Kakashi-sensei was waiting exactly where Naruto had last seen him waiting hours before. He was leaning against the wall beside Sasuke's door, arms crossed and familiar orange book out in one hand. The rest of the hallway was empty except for him.
Tsunade-ba-chan herself had examined Sasuke's injuries and pronounced him not dead as well. After that she'd left for some kind of meeting about what to do about evil missing-nin popping up in the village and had dragged Sakura out with her. Which was probably a good thing. Sakura tended to worry. Especially when it came to Sasuke. Besides, Kakashi-sensei and Naruto could handle this.
Naruto grinned. "Oi! Kakashi-sensei!"
"I'm standing right here, Naruto. There's no reason to shout."
"Bah!" Naruto replied with a cheeky grin he knew his teacher had to see even if the other man was pretending to ignore him. "Come on, we got work to do," he said before turning around and strutting off, hands folded behind his head. It wasn't often that he knew something that Kakashi-sensei didn't, and if Kakashi-sensei wanted him to share what their super-important mission was, then the other man was going to just have to keep up. The very idea made Naruto cackle to himself.
There was silence behind him, then a very distinct sigh and the sound of something being put away. A moment latter Kakashi-sensei was walking along side him. Naruto glanced over at him out of the corner of his eye and Kakashi-sensei rolled his one visible eye. "I was listening, you know," he replied quietly.
Naruto laughed a little. "Guess I should have known you would," he grumbled.
"Hmm," Kakashi-sensei replied.
So much for having the upper hand for once. He'd just have to find some way to pull a prank on Kakashi-sensei later to make up for it. He'd have to get Sakura and Sasuke or Iruka-sensei to help him, though, cause pranking Kakashi-sensei always required backup.
Once they stepped out into the late morning sunshine, neither of them wasted any time in moving off to the Uchiha district. It might be great that Sasuke was neither dead not doing something stupid, but that didn't mean that this whole things wasn't very important Team 7 business and village business.
The old head Uchiha family house really did look like a small tornado had hit it. The street just outside of it was all torn up, with crumbled walls surrounding it and deep gouges running from one end to the other. Even the little half-dead decorative bushes and tiny plots of grass out front were all dug up. Naruto and Sasuke had spent the better part of an afternoon cleaning up those plants when Sasuke had first moved back in. Something about making the place at least look presentable before taking up residence there again. It had actually been kind of nice doing something mindless and not life-threatening with Sasuke once again, just the two of them working together quietly outside in the nice sunshine. And Sakura had brought them dinner and cold drinks after she got off work. The three of them had sat inside the still kind of stuffy kitchen and pretended like nothing bad had ever happened there.
Naruto still thought Sasuke moving back into that place was a Bad Idea, but who was he to tell the class genius what to do?
"Where did it start?" Kakashi-sensei asked once they stood outside the front door.
Naruto shook his head to clear it, then moved into the house. "Old man's study. Itachi must have been looking for something when Sasuke barged in."
Kakashi-sensei just nodded and followed him.
The hallway didn't look much better than outside did. There were some distinct burn marks and gouges along the walls and floor. Naruto just walked by them and tried not to connect any of his own memories to such things.
The study was almost all the way at the end of the hallway. Sasuke had shown it to him once, explained that he was going to wait to do that one last and that he wouldn't need any help. Naruto had still offer to cart out boxes for him. He might not know what papers were important and which ones were not, but he could find something useful to do. Sasuke hadn't said much in reply.
The room was a lot messier than Naruto remembered, but at least there were no burn marks in here, just some stray kunai and shuriken. With as many books and scrolls and papers laying about as there were, one little spark probably would have brunt the whole house down.
Uchiha senior was obviously one of those guys that liked everything in its place, cause there hadn't been one messy stack of papers the first time Naruto had seen this room. Everything had been lined up perfectly, even the scrolls and books that filled the shelves. Most of the room was same way, but some thing had obviously been knocked over and thrown about. It was kind of hard to tell if any of the mess had been intentional or not.
"Left-hand side of the desk, bottom drawer, left-hand side of the desk, bottom drawer…" Naruto repeated. Kakashi snorted quietly, but Naruto ignored him. He'd been repeating it over and over again in his head ever since Sasuke had told him. Stepping carefully around the papers spread out over the floor – Sasuke would kill him if he messed up anything – Naruto slipped around the desk. The bottom drawer was still open. Naruto smirked. Bingo.
Naruto crouched down and stared at its contents. A couple of scrolls, an old tattered book, and a collection of loose papers. All of them with the Uchiha mon on them. Naruto reached in and pulled the bunch of them out and dropped them on the table top.
Kakashi-sensei moved away from the doorway then to join him. "This it?"
Naruto nodded, then paused. "Well, it's all I can see right away, I guess. Wouldn't put it beyond the guy to have some kind of hidden latch in there."
"We'll start with this," Kakashi-sensei replied. He reached out and poked each of the scrolls with one long finger. "These are both still rolled up. If he was looking for something, was in a rush and was interrupted, it would make sense that he wouldn't have taken the time to re-roll them."
"But if there was a third, he could have just taken it with him or burnt it or something," Naruto added.
Kakashi-sensei nodded. "Of course. But again, let's start with what we have. We'll move on after that."
"Right." Naruto snatched up the book and started thumbing through it. It looked like some kind of scrapbook or some sort of thing. Huh. Go figure. Most of it had written notes in it, name and dates, sometime bits and pieces of information. There were even a few pictures carefully attached to blank pages. "Hey, are all these people related to Sasuke?" he asked.
Kakashi-sensei didn't glance up from the papers he was sifting through. "It would appear these are all clan records."
"Guess so. Some of these dates are pretty old." Naruto paused to stare at a picture of a genin team made up of what looked like only Uchihas. Written underneath were three names, each with two dates written beside them. The latter dates were all the same, and not that long after the first. That didn't sound good. He quickly flipped to another page. There were even some official documents in there, that or copies of them. Letters of recognition, letters of discharge, even a couple of newspaper clippings.
He kept flipping through it. There didn't seem to be anything really useful about information about a bunch of dead people, but it was kind of interesting to hold Uchiha history in his hands. Besides, he didn't have any better ideas than waiting for Kakashi-sensei to figure out what they were looking for.
Towards the end of the book, however, the steady flow of page after page seemed off. Naruto frowned and flipped back to check it. "There's a page missing." Kakashi-sensei stopped what he was doing and looked up. Naruto glanced over at him then smiled sheepishly. "See?" he said as he held out the book for the older man to see. "You can see the torn part in the middle."
Without a word Kakashi-sensei reached out and took the book from him. "These entries are recent," he announced quietly. "About thirty or so years ago."
"Before the massacre?" Naruto asked. It was kind of hard to imagine a time before then.
Kakashi-sensei glanced up long enough to glare at him. "If it was made long before Itachi was even born, then yes, it would stand to reason before the massacre."
"I knew that," Naruto snapped back. "I was just thinking out loud, you know?"
Kakashi-sensei stared at him for a moment longer, then went back to studying the book. He flipped a few pages back, then several forward. "All of these people are recorded as dead. There's no entries about anyone who could have still been alive for the massacre."
"So it hasn't been updated lately?"
"No, there are entries up until the massacre, but all have a death date. Which makes sense. Keeping any information about living nin so openly comes with a risk."
"So why would Itachi care about some people who where already dead before he went all crazy?"
Kakashi-sensei stared silently at the pages on either side of the one missing. Naruto tried to wait patiently. He stared at the outside of the book. Then he stared at the pages on the desk. Then he stared at the stuff on the wall to the right. Just as he was about to give up and sit down to wait, Kakashi-sensei changed. His one visible eye narrowed very slowly. That was not good.
"What is it?" Naruto demanded. "What's the bastard planning? Is it some kind of twisted zombie move or something? Or maybe he and Sasuke aren't really related. Or maybe -"
"There may have been a Uchiha he didn't kill."
Naruto stared at his teacher. "Um, yeah. His name's Sasuke."
That narrowed eye shifted up from the page and something in Naruto shriveled up a little under its gaze.
"Sasuke might have a cousin."
Naruto had to sit down after that, to hell with not damaging anything. "A cousin?" he repeated. "Like his father's sister's kid or his mother's brother's -"
"His father's handicapped brother, if I'm reading this right."
Naruto frowned. That just didn't make any sense. It was the kind of stupid crazy thing that would happen in one of ero-sensei's novels. The long lost brother of such and such. "How would Itachi not know about this?"
"The dates here indicate that there was significant damage to his eyes as an infant. Degenerative. The medical nin's expected him to be completely blind before the age of ten. No hope of the sharingan whatsoever. It's little wonder no one spoke of it. Part of the medical file is included here," Kakashi-sensei explained before turning the book so that Naruto could see.
Naruto shook his head again. "But then where was he when – you know – everything happened?"
Kakashi-sensei turned the book back around and flipped the page. "There's an official adoption paper in here."
"What? Let me see!" Naruto jumped up and leaned over to see himself. Sure enough, that's what it looked like. It was really weird looking though, like it was written in some kind of code, with a seal he'd never seen before on it. But there were blanks for people's names and for dates and lots of signatures and even another seal down in the corner with two big people holding the hands of a little person.
Naruto glanced up at Kakashi-sensei. "Can you read it?"
Kakashi-sensei had pushed back his headband at some point and both of his eyes were shifting rapidly back and forth across the page. "Some of it," he finally replied. "I've seen examples of it before, but not enough to learn the entire language. It's not code. It's one of the outer countries' languages."
Naruto shifted back so that he wasn't stretched out all awkwardly trying to see the book from across the desk. He stared at the mess left behind for a moment. "So you really think this means that Sasuke's uncle's still alive or that he might have cousins somewhere?"
Kakashi-sensei looked up. "It's possible. Considering Itachi's interest, it's certainly possible. There's a death date here for the Uncle, but there's also a note that he had married a few years before that. Most people have kids once they get married. Which makes one or more cousin's a distinct possibility."
Naruto scowled. "But why now? Why didn't Itachi check for this earlier? He doesn't seem like the kind of guy to make mistakes."
Kakashi-sensei shrugged. "Who knows? We don't know exactly what that page said. And everyone makes mistakes." Kakashi-sensei grinned a little when he said that last piece, kind of like the way a guard dog smirks right before tearing a chunk out of you, like he had no problem making somebody else dead when they made such mistakes.
Naruto grinned back before returning to the more immediate problem. "So what'd we tell Sasuke?"