Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or any of the characters.
Warning: mildly disturbing imagery during the prologue (only).
AN: For my FF watchers. This isn't the sequel to Tsubaki of the Pen. I'm sorry, but that sequel's still on hold. This is a young!Mikoto/older!Obito story. I hope you'll still give it a chance. :)
Prologue
10 years before the Kyuubi Attack
Fat drops of sweat slid across her dirty cheeks. Mikoto paid them no mind, busy scratching symbols in the dirt. There was little room on the floor, for all that the cell was empty save for the people and a few handfuls of scattered straw, brown and broken and covered in filth.
The sharingan glowed faintly in the near gloom, a solitary gem in a drawn, ashen face. Her left eye was swollen shut and her now crooked nose was bleeding freely but she hadn't surrendered any useful information so far, let alone about her bloodline.
Dirt caught under her chipped nails as she worked but every line was drawn with painstaking patience.
"...And then I'd place the Three Heavenly Chains, to balance it all out, 'ttebane." she remembered Kushina saying. Her friend's voice had been slurring slightly as she sipped on her ninth glass of shochu, but the napkin doodle had been done with a remarkably steady hand.
"Course it's all… hypothetical… a work in progress. 'Cause I can make it slide forward… well tilting sideways, sort of, but Minato-baka's worried about the chakra cost. Oi, Mikoto-chan, are you listenin?! 'Cause I'm gonna need your help. You'll have to use the sharingan to see when to stop pouring chakra - lest I shoot past the end of the world!"
"You're so dramatic, Kushina." she'd huffed, hardly sober herself. "Like you'd have enough chakra for that."
"Don't underestimate me, 'ttebane! I could shoot past the end of the world if I wanted to!"
Her hand spasmed and she lifted it in a panic, careful not to disturb the unfinished seal. Her fingers were little more than swollen, broken lumps which twitched and seized and a few whimpers escaped as she breathed through the pain. Beside her, the guard moaned faintly, caught in the throes of a genjutsu.
This was her fifth escape attempt. Atsushi had died during capture, Hiro during the third attempt, Tanaka-taichou during the fourth.
She had expected them to kill her too, but they'd only laughed and jeered and dumped her back in the cell together with her teammates' corpses. The filthy straw stuck to her skin as she bent forward.
It had been three days now, three hot summer days and the room was starting to smell like a charnel house. Beside her, Hiro's mouth was twisted in a ghastly rictus, glassy eyes seeming to stare accusingly and she could feel Tanaka-taichou's gaping torso pressing into her side.
Even with a bleeding, broken nose she could smell the acrid stench of old blood and slowly rotting flesh.
It was likely, Mikoto reflected, that this would be her final shot. Her body felt like a collection of cracks, tears and bruises, uncertainly held together by battered flesh and a fraying will.
Her genjutsu wasn't strong enough to capture all of the camp's guards and Mikoto feared that she wasn't walking out of this. That they hadn't noticed her sharingan was a miracle, but the downed guard by her side would rectify that error the second her control should slip.
There was little harm now in attempting Kushina's crazy seal - a last ditch attempt before snapping the capsule. The 'little purple death' as everybody called it, standard issue for every Uchiha leaving on a mission above C-rank during wartime, an expensive, insidious concoction meant to forcefully destroy all capillaries in a twenty centimeter area, rendering their prized eyes unobtainable.
"Honorable suicide it may be", Mikoto thought, "but I don't want to die, I don't want to die." That single thought was like a filthy, cowardly worm crawling inside her brain, burrowing and swelling much like the maggots crawling inside her team's corpses. It was all she could think about for the past two days. How to stay alive… How to make it out of this alive.
This sudden, stubborn desire to cling to life went against every procedure hammered into her brain since childhood, against her duty to Konoha and of preserving the clan's secrets but no, she was hardly seventeen. Hardly seventeen. Mikoto had found that she didn't want to kill herself. Not without exhausting every other choice.
The special jounin finished the seal with a last, careful drag of her thumb through the dirt and her eyes snapped to the downed guard.
"For you, Kushina." Mikoto whispered with a wavering smile "That test you always wanted..." Quickly she pushed the guard towards the circle, before slowly rising herself.
Judging by the halting steps, the young man was fighting the order but the lengthy stay inside the genjutsu had weakened his resolve and his body betrayed him as he stumbled inside without smearing the lines.
With a twist of her feet Mikoto snapped his neck and settled above the corpse. The spine poked grotesquely, a tiny sliver of white bone surrounded by rapidly reddening skin and she took a moment to stare at it in morbid fascination, before rending her own hand on the sharp shard of bone. As their blood pooled inside the deep grooves, she forced her fingers into the first seal.
"Let's see how much time your life was worth."