Disclaimer: Naruto is the work of mangaka Masashi Kishimoto, Harry Potter is the work of author J.K. Rowling. The author makes no claim to ownership of the aforementioned works and no profit from this fanfiction.
Uchiha Fukurou
Of Nosy Cousins, Fictional Bows and Miserly Headsmen
Fugaku was sitting at the Uchiha Senbei shop that relocated to the clan district with some of the clan elders. He looked up when he saw Shisui arrive at the gate, frowning distractedly. The younger man paused when he saw the collection of older ninja looking at him expectedly. At length, Fugaku sighed.
"So he got you too huh?" He said.
Shisui seemed even more confused, "Um, Fugaku-sama what are you…"
An irritated-looking old woman interrupted him. It seemed she'd lost some money, "You were supposed to follow your cousin Fukurou to his home and report back to us."
Shisui blinked, then he blinked again and his eyes widened slowly, "Ah! Michiru-sama, I'm sorry!" He rubbed the back of his head in embarrassment, "I was able to follow Fukurou-kun as far as the Kokoro Forest when I remembered I had something really important to do today!"
The elders watched as Shisui bowed in apology, then after a while the one who seemed to have won the bet with Michiru asked him, "What was so important that it couldn't wait... for a mission from your clan?"
Shisui brightened, "Well today I'm going to start a… toenail… clipping… collection?"
Towards the end it sounded more like a question, one that the boy had just begun to ask himself.
With a sigh, Fugaku told the him go home and get some rest, the other three seemed to get better by the next day.
"So even Shisui fell for his technique, whatever it is..." Fugaku muttered.
"First was a phony ninja triathlon, second was re-indexing non-existent hentai-jutsu at the clan library," An amused Teyaki listed, "Then he tricked Itachi-kun into asking Neko-Baa to give him the Birds and Bees Talk."
Fugaku shuddered. He was still fielding the fallout from that incident from both wife and son. What the hell had that old lady told Itachi anyway? And why was Mikoto angry with Him?
"Toenail clippings… He's not even trying anymore," Michiru sighed in exasperation. She looked at Fugaku sternly, "No matter what happens that kind of talent cannot be lost!"
Fugaku nodded stiffly, "I'll talk to the others…"
Fukurou's self-study was stymied by the increasing interest from his clansmen into his whereabouts. He was often followed and the situation was quickly becoming annoying. He used a lesson from his past life when he had wanted to keep others at a distance, he talked to birds in plain view of his watchers, collected bottle caps, did what the hell ever he wanted without concern for what his clan thought of him... with a perfect, occlumency maintained, poker face. He channeled Luna Scamander a lot in conversations with Fugaku, the man never, ever got to the point of asking Fukurou about his living arrangements.
Even though his clan thought him odd, they still made a concerted effort to bring him into the fold. About half his clansmen were sharingan users, and fewer still showed the same kind of potential that Shisui, Itachi and Fukurou did. There was always a sense of pride when others spoke of them, even him, the eccentric bird guy. He wouldn't have known about the followers if it weren't for the defenses around his Fidelus Seal.
The key part of the seal was the bit that substituted for a secret keeper, allowing the user to stay at a home that only he or she knew the location of. The downside was that it wasn't possible to hide the Keeper runes within the secret that it kept. For reasons both practical and due to certain arithmantic impossibilities that Hermione had explained to him and he still didn't fully understand, the secret needed to be written in a manner that the one who cast the spell clearly understood and found unambiguous.
The seal also couldn't be obscured in any way or hidden…technically. Given that the paper seal could not defend itself from readers or refuse to speak, the elegant solution that Hermione had taught him was to use a second Fidelus Seal on the location of the first Secret Keeper. Essentially He was keeping a secret of a secret. And since he spoke a language that no one in the Elemental Nations seemed to know, there was no problem with him leaving the location of the second seal out in the open if he ever brought a guest into his home. It was disguised as a work of art.
It was the aversion and confundus seals on the path that lead to his home that his trackers had tripped. He didn't want people figuring out that the location of his home by inference. It had been quite a shock when one of his Uncles suddenly began counting off jumping jacks, especially when another jounin in green spandex joined in. After the third time he'd been so startled by a family member, he cottoned on to the fact that it wasn't a fluke.
He was always running into Aunts and Uncles who were willing to let him in to stay the night. He found that his trackers gave him a little more leeway when he wasn't disappearing for long periods of time and so accepted the offers. They were his clan and Fukurou felt no need to alienate himself from them. However, he'd had this kind of attention before as Harry Potter and as Minister for Magic, he knew what would happen if he let himself become a tool of others rather than his own person. Even if it was his family he wanted no part of that. Truly, he pitied Itachi.
He did welcome the positive attention from his cousins, the younger ones more than the older. The children his age and higher were people who had paid him no mind in the past, some had even been downright mean. Now that the elders thought Fukurou held value as an Uchiha, suddenly parents were pushing their children to 'make friends of the right sort'. It was an attitude Fukurou detested, that a few of his older female cousins seemed to take the 'make friends' part the wrong way was just plain disturbing. There was a sort of dawning horror at the realization that as a half-blood, he was expected to marry into his own family.
Still, Fukurou couldn't help but dote on his younger cousins. There were a lot of them and at times they reminded him of a batch of hungry chicks, eager to see his sharingan and ask when they'd get their own. He mainly wound up acting as a babysitter for the parents who he stayed with. Those aunts and uncles that had kids were grateful for the extra set of hands and eyes he provided so the offers weren't all contrived. He spent his time training with his peers, learning fire jutsu and in weapons training with Chun Chu-sensei.
Chun Chu-sensei, started working with them on basic weapons training after their third week of training. She was an expert user of a variety of ninja tools and there was a ninja supply store in the village that she co-owned and managed with her husband, a local blacksmith. Fukurou already had academy instruction in the use of steel wire, kunai, shuriken, flash tags, paper bombs and makibishi. His family also taught him about different shuriken variants. Chun Chu not only worked on their field craft by teaching more advanced trap making skills and survival techniques, she also expanded her genin's familiarity with a variety of weaponry.
The most basic shinobi weapon was the kunai. It was a sort of primitive multi tool useful for everything from killing to digging up roots and tubers. The broad flat blade was strong enough to use as an entrenching tool, could be sharpened into a spearhead or knife for use as either a weapon or a utensil. It could serve as a tent stake, a handhold while climbing and any number of the hundreds of uses that their sensei taught them; and yes, it could serve as a trowel.
Chun Chu introduced her team to the ninjatō and tantō, she familiarized them with the basics of using the weapons. They were generic blades, re-forged from scrap metal and broken swords in bulk to provide a cheaply disposable weapon that could be put to rugged use much like a kunai would and disposed of without worry that the weapon would betray the identity of a ninja's village. For smaller shinobi like Fukurou and Shigure, the weapons added to their reach and versatility. Hiko also benefitted simply from having a fall back option and proved to be surprisingly talented.
As part owner, Chun Chu got her team weapons for free. Hiko and Shigure practiced with ninjatō. Hiko fell into a style of flashy but effective aerial slashes that had their sensei shaking her head. Shigure began developing combat tactics that used her weapon to up her personal threat level, while preparing to ambush her opponent with kikaichu. It was an especially effective strategy since she didn't need to use hand seals for the basic Aburame jutsu or for simply directing her kikaichu to a certain location.
Fukurou practiced with a tantō that was easy to conceal but he'd found a more fitting weapon for his combat preference in a composite bow that had been on display. The small recurve bow wasn't a really popular sell and the one on display had just been a showpiece. It was functional though. This model was actually made from a backing of thin, laminated bands of spring steel, bonded to strips of specially treated wood. The project had proved a bit of a boondoggle as no one, not even Chun Chu herself could properly use the bow.
It was a compact, powerful weapon that had taken a lot of effort to create. It was also quite heavy, Chun Chu taught him how to use a simpler version of a recurve, but was doubtful that the one Fukurou wanted would be useful as a ninja tool. She was very reluctant to allow him to buy it even at full price. That lasted until he showed her what he could do with the weapon.
When most people talked about the sharingan they mentioned a user's jutsu copying ability and observational skill in that order. Fukurou's sharingan also seemed to allow an almost preternatural eye for detail at extreme ranges. Old myopic Harry could pull a snitch out of the air going at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Green-eyed Fukurou could put any throwing weapon on target ten times out of ten from fifty meters away and do the same at one hundred meters if he used chakra to enhance the strength of his throws.
With the sharingan, Fukurou never missed… ever. After the third time he pegged a butterfly from nearly a kilometer away his sensei was sold on the idea. It took enhancing his arms with chakra to draw the bow properly and he wouldn't easily be able to make a shot like that in a forest but Fukurou was getting some fiendish ideas when he thought about enchanting the bow and the arrows that he used to be soundless, unbreakable and the like. From the looks of his sensei, the woman was having ideas of her own.
It was after that lesson that Team Chun Chu took on their first C-rank mission. They were to protect a delivery of rice from Ogawa, a town in the north-west of Fire Country that had enough concerns about the security of the shipment to hire ninja as backup for their guards. Meeting at the village gates, they made their way north through the forests that surrounded their home. For an unencumbered ninja moving at a moderate pace, the village was a day and a half away. Giving her group rest breaks that Fukurou at least was secretly thankful for, Chun Chu-sensei lead her team into the headsman's office two days later with time to spare.
On arrival Fukurou quickly noticed the state of the village. He observed signs of a recent struggle, though the attitude of the children and the professionalism of the samurai that wore Hi no Kuni colors assured him that this wasn't a trap. His green eyes panned over the street and surrounding buildings noting a scorch mark on the relatively new village wall, scars from weaponry on buildings and people. He found Chun Chu-sensei had been watching him take it all in and she nodded to him imperceptibly.
The conversation between their sensei and the village headsman revealed that an attack had occurred on the village. After the upheaval of the Third Shinobi War gangs had sprung up composed of former soldiers and displaced civilians. One of these gangs had become ambitious, not satisfied preying on merchants crossing into Rice Country from Hi no Kuni, they'd been trying to scam the village into paying for protection from light raids that their own men had carried out on outlying farms.
The villagers had been preparing for the annual tax at the time and the grizzled headsman, a war veteran himself, hadn't even entertained the notion of paying another one to thieves. The shrewd old man had engineered a plan to bring in a platoon of samurai that had caught the bandits in the midst of another terror spree, this time attacking the village itself. The samurai had arrived only an hour before the raid and instead of finding a sleepy village, the night attack had turned into something of a rout. There had been several prisoners taken.
With Harry's experience as an Auror and a politician Fukurou easily puzzled out the headsman's dilemma and the solution that the man had found for it. Not knowing if the samurai would arrive on time, the man had also sent a request for a ninja escort which on arrival could be used to force the bandits into backing off. That hadn't been the end of it though. One of the prisoners taken claimed to be a relative of the bandit leader and swore up and down that his brother would take revenge.
Normally the samurai would have been allowed to execute the bandits on the spot, having caught them red-handed in an attack, with the village headsman serving as a stand in for a magistrate. The headsman had refused to do so, on the grounds that the prisoner's comrades were still at large and by having him interrogated at the garrison with an official magistrate there, what information gleaned would ensure that the bandits never attacked again.
It was sound logic, but the aged statesman in Fukurou looked at the situation in another way. The headsman worried that the bandits would attack when the samurai were gone and didn't want to pay for additional ninja to hunt down the bandits if he didn't have to. Executing the prisoners would invite an attack on his people, while sending them to a Fire Country official would lay grounds for a petition to the Daimyo, to have Konoha sweep the area for bandits as part of their mandate to protect Fire Country.
And of course, if the prisoner that wouldn't shut up was right and his brother was going to attack in an attempt to free his men, better the attack not be on his village. This was assured by having the prisoners transported along with the tithe caravan. An attack after they left the fortified village was more likely then. The samurai guarded the prisoners along with the tax levy in the caravan and the ninja guarded the caravan as a whole in event of an attack. The headsman was getting a package deal, especially if the bandits were further routed in an attempt on the travelers.
It struck Fukurou as a cold thing to do, seeing as his team was basically being put in the line of fire but he reasoned that the headsman was struggling to do the best under difficult circumstances. He wagered that the tax levies were high as a measure to cover expenses incurred by the recent war. The villagers probably had little choice but to pull this act of subterfuge.
Fukurou could see that Chun Chu-sensei understood the situation, though there was little she could do that she wouldn't have done anyway. When the caravan departed, Hiko and Shigure took turns scouting the terrain for ambushes. Shigure did so using her kikaichu allies while Hiko used his mind transfer technique on a bird that Fukurou had 'tamed'. Fukurou stood guard over Hiko's body with his composite bow and arrows out. Chun Chu-sensei seemed vanish among the wagoneers.
Predictably, the attack though expected; happened just when everyone, except perhaps Chun Chu-sensei and Shigure- who was a pessimist, thought that it wasn't going to come.
AN: Writing the outline of the plot really helps to keep a story from meandering. Add some detail and voila, tale ready to be read, garnish with pertinent dialogue and sprinkle on a little humor to taste. For a public serving pay attention to proper grammer and spelling. A story could be fabulously delicious and still no one will try it.
TTFN
