Princess of the Leaves
Chapter Five
"No, no, like this. Feet further apart, knees bent." Sasuke scowled at Naruto's posture. "If you swagger up to a fight, you're asking to lose."
"You swagger all the time!"
"I do not," he said. "And if I do, it's because my opponent isn't worth taking seriously." He placed a palm on Naruto's chest and shoved him backward. "See? If you were standing right, I wouldn't have been able to do that."
Sasuke was not a patient person, but he was a thorough one, and had chosen to start with the most basic of basics. Not the most exciting lesson, but one that was needed. With thirty students per class, the academy instructors had been content with "mostly right," while Sasuke had enjoyed one on one training from a master shinobi since he was four. Konoha may have been a meritocracy in name, but in practice those with the resources to become strong were passed down through clan lines.
But even with that advantage, not everything could be taught, and Sasuke moved through the taijutsu forms like the steps of a dance. From what little she knew of the clan, the Uchihas excelled in nearly everything and barely needed to be taught at all. But how much of that was real and how much of that was adulation for the dead ...
Sasuke approached her and put his hand between her breasts, right on the eye symbol of her tabard. She was so surprised by the move that when he pushed, she fell over backward.
"That," Sasuke said, surprise in his voice, "that was even worse." He turned away as she climbed to her feet, her face growing hot. Rationally she knew that he hadn't meant anything by the action and had tested Naruto's stance in precisely the same way, but it bothered her all the same.
Sasuke resumed the lesson, going from stances to steps to strikes and finally to a basic kata. He continued to be thorough every step of the way, though in recognition of the discomfort he had caused her, he began correcting their stances with a stick instead of his bare hand. Or maybe he just did that because it was easier. Regardless, he straddled the line between teaching and abuse until Kakashi arrived.
"Hey, kids," he said cheerfully. "Who's ready for another mission?"
"Is it another sucky one?" Naruto asked.
Kakashi chuckled. "One day, you're going to understand something about ninja missions. They're all sucky. So yes, yes it is."
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The mission was delivering mail. They weren't working as legitimate courier ninjas as all the deliveries were within Konoha, but between the web of unnamed streets, missing address numbers, and misspelled letters, the mission took all of their focus and most of their time. Zelda split up the village into thirds, organized the routes, and the team agreed to meet up in two hours with any packages that proved challenging.
Zelda started down the street, carrying a mental image of the village map in her mind. Perhaps she had gotten lucky, but she didn't run into any serious trouble as she made a loop to the outer edge of her route and circled back to the post office.
Kakashi was waiting for her.
There was no visible difference between Kakashi waiting and Kakashi waiting for her, but she felt it in his deliberate nonchalance. "Oh, you're back early," he said, glancing up from his book.
"Sensei."
He went back to reading. Icha Icha Paradise, by ... the LEGENDARY Jiraiya? The author had capitalized every letter in his epithet. Either he was completely full of himself, or he was using a pseudonym. She suspected the latter. If she was right about the genre, then no self respecting writer would attach their name to it.
He glanced up again. "Did you want something?"
"No, Sensei." If she knew what game he was playing, she could win—or lose, if that was easier—and be done. She suspected that the game was to irritate her.
A moment passed. "So I noticed Sasuke training you two this morning," Kakashi said. "That sure was nice of him."
What? So the game was to irritate her. But ... but he knew, didn't he? He had to. There was a slim chance that he had missed their genjutsu training, genjutsu existing mostly in the mind, but Naruto's escort training yesterday would have been obvious.
"Yes," Zelda agreed, accepting that "nice" was a relative term and that striking her ill positioned limbs with a stick was one of the nicer things he had done since joining the team. "I was worried that Naruto and I would have had to train without him."
Kakashi smiled beneath his mask. "Yeah, would have been a shame to leave him behind like that."
Had the game changed? Or had they been making fun of Sasuke the whole time? Either way, the game was more his than hers. "I'm worried that I'll run out of things to teach them. We all will, soon."
"Yeah," he said with fake dread. "Then I might have to get involved."
"I'm sure most of us would survive," she said dryly.
"One can hope. So, any ideas?"
Zelda froze. Are you asking me, or asking me? "I think the boys would be happy with anything you could teach them within their ability to learn. Particularly the more destructive jutsu."
He chuckled. "As long as it explodes, it's fun for them. But not you. What do you want to learn, Princess?"
She flinched again as she always did when he sprung that nickname on her. Which only encouraged him to use it more, and she couldn't exactly tell him that, yes, she was in fact a princess but was living her in exile, so there wasn't much she could do besides wait for him to grow bored with it and start calling her something else.
But he was asking her. Perhaps not offering her anything, but it was a start. I want to learn how the Fourth Hokage defeated the demon. That was her first impulse, but she stomped it out. That was either a village secret, or too advanced for her to learn. Genjutsu tips would be good, but she could do better. She was beginning, and the best thing to begin with was the basics.
"History."
He blinked. "History."
She nodded. "History. I knew nothing about Konoha before I came here, and I still know barely more than that. What was this place like a thousand years ago?"
"Konoha didn't exist back then."
"It existed in embryo. Time did not begin with the First Hokage, and he did not create the village ex nihilo. Even the academy texts admit that he united the different clans of the Land of Fire. Honestly I'd be content understanding the past fifteen years of history, if the deep past is too much." Fifteen years would give her the background to the demon's assault. "I was told that the different clans often keep their own records."
He nodded. "Some do."
"Does the Hatake clan?"
"Nope. The clan head tends to destroy everything written down for informational security. Also he's pretty lazy and disorganized."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Are you the clan head?"
He chuckled. "The Hatake clan is more than just me. But there is one clan head on the team, and he might even let you check out his archives. He probably stopped recording everything about five years ago, but I'm sure you'll make do."
A clan head? On the team? But ...
Uchiha Sasuke swaggered up to them, his task complete and his expression bored. "Naruto hasn't made it back yet? Figures."
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"You want to come over to my home and do what?"
"It's not a strange request," Zelda said. "There is knowledge to be had in studying the past, though if it's too much of an intrusion of privacy, then I apologize."
Sasuke stared at her as though she were a rare species of insect. "There's nothing there. The clan secrets, I understand, but the clan records? It's all trade agreements and meeting logs that no one bothered to throw away."
"In my experience," she said, "the most precious secrets are the ones we forget, not the ones we hide, buried by time and by time revealed. Besides, the Uchiha was one of the founding clans of Konoha. Your clan's past should reflect Konoha's past."
Sasuke stared at her for a moment, then rolled his eyes. "Fine. Sure. Knock yourself out. I'll show you where they are."
Zelda blinked. He was ... letting her? She had expected a heavy price at the very least. Was he up to something? Or did she just not know him as well as she thought she did?
"Thank you, Sasuke," she said, keeping her concerns out of her voice. With the mission being completed, she followed him to his residence. As they walked, she kept her eyes straight ahead as he made several glances in her direction. He did not like to talk, nor did he enjoy the sounds of others talking, but he expected it.
No, she realized. What he expected was a trick. He had collected an unwanted following of girls during their academy day who were determined to connect with him. Ino was only one of them and far from the most crafty. She might have asked him for taijutsu tips or help with shuriken throwing on occasion, but she never stole his lunch on a day when she "just happened" to pack enough for two or snuck into his home while he was gone to dig through his belongings. His was a history that cultivated paranoia, and he likey saw Zelda's request as one of the more obvious deceptions.
And yet, he was the one to break the silence. "Your clan insignia, the weeping eye. Is there a doujutsu behind that?"
She hesitated. Doujutsu? All she knew about eye techniques she learned from Hinata. The Byakugan had made the Hyuuga the strongest clan in Konoha, though the Uchiha clan had possessed a bloodlined that rivaled even theirs.
If Zelda had known that she would end up on a team with the one Uchiha in their grade, she would have asked for more details.
"No," she said. "There is no rare bloodline to be found amongst the Sheikah, but the ninja arts are those of deception, and we always seek truth."
"And the tear?"
"Because the truth oft gives cause to weep."
He stared ahead, his expression solemn. "You're not just talking about illusions and sleight of hand."
She shook her head. "The lies of enemies are small things. They will rarely do much worse than kill you. The lies of friends are far more dangerous, but most terrible of all are the lies we tell ourselves."
"Such as?"
"Such as an ordinary man living an ordinary life who cannot bear to face his sins. He justifies himself, buries his shame in lies, and lets his sins fester within his soul until, finally, he falls." Her father was no ordinary man, and he led no ordinary life, but he had fallen all the same. "Or, Naruto. How many times has he shouted to the world that he would become Hokage? How many more times do you think he shouted that to himself?"
Sasuke raised an eyebrow at her. "And you think he can't."
"Oh, he absolutely can. In the infinite possibilities of time, I'd be surprised if none of them had that destiny in store for him. And 'I can't,' that is a dangerous lie indeed, truncating possibility after possibility, trapping the liar in a cage of fear. No, the lie is that becoming Hokage would fill his empty heart. The lie is that something so trite as ruling a village would bring him happiness."
Sasuke considered that. "Yeah, that is depressing." He gave her a look. "If you think you know what sort of lies I tell myself, do yourself a favor and keep it to yourself."
"Of course." It was rude to wake those who blissfully dreamt, and pointless to speak to those who would not listen.
They passed through a gate to a neighborhood cut off from the rest of the village, and Zelda stopped. She stood at the threshold, feeling the difference in the air in her lungs and in the ground beneath her feet. The obvious architectural differences, the older, more traditional style in the buildings, hit her far more gently than the echoes of the past that still whispered to her.
This was a place where people died.
"Your home?" she asked.
"Yup." There was a sense of resignation in his voice. He glared at some of the other villagers as though they were trespassing. "At least, it used to be." He resumed walking, forcing her to follow. "This place used to be Uchiha territory from here to Muzumi Lake. It's still mine on paper, but one of the village council members is 'managing my inheritance' until I turn eighteen."
His tone held contempt for everyone involved, but ... Would you have preferred your inheritance left untouched? Would you rather have had this neighborhood empty save for yourself and the memories of the dead?
Maybe. She remembered Kakariko's reconstruction, remembered seeing her people move into old homes and build new ones. And she remembered Impa watching her ancestral home turn into just another Hylian town. The final desecration of her tribe.
"But it's better this way, isn't it?" she had asked. "A village can't live without people in it."
"If we bury our dead in fields, our crops will grow greener," Impa had said. "But we bury them under carved stones." Zelda remembered her looking down at her, her red eyes soft and sad. "Do you know what happens to memories when they are forgotten?"
"Here we are," Sasuke said. The house he led her to was larger than many of the others, but was in worse repair. The paint was flaking off and vines grew up the walls ... but if he had wanted to make it look nice, he could have. He chose not to in order to remind himself and the world around him that this place was a ruin, and always would be.
He led her through the empty house, and Zelda suspected that she may have been the first person invited into this building in years. There was a ... coldness to the house, one that did not welcome visitors.
"Here's the records room," he said, opening a door to a basement room. "And if you need anything ... don't."
He closed the door behind her and she pulled a scroll off the shelf and got to work.
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The records went back twelve years and stopped five years ago, but that was enough. Zelda was able to track the trajectory of the village like she could a shuriken. There was a rhythm to it all, the rise and fall of a civilization. Admittedly the fall had been left out, both the Kyuubi attack and the Uchiha Massacre weren't included, but she could fill in the blanks.
More than that, the records spoke of a silent strife between the other clans. Suspicion, jealousy, fear ... a bloody history of greed and hatred, buried in the past. But even in the basement, she felt the arrival of nightfall. There were ... memories, in this place, that were not written in ink and they were starting to wake up.
She put the scrolls away and left the room. She spotted Sasuke on her way out. "Thank you for your hospitality," she said. "Your clan's records were most enlightening."
He glanced her way. "Find anything good?"
"Have you read them?"
He shrugged. "I got bogged down in the accounts last time I tried."
She understood the sentiment. Accounting was a language unto itself. "The high council minutes are often more straightforward. Your clan voted on succeeding from the village once a year for five years straight."
He gave a brief smile. "Oh, yeah. I remember some of the older people always talking about how much better things were before Konoha was founded. A bunch of grumpy old cats not willing to admit that they had grown comfortable."
Grumpy old cats? Not how she had expected him to describe anything associated with his clan, but the impression she got from any set of records was always cold and dry.
"Sasuke," she said gently. "Do you know why your clan fell?"
His eyes flashed as he turned to her. "What kind of question is that? Of course I know! I was there!"
"I mean the general cause, not the specific one," she explained. "Every house is built to weather the storm, but the flaws that destroy it can be found in its formation. If you rebuild it with the same flaws, it will fall in the same way. That's not even destiny, simply the flow of time."
He glared at her, and for a moment she feared that she had pushed too far. "What the hell do you know about my clan? What the hell do you know about anything?"
"I have seen my own people fall." Both the Sheikah tribe and her own royal line were destroyed within her lifetime. Though she had been too young to understand much about the Civil War besides an enduring fear of the deep shadows, she had understood the threat Ganondorf presented when so many others had believed his lies.
"You ... have?" His voice was soft, subdued. "You have, too. What happened to them?"
To the Sheikah or to her father the king? But the answer was the same either way. The Sheikah and the royal family were tied together by threads of destiny to rise together and fall together. Ganondorf may have murdered her father and stolen his throne, but he did so through secrets gleaned from Sheikah renegades.
"They forgot who they were," Zelda said. "They forsook their identity and obtained nothing in return. They sought to fill their empty souls with fire and ash, and ended up with tears and silence." She tilted her head. "A common enough tale, one that happens time and time again. I'm sure you've heard it before. Perhaps you've lived it?"
Sasuke swallowed, then hid his pain in anger. "No, we've always known who we were. The Uchiha clan was the strongest clan in Konoha. Power. That was our identity. That ... was what destroyed us in the end, I suppose." He leaned against the wall and slumped down to the floor. "I will rebuild my clan, but ... but that's going to take more than continuing the bloodline and teaching a few jutsu, isn't it?"
"That alone would be a shallow identity for any clan," she agreed.
"So how are you going to rebuild yours?"
She ... hadn't been planning that far ahead. Surviving Ganondorf—defeating Ganondorf—would be miracle enough without dreaming for the day after. She went to sit down by the wall opposite Sasuke, trying to work out an idea. The royal family was easy. She was the royal family now, and her line had a chance to continue as long as she lived, but what of the Sheikah? Impa would not likely bear any children in the future, and despite Zelda's Sheikah form, her blood was purely Hylian. There were others, scattered members of the tribe who had escaped into exile, but they had forsaken the clan name.
Them, with the bloodline but not the name, and me, with the name but not the bloodline. But was the Sheikah tribe a bloodline? Red eyes, white hair, and all that? No. It was the oath. Those who kept the oath were Sheikah, and those who broke the oath were not.
"Far away in Kakariko Village, there is a temple dedicated to the honorable dead. Before its desecration, we could speak to our ancestors who chose to linger. I will restore the Shadow Temple, that those who come after me may remember those who came before."
That way, the history would be preserved, their memories would not be forgotten, and those who chose to immerse their spirits in the temple's secrets would come out as much of a Sheikah as she was.
Sasuke jumped to his feet. "You can talk to the dead? You have a family jutsu that can do that?"
A family jutsu? She had never thought of it that way. It was just ... talking. One spoke, another listened. But few besides the Sheikah knew how to do it right, so in a manner of speaking ... "You could call it that, yes."
"Can you do it ..." His voice caught in his throat. "Can you do it here?"
Could she? She had never done it before herself, but she had seen Impa bring forth the fallen. It seemed simple enough, but the difficult part was the listener. Most people vanished into the flow of time, but the Sheikah had taught themselves to leave behind an imprint in the sand, a shadow of the past. Once a year Impa had taken her to her mother's grave, but each time the queen's shade had seemed more and more tired.
But Sasuke's question hadn't been academic in nature. He wanted to speak with specific people, possibly those who had died in this house. This house ... had memories. Intense, sleepless memories. Even if the fallen Uchiha hadn't trained for this, they had left behind a shadow all the same.
"I could try."
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The night grew darker as Sasuke watched Zelda perform her jutsu. He had expected a series of hand seals and ... a flash of light or something. Instead she knelt in the middle of the room and seemed to pray.
As the minutes ticked by, he began to realize how little he knew her. He had kept to himself during his academy years, and those he had known hadn't been worth knowing. They weren't just weak. He could forgive people for being weak. He had expected them to be weak. No, they were trite. Their fears, their joys, their sorrows, everything about them had been so childish, and then after school they would go home to their happy boring families and live their happy boring lives.
Zelda had stayed in the background. She had transferred into the academy, what, three years ago? She hadn't bothered him, and he had ignored her. She had a weird quirk about using the transformation jutsu frivolously, switching from red eyes to blue so often he wasn't even sure which form was real. Even today, she had walked home with him with blue eyes, but had switched to red to perform her jutsu, which could have meant anything. But other than that, she was nobody. And now here she was in his home, kneeling ... exactly where his parents had died.
He grit his teeth as memories simmered in his mind and began to boil. He saw their bodies once more, lying in their own blood. He saw them dying again in his ... in his Mangekyou Sharingan. He saw ...
He saw the face of his father, stern, severe, and as clearly as he ever had.
"As worthy of my son. But ..."
The wooden pier creaked beneath their feet. A cool breeze cleared the air of the scent of fire, and despite the one word of praise Sasuke had ever heard from him, his father turned his back on him.
"But do not follow in the example of your brother."
"I'm nearly finished," Zelda whispered. "But ... I fear this may not be working as I had hoped."
"It's working." A cold sweat covered his skin. His mind may have been playing tricks on him, telling him what he wanted to believe, but he could tell the difference between reality and a dream. "Who are you summoning? My mother or my father?"
"Whoever is listening. Whoever is the most awake."
His father. He didn't know if he could handle seeing his mother again, but if she was at peace then she was at peace. And his father ... he was close. Sasuke could feel him even in the air he breathed.
Slowly, softly, Zelda began to hum. It was not a song he had heard before, but somehow it fit. And ... there was chakra in the rhythm and the notes, like hand seals made of music.
Before he could consider the implications of musical jutus, he saw something, a wisp of fire that appeared in the air and then burned out a moment later. As soon as it was gone, another took its place, like a candle flame but blood red. And from that phantom light, he saw his father.
Uchiha Fugaku, head of the clan, knelt on the floor, wrapped in his burial shroud, his image superimposed onto Zelda's. Zelda scrambled away and pressed herself against the wall as his form grew solid and he rose to his feet.
Sasuke opened his mouth, but found it dry. "F-father?"
His head snapped toward him, drawn by the sound of his voice. He reached up to tear at the cloth covering his face, and for the first time in five years, Sasuke heard his father's voice.
"S-s-son." He drew closer, his feet dragging behind him as he almost seemed to glide. "S-s-sas-s-suke."
"I'm sorry," Zelda whispered. "It didn't work."
Once more, his father snapped toward the sound of a voice, his body twisting like a serpent.
"It's close enough," Sasuke said. His father wasn't alive, but he was back, in this small way. It was more than he had ever hoped for.
"Who is-s-s this-s-s?"
"I only managed to call up part of him," she said, "the part of his spirit that would not sleep. This is not a true shadow. Just a Poe."
A Poe? He didn't know what that meant, and honestly he didn't care. "She's my teammate. She brought you here so I could talk to you." I'm a genin now, Father, he wanted to say. I graduated at the top of my class. Are you proud of me? But that was a foolish, childish boast, and he wasn't a child anymore. He couldn't afford to be. "I wanted to tell you that I will avenge our clan, and I'll rebuild it stronger than ever. Do you hear me, Father? I will kill Itachi. For both of us."
As he spoke, his father drew closer, the wisps of flame coming in and out of existence. Rotten teeth showed through desiccated lips. "You will kill your brother?"
"Yes."
"You will murder my s-s-son?"
He hesitated, but only for a moment. That was what he wanted, wasn't it? "I swear it on the graves of everyone he's killed."
"And who els-s-se?"
"What? Then it's over. Isn't it?"
"Will you kill the vulture who pecked out our eyes-s-s? Will you tear down thos-s-se who ros-s-se with our fall? Will you bear the Curs-s-se of Hatred?"
"I ... I don't know what your talking about." What vulture? What curse?
His father's head sank low. "No. You are still young. You will learn. I will sleep now." He rose up again. "But firs-s-st, I wish to s-s-see you, one las-s-st time."
Zelda backed away further as his father turned to her, whispering a desperate prayer he couldn't hear.
"A s-s-stranger within my hous-s-se. Your eyes-s-s will do, for this-s-s short moment."
"Sasuke?" she said. "Help!" She tried to dart around his father, but he grabbed her by the ankle and she fell to the floor.
"Father, stop!" Sasuke said. "I told you, she's my teammate."
"Only you can avenge us-s-s. Only you can res-s-surect our clan. The res-s-st mean nothing."
Nothing? Nothing? Yes, the clan had always looked down on the rest of the village, but they had been a part of the village!
"He's not your father!" Zelda said, struggling as he rolled her onto her back. "I told you I failed! This is just the part of him that hates!"
He reached with too-long fingers toward her eyes, and desperately she began to hum. Perhaps it was another song to banish him just as the first summoned him, but only a few notes in his father wrapped his hands around her throat.
"I told you to stop!" His father wouldn't do this. What had Zelda called him? A Poe?"
"Make me s-s-stop, if you can. Let me s-s-see you or let me burn." He turned his head up toward him, and for the first time Sasuke could look him in the eye. They were empty sockets, hollow and as black as night. "Prove that you are worthy to be my son."
As worthy of my son. He had said those words countless times to Itachi, but only once to him. Only once, when ...
Don't make me do this, he thought, but his father had always pushed him to do hard things in life. Why should dying make a difference?
"Fire release!" he shouted for his father to hear one last time. "Grand Fireball Jutsu!"
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Cool night air blew away the smell of smoke. Neighbors came out to gawk, but Sasuke ignored them as he always did, and watched his house burn to the ground.
Strange that a clan that prided itself so much on their affinity toward fire would build their houses to be so flammable, but maybe they wanted to burn. His father did. Maybe everything did. A smile tugged on the corners of his lips. The Will of Fire.
Then he thought about some of the things his father had said to him, about vultures and curses and pecked out eyes. He had some suspicions about what that had meant, but it didn't make what he would have to do any easier.
"We were experimenting with fire jutsu," Zelda said, explaining to a few members of the military police who had shown up, "and it got out of hand, as you can see."
"Fire jutsu, huh?" The police organization had fallen far since the Uchiha clan had been in charge of it. Most of the village had. The officer, a tall man with short brown hair, smirked. "So that's what the kids are calling it these days."
His partner, a woman with long black hair, rolled her eyes. "There's literally a burning building right in front of us, Kotarou. I'm pretty sure that's not a euphemism." She put her hands together in a series of seals. "Water release—"
"Hey!" Sasuke said. "What are you doing?"
The woman hesitated, interrupting the jutsu. "I'm putting the fire out."
"Don't."
"What?"
"It's my house. Don't." What was the point? To preserve what was left of it just to be demolished later on? It wasn't close enough to the other houses to spread, and it wanted to burn.
The two officers shrugged, and after asking a few more questions which Zelda answered, they left.
But Zelda stayed. "I am sorry," she said, watching the glowing embers of his home, "for what happened. I know that isn't what you wanted."
He shrugged. "It's what he wanted." There wasn't any happiness in that thought, but there was satisfaction. Go back to sleep.
She said nothing, standing next to him as the ashes grew cold. Which, it turned out, was exactly what he needed to hear.
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Zelda invited Sasuke to spend the night in her apartment. It was the least she could do.
You're not infallible. The Triforce of Wisdom was limited by what she did not know, and it meant nothing if she ignored it. But she couldn't learn more if she never journeyed into the unknown, and the unknown, by definition, could not be known to be safe.
Her first attempt at shadowspeach had gone poorly, and it could have gone much worse. The memory of the dead creature's fingers clawing at her eyes and squeezing at her throat were still fresh in her mind. Some shades are bound by duty, others are bound by love, and others ... others should be left alone.
Sasuke awoke before she did, and she heard him packing up his sleeping back as he prepared to leave. They had been taught to have an overnight bag ready to go in case of extended missions, and it had been one of the few things Sasuke had been able to grab as the fire spread.
"Leaving already?"
Sasuke glanced back at her. "I'm going to grab something to eat. I'll see you at the training ground." He carried his overnight bag with him. He wasn't planning on coming back.
"You are welcome to stay here until you find a place to live."
"I'll find one tonight," he said, determined to rely on others as little as possible. What had the Poe said? "Only you can avenge us. Only you can resurrect our clan. The rest mean nothing."
"I've been looking into moving someplace nicer," she said. Konoha offered Orphans education and housing, but after becoming genin and being able to accept missions, she hoped to be able to afford an upgrade. "Between the background check, contract, down payment, and several other formalities, even if you found a place to stay right now, it would be more than a week before you could move in."
He hesitated, then set his bag down by the door.
"Though," she added, "it could be seen as inappropriate for a boy and a girl our age to be living together." Ironically, Sasuke would be affected by the scandal more than she would be. He was the last surviving member of a prominent clan, while she was, in the eyes of the village, no one important.
Unless Ino found out. Then Zelda would suffer a violent death.
"So I have a proposal."
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Naruto burst through the door with a bright grin on his face. "Alright! I've never been to a sleepover before! This is gonna be awesome!"
Sasuke shot him a look. "That's your overnight bag? What did you bring?"
Naruto set down the pack that looked like it weighed as much as he did. "Let's see, I brought board games, playing cards, snacks, more snacks, so many snacks. I didn't know what to bring, so I brought everything."
"Did you have room for your sleeping bag in there too?"
Naruto glared at him. "Of course I did. Wait, hold on ... okay, yeah. Ha! In your face! Oh, hey, here are my pajamas. Where's your bathroom, Zelda? I'm going to go change."
"Over there," she said. Sasuke glared at her after he left with his bundle of clothes. "There's nothing wrong with a little enthusiasm."
"He skipped the little part and went straight overboard."
"He does that with everything."
"I know. That's why I didn't want to spend the night with him. But we'll be stuck together on the floor out here while you get to go hide in your bedroom all night long."
"Alright, alright, I'll try to get him to restrain his exuberance."
Naruto emerged from the bathroom wearing light blue pajamas and a sleeping cap designed to look like a small creature was gnawing on his head. The ensemble looked so unspeakably adorable that Sasuke was forced to turn away in disgust.
"Okay, so who's ready to party?" he said, sitting down on the floor. "I never learned how to play poker, but I've played Go Fish with myself a dozen times at least and I've never lost once."
"Naruto," Zelda said gently. "You may recall that the purpose of this training exercise is to simulate a mission where we travel for days on the road with only what we can carry. And every morning we would need to wake up well rested to face the challenges of the day."
He nodded. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And the best way to do that is to stay up all night eating junk food, playing games—"
"No," Sasuke said.
"And telling ghost stories!" He beamed at them, as though hoping that his enthusiasm would infect them.
"Alright," Zelda said. Sasuke shot her a look, but she ignored it. "I know a story you may enjoy. It's not a ghost story precisely, but ... have you ever heard of the tale of the House of Skulltula?"
WWW
A/n So this chapter is a little different from what I've been doing so far. Sasuke took a larger role, possibly even a greater one than Zelda did, and I wasn't sure if it would disrupt the pacing. But I had the idea in my head, and it was sort of Halloween appropriate, and it looks like I was able to finish just in time!
Ghosts play a small but consistent role in the Zelda franchise, and a surprising number of them are friendly. As for a Sheikah, they seem to always have a cemetery in their village. Even in Breath of the Wild, Kakariko Village had one, but none of the other towns did. They even had their Shadow Temple in their cemetery, and sure, in the game it was a pit of nightmares, but a temple is by definition a holy place, and in better days before it had been defiled, it would have been a place of deep spiritual significance. And that's basically how I got the idea of the Sheikah having a form of ancestor worship and/or necromancy.
As usual, I would like to thank my Patrons, Exiled Immortal, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, and Lady Charon. Happy Halloween!