Teaser: Uchiha Mikoto could count on her hand the number of instances where her performance had been less than satisfactory because she had gotten sick or injured. This was one of those times.

Warning: I'm really bad with history, and that includes fictional history as well. As said before, I'm not sure if any of this fits, but if you'd kindly ignore the blatant discrepancies, I'd be very grateful. Either that or I'm going to have to apply a semi-AU label in the near future.

Notes: Same stuff from last chapter applies.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

In the ninja world, death and pain are commonplace. Sometimes, in more ways than a normal person can imagine.

And They All Fall Down

"Defective Blood"

By Ikabi

Uchiha Mikoto had been extremely worried when she had fallen ill during one of her missions. As a jounin, it was her duty to Konoha to carry out her orders without fail; it was also her duty to make sure that her body was in top condition at all times. She could count on her hand the number of instances where her performance had been less than satisfactory because she had gotten sick or injured.

This was one of those times.

Briefly, she wondered if the enemy had somehow managed to poison her food without her noticing. It wasn't an outrageous notion and she wasn't so arrogant as to think too highly of her skills. She knew her limits, after all.

But for the Cloud to try and kill one of the Leaf's ambassadors and one of his jounin bodyguards? The idea, while it wasn't too farfetched, held very little credit. Kumogakure was in desperate need of peace, and to attack a potential ally in such a way…

Mikoto shook her head. They wouldn't dare try anything to her, even if she was only a bodyguard.

The mission lasted as long as it took for Kumo to sign a treaty with Konoha. She only hoped that it wouldn't take more than a few days.

Two days later, Mikoto was feeling decidedly more unwell. She didn't dare show any signs of weakness to the others in case it would reflect badly on Konoha's reputation. But when she was alone in her room, her limbs would shake, her breathing would become shallow, and the ever present pain in her head would threaten to take over.

The only consolation was that the ambassador was safe. This strange sickness was only affecting her and hadn't touched her colleagues.

She could have passed it off as an unusually strong case of her body not coping well with her menstruation cycle, but that wasn't supposed to happen for a few more days at the very least.

Then the room suddenly spun and she felt herself falling. She tried to catch herself – really, she did (somehow, her arms were slow to respond even though her eyesight [Sharingan or no] was clear) – but her body refused to respond and she could only watch helplessly as the wooden floor rushed up to meet her.

She awoke to find a very concerned shinobi crouched above her face, hovering nervously as if unsure what to do. Mikoto recognized him as one of the newly-elected chuunin who had been assigned to the mission under her command. For some odd reason, she couldn't remember his name.

"Uchiha-san? Uchiha-san? How are you feeling?"

She grunted when she found that she didn't have the energy to respond with a decent answer. The chuunin took this as a good sign and hurried to rearrange her into a more comfortable position.

"Just wait right here. I'll go get a medic-nin!"

Mikoto clenched her sheets nervously as she sat facing the medic that her subordinate had managed to find. She had yet to be properly diagnosed, and she wasn't sure if it was a good or bad thing that the other woman had taken one look at her and flatly said, "Congratulations. You've managed to get yourself sick and on the job, no less. When did the symptoms first start?"

At least the medic hailed from Konoha too. Otherwise, Mikoto would have been forced to choose between suffering for the remainder of the mission or reveal her condition to outsiders. She thanked whatever deities out there that the Hokage had had the foresight to assign a medic-nin to their little entourage.

Ten minutes later, she wasn't so sure if she should be shocked, scared, or relieved.

"Excuse me?" Mikoto's fingers trembled, and this time she knew why.

"You're expecting. And you haven't been eating properly, so part of the nausea is from dehydration and lack of proper nutrients. As far as I can tell, you haven't contracted a disease, so your earlier fears of poisoning were entirely misplaced."

The jounin slumped against the wall, brain spinning around so fast that she didn't know what she was thinking anymore save for one thing.

'I'm going to be a mom.'

She had been so caught up with the unexpected news that she didn't remember what happened in the following days after Konoha sent replacements and she had been allowed to return home early. Fugaku had been floored to find out that he was going to be a father in his quiet, awkward (Kushina's word, not hers), adorable (her word, not Kushina's) way.

(Her early dismissal had hardly mattered. In the end, nothing was agreed upon and Kumogakure had declared war on Konoha again.)

A little less than nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy boy.

His name was Itachi.

"What do you mean?" Mikoto had stood up when the medic had presented the news to her. "My child is perfectly fine!"

She cast a worried glance to her toddler who was playing with a pile of wooden kana blocks nearby.

The nurse sighed. "Uchiha-san. I am merely relaying what the others have found the last time you came in for a check-up. Itachi is not normal. There is something different about him."

But Mikoto had known this. Not at the very beginning, but there had been signs. Her baby had rarely cried; he had been wriggling and moving an almost excessive around in his crib since the second or third day; he didn't laugh; he didn't smile. And even after two years, Itachi hardly ever spoke. Sometimes she wondered if he knew how to speak at all.

And then, every once in a while, he would do things that scared her. Over a year ago, she had set her shuriken pouch on the kitchen counter after a very brief training session with her friends. After going to check that Itachi was safe in his play pen, she went to take a quick bath before preparing lunch.

When she had reentered the kitchen, however, her pouch had been opened and its contents were on the floor. The most startling part was that Itachi was sitting there, stacking them up neatly as if they were mere toys. And not just absently stacking – they were lined up perfectly as if he had taken a straight edge to them.

Mikoto had experimented after that incident. She left money out on the porch and watched as an eleven-month-old Itachi sorted through the coins and placed them in piles based on size and value. After correctly cataloguing all the loose bits of change, he started stacking these up like the shuriken from before as well.

Every puzzle or challenge she came up was met, scrutinized, solved and then defeated by the child who barely knew how to walk.

It scared her. Because, as a shinobi, she had watched over a number of small children during her genin days. And none of them had ever done anything like this.

So of course, she knew that Itachi wasn't normal. She had figured that out all by herself a long time ago.

That didn't mean that she appreciated it when the nurse put it so flippantly, though.

"Some of the medics believe," the nurse continued when she noticed that Mikoto's attention had returned, "that he has a type of pervasive developmental disorder."

"A what?"

"Basically, we think your child has autism."

Neither adult noticed when Itachi had stopped playing with his blocks and sat there, looking at them.

They also didn't notice that he had stacked the blocks in alphabetical order and arranged them in a way that it resembled the hiragana charts located in the classrooms intended to teach younger children how to write.

She had cried when she returned home.

Eventually, she learned to cope and deal with her situation. The medics hadn't been entirely sure about their diagnosis and so could not officially put it in their records. Soon, they even forgot that they had ever suggested such a thing when it became evident that Itachi was brilliant in a way that few could ever compare.

Fugaku had suggested that they enroll him in the academy early, and she had relented, hoping that their son might finally be able to find friends amongst the other children.

All her hopes were for naught when she spied on him one day and saw just how different her child was from the others, and she wept bitterly in secret.

When she found that she was with another child, she prayed fervently that he would be normal.

Because even though she loved her firstborn with all her might, she wanted a son whom she could relate to. She wanted a human being she could smile with and praise and spoil every so often.

She wanted a child who wasn't so brilliant as all the academy teachers claimed.

When she had voiced this concern to her husband, he had calmly pushed her fears aside, saying that Itachi was a prodigy and would carve out a legacy. He would carry on the Uchiha name with pride and make the clan stronger than it ever had before.

She wasn't so sure if she wanted her five-year-old to do those things.

Then Sasuke had been born. And after a few years, he was as normal as children could get.

Mikoto was so very relieved when she had found out. Fugaku, on the other hand, had been a little disappointed that his second son wasn't as promising as his first.

But in the end, it was the firstborn's brilliance and genius that was the cause of their clan's massacre.

Fin

Author's Notes – March 20, 2007:

Extremely rushed because I'm posting this before heading off to class. And I'm late!

Originally, this shot was supposed to focus only on Itachi using Mikoto's point of view. Then bam! Cue the intro and the background for this piece. Except, it got too long, and I didn't get to focus on what I wanted! So there – now it includes Mikoto's pregnancy (which I know virtually nothing about).

I wanted to explore the possibility of Itachi having autism partially because my brother was diagnosed with HFA at a young age. We're about a year and a half apart, so I have no memories of how he behaved when he was a kid and most of my information came from family members.

Edited: August 19, 2017, for minor grammar corrections and word choices.