A/N: And we're back! Enjoy the new chapter and please review! Thanks!
Chapter 4: Motherly Concern
Mikoto Uchiha was worried, much more so than usual. Worrying had become something of a habit for her unfortunately thanks in large part to the stress of the various roles she played in the village. She was the matriarch of the famed Uchiha Clan thus serving as an example to the younger females in the clan and a person to whom they could turn to for guidance, she was a loving and supportive wife to the clan head Fugaku a man who additionally served as head of village's military police force, she was a doting mother to Itachi aka the boy widely considered a prodigy throughout the village for the speed he had risen through the shinobi ranks, and she was an equally doting mother to Sasuke a boy who while still in the academy was quite bright and more than likely held just as much promise as his currently more well known older brother.
Unknown to many though there was an additional but just as equally important role she played in the course of her daily life…the silent guardian of a murdered woman's child since the day she had first seen him in that hospital all those years age …..Yes, murdered, for while she was not privy to all the details surrounding the events on October 10th of that year she knew enough, including the burden her dead friend and now the woman's son carried, to know that the village would have taken every precaution to prevent the complications a birth would have faced because of those circumstances and the fact things could have gone so catastrophically wrong just by chance...well that was a little too far fetched to believe.
In any event, while that last task of Mikoto's didn't necessarily seem that hard to do compared to the others it was in fact the most stressful. Rumors to the contrary aside, the boy known as Naruto Uzumaki was not under 24 hour surveillance as many assumed he was (given his status as village Jinchuuriki). Oh sure the Hokage occasionally had checked up on the boy in person, or via a special jutsu using his crystal ball or by sending one of his subordinates, but such events were infrequent thanks to other more pressing concerns. The fact was the village simply could not afford to spare the numbers or time needed to watch over the boy 24/7, what with the recentness of the last war and the damage inflicted to the village by the attack of the fox leaving their village in a precarious position. Later to this debacle was added the Hokage's having to initiate a hunt for one of his former students who had gone rogue which further depleted the ranks as they searched for him, and most recently of all a messy political incident with the hidden cloud village that necessitated even more forces be stationed along the borders to prevent possible retaliation. Add all this together and you were left with quite a substantial gap in which a variety of negative things could and did happen to the boy. So to compensate, unknown to even the Hokage, into this void of oversight had stepped Mikoto where she could.
Thankfully for her she found that her former skills as a kunoichi complimented her new discrete role rather nicely. Many people who knew her only as the easy smiling housewife if asked would never have suspected that the woman herself had been formerly ranked as a Jonin, the highest rank one could achieve normally amongst the ninja ranks short of a Kage position. She had even been offered a role in the elite Anbu black ops unit but had turned it down, having grown tired of fighting and wanting to instead focus on being a homemaker and raising a family. That was over a decade ago, and yet despite the time that had passed since then and all the burdens of motherhood that had come in-between her ninja skills were just as sharp as they had been before...or so she had thought.
In truth she highly doubted her husband or anyone else for that matter would have noticed her jaunts about the village to watch over the boy, had she not made the mistake of forgetting the old ninja warning about getting complacent.
Even to this day she had often scolded herself since the inadvertent discovery of her actions by her husband. It was unforgivably sloppy for one who had held her rank previously. The sad simple fact is that she had made the mistake of falling into a routine, something which unfortunately makes even the best ninja prone to mistakes should something unexpected disrupt the routine. Her schedule for quite some time had been the same: wake up and make food for the family, see her family off, head out of the house to do a little chatting with various people all about town and do errands, eat lunch, do household chores, make dinner in preparation for when her family came home, and finally finished up with her occasional going with her husband to clan meetings before calling it a day. Later on she had added picking up Itachi from the ninja academy to that list until he unexpectedly graduated after just one year, after which she had a blank spot in her schedule until Sasuke started the academy recently.
Other than that one change regarding picking up her children though, nothing much had shifted in her day-to-day life, and so in between performing these various tasks and whatever other bodily necessities she needed to do she would slip out to watch over the boy who her friend had been so looking forward to mothering before her tragic death. This routine had continued on unabated for some time until last October 10th. For on that day as the villagers prepared to celebrate the destruction of the Kyuubi festival Mikoto had witnessed firsthand just how similar Naruto was to her deceased friend...especially in regards to ill advised pranks.
It really was a shame Kushina had never been able to see her boy...he acted so much like her, even if his appearance was far closer to his father. Hmph...honestly, the fact nobody had made the connection to who the boy's family was still boggled her mind at times. Seriously she could understand the younger generation, what with them never having met Kushina or her lover, but amongst the older generation? Come on! You didn't need her clan's vaulted sharingan to see he was practically a clone of Minato! Besides ninja skills or not a late term pregnancy is NOT something one could hide easily. Not that the Uzumaki woman had made any secret of the matter. The redhead upon discovering her state had been bouncing up and down in joy like a rabbit hopped up on soldier pills….
...oh kami why did she have to phrase that last thought that way! Now she was having flashbacks to her genin days... she didn't care what other girls said, rabbits had an unlimited capacity for evil!
Somewhere far away
"Black Zetsu?"
"What do you want chatterbox?"
"Am I going crazy or did the Gedo Mazo just...sneeze…?"
"Earthquake"
"Earthquake…?"
"Yes...and nothing else."
"Are you sure...? Maybe we should mention it to the boss...cause I'm fairly certain that..."
"Don't make me break out the weed killer!"
...what was she thinking about again? Oh right...the fact that a good many of the villagers were hate blinded idiots to not notice the similarity the boy had to his parents. Maybe if they had noticed what happened that day wouldn't have happened…
On that day like previously mentioned she had witnessed the boy performing a very ill advised prank. Upset that nobody was in any way going to celebrate his birthday Naruto had made himself a little set up in a tree that just poked over the top edge of the Hokage monument, more specifically just over the top of the head of the 4th hokage. Then just as a crowd of people had inevitably come to a certain nearby spot beneath the massive stone face to pay respect to the now deceased Hokage, Naruto had seen fit to rain paint down on the people. That was bad enough, doing it to a bunch of half drunk very somber possibly ptsd afflicted people even worse, accidentally spilling a whole bunch of red black and blue paint on the monument in the process so to the people in town it looked like the Hokage, the man who had sacrificed his life to save all of theirs was bloodied and bruised and had just generally gotten the living crap kicked out of him...?
Oh kami that was an awful mistake!
If her guess was right then judging by what happened next it would be the first and LAST time Naruto would ever pull a prank on that particular date or ANY date within the week that holiday lay. Now normally the shinobi in town, while indifferent to the boy's plight, still tended to be more understanding of the nature of the boy's burden and because of that would ensure the villagers treatment of the boy never took that final step over the line into the realm of the physically threatening...until this time that is.
This time the Hokage had been busy dealing with some diplomatic matters and many of the shinobi and military police had either taken the day off and gotten drunk themselves, or were out patrolling the border of the village to make sure no enemy shinobi decided to use the distraction of the festival to make a sneak attack. So without anyone to keep their passions in check the more than a touch enraged villagers had formed a rabid mob, some of them grabbing anything at hand to use as a weapon or pelt the boy with and proceeded to chase the boy throughout the village.
Mikoto who had been busy doing some shopping, and taking advantage of the sales that usually went on around this time of year, had immediately blanched upon realizing what was happening. She dropped everything she was doing, ducked into a public restroom while summoning up a Kage Bunshin, and changing her outfit courtesy of a storage scroll she kept on her person. She quickly donned a simple generic black shinobi outfit with the jonin vest she used to wear back when she was still part of the ranks, her old headband, a pair of goggles, hair pins, and a cloth mask to cover the lower half of her face, and then without even giving it a glance she ordered her clone to take the things she had bought home and tore off after the mob. By the time she caught up to them they were already upon the boy. Seeing red (and not because of the sharingan for once) she blasted back the mob away from him by summoning a massive gust of wind along with a massive torrent of water whilst he quickly recovered from his injuries thanks to his body's tenant. Whilst his unknown savior, her voice altered thanks to a simple jutsu, was telling the mob to disperse he had used the opportunity to escape.
She thought that would be the end of the matter, but then she discovered she had blundered big time. Bunshin are very useful things, especially the more advanced versions that actually have some physical substance to them (even if they are much more chakra intensive), however ultimately how well they performed is determined by the skill of the person using the technique and their attention to detail. In her panicked haste to catch up to the boy Mikoto had made the mistake of sending the clone to her home without checking how it was dressed, meaning instead of wearing the outfit she had worn that morning she accidentally sent it home dressed in her "protect Naruto outfit". Needless to say when Fugaku happened to come home early to celebrate the holiday with his family he had been rightly spooked by the strangely dressed figure in his house. The purchase laden clone had been forced to reveal her identity lest he attack it and cause it to drop everything. Something which when combined with an incident report he received the next day from the subordinate he had put in charge of overseeing the festival regarding a similarly dressed figure nearly drowning a good number of Konoha citizens...well it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the connection.
So after demoting the man he had put in charge of ensuring order at the event (which he had CLEARLY failed at thus embarrassing him), Fugaku had of course asked Mikoto what the hell she had been thinking, and not having the heart to lie to him she had caved.
She told him about how she had been helping out with watching over Naruto since his birth, how she felt obligated to do it because of her friendship with Kushina, how she occasionally had seen fit to drop off small anonymous gifts of money and things to the boy to help him out, and most of all how she was upset that she even HAD to do anything in secret and had to keep away from him due to fucking Danzo the Hokage's advisor.
Stupid old war hawk! If he hadn't told the Uchiha to watch over the civilians during the fox attack instead of letting them fight on the front lines like they had wanted to initially then people wouldn't have gotten paranoid notions of them trying to control the fox, which was total BS! A normal sharingan didn't have the capability to do that anyway, only one that had evolved to Mangekyo form could and Fugaku had previously banned anyone from even mentioning that cursed form of their eyes existence to any of the younger generation in the clan. The last thing they needed was fellow Uchiha butchering each other for a quick power boost like during the darkest days of the warring clan era, or worse yet a second Madara Uchiha running around and fucking things up for everyone…
"ACHOO!"
"Yes that's right, that's exactly the sound I heard coming from the statue."
"KAMI DAMNIT! I turn my back and...grr! That's it chatterbox I warned you! I'm getting the weedkiller!"
"NO WAIT!"
Her husband had understood her words and the sincere sentiment behind them, but even still he had insisted that she had to stop with this. Heck it was only because of the rioters fear of being arrested for assault on the boy and the fact Fugaku had not gotten around to reporting the incident yet to the Hokage (something he sure as hell wasn't going to do now) that nobody was looking too closely at what had happened, but if she kept this up he wouldn't be able to shield her.
His words were true and her brain agreed with her husband...her heart however was still dead set on honoring her old friends memory. So while she had cut down on her observations of the boy, she had not totally ended them altogether and she still kept her ears open for news regarding the boy.
Which brings things full circle to the matter which now had her so concerned.
This past Friday evening as she returned home she had overheard some kids passing by the Uchiha district mentioning off handedly "the blond dobe" they chased into that weird bit of woods that had the fence around it the evening prior. Alarmed upon realizing which woods they were referring to and the fact she had not been able to check up on Naruto recently due to having been been distracted helping a sick relative of her's she had snuck over to the blond's apartment that night to check on him. To her relief though she found he was in fact in bed and seemingly okay. So content that things were just fine she dropped off some money for the boy and left, the only mishap in the whole endeavor being running into Fugaku at home and having to deal with him again telling her to stay away from the boy.
Still besides that encounter everything had seemed fine...except she later realized something had changed regarding the last Uzumaki in the village…. It was a well established fact that while Naruto would occasionally pull some sort of stunt during the week, it was from after school on Friday to Sunday evening that was really prime Naruto prank time and had been so since just after the boy's third birthday. This past weekend however was different...there had been no pranks, no mayhem, no anything. The only thing she could think was that he might have gotten the living hell scared out of him by something in the forest, not that she could fault him for that based on her own past experience, and would soon snap out of it.
Except then a whole week passed...and still...nothing, and other things were changing to. When somewhat concerned at what was happening she had arranged several times to pass by the Ramen shop he usually frequented under the guise of performing her daily errands she found that his usual chair, one nobody in Konoha but the shop workers would willingly touch, was always empty. It was totally out of character for him and the only reason she didn't suspect abduction or something worse had befallen the boy was that she knew he had been to class. She had seen him, albeit very briefly one day during the school-week when she went to pick up Sasuke. Yet what should have been a calming event proved to only fill her with more concern as she noticed that something was off with the boy. His aura seemed...darker... and when a few kids had inadvertently blocked his path he had shoved his way past them without a second thought. When they had protested this action he had stopped, turned around, and proceeded to shoot them a look of hatred at them so intense she doubted even a hardened war veteran could have pulled off the same without some difficulty, freezing them in their tracks.
'What the hell had happened to him in that forest?' She had wondered for some time... and then things took an even darker turn a few days later.
"So Sasuke-chan. How was school?" she said to her son as she walked him home from the academy.
"Eh, mostly alright I guess."
"Oh? Only mostly? Did something happened to you today at school?"
"Eh no. No Kaa-san, not to me. It was..."
A look of contemplation seemed to darken Sasuke's face, as though he were wondering whether or not to say anything. Seeing the concern in his mother's eyes though he evidently made up his mind and decided to continue.
"Well you know the Uzumaki dobe…?"
"Sasuke!" she interrupted, stopping in her tracks as she did so "How many times do I have to tell you not to call people terrible things like that!"
"Eh?! But Kaa-san...all the other kids do…!"
"I don't care about what the other kids do! If they told you to take a flying leap off the Hokage monument, would you?"
"No!"
"Then stop with that nonsense!"
"Gomen..."
"Hmph, your forgiven. Now what about N-I mean Uzumaki-san?"
She said quickly catching herself. No need to make Sasuke anymore suspicious about her having a connection to the blond boy by using an unusually familiar honorific for him. Especially given he'd never seen her interact with the resident pariah before. Thankfully her son seemed to have missed her near slip up and continued.
"Recently he started acting weird. I mean first he showed up late to class last Friday, which isn't that unusual really but then he got really quiet all of a sudden."
"Isn't that a good thing? It might just mean he started taking being a ninja more seriously."
"No...I mean, it almost seemed like that at first, but then he pulled the same thing again come Monday, only worse if that's possible. That day he just kind of trudged in, barely saying a word to anyone, and just kept staring out the window. It was almost zombie-like, like he just stopped caring about everything. He did the same thing practically every day this week and then today...well today he just kind of...lost it...I think."
"Lost it? What do you mean you think he lost it?"
"Well...I don't really know all the details, I was on the other side of the playground at recess when it happened. All I know is: he was by himself on the swings when a bunch of kids went over to him, there was shouting and then….something happened. Next next thing I know the kids are running away screaming."
"And did anyone mention this to the teachers…?"
"No and that's the weirdest thing! When a bunch of us asked the kids who ran off what happened they wouldn't talk and BEGGED us not to say anything about it."
It was then she noticed it, a shudder sweeping over her son's body.
"Sasuke...is there something your not telling me?"
"...it's just, like I said kaa-san, I don't know exactly what happened when those kids went up to where Uzumaki was...but just as I turned away from what was going on, just before those kids started screaming...I thought I sensed...something."
"Something?"
"I can't really explain it. It was..."
He hesitated as he struggled to find the right way to put it into words.
"Well...you know that feeling you get near where those weird buildings are? The wrecked ones in that one part of town near the village walls?"
"The one part near the…walls?" She said sputtering as her brain connected the dots. The one part of town that still had not been fixed since...what happened almost 6 years ago. The part that was still cordoned off and would remains so until...the remnants of Kyuubi's chakra dissipated.
'No! It couldn't be! Could it...?'
"Well the feeling was like that, Kaa-san." continued Sasuke ignorant of the rising dread in Mikoto's mind. "Only it was, different somehow. I don't really know how to explain it. Like stronger but also, tinged with...something else. Like I said I'm not sure how else to explain it"
"...and Uzumaki? What happened with him?"
"He just...kind of stormed off after it happened. He didn't even bother to make an excuse or anything. He just up and left and never came back to class."
"Huh...well I have to admit that is odd Sasuke-chan I can see why your upset. I don't know what you sensed on the playground, but as for how Uzumaki-san was acting maybe he's just going through some personal things in his life. Did you maybe hear something that might give you a hint of what he might be going through? How about your sensei, did he have anything to say about Uzumaki up and leaving like that?"
"No, I don't think so. As for sensei...huh, now that I think about it, it's like sensei forgot he even existed, or he didn't care about whether or not he was there."
'No. That idiot wouldn't do anything would he' she thought with a grumble at the teacher's actions.
"Then again that's nothing new. Heck the teachers tend to let things like attendence slide a lot of the time anyway"
"WHAT?!"
Ok now THIS was news to her. Hearing his mother's shriek Sasuke did what many a kid has done when faced with an upset parent...he spilled his guts.
"Y-yeah they've always been kind of lax about that. Uzumaki tends to be worst regarding it but they really don't seem to mind when the other kids don't show up either"
"...and when people don't show up do the teachers ever talk with them about it? Punish them? Anything?"
"Nooooo, not as far as I know. I guess maybe they figure since the kids don't care about being there why should they? I mean the only reason I was able to tag along with Itachi when he hunted that angry boar a while back was because we had to end class early since we didn't have enough people show up that day."
It's times like these that make one truly marvel at how one little change can greatly effect the course of events. In the original course of things, Mikoto had just assumed that the teacher had gotten sick at the last minute and didn't have time to get a sub and so nobody would have thought to mention the laxity of things at the academy to their parents. She never would have suspected that things had been like that in Konoha for a while, since the last war specifically.
Back during the most dire days of that war the combination of desperation to get as many bodies as they could on the front lines and the sheer number of people needing to head home to treat injured family members had resulted in the academy instructors to take it upon themselves to change the rules regarding attendance as well as a general abbreviation of the normal curriculum. As long as the kids passed the final exams they were seen as good enough and so they were sent to front lines. In short the quality of troops had been sacrificed in exchange for a greater quantity of meat shields to throw at the enemy. It was brutal, it was cold, but it had worked out and had delayed the enemy long enough for the future Fourth Hokage to tip the scales in their favor by putting his newly refined Hiraishin no jutsu to devastating effect against the enemy.
By all rights, this reduction in quality was something that should have been caught on to once things settled. Unfortunately other factors had served to mask the symptoms that something was wrong with the education system. There was of course usual bureaucratic bloat that befalls all nations eventually which kept departments from talking to one another, then there was the Third Hokage's temporarily shifting responsibility regarding certain matters to deputized underlings whilst he managed the war, and most crucially there was added the fact that the children of clans were typically given supplementary lessons at home in order to ensure their competence with clan exclusive techniques.
That last one may not seem like a bad thing but unfortunately the tunnel vision like focus on ensuring the clan heirs got their family techniques down right before they got shipped out inadvertently blinded people in regards to flaws the new curriculum was causing in anything else. As for anyone who wasn't from a clan? Well they typically weren't about to complain about things. Most of the time those non-clan applicants were from civilian families whose children under normal circumstances would never have passed but who under the vastly condensed new curriculum were able to slip through. Sure they would die but the civilian parents wouldn't blame the teaching their kids received. After all it was a long held unofficial fact (rightly or wrongly) in the ninja world that civilians turned shinobi typically were far less skilled and far more liable to die than those from clans, something which while tragic still did not deter them from the ranks as it was counterbalanced by the fact that in a ninja village having kids who were ninja meant you were higher up on the proverbial totem pole than your neighbor who didn't.
Again though, somebody SHOULD have noticed what was happening...and somebody had. The future Fourth Hokage had in fact noticed that something was wonky with the quality of the new recruits that had served with him during the war and after being sworn in he had ordered an investigation. Upon receiving the results of the final report he HAD fully intended to do something about this mess...only the Kyuubi attack had occurred the same week he intended to call the clans to discuss the info. As for the final report itself? Well either it had gotten destroyed in the assault along with many of the people involved with it or someone had through malice or incompetence absconded with it and filed it away where nobody would think to look for it.
So the matter had been swept under the rug and a new generation of teachers, who themselves were students of the very same, very new, and very flawed system had been sworn in to replace their now deceased predecessors. They were given the basics of how to teach courtesy of some hired civilian teachers and following training, ignorant to what was wrong with the ninja skills they had learned before, they had simply gone and taught what they knew flaws and all with nobody the wiser. Another thing further fueling the idea that nothing was wrong to the general populace was that in the village you had kids like Itachi who was a certifiable genius as a ninja. Unknown to most folks though Itachi's brilliance was not merely a natural result of a high IQ, it was also due to his near obsessive drive with learning new skills and jutsu in his spare time so that his precious family wouldn't get hurt.
Thus as a result of all this nobody knew anything was wrong, nobody noticed anything was wrong, and frankly nobody had cared enough to look into the matter since the Fourth...er, actually scratch that previous sentence. Somebody else HAD noticed what was going on before Mikoto, two somebodies actually. The only problem was one had refused to bring it up, for reasons that we'll get to later, and the other one who unlike the first HAD been vocal about it had been ignored, also for reasons we'll get into later. In any event the point remained that had things played out as they should have, had this otherwise mundane conversation not been triggered by a certain blond boy's furious storming off in the middle of the school day for reasons unknown, things would have remained as they were as nobody with both the political weight to change it and the will do to so had become aware of the matter since the Fourth Hokage...until now that is.
'Oh...you sons of bitches! It's bad enough you screw with Kushina's kid but now I find out your crap habits are threatening to undermine my kid's education on top of it!'
…
…
…
"Kaa-san?"
"You know what Sasuke...you go on ahead. I shouldn't be too long. If your father asks tell him I went to have a TALK with your sensei about his style of teaching" The now thoroughly enraged mother abruptly said before summoning a clone to escort Sasuke the rest of the way and immediately turning around.
"Um okay Kaa-chan, see you at home."
But she was already gone, vanishing in the distinctive blur of leaves that were the hallmark of a shunshin technique. Little did she know as Sasuke walked home with the clone he was thinking the very same thing as the vanished woman.
'Whelp, somebody is going to get their butt kicked! Still though...that leaves a question...what exactly set Uzumaki off like that?'
A/N: This all originally was part of one much longer chapter along with the upcoming next chapter but it was getting too massive so I split it in two pieces. FYI this chapter does somewhat reflect my views on the education of the leaf genin. Something isn't right when you can go from someone on the level of the Tobirama and Hiruzen in the older generations and then have it abruptly drop down to the level of pre-timeskip Sakura. Meanwhile you got folks like the Sand Trio and the sound kids murdering their way through the competition like so much chaff. If it wasn't for the almighty powers of protagonist Naruto had going on and Sasuke's devastating curse mark plus Sharingan combo that whole village would have been seven different flavors of fucked sideways in the sand invasion. Anyway rant over see you next chapter!
