Chapter Text
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Great news ! Shimura Danzô is dead !
But who could have killed him? Who could have given the final blow, when the man had been a missing-nin for years? Shimura Danzô is dead-!
No longer will the council be wary of the woods surrounding Konoha, no longer will they entertain the fear of finding the man returned with a vengeance. No longer will Sarutobi Hiruzen face the regret of his choices, no longer will he be reminded that Danzô is somewhere out there, somewhere beyond his reach. Shimura Danzô is dead.
The news spreads like poison over the village. Konoha is still in shock since Danzô had been declared missing-nin, since someone leaked the plans for the Uchiha massacre. Konoha is still in shock since Danzô was confronted, and revealed to have conspired for the seat of Hokage, revealed to have conspired for the annihilation of the largest clan of the village. Konoha is still in shock since the existence of Root was revealed to the civilians, since the experiments were shown under the harsh light of the sun, since the children were freed.
Someone leaked the plans. No one ever learned who. And in the shock of it all, no one thought to ask the right question- who profits?
It had taken seven Jōnin - amongst them Uchiha Itachu, the prodigy, and Hatake Kakashi, the Copy-Nin - to stand against Danzô then, and still, he had managed to escape. It had taken the best of them, and the few of ANBUS who did not belong to Root, and still Danzô had escaped with his life.
Who could have killed him?
Who could have been strong enough and why?
“It is something good,” the civilians gossip amongst themselves, unaware of the sheer power it must have taken for someone to win this fight. “He had a ticking bomb on his neck. It is good for the children, and for us, and nothing he didn’t deserve.”
“It is something awesome,” the children yell and shout among themselves, bright eyed and awed. It is something worth admiring-! There is someone out there who is strong, someone out there who avenged them, someone who’s a great ninja.
“It is something frightening,” the shinobi murmur and think, exchanging glances that speak of half relief and half worry. It serves their interest, but a strength like this can never be fully harnessed, and is soon enough as eager to turn against them than work for them.
“It is something relieving,” the council mutters. There will be no Danzô coming for their throat, not since Root has been debanded, and not since its leader is not anymore in the position to seek retribution.
It is something terrible," the Hokage thinks, grief for the man Danzō once was, relief he will deny himself, and underneath both, fear. Hiruzen has always mourned what-was more sharply than he sees what-is. It is an old flaw.
Someone from the what-was is counting on it.
Hiruzen is in his office when the bell drops, still slightly bewildered from the news of his friend’s death. But at which point does a friendship die? Can it survive if one clings to the memory of a ghost, can it survive if people can be fractioned by who they were at certain periods of time?
The thought is why his reflexes are slower when a shadow climbs through the window. It is why Sarutobi Hiruzen- the Professor, the God of Shinobi - can only look up as a familiar smile invades his line of vision.
“Good morning sensei,” Orochimaru says. “Did you enjoy my gift? I thought it would be easier to engage in a conversation, after that.”
For the first time in a very long time, the Professor has nothing to say.
Rookie of the year.
The title sounds fraudulent, even to Sasuke’s own ears. He receives it with the perfect politeness he is expected to show, and yet his smile rings hollow. What does the title mean, when Sasuke is not the first to bear it?
It’s not that he feels ungrateful for it, is not that he doesn’t respect it. It is that it had been expected of him: would have been more of a surprise had he failed - at that too - and the achievement leaves a bitter taste on his tongue. Worse is the thought that Itachi will be proud. There is a condescension in his brother's pride, though Itachi doesn't know it: that soft gleam he gets whenever Sasuke accomplishes something ordinary. Something Itachi did at half his age. It is the pride reserved for children, and Sasuke yearns for it as much as he hates it.
And what he hates even more, is the fact he hates it. It is stupid. He is stupid, as Naruto likes to say a lot, and very loud. Of course he doesn’t measure to Itachi, it is Itachi. No one measures to him. It is just the way things are, the same way the sky is blue, and Konoha is a shinobi village. Some truths are written beyond scrolls, edged in the very surface of the world.
It doesn’t help. It has never once helped.
Sasuke sighs and turns his hitai-ate between his fingers. The cloth is dark blue: a colour he picked himself. Hidden very deep within him there's something akin to satisfaction: the knowledge that this, at least, is different from Itachi's. His fingers had hovered over the black headband before he thought of his brother, and of how he wanted something that was his - not a pale copy.
Iruka-sensei - the title isn't appropriate anymore, technically - is lecturing them on the implications of becoming genin. He has been repeating the same idea in different words for close to thirty minutes now. The honour of Konoha rests on their shoulders. It means representing the village, or something.
Sasuke thinks it means representing his clan.
He slides a look at Shikamaru, who seems even less interested than he is. But then, there aren't many things that interest Shikamaru, who values napping over training. Perhaps that's how Sasuke would feel too, if Itachi gave him enough of his time for the academy's lessons to feel repetitive.
No. Sasuke stops the thought where it stands. That's unfair, and a little ungrateful. Itachi already gives me plenty of his time.
Still, he spends the remaining hour between turning the hitai-ate between his fingers and thinking that Itachi achieved this at seven. He is five years too late, and there is no exam in the world that lets you retake your childhood.
Iruka releases them, finally, with a last remark about conduct and a smile that wobbles at the edges- he is, Sasuke suspects, the only person in the room genuinely sad the lecture is over. And perhaps some small part of him is sad too, if only that Iruka was patient, and always watched Sasuke like there was no greater shadow behind him.
Outside, the academy courtyard has filled with parents. It's the same crowd as every graduation: mothers scanning for their children, fathers standing in small knots, comparing without appearing to compare. New genin peel away from the group one by one, swallowed into embraces and exclamations, hitai-ate tilted and admired and adjusted. He notices briefly how Shikamaru is pulled in an embrace while hiding a smile under one tiny “troublesome-!’, how Haruno Sakura has grown as pink as her hair as her mother adjusts the headband over her forehead, how Chōji disappears entirely into his father’s arms.
Naruto shoots past him down the steps, yelling something about ramen ‘’ttebayo at no one in particular. There is no one here waiting for him. He doesn't slow down to check.
Sasuke is still scanning the crowd for his mother when he notices the ripple instead: the way conversations dip, the way the knots of fathers loosen and turn. The crowd doesn't part for Itachi so much as rearrange itself around him, politely, the way water accommodates a stone. He is out of uniform, hands empty, utterly unremarkable except for the fact that no one within twenty meters is managing to look at anything else.
Somewhere behind Sasuke, a classmate whispers, "that's him," to a mother who has clearly already noticed.
Itachi's eyes find Sasuke's over the crowd, and he smiles- small, real, the smile very few people ever get- and raises one hand slightly, as though Sasuke could possibly have missed him.
"Otōto. Congratulations."
Sasuke's feet carry him forward before his heart can argue. He crosses the distance in seconds - nearly a shunshin, powered by eagerness alone - and throws himself into Itachi's arms.
"Aniki," he breathes.
Itachi's laughter is as subdued as his smiles, but Sasuke hears it. It rises over everything: the whispers, the stares, even the silence; this faint, brief sound that means Itachi is here. Neither their father nor their mother has come, but that's nothing. That's nothing, because Itachi found the time.
"I thought we might celebrate with dango," Itachi is saying, carefully extricating himself, the way he does everything: slow, assured. "I know a place you might like. They make that glaze we tried last time - do you remember? The one with milk."
Sasuke is set back on his feet at last. He tightens his grip on his hitai-ate and finds himself nodding along.
"Rookie of the year," Itachi continues, and there it is. The gleam. Pride lights his brother's eyes, and under it Sasuke's eagerness begins to sour. "Very impressive, Otōto."
But is it? Sasuke thinks.
The question follows him out of the courtyard.
So does everything else: the attention trails them down the street like a tide, heads turning in their wake, a pair of chūnin by the mission office going quiet as they pass. Itachi walks through it the way he always does, as though fame were a kind of weather: not to be acknowledged, merely dressed for. Sasuke walks half a step behind him and cannot decide, today, whether the eyes are on his brother or on the space beside him where he happens to be. He thinks, faintly, that he might be fooling himself.
The dango place is small, tucked between a bookshop and a shuttered tailor's, the kind of establishment that survives on regulars and stubbornness. The old woman behind the counter brightens when they duck under the curtain.
"The usual for you," she says to Itachi - not a question - and then, taking in Sasuke and the hitai-ate clutched in his hand, her face folds into a smile. "Oh. Oh. Today's the day, then?"
"Rookie of the year," Itachi says, before Sasuke can answer.
Her eyes brighten. "Of course he is !” She affirms it the way she might say the tea is hot, as though it could not conceivably have been otherwise, and disappears behind the counter calling for an extra skewer of the milk glaze, on the house, for the newest shinobi of Konoha.
They take the bench at the far end while they wait for the dango to be ready. Sasuke sets his hitai-ate on the wood between them, where it sits like a third guest. It must look a little stupid, he thinks, that he values something like this so much. For a sharp second, the excitement he felt at receiving it blossoms a little bud of shame.
Itachi’s eyes turn towards him. “Have you already seen who will be your team? Who will be your jōnin instructor?”
He puffs up his chest a bit at that. “Not yet,” Sasuke says. It is his chance at impressing his aniki. “But they say it is someone important. I heard Iruka talk about it.”
“Your former sensei?” Itachi frowns softly. “It is not very professional of him to be gossiping about your future instructor.”
Sasuke deflates. “He didn’t mean for me to hear. But he said it was someone important. Someone strong.”
“Otōto, everyone is strong in a shinobi village.”
Sasuke gives him a look. He really dislikes when Itachi does that, this little indulgence slipping through his words, as if Sasuke is no older than six and has said something cute. “Yes, obviously. But there are ranks, and there are instructors stronger than others. Imagine if I get someone like Shisui.” He hesitates, then commits, chin up: "Or even one of the Sannin."
"The Sannin do not take genin teams," Itachi says, kindly, which is worse. "Jiraiya-sama has not set foot in the village in years. Tsunade-sama refuses to. And I doubt Otōsan would allow the third one within a hundred meters of you."
He says it lightly, the way one cites the weather. Sasuke files the strangeness of that last sentence away, next to all the other things adults say around the edges of Orochimaru's name.
Sasuke pouts then, despite himself, and then makes a face - because he didn’t want to be so childish - but it has to merit of making Itachi smile.
“I am sure your instructor will be strong,” Itachi says then. He leans forward- and Sasuke isn’t quick enough to avoid the forehead poke. “He will need to, if he has you in his team.”
He squints at his brother. “Is it supposed to mean I am difficult?”
Itachi doesn’t answer that. Instead, he drums his fingers in the table in something that looks a lot like a code, and redirects his gaze towards the Dango shop. Warm smells are rolling out of the shop now, syrup and toasted rice, and Sasuke is no Inuzuka, but even he can tell the food is close.
“Otōsan couldn’t come?” Sasuke finally asks. He has spent whole minutes not asking it, and in the end it escapes anyway.
Itachi tries to hide his tiny wince but Sasuke had been expecting it too much not to spot it.
“Otōsan is very busy, Otōto. There is a new election incoming for the council of Konoha, and he intends to be a part of it. You know he would be here if he had the choice.”
But he has the choice, Sasuke wants to say. You’re busy too, but you’re here. Is he not here because it’s not as impressive as you? Is he not here because it was expected? Is he not here because you did it first, and better?
What he says is: “And Okāsan?”
This time Itachi manages to hide his wince. His voice is soft and assured, and yet it does not help in the slightest.
“You know Okāsan doesn't like coming near the Academy." And then he smiles, leaning back, reaching for lightness the way other shinobi reach for a weapon: "Why, are you that starved for praise? Has someone been inflating my little brother's ego?"
It is meant as teasing. Sasuke knows it is meant as teasing.
He looks down at his hitai-ate on the bench and says nothing at all.
The dango arrives before either of them finds anything to say: a girl not much older than Sasuke, balancing the tray with the excessive care of someone new to it, her grandmother supervising from the counter. Three skewers, glaze still warm, and the promised fourth set down in front of Sasuke with ceremony.
"For the newest shinobi of Konoha," the girl recites, pink-cheeked, clearly coached and clearly delighted about it.
And it is - for exactly the length of that sentence - a good day again. Sasuke is smiling. Itachi is reaching for a skewer. Sasuke is already deciding which one to reach for first, the way he always does here, because Itachi's face when he watches Sasuke eat them is worth it. The hitai-ate on the bench has gone back to being a trophy instead of a question. The newest shinobi of Konoha, perhaps not the youngest but at least, in their family, the newest.
The shadow crosses the curtain before the sound does.
Itachi is already turning- of course he is, he has never once been surprised in Sasuke's presence - when the ANBU lands at the entrance in a fold of displaced air. Cat mask. One knee down. The girl flinches backward into a table; her grandmother doesn't even look up from the counter. Itachi visits frequently enough for the scene to be familiar.
"Itachi-san. Hokage-sama requests you. Priority."
No forgive the intrusion. Whatever it is outranks courtesy.
Sasuke watches the change he has watched all his life and never gotten used to: his brother setting down the untouched skewer, and with it, somehow, the entire afternoon - the teasing, the milk glaze, the celebration - folded away in a second, like a summer shirt at the end of the season. What stands up from the bench wears Itachi's face and none of his softness.
"I have to go."
"I know," Sasuke says.
Itachi pauses. For a moment it seems there might be more: his hand lifts, and Sasuke half braces for the poke, wants it, hates that he wants it, but the hand only settles on Sasuke's shoulder, one brief press of weight, the way one shinobi acknowledges another.
"Congratulations, Otōto," he says. "Eat mine as well."
Then the curtain swings, the air folds shut, and both of them are gone.
Sasuke looks at the table. Four skewers, the glaze still steaming faintly in the afternoon light. The milk glaze - the one Itachi liked so much, last time.
I don't even like dango, Sasuke thinks.
He leaves all four on the table, untouched, and walks home.
Itachi's chair is empty, and it warrants more attention than Sasuke's hitai-ate.
Past his mother's congratulations, warm, real, accompanied by his favorite dinner, and over too fast , past his father's brief squeeze of his shoulder, the conversation has moved on to the elections. It is a well-worn subject in this house. It is the subject that pulls Otōsan through restless nights, that passes in glances between his parents over the rice, that gets discussed again, and again, in the low voice reserved for clan matters.
Sasuke has made his way through curiosity, and is now mainly bored of it. He doesn’t really like nor understand politics. He doesn’t understand how it can be more interesting than jutsu.
But for Fugaku, and the rest of the clan it would mean an Uchiha on the civilian council. A seat of power that is not the police force: not the clan's usual corner, patrolled and permitted. The opportunity is too good to pass up. Sasuke has heard the phrase so many times it has stopped sounding like words.
"Kacho believes the vote will be close," his father is saying. "The Hyūga will back Mitokado's man- that much is bought and paid for. But the Nara intend to abstain, and an abstention serves us as well as a vote. If the merchant families follow the Akimichi, and the Akimichi follow the Nara..." He turns his cup a quarter-turn on the table, the way he does when he is moving pieces in his head. "Twenty years, Mikoto. Twenty years they have kept us at the gates and called it an honor. The police force. As though a leash becomes a gift if you polish it."
"Fugaku."
"It was Danzō who argued loudest for it, did you know." He says the name the way the whole village says it now: a thing confirmed dead, and safe to despise in the open. Sasuke has never known the man, but he knows to hate him. "Keep the Uchiha where you can watch them. And they wonder that we want a seat at the table instead of a post at the door." His father's voice never rises. It never needs to. "This election, we take the seat. Then the Academy board. Then, in ten years, when the Sandaime finally sets down that hat…"
"Fugaku." Mikoto's voice stays mild. Her eyes flick, once, toward Sasuke. "Not tonight."
A pause. His father looks at him : actually looks, the way he looks at reports and Itachi, and something in his face adjusts. "Rookie of the year," Fugaku says, with a slow nod. "As expected of my son."
It is praise. Sasuke knows it is praise. Around the table, it even sounds like it, his mother smiling, the words themselves unimpeachable. As expected. He turns the phrase over the way he turned the hitai-ate, looking for the part of it that belongs to him and not to the name.
"Thank you, Otōsan."
"Your brother was summoned?" It isn't truly a question. Fugaku's gaze has already returned to the middle distance where clan business lives. "The timing is poor. I needed him tonight, when the Sannin comes."
The word drops into the meal like a stone into still water.
"The snake Sannin is coming here?" The question is out of Sasuke before he can weigh it. Curiosity nearly dripping out of him. Will he finally see who this man is, who makes them frown so? "Tonight?"
"Sasuke." His mother's voice, still mild. A warning wearing the same clothes as everything else she says.
"Orochimaru-san," and his father pronounces the honorific the way one handles a blade by the flat, "consults on the Root files. The investigation is under police jurisdiction, and his testimony is given here, after dark, where the whole village needn't watch him do it. He will come, he will speak, and he will leave." A pause, and then, without looking up: "You will keep to your room after dinner. Do you understand me, Sasuke? This is not a negotiation."
Sasuke looks down at his rice.
He has been told to keep away from things all his life, but he wasn’t a shinobi then. He doesn’t know why he thought it might change things. But he is a genin now: and Sasuke plans to show them that.
There is no version of tonight where he stays in his room.
Naruto wouldn't. That's the argument Sasuke settles on, stuffing his face with a mouthful of rice: Naruto would already be halfway out the window, loud about it, probably falling out of a tree by now — and there is no world in which Sasuke lets that usuratonkachi hold the upper hand in anything, including disobedience.
It's not a good argument. He makes up his mind anyway.
Otōsan has not given a time for the arrival of the snake Sannin. It leaves Sasuke forced to wait, pacing inside his room, standing every two minutes to try spot through the window if Otōsan’s office is lightened up. It isn’t, which means his guest hasn’t arrived.
The wait is a nightmare. Ugh.
Sasuke has laced his sandals around an hour ago, and then unmade them, and laced them again. He thought of waiting in the garden but he doesn’t want to be seen, thinks it’s better to get out as soon as the Sannin arrives, just in case Otōsan has people making sure he’s staying in his room.
So he goes to lie on top of the covers in his day clothes, hitai-ate on the pillow beside him, and listens to the house not-sleeping either. His mother's footsteps, moving things that don't need moving. Perhaps she’s nervous too.
He wonders, now, if it’s on purpose that Itachi has been called away. But surely not. Itachi is just called away pretty much all the time, because he’s in Anbu. That’s what Otōsan said, one time he thought Sasuke wasn’t there. It happened sometimes when he was younger, that Sasuke was not making any sound while drawing or colouring or playing, and Otōsan and Okāsan would forget he’s there and speak as if he wasn’t. He learned a great deal that way.
He is still, it occurs to him, learning things that way.
Suddenly, the light switches in Otōsan’s office. It throws away the shadows in Sasuke’s bedroom- and the excitement near explodes in his chest. He’s there.
Sasuke is out the window before the thought finishes.
The garden at night is a map he knows by heart- the blind seam between the storehouse and the old plum tree, the stretch of engawa that creaks and the stretch that doesn't, the angle where the office lights spill gold across the gravel and stop just short of the camellia bushes. He folds himself in behind them, low, breath managed the way the Academy taught and Itachi corrected, and looks.
Through the paper screen: his father's silhouette, seated, straight-backed even in shadow. A second shape near the wall that is probably Yashiro. A tea service being laid out by someone, for a guest the whole household despises, because form is form.
No third silhouette.
Sasuke waits. His heart is loud. The office door doesn't open; no one crosses the courtyard; the front gate, what he can see of it, stays shut. The light is on, the tea is out, his father is waiting - so where is…?
“You hold your breath when you are excited, Sasuke-kun.”
Sasuke twirls around–
The voice comes from behind him and slightly above, unhurried, conversational, as though resuming a discussion they'd paused. Sasuke's body does several things at once, none of them dignified: he is turned, kunai out, back against the camellias, before the sentence end– and there is a man leaning against the plum tree, where no one could be leaning, where no one could have arrived, because Sasuke was listening, Sasuke is always listening…!
He heard nothing. Rookie of the year, and he heard nothing at all.
The man who spoke is tall, pale in a way that the obscurity seems to accommodate rather than wash over. His hair is long and dark, the same way Okāsan’s is, and his eyes are not even looking at Sasuke’s face but at his feet.
Sasuke shuffles them, self-conscious.
“You held it for four seconds too much, when you thought someone would enter the office,” the man says. “It is the first thing which gave you away. Then was the crouch. Your feet are too wide away from each other, it makes you stumble. Only a half a second, but it makes sound. The approach is better - but I’d be disappointed if not, you know your own garden. But the main flaw remains the breathing. You went too quiet. And quiet, for anyone worth being a shinobi, can be very loud.”
It is not a scolding. It is a little too flat to be that- it is- Sasuke realizes, an assessment. He’d feel vaguely outraged if he wasn’t so taken aback.
"You're supposed to be in there," Sasuke says. He’s not an idiot and this can only be one person. His kunai has not lowered. "Otōsan is waiting."
"Fugaku-kun has been waiting for twenty minutes and will wait a while longer. It does him good." The yellow eyes lift from Sasuke's feet to his face at last, and being looked at by them is a distinct physical experience, like standing in a draft. "And I’d wager you are supposed to be in your room. Yet here we both are, on the wrong side of his instructions." A pause. "I won't tell if you won't."
"You know who I am," Sasuke manages.
"The whole village knows who you are. Rookie of the year." The Sannin says the title without any weight at all, and somehow that is a relief: the first time all day the words have arrived without a surname attached.
Sasuke doesn't know what to do with that, so he does nothing- which the man appears to find satisfactory.
Gravel sounds at the far end of the courtyard: a servant crossing toward the gate, lantern swinging. Orochimaru straightens off the plum tree the way water straightens, without any moment where the movement begins.
"They'll want their testimony now." He passes Sasuke close enough that the air stirs, unhurried to the last, and the voice arrives from just over his shoulder: "Work on the breathing, next time. You'll last twice as long unseen."
Then the garden holds only Sasuke, a kunai pointed at nothing; and, a moment later, across the courtyard, the office screen sliding open for a guest who appears to have arrived, perfectly, from the direction of the front gate.
This is better than the Dangos, Sasuke thinks. He crosses back to his window the long way, past the patrol's blind corner, and at the sill, just once, just to check, he works on his breath the whole climb up.
It works.
He goes back inside before anyone notices. He does not, for a very long time, sleep.