Author's Note: For those who don't know, Yashiro was one of the three members of the KMPF who went and confronted Itachi about Shisui's suicide note. According to the Narutopedia website, he was 45 at the time.
"Should've arrested him when we had the chance." was the first thing Uchiha Yashiro said when he'd run out the door to see what the commotion was only to find Fugaku's firstborn Itachi running amok and slaughtering everyone.
He didn't think too much of his chances against Itachi considering the pains that came with his age which had slowed him down considerably. For a civilian, forty-five was pretty much at the dawn of middle age. Forty-five was when civilian parents watched their children get married off one-by-one. Forty-five was when civilians started welcoming their grandchildren into the world. Forty-five was when civilians began to seriously think about the retirement that was only fifteen or twenty years away.
For a shinobi in any era, forty-five was practically ancient. Reaching forty-five in such a high risk field was considered either a sign of cowardice or quite the accomplishment depending on the reputation the shinobi in question had earned over their career. In this era, forty-five meant that the shinobi in question had managed to survive the last two world wars. For shinobi who tended to live fast and die young, the grandchildren were often half grown as they considered such things by the time they reached forty-five. By forty-five, most shinobi were either dead or retired.
Yashiro, who incidentally was forty-five, had seen action in both the Second and Third wars, and had loyally served in the Konoha Military Police Force for nearly three decades when he wasn't out on the battlefield. Over those years, time and injuries - including the ones he'd recently received from Itachi and was still recovering from - had slowed him down, and he was well aware of the fact that he was no longer the young Chunin at the start of his career who may have been able to keep up with the Clan Head's son.
A confrontation between Yashiro and the prodigy of the Uchiha clan could have only one outcome.
As Yashiro lay dying, bleeding out from a fatal wound that was not immediately so, he swore at himself for not pressing Fugaku further on the issue of Itachi's arrest despite the fact that the man was the Head of their clan. He'd learned long ago not to give someone the benefit of the doubt because they were Uchiha...
Yashiro had faithfully served the Konoha Military Police Force for more than twenty years but, the day he'd made what he would later consider to be his greatest mistake during his career had been during his first year on the force. Back then, the Second Shinobi World War had been in full swing, Fugaku's father was nearing the end of his tenure as both Chief of Police and Head of the Clan, and young Fugaku was out making a name for himself on the battlefield. The White Fang and the Legendary Sannin were out making their reputations on the battlefield as well, but Yashiro had been stuck guarding the home front as he recovered from an injury he'd received early on in the war.
At that time he'd been somewhat bitter as he watched his age-mates and even those younger than him who had passed him by making names for themselves, viewing his new position on the police force as something he'd been relegated to rather than the honor he'd later come to realize it was. As a result of his bitterness, he hadn't taken his work nearly as seriously as he should have, and that had been his first mistake.
The day She'd come in, he had been the only one who hadn't been busy at the moment, but that had mostly been because he'd just come in off of patrol and hadn't yet gotten himself situated at his desk. Before someone had gotten the bright idea to put Genin on the patrols during what otherwise would have been their free time, those who had been holding down the fort while almost everyone else was at war had been pulling double and even triple shifts, running patrols on one, and dealing with all other work on the other(s). The work had been practically never-ending since there weren't enough people at the station to deal with it as more and more came in every hour. Paperwork bred like rabbits and never seemed to be completed, and everyone was tired and short tempered as they tried to tame it.
She'd come in early in the morning when he'd been preparing himself a cup of coffee as he got ready to tackle the mountain of paperwork pertaining to a possible homicide which he'd been investigating that had been piled up in his inbox overnight. In any other situation, She might have been attractive, but hadn't been then. From the looks of it, She had only barely taken the time to get dressed before she'd run to the station, as Her clothes appeared to have been hastily thrown on. She looked like she had been crying for hours. Her eyes were swollen and puffy, and there was snot dripping down Her nose. A bruise had been forming along Her jaw as well.
When he'd seen Her, the first thought that had come to mind was that it was another Domestic case. During times of war, people tended to be stressed out more than usual, tempers ran hot, and domestic disturbance calls increased as ninja who were on leave started taking things out on their families. The first case he'd cut his teeth on had been a domestic call. Quite often, these cases ended in tragedy, further reducing an already undermanned shinobi force.
It hadn't been. She had come to report a rape. Not only had She come to report a rape, she had accused a member of the Uchiha clan of being the perpetrator. Following what he did next and the fall out that came after, he had spent the rest of his life regretting how he had handled that case.
Back then, he had been aware of the fact that rape had existed. He'd heard stories about what foreign shinobi had done to kunoichi on the battlefield. But, he'd been raised with the naive view that such things didn't happen inside the village, a view that he'd rather stupidly held until his early twenties. Along with this naive view he'd been raised with was the fact that his father had been one of those people with the view that most claims of rape were made by women who regretted having sex the morning after which he had passed down to him along with a number of stories about women making false claims against the Uchiha in order to tarnish the reputation of their clan.
It had been these factors that had caused him to take the case far less seriously than he should have. After filling out the report, he'd basically hustled Her out of the station, and had gotten back to what he'd seen at the time as a more important matter.
Her report sat neglected for the rest of the shift, and all that night after he'd gone home, gotten dinner, and caught some sleep. He'd only followed up on it the next day because he didn't want to be yelled at for not following up on something so serious and, even then, he'd done a rather half-assed job of doing so. Rather than trying to corroborate Her story through other means, he had gone directly to the man She'd accused, a man who was his second cousin on his mother's side of the family, and asked for his side of the story.
His side of the story had been pretty much as expected, he'd met the victim in a bar, they'd got to talking, and drinking together, and she'd invited him back to her place where they'd spent the rest of the night. She'd never said no, and he didn't know why she had claimed he'd raped her afterward.
With the accused being family, his story had held more weight in his mind than the alleged victim's had, and he had dropped the issue then and there.
He shouldn't have...
They found her body three days after I'd gone to visit my cousin to get his side of things, and it wasn't clear whether the cause of her death had been homicide or suicide. He'd been amongst the first on the scene since he had spoken to her the day She'd made Her accusation against his cousin, and he'd encouraged his fellow officers to mark the death down as suicide since the only person he could think of who would have had motive to kill Her was his cousin, and his cousin wouldn't kill a fellow Konoha citizen.
This was yet another mistake that he would come to regret for the rest of his life.
By covering up the cause of Her death, he'd basically told his cousin that the police had his back and that he pretty much had a get out of jail free card that would allow him to do anything he wanted. His cousin's other victims who had seen the man get away with rape as well as what had happened to the one who had been brave enough to come forward, were cowed by this and held back in fear. With nobody coming forward, his cousin had been free for far longer than he should have been, and it had only been a matter of time before the man lost restraint closer to home.
Even to the day he died, he would never know why his cousin had chosen his younger sister. It could have been because he had dared to question the other man after he'd been accused of rape rather than letting it slide, because he had been the one who had taken her report when she had shown the courage to be the first one to report his cousin, or it could have merely been because he'd wanted her, and he'd been taught that he could take whatever he wanted without consequences when he had committed an act that had the direst consequence attached and completely gotten away with it thanks to him. Whatever the reason, his younger sister had become his cousin's first and probably last victim within the clan.
The first sign that anything was amiss had been when he had come home from a long double shift to find his younger sister who had been fifteen at the time hiding in her room crying. At the time, he had foolishly thought that it had been because of some childish heartbreak since her mission had gone well and her entire team had come back alive, and left her to it. Over the next several days before she went out on another mission, he'd noted a change in her behavior that he'd been equally dismissive of. She'd refused to eat, and had sat picking at her food when he'd forced her to come to the table, and had wasted a large quantity of water taking in the upwards of five showers a day. She'd also gone out of her way to avoid him whenever possible, and cried herself to sleep at night.
Back then, he'd figured that she had gotten into a fight with her boyfriend and broken up with him and put the issue out of his mind after resolving to have a talk with the young man. He ended up having a brief talk with the boy a few days after his sister left on her mission only to discover that his sister had abruptly broken up with him for no apparent reason, and after sharing a drink with the boy he'd asked him to try to make up with his sister, because he didn't like to see her moping about the house.
When his sister's strange behavior continued upon her return from her mission even after her boyfriend had presumably attempted to make up with her, he became concerned, and decided to have a talk with her. At first she refused to say anything, but when she finally started to speak, the story she told stunned him. It wasn't just the fact that she had accused his cousin whom he'd thought had previously been unfairly accused that left him speechless, but also the fact that many of the details of her story were identical to those that had been given by Her several months earlier.
After his sister had finished telling her tale, he'd rushed off angrily to confront his cousin. In reply, the man had sneered over the fact that he hadn't cared about his actions before he'd let his sister get hurt without even once trying to protect her, and the fact that it had taken this long to learn what had happened. He'd seen red at that point and ended up killing the bastard.
It had taken five men to restrain him after he'd killed his cousin, and he'd ended up spending a couple nights in jail afterward. But, instead of being tried for the murder of his cousin, he had been released after several women came forward on his behalf, finally ready to talk since his cousin no longer held the threat of death over their heads. While nothing could be done to get justice for the women who'd been raped by his cousin since the man was dead, their testimony had provided enough evidence to prove that he'd been acting in defense of others and had secured his release. He had been allowed to return to his job after a thorough debriefing, which some of his relatives had thought was far more than he deserved.
All of that had been too late for his sister though. When he had left her side to go confront their cousin, she had hung herself knowing that she would be shamed by the rest of the clan, and possibly the rest of the village for what she had "allowed" to happen to her. As he stood at his sister's graveside following her funeral, he had vowed to do a better job, and to never give anyone the benefit of the doubt, even if they were family.
Many years later, as he lay in the street in a pool of his own blood listening to the screams of the dying that surrounded him, he reflected on the fact that every time he had given a member of his own clan the benefit of the doubt, he lost someone close to him. The last time, it had been his sister, this time, it had been his entire clan.
Edited 12-9-12
Parts 1-3 of Benefit of the Doubt Combined June 1, 2017