Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She is given flesh much in the way everyone is. Without being asked if she wanted it, covered in blood and sobbing. 

Her numb fingers press against the slick wooden floor, her body so heavy and her shoulder uncomfortably pressed into the ground by her weight. There is pitch black darkness around her, lit only by the moonlight trailing through the window. She gasps for air, feeling iron hot pain lancing along her throat. 

She scrabbles her hand up to her panging throat, something dark covering her fingers that looks too clear in the darkness. She blinks away tears, feeling her neck. 

It’s wet and warm, too warm. She can feel the edges of a slice there, before her rushing mind catches up and she presses firmly down on it. There’s pain, but she sluggishly moves past it. Better to be in pain than bleed out. And— god. Please. Please, why is there so much blood? 

She takes a shuddering long breath past her gasping sobs, trying to tell if there’s blood coming through the cut and down to her lungs. It feels empty, and her cut doesn’t suck at her hand either, like a hole would. 

What is happening?

She grunts, pulling her left arm out from under her and pressing her free hand flat along the bloody floor, pushing herself up to a sitting position. The small act feels insurmountable, her arm shaking with exertion. Something slit her throat. Something slit her throat and it may still be here, in her house—

Her house? This isn’t her house.

She looks around, eyes stinging with tears. She’s in the living room, her mother’s little paintings on the walls and the kitchen off to the left. The door is open, through the hallway. Why is the door open? Kaa-san hates leaving it open. Kaa-san told Masuyo she’d—

This isn’t her house. Her name is not Masuyo. 

Masuyo looks to her left, towards the coffee table by the couch. On the ground, she sees a socked foot. She follows the foot up and behind her, straining her back and her neck. She sees a kimono clad leg, then a torso, then—

Masuyo’s mother is staring at the ceiling, eyes open and unseeing. Blood seeps lazily from her pale neck and down her throat, staining the embroidered uchiwa at her chest. Laying beside her is her little brother, Masao. He has rounded cheeks, and his mouth is parted just so. His eyes are shut, as if he’s sleeping. 

He is not sleeping. 

Uchiha, she thinks as she looks back slowly at the Uchiwa on her mother’s chest. Not her mother. Her mother is alive, tan skinned and would never be wearing a kimono. She has no brothers. Her name is—

Uchiha Masuyo.

“What the fuck,” she says in a voice too high, and too ragged to be her own. 

Uchiha. Uchiha. Uchiha. Her mind repeats the name like a chant. Her name is Uchiha. She is dead. Not dead. Itachi—

Pain spikes from her throat, and she carefully loosens her fingers over her cut before she makes it worse. Her entire body is numbly aching. It must be the bloodloss.

The massacre. This is the massacre. Itachi is killing the Uchiha clan, and she’s one of them for some fucking reason. She can remember playing with Masao, and when she turns she can see an overturned shoji board on the coffee table, pieces scattered along the floor. Itachi slit her little brother’s throat.

Except, she didn’t do those things, did she? She’s not Masuyo. She had been at her real home, reading. 

Her throat. She needs to worry about her throat. Semantics don’t matter right now. Whatever is happening, she feels very alive and very much like she’s about to bleed out. 

Masuyo shuffles on her knees to the coffee table, ignoring her mother’s foot as she passes it and ignoring the way a shoji piece slides away when she knocks into it. With a heaving breath she grasps the corner of the table and pushes herself up shakily. 

She sways, enough to where she has to catch herself before she falls, but she stands. 

Her throat. She needs something to hold over her throat. 

She looks towards the kitchen and begins to walk, mind set on one of her mother’s rags. She notices she’s shorter than she should be, and that her body is shaped differently. Her hips are skinny and her feet seem smaller. 

She grabs a rag from the drawer her mother keeps them in, a pale one with flowers around the sides. She presses it to her throat. 

Outside the kitchen window she can see three bodies laid out on the street. Her neighbors, she thinks. The happy grocer couple and their daughter. 

She looks away.

Masuyo leans her side heavily against the kitchen counter, wondering if Itachi will come back to kill her. Or Obito. Obito had been involved, hadn’t he? She can’t remember. 

Should she get help? Should she hide? Will Danzo have her killed when they find her anyways? 

Sasuke is probably stuck in a genjutsu right now. Did they find him soon after the massacre? Is Itachi still there with him?

Masuyo thinks she may have better chances of living if she’s found with him, at least. And if she doesn’t, she’d rather not die surrounded by the dead. If Itachi cuts her down when she steps out the door, well. This isn’t her body anyways, is it? Maybe she’ll wake up.

Masuyo shuffles out of the kitchen, keeping her eyes away from her— from the bodies as she goes through the open front door. 

The air is still in the Uchiha compound, the smell of blood half as strong out in the open as it was in her house. The clan head’s house is nearby, down the street. Kaa-san was always proud of how closely they were related to them, her and Fugaku-sama sharing the same grandfather. 

She keeps her eyes straight ahead as she walks, ignoring the open doors and the few scattered bodies. Ignores the chance that doing this will bring her face to face with Itachi. She is nothing but a pair of legs, and legs walk. So she walks. 

Her eyes burn, and she blinks, feeling more tears fall. Sasuke is in that big house, she thinks, eyes only on the open door. The open door seems to be an indicator that Itachi has already been there, and the compound is so silent she’s sure she’d hear if he were arguing with his brother. 

Masuyo had always liked Itachi, Izumi always talked about him being so kind. Why would he do this? Why did he—

That’s not her thought. She stamps it down before it can take hold. This isn’t her body. Fuck. 

She presses the rag to her throat more firmly. Maybe the real Masuyo will wake up alive instead of her, maybe all she’s meant to do here is keep this stupid body alive until the ANBU find her. 

Even in whatever fugue state she’s in, she doubts that. 

Masuyo climbs the steps of the clan head’s house with weak, dirty-socked feet, and hopes for it anyways. 

—

Hound steps through the door of Itachi’s home and wonders, for a moment, if Itachi truly could be capable of this kind of depravity. Could he kill his own parents? His own brother? The rest of his clan, perhaps, but his brother?

He feels separate from his body. That’s the practical thing in missions like this. 

“Itachi’s chakra isn’t within the compound,” Panther says quietly just behind him. “The only two signatures are here.”

Hound follows the smell of blood, tanto drawn. The house is in pristine condition, nothing overturned or moved to show struggle. No signs of chakra usage as he passes the living room and trails through the sliding door at the back of the room. A courtyard of well manicured plants. Still no signs of battle.

Itachi’s parents were jonin. Mikoto-san had been in ANBU when Kakashi joined the ranks. Did they give in? Did he kill them while they were asleep?

He goes left, following his nose and the quiet sound of breathing. 

He stops before a half opened door, tanto at the ready. He peers into the room with a slight turn of his head. 

A training dojo lit only by a window on one side. Two bodies. A swift sweep identifies them as Uchiha Fugako and Mikoto. Kushina would have— Hound cuts the thought off. He looks at the back wall.

A girl clutches a bloodied rag to her throat, staring red eyed at Hound. Uchiha Sasuke lays with his head on her lap. Unconscious and breathing. Not bloodied compared to the girl. 

“Are you here to kill us?” the girl asks in a quiet croak. She looks genin aged, and with a slight step forward he can see calluses on her hand indicative of weapon training. No headband, no gear. She’s in pajamas. 

“Did the person who attacked you look like us?” Kakashi asks. He wants her to say no. He wants for the signs of Itachi’s techniques and chakra to have been a coincidence. He hopes he wouldn’t have worn his ANBU armor if he had done this. 

“Uchiha Itachi did this,” the girl replies dully, sharingan eyes spinning slowly. They don’t look like the typical kind he’s seen. A more advanced stage? “And he wore armor just like yours, with a mask to the side of his head, like the one on your face.”

“Were you here when he killed the clan head?” Hound continues. Panther, Yugao, makes a slight movement. Her hand is hovering over her medical supplies. She likely wants him to stop asking questions so she can make sure the genin doesn’t bleed out.

“No. I woke up after he cut my throat, and then I tried to find out if anyone lived. I found Sasuke-kun and—” her voice breaks, eyes glancing at the clan head and his wife, before back at him. Hound wonders if she knows she has her sharingan on. She’ll remember all of this for the rest of her life. 

He’s going to remember all of this for the rest of his life.

Hound sheaths his tanto and signs “Go ahead” towards Yugao. If she could sigh, he knows she would. He steps to the side so she can enter the room, palms out. 

“We aren’t going to hurt you, Uchiha-chan. We need to take you and Sasuke-kun to the hospital. Does your throat hurt?” 

Hound listens with half an ear as Yugao coaxes the genin, getting close enough to lift the rag from her throat. The cut there looks deep enough to be fatal, enough so that he’s surprised the girl is alive. 

“Hound, take her, I’ll take Sasuke-kun,” Yugao says, tone calm even as she presses the rag back to the girl’s throat with swiftness. 

He is the faster one when it comes to shunshin. Hound follows the order quickly, even though he’s the one who should be giving orders. A good taicho knows when to listen. 

“Ah. I am going to die, aren’t I?” the genin mutters to herself as he takes her into his arms. Her hand stays firm on the rag. “I don’t want Sasuke to be alone.”

Hound doesn’t reply, hoping she doesn’t throw up as he shunshin’s out of the house and onto the roof. She whimpers through the next few bursts of speed, Hound landing only for seconds on the next few rooftops before he lands at the ANBU entrance of the hospital. 

“What’s your name?” Hound asks, realizing he should have done that earlier. 

“Uchiha Masuyo,” the genin, Masuyo, says after a moment. “Genin of team Tsuyoshi. They’re all— my teammates were Uchiha.”

Hound nods and steps through the doors of the hospital. He’s swarmed almost immediately by medic nin, as per usual. Usually he’s the one they’re prodding at, though. 

“Hound, report?” the charge for tonight, Sugimoto-sensei says as she lifts the rag from Masuyo’s throat. She doesn’t curse at the sight of it, medic nin don’t do that in front of patients who aren’t Kakashi, but she does frown deeply. 

“Incident at Uchiha compound. First patient of two, other suspected genjutsu injury. First patient is genin Uchiha Masuyo, primary injury laceration to the throat. Notify the morgue of mass influx of body scrolls.”

Sugimoto-sensei pales, but nods, looking back down at the genin.

“Masuyo-chan, are you having trouble breathing?” Sugimoto-sensei asks as they usher him forwards to carry her into room three. There’s a nin hunting down blood bags, one headed towards the morgue and another rushing to the lower level archive for the genin’s file. 

“No, the laceration didn’t cut deeply enough. I didn’t feel any sucking when I pressed my hand to it and breathed,” Masuyo says. Hound enters the intensive room and lays her down on the bed, stepping back and out of the way of the three nin who circle her immediately. 

“My clan,” Masuyo starts, wincing when Sugimoto-sensei begins healing her throat. She looks pleadingly at Hound. “The morgue. Someone needs to watch the bodies. Their eyes.”

“Masuyo-chan, please stop talking. Your muscles can’t heal when they’re moving.”

Masuyo continues, much to Sugimoto-sensei’s annoyance. Her strange sharingan is still spinning, an hourglass turning into a fan. It goes faster and faster now. “ Please , ANBU-san. There’s too many of them, I don’t know if I’ll be able to check them all. And Sasuke-kun is too young.” 

“Someone will watch them,” Hound, no, Kakashi finds himself promising. A stupid promise. He doesn’t know if anyone will. “Sugimoto-sensei, her sharingan.” 

“My what?” Masuyo asks faintly. An IV is being inserted into her small arm. 

Her chakra is developed enough for an Uchiha of her rank, but she’ll exhaust herself if she leaves it on longer. And he doesn’t think her remembering any more of this will help anyone. 

Sugimoto-sensei presses a glowing pair of fingers to Masuyo’s temple, and she slumps unconscious. 

Hound steps out of the room before he can make any more doomed promises, spotting Yugao carrying Sasuke to the room next to his cousin. 

“Panther,” Hound calls, watching her lay the boy onto another hospital bed and look at him. 

“Reporting to Hokage, check on team and assist in body retrieval,” Hound signs. Yugao nods firmly, and he shunshins away. 

Why was the genin so worried about her clansmen’s eyes? He realizes, belatedly, that she had called him ANBU-san. He’s going to need to speak with Lord Third about this… mess. He can’t allow himself to live in the reality of it yet, so he doesn’t. 

He can’t shake the smell of iron from his nose as he crawls through the window of the Hokage’s office. He can’t stop seeing Mikoto-san’s slack face. 

—

Masuyo wakes to an aching body. It’s not an ambling rise, she doesn’t get to linger in that in-between place where everything is soft and calm.

She sleeps, she is awake in a snap, and there is an old man at her bedside.

Not the worst old man, half his face isn’t covered in bandages, like Danzo is meant to. But not the best man either, because this old man is the Hokage.

“Hokage-sama,” Masuyo says quietly, nodding her head in a bow. Her throat doesn’t hurt with the motion, so she takes that as a win. 

Sarutobi Hiruzen is close to what she imagined, and exactly as he should be according to her stolen memories. A wizened face marked with sunspots and wrinkles, with dark cunning eyes. Shapeless pristine Hokage robes cover his frame, making him look more swallowed by them in this moment than stately. 

It may be his posture doing that to him. Or the way he’s looking at her with some kind of idle sorrow. Not enough to show regret, but enough to make him look very old. 

“Masuyo-chan. I fear we have much to speak about,” Hiruzen says carefully. 

“My clan’s bodies, are they safe?” she asks, shuffling to sit up straighter in the hospital bed. 

“Are you worried for them?” Hiruzen replies, not answering her question. 

“There’s too many eyes.” Masuyo feels sick thinking about the number of corpses. Her memories tell her there were almost five hundred members of the clan, they were one of the biggest in Konoha bar the Ino-Shika-Cho coalition. She needs to check every single one for their eyes if she’s going to be stuck here. “I don’t know— there are too many and they could go missing. I can’t let them be burned without them. Kaa-san said they can’t enter the Pure Land without them.”

Kaa-san hadn’t said that. Masuyo doesn’t care.

“Their funerals will be handled, Masuyo-chan, I promise you. No eyes will go missing while they are within the morgue. Is that your only concern?” Hiruzen asks, a concerned twist pulling at his mouth. 

That is one of too many concerns, Lord Third. Masuyo wants to hit him in the face for even asking, and then to hit Danzo harder. 

Masuyo’s face crumples against her wishes, eyes burning. She’s afraid, and she’s angry, and she’s feeling grief for people she doesn’t know. Or does, but through stolen memories. She’s in the body of a dead girl ten years younger than her. Someone may kill her now to clear up loose ends.

She’s in Naruto. The fucking anime . Someone save her.

“Sasuke-kun, was he hit with a genjutsu?” Masuyo asks, since it’s a more believable question than asking him if he’s going to kill her. 

Hiruzen nods. “A genjutsu cast by Itachi’s sharingan, yes. He hasn’t awakened yet, it’s only been a few hours since you were brought here. The medics believe he will awaken, but they are unsure of when. His mind was strained greatly by the jutsu.” 

“Were there any other survivors?”  

Hiruzen shakes his head. Masuyo works her jaw, swallowing. She looks away to the pale wall in front of her bed. 

Should she say she knew about the coup? Probably not. That seems like it will only get her killed. Her memories don’t seem to recall her being invited to any of the meetings. She’d been too fresh of a graduate and too friendly with a few non-clan members. 

“Masuyo-chan, do you know why your clan was meeting together so often?” 

Ah. Here it is. 

Masuyo looks back at him. She decides a half truth is always better than an outright lie. 

“I have too many friends outside the clan,” Masuyo starts, making sure to sound bitter about it. The real Masuyo was bitter. “The elders didn’t like it, so I wasn’t allowed in the meetings. But I’m not stupid. They were planning something, weren’t they? And that’s why Itachi did what he did.” 

The Hokage sighs, straightening just so. Then he lies. “Itachi-kun acted out of his own interests, though the reason for his involvement is still unclear. I do not believe he intended for any but his brother to survive his massacre, though, Masuyo-chan. You are a very lucky girl.”

“I don’t feel lucky, Hokage-sama. I feel alone,” Masuyo says before she can stop herself. 

Hiruzen doesn’t seem to know what to say to that for a moment, so Masuyo lifts her blanket to check herself. She’s wearing hospital pants and a shirt. The thin, white kind she’s seen some of her family in when she’s visited them at Konoha’s hospital. Understandable, considering her clothes were so bloody. They likely had to cut them off since she was unconscious. 

“What time is it, Hokage-sama?” she asks, looking down at the IV in her arm. There’s no lines attached to it, though there seems to be an empty blood transfusion bag hanging from a pole by her bed. 

“It is five in the morning. The medics suggest you have at least a day’s bedrest, I do not think it wise to try to leave yet,” Hiruzen orders, watching her take in her situation. 

“The blood needs to be cleaned out of the compound before then,” Masuyo says, rubbing her face. “And I don’t know— I don’t know how the inheritance will work, or how much money having someone do that is. I don’t even know who the clan head is, because Itachi is alive and he was the heir.”

“I will handle that, Masuyo-chan, you do not need to worry about it at this time,” the Hokage tries to soothe, raising his hands in placation. 

How does she say “I don’t trust you it's your fault this happened you stupid asshole” in a way that doesn’t get him to order her execution?

“Did you have any more questions for me, Hokage-sama?” Masuyo asks, expressly not agreeing to let him do anything, nor to not leave against medical advice. 

The Hokage shakes his head, understanding what she’s doing. “Tell me what you remember of that night, and I suppose we will be done.”

Masuyo does as he asks, wondering where the fuck she’s going to find an estate lawyer. She guesses she’ll have to go through the clan head’s house and find out if they already had one. 

—

In the end, she does have to ask for the Hokage to help with some parts. The clan compound is a gorey mess and the real Masuyo was a child, for all that legally she was an adult to the clan and the village. She didn’t know about the clan’s assets, didn’t know about the laws related to clans outside of certain things being their business and not Konoha’s business. 

So. She lets him order the cleaning of the blood, and she handles the bodies. Even though he kept telling her not to do it, and even though she’s concerned her clan’s things will be stolen or “misplaced”.

He sends an ANBU with her to the morgue, one with suspiciously silver, spiky hair. She says nothing. It’s meant to be for her safety, in case Itachi returns to finish the job. Masuyo thinks it’s really because he thinks Danzo will send ROOT after her. 

Whatever. She can die after she makes sure Danzo doesn’t get any of those fucking eyes. 

“Hound-san,” Masuyo says blandly, staring at the piles of body scrolls stacked on three tables at the front of the morgue. She feels sick. She doesn’t know if that matters. “Could you please retrieve the clan registry from the clan head’s house? It should be in Fugaku-sama’s office.”

That, Masuyo does know. Her mother had taken her over to the clan head’s house when they added her brother to the registry. Or the real Masuyo’s brother. She doesn’t know. She can’t remember her real name, it’s like an aching hole is left where it was. There are photos for each member, in case of deaths on the field and no one being around to recognize them. Though some may be old or inaccurate now. 

It’s what she has. She’ll deal with it as she goes. 

“My orders are to protect you,” Hound, or rather Kakashi says. His voice sounds odd behind his mask. Monotone and muffled in a way that reminds her of voice modulators. 

“I guess we can both walk there then,” Masuyo murmurs, still staring at the scrolls. She starts counting them, feeling sicker the higher the number climbs. How many of them were children? How many were babies? Did he kill babies? Or did he have Obito do it? 

No. She thinks she remembers Obito handling the police force in the anime. Did they retrieve those bodies too? Those will likely have the most awakened eyes. 

Kakashi seems to slump, just so, before making a hand sign. In a burst of smoke a second Kakashi appears, before it shunshins away. 

Masuyo blinks at the pile of leaves drifting to the ground where the clone of him once was. Right. Shadow clones. She forgot about those.

Masuyo looks back at the dark scrolls, resisting the urge to start counting again. “I’m sorry your team had to seal all of them.” 

Kakashi doesn’t say anything. 

She shuts her eyes, ignoring the buzzing of the bright lights in the morgue and the quiet movement of the morticians working paperwork. 

It takes a few minutes, but the clone reappears with the thick set of binders in hand. There’s four of them, all detailing the members of the clan. Masuyo takes them into her arms and sets them down at the closest table of scrolls. She’ll start there. 

They left a clear examination table for her to release the bodies onto. Now she just needs to remember how to open a scroll. She vaguely remembers how chakra works. It’s going to be very embarrassing if she, a genin, can’t open a scroll. 

She grabs a scroll on the top of the pile and walks to the examination table. 

“Hound-san, what’s the best way to unseal one of these?” she asks quietly, looking over at him. “I’ve never used one before.”

Kakashi steps stiffly forwards, carefully taking the scroll from her hand and rolling it open on the table. Inside is what must be a seal, with a small box at the bottom with a description. 

‘Boy child of seven or eight, dark haired, laceration to throat.’

“Channel your chakra to your fingers and then press above the box,” Kakashi instructs, pointing above the description. 

Masuyo does as he says, drawing at the power in herself she knew she could touch from her fake memories, but wasn’t sure would work. 

It pools easily to her fingers, and she presses them above the box.

In a burst of chakra, a small child appears on the examination desk. She recognizes him, he was one of her brother’s friends at the academy. 

“Uchiha Ryoichi,” she says weakly. She looks down at the description box of the scroll and sees its blank now. “Do you have a brush, Hound-san?” 

He does. She writes down his name in the box and then checks his eyes with gloved hands, finding them untouched. She turns to the registry binders and searches for his name to mark him as deceased. There’s a section to neatly note the date of death and cause. 

“Laceration to neck by Uchiha Itachi sounds apt,” she mutters, more to herself than to Hound. Her hand already aches at the prospect of writing down so many causes of death. 

The smart thing may be to open all of the scrolls and check the bodies before she cremates them on the funeral grounds. But that would require carrying all of the scrolls to the clan funeral grounds. 

Well, luckily the Hokage has provided her with a pack mule. She reseals Ryoichi, ever present nausea subsiding only just a little once he’s out of view. 

“Hound-san, how many scrolls do you think you can carry at once?” 

Chapter Text

The Uchiha funeral grounds are nestled close to the Naka shrine and surrounded by a quiet forest. Soot-stained stone fills an entire clearing, with beds of dark rock raised for the placement of bodies. It’s a solemn place meant only for Uchiha in mourning.

Masuyo steps silently onto the stone, feet clad in sandals borrowed from the hospital. She’s always been a quiet walker, but now barely a tap follows each step.

“I don’t think I’m meant to bring outsiders to this place,” Masuyo tells Kakashi with little feeling. “I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. I’d rather not be alone.”  

He has a sharingan. He’s the only person in Konoha with one besides her and Sasuke. He’s practically an honorary Uchiha. Certainly more of an Uchiha than Masuyo, who is only piloting the body of one and co-opting her memories.

There had been a sealing scroll full of urns left in the Naka shrine for funerals, but there wasn’t enough for all of the bodies. Each one will have to be interred separately to follow tradition. And each one has to be cremated with a great fireball technique. 

Tradition may not matter in the face of four hundred and sixty two corpses. She’ll see. 

“You don’t have the chakra for this,” Hound says as they walk towards the first stone bed. He has bags of scrolls in his hands and the hands of two clones. Masuyo holds the clan registries and her storage scroll of urns. They make a grim pair. 

“Then it will take days. I have time,” Masuyo says practically. As long as the scrolls stay close to her and she’s able to check each body for signs of eye loss, she wins. And with the registries she’ll know if anyone is missing. 

Beat that, Danzo.

“Do you think Sasuke-kun would want to miss this?” Hound asks again. He’s being more talkative than she’d expect. She settles the registries on the ground, far from where the great fireball should be able to catch them. 

“Sasuke-kun will probably wake up before I’m done. Then he can be here too, if he wants.” Masuyo gestures for him to drop the bags of scrolls beside the registries. 

“Do you have to start this now?” 

So fucking nosy for an ANBU. He’s probably here to spy on her on top of keeping ROOT from slitting her throat again. 

The scar tissue along her neck pangs at the reminder. It’s not too thick, and the med-nin said she could come back to have it broken down in a month. She doesn’t know if she cares enough to do it. This body isn’t hers anyways. A scar is secondary to all of the work she needs to do.

(She’s only looked in the mirror once since waking up here. Her face was wrong. Her eyes dark, her features delicate. More like a doll than a teenage girl. Maybe the scar will make this body feel less like it’s on lend.)

“The longer I wait, the more time someone has to take their eyes,” Masuyo says plainly, grabbing a scroll from the pile. “Which people will, once they realize only a genin and an academy student can come after them for the slight. I won’t let that happen. Not while I’m still alive. My clansmen’s eyes will burn with them, and if someone wants a sharingan, they can try and take it out of my head.”

Or Sasuke’s. But Masuyo has on good authority that Itachi will hunt down anyone who tries to take Sasuke’s eyes with much better effectiveness than she could ever threaten. 

Kakashi doesn’t offer anymore opinions, and Masuyo carries the body scroll in her hand to a stone bed, unrolling it upside down so that she’ll be able to remove the scroll from on top of the body instead of under. These body scrolls don’t belong to her, and she’s not risking Konoha asking for the amount of ryo one would cost if she burns it. 

She peeks at the description for the scroll, grimacing. 

‘Old man, sixty-five to seventy-five. Grey hair. Stab to heart.’

Masuyo channels chakra to her fingers and unseals the body. 

He poofs into place below the scroll, lying face up. She carefully lifts the scroll from him and rolls it up, setting it to the side. She adjusts her gloves, a pair she commandeered from the hospital. The med-nin rarely wear them, she thinks they can sanitize their hands with jutsu easily. 

Masuyo is not a med-nin, and touching dead bodies with your bare hands is a great way to catch something you really don’t want.

She checks the old man’s eyes, notes that they’re there with a grimace, and moves on to check the registries for him. She finds a photo of his face and his name after ten minutes of searching, before writing carefully the date of the massacre and his cause of death. ‘Stab wound to the heart by Uchiha Itachi.’ She may end up shortening that to just Itachi after a while. She’s sure no Uchiha in the future will ever forget his name. 

Then again, people like to think a lot of things are eternal. Better to be thorough for Sasuke’s sake. Or Sasuke’s future children. Whatever comes first.

She clears the stone bed of anything that she doesn’t want to burn, and then wonders if she should search the bodies before burning them. The idea makes her so sick she has to turn away and look up at the sky for a moment, stomach rolling. 

No. Nevermind. It all burns. If they have anything important in their pockets then it’s spilled milk.

Masuyo stares at the clouds for another few seconds, tracing their slow tread across the pale blue sky. Let’s out a little breath, and then looks down again. 

She steps back a few feet and draws on her chakra, muscle memory guiding her fingers into the hand signs for the great fireball jutsu almost seamlessly. 

Snake, her hands clasped together, chakra rolling at her core. Ram, index and middle fingers out, left hand covering the right. Her chakra moves up her throat, building at the back of her mouth. Monkey, hands flat atop each other. The chakra builds heat. Boar, she brings her hands closer to her lips. Pressure builds, filling her mouth and forcing her to purse her lips to keep it in. Horse, her chakra goes tighter than a bowstring and—

Tiger. Brilliant flame gusts forth from her lips through the circle of her hands in front of her mouth. The ball of fire slams into the old man’s body, burning him away like kindling. His nice kimono, his grey hair, his body and his blood. Everything becomes ash in a few moments. 

Masuyo stares at it, panting. The fire chakra has left her mouth tingling. Not in a bad way, but in a way that tells her casting more of those will make it worse. 

“One out of four hundred and sixty two,” Masuyo says, checking her chakra and grimacing when she sees how much she’s lost. Something like fifteen percent to one jutsu. She’ll have to try and put less chakra into it. Enough to cremate, but not enough to make her limited to a few bodies a day. 

“You could hire someone to do this,” Kakashi says unhelpfully. 

Masuyo shakes her head. Her memories are very clear on how this is meant to be done. “It has to be the great fireball, and I have to watch it be done. Until Sasuke-kun wakes up, this is how it has to happen.”

She gets ready to sweep some of the ash into an urn, before starting on the next one. 

She doesn’t think about her body. She doesn’t think about these people who are meant to be her family. She does not wonder if any of this matters at all. 

—

The Uchiha spends hours burning her kin. 

The smell of ash burns his nose, eventually. Uchiha Masuyo moves with the methodology of Kakashi on his low days, when he cleans the memorial stone and presses his face to its cold side, eyes locked on names. Tracing Namikaze Minato over and over again, then beside him, to Uzumaki Kushina, and four rows up to Nohara Rin. 

Obito is always last. Six rows above Rin, to the left. He was always late in life, it’s better to keep him late in his ruminations too. 

The Uchiha’s chakra control refines with every cast of the fireball jutsu, her hand signs becoming sharper and her chakra replying quicker. She’s a genin, but one with clear ninjutsu talent. 

And a commitment to her mission. He watches her cry after the eighth fireball, blink through the tears, and then start on the next. Listens to idle commentary when she has the stomach for it, through a croaking voice from channeling too much fire chakra through her throat. 

He feels like a voyeur more than a bodyguard, though sometimes those roles are one in the same. 

Her hands fly through the hand signs for her family’s jutsu once again, shaking, and she burns another corpse. A child, this time. One younger than Sasuke. 

Itachi , he thinks again, because his name hasn’t left his mind since he stepped inside the Uchiha compound hours ago. Why?

Why, he wonders. He watches her sweep the remaining ashes into a small urn, labeling the name on it with careful strokes of ink. Why why why, like the buzzing of an Aburame beetle by his ear. Masuyo sets the urn beside two dozen others. 

“You’re going to enter chakra exhaustion,” Kakashi comments. He can’t slip into the cool indifference of Hound since he left the compound. There’s only so many of Konoha’s children and civilians you can put into a body scroll before your conditioning starts cracking. Genma had thrown up. Kakashi couldn’t even bother with a reprimand.

He pointedly doesn’t suggest Masuyo stop cremating corpses, well aware of what he would do if someone told him to leave the memorial stone after any of his own failures. His grief has the advantage of not being chakra intensive. Until he uses Obito’s eye, of course.

Masuyo nods, looking back at the bags full of body scrolls with empty eyes. 

“Twenty days,” she says shortly, sounding as though speaking hurts. The significance of the number takes him a moment to register, before he counts the number of urns again. At two dozen a day she will be at this for a month. 

If Kakashi’s clan had been larger, if they had died like this when he had been her age, would he have spent almost a month burning them? 

It’s a stupid question. Rin had just died when he was her age and he had been a Jonin. Minato-sensei—

Well. He wouldn’t have had to burn so many alone. And he’d had better chakra stores.

Kakashi says nothing in reply, simply helping her pick up the bags of body scrolls and the urns so they can be interred. Uchiha Masuyo moves sluggishly to the Uchiha shrine by the Naka. 

His eyes trail off to the side of the old shrine as she steps inside, sweeping the area for enemies. Through the woods he can see a path up to a cliff lined with fences. The fences look new, and in a moment he realizes that that must have been where Shisui killed himself. 

Kakashi turns away. 

Masuyo takes urns from his clone’s hands with soot stained fingers, stepping into the back of the shrine to begin setting them onto shelves. 

“They’re meant to be sorted by their branch,” Masuyo tells him as she clearly does not do so. 

The urns clack each time she sets them down. This back room is lit only by the sunlight trailing through the doorway, drawing her pale face wane. There are candles lining the ground that could be lit. She doesn’t bother.

Kakashi gets the sense he is not meant to be in this part of the shrine, just as he was not meant to see the Uchiha cremation grounds. Especially not him, not with his eye. Fugaku had made clear he was not to go near even the clan compound after the elders debated plucking out Obito’s eye.

Masuyo doesn’t object to his presence though, which is convenient. It would complicate him protecting her if she made him wait outside. It may help that she only sees him as a member of ANBU, and not as himself.

He keeps half an eye on her and a clone by the front to watch for any sign of threats, willing himself to become a weapon again instead of a thinking man. It works for a moment, at least until he hears another urn settle on the shelf, and then he’s back to the start.

She finishes eventually, stopping to simply stare at the collection of urns she’s placed. Her hands are limp at her sides, stark against the pale white hospital robes she was given. 

Then Masuyo turns, murmurs a quiet, “Let’s go back to the hospital,” and brushes past him. Kakashi follows. They’ll have to shunshin back, just as they did coming here. There's a higher risk of engagement and attention in Konoha’s streets. Especially with the Uchiha clan’s body scrolls in hand. 

—

Uchiha Sasuke is dead. 

He isn’t, not really. He knows because he wakes up tangled in unfamiliar sheets and staring at a white ceiling. But he’s dead. He should be dead. 

His heart thrums against his chest, hands trembling. He reaches up and grips his shirt. He feels his traitorous heart as it batters his ribs. 

“Itachi-nii,” he whimpers. He jerks up and looks around the room frantically, expecting his brother to be there, somewhere. Standing in the corner or the doorway watching him with his sharingan. Everything is so dark. Is it night, still? Was it real? Was he dreaming? 

He looks to the right and stops, panting. 

That’s his cousin, isn’t it? He doesn’t remember her name. She’s slumped in a seat beside his bed, sleeping. He watched—

His eyes go to her throat, widening when he sees a scar there.

Her throat. He watched Itachi slit her throat. He remembers now. He’d done his littler cousin first, Masao. It had been so red. He saw his bone.

Sasuke gags, clasping a hand over his mouth with wide burning eyes. There’s a rushing in his ears muffling everything else. It wasn’t a dream! It wasn’t— 

His cousin jolts awake in seconds, dark eyes shifting to red and her hand rushing down to grasp a bag at her feet. She looks around, then her eyes land on him. 

“Sasuke?” she says in a rough voice, eyes going dark again in a few blinks. She stumbles to her feet, looking to the door and back at him. “You’re awake.”

He must be dead. This must be a genjutsu, like the one before. His mind runs back to his academy lessons on genjutsu. Pain was supposed to break it, but pain hadn’t broken nii-san— it hadn’t broken his genjutsu. 

Sasuke reaches down and pinches his leg as hard as he can and ignores when his cousin hisses a bad word. 

She reaches forwards, warm hand holding his wrist. 

“I’m real,” she insists, somehow knowing what he’s already figured out. Her voice sounds like the croak of the elders. Is it because he’d slit her throat? “Itachi is gone, Sasuke, he’s gone. It’s been five days.” 

“You’re lying,” Sasuke insists even as he lets her pull his hand away from his leg. His skin throbs where he’d pinched it. He can barely see her, blinking through his crybaby tears. They trail down his cheeks hotly and gather at his chin.

Before his cousin can respond, he thinks her name sounds like her brother’s—he gags again—the doors to the room open and someone flicks on the lights. He flinches.

“Stand back, Masuyo-chan,” a woman says. He can blurrily make out a doctor’s coat as his eyes adjust. 

Sasuke’s cousin steps back, letting go of his wrist and leaving it cold. His hand reaches out for her again, grabbing her own. Will she die again if she leaves? Will the genjutsu end and leave him alone? 

“No!” Sasuke says, holding her tightly and looking at the doctor. Is the doctor Itachi? Sasuke knows what henge is, Shisui used it to trick him before. 

“Post-genjutsu paranoia,” the doctor murmurs calmly, looking back through the door at another person peeking in. The person nods, leaving. 

“Sasuke-kun,” Masuyo says. She doesn’t try to leave his hold, just stands there. He wants to claw her closer. He wants to hide behind her. “It’s been five days. You’re in the hospital. Itachi left the village after the attack.”

“You died,” Sasuke insists. He can feel her heartbeat in his hand. He can see her throat being cut, her brother’s. His parents. The neighbors. 

Masuyo nods. The silvery line of her scar shines in the light. “He cut my throat but I lived. Did you see it in the genjutsu?” 

Sasuke can’t say anything else. His throat stings and the tears won’t stop. He can’t— he shouldn’t cry. Shinobi don’t cry. Itachi said he needed to become strong to kill him. 

He manages to choke out, “Kaa-san?” because he’s weak . He’s weak and he wants Kaa-san. If his cousin lived, could she have? 

Masuyo’s face shudders like crumpling paper. That’s weak too. Maybe that’s why they’re both alive. She shakes her head. 

“It’s just us, Sasuke-kun.”

Just them. Just them and Itachi. 

The doctor comes forwards and starts testing him, asking him stupid questions about where he is and what he remembers after he gets control over himself. She says they’re going to tell the Hokage he’s awake, and Masuyo frowns. 

“Can it wait until morning?” Masuyo asks. Will her voice stay like that forever? He’s starting to place it. It sounds like when he practiced the great fireball too often and— and that man told him to stop. 

The doctor sighs, rubbing her eyes from under her glasses. “He gave direct orders to be notified when he wakes, Masuyo-chan.”

Masuyo turns and looks at Sasuke. She’s Izumi’s age. She babysitted him when he was younger. She looks tired. 

“The Hokage is going to ask you about what Itachi said and did, and what you saw. He didn’t tell anyone why he hurt people before he left. The Hokage thinks you will know.” 

“You’re too weak to kill, otouto,” Itachi whispers in Sasuke’s mind. “I had to prove my power.” 

Sasuke looks down at the white blankets. Something awful lodges itself in his throat, and he thinks he’s going to cry again. 

—

Masuyo would like to see less of the Hokage. 

He steps through the hospital room door with tired eyes and an exhausted slope to his shoulders. He’s getting old. It can’t be good for him to wake up in the middle of the night. He offers Masuyo a smile from where she stands beside Sasuke, then the boy himself. 

“Good morning, Hokage-sama,” Masuyo says in her croaking voice. The doctors have refused to heal any of the irritation. A sort of silent protest against her personally cremating her entire clan instead of getting help. 

She does have help. She has Kakashi, who has somehow diligently been assigned to follow her around every day since this fucking mess started. He can’t help burn anything since he needs his chakra in case someone attacks her, but it’s still help. More help than the other two ANBU shadowing her are, anyways.

Doctor Sugimoto disagrees. She is of the opinion that she shouldn’t have to be the one to do it at all. Masuyo doesn’t argue, just takes cough drops from more sympathetic nurses and prepares for the next trial.

“Good morning, Masuyo-chan, Sasuke-kun,” Sarutobi replies, stopping to stand towards the end of the bed. “I am sorry to disturb you.”

No, he isn’t. Or maybe he is but it won’t stop him anyways. 

If he were really sorry then Danzo would be dead. 

Sasuke stares down at the blankets, hand tightening where it's gripping her own. His hold has gotten sweaty after fifteen minutes, but Masuyo has a feeling that if she lets go then whatever follows will be worse than a little sweat. 

“May I sit down?” Sarutobi asks politely, glancing at Sasuke and then at her.

Her bags of body scrolls are nestled under the uncomfortable hospital seats. Masuyo figures they’ll probably be even safer with a Hokage on top of them. Provided that he is the Hokage. 

“Hokage-sama, forgive me. May I look at you with my sharingan before you sit? Sasuke was worried the doctor earlier was a genjutsu. It may make him more comfortable,” Masuyo says with an appropriate level of apology. 

Sarutobi nods easily. Good. She didn’t want any of the ANBU nearby getting twitchy because she started looking at the Hokage funny. She remembers very distantly that Danzo went around impersonating the Hokage, and that’s part of why Itachi killed the clan. She could be misremembering, but she’d rather be paranoid than dead. 

Well. She’ll still probably die if she does realize it's Danzo. Maybe someone else will be able to do something about him.

Masuyo’s chakra jumps to her call almost eagerly, rushing to her eyes in seconds as red bleeds through her dark eyes. 

Masuyo had had the sharingan before she watched the massacre, but her brother dying—

She has the mangekyo now. How fucking exciting. She would rip it out with her bare hands if it’d just bring her home.

The room fills with clarity, individual grains of wood on the floor and every one of the Hokage’s pores on display. She scans him, then the room, and then Sasuke. Sasuke stares back at her with a pale face. 

It looks like Masao’s face, her not-brother. She can see his throat being cut in startling clarity, Itachi’s hand moving with clinical efficiency before he pounced on her. She can see the bodies, the bloodied living room. She can see when she found Sasuke in the clan head’s house, knocked onto the floor beside his parents. She’d worried he was dead and that she lived in some kind of disgusting trade.

She blinks, cutting the chakra off. She hates the sharingan.

“No genjutsu, no Itachi. Just the Hokage.” And no Danzo either.

Sasuke relaxes, then pointedly looks back down at his blanket again. 

The Hokage sits down in one of the uncomfortable little chairs after levying a heavy look at the bags underneath them. He doesn’t say anything about it, which is good. Sasuke has only just calmed down. Masuyo doesn’t need him to know his whole family is in the room with them because she couldn’t trust ROOT not to tamper with them. 

“How are you feeling, Sasuke-kun?”

Sasuke scowls, looking up finally. His eyes are red rimmed from the crying earlier. “You want to ask about—” he cuts himself off harshly, swallowing. Then continues. “About that man.”

Sarutobi Hiruzen, faced with two temperamental Uchiha children instead of just one now, simply nods. 

“You were the last one he spoke to after the violence. What happened when you entered the compound, Sasuke-kun? What did he tell you?”

Sasuke fumbles through a retelling of the events, straying to odd details like the child he is and then back on track. He stops when he gets to entering his house. Haltingly mentions searching each room until he found his parents. 

Itachi. His supposed wish to prove his strength. The genjutsu. An order to come find him and kill him, once Sasuke is strong. 

Did Itachi wonder about who was going to have to burn his family when he was killing them? Did he care at all? 

The Hokage leaves, eventually, citing the lateness of the hour and giving them privacy. Masuyo watches him leave until the door shuts, then carefully lets go of Sasuke’s hand. She can’t feel her fingers very well anymore from how hard he was gripping it. 

“Is it really…?” Sasuke trails off in a small voice, hands limp at his lap. He looks younger than he is in the hospital bed, white blankets swallowing him and his arms looking too thin.

Masuyo sits down heavily in one of the uncomfortable chairs. Her body aches from all of the chakra usage, her mind is heavy with the work she’s done. She’s not a child, not really. She hasn’t been for years. But even adults balk at the sight of the dead, let alone washing crematorial ash off of themselves every night. 

“What do we do?” Sasuke asks instead, looking at her with shining eyes. 

There isn’t hope, or some kind of overwhelming familiar love in them. It’s fear. The sort of fear a drowning person has when they finally spot a life preserver but it's a couple feet too far away. 

“The Hokage ordered the houses cleaned already, so we could move back in if you wanted,” Masuyo starts. Sasuke’s face blanches at that, which is to be expected. It was a week ago for her, but a sleep ago for him. “And the funerals—”

“Did I miss them?” Sasuke interrupts urgently. 

Masuyo grimaces. “No. Not most of them, anyways. You went to Elder Shun’s funeral last fall, didn’t you?” 

Sasuke nods, uncomprehending. Masuyo has pulled most of her knowledge of how the funerals work from that one, since it was recent and she was finally old enough to be included in the interring process.

“I’ve been doing them all. The burning parts, at least. I think we can hold a mass funeral at the end of this month for people’s friends and teams. The other clans will probably have their heads attend too.” 

Masuyo hasn’t had time to contemplate the politics of it all or to care very much about anyone other than Sasuke. She’s sure there are plenty of Uchiha who had teams outside of the clan, senseis, lovers, whatever. They just knew it was impolitic to talk about it near the ones who were committed to the coup. She doesn’t know. Some of her memories are clearer than others, and Masuyo had been a fresh genin. Her biggest concern was learning water walking, cute boys, and joining the police force.

Sasuke stops listening somewhere at “burning parts” and looks increasingly stricken. “That’s why your voice is so rough!”

“It is,” Masuyo replies.

“Why? Why didn’t you wait until I woke up? Are my parents already— did you do them without me?” 

“No, Sasuke. I didn’t do your parents yet, I knew you would want to be there,” Masuyo starts carefully. She doesn’t want to be the one to explain this to a child. She doesn’t even want to be awake right now. “You know that sometimes people steal our clan’s eyes, right? For the sharingan?”

Sasuke doesn’t react well to her more gentle tone, glaring. “Of course I know about that!”

“If you were a shinobi who didn’t care about bloodline theft and several hundred Uchiha entered the village morgue, what would you do?” 

Sasuke gapes, then goes a bit green. Masuyo almost gets up to find a throw up bag before he speaks again. 

“Have any of their eyes been stolen?” 

“None that I’ve seen yet. And I will see, because I am checking every single one.” 

She’d rather it be her than Sasuke, who probably didn’t even know what happened with the bodies until he was shoved into funeral robes in another life. After Konoha got their pickings, of course. 

She still may find missing eyes once she gets to some of the Konoha Police members. They’re towards the bottom of the bags, and she was warned they were the most gruesomely injured. Probably because they put up a fight.

They sit in uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Masuyo imagines that if Sasuke could pick a cousin to wake up with, to have been kept alive, he probably wouldn’t have chosen her. 

“What happens after?” Sasuke asks, avoiding looking at her face. “Am I— I need to go back to the academy.”

His teacher has been dropping off homework as far as she can tell. Little booklets and small vases of flowers have appeared on the table in the room when she’s not here. She hasn’t seen him yet. She doesn’t particularly want to. 

“If that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do,” Masuyo agrees.

“We?” Sasuke repeats. He doesn’t sound upset about it, just a twinge relieved.

“We’re family, Sasuke-kun. I’m not leaving you. Someone has to take care of you until you’re an adult, and after, since being a genin is barely an adult.” 

“You’re only a genin,” Sasuke says mulishly. 

Masuyo sighs, rubbing her face. “Fine. I’ll get promoted to chunin so that I’m more adultlike.”

“That’s not how that works!” 

“Jonin then, since you’re so picky. Can we go back to sleep now? I’m tired.” 

Sasuke pauses, looking towards the door, then the window. Checking for places someone could enter. 

“The window is locked, and there’s four ANBU assigned to this room until you recover.”

“...he wouldn’t be stopped by them.”

“Maybe. He would be stopped long enough for me to carry you to the Hokage tower, though.” 

“I’m not worried about myself, ” Sasuke hisses, childish voice going harsh. He looks sharply over at Masuyo, staring pointedly at her neck. 

Ah. Okay. She’s going to have to become a jonin. If she doesn't, Sasuke will almost definitely use her survival as an excuse for his revenge obsession. She can see it now. 

“If Itachi gets within fifty miles of the village he will be apprehended. He got out because he attacked when no one was expecting him, Sasuke-kun. If he comes back for me, a genin, then it’s because he’s stupid.”

And he won’t come back for her because the Hokage has turned him into a spy for the village. He would be obligated to execute him if the ANBU brought him in. 

Sasuke doesn’t seem to agree with her, likely because he’s a traumatized seven year old with no future knowledge and who watched her die. Which is understandable. If she were the real Masuyo she’d be hiding under the covers of her hospital bed still, terrified that he’d come back and finish the job. 

But she isn’t actually thirteen. There’s work to do. She needs to sleep to do it.

“Sasuke, I promise if he manages to break in I’ll set him on fire. I’ve gotten very good at that. After he’s on fire, I’ll grab you and run. Is that better?” 

Sasuke vehemently disagrees. So Masuyo stays up an extra hour for him watching the exit points until his eyes finally get too droopy to stay awake. 

Masuyo never really wanted to be a parent. She figures she’ll just suck it up and do her best. She can be an older sister, maybe. She's done that before. 

She falls asleep seeing her sisters’ faces, indistinct and nameless now, and her not-brother clutching his throat.