Chapter Text
It is, as these things so often are, a deeply unremarkable winter morning — right up until the moment it becomes abundantly clear that it has not.
Kagami is crouched behind her wall of snow, tucked behind the big oak at the edge of the yard where Shisui, the overgrown weasel, won't see her until it is far too late for him to do anything about it. She is assembling her snowballs one by one. Pack the snow. Roll it round. Shove a stone into the middle. Occasionally two stones, if she feels the universe — or Shisui's smug face — requires a firmer nudge.
This is not, she wishes to make absolutely clear, cheating. This is tactics. There is a difference. A subtle one, perhaps, but a difference nonetheless.
Shisui is the sort of insufferable git who moves like the air itself apologises for getting in his way. A fact he is deeply aware of and annoyingly pleased with. He is also slippery, thinks he is hilarious (he isn't), and has already pelted her with three snowballs before breakfast, despite her having stated — clearly, out loud, using actual words — that she is cold, tired, and thoroughly uninterested in his nonsense.
He'd grinned at her like a delighted ferret and thrown another.
So, no. The stones aren't cheating. They are an equaliser. They are justice. They are the natural consequence of a world that refuses to take a hint.
She is inspecting the snowball in her mittens, making sure it is perfectly spherical — because lopsided ones fly like a genjutsed pigeon, and she has standards — when something happens. She blinks. And in the space between one heartbeat and the next she remembers being someone else entirely. Like nightmares in reverse, and far more disturbing, it slams into her all at once. Another whole life. Another whole person. Dumped into her skull like an enormous box tipped over without warning.
It's fragmented. A jumble of sensations and half-formed facts, none of which arrive with permission or order. Her hair used to be black. Her eyes were green, flecked with gold. Her brows were thin. Her physique had grown tall before the illness crept in silently. She used to have small, fragile hands, always tangled with IV lines, the nails short and chewed down.
Her hands now — she yanks off her mittens — are a child's: pudgy, reddening from the cold.
The hospital room. By the end, she'd known it better than her own bedroom. Especially the ceiling — that water stain in the top left corner that looked, she'd always thought, almost exactly like Australia. The relentless electronic beeping, stupid and indifferent to whether she was trying to sleep. The staff wandering in and out at random hours, cheerful and tired and sometimes both, asking the same questions as if they'd forgotten she'd already answered them. The scratch of hospital sheets against her arms, always a little too rough — until her dad brought her blanket. An iPad propped on a pillow, its screen glowing in the dark of a long, long night. Fanfiction, then manga, then fanfiction again, because the nights were very long and there was absolutely nothing else to do, and she was so profoundly, soul-deeply bored of being ill.
Boredom, it turns out, is worse than the pain. Pain at least feels like something. Boredom is just the world slowly forgetting you exist while you're still there to notice.
She is no longer there, because she has died.
That is the part that sits strange and heavy in her chest, like a rock that has no business being there. She died of blood cancer — slow and quiet and deeply unkind about the whole affair, on top of being so expensive that she thought about making it easier on her parents by leaping off the roof, except then there was the possibility of surviving and being crippled. The cold crept in from her fingers first, taking its time because it could. The last thing she saw was a dodgy fan translation of the final Naruto chapters — which were, in retrospect, a terrible thing to have as her final earthly experience — and the moon sitting in the window between the bare fingers of a tree outside. She'd thought something nasty about the ending midway through: the pacing, the unresolved character arcs. She'd been mid-sentence in her head, composing a truly scathing paragraph about the wasted potential of half the cast, when she realised the cold had reached her chest.
She thinks she probably always will have feelings about that ending. It's a grudge she intends to take to whatever afterlife comes next, and possibly the one after that. The universe could offer her enlightenment, reincarnation, oblivion, or a personal audience with whatever deity designed this whole ridiculous system, and her first question would still be about what exactly they had been thinking with Kaguya.
Kagami. Her name, she realises with a little dizzy jolt. It has always been her name, and also it hasn't, and both of those things are true at the same time, which makes her head feel like it is full of water and slowly tipping. Like trying to stand up on a boat that has already decided to capsize.
Kagami Uchiha. Named after her grandfather, the only Uchiha trained under the Second Hokage himself — Tobirama Senju, who is either a legend or a problem depending entirely on who you ask and whether they are related to someone he has had opinions about. (And Tobirama Senju, she knows now in a way she did not know five minutes ago, has had opinions about the Uchiha. Lots of them. None of them good.)
A headache begins to bloom behind her eyes, sharp and insistent, as the full weight of her situation finally crashes through the last of her denial. She is in the ninja village. The Village Hidden in the Leaves. The default main setting from the manga which — arguably, though not very arguably, because the evidence is fairly damning — every major catastrophe in the entire recorded history of the plot either originated within its walls or passed through them on its way to make someone else's life comprehensively miserable. Where children are sent to die in wars that adults started. Where the Will of Fire sounds lovely until you realise it's mostly an excuse to feed young bodies into the woodchipper of state interests and call it honour.
At least she's not in Kiri, she thinks hysterically. At least she won't be forced to murder her classmates for the privilege of graduating. Small mercies. Tiny, pathetic, probably-not-going-to-matter-in-the-long-run mercies.
But being an Uchiha in Konoha is a Kiri-level horror all on its own, and she knows it.
The snowball slips out of her hands. She kneels in the snow and presses her palm flat against her sternum and feels her heart going — beating, beating, beating — loud and unsteady and utterly refusing to be reasonable about any of this.
"Kagami-chan?"
She looks up. Shisui is standing a few feet away, snowball still in hand, wearing the expression of someone who had been lining up a very satisfying throw and has completely forgotten why. Her brother, something in her brain offers helpfully, as though she had asked. As though this information is remotely useful right now.
But then the familiarity of him sinks in. The curve of his grin. The way he stands with his weight on his back foot, ready to dodge. The stupid little cowlick that never lies flat no matter how much he complains about it. And suddenly he is no longer a background character from a manga she read in a hospital bed. He is not a plot point or a tragic backstory or a name on a wiki page.
He is Ni-san.
Ni-san, who lets her climb onto his back when he body-flickers through the trees, her arms locked around his neck and her laughter swallowed by the wind. Ni-san, who reads to her when she's too tired to hold a book herself, making different voices for every character even though he's terrible at it. Who picks flowers with her in the spring and tucks them behind her ears and tells her she looks ridiculous — but in a nice way, he always adds, like that makes it better.
Ni-san, who annoys her with his jokes and makes fun of her for being small and then turns around and plays with her hair when she can't sleep, fingers gentle and patient in the dark. Who kisses her eyelids sometimes, soft and quick, when she's pretending to be asleep and he knows she's pretending and they both pretend anyway. Who tosses her into the air just to watch her shriek, just to catch her again, just to feel her cling to him like he's the only solid thing in a spinning world.
Ni-san, who eats the portions of food she doesn't like without being asked, and fills her plate with her favourites from his own, like it's nothing, like it doesn't mean anything, like she won't remember every single time.
Suddenly, she loves him so much it hurts. It hurts so much, how deeply she loves him. How completely. How entirely unprepared she is for a world where he doesn't exist.
Then she is overwhelmed by a surge of tremendous, shapeless emotions. A grief so anticipatory and so total that it has no edges she can find, no boundary she can press against to understand its size. Underneath the grief, the fear. Underneath the fear, something that doesn't have a name yet but occupies the space between all of it like a low, sourceless sound, that feels — distantly, hysterically — like the universe looked at her life and decided it hadn't been sufficiently creative about being unkind.
The tears come. She doesn't stop them. She isn't sure she could if she tried.
"Kagami-chan!" The snowball drops from his hand. Whatever has been playful in his face vanishes instantly, replaced by something much younger and much more frightened, which is — she thinks blankly — entirely reasonable under the circumstances. He crosses to her in a breath and drops to his knees in the snow, hands coming up to hold her face, tilting it toward his with a careful, urgent gentleness.
He looks so young. She supposes, somewhere in the back of her flooding mind, that she does too.
Thirteen years old, maybe? Fourteen? Still a child by any reasonable measure, even if this world has never been reasonable about its children. His cheeks are still rounded with the last traces of boyhood. There's a small scratch on his jaw — probably from training, probably from pushing himself too hard, because that's what he does, that's always what he does. His breath clouds between them in the winter air.
"Kagami," he says, and his voice has dropped that teasing lilt entirely. It's just her name now, stripped bare. "Hey. Look at me. You're scaring me. What's wrong?"
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.
How do you tell your brother that you've watched him die? Not once — a dozen times, in a dozen different versions of this story. That you've read about his eyes being stolen and his body never found and the way the village will let him disappear like he never mattered at all. How do you say I love you in a way that means I know exactly how much time we might not have? How do you look into his dark, worried eyes, and find any words large enough to hold all of this?
"I'm cold," she whispers instead, which is true and stupid and nowhere near enough.
He stiffens. His dark eyes search her face for something. Injury. Attack. Enemy jutsu. Something he can fix. There is nothing he can fix.
Her lips wobble as she sniffs, and she bursts into laughter. It comes out mushy, weird, and unfunny.
With his bare hands, he captures her face. She can feel the agitated concern seeping into the corners of his countenance, but his palms are warm on her cold cheeks, his fingers firm. She attempts to explain, apologise, or tell him that he's the finest thing that has ever happened to her in either of her lives, but instead she begins to cry so much that her body trembles.
She shakes so much she can't breathe. Gasps for air like she's drowning, and maybe she is, maybe she's been drowning since she opened her eyes in this body and realised what she'd lost and what she'd gained and what is still coming for all of them.
For a brief moment, Shisui freezes. Then his arms are around her, one hand splaying flat against her back, the other hooking under her knees, and the world lurches sideways as he body-flickers them both straight into her room.
Gently, he places her on the bed. Shisui doesn't let go. He pulls the blankets up around her shoulders with one hand while the other stays pressed against her back, rubbing small circles, grounding her.
"Breathe," he says, and his voice is shaking too, just a little, which somehow makes it worse and better at the same time. "Come on, Kagami. Breathe with me. In — there you go — now out. Good. Again."
She follows his breathing because she doesn't know what else to do. Because he's here, solid and warm and alive, and she can feel his heartbeat where his chest presses against her shoulder.
"I'm sorry," she manages between sobs. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to — "
"Shh," he says. "Shh, shh, shh. I've got you. I've got you, Kagami. You're okay. You're okay."
She's not okay.
She's not okay, and she might never be okay again, because she knows things she was never supposed to know and loves people she was never supposed to love this much and the weight of it is crushing her.
But he's holding her. He's holding her, and his heart is beating under her ear, and he's warm — so warm, so alive — and for just this moment, that is enough. She grips the back of his shirt with both hands. Holds on. Dizzy, Kagami shuts her eyes.
When she eventually opens them, a pair of Sharingan — so red and bright and so beautiful — are peering down at her from Shisui's face. Oddly, her vision is crystal-clear. Sharper than it has any right to be. She can see the way the light catches on his irises, the way each lash frames his eyes, and the slight quiver in his pupils that reveals how uneasy he truly is.
"You awakened the Sharingan," he exclaims, looking simultaneously stunned, amazed, and concerned, as if someone has given him a gift he isn't sure he wants to accept.
"Sharingan," she mumbles, in disbelief.
Kagami fights the urge to throw up.
The Sharingan, as every wretched child in this place knows, awakens through emotional trauma. You lose something. You suffer something real and terrible and too large for words, and your eyes open in response — as though grief is merely a key, and the Sharingan a door that has simply been waiting.
She has lost an entire life. And then, scarcely a breath later, found herself teetering on the very edge of losing this one as well — with everything sweet and precious in it. Kagami supposes that ought to count for something.
The world through the Sharingan is so bright. Full of details she's never noticed before — the way dust motes catch the light, the weave of the blanket beneath her fingers, the subtle shift of air currents in the room. More colourful and more complex, and she can even count the shades of Shisui's own Sharingan, made of so many shades of red she didn't know existed, with its tomoe stone-still and watching.
"They're so beautiful," she says, breathless.
Shisui's eyebrows knit together. His mouth turns down at the corners. A wave of dizziness sends the whole room tilting sideways. Having the Sharingan, it turns out, costs something. Of course it does. Everything in this world costs something. She lets her head fall back onto the pillow, suddenly so hollow and weak she can scarcely keep her eyes open.
"Wait," Shisui says, his voice thickened with further worry. "I'll make you breakfast. You're reaching chakra exhaustion — you should not have used your chakra to throw snowballs." He sounds frustrated now, at himself and at her. "Turn it off. I'll make your breakfast, and don't move."
He doesn't walk off. He stands there, arms crossed, watching her with those beautiful red eyes, waiting. She realises, dimly, that he won't leave until she does what he says. That he'll stand there all morning if he has to, because that's who he is — someone who stays.
She closes her eyes. Focuses. Then, somehow, instinct wins out, and as a result, the Sharingan retreats. It happens as naturally as drawing a curtain across a window at dusk. The world goes soft again. Less bright. Less sharp. The dust motes disappear, and the chakra under Shisui's skin fades from view, and everything returns to normal.
Or what passes for normal, now.
"Good," Shisui says. He sounds relieved. "Stay there. Don't move. I mean it, Kagami."
He heads for the door. Pauses. Looks back at her — pathetic little bundle of blankets and tear tracks and red-rimmed eyes.
"We're going to talk about this," he says. "Later. When you've eaten. And when I've had time to — to work out what questions to ask."
He doesn't shut the door behind him. A measure, she thinks, to hear her if she calls.
The walls of her room are lilac. Pale and soft and faintly luminous in the thin winter light that falls through the curtains. The bed stands against the wall near the window, a dark wooden frame, and the bedding is light pink, slightly faded from washing, with an extra blanket folded at the foot — a darker pink, the colour having bled a little in the wash once, years ago, and never quite recovering.
A teddy bear sits against the pillow near her head. She picks it up and squeezes it, using the bear as a makeshift stress reliever. Old habits die hard. She puts the bear down and peels off her winter jacket, throwing it aside, then tugs off her shoes as well — only to realise, much to her annoyance, that she's left marks on the bedding. Dark little smudges where the melted snow from her shoes has soaked into the light pink fabric. Perfect. Just perfect.
A desk is tucked beneath the window, a small lamp at one end and a general accumulation of things at the other. On the low table beside the bed, crowded with the things she apparently keeps close while sleeping: a cup, a hair tie, a folded piece of paper whose contents she cannot for the life of her remember.
There is a photograph. Small, in a plain frame.
She picks it up without having decided to. There — she recognises now, with these new memories, or perhaps the old ones settling into place — is her grandmother. Shisui. And herself, perched on Shisui's shoulders with both hands twisted into his hair, gripping it less like she is holding on for balance and more like she has simply decided this is an acceptable thing to do and is waiting to see if anyone will object. Her grandmother is looking at the camera with an expression that has long since given up being surprised by anything. Shisui is grimacing, but badly — the grimace keeps sliding towards a grin, and losing.
Kagami can't look away from the two of them. Her heart is so full of love she isn't sure what to do with herself. The feeling swells and presses against the inside of her ribs like something far too large for its container, and staring at the photograph makes her quite sick with it — dizzy and overwhelmed and absolutely certain that she cannot bear to feel this much, and also cannot bear to stop.
She turns the photograph face down.
Her stomach gives another, louder growl.
She looks towards the open door. She can hear Shisui moving about in the kitchen — the clatter of pans, the hiss of something being reheated. Kagami takes a breath. Then another. Then she pushes herself off the bed — slowly, carefully, because the floor tilts rather unpleasantly beneath her feet — and makes her way to the bathroom at the end of the hall.
The bathroom is small and familiar. Blue tiles. A somewhat narrow mirror. A shelf with three toothbrushes in a cup — hers (purple), Shisui's (green). She pulls the stool over, climbs up, and catches her reflection in the glass.
And stops.
She stares at her own reflection.
She looks like Shisui. They have the same nose — small and slightly rounded at the tip. The same shape to their eyes, wide and long-lashed. His face is older, the angles of it just beginning to sharpen in that way faces do in the years before they settle, and his hair is dark and curly, cropped close at the sides. Hers is darker and looser, cut to just beneath her ears in a way that tends to do whatever it likes in cold weather, which is usually outward.
She is awestruck, feeling her hair. And then, before the surprise has even quite finished, she is pleased — a warm, quiet rush of it moving through her chest, quite unexpected. She has hair. She tugs at it, feels it between her fingers, plays with it. It is soft and slightly damp at the temples from the water, and it is hers, and she has hair.
The cancer had taken hers, in that first life, where an overly emotional Italian barber had shaved her head for her. She remembered having long hair before everything started falling apart — long enough to tie back, long enough to feel the weight of it when she moved. She had forgotten what it felt like to pull her own hair.
Kagami notes that she has three beauty marks. One below her left eye, sitting high on the cheekbone. Two more near her jaw on the right side, close enough together that one might at first mistake them for a smudge. Her eyelashes are too long — long enough to be slightly absurd, long enough to cast faint shadows on her cheeks when the light hits sideways. Her cheeks are round, still carrying that softness of a child's face. On the left side, a single dimple presses into the soft skin as she grimaces.
Then she turns the cold tap up fully and bends over the sink and holds her wrists under the water, letting the cold travel up her arms and into her chest where everything is too loud and too hot and altogether too much. She cups her hands and splashes her face — once, twice — and straightens up, water dripping from her chin.
She dries her face on the towel hanging by the mirror. She takes a breath, and another, hovering somewhere between panicking and thinking — the two states she has been occupying all morning, taking turns, neither one fully giving way to the other.
She glances at her arm, then pinches it. Hard. The pain is immediate and sharp and entirely real. Oh, bloody hell — it is real. The skin goes white and then red around her fingers. A small, bright bead of blood rises where her nail has caught.
"Oh," she says. And then, quieter, with great feeling: "Fuck."
She makes it to the toilet just in time to be sick. Mostly acid — her stomach has nothing else to offer — sharp and foul-tasting, burning the back of her throat on the way up. She retches until her eyes stream and her stomach cramps hard around nothing, until her whole middle aches with the effort of it, until her body finally accepts that it has made its point and there is nothing left to make it with. She sits back on her heels on the cold bathroom tiles, breathing through her mouth, forehead tipped forward against the heel of her hand.
Then she gets up, flushes, and goes back to the sink.
She rinses her mouth twice. The foul taste clings on anyway, stubborn and unpleasant and thoroughly uninterested in leaving. She straightens up and reaches for the toothbrush in the little cup beside the tap, and then stops. Looks at it. Makes a face.
It is — well, it is a toothbrush. Presumably her toothbrush, in the sense that it lives in her bathroom and nobody else uses it, and she has presumably been using it her whole life without incident. But she stands there and looks at it and cannot, in any meaningful sense, bring herself to put the thing in her mouth.
The feeling is difficult to explain. It isn't hers. Or it is, but not in the way that counts right now, not in the way that her hands understand. It belongs to a version of this morning that exists before the snow and the blink and all the rest of it, and the distance between that version and this one feels, in that moment, insurmountable.
She chucks it in the bin, deciding she will say she accidentally dropped it on the floor. Squeezes toothpaste onto her finger. Brushes her teeth that way — methodically, working around her molars with the focused determination of someone who has decided this is perfectly fine and is jolly well committing to that decision. She swishes water, spits, swishes again, and spits again, and the taste is finally, mostly, gone.
She makes her way back to her room, where she finds fresh socks in the drawer beside the bed and puts them on. By then, Shisui nudges the door open with his leg, a tray balanced in his hands — laden with food, egg and rice and smoked mackerel, and a great helping of tamagoyaki, because it is her favourite, and he is trying to be accommodating. He crosses the room without waiting to be invited, because he is Shisui, and sets the tray down on the desk, then sits on the edge of the bed beside her and presses the back of his hand gently against her forehead.
His hand is warm. She hadn't realised how cold her face still was until the warmth of it lands. Something in her chest moves — a slow, quiet flutter of sadness, shapeless and tired.
"How are you feeling?" he asks, quietly.
She considers the question with the seriousness it deserves.
"Like shit," she says into the pillow.
A pause. Then, soft with a hint of amusement: "Fine. Come on, Kagami-chan — sit up and eat something. We can talk after."
"Don't want to talk."
"Why not?"
"Just don't."
"Sooner or later, you're talking to someone. If not me, then Grandma."
"Pass."
"That's not really an option — "
"I said it's my choice." The words come out muffled into the pillow. She sounds childish, she knows, and she doesn't care. But something about that childish stubbornness seems to relax Shisui slightly. The tension leaves his shoulders like a held breath finally released. Like this petulant refusal is familiar ground.
"Not with this," he says, gentler now. His hand threads through her curls slowly. "Not with the Sharingan, Kagami-chan. That's not something we keep quiet about. The Sharingan is dangerous, and people want it. And you — " He pauses. She feels his gaze on her even with her face hidden in the pillow. "It doesn't just wake up on its own. Something triggers it."
She says nothing for a moment.
"I don't know what to tell you," she says at last. And then, because it's the truth and she's too tired to hold back: "I don't know what happened."
That's the honest answer. The only one she has.
She lifts herself up slowly, every movement heavy with lingering weight and the dull ache of chakra exhaustion, and then she blinks once and lets the Sharingan awaken. It feels like reaching inward for something warm and alive hidden behind her eyes, a thin burning thread of chakra that has always existed somewhere deep within her blood, waiting to be grasped. The moment she catches hold of it and allows it to unspool, the world changes.
Everything sharpens at once with almost frightening clarity. The grain of the wooden bed frame becomes severely distinct, every tiny groove and imperfection visible as though carved beneath a magnifying glass. She can make out the individual fibers woven into the blanket pooled around her lap, the loose strands fraying near the seam, the slight differences in colour between one thread and the next. Dust swirls lazily in the pale winter light spilling from the window, and she can see every particle hung in the air as if time itself has slowed down sufficiently for her to study them individually. Somehow, the room feels brighter. Hyper-focused. Precise. As if someone has reached into reality itself and increased the resolution until everything is too intricate to ignore.
She instinctively looks up at him. He is already observing her. His own Sharingan is active, three tomoe rotating slowly in each crimson eye. The way he wears it has an unsettlingly serene quality. Familiarity. Ease. These eyes belong to him in a way hers still do not belong to her. For him, the Sharingan is second nature, as effortless as breathing. For her, it still feels like touching something sacred and dangerous at the same time.
She stares for a second too long before speaking.
"That's cool," she says honestly. The words come out almost stupidly simple compared to the enormity of what she actually means, but she can't think of anything else to call it. Because it is cool. A small, reckless part of her wants to ask him to activate the Mangekyō.
Not for any practical reason. Not because she needs proof it exists. She already knows it does. But she wants to see it up close — to trace the pattern burned into those eyes, that unthinkable, warped geometry that belongs to him alone. Beautiful the way a storm is beautiful. Even thinking about it makes curiosity crawl restlessly beneath her skin.
Kotoamatsukami. The name alone feels heavy. Arguably the most powerful genjutsu in the entire history of the Uchiha clan, and it belongs to her brother. To this boy slouched at the edge of her bed, one hand tangled lazily in her hair as though he is harmless. As though he is ordinary.
The contradiction nearly makes her laugh.
Because those eyes of his can rewrite a human mind so perfectly that the victim never realises anything was changed at all — no struggle, no crack, not even the faintest whisper that something foreign has slipped into the deepest folds of them and curled up there like it always belonged. A person could walk away believing every altered thought was their own. Flawless control. Completely undetectable. Quiet enough to pass through the world without leaving fingerprints.
The possibilities of it are horrifying.
And maybe that is part of why she cannot stop thinking about it.
She watches the slow rotation of his tomoe and wonders what it must feel like to hold something like that inside yourself. Something powerful enough to reshape people without bloodshed, without noise, without anyone ever noticing the moment their freedom disappeared.
Then again, she thinks as his fingers continue absentmindedly combing through her hair, maybe that is what makes it frightening.
Unfortunately, as embarrassingly overpowered as Kotoamatsukami is on paper, it comes with limitations so absurd they render the whole parlor trick functionally worthless. You get one shot every several years. Maybe a decade. The timeline, like everything in that godforsaken manga, is a vague, hand-waved mess, and the translations only add more fog. The only reason Danzō could cheat the cooldown at all — if she chooses to believe the fan theories that have achieved the intellectual rigor of a religious cult — is because he turned his arm into a grotesque petri dish of Hashirama's cells, juicing himself on stolen power like a back-alley junkie.
At least, that's what the forums have decided. People have written doctoral theses on this nonsense.
The thought hits her so suddenly that her lungs seize. She inhales sharply.
Danzō. A cold spike drives through her chest. The future thief. The vulture who'll corner Shisui, gaslight him, and rob him of an eye that should have rotted in its socket before ending up in that fossil's. Her stomach does a violent pirouette. Because Danzō isn't some abstract future problem. He is here. Right now. Rotting somewhere inside this village.
Probably already keeping an eye on Shisui. Calculating with that patient, parasitic creepiness he calls strategy. The desire for that eye is likely already festering in him. Maybe it's been there for years. Who knows. He was Tobirama's student, after all. Whatever noble qualities that pedigree supposedly grants, it mostly seems to produce spectacular self-righteousness and an ethical floor that falls straight through to the basement as long as the "ends" sound good enough. The whole ideological tradition has a real gift for dressing up its ugliest choices in the cheap suit of necessity.
Shisui quickly straightens up, very intrigued and apprehensive. Inside her chest, Kagami's memories twist unpleasantly, old sadness and terror blending together to make her feel a little queasy. She forcefully swallows.
"What is it?" he demands.
The room suddenly feels too warm. Without a word, she grabs her chopsticks, stabs the nearest piece of mackerel, and jams it into her mouth. Chewing gives her something to do. "I just… feel like garbage."
The fish is perfectly smoked, fragrant with herbs, and she finds herself wolfing it down. The force of it makes Shisui pause his quiet investigating until she's cleaned every plate and washed it all down with water.
"Decent?" he asks.
"Acceptable," she says.
"Ungrateful." A pause. Then Shisui says, flat and certain: "You're not going to explain anything, are you."
"I will," she says. "Just — not this second. I need — " She waves a hand around her ear. "I need to find words that don't make me sound certifiable."
"Bit late for that."
"Fair point."
"Kagami."
"I'm all right."
"You're not."
"No," she says softly. "I'm not. But I will be." She holds his gaze. "I will be. I just need a little space."
"Is this about me?" he asks. "Should I get Obachan?"
"Is it too much to ask for five minutes of quiet in this house?"
"Yes," says Shisui, without an ounce of shame. "Absolutely."
"Well. Thanks for the meal — even though you ambushed me with snowballs on an empty stomach. I'm going to rest now. Close the door on your way out."
She turns her back to him and shoves her face into the pillow.
"You brought this on yourself," he murmurs. Then she hears his footsteps — and the shift into a sprint. "Obachan!"
Kagami is fine. Obviously. Their grandmother is currently taking her midday tea with her equally ancient friends, which means no one's about to walk in and catch her having a minor crisis. So really, everything is under control.
It is both strange and unsettling, how quickly she stops worrying about her previous life — the reasons for being here, the cosmic absurdity of the whole situation. She'd expected it to consume her. Expected days, weeks, of cycling through denial and grief and existential crisis like a hamster on a broken wheel. Instead, somewhere between the second bowl of rice and pretending to be asleep while Shisui hovers at the edge of her bed like an anxious, overgrown firefly, she is just... filing it away.
So what, some practical, exhausted part of her has concluded. It's a rebirth. It happens.
It is a well-documented phenomenon, actually. Extremely popular in Korean webtoons. The genre has practically built an industry on it — die in one world, wake up in another, navigate the consequences with varying degrees of grace. She read enough of them in the hospital, in those long empty hours between medications, that she feels reasonably qualified to handle the format.
The honest truth, though? She never particularly loved the shonen variant.
If she'd had any say in the matter — which she obviously didn't, but hypothetically — she would've picked something else. Something with a ballgown and a duke. Villainess rebirths are where it's at. Wake up as the story's designated bitch, change your destiny through the sheer force of being more interesting than the original plot anticipates. Enemies to lovers. Maybe a reverse harem assembled through a combination of charm and morally questionable scheming. She would've liked stealing someone's fiancé in a nineteenth-century pseudo-European setting, or marrying the brooding northern lord with the red eyes and the tragic backstory and the drafty ancestral manor. Eventually, reluctantly, falling in love over the course of several hundred chapters. Something with tea and jewels. Something with a reasonable expectation of not being murdered by a rogue S-rank ninja or a government conspiracy before thirty.
But no. She got Naruto. Lucky her.
Kagami squeezes the teddy bear, then lets go, then squeezes it again. There are neat little stitches where her grandmother has clearly sewn it back together after it got torn apart once. "What can I do?" she asks the stuffed thing. "You think any of this is real? Or am I just overdosed on medication, hallucinating my own tragic backstory? Maybe it's a genjutsu so deep I don't even know I'm dreaming."
The bear, predictably, has nothing useful to say. She hugs it, bites it, then hugs it again. Outside the door, Shisui is doing the thing — pacing, staring out the window like their grandmother might materialise out of sheer longing, or hovering because he wants to guilt-trap her into spilling her guts by asking if she unlocked the Sharingan because of him and that stupid snow fight. As if losing at a child's game is trauma material.
She half-considers saying yes. It would make a clean excuse: Oh, I got so frustrated I couldn't even hit you once that my legendary clan dojutsu just... activated. Almost reasonable, in a deeply stupid way. But that would mean painting a picture that she's the kind of person who gets that emotional over nothing, and she isn't sure she wants to be known for that. Not when she barely wants to be known at all.
Kagami has spent most of the day sorting through her double-exposed memories like a bad photocopy — laying them out, squinting at them, shoving them into some semblance of order. She is maybe half-convinced she can pull this off. Answer questions without imploding. Act weird and traumatised and blame the Sharingan for any odd behaviour, because hey, a fresh Sharingan awakening is a documented excuse for personality fractures, and she intends to milk that excuse dry.
She is still ironing out the details when her grandmother walks in. Sachiko Uchiha doesn't knock — which, Kagami thinks, must run in the family.
Her grandmother is a small woman, pared down by the slow erosion of age. Just the slightest thing. Nothing about her, at first glance, suggests formidable. Kagami has learned that this is entirely by design. Her hair falls in fine-spun silver, thick and glossy despite the years, with bangs cut straight across a brow. She wears it loose, tied at the back with a green ribbon. A gift from her grandfather. The same way she once wore the shrine maiden's white and red ribbons she had surrendered when she broke her vows.
Her face — narrow and delicate, with dimples she has generously handed down to them — holds a pair of keen, shrewd eyes the colour of obsidian, set deep above high cheekbones that time has only sharpened.
She periodically claims, with remarkable convenience, to be going deaf. Everyone in the clan privately suspects this is at least thirty percent theatre, and no one has yet caught her out definitively enough to say so to her face.
She was considered something of a conventional rebel in their clan. Which was to say: the first shrine maiden of the Uchiha since Konoha's founding to break her vows and marry. The scandal had been considerable — not because she had married poorly, but because she had married at all. The shrine maidens belonged to the shrine, the shrine to the ancestors, and the ancestors were a jealous host, unaccustomed to sharing what was theirs. And the juiciest bit, the one the gossips chewed on longest: she was ten years older than Kagami's own grandfather.
He'd pursued her relentlessly, leaving poems at the shrine gate, standing in the rain like a lovelorn fool, begging her to take tea with him, and once, memorably, setting his own sleeve ablaze to prove a point about devotion that no one present could rightly fathom. The elders called him a stain upon the blood. The shrine maidens called him a plague. Her grandmother said nothing at all, and that, perhaps, should have told them everything. So when, at last, she unbound her hair and descended from the shrine to the man who waited below with hope plain upon his face like a wound that would not close, no one could claim they had not seen it coming. And yet, somehow, they all were surprised.
Fortunately, the Naka Shrine still had two maidens left after she left. That's the only reason the ancestors didn't bother cursing the whole house — or so the story goes, and Sachiko never saw fit to correct it. Everyone now assumes she intends to train Kagami as a shrine maiden herself, a sort of penance for the vows she shattered. Kagami isn't sure how she feels about that. Rummaging through her memories, she has to admit she found the rites pretty entertaining. And it's a safe job. Respectable, even.
Her grandmother stares down at her as Kagami stubbornly buries her face in the pillow. Being a nonexistent character who probably died off-screen — since there's no way Itachi kills Shisui's baby sister or his own grandmother, unless he really is that slow. Then again, he did butcher his parents and treat his brother to a front-row seat of infinite psychological torture. So. Now that she thinks about it: she probably died too young to matter pre-massacre, or right in the middle of it. Either way, her half-chewed, bargain-bin foreknowledge is useless. It's all guesswork now. Will she die? Probably. Will they both die? Almost certainly.
"Don't waste my time, child," her grandmother says. Warm hugs have never really been her brand. She's shrewd, dry, randomly funny — when her jabs are aimed at other people. Not when Kagami's the target. Kagami drags the blanket down from her face.
"You have the Sharingan," Sachiko states.
No point dancing around it. "Yeah."
Her grandmother settles onto the bedside. "Show me."
Kagami does. Her grandmother activates her own in return, three tomoe staring down Kagami's lonely little one across the few feet between them.
"The Sharingan is our greatest blessing," Sachiko says. "And our heaviest chain. We Uchiha feel everything too much — our love is a fire, our hate is a flood. That has always been our blood. The Sharingan grows from that soil." She pauses. "That is also what makes it dangerous."
Kagami says nothing. She is watching her grandmother's face.
"It will trap everything," Sachiko continues. "Every face. Every moment. Every wound. Whatever you see with those eyes stays — here — " she touches her temple, fingertips cold, " — and here." Her hand presses against her heart. "Both. Forever. You will grow old, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, you will grow old like me. And everyone you lose will stay exactly as they were — laughing, crying, bleeding, begging you to save them. Frozen in time." Her breath catches. "They become ghosts that follow you into every room. And you become the one who outlived them. That is the cruelty of it." She blinks slowly. "I know someone who has carried her ghosts for decades. She still cannot say if seeing their faces is mercy or torment. She has stopped trying to figure it out." Her voice drops to nearly nothing. "There's no curse more twisted than love."
The room is very quiet. Outside, distantly, the sound of Shisui in the kitchen. The soft knock of a kettle being set down. His crows in the trees outside, cawing.
"It carries weight, this power," Sachiko says. "And risk. Not just because of what it does to you — though that's part of it." Her eyes, dark and steady and old, settle on Kagami's face with a weight that feels specific. Intentional. "You're young, Kagami. Very young. And there are people — inside this village and beyond — who won't accept a child awakening these eyes so early. People who will want to claim what lies behind them for themselves."
Kagami thinks, involuntarily: Danzō.
She keeps her face still.
"You understand what I'm telling you," Sachiko says. It isn't a question.
"Yes," Kagami says.
Sachiko looks at her one moment longer. Then she reaches out and tucks a curl back from Kagami's face, the gesture brief and unhurried, and withdraws her hand.
"Good," she says. "Now — what triggered it. What were you feeling when it emerged."
"Frustration," Kagami says.
Half the truth. Technically accurate.
"I was hungry," she continues, arranging her expression into something appropriately small and aggrieved, "and tired, and it was early, and I had told Shisui — clearly, loudly, with real words — not to throw snowballs at me, but he did it anyway. And when I tried to hit him back, he just vanished — " she pauses, letting the injustice of this hang in the air for a moment, " — but I'm not actually angry at him. Not really. It was just. Too much. For that time of morning."
Sachiko listens to all of this without expression. She seems taken aback.
"Interesting," she says. "I had my suspicions, but still. It isn't always fear or rage or hatred that awakens the Sharingan. You must find your brother extraordinarily irritating."
"He's annoying, I'll give him that." Kagami resigns herself to being known as someone who gets irritated easily. "I didn't manage to hit him even once. I have no idea why that made me so … wound up."
Her grandmother's expression turns thoughtful, grave even, like she's sniffing out the half-truths in Kagami's flimsy excuses. Between Kagami's version and Shisui's, though, the story holds up well enough. She chews on her doubts for a moment, then seems to spit them out. A grin breaks across her face, tired but warm. "This is something to celebrate, Kagami-chan. I'll have your brother buy a cake. Afterwards, we'll visit the shrine and offer incense to the ancestors."
Kagami perks up. "Wouldn't the best celebration be teaching me some cool tricks with it?"
Her grandmother sighs. "You begin at the Academy this spring," she says. "You'll learn there. The right way. From real teachers."
"A little head start never hurt anyone."
"No," Sachiko says. "Let yourself be a child for just a bit longer, Kagami-chan."
Kagami stares at the ceiling after her grandmother leaves.
Be a child a bit longer.
Right.
So she is going to have to figure things out herself, then. She's done it before — not in this life, not with this body, but she knows how to exist inside a cage. She spent the better part of a year with nothing but a busted internet connection, an iPad with a cracked screen, and four walls that never changed. Kagami knows how to make do with scraps.
So. What scraps does she have? Her useless, half-remembered foreknowledge, for starters — the narrative equivalent of reading the last page of a book that's been through a blender. She needs to sort through it carefully, map it out, find the places where she might actually change something. And the places where she can't. And the places she's too afraid to look at just yet. (Those get a sticky note that says "deal with later.")
Then the library — or whatever moldering collection of scrolls passes for one in this compound. The village is a functioning military machine; there are records somewhere. She'll find them. She'll read everything remotely useful and keep her mouth shut about it.
There's also Shisui, who is seventeen kinds of rule-bender when he feels like it and who has a documented weakness for her asking nicely, then less nicely, then just staring at him in silence until he caves. Her grandmother's word has never really been the final word where Shisui is concerned. It's more of a suggestion. A starting bid. A polite fiction they all pretend to believe. Thankfully, Kagami is a cute child with squishy red cheeks, curly hair, and big doe eyes that she is not above weaponising. Probably the other Uchiha will fold just as easily — show her techniques so she can copy them, or at least give her pointers. They also love a prodigy. Or a wannabe prodigy. Same difference, really.
She stretches both arms above her head, working the stiffness out of her joints, and walks to the desk. Peers outside at nothing in particular. She has a long list of things she needs to do, a long range of goals: get strong. Stop Shisui from dying — by Danzō of all people. Hell, expose that piece of shit. Ruin him. Stop her clan from being slaughtered like sheep.
She has a body with working joints. Hair she can yank when she's frustrated. A stomach that's half-empty but present and functional. A grandmother who sighs at her with genuine warmth underneath the exasperation. A brother who is going to help her whether he's decided to yet or not.
She wants to live.
Not survive — she's done that. She knows what that feels like. The gray narrow corridor of it. The way the world shrinks to just getting through the next hour, then the next. She wants to live. She wants to be in a body that runs when she tells it to. That eats food that actually tastes like something. That gets cold in the snow and complains about it and throws snowballs at her brother — with rocks in them. She wants to grow her hair long. She wants to be loud and healthy and take up too much space and be annoying about it and never apologise to anyone. She wants, for the first time in a long time that spans two lives and one very bad fan translation, to find out what happens next. Most people live their whole lives cornered in one spot of the world until they die. Kagami wants to see what's out there. Have her fill. And then have some more.
Rummaging through the desk, she finds a colouring book pushed to one side, half-finished, some lopsided flower, abandoned mid-crayon. She turns to a blank page near the back. And she writes.
Canon first. Everything she is reasonably confident about: events, names, the order of things, the approximate distances between now and disaster. Then fanon, because she has read enough of it, has spent enough long hospital nights in the company of people who have combed through every panel and every throwaway line and every background detail with the focused devotion of people who genuinely love something and want to understand it completely. Kishimoto is brilliant. He is also, she feels with affectionate exasperation, not always rigorous. He leaves gaps. He leaves threads. And his readers have spent years filling those gaps with something that is frequently more coherent than the source material.
She writes their contributions down too. The pages fill up, small, cramped, crawling into every margin and corner.
Then she activates the Sharingan. Reads it back once, committing every word to a memory that won't fade. And tears the page into pieces small enough to swallow or burn, dumps them in the bin. Then, after a moment's consideration — because paranoia is just good sense in this universe — she picks up the bin, takes it downstairs to the kitchen waste, and buries the folded scraps underneath everything else in it. For good measure.
Shisui is in the sitting room, cross-legged on the floor, a whetstone in one hand and a kunai in the other. The slow, rhythmic scrape of sharpening fills the quiet like a metronome counting down to something. He looks up when she comes downstairs and opens his mouth to say something. She walks past him without a word, slides the door open, and steps into the yard. The cold hits her immediately. The snow glares bright under the late afternoon light. She looks at it for a moment. Then she crouches down, packs a snowball with grim efficiency, stands up, and holds it behind her back like a weapon she isn't quite ready to deploy. Turns to face the house.
Shisui is in the doorway. Of course he is. Because he is Shisui and following her is apparently his primary hobby, right after being annoyingly talented at everything. He leans against the frame, kunai still dangling from his fingers. The whetstone has vanished somewhere. Kagami looks at him. He looks at her. She counts to three. And throws. The snowball crosses the yard in a clean, fast arc — genuinely well-aimed, she thinks with a flash of pride that lasts about half a second — and hits the exact spot where Shisui was standing, spattering white against the wooden frame of the door. Shisui is already four feet to the left, having moved in the time it takes the snowball to cross the yard. Which is to say, no time at all. The crows immediately start guffawing and tittering at her loudly.
He is grinning. The bastard.
"I'm going to hit you," she says flatly, "eventually."
"Sure," says Shisui.