Because Fugaku doesn't get enough press.
AN: This fic was months of halting progress, but it was an interesting enough topic to keep me motivated to the end. Fugaku's motives aren't exactly canon; still, I couldn't shake the notion that his role in the Uchiha coup is not as shallow as the manga makes it out to be. This was originally supposed to be a comparison of two types of loyalty, Fugaku's versus Shisui's, but I ended up getting so involved in Fugaku's character that I dropped the original idea. I hope you enjoy!
The character of Uchiha Fugaku and the Naruto universe belong to Masashi Kishimoto (and the title to Linkin Park); all other details are courtesy of my imagination.
What he remembers is the wet slap of leather against the bare skin of his back and the welts that would bloom across his small shoulders the morning after, so sore that he had to lie on his stomach in his cot at night in order to sleep. He'd bite back his groans, afraid of even the slightest sound waking his father on the other side of their family's decrepit shack as the winter wind outside howled and tore across the steppe land like a wounded animal. As the days grew longer and the weather warmer, the red lines of welts would dissolve into a patchwork of purple and yellow bruises coloring the white canvas of his back like oil pastels. Generally the beatings ceased in the summers, when there was enough food to appease his father's frustration at their chronic poverty – remnants of hunger and defeat that had once stalked the Uchiha across the Land of Fire like some ravenous, calculating wolf – but every winter Fugaku could expect to feel the belt across his shoulders again.
He was the youngest of seven children, all boys and the two oldest already gone to work to ensure they had enough provisions to stay one step ahead of starvation. As an infant he learned that being the youngest earned him no special place in the family other than another mouth to feed. He taught himself to tie his shoes and to forage and to throw a kunai, until the afternoon his oldest brother, returning from a menial job of digging ditches in the village, stooped to wordlessly adjust his grip before ducking indoors. Fugaku hefted the iron weapon in his child's hand and flung it at a bale of hay next to a feeding trough several yards away; it stuck fast, quivering, and startled the two horses tied nearby so that they stamped their hooves and snorted loudly, breath steaming in the cold air. It was then that he realized how the shinobi arts might earn a man a place in the world and set about his education.
Some evenings, when their father was sober enough to call them by name, he would tell them stories from his childhood. He spoke of being seven the year the peace settlement was made and Konohagakure was established on the edge of the Senju forest against a rearing sandstone cliff; how he had sat on his older brother's shoulders so he could watch the armistice unfold, a small boy peering across the dark heads of a sea of people in the grey pre-dawn light as Uchiha Madara and Senju Hashirama signed the paper treaty with ink brushes and clasped hands. He would describe how both men's faces were solemn but Madara's was as unremitting as if carved out of stone, in stark contrast to the gentle features of the man standing next to him on the raised wooden dais. Until that moment, Fugaku had only heard half-cast descriptions of the clan's once formidable leader: the wild black hair, the battle fan. He had always been mythological in Fugaku's mind, a warrior figurehead with eyes that burned an impossible red.
"His diplomacy ruined the clan." Fugaku's father spoke bitterly and spat into the cooking fire, a shadow passing over the hard, weathered planes of his face. Fugaku was too young to understand how change threatens a man, how it pulls at the ground beneath his carefully constructed life until the foundation slips and crumbles and he must begin over again. What he did understand, even at the inexperienced age of five, was that in the new social order that followed on the heels of the treaty, there was still no place of honor for a man without the Sharingan eye. The clan might have finally forsaken their tents for real beds and warm blankets and enough food to sate their dogged hunger, but it would never be enough to fill the depth of his father's failure, to erase memories of being forced to stand last in line for rice or the sneering faces and whispered charges of more privileged clansmen. Fugaku did not know why his father remained loyal to a clan that marginalized him, only that he demanded the same loyalty of his sons. And so Fugaku's worldview was carefully shaped by these two interlinked concepts, the clan and its doujutsu, in fine tapered words and admonitions like a potter shaping a clay pot, so that the measure of success grew to become a single word: Uchiha.
X X X
The Uchiha are an aristocratic people. The earliest generations established elaborate governing rituals, rules about marriage and breeding, songs and stories that once laced the clan's displaced campfires late at night, their smoke and words twisting lazily towards a starless sky. It did not take long after the peace settlement for the clan to rediscover and settle back into the traditions of its ancestors. Before they finished nailing a roof over their children's heads and painting the clan crest on their gates, they built a shrine above the Nakano River with a hidden room beneath tatami mats where all the clan's secrets could go: a mahogany chest of brittle, cobwebbed scrolls in the language of their past. The trapdoor would swing closed with a resolute thud, filing away their bloody history, myths, and legends in the same way the Sharingan shuttered away techniques.
Fugaku first gained admittance to that room when he was nine years old, three days after a night terror found him screaming and clawing at his eyes until beads of blood welled. They kept him drugged for the pain and blindfolded in the storm cellar until the clan was ready for him, at which point someone he did not know came to fetch him through the dark to the shrine. Fugaku could not see the bent and hesitant way his father stood at the door of their small wooden shanty, the oil lamplight spilling forth and casting his shadow long and narrow on the dirt path, watching as his youngest son was spirited away from the heath lands to a place he could never know. The man who carried him bore a lingering scent of ash, like the fire-wielding Uchiha were wont to, and Fugaku trembled hard against his chest. After a while he could hear crickets chirping and frogs singing in the river grass and the steady footfalls of his escort until suddenly all sound disappeared and the air dropped several degrees in temperature, the way it does when one descends underground. Fugaku was swiftly set upright on his feet with a disorienting rush of vertigo. He swayed as the silence pressed heavy against his eardrums. And then a voice:
"Remove his blindfold, Inoue."
Rough hands untied the scratchy wool cloth around his eyes, and Fugaku braced himself for the wincing needle-pierce of light, only to encounter darkness. For one terrified second he thought he had gone blind, until his eyes adjusted and a dimly lit room came into focus. It was empty except for three men, his escort Inoue, and a bronze altar with an ancient-looking scroll. He blinked. The three men were familiar – two clan elders and the clan head who had taken Madara's place after the former fled the village to die by the Hokage's sword at the Valley of the End.
The clan head took a step towards Fugaku. He was an unobtrusive-looking man with a blank, clinical air and the dark hair and eyes of his kinsmen, utterly lacking in the dangerous and commanding elegance of his predecessor. He reached out one hand and pinched Fugaku's chin between his thumb and forefingers, tilting the boy's head back so his eyes caught the candlelight. Raw red sclera illuminated a single black tomoe like a drop of ink at each pupil; the kekkai genkai was not yet fully formed, slightly blurred around the edges. Fugaku felt his chakra twist viciously before he realized that the clan head had activated his own Sharingan, searching for any clever concealing genjutsu. After a few moments of dry examination, the man dropped Fugaku's chin with a resigned cluck of his tongue and turned to face the elders.
"Shimoru was not lying – it's the real thing." One of the elders shot a surprised glance at Fugaku. He felt himself shoved from behind towards the altar, where Inoue took his finger and nicked it with a kunai, directing him to press the digit to the scroll, a single bloody fingerprint that glistened wetly and then was absorbed by the fragile paper. The clan head watched impassively, the flickering candles casting short, punctuated shadows across his face.
"Boy, go home and tell your father this: you are now Uchiha."
X X X
Konohagakure appeared to grow slowly, like a new leaf unfurling from its bud, yet its growth was startling in the way that Spring can be, one moment the world grey and barren and the next carpeted in pale green giving way to the vibrancy of Summer. Fugaku would one day look back on his life and feel this same trick of time as the memories crowded thick at the base of his skull – his brothers parting like a curtain, deferential and afraid, the evening he came home a new clan initiate; the weight of his jounin vest on his shoulders; snow and paper flowers on his wedding day; his father's whispered last words, you did me good, son.
The clan had been less-than welcoming at first to the waif from their most maligned family, but Fugaku quickly gained traction in their ranks with his deft manipulation of the Sharingan and mastery of their signature techniques. He learned to gather chakra at his core, hot and coiled tight like a spring, and set a match to the timber of his energy until fire exploded from his throat in a blazing globe of orange flame not unlike the fiery murals that decorated the walls of the clan's imposing meetinghouse. The day he turned fifteen and set fire to three Kumo nin in one breath, their dark-skinned forms reduced to charred bones and ash in the time it took to exhale, was the day he came of age in the eyes of the clan. After that his future opened with all the glory of singular power and the optimism of youth, a silver ribbon spread gleaming towards the horizon, the Uchiha's birthright his for the taking. One step down that bright road and he never looked back.
When war settled along the border with Stone, Fugaku kissed his bride goodbye and led his men into the mud trenches. Any bad blood that had existed betwixt the village and the clan after Madara's defection gave way under the Uchiha's sheer battle prowess, the subtle twist of the Mirror Eye and roaring infernos that incinerated entire regiments. The war lasted fourteen long years, and somewhere in that expanse of dirt and time Fugaku found himself named clan head. At first, the irony of the appointment was cathartic; he had begun his life on the outside looking in, worked his way painstakingly into the clan ranks with the genius of a boy striving to loosen the chains of circumstance, and all along he had been destined to end up at the center of things. The first day he sat at the low conference table and the clan elders stacked thick manila folders in front of him – a work order for a new roof for the clan meetinghouse; receipts for restocking the police armory; a diplomatic dossier from Suna – the monumental weight of the moment did not escape him.
He approached the task of clan head like any other task that had been set before him, with precision and merciless vision. Within a month the clan council was reorganized, within three the entire police force restructured. The iron curtain of bureaucracy that had grown up between the clan and the village since Madara's defection gave way under Fugaku's relentless pressure and the same cold determination that had driven him forward from those wind-blown steppes years before. The clan elders stood by and watched with a mixture of admiration and unease, the past always lingering close on the edges of their red-warped vision: a clear-cut image of another young and brilliant clan head whose diplomacy had begun with a clasped hand and ended with a sword through the heart.
Fugaku understood well the perilous legacy he had inherited. It was a shadow cast long in brightest sunlight, the bitter edge to the clan's collective memory, unspoken but ever present on the periphery of their identity. The treaty and Madara's desertion - these were pieces of a reality he had grown into. As a child his father had spoken of their former leader with a twisted combination of awe and disgust, for no clansman had ever scaled so high the heights of Uchiha lore, or fallen so far. But Fugaku shared neither his clan's sense of reverence nor their feelings of oppression. On the eve of his inauguration as clan head he had stood at the Valley of the End, felt the thundering vibrations of the great waterfall crashing between the immortalized forms of Konoha's founders, and wondered. Wondered, as the cool spray settled heavy on his wool travel cloak, from whence the Uchiha had come and to where they were going. He was a self-made man, as was his clan, hewn from blood and fire, and so he refused to let his people chain themselves to the past. He would be loyal to the Uchiha, yes, but only to their future.
And so it remained - the slow, halting march of progress - until the evening two of the clan elders came calling, just hours after he had finished swearing in the newest class of police cadets. The village streets were suffused with the golden light that heralded autumn; it spilled through the rosewood latticework in the foyer, while overhead the clamoring calls of geese heading south for the winter could be heard. Fugaku led the men back to his study, Mikoto peaking curiously from the kitchen where she was washing dishes as they passed. Gesturing for them to make themselves comfortable, he kneeled on the tatami mats and waited.
Aoi – the younger of the two elders, his spine not yet bent by time – cleared his throat to speak. "Before we divulge our reason for visiting, we would first like to congratulate you on Itachi's recent graduation from the Academy. He is certainly proving himself worthy of the Uchiha namesake."
Fugaku bowed his head politely in acknowledgement of the compliment.
"Is Shisui at home?"
"No, he is away on a mission." The elders nodded their understanding, then paused uneasily, as if unsure how to proceed beyond these niceties. Fugaku flattened his palm impatiently against his thigh and steeled himself for what he sensed was coming. "Now gentlemen, how may I help you?"
Aoi shot a quick, sideways glance at his partner before confronting Fugaku fully. "We will make this as brief as possible. There has been some concern among the council that you have forgotten the objectives of the clan in your dealings with the village."
Fugaku frowned and folded his arms across his chest, but remained silent. Through the open door to his study the hollow click of the deer-chaser in the backyard emanated.
"What we mean to say," Aoi hastened, "is that it appears at times you forget to fully keep in mind the advancement of the Uchiha when negotiating our interests with the Hokage. We understand that it sometimes might be easy to lose sight of our goals for the sake of reconciliation, but that is no excuse." The words stacked one on top of the other, clipped and hurried, a defensive wall.
Fugaku felt an old fury stir deep inside him; steel crept into the quiet timbre of his voice. "This clan will not live in the shadows of its past."
The more stooped of the two, Gorou, spoke up, spreading his gnarled hands wide and smiling beatifically. "Of course, Fugaku, of course." There was a pregnant pause. "But surely it is unreasonable" – and here he tilted his head to the side, fixing Fugaku with a knowing gaze, his cadence slow and measured – "to expect the clan to give so much ground on so many crucial issues. Everyone knows that the village has a history of marginalizing the Uchiha. We only ask that you remember to put the welfare of our brethren first."
Fugaku did not respond. He was thinking of Mikoto in the kitchen cleaning up after supper, the evening light catching in her long dark hair and Sasuke dozing in the blue cloth baby wrap against her chest. And of course Itachi, now seven years old but still small for his age, and the newest clan initiate. People told him Itachi was just like him, but Fugaku was not convinced. Did they not deserve a clan better than the one he had inherited?
The elders rose to leave with a creak of floorboards and a rustle of robes. At the door Gorou paused, one wrinkled, liver-spotted hand resting on the grooved handle. His voice was soft and dangerous.
"We trust you will make the needed adjustments."
The door slid closed with a sharp clap, like an iron bolt turning into place.
X X X
That night Fugaku awoke to the distant crackle of flames and the heavy scent of smoke in the air. He sat up in bed, disoriented, the sheets pooling around his bare torso, and reached for Mikoto in the dark. As his fingers closed around the slender bone of her wrist, the front door shook with the sound of someone pounding at its oak frame. Mikoto bolted awake, eyes wild. "Fugaku, wha –"
He had already slid out of bed and was padding swiftly for the door, calling over his shoulder for her to wake the boys as he made his way down the shadow-dim hallway.
When he wrenched open the front door, the young shinobi outside nearly tumbled indoors before striking a quick salute. Fugaku recognized him as one of the new police cadets from earlier that day. "Captain," he panted. "Bijuu attack at the western gate. Shinobi reinforcements have been requested immediately."
A horrible sensation overtook Fugaku for a moment, a premonition that he was wholly unable to name, almost as if the good fortune he had enjoyed the past few years had finally run its course like the last grains of sand slipping from an hourglass. Over the young shinobi's shoulder he could see the underbellies of clouds in the western sky lit red by fire, and the cool nighttime breeze carried an unfamiliar, ominous energy that made the hair on his arms stand on end. Fugaku stood stock still, every muscle fighting the warning voices in his head - the instinct to flee spurred on by the three warm flickers of chakra moving further back in the house - until his sense of duty eventually won out and he dismissed the messenger with a clipped order to notify the clan elders. He turned back towards the house, his mind already thumbing through a list of emergency protocol, only to stop short at the sight of Itachi standing barefoot in the entryway. The small boy was in his pajamas, his eyes wide and still, and Fugaku could see the shadow of a kunai clutched tight in his right hand. Fugaku's stomach clenched with a sudden unwelcome realization. He knelt in front of his son and gripped his shoulder, speaking urgently.
"Listen to me closely, Itachi. The Hokage is in need of shinobi. Now that you have graduated, you are bound by duty to come to his aid. But I want you to stay with your mother. I must go, but I want you to stay. Do you understand?"
Itachi was silent for a moment, a moment when Fugaku felt the first drops of fear crystallize in his mind: fear that the village he served might take something from him he was not willing to give, fear that the elders were right and he had miscalculated. But then Itachi nodded, nearly imperceptibly, and raised his eyes to meet his father's. Fugaku heaved an inward sigh of relief and passed his hand over Itachi's head, making to stand, until his son's plaintive voice gave him pause.
"But Father, Shisui is not home yet."
Perhaps he was mistaken, but there was something haunted in Itachi's dark eyes, not quite fear or outright need but the flicker of an old ghost that Fugaku had sensed after the war but had never known how to soothe. A memory of Itachi slipping into bed between Mikoto and him, dry-eyed and shaking, surfaced in the well of his mind. His brows knit together briefly in consternation before Fugaku hurriedly pushed the image from his thoughts. "No, he's still on his mission. But don't worry," he assured his son. "He'll know what to do." The words gathered in the quiet foyer, half-baked reassurance, but Fugaku was out of time; he left Itachi standing there alone, a diminutive form shrouded in the rising wail of the village sirens.
X X X
By the time Fugaku reached the western gate, there was little left but an immense, twisted pile of blackened stone and splintered wood. Many of the buildings that stood near the gate and wall were on fire, civilians fleeing to the roofs as the flames crept higher or leaping from windows to the glass-littered streets below. Fugaku ducked, instinctively covering his neck and head, as a gas main a block away blew, sending a cloud of choking black smoke into the air. The explosion deafened him and rocked him to his knees until the infuriated roar of the bijuu cut through the ringing in his ears and drew his attention up and past the gaping hole in the wall, where several hundred yards out the Fox reared against the blackened sky, its great gleaming jaws snapping at the shinobi forces arrayed below. The Fourth Hokage was nowhere to be seen.
Fugaku directed a third of his men to aid the stranded civilians and another third to set up a fire perimeter against the village wall to help halt the advancing inferno. The final third followed him through the ruined gate into the melee. The rising smell of blood and charred flesh dredged up memories from older battlefields, unbidden yet somehow bracing in their familiarity. Fugaku crouched low to the hot ground and watched the Fox's tails slice through the air, charged with an unholy chakra that appeared to split the very atoms it encountered, the atmosphere rending with each violent whipsaw motion. He found himself recalling the fiery murals that adorned the walls of the clan meetinghouse, orange and yellow painted flames that chased themselves down the hallways like a wildfire leaping from pine tree to pine tree, until they climbed upwards in swaths of color to the magnificent ceiling fresco that overhung the main hall: the picture of a terrible beast of legend wrapped in glittering flame, its Sharingan eyes perpetually fixed on the congregants that gathered below. It had taken the commissioned artist several years to paint, lying on his back on the rickety scaffolding with his nose just inches from the ceiling, paint dripping onto his eyelashes.
The angry snarl of the kyuubi brought Fugaku back to himself, and he watched helplessly as the beast advanced, one of its powerful tails taking out three of his men in a single clean sweep, like a painter's stroke. He wondered then at how art and life are similar in this way: they take an eternity to create, but only moments to destroy.
At first it seemed that dawn might never arrive, but somehow it still came, grey and burdened with the events of the night before. Fugaku stood on a pile of rubble - dirty, battle-weary, and clutching at a deep gash in his right shoulder – to survey the damage. The western quarter of the village lay in ruins, pockets of demon fire reflected in the burnt out shells of buildings. Smoke drifted lazily towards the iron sky, carrying with it the faint cries for help from those still buried beneath the wreckage. Over the backs of shinobi toiling to reach the trapped survivors Fugaku could see the white tops of the medical tents rising, a stiff breeze rustling their canvas roofs. Then came the rain, slowly, a single drop that streaked his dirty cheek, then gaining momentum faster and faster until it swept across the smoldering landscape in great sheets, the Fox's accumulated residual energy arcing forth from the leaden clouds above.
This Fugaku knew: that the initial casualty count stood at one-hundred-fifty-seven shinobi and civilians, twelve of them Uchiha, though it was yet unknown how many were buried or had perished in the fires; that the Fourth Hokage's body, as well as his wife's, had been recovered and lain apart from the rest, many of them burned or mangled beyond recognition; and that somewhere to the east the refugees were emerging from their underground shelters into a village that was now violently, irrevocably altered.
X X X
The days and months that followed were like a waking dream, an immutable haze of activity with no conceivable end. The dead were buried, the western wall rebuilt, and new leaders took their places, but the loss remained, a weeping wound beneath the placid bandages of daily life, refusing to fully heal. Fugaku found he could no longer sleep. At night he would lie awake, the bright columns of the funeral pyres burning before his closed eyes, the muffled weeping of the bereft ringing off his interior walls. The war had been hard, but somehow, Fugaku believed, this was much harder. Grief lacked the neat, fixed order of trench warfare and belied all rules of engagement; instead it wound itself like a creeping vine around the bastions of memory, hid itself away in dark, quiet spaces, until one day you opened a cupboard or snapped a sheet over the bed and there it was, a sentient emotion that stole the breath from your lungs and fed on the empty consequence of tragedy. Konoha, once a beacon in the forest, had become a village of ghosts.
Still, spring came again, with its promise of new beginnings, and on one fine day, when the sun was high and bright in a picture-blue sky, Fugaku made his way along the village's narrow hard-packed streets to the Hokage Tower. The summons had come the evening before, a small, tidy scroll sealed with red wax and the Sandaime's monkey insignia, and hand-delivered by a chuunin in stiff, grey fatigues. Perhaps Fugaku had initially thought it odd that the summons came by messenger rather than the hawk courier system typically used within the village limits, but the note had been unobtrusive enough: a personal invitation from the Hokage to visit his private offices on the following afternoon, written in a neat, equally unobtrusive hand. Fugaku could feel the slight, compact weight of the scroll tucked into the sleeve of his robe as he wound his way among the stalls of an open-air market, the first to tentatively spring up in the wake of the tragedy, almost as if the villagers were unsure whether simple acts of commerce were yet appropriate. Despite the warmer weather, the market was eerily vacant; somewhere close by a high, clear laugh rose on the air and then cut off abruptly. Fugaku stopped to buy a few apples then gave them to a cluster of ragged orphans gathered in the lee of a building that still bore the marks of fire.
When a page dressed in standard grey ushered Fugaku into the Hokage's spacious office, the Sandaime was standing with his back to the door, gazing out through the set of large picture windows that adorned the wall behind his desk. Fugaku could see straight through the glass to where the cloudless vault of sky met the spring-green forest, the horizon a clean line stretching for miles in either direction. The village lay before them, colorful and sprawling, and for a moment he could pretend it was the Konoha he remembered, a Konoha that held only the sure knowledge of home and family and a promise greater than the present moment's burdens. Fugaku wondered if the Hokage felt the same way.
At the pageboy's announcement Sarutobi Hiruzen turned away hurriedly from the windows. "Fugaku - thank you for coming on such short notice." The words were gracious, and when Fugaku ducked his head politely in reply the old man smiled, a gesture that carved the prominent lines around his mouth and eyes even deeper. He was dressed casually; the traditional robe and hat of his station hung on a coat stand in the corner. Sarutobi motioned towards a pair of chairs, gesturing for Fugaku to take a seat. The sturdy oak desk, hand-constructed by the Shodaime himself, was already set for tea, its rich grain polished to a perfect gleam. Fugaku sat in the cushioned chair opposite the Sandaime and waited.
Konoha's leader poured the tea, then steepled his fingers, peering at Fugaku in silence as he took the first sip. Fugaku would always remember afterwards the pleasant heat of the porcelain teacup radiating against the skin of his palms and the faint scented curl of steam brushing his face. The tea was delicately flavored, an expensive floral import. He didn't like it very much.
The silence stretched for several minutes until the Hokage leaned back in his chair, fixed Fugaku with a considering gaze, and asked lightly, "How have you been sleeping?"
The question caught Fugaku off-guard. He paused with the teacup halfway to his lips then slowly set it down on the desk, a faint clink of porcelain against wood. He kept his face carefully blank, but the wary tension that leaked into his voice gave him away. "Fine."
Sarutobi pretended not to notice this lie and merely nodded thoughtfully before reaching for a sheaf of papers at his right. He spread them before Fugaku, four white pages in neat block type, the ANBU seal printed as a faint watermark across the center of each sheet. Fugaku leaned forward to better read the title fixed across the top of the first page: "Initial Report on the Activity of the Uchiha Regarding the Bijuu Attack on Konohagakure." His brows drew together sharply. "What – "
"This," Sarutobi cut in smoothly, "is a report written by Intel on evidence potentially linking the Uchiha to the kyuubi attack."
"I don't underst –"
"It was written at the request of the Village Council – "
"Sir – "
"– and concludes," the Hokage continued, raising his voice slightly, "that only a person in possession of the Sharingan has the requisite capabilities necessary for controlling the kyuubi."
Fugaku fell silent. He sat quite still, staring in disbelief at the Hokage, throat working against the monstrous implication hanging in the space between them. The sound of a street-sweeper drifted up through the open window, if only to remind Fugaku that this absurd situation was indeed happening. And it was absurd, Fugaku thought, absurd and unbelievable and completely, utterly wrong.
At last he found his voice. "Are you saying...that the village thinks the Uchiha directed the Fox to attack Konoha?" He spoke slowly, his tone carefully restrained in an attempt to hide the dangerous edge of anger growing behind his words.
The Hokage ignored this question. Instead, his clear gaze never leaving Fugaku's face, he asked very quietly, very gently, "Fugaku, is there anything you want to tell me?"
"No!" The vehemence of his answer startled Fugaku. He reared back in his chair, fists clenched against his knees. "No, because there's nothing to tell! This - this is a ridiculous accusation! I was there. You know I was there! I led a whole unit of my men against the Fox. I saw the fires and the devastation. For fuck's sake, Sarutobi, we lost twelve men that night, four of them veteran officers! Why would we inflict that kind of loss on ourselves, let alone on the village?"
The Hokage didn't seem surprised by this answer. Gathering the report back together, he leaned back in his chair with a heavy sigh, massaging one grey temple. "I understand your anger Fugaku, and I agree – the motive is implausible. But the evidence is enough to raise suspicion and –" a careless flip of the report "– the villagers have been demanding to know why this happened, which means the Council needs to demonstrate that it has been taking steps towards resolving the issue, if only to give people a sense of closure."
Fugaku gave Sarutobi a sharp look. "The Uchiha don't deserve to be scapegoated just so you can play politics. My clan is nothing but loyal to this village."
The Hokage's face hardened just a fraction. "I know. That is why," and here he sat up straighter, his voice taking on the resolute tone of a commander giving an order he knows will be followed, "I am confident you will listen to what I am about to say to you and not argue. By order of the Village Council, the Uchiha clan will be relocated to a compound in the eastern quarter of the village to better facilitate Intel's ongoing investigation of the clan's connection to the bijuu attack."
Fugaku could barely keep the rage and disgust out of his voice. "What you mean to say, is so that the Council can better monitor our activity. Am I correct?"
A beat. "That is correct."
When Fugaku was a new clan initiate, he had been made to sit through a series of lectures on clan history. The retired elder who had taught the lessons had seemed ancient in Fugaku's youthful estimation, his voice a raspy croak, carmine irises long since turned milky with cataracts and age. Fugaku had been suitably bored and spent the duration of most lessons tracing imaginary patterns on the floorboards, until the day the lesson described Uchiha Madara's schism with the clan. He had not forgotten his father's derisive words and, his interest momentarily piqued, inquired (with a logic that only testified to his naiveté) as to why the Uchiha's supposed great leader had deserted instead of immediately exacting retribution on his betrayers. The old man had paused only briefly in his remonstrations. "My dear boy," he had answered dryly, "shame is always a powerful deterrent."
Seated in the Hokage's office, Fugaku heard those dusty words echo once more in the chamber of his mind and thought he might be sick.
"Very well." He stood up and bowed stiffly. "Thank you, Hokage-sama. I will go now and apprise my clan of the Council's decision." He turned to leave.
"Fugaku, wait." Fugaku stopped, but he did not turn around. The Hokage's voice was soft, almost plaintive - the voice of a man who has long since resigned himself to the empty solace of regret - and his words caught on the air, infinitely hollow. "I am truly sorry."
Fugaku closed his eyes briefly, felt the world slip and fall, then straightened his shoulders and walked out of the room.
X X X
He took up smoking. A pack a day, then two, although he never lit up in the house. Instead, in the evenings he would follow the cracked concrete wall to the furthest corner of the compound where he could watch the ANBU change shifts as the sun went down in a liquid ball of orange behind the village. The Hokage kept five agents posted on the compound at all times, five agents to guard over three hundred clansmen. From the shadow of the wall Fugaku would turn this incongruous ratio over and over in his mind like a smooth river stone, a thin stream of smoke escaping from between his lips and his last cigarette burning down to an embered stub that glowed in the gathering gloom, at which point he would let it drop to the ground, a dying star falling to the earth, extinguished beneath the sole of his boot.
The clan council's excoriation had seared like acid, and for months afterwards bile would rise in the back of his throat at the memory: bitter, nauseating – the harsh taste of disgrace. Their fury had piled high on the smooth conference table top, accusations sharp like swords, and Fugaku's spine had bent beneath the whiplash of their tongues, forehead slammed repeatedly against the stained tatami to pronounce his guilt: I have failed the clan.
Afterwards he had gone home and stood among the boxes and bundles of clothing that littered the unfamiliar halls of their new home. He could hear Sasuke in the nursery, awake from his nap and crying for someone to fetch him out of his crib, but Fugaku ignored him in favor of unpacking the nearest box. It contained an odd conglomeration of objects: an engraved letter opener, an ornamental fan, and a grainy black-and-white photo of his father when he had still been young, his handsome face lacking the deep lines of hardship and oppression Fugaku remembered so well from his childhood. He stared at the image as Sasuke's wails grew more insistent. Long since he had assumed that the day he gained his Sharingan was the day he walked free of his father's tortured legacy of failure, left behind a future of barely scraping by on the edge of humanity to enter the exalted embrace of peerless legend. It seemed though, now, that he was indeed his father's son, and Fugaku had never truly rid himself of that past; it had only come back to haunt him in new and unexpected ways.
Still, in all his years as clan head he never believed anything less than this: that a leader must always pursue justice, though never for himself. Leadership was not an article of clothing one slipped on and off at will. He had made vows to the Uchiha in both blood and breath, and they bound him tightly, tethered him body and spirit to the welfare of every man, woman, and child in his clan. If the price for being a fool was ignominy in the eyes of his kinsmen, then he would pay it in full. He would not be a coward; he would not run.
It was this knowledge that weighed heavily on him as the months blurred faster and faster. Itachi grew tall and joined ANBU; Sasuke lost his baby fat. Dark circles blossomed beneath Fugaku's eyes. Night after night he would lie awake in bed next to Mikoto without touching her, watching the shadow of cherry tree branches outside the window drift across the ceiling as the bed covers pressed down heavy on his bones until he couldn't breathe but for the thoughts that tangled like fishing wire in his fingers, finally throwing back the covers to go lie on the cool, wooden planks of the back porch and unburden himself to the velvet sky. The council summonses were coming more frequently, and he had spent more than one late night in recent weeks at the shrine above the Nakano attempting to stave off the inevitable. But the day he let the Hokage steal the Uchiha's dignity was the day Fugaku lost what little leverage he had accumulated with the elders over the years, and now he sat by helplessly as they counted their grievances and plotted and schemed, the candles unwavering in the airless room.
"We will need someone to gather intelligence. Someone who has insider access."
"Perhaps Iwami? He's discreet enough, and he already has a Tower billet, so he wouldn't be too suspicious..."
"Yes, but he doesn't have the necessary security clearance. I would suggest Saro, but lately he's been –"
"Itachi will do it." Fugaku's head snapped up at Gorou's bald statement. The old man was seated at the opposite end of the conference table, his gnarled hands curled loosely on the twin arms of his chair. "He is young, he is ANBU, and he happens to be a personal favorite of Hiruzen's – all of which suit him to this task more than any other clan member without having to ingratiate himself to the Council. I am sure Fugaku would agree that he is the ideal candidate, would you not Fugaku?" Gorou smiled at him across the table like a cat licking the cream from its whiskers, and for a moment Fugaku thought he might snap the old man's neck. These days, though, anger was just as futile as it was dangerous, and the desire quickly fled, leaving only a hollow resignation in its wake.
Fugaku nodded, eyes never leaving Gorou's. "Itachi will do it."
One of the candles flickered with a phantom draft then guttered out, silent.
X X X
Fugaku was seated at his desk at police headquarters, head bent over a stack of wage referrals, when the sound of angry footfalls echoing off linoleum drew his attention towards the hallway. He glanced up just as his office door blew open, banging backwards into the wall.
"You bastard." Shisui slammed his hands onto Fugaku's desktop, dislodging a few loose papers and upsetting a pot of ink. "You let them assign Itachi?"
Fugaku had been expecting this. The vote had been held the night before, at two minutes to midnight, every Uchiha who possessed the Sharingan pressed tight in the shrine's underground chamber. Their combined chakra had been nearly crushing, despite chakra suppressors painted on the outer posts and the inner walls that kept the ANBU unawares, and it had taken considerable effort for Fugaku to bear up beneath the weight of it, his spine ramrod straight in the heavy darkness as he called Itachi forth from the ranks to receive his commission. The boy came silently, obedience bred faultlessly into the graceful quality of his stride and the flawless angle of his chin, and Fugaku had refused to allow his throat to close at the sight of his son's bowed head as he knelt at Fugaku's feet, dressed in the bone and black of Konoha's elite. A lone image of Itachi – small and fragile and receding from his vision as he left to fight the Fox – had fled across Fugaku's mind, and he had realized with a sickening lurch that he should never have been afraid that the village would sacrifice what was most precious to him, because somehow he had always been destined to do it himself.
"Look at me!" Shisui's anger was palpable, the low grind of his voice peaking with frustration and his distinctive chakra flaring hot beneath his jonin blues. Fugaku met his eyes coolly across the desk.
"Itachi accepted the assignment willingly. It is a great honor, one you would be just as privileged to complete." Even to his own ears, Fugaku's voice sounded mechanical.
"Honor, my ass," Shisui snarled. "If I had been there, I would have made sure everyone in that room understood that there is nothing honorable about using one's own son to initiate a coup."
"How fortunate you were on a mission, then."
The icy silence that filled the room was sharp enough to kill. Fugaku lowered his eyes to the spreading stain of ink on his desk. When Shisui finally spoke, his voice had dropped to a low growl but his chakra continued to burn, hot and dangerous on the edges of Fugaku's consciousness.
"The elders may have had enough foresight to ensure I was not present to voice opposition," Shisui said slowly, straightening up and fixing Fugaku with a hard, level gaze, "but it is your job as clan head to keep the best interests of this clan – not to mention your family – in mind when making decisions. In my estimation, you've failed monumentally."
Fugaku slammed to his feet, letting rage lend force to the low pitch of his words. The Sharingan bled red across his vision. "Everything I have ever done has been for the betterment of the Uchiha. If you ever criticize my commitment as clan head again, I will have you brought up on charges of treason. Is that understood?"
Shisui was silent for several seconds, meeting Fugaku's eyes with his own slate grey. His lips momentarily twisted into a scornful smile. "Yes, sir," he replied sarcastically. "Be assured the Uchiha will always have my full allegiance." A sardonic salute and he was gone.
X X X
A bell is chiming at the shrine on the Nakano. It is a funeral toll, one for every year of Uchiha Shisui's life, and Fugaku stands on the fishing dock, hands thrust deep in his pockets, listening to the reverent ring of brass echo across the river. In his right hand is crumpled Shisui's suicide note, and when the bell ceases its tolling, leaving an eerie silence in its wake, Fugaku takes the note out of his pocket to read. A large crease runs through one corner and he smoothes it with his thumb, examining the messy handwriting scrawled crookedly across the page. Even in penmanship his nephew had maintained a purposeful air of chaos.
I am tired of my duties...there is no future for the Uchiha or for me. I cannot walk this path any longer.
Chaos and ambiguity. Fugaku narrows his eyes against the setting sun and drops the hand with the note back to his side. It is a perfect autumn evening, the bullion light angled across the river's glittering surface and the trees on the riverbank flaming orange and red. A lone bird calls further down the current.
In a few days' time Fugaku will slide his bedroom door shut, kiss his wife goodbye, and slit his throat to escape his son's scything blade and the certain knowledge of his final failure. With this one last act of fidelity to a long-perverted ideal he will die swiftly, ignominiously, his lifeblood permanently staining the floorboards a rich red. The compound caretaker will use every cleaning solution he can think of to remove the stain, but it will remain, just one more added to the already discolored broadcloth of the Uchiha's past, a past that will one day drive the clan's sole remaining inheritor to leave the village his ancestors built and flee to the perilous brink of vengeance, always pursued by the shadow of the blood spilled the day the Uchiha departed the world.
But Fugaku is a shinobi and he does not think of death in terms of its details and far-reaching consequences, only its unforeseeable certainty. Instead he thinks of how just a few weeks before he had stood on this dock and observed Sasuke execute a perfect katon gokakyu, watched the great fireball soaring outward over the river and drawing steam from its dark surface in a loud whoosh of evaporating water. In the shimmering haze of heat that engulfed him, Fugaku had beheld his youngest son with a pride that eclipsed even the greatest moments of his own life. It was a pride bred from deepest devotion to kin and clan, the pride that had filled his father's voice on his deathbed, and this was it: that he was building a clan where his sons need never doubt nor be ashamed of their identity as Uchiha, but instead could always stand confident on the future they had inherited. Fugaku wore the same hitai ate as every other shinobi in the village, but before there was Konoha there was the Uchiha – the inexorable fire burning in his bones and his blood on a piece of parchment touched by the gods. He had an oath to keep, and so he would leave out all the rest.
A sigh of wind, and Fugaku lights the note on fire and lets it fall to the river, ash on water.