Title: The Choices She Made
Theme: #25 – Fence
Rating: PG/K+ for vaguely adult themes of long-term unhappiness

Disclaimer: The characters and situations portrayed in this story are the sole property of Kishimoto-sensei and the assorted corporate types who've bought the rights. I've merely borrowed them for a brief time.

Notes: I made an OC because I needed a semi-innocent to watch an exchange from an exterior point of view. Someone shoot me now, please.

Uchiha Chika is completely unlike her mother.

For one, she has kissed three boys already in her life, and she is not yet thirteen. The first was the boy she intends to marry someday and he is also the boy she allowed to secretly watch her as she bathed naked by the waterfall at the edge of Konoha one pale morning a month ago. She knows, however, not to put all her bets on the same horse, so she has also kissed her close friend and her love's close friend, just to cover all her options, should her true target prove intractible.

Her mother, time-faded and weary of love, knows none of this, and likes to tell her only child stories of her first kiss, age sixteen, to the boy who she would one day marry and bear a single child for. Her father kissed her mother one evening in early summer when the frogs bellowed themselves hoarse in the thick, muggy air, straining for prospective loves. Chika's mother's description of the night is so vivid that Chika generally has to leave the house immediately afterward to fight off a nebulous sort of dread, rife with claustrophobia and the faint taste of pond-water in her mouth.

Chika never knew her father, but she's heard the stories. She knows why the other children were very careful around her when she was younger and wanted the love of every kid on the playground. Her mother explained that Uchiha Sasuke had been . . . unique, in both situation and substance, that he had been beautiful and sad and, for those last few years, completely mad. Chika was barely out of infancy when her father set the entire west side of Konoha ablaze. The conflagration had ended only when the Uchiha's doting wife had slipped a filleting knife gently between his ribs. His mind crazed with fire and fury, he never felt the strike and it took him several minutes before the blood loss slowly dropped his crumpled body down to his wife's ready lap.

When she was young, Chika's mother had been beautiful. Chika has seen the pictures of the bright-faced girl with hair the color of soft, baby-pink roses, one arm slung around the boy who would nearly destroy Konoha, the other around the boy who would become Hokage. To Chika, the comparison is heartbreaking. All that gorgeous, bright hair is now fine-spun rose-gold, faded to only a hint of strawberry, as though her time as an Uchiha drained her of a vitality she didn't know enough to miss.

Chika inherited her father's looks, feathery-dark hair like a crow's wing and black eyes that swirl to Sharingan-crimson when she's angry enough. She also inherited the keen insight of her father as well, a sort of brilliant adaptability and the will to get things done. She hasn't felt even a hint of the Uchiha madness, however, and it gives her hope for the future. There's little of her mother in her at all, in fact, perhaps only a hint in that wistful expression when Chika watches the boy she wants.

This wistful gaze is familiar to Chika since every photograph of her mother as a child features it. Chika's mother always aimed it at her dark teammate and not the golden one, not the one who's staring at her in every photograph of the team. Chika wonders how her mother missed the adoration of the fox-faced boy who remained at her side, even through the Uchiha mess.

Or perhaps she didn't, Chika thinks as she stares down into the garden from her bedroom window. Her mother is cutting peonies with a sharp knife and collecting the huge, top-heavy blossoms in an old wicker basket. She's also talking with the Hokage, who is perched atop the garden wall that fences off the Uchiha yard from the Uzumaki yard, looking closer to Chika's age than her mother's, with his robes in disarray and his hat missing entirely. Her mother tried to get Chika to call him 'Uncle Naruto' for the first few years of her life, but the 'Uncle' part never stuck and therefore he is Naruto.

He is watching her mother with such longing in his eyes that Chika would have been embarrassed, had she not been accustomed to it. As usual, her mother is looking elsewhere.

"The council believes that since the Uchiha clan has been unrepresented at the conclave for over a decade that they can begin to strip status from you guys," the man says, his voice cheerfully dismissive, despite his gaze.

Chika's mother drops a peony into the basket, the petals to dark a red they look nearly black. "What exactly does this stripped status entail?" she asks wearily, still not looking up from her garden. Chika wonders whether her mother is thinking of her child's future, or whether she's thinking of her dead husband's past.

The Hokage shrugs, his golden hair glinting in the sun. Chika thinks he's one of the most handsome men in the village, tall and broad, with eyes bluer than any sky. "Well, the seat that could theoretically be taken by whoever the clan head is . . . well, that wouldn't be a possibility anymore. I think that's what the Aburame was mostly aiming for." He idly scratched his mop of disheveled hair. "But you haven't shown an interest in the council in a long time."

This is something that Chika hasn't heard of yet, so she pays attention and strains to hear her mother's quiet replies. "I'm not a true Uchiha, Naruto," she says. "I don't really think Sasuke ever intended that I become clan head." She shrugs, much like the Hokage. "Besides, Chika's too young for it, though I'd like to leave her the option when she's older and can understand the burdens of being an Uchiha."

Like I don't already? Chika thinks.

Naruto's face clouds over. "Well, they also want to strip away some of the hereditary Uchiha lands and demote the family to lesser-clan status."

Chika's mother finally glances up in time to see her old friend looking unhappy and worried, instead of love-sick. "I can't allow that," her mother says.

"I know you can't," Naruto replies, and Chika knows they're talking about more than just a few out-buildings that no one uses anyway.

Not for the first time, Chika wonders what happened, all those years ago, that made her mother choose the Uchiha over the Uzumaki.

"I'll go to the council," the Uchiha widow says firmly. "I suppose that if I can just sit on the council long enough for Chika to reach the age of majority, then we can probably get out of this mess."

Naruto sighs and looks down at his hands, scarred and prematurely twisted from years of ninja work. He is only 30 years old. He leans back and begins to wrestle his hat from the tree Chika can now see it is caught in.

In that instant, she happens to glance at her mother and catches her breath in surprise. There is mirrored the same longing that Chika's grown accustomed to in the Hokage. It's quieter, less sure, but adoration nonetheless. Gone is the wistfulness of the rose-haired child. Suddenly Chika realizes what she, herself, must look like when she's secretly watching the eldest of the Hyuuga boys, the 15-year-old with hair longer and finer than any girl's and eyes that are so very gentle.

Then Naruto slaps his hat back on and Sakura's face is schooled into it's old, familiar weary expression. She snips another peony, pink this time, the color of soft, baby-pink roses.

For the first time, Chika wonders why her mother doesn't choose him now.