Chapter 10:
They Call Him Danzo

One day, my father told me a secret.

And on that day, I learned how little I knew.

I thought I understood.

Back when I first awakened into this world, twelve long years ago, I thought I knew what it meant to be born in such a place, in this world of shinobi - of liars, of killers. Of Ninjas. A world full of lies, where every shadow could hide a silent killer and even the kindness smiles could be nothing but empty masks to hide a heart cold as stone.

I thought I understood that this world was one where only the strong survived and the weak perished, and that kindness was nothing but a liability.

I thought I understood all of that.

I didn't.

Back then I truly believed I knew what it meant to live in a world full of monsters.

I was wrong.

I hadn't understood a thing.

With a single sentence, my father taught me how little I knew.

The Uchiha Clan was slaughtered by Konoha.

Shadows danced across my father's face, turning familiar features strange. I didn't recognize this man sitting across from me, his face blank and hard as stone under the flickering light of the single candle set between us.

We were alone, so only I would ever remember the words he spoke.

That morning, the day following my twelve birthday and my last as an Academy student, my father called for me. He had brought me here, down to this dark empty room in the heart of the compound. Nothing but the worn tatami mats beneath our feet and a single lit candle between us.

Around us seals lined the walls, engraved into the wood by skilled hands long ago and were filled so densely packed with Chakra that I could sense them without my eyes. Fūinjutsu.

It was like standing next to an open stove, the power held in those seals lapping on my skin like waves of scorching heat, so dense was the chakra in them. They even managed to hold back the power of my eyes – my all-seeing Byakugan – so that even my vision could not pierce beyond those walls.

No. No, that wasn't precisely true. I could see through the walls, despite the seals best attempts to do otherwise, my sight still managed to pierce through them as they did everything else. Even surrounded by them I could, with but a single glance, see where everyone in the compound stood. From my mother, who was tending to the flowers in her garden, to Hanabi, who tried her best to help our mother but failed to do anything other than dirty her clothes with her efforts - though neither seemed to mind- to Naruto, who snoozed contently in the bedroom next to my own, dreaming who knows what.

I could see them all, but not clearly.

The walls distorted my sight, mudding my vision. It felt as if looking through a pair of old lenses that no longer matched, throwing everything slightly out of focus. I could still see everything that surrounded us but now all the small tiny details escaped me.

The chakra running the wall from the runes in a constant but fluctuating stream assured that.

In a single moment of comprehension, I understood their purpose. The seals were not meant to protect us from the ears of outsiders trying to listen in, but from the prying eyes of our own clan.

The Byakugan did not let us hear with our eyes but we did not need to hear to know the words that were spoken in the dark. Lip reading, a difficult skill to master due to the precision needed to focus one's eyes on a person's lips and lungs from afar, was not a skill possessed by me alone.

Whatever secrets my father was about to tell me, he wanted no one in our family to know.

And he had a lot of secrets to share. Not one or two but many. Dozens. Hundreds. In a room that no one would ever learn the words spoken between the two of us, my father told me all the secrets of my clan.

Shinobi were not good people.

We were not kind nor honest nor fair.

We all had our secrets, our own dirty laundry. Skeletons in our closets, both literally and metaphorical. An entire Clan of Shinobi that was centuries old? Our share of secrets could have filled a graveyard. And yet, we could not allow them to be forgotten. Each secret, every dirty deed, needed to be kept track of and accounted for least they returned to bite us in the ass one day. Secrets had a tendency to that. So we kept a careful watch.

As the future leader, I was expected to lead the Clan one day, which meant I had to know and manage all of its secrets. As I had graduated from the Academy and had become a shinobi in truth and in name, it was decided that the time had come for me to be inducted into the dirtier aspects of being a Clan Heir.

And so from the centuries of secrets that my father held in his head, the knowledge of which he had received from his own father, who in turn had been given from his own father and so on for who knew how many generations, he chose to begin with the most recent.

He told me the truth behind the Uchiha massacre.

How all of Konoha played a hand in it.

Leaders from three of the four Noble Clans of Konoha; Aburame, Akimichi and Hyuuga.

Leaders from the five largest Clans not among the noble four; Inuzuka, Nara, Sarutobi, Shimura and Yamanaka.

The Anbu Commander.

And of course the Hokage.

All of them had played a part in the extermination of the Uchiha.

They all saw the signs. How could they not? It was obvious to anybody watching that the Uchiha had become unhappy. They had all noticed their discontent, how unsatisfied they were with their position in the village, and when the entire clan had begun to withdraw into themselves, alienating themselves further from the rest of the villagers, they had all watched and took note of it.

The discontent of the Uchiha was an old grievance, as old as Konoha itself, there from the time of the village's founding. They had been passed over not once, not twice, not even thrice but on four separate times when it came to choosing who would lead the village. Though they were widely considered by many to be the most powerful Clan in the Elemental Nations, not once had any of their members bore the title of Hokage.

The discontent had been there for decades, long before the Kyuubi incident; the Kyuubi's rampage and the rumours that an Uchiha was behind the attack only helped fuel the embers of what was already there. Their resentment over slights, real and imagined, built over the years until it began to fester like a diseased wound, poisoning their hearts against the very village they had sworn to protect.

The other Clans, they saw the signs, they knew which direction the wind would blow and that trouble was brewing just beyond the horizon. They had all gathered together, in secret, to deal with the matter before it became too big to stop. And after months of meeting, discussions and planning, a decision was made.

The Uchiha had become a festering limb that would poison the rest of the body.

So, like the metaphoric diseased limb, they chose to amputate the problem.

It didn't take much convincing. At first they had wanted to reconcile with the Uchiha, to mend the rift that grew between the village and its oldest clan, but once they discovered that the Uchiha were planning to perform a coup of their own and overthrow Konoha's leaders, all talks of reconciliation were thrown out the window.

The decision was made that very night. It was unanimous.

The Uchiha were sentenced to death for treason.

Traitors deserved no mercy.

That was the truth behind the Uchiha massacre.

Every member of the clan, every man, woman, child, every mother, father, son, daughter, husband, wife, brother, sister, young and old alike, all were to be executed – none were to be spared.

I listened as my father told me with clear and passionless words the role he played in it as if he were speaking of the weather rather than the slaughter of an entire clan that he had once called comrades. From the oldest half-blind crones to the crying babes still clenched to their mother's breast, all butchered to the last. And not only did he support it, he helped make it happen.

Really, these ninjas made me look normal.

It was then, as I lay stunned by the revelation, that a stay thought crossed my mind and I had to stifle the urge to laugh.

Looks like owed Sasuke an apology, turned out he was right all along.

Konoha did murder his clan.

Oops, I'll be sure to send him flowers if I ever drop by his grave for a visit.

Looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised. All the clues were there, the signs laid out before my eyes for me to see. If only I had bothered to stop and think, to puzzle on the holes and wonder rather than gloss over it all as I had I might have realised it sooner.

I, at twelve, could see any inch of the village I choose to so long as I stood within its walls, and I knew I was not the only one who could. So that brought up the question, 'how had Itachi managed to murder his entire clan without anyone noticing?'

He couldn't have murdered them all in silence, not when they numbered over a hundred in total. Not when they had veteran Chūnin and Jōnin among them.

There must have been a battle, a clash of steel, an exchange of jutsu, no matter how brief it may have been, so why hadn't anyone noticed? In an entire village full of ninjas, who had all sorts of abilities from super-hearing to chakra sensors to eyes that could see for miles and pierce through walls, how had he gotten away with it without a single person noticing?

Simple, he didn't.

They had all chosen to look the other way.

On the day of the Uchiha Massacre, they made sure that Konoha was empty. That the majority of the ninjas who were responsible for patrolling the section of the village where the Uchiha compound lay received emergency missions and were assigned elsewhere, to the borders of the Land of Fire where 'reports' of increased activity of foreign ninjas had been sighted. While other people, who like me had the ability to sense what was happening from a distance, were either sent outside of the village on random missions or assigned to a location within the village that would place the Uchiha compound outside of the range of their respective senses.

All of which was done to make sure that no one would catch sight of something they shouldn't have and try to interfere. Due to this, the village was almost entirely barren of ninjas, holding only a small fraction of the usual population it usually had available.

The true irony of it all was that because the village was so empty, the Uchiha had decided to attempt their Coupe sooner than they had planned. With the village so barren of forces they had a golden opportunity to act, one that they had no intentions of letting slip from their fingers.

For a clan that prided themselves on their eyes, they were so painfully blind.

Perhaps if it had been in another time, under different circumstances, the Uchiha would have found it suspicious to discover the village so empty, but instead all they saw was the opportunity it presented. To them, to those who wanted to overthrow Konoha, it must have appeared to be a sign from the heavens. A perfect opportunity to strike had been granted to them and, given another day to prepare, they probably would have. It was nothing but pure karma that the very night before they intended to betray the village, they were betrayed instead.

And so, Itachi slaughtered his clan, and when the time came for him to make his escape they left a large hole in the village's security for him to do so. S Rank or not, there was no way he could have gotten past all guards patrolling the village undetected, not without being forced to kill some of them. And yet, other than the Uchiha that died that day, Itachi hadn't killed a single Konoha Shinobi during his escape.

If I had only bothered to think on it then I would have realised that the only way that could have been possible was if he had help getting away.

Everything made sense, even why the Hokage would bring the other clans into the fold when the time came to execute the Uchiha rather than try and carry it out in secret. The risks were too great not to. If he had attempted to exterminate the Uchiha in secret and the truth was later revealed, it would have been a disaster even worse than the Uchiha attempting a coup.

Had the other major clans in Konoha Ever found out that Hokage had allowed an entire clan to be exterminated, a noble one that co-founded the Village at that, it would have sparked a civil war at worst or have him imprisoned at best. There was no way that would let the matter lie.

And besides, it would have been stupid to try. With the eyes of the Hyuuga, the swarms of the Aburame, and hounds of the Inuzuka, the other clans would have noticed and figured it all out eventually, they would have had to be willfully blind not to.

The Uchiha steadily secluding themselves over the years from the rest of the village behind their compound walls, shutting everyone out as all the while rumours of their rising discontent and dark muttering continued to grow. Only to wake up one day and discover that the Uchiha, a trouble-making but extremely powerful Clan, had been wiped out overnight by a single Shinobi, one who had no motive other than insanity to do so.

No, it wouldn't take much to realise there was something else going on beneath the surface – and with the resources some of the clans had at their disposal, it wouldn't take much for one among them to put the pieces together.

But if they were brought in on it, well, then things would be different.

They – every single one of the clans – had agreed, none would be spared. Not even the youngest children. Should any of the survivors ever discover the truth, that it was their village that was responsible for their clan's demise, they would seek out revenge. It would have been strange for them not to.

For all of their callousness to life and death, within the Shinobi world duty to one's clan was an exalted trait. It was a rather common tale in the Elemental Nations for children of fallen clans to dedicate their lives avenging it.

They were duty-bound to; avenge their clan or die trying, no other option was acceptable.

So no, there would be no survivors, no children that would grow older and stronger in their midst, trained by the village's own resources, fed by its food, protected by its power, only for them to betray it in the end.

All would be killed, down to the last, for the good of the village.

All, but for one reluctant exception.

Uchiha Sasuke, only he was to be spared. That was the price for Itachi's loyalty.

His clan he would slaughter without hesitation; his cousins, uncles and aunts, his father and even his own mother, he would kill them all, if not gladly then reluctantly to fulfil his duty. But not his brother, never him. He was the only one who he would not forsake for the safety of the village.

Reluctantly the clans all agreed he would be spared. They all swore that they would not seek retribution upon him for the actions of his clan and that he would be treated as any other member of the village.

To secure Itachi's loyalty, they would allow Sasuke to live.

Even so, they were uneasy. They all understood the risk that Sasuke represented. Right now he was harmless, nothing more than a cub. But time had a way of changing that, and as the years go by he would grow, both wiser and stronger. And one day, should he ever discover the truth, Konoha may find itself with an anger tiger within its walls.

But they had no choice. It was a price they had to pay, and so they paid it.

They agreed with Itachi's demands but they were apprehensive. For they all knew that so long as Sasuke lived, the business of the Uchiha clan would never be truly finished.

Then a miracle happened.

Uchiha Sasuke had vanished.

Someone had taken care of that last unfinished business.

Only now that I had all the pieces in front of me did I realise how unbelievably lucky I had been that night.

To give room for Itachi's escape, security in Konoha had been lowered significantly. Guards normally patrolling the streets were sent to the borders instead, ninjas relaxing on their downtime in the village were sent away on sudden emergency missions, while many of those that still remained were sent to track down and capture Itachi. And perhaps most important of all, the Uchiha, the Village Police Force, no longer existed.

Over a hundred ninjas whose duty was to patrol Konoha's streets and guard the inner city were gone.

While the clans and the Hokage had anticipated it, they could not act on that knowledge, not without giving themselves away. It would have looked far too suspicious to have a newly trained police-force ready to take the streets the same day the last one died. To make the Uchiha's demise appear like the actions of a single mad man rather than the mechanisms of the village, they needed to appear as blindsided by the incident as everyone else. So they allowed the natural chaos and confusion that would follow such an event to reign for a time before they reestablished order.

For the following two days after the massacre the village was so barren of ninjas that had a foreign army tried to invade, they would have probably succeeded. And in that forty-eight hour period, the whole of Konoha was in chaos as it scrambled to recall its ninjas and tried to fill the gaps that the Uchiha left behind with their absence.

Which was perhaps the only reason why I had gotten away with it.

A hole in the village's security was deliberately created for Itachi to escape. I just happened to use that security flaw to kill Sasuke. Had I chosen any other night, I would have failed. Sometimes despite all the hours spent planning and honing your skills, it was only luck that determined if you win or lose.

In the end, it all came down to luck.

And that night luck was with me.

They didn't bother to send any ninjas to guard Sasuke, why would they? They all knew that the 'threat' Itachi posed to him did not exist so he was safe. And with the village's defences so dangerously thin as it were, with the police force completely decimated, they could ill afford to spare even a single man to guard someone who they knew was in no danger.

They were just as shocked as everyone else when they woke up the following morning only to find him missing.

They hadn't realised until almost half a day later. The nurses noticed he was absent from his room and had reported it in but they did not panic, believing that he had hidden himself somewhere nearby to grieve, needing time alone to cope with the shock of losing his entire family. It was only after the staff, and then some guards they called in to help, failed to find him did they begin to realise something was wrong.

They never did end up finding out what happened to him.

And perhaps, in the end, they were better off for it.

None among them had wanted Sasuke to live, not the Clan Heads, not the Anbu commander, and maybe not even Sarutobi. It was only their promise to Itachi that stayed their hand and saved him from sharing the same fate as the rest of his clan.

And while they did make an effort to search for him, the simple truth of the matter was they were happy to have failed because no one wanted him to be found. He was a loose thread, unfinished business, and a threat to the village and their families, but because their hands were tied it was a threat they could not take care of.

So when he went missing, when they couldn't find him anywhere in the village, more than one among them felt relief. With him gone, the issue of the Uchiha Clan would finally come to a close and they could say with complete honesty that they had nothing to do with it. So even though the clans made a show of desperately searching, in secret they celebrated this turn of events.

No matter what Sasuke's fate was, it no longer mattered to them.

If an outsider had killed him, that was fine. It got rid of their unfinished business while leaving their hands entirely clean. If he had committed suicide from the grief over the loss of his clan and the betrayal of his brother, that was even better. If another of the Hidden Villages had managed to take advantage of lowered security to sneak in and kidnap him then that was fine too; Itachi will track them down soon enough and his wrath will fall upon their village instead of Konoha. And if it was one of their own who took care of Sasuke, well, it wouldn't do to look too deeply into the matter.

So long as they never learned the truth they could tell Itachi with a clear conscious that they had nothing to do with Sasuke's disappearance, and with Itachi's Sharingan – whose skill with it was so prodigious that it was said to be able to see through all lies – he could take one look at their faces and know they spoke only the truth. They honestly didn't know what happened to him, and thus they could not be held accountable for Sasuke's fate.

Somehow, I doubt Itachi saw it that way.

Though I desperately wanted to know what Itachi's response was to his brother's disappearance my father didn't bring up, and I didn't dare ask. No matter how much time has passed, I didn't want to show the slightest bit of interest in Sasuke. These Shinobi have shown themselves to be far more cunning than I ever gave them credit for; it wasn't impossible that they might have suspected me and simply decided not to look too deeply into it, so it was best not to take the chance just to satisfy my curiosity.

But there was more to the tale of the Uchiha.

The story did not end there.

For among the Clan Leaders, the Anbu commander and the Hokage, there was one more man involved in their massacre.

He was there during every meeting, standing by the Hokage's side like an obedient lapdog, or perhaps a shadow would have been more appropriate. Yes, a Kage's shadow, that was the best way to describe him.

He never said a word during those meetings, never contributed anything, just stood by his master's side, observing silently, judging all with his single watchful eye.

He was an unassuming man, slight and frail. At first glance, he would have appeared harmless, a crippled old man well past his time. With a lame leg, one working arm and but a single eye, what threat did he pose to a room full of experienced killers?

Not a single person in the room was fooled. They knew who he was.

Even Gods cast shadows.

Sarutobi Hiruzen, the Third Hokage, the Professor, the Monkey Summoner, he was all of these things and more. But during his prime, when he was in the peak of his power he was known by one other name, one that was both a praise and a warning. To the people of Konoha, Sarutobi was a beloved father figure, adored and revered, but to the rest of the Shinobi world, he was a monster. He was hailed as the 'God of Shinobi', a title he earned because in a world full of killers, he was unrivalled at his skill in killing.

A God among killers.

And like every man had a shadow, so too did God.

That was the title given to the man who forever stood by God's side. 'God's Shadow'.

The darkness born from God.

Utterly loyal, absolutely obedient, the Shadow only moved to fulfil God's will. In the entire village there was not a man more obedient to the Hokage, or more trusted by him. To make sure God's hand remained clean, he, the shadow, would go where God must not tread, do what only devils dared do.

Assassination.

Child soldiers.

Genocide.

Betrayal.

There was not a thing he would not do. No act too vile, no sin too cruel, no crime too reprehensible for him. Like a fanatic fighting in the name of his God, all was justified in his eyes.

In the room full of killers, he was perhaps the most blood-soaked of them all, and only the Hokage had nothing to fear from him. To the rest of the Elemental Nations, he was a bogeyman.

A shadow.

The shadow had a name.

They call him Danzo.

And now he has come for me.

*Chapter End*