It was hard to tell what time it was from where Rasa was seated at his desk. He had always kept meticulous track of everything that happened around him, but inside that sealed guest room it was impossible to tell if the sun was even shining. Every inch of the walls, floor and ceiling had been covered in a network of seals, making them impossible to see through and impervious to harm. The air itself had been saturated with gold dust so as to disturb any spying technique that might have been hidden in the room beforehand, and the Kazekage's own sensing abilities would have told him if anything had changed in that regard.

Even so, it would be an exaggeration to say that he felt at ease in that moment.

He looked up from his paperwork when there came a knock on the door and someone entered without permission. There was only one person in the world who would dare to enter the Kazekage's chambers uninvited, and so he was not surprised to recognize the old lady standing in the doorway, for all that she was wearing a brown wig and enough makeup to look twenty years younger.

"Chiyo," he said as she closed the door behind her. "How goes the operation?"

"Well enough." She took a moment to inspect the seals on the door, making sure they were receiving enough chakra from his barrier team located in the room downstairs. Chiyo was the type of person who looked annoyed even when she could find nothing wrong in the work of others, as if it only proved that the world was trying to hide its flaws from her. "We have managed to recover some of the Sand Spirit's chakra, but its power won't be like before."

"That's good," he said distractedly. He stared back at his paperwork, trying to remember what it was that he had been working on. It probably had not been all that important, anyway.

"You should not tell the Hokage that during your meetings, however," she continued. "Let him think that we've been dealt a terrible blow: They'll be more willing to offer us compensation if they think their mission was successful. And if the vultures come for us later on, we'll use Shukaku's chakra to scare them off with a right old puppet show."

"Right."

For a long moment, silence reigned inside that dark, oppressive room. Chiyo was the first to break the quiet, as was usually the case. "Have you considered Aconite? It's almost untraceable."

"She'd trace it."

"Cyanide then. We'll off him before that nasty slug witch gets the chance to do anything about it."

He shook his head, still staring at his paperwork, though the kanji inscribed on the scrolls might as well have been meaningless scribbles at this point. "We would not be able to get away in time."

"There has to be some way," she insisted. "What about…"

"Chiyo, there is no point!" He clenched and unclenched his hands, trying vainly to keep the frustration out of his voice. "If that man has any sense at all, he's using a shadow clone in every single one of our meetings. Even if we were to locate his true body somehow, it would still be nearly impossible to get close to him. And then if we did manage to poison him despite his guards, Tsunade would just cure him anyway. And we would still be in the middle of a hostile village, surrounded on all sides by the most powerful army in the world!"

She frowned. "We'll use a different approach, then. We have close to three hundred shinobi here with us. We can use them to-"

"Chiyo, no."

"You can't mean to let them get away with this. They killed your son!"

"It might have been an accident. They were fighting in a tournament…"

She scoffed loudly. "An accident? Rasa, you can't possibly still be that naïve. The boy intentionally dragged out the fight until Gaara was forced to call on Shukaku's power, then waited for the spirit to take over his mind to summon him to his position. He slashed him with a chakra blade across the seal on his stomach, and then stabbed him through the brain before I could react. Any less and I could have saved either the Spirit or the boy. This was an assassination, Rasa!"

"You can't prove-"

She slapped a parchment down onto his desk. It was portrait, a painting of a man who could only be fourth Hokage himself. "Look familiar? They destroyed almost every image of him in the Leaf, but some of us in the Sand are old enough to remember." The image blurred in front of the Kazekage's eyes, but the only thing he really needed to see was the colour of the man's hair. "That clanless genin Gaara was supposed to fight to show off his abilities to our rivals? That was the son of the Yellow Flash!"

He hesitated. "It might not have been the Hokage who planned it. There are others, within the leaf…"

"A leader is responsible for everything that is done by his subordinates. I'm sure I taught you that much back when you were still in your swaddling cloth." She leaned away from his desk. "He has a son too, you know. Sarutobi Asuma. He's a skilled jōnin – used to be a bodyguard for the Fire Daimyo – but it shouldn't be too hard to make sure he doesn't come back from one of his missions."

Rasa shook his head. "I will not hold a son accountable for the crimes of his father."

"The boy, then. He's the one that did the deed, after all."

"A mere tool, brainwashed by the Leaf to do its dirty work, if what you say is true."

She squinted at him. "Are you trying to talk your way out of this? You can't mean to let them get away with killing your son. You would lose support in the council, and other countries would think of us as weak. Sure, he was a liability – always has been. But he was still your son."

"My son is dead!" He slammed his hands upon his desk. "Gaara is dead, and there is nothing in the world that can change that. I could burn down all of Konoha and it would change nothing. Do you understand, you crooked old witch? Or did you finally become as senile as you always pretend to be?"

She said nothing, only watched patiently as she waited for his tirade to end.

"This is all your fault! If you had not turned my boy into a demon host he would never have gone mad. Gaara would still be alive." His voice caught. "And the light of my life, Karura, would still be beside me… but you had to take them both away from me. Are you so haunted by the deaths of your own children that you must destroy my life as well?" He barked out a wild and bitter laugh. "Oh, but I see it now. This is all your doing, isn't it? This entire time you have been manipulating me, trying to get me to destroy the Leaf for the sake of your own vengeance. Perhaps it was you then, who killed my son?"

There was a sharp clap as her hand slapped across his face, and his head snapped to the side from the force of the blow. He stared at her numbly, not quite sure what had just happened. In all the forty years of his life, in all his time as Kazekage, nobody had ever dared hit him before.

"You are not old enough to go mad with grief," she said calmly. "Try another twenty years of ruining all that you touch, watching everything you love turn to ash until you have nothing left. Then, you have my permission to go mad – preferably well after I am done turning in my grave."

He touched his glowing cheek, which burned fiercely. To touch the Kazekage was death, but somehow, the rules never seemed to apply to Lady Chiyo. "What would you have me do, then?" He buried his head inside his hands. "What am I to do?"

She looked at him with not a sign of remorse or pity. But then, that was why she was his advisor: In front of anyone else the Kazekage could not afford to show weakness, but weakness was all her beady little eyes ever saw, and so there was no point in pretending.

"Continue your meetings with the Hokage. Get as high a price for your son's life as you can manage. And then, we'll find a way to make them really pay."

Sharp claps rang across the courtyard as quick jabs were parried and feet scraped over rough dirt. Hinata struck out, but Neji's defence was flawless as always, turning her hand aside without ever so much as coming near her outstretched palms. At the last second the tip of her index finger curved around and flicked towards his wrist, but he hastily leaped back to avoid the attack. Not a moment later he was on top of her again, driving her back with a furious chain of attacks.

Hyūga Hiashi watched the sparring match from his balcony with consternation, not liking what he saw one bit. By all rights he should be euphoric about the fact that Hinata was keeping up with Neji – the fact that the two of them were even willing to train together was a miracle by itself – but in his long years as head of the Hyūga clan he had learned that everything came at a price. Her progress was too fast, too different from anything she had shown before to be the result of any natural development.

People did not change. Even when they did, it only proved that they had always had the natural capacity for it, and so in a sense they had not truly changed at all. Hinata had never shown any capacity for change. Even when she had been promoted to genin, even having gained new teachers, even when she had sworn a vow on her mother's grave that she would become a worthy heiress to the Hyūga clan, she had not changed. Just like her mother, she had been incorruptibly, incontrovertibly, nice.

Niceness was not a good trait to have, if you wanted to survive in a world of ninjas.

A scream of pain shook him out of reverie. Hinata recoiled from where Neji had touched her chest and collapsed onto the ground in agony. For a moment Neji seemed taken aback, and glanced at the guards around them as if he were afraid they would kill him on the spot, but then Hinata grasped a clump of dirt and hurled it at his face. At the same time she kicked out and struck Neji's shin with her heel, and as he lost his footing she screamed again and leaped up to drive home her advantage, launching a series of vicious kicks and punches half of which did not even use the Gentle Fist technique.

"That's not proper form," Hiashi's father protested from his seat down in the common room. "You should discipline your daughter at once, Hiashi. She'll never master the true Hyuga style this way."

Proper form be damned, thought Hiashi. She's fighting to win. His knuckles ached from where he held the railing in a death grip, until they turned whiter than even his robes and the walls around them. He might have been able to believe it if Hinata had just shown a gradual increase in confidence and skill, but this? This was not normal. I was not born with the Byakugan just so I could fail to recognize my own daughter from a greater distance.

"Lord Hiashi?" It was Ko, the branch member who had been assigned as Hinata's personal bodyguard. He had walked up to him from behind, and it was a sign of how distracted Hiashi was that he had almost not seen him approach. "The Lord Uchiha has arrived."

"Lead him to my chambers, and keep your Byakugan on him at all times." Hiashi turned and strode back inside, heading straight towards his private chambers. He could have used the main reception hall instead to try and intimidate his guest, but he somehow doubted the Uchiha would be all that impressed. Besides which, he expected he would need privacy from even his own clan for this meeting, and his own quarters were best equipped for that.

He entered into his own personal tea room, which was designed for welcoming formal visitors. There were no servants allowed in this section of the compound, which also meant that there was nobody to offer him a change of robes, but then it was not as if he even possessed any non-formal robes to begin with. He took off his sandals and assumed the seiza position atop the host mat, which was placed in between two white marble statues of his ancestors as if he were just one more fixture of that room.

It did not take long for his guest to be ushered inside the room. After a brief announcement from a servant, the door slid closed behind him, allowing all of the seals to form a perfect enclosure once more. It was strange how blind he felt without the ability to see the entire compound, and yet it still felt safer. Secure in the knowledge that for once, he did not have to put up an act in front of his own family.

"Lord Hyūga."

He looked at the Uchiha with regular eyes. He looked… young. Noble and proper, dressed in his own black Uchiha kimono, but still so terribly young. It was hard to remember that this teenager was a credible threat to his family.

"Lord Uchiha," he said. "Thank you for agreeing to meet with me. Please, sit down."

The boy sat seiza on the other side of the traditional tea set Hiashi always kept ready for such an occasion. "Forgive me," the Uchiha said, indicating the ornate tray and cups. "My family trained me in the custom, but I must admit it has been a long time since I had the opportunity to practice. I fear I would embarrass you with my mistakes."

Hiashi nodded. Even odds that he remembers them perfectly, and simply does not care. In frankness, he could not say that the blamed the boy. As far as he was concerned, tea ceremonies were the greatest waste of time since the civilian trade confederation, and everyone involved in its invention ought to fall on their own swords – rear first if possible.

"I'll simply pour then," he said, being quite fond of the substance itself. There were all kinds of messages you could convey by choosing the type of tea and the method with which you served it, the intricate subtleties of which he could have better appreciated if it did not take so much bloody time. "Which flavour do you prefer?"

"I've always been quite partial to black tea," the teenager said. "Though lately I've taken more of a liking to white tea."

Hiashi narrowed his eyes. This boy, it seemed, also preferred his subtlety to not be of the time-wasting variety. He touched a seal in the centre of the hearth-mat, and a steaming pot of Silver Needle tea appeared on top of it. From it wafted a faint floral aroma, like fresh wildflowers with a hint of honey.

"I should congratulate you on your promotion," he said as he poured. "Young Neji is the strongest branch member of his generation. Your victory over him was most impressive."

The boy smiled politely. It was striking how much his black hair and robes contrasted with everything else in that room – as if he were a living shadow that refused to allow light near it. Or possibly just a smudge that refused to be wiped out. "Your nephew was a fearsome opponent," the boy agreed. "The Hyūga blood runs strong within his veins."

The Lord Uchiha took a long sip from his tea cup. The Lord Hyūga did the same.

"I understand you have taken to sparring with him," Hiashi said lightly.

"As I said, he was a formidable opponent. I'd be a fool to pass on the opportunity."

Hiashi nodded. "I see. And is that also the reason you have begun training with my daughter? To improve on your own abilities?" He took another sip from his cup.

This time the boy actually seemed to hesitate a little, perhaps coming to realize the danger he had put himself in. Everyone would realize what had happened if the Uchiha never made it out of this room, but that did not mean that Hiashi could not arrange for an accident to happen at some later date. He had a clan. The boy did not.

"I would say that the training is of mutual benefit," the Uchiha said at last.

"Indeed." Hiashi put down the cup with a clink. "And in what way, exactly, are you benefiting from my daughter?"

The boy looked at him, not a trace of the Sharingan to be seen in those dark grey eyes. "I am interested in becoming part of the Hyūga clan."

It was fortunate that Hiashi had already put down his cup, for else he might have made a rather embarrassing spill.

"One normally enters a clan through marriage," he said. "Perhaps I was misinformed, but I believe you have already been, ah, accounted for?"

"I am, and I care for Sakura very much," Sasuke said. He carefully put down his own cup, making sure it made no sound at all. "But we both know that there is a difference between a romantic interest and marriage." He folded his hands together, looking very sincere indeed. "I am without a clan, Lord Hyūga. As your nephew so succinctly pointed out, without a family I might as well be the Lord of Nothing. I am, however, still entitled to a seat on the Konoha council. I believe this is an arrangement we both could benefit from.

Hiashi leaned back. The proposal was mad at the face of it, but he had long learned not to take anything at face value. The Uchiha name still inspired awe, and for two major clans to merge through marriage was hardly unheard of. He had spent endless time and effort positioning himself as a crucial swing vote on the council, balancing the power of each faction until both sides were ready to offer him their firstborn sons for his support. With another vote to his name, however… the Hyūga might actually be able to steer the Village in their own direction.

"And for this purpose," he said slowly, "you have been training with my daughter."

The boy had the grace at least to look embarrassed. "Yes sir. As I said, I believe the arrangement to be of mutual benefit. She herself asked me to help her achieve her true potential, using whatever means necessary."

Hiashi gave the teenager a long, hard look. Uchiha Sasuke. The last of a long line of traitors and backstabbers, cursed with baleful red eyes that seemed to inflict misery wherever their gaze turned. Hiashi had not forgotten the disdain with which the boy's parents had treated the Hyūga, spreading foul rumours and mocking the clan in front of the whole village with their silver tongues and hypnotic eyes. But the question was, did the boy know? Did he know?

He was handsome at least, he had to grant him that. Smooth, pale skin, not unlike that of a Hyūga. If he and Hinata did end up having children…

He shook the thought away. "My daughter has benefited from the greatest teachers the Hyūga clan has to offer. In addition to that, she has served as a genin under a very well-regarded jōnin sensei for over a year. What makes you think you would fare any better?"

"I would not dare claim to be more skilled as a teacher, my lord. Rather, it's the method that is different." The Uchiha looked him in the eye. "As you know, the Sharingan has a limited ability to impart suggestions. Though actual mind control lies solely within the domain of the Yamanaka clan, upon Lady Hinata's own request I was able to impart the suggestion that she become her own true self. The effect is mostly psychological: As long as she believes that the suggestion gives her confidence, it will."

"I see," Hiashi said, steeping his hands. "And it did not occur to you to ask permission for this?"

The boy fidgeted nervously. "Ah… forgive me, Lord Hyuga. I thought it might be easier to convince you if you saw the results first."

Hiashi resisted sighing in exasperation. The technique was working, that was the problem. Whatever foul enchantment the Uchiha had used, it had turned Hinata into a force that could almost stand up to Neji in single combat. And he desperately needed Hinata to be strong. If she married within the clan, his rivals would devour her. If she married an outsider, she would no doubt be controlled by her more powerful husband. He had been all but ready to name her younger sister as heir instead, to spare her from that fate.

But Uchiha Sasuke… if the boy had been grooming her to be his puppet, Hiashi would have had him assassinated and damned be the consequences. But instead, he was making her more independent. More able to resist pressure and foreign influence, which was exactly what she so desperately needed.

The question was: Did the boy know?

He thought back once more to that fateful battle between the two genius members of their respective clans. "You Uchiha always think you're so clever," Neji had yelled, his attacks raw and unfocussed with rage. "Everyone acts like the Uchiha were this great and noble clan because they were so afraid of them, but meanwhile everyone hated their guts! Do you think nobody noticed when your family was being slaughtered? We all heard the screams, and they were like a lullaby to us! As far as the Hyūga clan is concerned, your brother was the only noble Uchiha that ever lived!"

Could the heir to the Uchiha clan really have forgiven that? He surely had not forgotten it.

And yet the fact was that he really had put it aside, at least for the time being. The Uchiha was sparring with Neji on a regular basis now, and though he doubted there was any great love between them, there had been no reports of any incidents.

For the sake of revenge against his brother… that's what it was. For the sake of revenge that boy would put everything else aside, at least for now. And Hiashi would do the same: For as long as the Uchiha was teaching his daughter independence, he would play along. And after that… well, who knew what could happen with the passage of time. He smiled inwardly.

The Uchiha heir was waiting patiently for Hiashi to finish thinking, still sipping the last of his tea.

"You have given me much to contemplate," Hiashi said. "I will have to discuss with all interested parties, which I fear will take some time. Please consider this meeting a matter of utmost secrecy while I work behind the scenes. In the meantime, you are free to continue with your training sessions."

"Thank you, Hyūga-sama." The boy bowed politely, and after observing the bare minimum of ritual the Uchiha heir was out of the door, leaving Hiashi alone once more amongst the statues of his ancestors. He sat there for a long time, blending in with the past as he considered his family's future.

Uchiha Sasuke… what an interesting person.