I know that the statue has left a lot of questions, but those are going to be answered in full soon, soon, I promise. This chapter here sheds a bit of light on the Uchiwa-side of things, which I hope helps some of you. Two people actually figured it out, and those are InARealPickle and the other is HistoryHound. So, broke tradition there with that shout-out, but I'm stoked that the two of you did that. Now, for the funfacts!

Funfact: A butsudan is a Buddhist shrine which was and still is found in Japanese homes, although these days it appears less in city homes and more in country/rural ones. From what I read, it seems that it fell to the newest daughter in law to maintain this shrine—so that is what Sakura is up to. Also ihai were the tablets/whatevers where one's death name was inscribed, because the Buddhist monks and priests would give you a new one after you died. Yup.

Funfact: Samurai had the right to "carry two swords," as I alluded to in like the very first chapter, but they weren't limited to two swords. The swords you need to know about are the katana (the longsword basically), the wakizashi (a short dagger/sword thing) and the tanto (another short dagger/sword thing. The sword Kakashi inherits from his father in the series is a tanto if I'm remembering correctly). Because things were…fairly peaceful under the Tokugawa samurai often tied their sword hilt to their obi with a fancy knot. Can't go around being violent if you can't get your darn weapon drawn.

Funfact: Tokugawa Ietsuna was the Shogun at the time, and just barely coming to the fore of his time as Shogun—regents were ruling for him at this time. Also, bakufu is the term for the Shogunate. It used to just refer to the guy's house, but after a while it was synonymous with the government entity.

T. Iemitsu, Ietsuna's dad, was the Shogun who laid down the banhammer against foreigners and their ilk during his time as Shogun (Rebellion of Shimabara 1637) and is in fact dead at the time of this fic. He offered some pretty lavish rewards to those who turned in others for harboring foreigners or foreign customs. Like I said, bahammer.

Funfact: Shudo was a mentor/mentee relationship conducted as an institution among samurai, where an older, recognized samurai taught a pre-coming-of-age young man/older boy the ropes. This also included homosexual and homoerotic aspects, but these were expected to end once the younger man left his mentorship. This author's note is already way, way too long so I would recommend that you look it up if you're curious.

Funotherstuff: I've created a tumblr blog for and about this story. It's going to feature compiled lists of the funfacts as well as sometimes more detailed explanations of their purposes. Also appearing will be rationales behind certain characters or plot development, deleted scenes (of already published chapters, or scrapped entirely and thus not spoilers), and other stuff. Also, you'll be given a chance to interact with me on a forum other than the one here on fanfic. No you don't have to get a tumblr to access it or comment and such, you merely have to PM me to get the URL. Okay? Okay.

Funotherstuff: Trying to change the updating schedule to every two weeks instead of every four. Everyone say "Yaaaaay!"

With that, may a Hatake never put onions in your tea!

Enjoy!

Sakura never heard what happened to the statue after that day, but her life in Fujimi was so busy that she hardly missed it. There was the garden to tend to, clothing to wash, the house to keep clean—the floors shone brightly because of her work, and more than once Tenzou or Kakashi had almost slipped as they chased one another around arguing about who was going fishing—Pakkun to housetrain, making the morning and evening meals, and finally her own personal projects. One of her projects was almost completed, too. A daringly shaded orange toddler's kimono embroidered with an intricate pattern of black fans for Shisui and Rin's upcoming wedding.

Kakashi saw to it that she knew her way around the little shrine kept in a small room just off the main one, telling her the names of his ancestors and relatives. In the quiet little room, where Tenzou's singing could only barely be heard, he'd told her about his father. They each were hardworking men, and life had very rarely smiled on them. Sakumo had taught Kakashi to endure, to show compassion, and to live. Sakura could tell that her dead father-in-law was greatly missed, and she resolved to keep him apprised of the goings-on of the household.

It was, very suddenly, the middle of summer, and Sakura only knew because of her radish crops. The spring radishes had ripened, and it was time to plant the fall and winter ones, and Sakura had laughed at herself for forgetting the passage of time.

She met a good deal of her new neighbors. They were pleasant to her, but none of them had homes even remotely close to hers and wanted little to do with her after their initial visits. Kakashi said not to hold it against them, they had never been on friendly terms with the Hatake. Asuma and Kurenai were the people she saw most regularly outside of Kakashi and Tenzou. This didn't bother Sakura because the people of Fujimi hadn't been kind to her for the most part before she'd married, so she avoided going to town. She had been there once, a little more than a month after settling into the house, with Kakashi at her side.

She had been terrified of the prospect of making the walk alone, but hadn't said anything to Kakashi. But he had somehow heard her, not even bothering to invent a reason to accompany her on the trip—other than a smile as he tied his katana to his side and adjusted his wakizashi and tanto, he never said a word about it. Fujimi proper, Sakura decided, was not a place where she ever wanted to spend time by herself. There had been much more than simply stares and whispers in the marketplace and in the few shops Sakura had needed to visit.

—Bewitched, I heard…

…he seems happier, but demons can trick you into believing anything—

—Struck a bargain, prosperity in exchange for—

—Must have been driven mad by grief.

But Sakura had lived with those words her entire life, they had surrounded her family like a nosy, black miasma of ill-will. The words that had made her afraid of the town were the unspoken ones—the leering grin of a man Tenzou's age, the long stare of an elderly man, a teenaged boy trailing after them for three dozen paces. Kakashi's slow, measured steps next to her had Sakura walking as though she were attached to his elbow. How had her mother lived with this? How had her grandfather?

On the road home, Kakashi took her hand and brought the knuckles to his lips, speaking softly against the skin there. He would never have her go to the village without him. He didn't offer Tenzou in his place or even Asuma, he promised her that it would be him and no other. Kakashi didn't trust the townspeople either, it seemed.

In Edo, the capital, in a cavernous room deep within Shogun Ietsuna's palace, a conspiracy was being disclosed to the advisors of the head of investigations. The night air was hot and muggy even there, the worst part of the summer in the capital. A young man had entered the grounds at around sunset, being led through spacious halls and receiving chambers toward his appointment with these men. But that was hours ago, moonlight now shrouded the grounds he had passed through, and lamps and candles were lit sparingly throughout the complex.

The young man, who looked barely twenty, knelt in the center of the darkened room. His head was bowed and the lamplight flickered in his hair, his hands rested on his knees. He stayed silent as the older officials debated in hushed murmurs. The gloom hid their faces, and their dark, formal clothing didn't make them any easier to see. They were seated on a small dais in front of him, close enough that he could hear their words despite how they tried to be discreet. There was a great deal of shock at his revelation, of course.

The young family head of the Uchiwa, Uchiwa Itachi, was abandoning his family, nearly without remorse it seemed. Oh there was remorse, he wanted to tell them—never believe for a second that there isn't remorse, the words were on the tip of his tongue. His mother's face flashed in his mind, and he prayed then, his lips moving in the familiar shapes of words that had been taught to him at a young age, as they were to all children. The men in front of him couldn't see his mouth, and in any case what could they really do to him if they did? Torture him to find out if there were others part of his nefarious plot, during the meeting where he told them explicitly who was involved in it?

"Uchiwa-dono, are you really sure this is the path you want to take?" They were giving him an out—of course they would try to. If the heir of the main branch of the Uchiwa house took his words back now, then these men could conveniently forget that this visit had ever happened. His family was ancient, descended from a distant royal relative in the distant past. Of the major samurai families, the Uchiwa certainly commanded respect. If he took back his words, his claim, then his family would remain safe from their treason, safe from their beloved clan heir. A safely blind eye would be cast towards their beliefs, their practices, and their continuing betrayal of the bakufu.

"I have given it thought since I was first placed to receive my training. I was supposed to be taught by the head of a small samurai family in Fujimi, but upon arrival there I was taken directly to the family house of an uncle. It was then that I started noticing how so many people were kept carefully at bay around us." Itachi sighed, asking for strength to tell the full truth, separating himself from the lies he had been nurtured on.

"We live in terror and secrecy, and against the laws of the shogun. It is not honorable for a family such as ours to so greatly defy the government and the emperor. We deserve our fate."

They had conferred again, this time talking louder as though they need not keep their debate from his ears. These were the words of action, not words of counsel between officials. Itachi bent his head again, this time looking at the folded letter he had brought with him, laying on the ground as innocently as any other correspondence. It contained the proof as well as all who were involved. He prayed that his family had kept the infection to itself, rather than dragging other respected families to darkness with them. Shogun Ietsuna would never be as powerful as his father Iemitsu, but he still deserved Itachi's loyalty. He didn't do this for the riches the law promised him, he did this to regain his family's honor.

"You may return to your city home, Uchiwa-dono, please await there for further instructions. Do not leave the city." Itachi gave a short bow and stood, bowed again, and was shown out of the room. The servant who accompanied him through the grounds walked slightly ahead of him with a lamp to fight away the gloom. The light did nothing to fight the gloom which surrounded Itachi's heart.

He measured his steps through the city, and his thoughts trailed to Iimori where he had grown up. His mother was from there, the third daughter of the village lord. His own father had been quite taken with the mountain village and had kept a house there where he raised his family. The man had died, however, when Itachi was ten and living in Fujimi with his uncle. His uncle, Fugaku, had adopted him in some fashion—getting official permission to raise Itachi and his younger brother Sasuke, while keeping their lineages separate. Fugaku already had his own heirs at the time, and hadn't wanted the main branch of the family to be his responsibility entirely.

Itachi hadn't been back to Iimori or Fujimi for a long time now. His cousin had died during a rebellion in the district, and Fugaku had been terribly shocked by Obito's death. Fujimi was a place filled only with sadness during the last few years—and Iimori was not much better. Itachi had instructed his younger brother to marry a girl there and that the two would care for their mother, but to his great dismay Sasuke had refused the order preferring to maintain his shudo relationship with a Kyoto lord for a while longer. Itachi had brought his mother to Edo in the hopes that being close to her would ease his guilt at the subversive tendencies of the branches of his family. And someone had to care for her, after all.

When he finally faced the house, Itachi breathed in the choking, moist heat of the night air deeply. He missed Iimori especially in the summers. There it was high enough that the summers were bearable, cool breezes sifting through the warm-almost-hot air of the mountains. Itachi decided, as he stepped up into the house, that before the arrests swept through Edo and Kyoto in the winter, he would visit Iimori at least one more time. Even Fujimi would be better than this cloying humidity in Edo. He would at least try, perhaps ask that as his reward for his utter loyalty to the shogunate. His brother, whose life for so long had taken first priority in Itachi's mind, faded in the face of his recent willful disobedience.

Kakashi enjoyed people who didn't dabble, who didn't practice strange hobbies or behaviors. Dabbling, in his experience, led only to weirdness and getting mixed up in things one shouldn't. He had been dabbling with the Uchiwa family circle when he had met Rin in his youth, he had been dabbling with fighting alone when he had lost his eye. Life had taught him, excruciatingly, that dabbling was not good for him. It was hard to see why others would do it, or make a habit out of it. The Uchiwa had been dabbling against the fierce laws of the shogun for years, and Kakashi had long ago decided where his loyalty would ultimately lie if the Uchiwa's experiment blew up in their faces.

He and Sakura did not attend Shisui's private wedding to Rin. Kakashi did so knowing that while they were welcome he did not need to dabble with such things. He had to walk a much straighter path these days. Shisui understood, he was sure. Kakashi had put himself in danger of being too closely associated with the Uchiwa because of Sakura. But his old ties to their clan had put Sakura in danger, which went against his vow to shield and protect her. It was a terrible place to be if the Uchiwa weren't discreet, he couldn't do that to Sakura.

She had saved him, the least he could begin to do was to fulfill those promises he'd made to her in the spring. His farmlands, kept flooded until just very recently, were flourishing as though someone had enchanted them. They were well tended because he and Tenzou no longer had to devote parts of their day towards making food, washing clothing, changing the water of the bath—all the little things Sakura did which built up towards saving them valuable time.

And that was not all. She was sweet to him, in a way that left him hoping. It seemed now that he cared for her hair nearly as much as she did, combing it each night and braiding it. He knew this was reserved only for him, because one morning he walked into the cooking area to see her drop onion slices in Tenzou's tea, glaring at him fiercely. Only a moment after she did so, she noticed him standing there. A blush had crept down her face slowly, staining her neck even. Tenzou had apparently pointed out a loose lock of hair, it was later explained, and Sakura had destroyed the poor man's morning tea for it. Kakashi hoped this wouldn't become a habit in his household, onion tea was nasty stuff.

In the evenings, after Sakura had cleaned up their supper, when it was growing too dark to work and Tenzou went to heat up the bath, they would sit on the porch. The nights were starting to cool sooner, so it was quite pleasant to be outside just after sunset. They'd sit close together, Kakashi sitting crosslegged while Sakura knelt properly with her feet tucked beneath her. They would speak about the next day—if Asuma was coming over, whether or not Sakura and Kurenai would be doing the washing together in the morning, and Sakura would occasionally ask if he had finished his book. She teased him that he was reading it slowly on purpose, to keep her from borrowing it.

He was not reading it slowly to keep her from it, he had finished it three or four times by now—but it would be some time before he showed her the contents of that book. For the time being he just took her hand and covered it with his own, reeling her in and kissing her, telling her as he leaned back that he would read it to her soon enough and that she had to have patience. A few kisses here and there when they were alone was all he afforded himself other than the pleasure of holding her close as she slept. She kissed him before settling down to sleep each night, but he was going to let her decide how fast the two of them progressed. For the time being, her goodnight kisses were more than enough.

There was another side of her, too, that was just as appealing as how she treated him. Kakashi had never seen this side, he had only heard it and glimpsed it. Sakura cared for the Hatake ihai, stored carefully in the butsudan, it was her duty as his wife. She had left the shoji open one morning, and Kakashi had been about to pass by without bothering her when his brain caught up to what she was saying.

"I hope that the smell of this is pleasant to you. I know that you are used to incense, but the work that went into it should please you far more than incense burned by a woman who didn't know you." Kakashi sank to his knees in the shadow of the hallway, whatever he had been about to do immediately forgotten.

"I stole it from the field this morning, but how else could I have you know? Kakashi won't mind, he is a good man. He has gotten so much warmer since I've been here, no one—besides my mother and father— has ever looked at me without disappointment in their eyes somehow. But Kakashi…" he was hanging on her words now, even as she spoke in a far softer voice, "…he looks at me as though he loves me. I wish you could see him through more than just a burned stalk of rice, I wish you could tell him so much more than you got the chance to…"

Kakashi didn't stay to listen more, instead silently standing and backing away from the butsudan room and instead racing outside. It must have been the smoke from Sakura's improvised incense that tore at his eye, and the stuffiness of his nose an artifact of disturbed dust in the lightly used room he'd been outside of just now, nothing more. His father had burned rice stalks in late summer for Kakashi's mother, and now Sakura was apparently doing the same for Sakumo.

Once he was leaned up against the fence, facing the fields he had cultivated with his father for years, Kakashi pressed his hands to his eyes and tried to stifle the urge to weep. Even his blind eye ached, but he held steady against it. Once the terrible feeling passed, Kakashi took several deep, calming breaths as he looked out across the fields. Something serene settled over his shoulders then, erasing the despair of only moments ago. He had had time to feel, more time than he'd had in what seemed like years. He was…happy. His life had been lit by Sakura's presence, being brought into a balance it had never had before. Slight breezes waved the tops of the rice plants, the blades flashing like Sakura's eyes when she teased him. Hatake Kakashi was happy. A smile tugged at his mouth against this will. Him, happy.

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