Capacity
It was snowing the night of the murder. The flakes were soft and scattered at first, thinner than a sheet of paper, but gradually they began to thicken and stick to eachother, and soon the newly frozen ground was hidden underneath a sparkling layer of white.
The trees outside were illuminated with an almost ethereal glow, cast by lanterns that had been hung over the porch at the beginning of summer. She had watched as they were placed there; the sound of nails being hammered into the wall had upset her, and she had turned away, biting her nails as she tried not to imagine her house caving in on itself.
For weeks she had refused to use the lanterns, but when she felt her son creeping down the hall and slipping out of the house, she had startled herself into action. Her housecoat was thin, light purple and translucent, and she threw it on quickly, gathering the front of it in a fist as she slid the door to her bedroom closed.
Her steps were hurried, and each time her foot came down on one of the floorboards, she heard her husband tossing around in the bed that she had abandoned. Her side was neat and cool and unoccupied; he clutched at it while sleeping.
She sat at the back of the house, confined within the screened-in area off the edge of the forest, rocking in a wicker chair and humming to herself. The longer she idled there the more she worried for Itachi, but she pulled herself together and attempted to remain calm.
Almost an hour passed before he returned, and by then the snow on the ground had already begun fading at the edges of the yard, melting away and into an earthy vacuum of nothingness. It continued falling, but the eddies that swirled in the gentle breeze seemed to bypass directly into the softening ground, disappearing forever.
His face was flecked with blood, and he glanced at her only briefly. In the split-second that he noticed her sitting and waiting, he hesitated. Her eyes roamed over him critically, searching for wounds but coming up with nothing.
She focused on the cold water droplets in his hair that glittered like a diamond tiara, and then she smiled at him in a way she hoped looked soothing. It would have bothered anyone else to realize that their son was wearing someone's blood, but Mikoto took this all in stride. If she squinted she could even find it in herself to pretend that the water was indeed a group of diamonds, and the spots of blood on his weary face were really rubies.
They nodded at eachother and vanished into the kitchen, stepping at an equal pace. She offered him some late-night tea. He downed it politely and excused himself without ceremony, and for a long time, Mikoto remained rooted to the linoleum floor, staring at the empty cup he had left on the table.
After he had given into sleep, she rinsed it out and put it at the back of one of the cabinets, behind the tall bottles of wine that she and her husband sometimes shared. It was in Fugaku's study that she found something to occupy her; an orderly stack of mission reports that Itachi had scrawled out himself.
She read until the words smashed and collided and blurred together, and when she finished she put the papers back into the order that she had discovered them in. Most of them concerned Uchiha Shisui. Otherwise, the papers featured grisly accounts of A-ranked assassinations.
She shed her housecoat, draping it over the side of his desk, and then she settled herself on the tacky, overstuffed sofa that filled the living room. –That's where the largest window in the house happened to be.
Her posture was stiff and awkward, but she stayed vigil and alert throughout the wee hours of the morning, watching as the fragile white world outside transformed into its summer self.
By the time that the others woke, all of the evidence was gone. The river that her son had drowned a friend in appeared as normal. At the bottom, in the sand—which was still quite cold—Uchiha Shisui was frozen to a bed of rocks in eternal rest.
Itachi was accused, but no one could find a body. Mikoto drank tea again the next morning, and when Itachi returned from a short mission, she read his report.
C-rank.
(He was recharging.)
She bought more tea.
Fin.