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CHAPTER TWO

Madara stumbled to the ground and stayed there for a moment, blinking to the floor with a surprised expression. He had been trying to walk for some time now, and was Hahaue's nightmare, always falling and stumbling around, refusing anyone's help. I could see his future self already, and it amused me to see his affronted small face scrunched up.

I walked up to him and extended my hand to help him get up.

"No!" he shook his head vehemently and sat with his own effort. I huffed at him, impatient with his stubbornness.

"You know, it's easier if you accept help, Ma-chan," I informed him, squatting at his side. He just looked at me from his high ten months old and turned his attention to his current predicament: walk without leaning into anything.

I could understand Ayumu's churlish ways better and better, even if I refused to pass judgment on my own little brother. Ayumu just lacked any kind of tact to deal with a baby, and Ma-chan was certainly difficult enough for him without the added precociousness and the obvious prodigiosity.

I sighed when Madara finally figured out how to rise to his feet again, wobbling precariously but standing on his own all the same. He gave a victorious smirk in my direction before resuming his swaying trek through the porch, in the direction of the open fusuma panels.

"Hah! I win! See, aniki, you're not so great!" Ayumu's derisive laughter and loud shouts drew my attention to my older brothers. They were training with bokken that afternoon, with the grudging supervision of Souma-san, one of our older cousins. He had a broken arm and was out of the field until it was healed, so he had the dubious honor of looking after the Clan Head's children.

At that moment, Ayumu held our older brother at sword point, looming over him with a pleased expression. Souma-san appeared at his back and in a movement fluid like water Ayumu was on the floor, their instructor for the day scowling at him.

"Gloating on the battlefield will only get you a swift death… If you're lucky," he reproached. I approved of his lessons, even if his methods were too drastic in my opinion.

"Teme! I wasn't paying attention! It wasn't fair!" shouted Ayumu, his face slowly turning red with anger and embarrassment.

"Nii-san, watch your language!" I exclaimed something that Hahaue was always complaining about. Honestly, Ayumu-onii-san cursed more than the some of the Clan's hired mercenaries that sometimes took a day or two to restock at the compound.

"Kazumi-chan, you have to take my side!" he protested, pointing in my direction with his wooden sword. Souma-san immediately stepped on his wrist, making him yell in pain and let the sword fall.

"You never point a sword, if you're not going to use it," ranted our cousin, looking stressed. I asked myself for a moment how many eyes Ayumu-onii-san had almost taken with his stunts, now that he was allowed to carry his bokken around.

Of course Ayumu began to rage in response, disregarding the fact that Souma-san was triple his size and weight and his better in all shinobi arts. I huffed affectionately at the scene, already used to it.

"He doesn't change a bit, ne?" Masaru's voice startled me, and I looked to my left. He was in the process of sitting by my side, and it disturbed me that I hadn't notice his approach or any kind of noise until he had chosen to speak.

"No, but he's Ayumu-nii-san," I answered, smiling at him.

Recently, Chichiue was more present at home than ever before. He still spent a lot of time out, at the compound, supervising the men and having meetings with the Jounin or the spies. I knew because Hahaue liked to be kept informed, and she had her means in the form of the spouses. Many Jounin were actually the heads of other compounds, and in the rare times they came to Chichiue they would bring their spouses. Hahaue was their host, while the men discussed the war-effort and tactics; she always knew who was at the compound.

One of the greater changes that had occurred with Chichiue's close supervision was the family dynamics. Masaru was more and more pressured in his training, which in the last year had stepped up in difficulty. My brother, being who he is, kept up with easy, and currently was hailed as a prodigy. It broke my heart to see his infancy being slowly but surely killed in favor of the efficient soldier.

Ayumu, in some ways, had it worse. He didn't have the discipline required for the shinobi life, and lacked the maturity and focus to get better. He was constantly punished by our father for his loud and emotional ways. The only thing Chichiue hadn't anticipated was having his own obstinacy turned against him. Hahaue was the sole reason they hadn't killed each other, yet.

Madara and I didn't have the same problems. I was a girl and Madara was a baby, therefore useless in the foreseeable future for Chichiue. We spent a lot of time shadowing Hahaue or left to our own company, oversaw by the hawkish caretaker, Chinatsu-san.

A heavy thump broke our silent observation of Souma-san teaching nii-san the error of his ways, which translated in a heavy training session that would end with Ayumu-nii with bruises all over his body and a shimmering anger that threatened to explode on the next person to set his temper going. In many ways, our family was predictable, in that the response of our males was unexpectedly similar. I could see Madara doing it, as well.

Masaru and I turned to watch Madara sit, glaring at his own chubby legs.

"He's still at it?" mumbled Masaru to me, looking at Madara with laughter in his eyes.

"Um… Hahaue's worried," I answered, absentminded. I kept my words to a bare minimum. My vocabulary had definitely improved that last year and it was rare to not understand a word, but I still had difficulty coordinating my mouth and tongue muscles and sometimes the words came mangled by my faulty diction. Besides, I was considered intelligent and was many times compared to Masaru, but I didn't want to stand out that much.

"You won't help him?" he asked, turning to me with a raised eyebrow.

"Madara is… Not easy," I replied diplomatically, making he snort with amusement.

"A true son of Uchiha Tajima, then," said Masaru. I turned to him, detecting the soft bitterness hidden in his voice. For the first time, I noticed the smudges under his eyes and the tired way his eyebrows creased.

"Something wrong, aniue?" I asked with worry. Masaru looked at me for a long moment, considering something, before turning away to look at the sky, inhaling the clean and crisp smell that the autumn winds brought from the surrounding forest.

"No, nothing. I'm sure it's going to be alright," he said, throwing his calm smile at me, the one that reminded me of Hahaue. It made me suspicious, but I didn't have a way to make him trust me and tell what was going on. The foreshadowing note in his voice, though, made a bad feeling surge in my stomach.

The house was in great uproar the next month. Something was happening, and it somehow affected all of us. Never before had we so many visitors, and it was surprising to see that many of them were women. They were always meeting in a section of the house specifically partitioned, it seemed, for that purpose. In my opinion, it had less to do with privacy, and more to do with Chichiue's peace of mind.

Madara and I had been definitely pushed to the side and these days we rarely saw Hahaue or even Chinatsu-san. Masaru and Ayumu continued their training regimen under Souma-san and, later, Chichiue. Our days were spent watching them and running around the house and making a nuisance of ourselves to the servants.

During that time, when we were each other's only company, we began to get closer. I would show him how to walk and the proper way to hold the chopsticks and he would create some exciting games for us. It wasn't an uncommon situation to be reprimanded for our house-wide machinations, many times involving sneaking around, procuring items that didn't belong to us or changing the placing of random objects without getting caught. Sometimes I caught myself thinking that Madara truly had been born to the shinobi life. He was, after all – and much to my shame –, much more adept at the games than I could ever hope to be.

Another point to the sneaking exercises was the need of escaping the tittering and gossiping women and Chichiue's temper, when he was at home. We learned pretty fast how to silently walk around our own house – the places you could step in without making a sound, the best routes through the corridors so that we could hide if needed, the right technique to slide fusuma and shoji without making a noise. It was something only we could do; not even Masaru or Ayumu knew about it.

It was on one of our "information gathering" games that we finally heard some truths about the odd feeling of unrest and excitement permeating the house.

We were tiptoeing around the sleeping quarters, easily listening to the maids walk around, cleaning the bedrooms, through the fusuma panels. It was one of the days to put the futons in the sun and beat the accumulated dust off them, so they were making enough noise that slipping past them was simple enough.

We had discovered that maids and servants in general were highly knowledgeable about their masters' lives and doings. It was the best way to be kept informed without prying, if you knew not to get caught. That is to say, I liked to know what was going on, and Madara just went along for the thrilling adventure; not that I could fault the boy in his disinterest. He still was a baby, after all, even if a sneaking, conniving, arrogant one. That day, two maids whose names I didn't remember were speaking while organizing Masaru's room.

"Did you hear? About the wedding?" one of them asked in a hushed and excited voice that made us stop in our tracks to listen; it was standard voice for gossiping maids.

"Of course! They say it will be lavish! I just hope it won't be held here, like the old hag was insisting. It would be complete chaos," answered the other.

I looked in Madara's direction and he returned my glance with a perplexed frown of his own. No, neither of us knew about any kind of wedding. We returned to our eavesdropping with renewed curiosity.

"I know!" huffed the other, a heavy thumping sound making listening to them a little more difficult. "That witch is terrible… Imagine having to suffer that woman's presence all the time till the wedding. I would trade with one of the cooking staff, that I would."

"Ne, ne, Mio-chan, did you see the bride? Weren't you the one that cleaned a room for her?"

I blinked rapidly at the new information, perplexed. So we had a guest, or maybe two, and I didn't even know about it. But, well, it had been a little crowded in recent times; she could have easily slipped past our notice. It made me think about the quarters where the women congregated… Maybe she was sleeping there. It was the only place that Madara and I kept our distance from. And we wouldn't have met her at meals time, because we children ate separately from our parents when there were visits, like our house was full of, these days.

"Yes, she was so beautiful! She was a true princess!" gushed one of them, garnering my attention once more. "I can hardly believe she's Tajima-sama's sister, they're nothing alike. She's so sweet and kind!"

I leaned forward without thinking, intent on hearing some more, when I almost revealed our position with an undignified scream when Madara's little hand closed around my wrist and pulled with all the weight of an eleven months baby, stumbling to his feet. I frowned at him, but my eyes widened when I saw his frantic mimics, indicating the end of the corridor.

I stood up and started to pull him to another room when I heard it. It was Chichiue's authoritative voice, surging earlier than his presence, resounding through the halls. Madara grabbed my hand and started to run away, trying to get me to move along, but then I heard Hahaue's voice, sharper than I thought it could be. I stopped, using my own greater weight and ignoring his frantic pulling, trying to understand what they were discussing about.

"Nee..." whined Madara with an impatient voice, calling my attention. I made a shushing movement and quickly pulled him in Masaru's room, disregarding the two startled maids. I closed the panel without a sound, effectively hiding us from our parents, and crouched out of habit, pressing my ear to the paper divider.

"Kazumi-sama, Madara-sama, you shouldn't…" I interrupted the maid, making a sharp silencing sound, turning to glare at her. If Chichiue caught us spying on him, we would be locked in our room for weeks.

"… is more than prepared. I had children his age out there, Kotone," Chichiue's voice interrupted any and all movement inside the room. I think all of us held our breaths, and I went as far as putting my hand above Madara's mouth, lest he made some kind of noise.

"And I was there to see their mothers mourning, Tajima," Hahaue's voice wasn't soft and gentle at the moment; she sounded sharp and there was ice in her tone. I knew right away who they were talking about. Masaru. The casual, almost aggressive way Hahaue addressed Chichiue made me shudder.

"He is a good shinobi, and he has potential. He'll be fine," replied him. The sound of their clothes was close when they passed in front of the door, and I leaned forward to catch Hahaue's soft answer.

"He isn't a shinobi, Tajima, he's a child. Our child, not some kind of disposable killer to be sent out on missions."

They stopped walking almost in front of me, so near it gave me the illusion of hiding in open space, making me uncomfortable with the possibility of discovery.

"Exactly, he's my child, the Clan Heir. And if he wants to keep that title he will need to prove himself sooner or later. Especially now that Ryuunosuke get to marry his son with my sister," he growled. The animosity in his voice was telling, but I never before had heard about a Ryuunosuke. "He's coming with my team next mission and this is final."

I trembled, hearing the assertive tone of his voice. My heart clenched painfully when I thought about calm, sweet Masaru out on the field, killing, fighting for his life. I knew there was nothing Hahaue or I could do for him, though. She was a civilian with no say on the running of a shinobi Clan, and it was laughable to think Chichiue would hear a toddler. Masaru was going to war, but I hoped with all my being that it wouldn't be as final as my father's words.

After that, I couldn't act as cheerfully as before, as if I was still ignorant of the transpiring drama going on in my own house. Poor Madara was the one who most felt it, as our adventures were put-off by an indeterminate amount of time. I didn't feel up to any of the usual games, and those days they just reminded me of Masaru, and that soon he would put these in practice, and he would need to play them flawlessly, if he wanted to come back home.

My memories of what would happen just made everything more unbearable. I knew Masaru, Ayumu and I didn't survive in the original storyline, and it made all the air leave my lungs to think that sometime soon Masaru wouldn't come back. I wondered if he would die on that first mission. Chichiue had tried to be reassuring during his conversation with Hahaue, but things happened. Problems and situations that were impossible to be predicted; shinobi worked with the assumption of the worst case scenario being their best bet, and even then they were caught unaware and killed.

I started to spend more time with him, watching him train relentlessly, only now understanding his new found drive to succeed. He didn't want to die either. The conclusion made me hate my father a little more each time I saw the determination shining in my brother's eyes. I also began to invite myself to his room at night, when the nightmares began. I discovered then that I had a vivid imagination, and that the helpful remembrance of some of the more gruesome passages of the manga, illustrative of all kinds of possibility, didn't really help.

"Kazumi-chan, what are you doing here?" Masaru deadpanned when I accidentally awoke him one of those nights, trying to sneak beneath the covers of his futon.

"Um… I had a nightmare, aniue," I whispered back. The silence at night was oppressive there; very different from my old world, where quiet was elusive at any time of day or night.

"Another one?" he asked with exasperation, shuffling to the side so I had more space. I quickly joined him, escaping the chilly air; the autumn nights were colder than what I expected. "Care to tell me what it was about? Hahaue says it helps."

I thought about it for a moment. Was it right to burden him if he didn't know for sure if he was going out on a mission, yet? But if so, wouldn't it be better to let him know, so he could prepare? I shook my head, trying to think on a course of action. Masaru was seven years old now, and our father deemed him ready to kill and be killed. To my perceptions still influenced by my old world's standards, he was terribly young, and what was happening to him could be constituted as a severe case of child abuse.

"I heard…" I stopped, surprised by myself. I hadn't wanted to say that, not really.

Masaru turned around, resting his head close to mine. I couldn't see his face in the complete darkness of his room, but I could almost feel his gentle smile, warming my chest and making something unwound deep inside it.

"It's okay, you know? It's going to be alright, Kazumi," he whispered to me, his voice close and comforting. I felt my eyes begin to tear up, my throat beginning to close with emotion. I didn't want to lose that sensation; didn't want to think about his little warm body lying cold and blooded on some unknown patch of forest ground.

"H-How do you know?" I demanded with my voice wobbling, clearly indicating I was crying. He made a soothing sound and wound his arm around my shoulders, bringing me closer, making me cling to the simple feeling of him. His smell, which still had that indistinctive aroma that I associated with Madara and thus a baby; the beating of his heart and the breathing pattern of his chest; the way his hair fell, as thin and silky as mine, and many times more obedient.

"Because I'm training really hard and I'll give my all in this mission. I promise I'll come back to all of you, Kazumi," he said with such a young, serious voice that my heart broke. He couldn't promise me that, not when I knew that, if not in that first mission, than maybe in the next, or the next – sometime soon, so soon – he wouldn't come back alive. "Don't you believe me?"

I nodded, softly bumping my head against his chin. I believed him, of course I did. I saw how much he trained and how good he was, from observing him and from comments overheard by his teachers. I just didn't believe in anyone else to refrain from killing a little boy. Not in that world, not at that time.

For some time, I realized, my memories of future outcomes had blinded me and made me arrogant. I thought I could change everything for the better, just by existing. There had to be some butterfly effect happening even if I, myself, wasn't acting on any of my knowledge. I had been secure in the fact that, when the time was right, I would change the major outcomes to way I wanted. Even while I lived there, for months now, I still felt detached from any kind of threat directed at me. The fact that I, as a baby and daughter of the Uchiha Clan Head, had been sheltered for my whole life there, was just something that aggravated my rather skewed view.

Suddenly, I discovered myself powerless to put a stop to it, to this sick Fate dictated by a Japanese manga writer. It was a shock to understand just how much my existence affected the plot. Some part of me was still hoping that, as my presence here indicated, the story was changing, mutating to a new reality, one where my brothers were alive and happy.

It was foolish and naïve. It was such a disgustingly passive way of living this second life that it made me sick. How could I wish for change when I didn't push for it?

I remembered Hashirama's plans for the future, for Konoha. I understood him more now, even if when I first read those chapters all I could think was how unrealistic that desire was, in war-torn times marked by thousands of deaths and years of disputes. How could it be made true, with just two children behind it? I remember reading about the First Shinobi War and thinking that it was a logical outcome to a dream like theirs, in a world like that.

Now, I supported it whole-heartedly. If I just could save all my brothers – all my four brothers – with this dream, I would help Hashirama found his precious village. I would fight his inevitable war, and I would win. Because to lose or give up was not an option, not when my loved ones were dying out there, for land and gold and pride. Those weren't reasons good enough to sacrifice them, not to me.

"Aniue, I'll protect you. All of you," I murmured in the fabric of his sleeping clothes, closing my hands in fists in the front. I was startled by his chuckles, near my ears; it had been so quiet that I thought he was sleeping.

"I don't doubt it, Kazumi-chan. You're an Uchiha too, you know?" he said, his hot breath caressing the top of my head. "We, Uchiha, have fire inside us. We burn, Kazumi, for those we love and wish to defend. Someday, you're going to make this will your strongest weapon, too, and I believe in you to protect the Clan, ne?"

I kept quiet, but got closer to him, feeling him hug me and yawn tiredly. I mused over his words. To have the strength to burn for my precious people… I promised myself that when the time came, I wouldn't hesitate.

I would make this will of fire my own, and protect them all, even if it consumed me as well.

A/N: Please, feel free to comment on the story or on any mistake you happen to see!