he realized those warnings were correct it had been far too late.

Only when Konoha could no longer afford to lose the threat that Root and its commander held had it become truly clear to him just how far his former friend had fallen.

And now that threat was gone, both to Konoha and to her enemies.

Hiruzen knew who had done the deed, of course. He had not needed to see the evidence his ANBU had gathered to be sure of it. The daughter of Kagami’s granddaughter had killed the Head of the Root Foundation, putting to rest the threat that Hiruzen had been warned of by those she was descended from and multiple others besides.

It had never truly been a question of if Danzo would die at Izumi’s hands for what he had done, but when. He had done his best to delay the inevitable, but Danzo’s death had still arrived sooner than he would have preferred.

His choice not to approve Izumi’s wish for revenge had bought less than a year, in the end. It might have been better to simply approve with so little time gained.

At least then he would have had more confidence in the girl’s loyalty.

Even as she leisurely rested in the chair across his desk from him while he pondered what she had done, he could think of so few reasons for the girl to be loyal to his village and so many reasons that she might betray it.

Hiruzen had ignored such warning signs in the past and it had not ended well, but it didn’t matter. That wasn’t what this meeting was about on the surface. “What would your recommendation be for your team, Lady Uchiha? Which would you say deserves promotion?”

He didn’t need to voice his suspicions towards her loyalty, he was certain that Izumi already knew on some level. She had already betrayed the village to a certain extent in killing Danzo, and he would be fully justified in having her executed if he believed such a thing was possible without massive risk. If doing so wouldn’t simply deprive the village of yet another of its strongest defenders, even if that defender seemed as likely to abandon the village as to protect it.

At the very least he didn’t believe he needed to worry about the girl attacking the village itself, and that was enough for the time being to avoid treating her like the threat he knew she could be.

Izumi seemed to examine him for several moments before she responded to his questions, perhaps weighing her words carefully or perhaps simply taking her time because he had kept her waiting before he spoke. The words that she eventually settled on were surprising, very different from what he would have expected. “None of them.”

His hands, briefly, twitched as if to tighten their clasped grip on each other, but he refrained from allowing them to do so. Instead, he unclasped his hands and pulled open a desk drawer, withdrawing his usual pipe and smoking leaves. Hiruzen stuffed the leaves into his pipe, carefully filling it just the right amount before lighting it with the same simple katan jutsu as always.

Just the act of smoking, especially in immediate response to her words, would doubtlessly reveal his irritation and anger towards the Uchiha across from him, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. Arguably justified or no, Izumi’s actions had placed those he was responsible for in increased danger and now she was taking enjoyment out of being even more difficult. It would be better to ease his frustration in some small way before he addressed her further.

If she wasn’t as valuable as she was, if Konoha’s position were more secure, he would have revealed her treachery on the spot and made an example of her. And he certainly still wanted to, he mused, but Konoha couldn’t afford such a loss when it was already so clearly weakened.

As he breathed in the smoke from his pipe, he recognized that he had thought much the same thing years earlier when he had learned of a failed assassination attempt on his person ordered by the very man that the girl he was so angry at now had put down. Sparing Danzo in that moment had been a mistake, he now knew, as it had only led to a weakening of the Leaf in the long run.

He could only hope that allowing Izumi to go unpunished would not have the same consequences. It was hard to believe that it wouldn’t when he could see the manic gleam in her eyes as she watched him think, reminding him so clearly of another one of his mistakes…

But this was not the aftermath of the Kyuubi Attack, when the other shinobi villages had still been weakened by war and Konoha had stood strong even with their losses. Orochimaru was gone, the other Sannin barely associated with the village, the Uchiha had been massacred, Danzo was dead, and Hiruzen was aging out of the great strength that had once made him the second God of Shinobi.

As far as S-Rank shinobi went, Konoha only officially had two that were still young and (from the outside at least) seemingly loyal to the village. There were others that, maybe, had the potential to one day grow into that kind of threat, but only Izumi and Kakashi were actually at that level.

So he simply couldn’t afford to lose one of the two that he had, even if trying to keep her around was a risk. He couldn’t even afford to alienate the unstable girl by giving her a lighter punishment, he had to sit on his hands and hope that she would grow out of the madness that seemed to lurk in her eyes. Hiruzen prayed that she would, both for the village’s sake and for the sake of the young girl that didn’t deserve to have become so damaged.

Hiruzen breathed out the smoke that his lungs were filled with, his tired eyes staring at the dangerous girl across from him, and asked plainly. “Is there any reason in particular that they shouldn’t?”

Izumi smiled, that terrible glint lingering in her eyes, and she responded in a way that revealed almost nothing and only further reminded him of his traitorous student. “I think it will be best to save that for later, don’t you? Perhaps at the next Clan Head meeting, or perhaps not.”

He sighed, closing his eyes tiredly before lifting his pipe and breathing in another lungful of smoke.

“Very well.” He breathed out, but when he opened his eyes Izumi was gone. A small pile of three papers rested on his desk in her place, the recommendation against promotion paperwork that he would have asked of her.

The recommendation was more of a formality than anything, it held no true weight even though it was generally respected to a certain degree.

If nearly any other jonin had placed such a recommendation against a chunin exam participant that had performed so admirably, much less a full team, he would have ignored it outright.

For now, he would at least wait to hear what she had to say.

~Itachi~

His death was now approaching.

With Shimura Danzo dead and gone, Izumi would turn her gaze towards Itachi and she would kill him.

Eventually.

Itachi would delay that inevitability for as long as he was able, but he would accept it when the time came. He had work to complete before he could allow himself to die, threats to eliminate, peace to secure for those that mattered.

Including Izumi.

The first step was as simple as donning a disguise and heading to a shady bar as a nondescript shinobi, a random nobody, and grabbing a drink.

To call the establishment he had chosen to visit shady was something of an understatement. The bar’s surface, the stools, the tables, and even the glasses the drinks were served in were old and worn from many years of use. Even the beer tasted horrible, but that might have been more due to Itachi’s limited amount of experience with the beverage.

It was also mostly a front. The establishment’s real purpose was to serve missing ninja and to rake in the profits that came from doing so. They did everything from providing missions to paying out bounties, all while taking a sizable cut for themselves of course.

As a result, nukenin of all stripes commonly decorated the bar’s tables and stools. It was exactly the kind of place that, when he had been a fresh ANBU years earlier, Itachi had been warned to avoid if he valued his life. One never knew how many nukenin might be in a place like this one after all, or what threat level those missing ninja might be.

Itachi reached into one of his pouches, withdrawing his hand from it in a slow, easily readable movement so as to avoid any particularly twitchy guests of the bar getting the wrong idea about what he was doing. When his hand returned to where his eye could see, it was holding a book with a simple black cover. He flipped it open to a specific page and turned it to face where the bartender would be when he returned.

Then he took another less than satisfying sip of his beer, waiting patiently.

When the bartender returned, a wiry older man that had many of the telltale signs of a former shinobi about him, he took one look at the book and raised an eyebrow. “Awfully up-front of you, and an… interesting choice of subjects.”

The drink he’d been sipping came to rest on the bar’s surface. “I’d like whatever you have on him.” He got a deadpan stare from the bartender at his words, but that was about what he had expected.

“We’re not in the business of handing out information here.” The older man picked up a leftover glass from one of the bar’s patrons that had already left, beginning the process of cleaning and polishing it.

“I was planning to trade. New information for old information, if that interests you.” Itachi eyed the practiced movements of the bartender, precise and without any wasted motion. He was a skilled man at what he did, and he didn’t believe that the man’s skills stopped at bartending.

And he seemed rather unimpressed as he eyed Itachi’s disguised appearance. “What makes you think you know anything that would surprise me?”

Rather than answer verbally, Itachi simply activated the sharingan in his remaining eye for a brief moment, just long enough for the older man to catch without making it obvious to everyone else in the establishment.

After a momentary look of surprise, the barkeep withdrew a simple pen and pulled Itachi’s book over to begin writing in it. Just the knowledge that Itachi was in the area was enough to qualify as ‘new information’, as Itachi had been careful not to advertise his presence in any way.

But that wasn’t the information he was there to share, and Itachi rested his hands on the bar as he leaned in slightly and spoke just loudly enough for the man to hear.

“Shimura Danzo is dead, killed by Uchiha Izumi.”

He leaned back again to rest comfortably in his stool, smiling as if he’d said nothing of real note in a clear contrast to the way the bartender had stiffened at his words.

Breaking the news the way he had chosen to was, in some ways, a gamble. The rumors it would cause would be taken skeptically at first, and it would need time to spread. If it was able to spread far enough, however, it would be given a certain amount of legitimacy once Danzo’s death became more clear.

Ideally, the rumor would come to be treated with enough legitimacy to give Izumi’s reputation among the other hidden villages teeth rather than the generally untested impression they currently had about her strength, but not enough legitimacy to drive his former friend out of Konoha.

Only time would tell if it had been the right move to make.

Chapter Text

~Izumi~

Her blade flashed forward, the tip piercing a man’s throat, continuing through his flesh and penetrating the C2 vertebrae of his spine. A careless withdrawal of the blade left the senseless body to fall to the ground where it would remain motionless until life left it.

Her hand carved through the air as she yanked her sword from the still living corpse, a swipe of her lightning scalpel decapitating the female operative that had been beside the male just as she began moving to respond to Izumi’s sudden appearance.

It was easy, pathetically so, to kill these nameless drones. The difference between an average ANBU operative and an S-ranked shinobi was nearly as large as the difference between a jonin and a genin.

One after another, they fell to her blade or her chakra coated hand, none of them putting up enough resistance to even make her presence known to her next victims.

She found herself wishing, not for the first time, that she still had her real right hand as blood sprayed onto her from a neck she had slashed open. The lightning scalpel flash fried the flesh of its targets with electricity as it cut, significantly reducing the blood that would spray from the wounds it created.

But she didn’t have her real right hand, and each brutally efficient slash of her sword added a new splash of red to Izumi and her surroundings.

As more and more and more fell at her hands, a grin slowly spread across her face beneath her mask, and she found herself caring less and less about the blood splatter as she continued. If anything, the blood of those she was wreaking her vengeance upon began to feel satisfying on her skin, soaking into and under her plain ANBU uniform.

Her left hand cut a woman’s legs out from under her and her false right hand gripped the kunoichi’s jaw to force her mouth shut and hold her up against the wall, muffling her brief scream of surprise and pain as the lightning coated scalpel slowly carved up what was left of her right leg. The electric current from the scalpel caused the operative’s muscles to spasm violently, her body no longer properly responding to her commands as her nerves fried.

Izumi’s eyes were wide beneath her mask, the pupil of her sharingan dilating and her heart racing as she took far too much pleasure from the pain she was inflicting. She bit her lip, and the sudden burst of her own pain as she bit too hard restored just enough sense to realize what she was doing.

She dropped the operative, her lightning scalpel finishing the job by decapitating the woman as she fell.

After a shaky breath, Izumi continued deeper into the underground complex.

Again and again, she lost herself in the blood of her enemies and took joy in their suffering. She killed Danzo and just kept going, another and another and another dying at her hand in pain or in an instant.

She didn’t even notice as the faceless masked assassins slowly changed, becoming distantly familiar dark haired faces. As the underground complex became familiar streets.

Her sword pierced Mikoto’s heart and her scalpel made Fugaku scream as she took her time with him, enjoying the pain of the man who had gone along with her clan’s thirst for blood.

Izumi tore through the members of the Uchiha Police Force with contemptible ease, the overconfident fools that had failed to do anything when the time came for them to defend their families, her family. Their deaths were painful and brutal.

The elderly civilian owners of the tea shop that she had sometimes visited died quickly and painlessly, and she hardly even felt anything as they fell.

A careless swipe of her blade carved open Sasuke’s neck, and he fell to the ground with a terribly familiar spray of blood. He wasn’t the first child that she had killed, and he wouldn’t be the last.

Her eyes met a familiar and pained pair of black eyes, as dark as her own. As she shot across the distance between them, it felt as though she were moving through molasses. Her tanto raised in a motion she hazily recognized as identical to the one she had seen Itachi perform as he’d rushed towards Sasuke in the moment before she’d intercepted him, but no one was there to do the same for Itachi as her blade neared his heart.

The tip of her sword touched skin and Izumi suddenly felt a hand come to rest on her shoulder, before suddenly she was somewhere else.

“It’s alright Zumi, just a nightmare.” The voice was deeper than she remembered, but not as deep as it should have grown to be. The quiet sound of water flowing down a stream added to the calming effect of the voice and the hand on her shoulder, and Izumi realized she was sitting atop the water of her spring.

It was safe here in this familiar place, she didn’t need to be all the twisted things that she had become.

She still was, but she could at least pretend otherwise.

“I don’t feel like it.” She said, staring lazily up at the maybe-ghost of Shisui from where she was splayed across the couch.

He raised a ghostly eyebrow at her. “Weren’t you the one who outright told the Hokage you were gonna speak at the next meeting?”

“Technically, I said I might speak at the next clan head meeting. I also said I might not, and look.” Here she paused and gestured to her chest, where little almost-two year old Kasumi was resting peacefully on top of her. “Would you really have me disturb a baby for those stuffy old has-beens?”

Shisui seemed distinctly unimpressed, but she could see the hint of amusement underneath his responsible facade. “You really want me to pretend you can’t escape a baby’s clutches without disturbing her? They’re probably going to be talking about Danzo, you know.”

She sighed, but not too deeply to avoid moving too much and disturbing Kasumi. “Fine. You’re no fun as a ghost, you know that? All ‘be responsible’ this and ‘take care of yourself’ that.”

Izumi raised her left hand in the half seal for a shadow clone, before immediately using the summoned clone in a substitution jutsu. She stretched idly as Shisui began responding, all the laying around having made her feel a little stiff.

“Believe me, I would love to be all fun and games if I could. You gotta get yourself cleaned up before the meeting too, yknow. You’re kind of a mess.”

She rolled her eyes as she walked towards the bathroom. “Yeah, okay dad. I’ll try and live up to your high standards.”

A few steps more and she was in front of her bathroom mirror, eyeing her dishevelled appearance with dissatisfaction. Her hair was a mess of brown tangles that was far longer than was practical, but was at least a clean mess from the shower she’d taken the previous night. Her dark eyes were accentuated by deep circles, and she was just slightly tanner than usual after her month in the desert.

At least that last one was a positive in her own personal opinion.

Beside her, Shisui still looked mildly exasperated from her earlier jab. He somehow lifted up the hairbrush from its place on the sink. “You want help with that bird’s nest you call hair?”

She’d woken up that morning slightly later than usual, four in the morning rather than three, to the strange sensation of the ghost’s hand resting comfortingly on her shoulder. It didn’t make any sense to her, his strangely almost-physical presence in the world shaking her belief that he must be a hallucination of some kind.

Still, it was one thing to be able to touch her. She was sure she could imagine that, so it wasn’t proof of anything. Moving a physical object like the hairbrush was another.

Izumi eyed the probably-ghost with a new interest. “Sure, if you can do that. I’ll take care of the circles I guess.”

She moved forward, her hands finding the color corrector and concealer to begin working on hiding her chronic exhaustion as she so often did for these more official occasions. As she worked she felt Shisui’s ghostly hands begin working the brush through her hair, starting near the ends to work out those tangles and moving up from there.

It felt comforting, if oddly domestic to have the help in taking care of herself. She’d been alone for so long without family or close friends to help her that it felt almost alien, but it was nice.

And maybe she could believe that Shisui was real.

It was either that or she was even crazier now than she’d thought, so… she’d prefer to believe that he was real.

‘Desperate, aren’t you Potter?’

Yes, if she were honest.

Izumi let out a yawn.

It was only when she noticed the varying looks she got from the other council members and the disbelieving stares from the two elders that she realized it was probably a very inappropriate time to yawn.

The council had started the meeting with discussion on Danzo’s death and the ways that the other villages might respond and what not, then moved into discussion on how they would honor his death and service to the village.

It was all deeply uninteresting to her of course, personally she’d love to honor Danzo’s passing by pissing on his grave. Or whatever passed for a grave after she’d burned the man’s corpse to ash and probably accidentally mixed what was left with the ashes of others.

Though that really only made it more satisfying honestly, no proper burial for that warmongering murderous piece of shit.

Homura, the male elder across the table from her, frowned deeply. “Is there something about the funeral ceremony of an elder that bores you, Miss Uchiha?”

Izumi ignored the casual disrespect of the elder and shrugged, she had just been rather disrespectful with her yawning herself after all. “It isn’t a topic that interests me much. Since you’re asking, however; I am curious as to why we are planning such an extensive ceremony for a man whose impact on Konoha has been largely negative in nature.”

Beside her, Shisui gave her a startled look. “Why did you say that? They’re going to have more reason to suspect you now.”

But she ignored him for now as the other elder stood from her seat, actually glaring across the table at Izumi for her words. “How dare you? Danzo had an honored seat on this council for many years and served Konoha faithfully for longer than you’ve been alive, girl.”

She didn’t bother to return the elder’s glare or stand from her chair, she simply gave Koharu a disinterested stare. “Yes, a seat that he was removed from after many years of his war-heavy politics serving to worsen relations with the other villages. It really shouldn’t need to be said, but Konoha is in the center of the continent, surrounded by the other great nations. It is far from in our best interest for our neighbors to have so much reason to dislike us.”

The elder looked like she wanted to argue the point, but before she could another voice spoke up with a mildly lazy drawl. “Be that as it may, Lady Uchiha, it might be best to avoid speaking quite so disrespectfully about a dead man in front of those who knew him.”

“Ah. Apologies Nara-san, I suppose I simply let my distaste for violent politics get the better of me.” She sent the man a grateful smile, appreciating the easy out that he was giving her.

It was well disguised, but the man’s returning look was calculating. Shikaku probably saw right through her, his notorious intelligence picking up the pieces and putting them where they belonged. The only piece he didn’t have was how exactly she could have pulled it off, but not every piece of a puzzle was needed to have a good idea of the picture it showed.

In the end, he simply nodded at her in response to her words before turning back to address the council as a whole. “Now, I do think we need to scale back the ceremony. Despite all of his contributions to the village, whether you think them good or bad, he was not a widely known figure to much of the general populace. Those who attend the ceremony will most likely be smaller in number than…”

She started tuning him out at that point, really not interested in the specifics of Danzo’s funeral.

Beside her, Shisui seemed to have settled down somewhat from his previous surprise and worry, a more thoughtful look on his face. “I think I get what you were trying to do there, it still has more risks than I’d like though.”

Izumi didn’t respond in any way, the location not exactly conducive to her ability to communicate with a person that no one else could see or hear. Some of the village’s most experienced shinobi were in the room after all.

Shisui was probably able to deduce the purpose behind her actions anyway, even if the yawn that had prompted them had been unintentional.

She was making it clear and open that she had disliked Danzo, something that would obviously be stupid to do if she had been the one that killed him. In doing so and linking her reasons to a dislike for war, she ironically made herself seem like a less plausible suspect simply because surely if she’d killed him she wouldn’t be openly talking badly about him.

Linking her reasons to disliking pro-war politics made herself seem soft in the militaristic council of Konoha, which itself made her seem less likely to go so far as to assassinate an elder. Her next choice of discussion would only make that softness seem more clear.

Hiruzen’s voice called her back to awareness. “-chiha, I believe you had a topic you wished to discuss with the council?”

She nodded. “Yes, Lord Hokage. I felt that, given two of my students’ status as prominent members of Konoha’s clans, it would be appropriate to discuss the results of their chunin exams and invite discussion on the topic. I have elected to recommend against the advancement of my students.”

The surprised and disapproving looks she got from many members of the council at that were unsurprising, as was the man who chose to speak in response to her decision.

“It is my understanding that your students performed admirably at the chunin exams, and that each of them were considered worthy of a promotion by the examiners in Suna. You would hold them back in spite of this, Lady Uchiha?” Hiashi’s words were spoken cooly and stabbingly, not so easily riled as he had been in their first mutual council meeting when she had been an unfamiliar face to him.

Her words were spoken with a similar calm, unphased by his accusation. “I believe that while my students are certainly capable enough shinobi in their own right, they lack the maturity required to adequately lead other shinobi in battlefield scenarios.”

Tsume was the next to speak from her place at the table. “Aren’t you younger than two of your students?”

The woman was mildly irritated, Izumi could tell, but there was no real heat to her words. The Inuzuka clan head generally seemed to like her, a silently shared comradery existing between them in the boredom that they both found in these overly stuffy meetings.

“I would argue that the promotions of myself and my own peers were largely hasty and ill-advised, and led to consequences that I’m sure none of us would like to repeat going forward. Academy graduation has an age limit these days as well, which I understand is for reasons similar to my own disapproval of early promotions.”

Some members of the council seemed mildly disturbed at her reference to Itachi, but Hiashi chose to take the opening she’d left in her words. “You would call even your own rank into question, Lady Uchiha? Should you not be demoted if, in fact, your promotions were hasty and ill-advised?”

Izumi shrugged with a smile, unbothered by the prospect of demotion. “If that is what the Hokage wishes to do, I have no issue with it. If being demoted is all that it takes to ensure that future generations are not given responsibilities they are not ready for, that seems like an easy price to pay.”

For the first time since discussion on this particular topic began, the Hokage chose to speak. 

“That will be unnecessary, Lady Uchiha. You have fully demonstrated your own capabilities in your service to the village, and such a mark on your record would be a poor reward. Now, am I right to assume that you wish to suggest a minimum promotion age for chunin and jonin?” The old man was looking at her differently than he had over the last year, the suspicion and wariness that she’d grown used to significantly lessened.

That made sense, she supposed. For all that she’d chosen the topic in order to make herself look soft, it was also one that she actually believed in and had incorporated into her strategy because of that conviction. Perhaps he believed that her ‘soft’ beliefs on such a subject was a sign that she wasn’t treading as dark a path as he’d suspected.

“You are correct to assume that, Lord Hokage.” She confirmed.

The Hokage nodded in understanding. “Very well, draft a proposal on the subject and it will be added to our topics for next month’s main council meeting.”

“And my students?” She raised an eyebrow at the old man, not planning on dropping the topic quite yet.

Hiruzen idly looked around the room. “Well, we are already in a full council meeting. I suppose we could put it to a vote.”

And so they did. The results were about what Izumi had expected when the old man suggested voting, with each of her students receiving over half of the council's approval.

It was unfortunate, but there was little she could do from the moment a vote had been suggested outside of withholding her own. Preventing their promotions after that point would only serve to draw the ire of at least two of Konoha’s clans even if she succeeded in finding a way to do so.

At least it had served as a way to push her agenda on promotion ages, if it helped prevent future shinobi from being promoted too young then it would be worth it.

She didn’t know if it would ever be good enough, but that was no reason not to try.

~Shisui~

Izumi had begun to scare him.

Not in the sense that he was scared of her, but more that he was scared for her. For all that she held strong in public for the most part, was still capable of holding together the image of the somewhat eccentric prodigy, it all fell apart the moment she was safely at home.

She struggled with working up the motivation to perform household tasks, using shadow clones to pick up the slack. Given what he knew about the mental strain the technique caused, he was certain that doing so was not helping with improving the exhaustion that visibly weighed on her shoulders.

He had to remind Izumi multiple times a week to take care of her hygiene, from brushing her teeth in the mornings (she usually did fine on that in the evenings) to taking showers before she was gross enough to feel like she had to.

Shisui sighed, the brush in his hand steadily moving in its path through Izumi’s hair. From what he’d been able to tell from the tangles the first time that he’d taken care of the task for her, it had been weeks at the bare minimum since she’d bothered to do it herself before he’d been unceremoniously brought back into her life.

Doing it for her seemed like the right thing to do, especially when he could see some of the tension visibly leaving her as he did so.

She’d taken far too much weight onto her shoulders since he died.

The brush made its way through the long brown hair, then again, and again. It was somewhat soothing to him too, he idly mused as he worked. The repeated motion of the brush was grounding, it made him feel present, and it felt good to help someone he cared about.

Izumi had told him, days earlier, about why she had ‘betrayed’ the village to the clan. How it had all been a mission, a plan meant to bring peace between the clan and the village. How she had regretted not just telling him in the first place, regardless of her orders.

It reminded him of his own regrets, felt on the edge of a cliff in the minutes before his death.

He’d let the village’s internal conflict drive him away from Izumi, let himself believe it was right to avoid her in the wake of her apparent betrayal. All it had really done was break the communication between them.

Maybe she would have told him what was going on if he hadn’t all but made sure that she couldn’t.

Instead he’d died trying to give Itachi a tool he could fix things with, and inadvertently given the other boy the tools he’d used to slaughter their clan.

It was still hard to believe that Itachi would ever do such a thing. A massacre just didn’t fit with what he knew of the former clan heir, unless Shisui’s death and the fallout of it had broken him? Even then, that didn’t make sense. The massacre had been done under orders, not because of a mental break.

Would Itachi attempt murder his entire clan just because he was ordered to? His own family? The girl he clearly (despite repeated denials on that particular subject) loved? 

Shisui didn’t believe so, and he had a pretty likely guess as to what had led the other boy to do it anyway. He even had a way to confirm it, though it would take time to find the specific memory involved among the mass of memories his sharingan had recorded in the nearly two years following his death.

He could only hope he wouldn’t find what he was looking for too late.

The brush ran through Izumi’s hair one last time, and then he set it on the low table in front of the couch. The girl’s chest rose and lowered at a slow, even pace. She’d fallen asleep while he was working on her hair for her, her head resting on the soft armrest of the couch.

It probably wasn’t the most ideal resting position, since she was propped up in such a way that allowed him access to most of her hair, but that was fine. She didn’t sleep nearly enough, a few extra hours in a mildly uncomfortable position would be better than nothing.

Izumi looked peaceful in sleep, so peaceful that he was almost able to fool himself into believing she was still the same as the little girl he’d grown up with.

But she wasn’t, in the same way that he wasn’t that little boy who hated himself for the death of his former best friend. They had grown and changed, for better and for worse.

And he knew that Izumi was currently planning on killing her own former best friend, that doing so might destroy her even if it was right to do so. She had cared for Itachi just as much as he had, probably more so if even half of what he’d guessed about the two of them was accurate.

For Izumi more than for Itachi, he had to find the answers.

~Itachi~

His sword flashed forward, piercing the shoulder of his target even as the plant man attempted to get out of the way. Not quite the middle of the chest as he’d been aiming for, but that was the point of aiming for center mass.

In this particular case, it didn’t matter where he hit his target so long as his strike landed.

“I-Itachi?! Madara will… Madara will kill you for this, Itachi.” Both halves of Zetsu blustered, even as his body began to melt into the watery blade of Itachi’s sword.

Itachi stared at the strange man dispassionately. “The rest of your existence will be spent in a spiritual world of drunken dreams. Madara will never know, and he will likely try to kill me regardless when the time comes.”

“This… The Totsuka Blade? No… M-mothe-” His words were cut off as Itachi sheathed his sword, permanently sealing away the spy that had impeded his movements over the last year.

The Sword of Totsuka was a weapon of legend, one of few that were said to predate even the legendary Sage of Six Paths. He hadn’t been sure of how much stock he should place in the ancient myths and stories he’d found in his clan’s archives, but he had been able to narrow down around where the blade was if it existed.

Finding the ancient shrine that housed the sword had taken longer, but he’d had little else to do between the light training he could do on the run and the occasional mission he took to keep up appearances with the Akatsuki.

He had originally planned to seal the weapon away into his Susanoo if he’d been able to find it, but with only one eye it simply wasn’t possible for him.

Instead the weapon hung from his belt in its physical form beneath his cloak, a sword handle sheathed inside of a jar of sake. It was a dangerous thing to carry, when he eventually died it would be a powerful weapon in the hands of whoever killed him.

It was a good thing that he expected to be killed by someone who he trusted to use the weapon properly.

For now, it was time to go.

The Land of Hot Springs no longer held the goal that he had come to it for. Staying longer would only mean an early death and fewer threats eliminated.

Chapter Text

~Sasuke~

The ceiling was familiar, in a way that he hadn’t expected it ever would be when he’d moved into a (by his standards) small apartment in the wake of what Itachi had done. It was close in a way that was now familiar as well, from his place on the upper bunk of his bunk bed.

He had expected the unfamiliarity to linger, and the overwhelming hurt that he felt from what had happened to weigh on him like an anchor forever.

And though the first one had disappeared, he had been mostly right about the second.

It hurt to remember, it still made it hard to get through the day sometimes. His own brother had killed his family and clan, had tried to kill him. That kind of thing didn’t just go away.

A messy head of blond hair popped up at the side of his bed, blue eyes looking at him over the rail of his bunk. He, too, was newly familiar in the same way that the ceiling was.

Seeing that he was awake, Naruto grinned. “Mornin, bastard.”

Sasuke sent him a halfhearted look of irritation. “Good morning, idiot.”

“We’re gonna be late, yknow?”

He made no attempt to move. “Late to what? It’s Sunday, we don’t have anything we need to do today.”

“That’s not true, we have training we need to do today!” Naruto let go of the railing to slam his fist into his open hand, shifting his leg back to catch himself on the ground now that his arms weren’t supporting his weight.

Sasuke stretched, trying in vain to make the laziness leave his body with the motion. It didn’t work, and he stared tiredly down from his place on the top bunk at Naruto’s expectant face. “I don’t feel like it.”

But, as he’d grown used to over the last few months or so, it wasn’t that easy. He was dragged out of his bunk, had clothes thrown at him until he gave in and changed from his pajamas into his training clothes, and then was grabbed by the forearm and dragged out of their shared apartment.

That was another thing he was newly accustomed to, living in Naruto’s apartment rather than his clan head’s. He’d moved in with the other boy around half a year earlier, when Izumi had all but demanded that he do so.

“Kasumi needs her own room,” and “You basically already share a room with Naruto anyway,” were the sorts of reasons the girl had given him, but he hadn’t missed the undercurrent of worry and something approaching panic that had been written all over her face. It had been hard to say no when she clearly felt so strongly about it, and he couldn’t say he really regretted agreeing to the move anymore.

Naruto was good at keeping him moving and helping him avoid sulking too much, though he’d never admit as much to the idiot.

~Hiruzen~

He sank heavily into the comfortable cushions of his armchair, his pipe already held in his hand and easily lifted to his lips to take a deep draw.

As his lungs filled with the comforting and familiar burning sensation of his favorite pipe leaf’s smoke, two of his oldest friends took their seats on the couches to his left and right. The couches and his armchair were situated around a low rectangular table, another armchair that now sat unoccupied was positioned across the table from himself.

Koharu set a book on the table, already opened to a specific page. He recognized it as Iwa’s bingo book from the layout of the pages, and he certainly recognized the girl that was pictured on the page the book was opened to. The picture was slightly outdated, but not meaningfully so. It was the same one that had been taken as part of a paperwork update when the page’s occupant had taken on the status of clan head.

Name: Uchiha Izumi

Birthdate: July 31, 46 SVE

Height: 5’2”

Weight: 110 lbs

Affiliation: Konohagakure

Rank: Jonin

Threat Level: S-

Bounty: 10,000,000 ryo

Ninjutsu: S-

Genjutsu: A-

Taijutsu: S-

Stealth: S

Sensory: A+

Strength: A-

Speed: S

Stamina: A+

Additional Skills

Kenjutsu: B+

Medical: B

Additional Information

The last remaining ‘Uchiha Prodigy’ of the current generation that is loyal to Konoha, and current Uchiha clan head. She is credited with driving her fellow prodigy, Uchiha Itachi, from Konohagakure and bringing an end to the Uchiha Massacre. Rumors also indicate that she may have been directly involved with the assassination of Shimura Danzo, though Konohagakure has made no comment on these allegations.

Engage with caution, all listed statistics are estimates and may not be entirely accurate.

‘Not entirely accurate’ was one way to put it. No shinobi on the lower end of S Rank could have accomplished what he had seen in the remnants of Root’s main base, especially not with how heated the fighting seemed to have been in the room that Danzo had died in. As a full stealth assassination, perhaps, but not if it came down to open combat the way it seemed to have.

The idea that a shinobi on the lower end of S Rank could have killed Danzo and then showed up the next morning across the continent looking right as rain was ridiculous, but Iwa clearly didn’t know as much about the incident as he did.

He closed his eyes, breathing out the smoke that had filled his lungs. When he opened them, Koharu was looking right at him.

“Is it true, Hiruzen?”

He didn’t respond for several seconds, considering his options. He had previously chosen not to tell the two elders the truth of what had happened to Danzo, instead choosing to keep them in the dark and allow them to come to their own conclusions.

If he had, he knew they would have demanded Izumi’s head. They were comfortable and confident in their own and Konohagakure’s position in the world, a sense of superiority that had been built through surviving and arguably winning three shinobi wars. They had lived through nearly sixty years of Konoha’s dominance, victory regardless of the odds against them.

It was easy to see why they would have such a sense of superiority, almost arrogance.

For all that Hiruzen had a similar faith in his village, he was the man who had, in the end, made the majority of the decisions that led to that dominance. He’d had to weigh the risks, make the decisions, see the rewards and consequences. It had all weighed more heavily in him than on the two elders, who only had to advise him.

He could think of half a dozen choices he’d made that could have resulted in his village’s destruction if he’d chosen the other option. He knew exactly how precarious their current position was, he could feel the eyes of the other Kages searching for weakness.

This time, he was afraid that they would find it.

Finally, he responded. “It is an S Rank secret, but yes. Uchiha Izumi killed Shimura Danzo on the 31st of July, 59 SVE.”

Koharu looked murderous, but it was a wordless anger. Homura was the one who actually spoke in response. “Why has she not been punished? She committed an act that should easily qualify as treason in killing Danzo.”

The actual reason, the ‘we can’t afford to lose her right now’ that had stayed his hand, would not serve as an acceptable answer. Unfortunately, he would have to deceive his old friends this one time, and he wasn’t sure how they would view him with what he planned to say instead.

“What Uchiha Izumi did does not qualify as an act of treason.” The even statement was not said in the voice of an old friend, but with the authoritative voice of their Hokage. It was a telling statement, one that would only leave one reasonable explanation for the two who were sitting with him.

That he had ordered the death of Shimura Danzo, and Uchiha Izumi had simply been the assassin chosen for the task.

“I see…” The words Koharu let out were quiet, heavy. The righteous anger that she had seemed to be full of only seconds earlier had drained out of her at his words as if it had never been there, replaced with a resigned sort of sadness.

If it were anyone else telling her what he had essentially told her, she would have stayed angry, perhaps even grown more full of rage. It was only the half century of time she’d spent under his leadership that stilled her temper.

Homura however, usually the more even tempered of the two, was eying him with a look on his face that clearly conveyed the betrayed emotions he was feeling. “Why, Hiruzen?”

The Hokage let out a deep, heavy sigh, before beginning the story he had decided on.

“It was for reasons that are not so different from what young Izumi expressed in the most recent full council meeting. Danzo had grown too power hungry, too thirsty for war, and too prone to acting outside the bounds of his own authority. The most glaring of these transgressions was his handling of the Uchiha situation, but it was far from the only incident.”

Homura’s jaw tightened, and he looked away.

“A warning wouldn’t have sufficed?” Koharu spoke again, though Hiruzen could tell it was more for Homura’s sake than for her own.

He took another draw from his pipe, before letting the smoke leave his lungs as he decided to return to the full truth. “Multiple warnings were given. If anything, I was perhaps too lenient with Danzo due to his status as my old friend. The first warning was after an assassination attempt on my person, the second after the Uchiha Incident.”

Koharu sighed. “I understand…”

Hiruzen chewed lightly on the end of his pipe, watching how Homura still refused to look in his direction. It hurt to lie to his old friends in this way, to take the weight of a personal loss onto his own shoulders, but it was the only way that would truly ensure that the two elders kept the ‘truth’ of Danzo’s death to themselves.

He set his pipe down on the table.

“Perhaps we should end this meeting and return to this topic at a later date.”

Homura and Koharu’s exit lacked the friendly pleasantries that he had grown used to over the decades.

~Hana~

She shifted the collar of her vest with her hands, trying to get used to the unfamiliar feeling of the garment’s weight on her shoulders.

A few yards away from her, sitting on the ground and doing her daily stretches, Ayame seemed much less uncomfortable with her new chunin vest than Hana was. That might have just been the familiarity of the routine the other girl was going through, however. Regardless of what the reason for the other girl’s ease was, she had changed significantly from the self-doubting girl that she’d been half a year earlier.

Ko was sitting to her left on the bench they were both waiting on, looking just as well put together as he always did. He was much less stiff than he’d been in the academy or when they’d first been put on a team together, but he still had a sort of dignified air about him.

As for herself, well… She just felt less trusting than she ever had before she’d been on her team, more suspicious of people. It was a good trait to have as a shinobi in some ways, but it wasn’t one that she ever would have expected to come so naturally to her.

They were gathered together for what would be their last meeting as an official team, waiting as they usually did for their jonin sensei’s arrival.

It was strange, thinking about the fact that they weren’t going to technically be teammates anymore. They would still probably have some missions together of course, they were still trained as a tracking team and had experience together, but it was a daunting prospect to imagine working with other teams.

Leading genin, even.

She wasn’t sure whether the three of them would ever work under Uchiha Izumi again. She’d heard from her mother about what the girl had done at the most recent clan head meeting, and wasn’t sure what to think of it at all.

It conflicted with what she’d come to believe about the younger girl, and she wasn’t sure how to interpret what she’d been told.

In the end, she’d decided to just reserve judgement for the time being. Hana wasn’t going to be under Izumi’s command anymore regardless of what the jonin had wanted, so there wasn’t much of a point in worrying over it one way or another.

Speaking of Izumi, Hana knew that she would be there soon. As always due to her clan’s inherent abilities, Hana smelled her before she saw her.

Only a couple moments after Hana herself noticed her, Ayame perked up from where she was on the ground, ending one of her stretches early as she looked in the direction that their soon-to-be former sensei was heading towards them from.

After a few seconds, Ayame’s eyes widened and her cheeks turned a rather fascinating shade of pink.

When Hana looked for herself to see what that reaction was all about, she felt her own eyes widen just slightly, though more from surprise than anything.

In all the time that Hana had known her, Uchiha Izumi had always maintained a somewhat professional and even outright dangerous appearance. All military uniforms and nonchalant lethality.

What was walking towards them was anything else, and if Hana didn’t already know better she might have mistaken the other girl for just another pretty civilian at a glance.

Uchiha Izumi was dressed in a casual lavender sundress and simple sandals, a leather messenger style bag hanging from one of her slim shoulders. The only indications of the danger that the girl posed were the defined and flexible muscles of the visible parts of her body, along with the unusual puppet prosthetic that replaced her right hand.

She hadn’t even bothered with the goggles she usually carried or her leaf headband.

Even her face, as naturally (deceptively) gentle and kind looking as it was, contributed to the nonthreatening look.

The relaxed gait and cheery wave as she approached them fit too well with the look Izumi had about her. The jonin gave a sort of half smile as she reached them. “Well, today’s the day I suppose. How do you all feel about it?”

Ko was the first of them to speak, partially because Hana let him and partially because Ayame still seemed a little off balance and was avoiding their sensei’s gaze.

“I feel fully prepared for my duties as a chunin. Thank you for all of your hard work in helping us to reach this level, Lady Uchiha.”

The words sounded genuine, and Ko looked as if he really meant them. She couldn’t disagree, really. For all the issues she had with the other girl, Uchiha Izumi’s ability to teach had never really been one of them.

Hana shrugged. “I agree with Ko, sensei. I’ll probably just be working in the hospital for the most part now, so I’m not too worried.”

The Uchiha clan head nodded at them. “You certainly have the skills required, at least.”

But what were they lacking that had made Izumi try to hold them back? Was it anything at all, or had she just wanted to keep them around for some other reason?

Their third teammate finally decided to speak, having recovered her composure. She still had a tinge of pink on her cheeks though.

“So we won’t be working with you at all anymore, sensei?”

The Uchiha smiled, something like fondness on her face. “Not in an official sense, no. I’m no longer your direct superior, though you are certainly welcome to seek me out if you need anything. Training tips, advice, whatever it is. I’ll help if you need it.”

Hana couldn’t say she had any plans of taking the young jonin up on that offer, but it was a good one for a civilian born girl like Ayame.

“And missions, sensei?” It was Ko speaking this time.

“I’ll be sure to request you three first for anything that requires a team of chunin, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one. The missions I usually get sent on, well, they’re not really suitable for your skillsets.”

It hadn’t often occurred to Hana before, but Uchiha Izumi wasn’t exactly the kind of kunoichi that suited a tracking team. She had skill as a sensory ninja, sure, but…

Mad laughter echoed through the forest, almost seeming to overwhelm and drown out the screams that filled Hana’s sensitive ears as her sensei slaughtered what could only be described as her victims with a brutal sort of ease.

Uchiha Izumi was not a tracker. Truthfully, Hana did not believe that her skillset reflected her supposed specialty as a medic either.

Izumi smiled again, her mostly harmless appearance betraying the danger that Hana knew lurked behind the jonin’s eyes. “Anyways, how about we grab lunch together to celebrate? You’re chunin now, all at the same time. It’s a big achievement for all of us, really.”

Hana couldn’t eat the barbecue they went to after that fast enough, honestly. She was looking forward to finally being able to avoid her former sensei, the sooner the better.

~Izumi~

Northeastern Fire Country was chilly this time of year in comparison to Konoha. Further north from the equator and higher in elevation was her guess.

Regardless, it made the tea she was drinking and the comfortable warmth of the cafe feel so much more satisfying. She’d only really been outside for a few minutes, but she’d still had goosebumps rising on her skin by the time she’d stepped inside.

Probably should have worn a dress with sleeves, maybe some warm leggings.

Next time.

Or after the cafe, maybe. She could always pop back to Konoha real quick and grab something more comfortable, the chakra cost of teleporting wouldn’t be that big of a deal for what she had planned.

Izumi popped one of the many sweets that littered her plate into her mouth, practically purring in delight as the flavor hit her tastebuds. ‘Itachi was so right about this place. Maybe I should get more recommendations before I kill him…’

She frowned at that thought, before shrugging it off and popping another sweet into her mouth.

“You’ve developed quite a sweet tooth, huh? You used to stop after a few.”

The ghost’s comment was met with a noncommittal shrug. She’d started indulging in sweets more after Shisui’s death, when she’d found a good source for the sweets that she remembered him getting her for her birthday once.

It had, at first, been a way to remember him. Now she was pretty sure she’d just developed a mild addiction, if it could be rightly called that.

It didn’t really seem like a thing she should tell him, knowing would probably just make him sad.

She took another long sip from her tea as the bell on the cafe’s door jingled to signal a new customer for the second time in the half hour since she'd been there. Izumi lazily scanned her eyes over the cafe’s new occupant, before calmly lowering her cup to rest on the table as she pretended she hadn’t noticed him.

A pale and handsome face, long dark hair, along with very recognizable features.

Beside her, Shisui was staring in open shock. Such was the advantage of not being visible to anyone else.

“Is that…?” It was exactly who Shisui thought it was, there was no question.

And he was walking right towards her, clearly indicating who he was here for.

The man sat down across from her, looking almost exactly as he did in the pictures of him that existed within history books. The only real difference was that she could see some slight wrinkles, little signs of aging that he hadn’t gone through the effort of hiding.

Izumi lifted her cup back to her lips, taking a long sip as if she was completely unphased by her visitor’s presence. She was not unphased. The man across from her waited patiently.

She lowered her cup back to the table. “Orochimaru.”

A smile crossed the nukenin’s face, as unnerving as the rest of him.

“Good afternoon, Izumi-chan.” His voice was sickeningly smooth, almost condescending.

“That isn’t something I’ve been called in quite a while.” She kept her tone even, preferring not to offend the dangerous criminal until she at least knew what he was there for. Beside her, Shisui was examining the Sannin closely, watching his every movement.

Konoha’s most infamous missing ninja rested his chin lazily on his fist, visibly relaxed in a way that Izumi was sure she wasn’t completely replicating under the circumstances. Her face had always given her away in that regard, far too expressive for her own good.

Slitted eyes stared at her in amusement. “You seem so uncomfortable. Is it so wrong for me to visit a former patient of mine?”

Shisui gave her a sharp look. “A former patient?” And she repeated his question aloud in the next second. She could remember no time in which she had met Orochimaru, much less had medical appointments with the man.

“Ah, I suppose you wouldn’t remember. You were so young, and with everything afterwards…” He looked almost understanding, it made her feel wary and slightly uncomfortable. “Well, the Kyuubi Attack was difficult for everyone in Konoha.”

Fire filled the entirety of her vision, vivid memories that both were and weren’t her own flooding into her mind at the Sannin’s mention of the Kyuubi even as she stared (hopefully) impassively at him. Orochimaru was a pretty man and the snake man in her dreams was horrifically ugly.

How had Izumi known who Orochimaru was at that point in her life? She hadn’t had any actual history lessons at that point, she hadn’t started at the academy yet.

The legs sticking out from under the fire and the crushed wall of earth, a nightmare.

Izumi frowned, trying to think back further, and she could dimly remember having seen the pale man before her at appointments that the very young Izumi had not really been paying attention to. She’d never truly thought about those memories, hadn’t considered them important during a time when she was still trying to find her place in the world.

Her brows furrowed. “You were my pediatric care doctor… Why?”

It didn’t make any sense, he was far too important to the village at the time to have any reason for taking such a relatively unimportant role. The only possible reason for him to have done so personally would be if he’d wanted to for some reason.

Orochimaru lifted his head from his fist, leaning against the backrest of his chair and smiling politely up at a waitress who had just arrived. The waitress seemed as though she wasn’t aware that she was serving an international criminal and outlaw, though whether that was acting or legitimate was difficult to tell. She simply set a tea cup on the table in front of Orochimaru, filled it up and refilled Izumi’s cup, and left with a smile to allow them to resume their conversation.

The Sannin took a sip of his tea, before finally deigning to ‘answer’ her question. “You were born during the Third Shinobi War, when resources were spread thin. Of those present in the village at the time, I was the most skilled in medical ninjutsu. Given your mother’s importance to certain parts of the village, it was decided that I would ensure she survived giving birth.”

She took a bite out of one of the sweets, allowing every bit of how unimpressed she was by his answer to show on her face. When she finished her bite, she set the sweet down.

“And choosing to provide medical care for me after that was, what, just a passing interest in a baby you helped in the birth of?” She lifted her tea cup to her lips, taking a larger drink of the nigh-perfectly brewed beverage this time.

He smiled. “Something like that. In the end, I’m sure we can agree that my ‘passing interest’ was warranted, wouldn’t you agree? You have, after all, grown into quite the exceptional young kunoichi.”

“Right, I’m sure that’s all there is to it.” As if, it couldn’t be that simple. Not with Orochimaru of all people. She didn’t even know him personally and she was sure of that much.

“Indeed, now I believe that’s enough about me. I’d much prefer to talk about you. In particular, I really do have to thank you. Danzo was, while useful for my own ends, a man that I am quite happy to see dead." The Sannin’s thanks seemed oddly genuine, almost candid in a way that felt wrong coming from him.

Izumi hummed noncommittally. “He certainly deserved his end.”

“He most certainly did. Many of Konoha’s wrongs can be traced back to him… and to the one who gave him the power he had.” His gaze was piercing, as if he was waiting to strike like the snake he was.

And there was some merit to what he was saying. So many of Danzo’s wrongs could be traced back to the authority and trust he had been given, time and time again, by the Hokage. There was enough separation there that she didn’t feel a burning desire to kill off Hiruzen, but she disliked him as much as she did for a reason. It was partially his inaction that had cost her everything she had lost in the Massacre.

Shisui was giving her a worried look, probably reading how she was feeling right off of her face. “He’s just trying to manipulate you, don’t let your guard down.”

She knew that, she really did, but… So much of what she disliked or hated about Konoha could be linked back to the Third Hokage’s decisions over his two tenures, nearly everything went through him.

Izumi frowned, finally deciding that she was done playing the snake’s game. “Do you have anything new to say to me, or are you just going to keep up the blatant manipulation tactics?”

Everything, from the beginning of the conversation, had been set up to shake or lower her guard so that he could manipulate her. Bringing up the Kyuubi Attack, revealing out of left field that he’d once been her doctor, bringing up Danzo. She was tired of it, it was time to make the Sannin get to the point or leave.

He smiled in return to her irritation. “I see I’ve worn out my welcome. Very well, I will simply tell you what I came to let you know, free of charge. Uchiha Itachi has left the area, he is no longer present within the Land of Hotsprings.”

She stared at him, unimpressed. “And he went where?”

Orochimaru looked as condescending as ever, as if he were simply above her. She was curious as to how deeply he believed that. “How bold of you to ask more of me, after you so rudely ended our conversation.”

Izumi smiled sweetly back at the dangerous man, but she knew as well as anyone who looked at her that the sweetness didn’t reach her dark eyes.

“I think you’ll tell me anyway, don’t you?”

The Snake Sannin seemed to consider her for several seconds, examining her in a way that she imagined he probably examined his many unethical experiments.

“No Izumi-chan, I don’t think I will. It will be more-”

His words were abruptly cut off, his eyes shifting as if to widen for only the barest fraction of a second before they glazed over as Izumi took advantage of the fatal mistake that the man had been making throughout their conversation.

The sound of a blade on stone rang through the air, echoing in the dark room.

Orochimaru had been meeting her eyes regularly during their conversation, a foolish mistake, and she was curious why he would make it. He was a former elite of Konoha, there was no way he wasn’t aware of the sharingan’s capabilities.

Her eyes followed the implement in her false hand, a copy of a blade that had seen many victims over the last year.

Perhaps he simply wasn’t aware of just how far her own skill with her eyes’ genjutsu went, or maybe he’d simply never faced anyone with a similar level of skill. It would make sense if that was the case; A skilled enough shinobi could escape from even sharingan genjutsu, though it would always be more difficult than genjutsu made using any other method.

She shifted her gaze from the blade to look upwards, her eyes finding a dark haired man, restrained in a manner identical to the dozens that had come before him.

A genjutsu made by someone on her level, however? Without a sharingan or similarly powerful method of genjutsu disruption, it may as well be impossible to escape without outside help.

The man stared down at her, more curious than anything. “You truly believe you can keep me trapped in this illusion?”

In a few deft motions; Izumi left her seat, lifted Orochimaru from his, and exited the tea shop faster than anyone else present could possibly react. She shivered as she ran out into the chilly air outside the tea shop, it really wasn’t a great day to be wearing a sundress.

“Less ‘believe’ than ‘know’, really. I suppose you don’t have much experience facing Uchiha genjutsu masters, given that your time at war was fought with them at your side rather than on the side of your enemies.” She slowly stood, twirling her blade between her fingers.

As she carried the Sannin to a place she wouldn’t have to worry about being interrupted, Izumi took the time to examine him closely with her sharingan. He was healthy from what she could tell, his body having aged as gracefully in health as it had in appearance. She could see some signs that he would soon begin to decline from his prime, but nothing that was worrying in any way.

He was looking at her with more interest now. “Your predecessors were much more close lipped when it came to the sharingan’s abilities.”

His chakra levels also seemed a good bit away from full, which was interesting for someone who had decided to pay a visit to a hostile S Rank kunoichi. She could also tell that he was attempting to disrupt the flow of his chakra, but she had little trouble countering his admittedly skillful resistance.

“There is little point in hiding what the sharingan is capable of when the rumors of its abilities already vary so wildly.” She was standing in front of him now, her eyes trailing across his form in search of the ideal place to start.

Beside her, Shisui was staring at her captive with some worry in his eye as he floated along at her pace. “Are you sure this was a good idea? Orochimaru isn’t a man who is used to losing, he’ll probably never let this go and he’s a very dangerous enemy to have.”

“I think he wants something from me regardless, so I didn’t see the point in being careful.”

There was really only one thing she could think of that might have caught the Sannin’s interest when she’d been so young, and she really hoped she was wrong.

Orochimaru stared down at her knowingly, unbothered by the situation. “Personally, I prefer to start with the fingers or toes. Or the tongue, if I’m not looking for answers. A simple application of healing ninjutsu is plenty to avoid the victim choking on their own blood.”

Izumi dropped into a forest clearing, a good distance away from the little border town.

She carefully laid the Sannin down against a tree. She stared down at him in surprise, not at all used to the kind of turn the conversation was taking in her mind. The last time someone had talked to her in a similar manner was…

“Never used an Unforgivable Curse before, have you, boy? You have to mean them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain, to enjoy it!” The mad woman’s words echoed in her mind, a voice from another life, a woman she had viewed as being nearly as evil as Voldemort himself. It would be easy for her to use the cruciatus curse now, she knew, as easy as breathing. In that way, she wasn’t much different from Bellatrix anymore.

In the illusion, she was staring up at him with much the same expression as what she had in the real world. A smile crossed the snake’s face, clearly entertained by her surprise. “You’re far from the first monster Konoha has created, Izumi-chan. You won’t be the last.”

Her gaze turned cold as she stared down at the man she’d trapped in her illusion, though she couldn’t say she truly disagreed with him. Still, if he wanted a monster…

Her eyes shifted down to look at her hands, wondering… With a simple flex of will, a familiar wand appeared in her hand to replace the knife she had been holding. Strangely, rather than the one that had chosen her in her previous life, the wand that had killed her manifested instead.

It wouldn’t mean anything to Orochimaru, she thought, but it meant something to her.

There would be time to unpack that later, however. For now, she lifted the wand towards Konoha’s most infamous traitor with a sick grin across her face.

“Crucio.”

The perfectly replicated effects of the strongest cruciatus Izumi had ever experienced tore through the Sannin’s nerves, and the man screamed in pain as his composure finally broke.

The sadistic grin that she was wearing in the illusion slowly spread across her real face, and she saw Shisui’s ghostly face pale further in worry out of the corner of her eye. “Izumi, what are you doing to him?”

“Just what he deserves.”

After several seconds, Izumi released the effects of the curse. “The mind can only take so much before it breaks, you know. Best to just tell me what I want to know.”

Orochimaru’s chakra attempted to disrupt itself in a new way, one that was familiar to her and easy to prevent. A shadow clone’s attempt to dispel itself. It wasn’t a surprise, but having it confirmed fully explained why he’d been so comfortable meeting with her.

Shisui clearly caught it too. “He’s definitely a clone, then. The real one will never stop hunting you after this, you’ll have to be careful.”

“He’ll be next on the list, then.”

“Don’t be overconfident, that’s part of what got me.”

As she stared down the heavily breathing, clearly frazzled nukenin, she knew her smile did not promise the same escape her words had. Clone or not, Orochimaru would suffer the heights of pain that her vivid imagination could provide in this illusion, and the real Orochimaru would have the distinct pleasure of receiving the full memories of the experience all at once.

When the man didn’t begin speaking, she pointed the wand back towards him.

“Crucio.”