Notes: I'm going to update as it occurs until the Doom arrives. So…Yukina gets to stay on her horse a little longer, because the chapter was getting too epic. (Read "long.") I just realized that Sakura would be pretty young when Yukina first met her, but let's just say that she had been apprenticed to Tsunade for a month or so already.

Trespassing is a crime, but I think it's less actively enforced in Konoha. As to how sadly un-Lionhearted Yukina is when faced with Sasuke, just think about how it is to be confronted by a local legend in the flesh.

Disclaimer: Waiting for Itachi to kill Sasuke and thus throw every single thing that's in my head into the realm of Alternate Universe.

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I went home to take a nap and then go train some more. No sooner had I shut my eyes, it seemed, did my mom shake me by the shoulders so frantically that I couldn't sleep. While I dug the heels of my palms into my eyes and mumbled, she informed me of the pressing problem.

"Yukina, your little brother is missing!"

"Huh?" It was only seven-thirty. But then again, I should explain something about my brother.

Eiji is only one year younger than me, but he's my polar opposite. I guess he was relatively well-behaved for a boy, but really he drove me crazy. I had to hide all my ninja equipment because our mom wouldn't let us lock our bedroom doors. Eiji was tall enough to reach the top of all the furniture in my room, and if not, he was resourceful enough to move my chair and stand on it. He liked to mess up my things by putting the kunai in the shuriken holster, making a headscarf out of my stock of rolled bandages…and he didn't even want to be a ninja. He's Mommy's Little Civilian.

Well, sometimes I respect him for trying to find his own way. But as I stumbled out of the house, still seeking the elusive clarity known as the state of being awake, I was in no mood to appreciate Eiji's independent drive. He was never less than an hour early for dinner, although in this case, my mom had probably overreacted.

I took a stroll through the usual places that little boys like him tended to frequent, doubling back to check the playground and unused training fields twice. I asked store clerks and discovered only that a young boy matching the vague description I gave had been last seen in the company of a gaggle of similarly-aged boys.

The sun was setting as I turned for a third patrol. My sweat was making the fabric of my shirt clingy, and my ankles had begun to ache. I decided that I could afford to lean against the wall of a shop on the corner – it sold poultry and dairy products of a caliber that fell short of my mom's standards – and catch my breath. A late-forties-ish woman was locking up the door. I thought about moving away because she looked irritable, but concluded that it wasn't worth the trouble.

"You, young girl – what are you doing here? Run along. Store's closed for today."

I couldn't ignore her sharp, shrewish eyes. She was one of those adults who believe that everybody under the age of thirty is a young ruffian and everyone above that age is an older ruffian and maybe even a closet pervert. "Excuse me, ma'am." My most polite tone failed to smooth the suspicious, mean crinkle from her face; still, I had to ask. "Have you seen a group of young boys pass by your corner today?"

She coughed, a scornful tilt to her graying head. "No." My heart plummeted. At this rate, I was never going home and getting enough sleep or time to prepare for my first full day in Team Four. "But I did sell two dozen eggs to a young boy. Seemed well-mannered, too," she sniffed, "before he headed downtown! What business does a child his age have there, alone, no less! Why do you want to know?" She added, if a little late.

"I'm, uh…I'm his sister. Probably…"

Giving me a glower that implied Eiji's pigheaded idiocy was all my fault, she turned away. "You had better collect your brother before it gets dark! Who knows what that young delinquent can get up to."

I looked down the emptying street, thinking about what the unsympathetic store woman had said. Downtown. Konoha's busiest sector, where several roads met and the main street veered down to a part of the village that I'd never been allowed to explore. At this hour, the bars and restaurants, which Ayame had described to me from the time her cool, older cousin had escorted her there, must be welcoming in the regulars. There would be lots of adults, lots of tall…intimidating people. And there would be Eiji, barely four feet tall, looking lost. With two dozen eggs. What on earth was he thinking? Without further ado, I tore down the main street in the direction of downtown.

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Eiji wasn't just in the downtown area. He was somewhere infinitely worse. Somewhere known to all kids as the single most haunted area of Konoha. When I found him, he was shaking like a leaf, and you know what? I think I was, too.

Every normal kid has heard his fair share of ghost stories in childhood: the freaky shrine with an evil spirit that drives whoever spends the night there insane. The deep, dark tunnels in the bowels of Earth Country, where an overgrown demonic worm consumes unwary victims who rouse it from its lair. The freaky stories about the Kazekage during his formative years.

(They don't tell the last one anymore. It's not diplomatic, probably untrue, and our current Hokage got so angry when he heard about it that he – well, it's obvious to anyone who has dropped by the Hokage's office. It's still in repair.)

One place tops them all. Unlike all the mostly invented stories I knew, the legend about it was true. It was obvious from the way that even grownups gave it a wide berth. I think I know the difference between not wanting to trespass on private property and fearing to set foot on it…that is a difference that children are very quick to notice.

That street was at a junction, a handful of blocks from the municipal buildings and en route to downtown proper. While the crowds thinned out at other places and thickened near this end of the main street, no one strayed even by accident into that other, quietly abandoned street. The street that, as the story goes, is haunted by the dead of an entire clan. They were slaughtered by the greatest genius that had come from their family since the Second Hokage's time, and now they lingered in the dead, black windows, the shops with empty displays that never opened… their last survivor, a psychopathic recluse who had killed his own brother, the mass-murderer of his clan.

Among adults, that might have earned him some quality of redemption (no one mentions, I now realize, the part where he became a missing-nin to hunt down said brother). The younger generation, though, reasons with flawless logic that because he killed a psycho, he was necessarily an even crazier, scarier psycho.

Don't laugh, please. For a long time, I agreed with it, too.

So did Eiji. This would explain why he was shivering as though he stood in a strong wind on a snowy precipice instead of at the mouth of the branch street that led into the eerie, haunted part of Konoha called the Uchiha compound. From his left hand dangled a neon-green bucket of eggs. Two dozen, as I already knew. His knuckles were white around the thin metal handle.

"Eiji, what the hell are you doing?" Something about our location made me hiss this in an angry whisper rather than bellow at the top of my lungs.

"I need to egg…his…door." His voice didn't sound much louder than a seagull in Water Country.

"What?"

My idiot brother turned to face me with an expression of total misery. "It's a dare. I've got to do it."

"Oh my God! How old are you?" I clapped my hands to my temples. "No! You could die!"

Judging by his dejected posture, Eiji was deeply aware of that. He faced the Uchiha compound and started to walk. His voice wavered. "Yu – Yukina-neesan, tell mom that I love her."

I couldn't let him do this. Now, we both knew that I was much faster than he was, so I could just scoop him up and run like the wind until we got home. At eleven, he had put on some weight, but I was a ninja. I could –

"And if you try to pick me up and carry me out," he added in a tiny, guilty voice, "I'll scream. I'm sorry."

Dithering at the mouth of the street, I saw him reach the front door of the imposing, dark façade of the main house where the freaky lunatic lived, and set his bucket on the ground. I couldn't let him get killed without a fight! So I hurried forward, fighting the nausea and cold sweat that can only be instigated by a lifetime of ghost stories and superstition.

We stared at the front of the house. The windows opened to unlit rooms like ghastly, condemning eyes. Then we heard, from behind the house, the latch of a gate turn. It was him.

Eiji gave a petrified little squeak. My heart shot up to my throat, pounding an erratic rhythm as I grabbed my brother with a hand clamped over his mouth and dashed into the narrow, dark space between one haunted house and another, on the side opposite the main house. We were so close that we could see everything. Our knees were quaking.

The forbidding door opened.

Out stepped the last scion of the Uchiha Clan. Eiji and I waited with baited breath. Even the sound of us not breathing seemed to draw the silence around the mad thumping at our chests. It was too late to slink even deeper into the narrow gap. The roofs extended and nearly met above our heads, leaving a silver of deathly light to trail along the middle of our third-rate hiding place.

The Uchiha didn't look as…wild as I thought the local bogeyman would look. Somehow that made it even worse. His black hair was parted in the middle to form long bangs around his face, but stuck out in the back in imitation of a crow's tail feathers, like an evil omen. His eyes, which were drawn with agonizing slowness to the road, were as dark as black coffee, like two pits in his pale face. I half-expected an eye-sized worm to poke its head out of one eye and slither back in through the other. Now I wanted to retch. The psychopath had no clear deformity, but his mere presence was paralyzing.

He was staring down at the most glaringly hideous feature on his gloomy, dusky street – the neon-green bucket of eggs. The beginnings of a moan twitched at the back of Eiji's throat. I squeezed his arm very tightly and he fell silent, my hand still clapped over his mouth. One whimper out of him could be the death of both of us.

I could see, at this distance, the man glare at the bright green bucket. The downward tip of his mouth proclaimed him not amused, an offense punishable by death. Just then, I heard the casual, soft slap of sandals on the ground coming from the junction where this street met the main road. A short moment later, I saw a sight that simultaneously raised my hopes and trapped me in greater terror.

First reaction: He wouldn't kill children in front of another adult, right? (No, wait, even the adults are afraid of him.) She wouldn't let him kill us, right? (She may be a grownup, but hello, adults are scared of him, too.)

Second reaction: Holy crap, my sensei is not going to approve of me being here. (And then, even worse –) Is she…in league with him?

Help!

All coherent thought derailed.

"Hi, Sasuke-kun." Sakura-sensei's friendly tone was the fulfillment of my worst nightmare. "Um…why is there a bucket of eggs in the middle of the street?" A restrained, uncomfortable laugh tinted her observation.

"They're not mine," said Sasuke flatly. I knew it – there was no mistaking the annoyance in his voice, but the lack of killing intent in it clearly indicated their familiarity with each other.

After a pause, I saw my sensei step closer to the Uchiha. The light cheerfulness in her voice seemed to disperse with her next query, although her effort to sound casual was apparent. "We missed you today at Ichiraku. What came up?"

This brought up memories of my mom – whom I was unlikely to see again – asking the very same question. She doesn't ask What did you think you were doing, being late/absent/stupid like that, as normal mothers do. When she's angry, she towers, emanating a glacial aura that chills to the bone. This is the worst part of it, the anticipation before the volcano erupts – when she asks coldly, Well, Yukina-chan? What came up?

I mentally rifled through all my excuses. Extracurricular work. Training. A friend's mom's invitation that I couldn't refuse. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Very sorry, mom. Won't do it again. Please, have mercy!

"Nothing," said Sasuke in a voice of stone. Heavy, unyielding, and final. So he was the one that Sakura-sensei and Naruto had been talking about. He was scary. They wanted to eat ramen with him?

He only orders the miso ramen…

I came to the disheartening realization that my sensei was a closet lunatic.

"Then why?"

In that instant, I became aware of the fact that this was a rather private exchange, and that Sasuke murdering me and my brother wasn't the only unpleasant outcome that could occur. I shifted my foot in discomfort. As fate would have it, the sole of my sandal scuffed an errant fragment of pebble against the dry ground. The unnatural silence of the street magnified the sound of its scraping a hundredfold. Eiji and I shared a silent, nearly fatal heart attack.

"Did you hear that, Sasuke-kun?" Sakura-sensei's head moved; if it turned one more fraction of a degree, she'd be staring directly at us.

"Go home, Sakura."

I had never been so grateful to hear a psychopath's cutting voice in my entire life. Sakura-sensei's tentative hand reached for his face. I winced, waiting for it to be amputated. But Sasuke stood still, letting her fingers glide down his cheek.

"Just go, Sakura." Almost, but not quite, sounding bored. I could tell from the way she withdrew that it had hurt her.

And then, the weirdest thing of all crossed Sasuke's face. It disappeared too fast for me to be sure, and my sensei, who was backing away with her face a dangerous ninety degrees away from my hiding place, must have missed it while she was blinking. Frustration, disappointment, even a sliver of hope laced her voice. "I suppose it'd be a waste of time for me to ask you to lunch at Ichiraku tomorrow." She turned away from him, preparing to walk back into the main street – maybe join the nightlife that I was never going to live to see. "Have a good one, Sasuke-kun."

It happened again. It lasted about as long as it had the last time, but because I'd seen it already, I felt certain. Uchiha Sasuke, the psychopath who had killed his own brother, looked regretful. Not just the I wish I ate one less ice cream before dinner brand of regret. It was the guilty, lonely variety that said he wished he could call her back, delay her, swallow every antagonistic, hostile word he'd said before. If it struck a chord with me, a terrified twelve-year-old, I'm sure it would have made Sakura-sensei return, but she didn't see it because he'd waited until he was a hundred-percent certain that she wouldn't see before allowing himself that second of weakness.

This was around the time that I realized that people didn't exist for me. Sakura-sensei wasn't just my teacher, and the village bogeyman didn't exist solely to frighten kids out of their skins. They were people. It was a very scary concept.

"Sakura."

Sakura-sensei – and Eiji and I – froze at the unexpected sound.

"I never told Naruto that I was joining you for lunch."

"Oh, really?" A degree of hotness flashed into Sakura-sensei's voice. "That's not what Naruto said."

"Of course Dead Last wouldn't say that. Today while we were sparring, he said that if he won, then I would go to Ichiraku and have lunch with both of you. Obviously, he didn't."

I thought my eyes were going to bug out. "What about the other day?" My sensei's voice had softened a fraction.

"The other day, Naruto claimed that I was going to eat with you. I said hm to let him know I'd heard. I never said that I would."

Sakura-sensei turned all the way around and walked right up to Sasuke. Here, her voice dropped so low and quiet that I can only guess she said, "Then, Sasuke-kun, will you have lunch with us at Ichiraku tomorrow?" A yes-no question.

Reading his lips, I think he said, "Aa." His tone was reluctant and hassled, but I knew better.

"So you'll be joining us?" Her voice grew stronger. "Nod or shake your head, please."

Looking extremely annoyed, Sasuke nodded. At once, a sincere, warm smile wreathed Sakura-sensei's face.

"See you tomorrow afternoon." She walked away with a spring in her step. Sasuke watched her back for a few moments. By now, I've noticed that men's eyes tend to trail after my sensei. I think it's too early to get into that just yet, though.

As soon as she was out of sight, his eyes went straight to where Eiji and I were hiding. My stomach froze all over again. "Leave." He didn't even need to raise his voice to stab us with fear.

Trembling slightly, we crept into the faint moonlight. Sasuke's mouth curled. As if a dam had broken, babbling apologies flooded out of my mouth. "I – we're very sorry, sir, we didn't mean to – to – you know – uh – we're sorry!" Don't hurt us, please would only remind him.

Before I could stop him, Eiji contributed to the inanity as I trailed off. "Um. Um – um – I – brought the – eggs to –"

"I know what you brought them for." His scowl darkened the heavens. I thought lightning and a peal of thunder would crack across the sky, and then he'd summon the rain to fall on our heads as he loomed over us. Glancing down, I saw that Eiji had been scared clean out of his wits. Unexpected courage flared to life inside me.

"Hey! He's just a kid!"

"He should know better." The frost in Sasuke's voice stole the warmth out of ten subsequent summers. My tendril of courage shriveled up.

"He's my little brother." I averted my eyes briefly from that stormy black glare. Eiji's upturned face as he stared with awe, love, and wonder at me gave me enough guts to raise my head. "He doesn't."

Perhaps I was looking too hard or delirious with fear. Hope for survival makes people imagine things. I probably imagined the softened look in Uchiha Sasuke's eyes until he said tersely, "I don't care. Get out."

"But –" Eiji didn't have a very strong sense of self-preservation when he was scared silly. "The eggs –"

"Take them with you."

I grabbed the bucket by its handle with my right hand and Eiji's wrist with my left. "Thank you so much," I said breathlessly before getting the hell out of there.

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Once we were in a familiar neighborhood and I could breathe again, I snapped, "I guess your stupid friends will have to be satisfied that you talked to the Uchiha and lived."

Eiji's head bobbled. The bucket hung from his hands like a dead weight after I thrust it at him. We walked in silence for a while longer. Then he said, "Thanks…thanks for standing up for me, Yukina-neesan." Even in the dim light I saw his face scrunching up to fight off tears of relief.

"You're my stupid little brother." I ruffled his hair roughly and shoved his head away to ease the diminishing tenseness in my body. "You say that like I had a choice." A huge, heavy sigh expelled from my mouth. I was never going to get enough time to train and sleep to be in top condition tomorrow.

"Um…is mom mad at me?"

I thought about it. By this time, she must have gone ballistic. "Eh. Yeah." His chin dropped to his collarbone.

"She won't be – I mean," he corrected, "she'll believe me if I say I just bought the eggs because I wanted to eat them, right? I checked all of them against the light bulb like mom does. The yolks are okay."

Eiji's distant flash of random intelligence might not be enough to save him, but… "Just…don't even try to explain the truth." He nodded.

Our family ate eggs into the next century.

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TBC: Yukina is late for the test of her life.