Disclaimer: Naruto is the work of mangaka Masashi Kishimoto, Harry Potter is the work of author J.K. Rowling. The author makes no claim to ownership of the aforementioned works and no profit from this fanfiction.
Uchiha Fukurou
Of Desperate Housewives, Work at Home and Abroad
Sasuke glared at him; Tsuruko's daughter, little Chiasa, smiled innocently. The three pregnant woman sitting on the couch behind the boy and his second cousin looked amused. One of them was Mikoto. A seventeen year old Fukurou sighed but answered their questions in the order they were asked.
"No," He said, "You don't have to call me daddy if you don't want to..."
'Please don't...'
To Sasuke all he could say was, "I'm sure they taught this at the academy but if you want I can have Nekobaa explain the birds and the bees to you if you like?"
"Stay away from my mother!" He yelled.
"Kid, that's so totally not the problem..."
Konoha
Contrary to the belief of the medic-nins treating him, Uchiha Sasuke would have made a full recovery even without Fukurou's aid. In the early light of day, the news of what had happened in the Uchiha District was only just beginning to spread among the higher level shinobi from the doctors that had received the bodies and the KMP forces that mustered along with the AnBu. The medics had retreated quickly from Fukurou's presence in spite of him having no authority to banish them from Sasuke's hospital room. Their honest relief at seeing another survivor was balanced against the dark aura that Fukurou seemed to be emanating at the sight of Sasuke's condition.
The only other person remaining in the room was the AnBu hidden in the ceiling behind a cloaking genjutsu that was useless against the Uchiha Jounin. Fukurou spared him a glance then left him there. Fukurou's control technique and Shisui's looked the same on the surface but in practice they were quite different. Fukurou's was a hammer blow that crushed his opponent's sense of self and quashed the ability to resist his commands.
It was dependent of a subject's strength of will relative to Fukurou's desire to dominate that will. The effect not only varied in strength from person to person, it was also temporary. If not reapplied within a few days it could be overcome by someone with a strong enough will. Another drawback was that applying the technique multiple times to a person over a period of time damaged the victim's psyche. Fukurou learned this at the cost of a wild owl and while not an issue in battle when used for quick distractions, it was only a stopgap measure when used against Danzo's drones like the one on the ceiling.
Shisui's technique, which Fukurou had long ago faced before reading and defeating Danzo's inept copy, was closer in nature to Fukurou's Legilimency. It was a technique that worked by having a user sympathize with his victim's mind until their thoughts and memories could be freely substituted for ones of the user's creation. It required subtlety and an understanding of human psyche to pull off. By the time he had entered the Hokage's office that morning he had been mentally fatigued from the effort of using the technique on all the Root shinobi recalled to the home base in anticipation of things going south with the purge of the Uchiha.
The ninja above taken care of for the moment, Fukurou focused upon the child in the bed before him. A gentle had lifted Sasuke's head and brushed aside limp, sweaty hair. Prying one eye open, he gazed into the blankly staring orb. The tomoe of his right, active sharingan swam inward to merge with the darkness of his pupil before his mangekyō sharingan spread out in a swirl to occupy his iris. The technique he used did not have a name it was simply an extension of his natural legilimens ability.
"Time to wake up Sasuke…" He said softly.
At first nothing changed. Then Fukurou's right eye returned to normal and as he let go, the boy's eyelids fluttered gently. There were dark circles around his eyes and his face was pale. Sasuke groggily stirred awake. Fukurou had teased him conscious a few hours earlier than he would have awoken on his own. It was a few hours less of nightmares but as the boy's eyes focused on his own with relief and hope, Fukurou feared that reality would be far harsher.
The Fort Himei location was fraught with nervous tension. The initial confusion and dismay gave way to grief and a rage that was as yet undirected. None who lived knew exactly what had happened just that there had been an attack and that half of their family was missing, presumed dead. The sixty-five survivors were mostly civilians with a score or so of them shinobi, mostly genin with a few chunin and jounin on maternity leave.
Given the situation most groups would have descended into anarchy given their loss. Someone might have left the relative safety of the fort or given away their location in some other way. In this case Fukurou's brief talk with a few of the jounin kunoichi and a briefing from the ninja cats and crows on the purpose of the fort was enough to temporarily establish some semblance of order.
Thus, when Fukurou side-a-long apparated in to the home seal with a traumatized Sasuke in tow, he was greeted with the normal ninja cat guards bolstered by two genin under the imperious command of one of his less obviously pregnant cousins. The boy made a beeline for Mikoto who was now in stable condition after a blood replenishing pill and some surgery to repair damage to the wall of her stomach. Leaving Sasuke to his own devices Fukurou found himself pulled into council with what were now the Elders of his clan and leading jounin. A collection of worried men and women in their Thirties and Forties along with a collection of kunoichi in varying stages of pregnancy watched him anxiously with fatigued but hard edged eyes.
Later the ten of them sat together in the room assigned to Mikoto. An exhausted Sasuke had been sedated and taken away to the next room. Fukurou intended to return him to his mother's side after the meeting. Mikoto wouldn't meet his eyes from where she lay across from him in her futon. The others were too dazed or absorbed in their thoughts to notice her odd behavior.
One of the jounin mothers, Tsuruko sat propped up upon a pile of pillows. Her sister, Moriko, a genin a three years younger than Fukurou tended to her.
"My husband is dead," She said matter-of-factly, "My father, my mother and half of our clan is dead. In the dark of night, someone walked into our village and killed them all. Is that what you're saying?" She asked him quietly.
"Itachi also killed Shisui," Fukurou told them, "He has the mangekyō he used it on Sasuke."
"Mangekyō?" Moriko questioned.
"An advanced form of the sharingan," Tsuruko told her sister and the others that seemed puzzled, "Gained from murdering friends." She finished with disgust.
"Itachi did this?" Uchiha Sho, a shopkeeper, exclaimed disbelievingly, "Sasuke's brother, Itachi? That's…"
"Monstrous," Whispered one of Fukurou's cousins.
"Impossible!" Corrected the waspish looking woman beside Sho, "Even with the Mangekyō, Itachi still had to face more than forty jounin and at least fifteen or so Uchiha chunin, not counting retirees! There's no way he could have taken them all! At the least there should have been an alarm! Where was the village police when this was happening? Or the AnBu? Or all our other so-called prodigies?" She turned to Fukurou, "Where the hell were you?"
"Shut up." Tsuruko cut across the woman's tirade coldly, the thinly veiled violence in her tone caused the older woman to fall silent in an instant. "Let him answer," She turned her dark eyes upon him and silently bade him to speak…or else…
"Don't fight," Mikoto said to them tiredly, "Fukurou-kun was away on a mission before this began. The only reason any of us are alive is because of all the hard work he's put in to refurbishing our safe houses and creating those emergency summoning tags that I gave out."
There was a short round of murmurs and the waspish woman apologized. Another man spoke up, Uchiha Takayuki was a war veteran and a double amputee, "Well that explains how we got here but it doesn't tell us how this happened. I'm grateful Fukurou-san, but Akemi has a point. Itachi couldn't have killed all of those people without someone noticing. You were in the village, did the Hokage have an explanation?"
Fukurou answered them carefully, "I had the chance to look over the preliminary AnBu report on the incident and get a look around the district before they finished moving… the bodies," The AnBu report came from Danzo's men reporting back from observing the attack . "From trace evidence, blood splatter, the positioning of bodies, the victim's wounds and tracks; I deduce that many of the victims were lying prone on the floor when they were killed. Few put up much of a fight. The rate at which the blood dried, taking into account atmospheric humidity; onset of rigor mortis, dispersal pattern of the corpses; indicates that they were all killed within a short time of each other." He spoke in a clinical tone.
His tone of voice might have thrown off his non-sharingan bearing relatives but those that had spent time with the KMP recognized what Fukurou was doing and Takayuki, a detective for the KMP followed along. Using mnemonic triggers Fukurou recalled all that his sharingan had observed and was parsing the data for relevant information. "There was more than one attacker, less than five, at least three definitively. Suspect one in one hundred and sixty-seven centimeters in height, weighing sixty-seven kilos and killed with a ninjatō, likely Itachi. Suspect two is one hundred and seventy-eight centimeters tall and weighs seventy kilograms, unidentified. Suspect three stands at one hundred and seventy-seven centimeters high and weighs about seventy-five kilograms."
"Itachi and two others," This was the obvious conclusion that they came to from the information given. But why wasn't an alarm raised? Some wondered, inevitably the question was asked, "Could this have been a sanctioned action by Konoha?"
"Unlikely," Fukurou answered, "The political ramifications of such an act would be enormous," He said, "Also, from the statement Sasuke gave, Itachi implied that one of the attackers might be a sharingan user"
The others straightened in their chairs at that, as terrible and senseless as it was to be betrayed by one of their own, the knowledge that Itachi might not have been working alone but had help from another Uchiha was galling.
"Something like this could only weaken the village in the long run militarily," Takayuki slowly stated. "And the other clans wouldn't stand by while one of their own was killed off. It would mean a rebellion."
"All of the ninja killed had their sharingan removed if they possessed one." Fukurou told them then he folded his arms, "A more likely scenario is that Itachi led a small squad into the village and the Uchiha district, a barrier specialist and a poison user would explain why no one heard what was happening and how come our clansmen didn't put up a greater fight."
He wasn't completely lying through his teeth. Danzo had at least provided the barrier squad though his memories held nothing on a poison user being assigned to aid Itachi in the killings. It was a little jarring to see adults hanging on the words of a thirteen year old, shinobi or not but they were. One by one they nodded at his reasoning. They speculated on whether the fact that the eyes were taken meant that Kumo had been behind the attack. And they wondered who the mysterious Uchiha Itachi had spoken of was. Eventually the subject of the conversation turned to more pertinent issues.
The conversation carried on, "What do we do now?" fretted another of Fukurou's cousins.
"Return home of course!" The man sitting across the room from her answered.
Grim silence descended on them at the thought of returning to the scene of the massacre.
"We'll stay here for now," Mikoto told them, "This fort is fully stocked for at least the next month. The Hokage can't fault us if we don't feel safe in the village."
"Then what?" The waspish woman asked her.
"Then we build a new home in the village and have Fukurou-kun put up some extra protections." She answered, smiling wanly at the boy sitting at the foot of the bed. "Our clan has been grievously by one of our own with the aid of accomplices unknown. Not since the Shinobi World Wars have our numbers been so sharply decreased. I was born in this place, during an era of conflict. If we are to survive we must pull together," Mikoto gasped slightly in pain, garnering worried looks but she kept on speaking, "W-we must work together, for our children, for the future, we can't let I-Itachi take that away from us! I won't let him!"
Immediately after the group left the room Mikoto looked at the air above Fukurou's head, "So you have it too…"
The thirteen year old ninja sitting in the chair at the foot of her bed vanished like a hazy mist banished at dawn. Behind the chair there stood another Fukurou, this one wielding a pair of mangekyō sharingan. "I could have questioned you," He said, "If I had known…"
"I would have been forced to kill you," Mikoto answered him with dismay, "Don't blame yourself."
"I can't help it…" He replied.
She looked into his eyes without fear. Mangekyō was something spoken of with revulsion… and longing. "Those eyes will lose their light," She said, unconsciously parroting words heard whispered long ago. It was not a warning, merely a statement of the price he would have to pay.
"I know," Fukurou replied, his sharingan returning to their normal configuration. He'd have to have another look at the tablet under the Naka shrine when he got the chance. There had always been the feeling that there was something more, even before he'd viewed Itachi's hint to Sasuke while healing the boy.
He'd noticed that his mangekyō drained enormous amounts of Yin and Yang chakra even when in passive operation. He had more than enough Yin chakra but the draw on his Yang chakra was the same as for the Yin only his body held a smaller reserve. The discrepancy would probably damage his vision if he pushed it, draining more physical energy than he could spare from his eyes. He resisted the urge to touch the seal on his chest. He'd just stop using his advanced sharingan until he found a way around that limitation.
Mikoto bowed to him heedless of the pain in her side, biting her lower lip so hard she drew blood, "Forgive me!"
He told her, "I've stopped them from questioning the timing of your giving out the emergency summoning tags. Itachi was determined that the Uchiha name not suffer, so long as we hold the truth to ourselves the clan will be safe."
Fukurou said nothing for a moment, then he turned to go, "Take care of Sasuke and watch over our clan as its leader Mikoto," He said opening the door, "I will protect it for you… leave Itachi to me…"
As he shut the door and went to bring her other son to her, Mikoto's head remained bowed as she cried silently, "Forgive me!"
Their Clan moved back into the village two months later. The cabin and work sheds that Fukurou had used were torn down and became the center of a large compound that extended from the Kokoro Forest into the adjacent residential area. It was much smaller than the previous Uchiha District but still larger than the Hyūga compound though only housing fifteen families. The ninja cats had helped in its construction and it was paid for by selling and leasing several homes and business spaces within what was becoming the village's western residential district.
People were at first put off by moving into the home of a family that had been murdered, but space within a walled village was at such a premium that there were still plenty of offers anyway. It helped to offset the large drop in income due to losing so many active high-level ninja. Half of the surviving the families were headed by shop owners and businesspeople like Akemi so a sentō was opened up at the northern end of the compound and a number of restaurants and grocery stores that catered to the influx of tenants in the formerly Uchiha only district started making the clan very rich under Mikoto's leadership.
She never let her clansmen wallow in pity and given her duties, becoming the manager of the sentō allowed her to lead by example. It also helped business since the young men flocked to the place in droves to see her. It drove Sasuke wild given the intense mother-complex he developed in the wake of his family's tragedy. Tsuruku and Moriko managed a Kunoichi only dorm, other retired ninja clansmen opened mahjong and go-parlors, in a very strange way the Uchiha's wish to become a respected part of the village became real.
Mikoto, with Fukurou always somewhere in the background, joined the village council as a representative of the Uchiha Clan. It helped that the Hokage had always suspected that she was the one to first come forward to highlight the straining relationship between her clan and the village. It wasn't so much that she was trusted as that Sarutobi believed that an open dialogue was more likely to happen with her than another ill-fated secret rebellion. The way that her clan was peacefully becoming engaged with his village's economy also lent credence to Fukurou's claim of keeping the Uchiha from seeking revenge.
Koharu and Homura, the Sandaime's advisors didn't quite see things that way, at all. At first they had thought to outmaneuver Fukurou, by proving the old adage of 'experience over youth' but things hadn't gone the way they planned. Over the years, the two had planted a number of double agents within Danzo's organization in an effort to keep track of his actions. It didn't let them know the things that he held close to his chest, but in the wake of Fukurou's proclaimed takeover, the older shinobi had thought it possible to usurp control of Root from him.
At the time that Fukurou had made his proclamation, he had actually controlled sixty percent of all Root agents regardless of their actual affiliation. In the three days that it took for Koharu to arrange a meeting with their mole, not only did Fukurou control the entirety of the organization down to the trainees. He had by then used Shisui's adapted techniques on more than half of them including all of the double agents.
As far as they knew Fukurou had always been a constant fixture in life at Root. In some memories, he simply placed himself at Danzo's side during a briefing, or replaced the man completely. In some he was a comrade that had saved their lives, helped them through training, earned their respect or stood by during the most trying times of Root. Danzo's memories allowed him to remain consistent, the compartmentalized nature of the organization meant that for most there was little need to go into deeper detail than a face seen during a briefing or passed down a hallway on the way to a mission.
He knew that he'd scared the crap out of the two advisors by having their informants gaslight them by claiming that Fukurou had always been in line for command of Root. It was an easy trick to pull off especially with Danzo's memories. He had access to all of Danzo's personal pass codes and with them, the man's most restricted files, sealed official documentation clarifying the chain of command in the event of his death or capture and the means to create perfectly indistinguishable forgeries.
With taking control of Root away from Fukurou impossible without starting a war by sending assassins after his head, the elders fell on the old standby of limiting Fukurou's political influence and access to the Hokage. The former was nearly impossible with Danzo's records of who was accepting bribes from whom and whose mother's grandfather was an immigrant from Iwa. The Hokage wouldn't stand for it either when they tried isolating Mikoto or indirectly hindering an Uchiha Business. The political and economic goodwill of the Uchiha was simply too great.
On keeping him away from the Hokage, Fukurou generally kept a low profile unless he had a report to give on some important event or follow up on a request that was made of him by the Hokage. In those occasions the best that they could do was fill the room with hidden AnBu and guard over the Hokage themselves. Attempts to cut him out of the picture by acting as middlemen were stymied by a simple fact. The intelligence that Fukurou's agents gathered was more effective in some areas than even Jiraiya's network.
Aside from setting up a more complicated intent based ward over his clan's new home. Fukurou had been busy having the one hundred or so Root trainees that Danzo kept off of the books, travel about Fire Country and beyond planting hermetically sealed metal spikes. Each spike served two purposes. They bore a simpler set of seals than the ones his family had used to get to the safe houses. The compressed seals on these formed the Kanji for Gate and Detection.
When the system was completed, Fukurou would be able to not only send portkey seal bearing agents and equipment instantly to within fifty meters of any Gate, but the detection seals was starting to form a gigantic Marauder's Map of the Elemental countries. There were still large holes in the detection grid, and countries Ike Ame were completely dark. Still, Fukurou had created a massive real-time detection grid that passively tracked ninja by the use of chakra. Should an agent could identify a particular signature while in the field or retrieve a sample of either their blood or chakra then names could be put to faces.
Already both the jinchūriki of Kumo and certain convicts and fugitives were having their chakra's actively logged. Using a seal set on the roof of a Root agent's throat and inner ear a form real time long distance of communication was set up using adapted Protean Charms by tying the vibrations they made to a crude speaker and microphone. With the ability to shuffle assets around on the field and stay in contact with teams in real time Fukurou was slowly changing Root from a fringe outfit of disposable fanatics, into what Danzo could have only hoped to make them. The people the Hokage turned to when his AnBu couldn't hack it.
In the shadows of Konoha's upper echelons the name Uchiha Fukurou was slowly gaining notoriety. The new commander of AnBu, Nara Shikaku found having two separate special operations commands to be beyond troublesome but there was nothing he could do about it. Fukurou ran Root with an iron fist and the organization was not only successful but also served as a safe area to stash the surviving Uchiha genin from bloodline hunters. For so long as they stayed out of the way and continued to provide superior intel, he lived with the situation as best he could, which was very well considering it was less paperwork for him to do.
Forests of Eastern Fire Country
A youth strolled down a forested path one fine summer day. The rays of light fought their way through the canopy falling in narrow golden, slanted pillars down to the forest floor below. Sounds of nature around echoed around him filling the air. He slowly, tipped his hat as birds sang their mating call. A silvery flash of light preceded his beheading.
A masked man wielding a katana, appeared at the forested scene. The beheaded 'youth' collapsed to the ground a soft and woody thump. Behind the swordsman, the young traveler landed nearly silently amid fallen leaves.
Even so, man heard the shifting rasp of the dead leaves and moved. He spun on his heel, settled his feet and slashed once. The traveler dodged. The masked man twirled his katana in a single flowing movement backed by deceptively powerful force. Up and across the blade swept. The youth dipped under the attack with seconds to spare and with a sandaled foot, attacked the swordsman's legs.
The masked man stepped back and swept his sword down. The young man he was fighting retracted his leg rather than lose it. The youth spun to his feet and dodged to one side so quickly that the tip of his opponent's katana stabbed a blurry afterimage. The two stepped apart for a moment and circled each other. The walking stick in the boy's hand proved to be a shikomizue as the blade left its sheath with a softly menacing hiss. The two lunged at each other, the shikomizue sparking as the two blades brushed each other on their way seeking a temporary home in soft flesh.
The two broke apart. The youth stumbled and fell to his knees with a large gaping wound in his side. The masked man leaned against a tree. The youth fell face first to the ground. A few strands of dark hair could be seen at the edges of his takuhatsugasa. The swordsman slid down the tree before stopping, hanging there with his knees slightly bent. An arrowhead protruded from the other side of the tree, it disappeared with a light puff of smoke freeing the dead man to fall the rest of the way. The fallen youth dissolved into loose earth.
Later, the young man walked down another forest path. The air was faintly misty and the sunlight not as clear as it had been in the morning. Suddenly the boy paused midway through a stand of dead trees. In a single moment, he drew a shikomizue and sent a crescent blade of wind cutting through the five rotted tree's to his left. Two of those trees erupted in a shower of blood. A claw tipped hand exploded from one of the trees to the boy's right.
Cloth rent as an outer robe was sacrificed in order to escape. A large masked man, twice as tall as the youth, with long gangly arms stepped forth. The youth's hidden eyes narrowed as he took in this person's unusual proportions. The legs and arms were too big but not in a way that signaled some form of gigantism or a naturally developed skeletal structure. As his attacker swung and clawed at him with vicious intent he realized how it happened.
The bones in the man's arms and legs had been systematically broken and tensioned in his youth in order to lengthen them. It must have been an excruciating procedure, lasting years with the threat of a fatal infection looming large. Another hollow tree shattered under the force of a metal encased fist. The youth chucked the lightning encased shikomizue through the space between radius and ulna in both of the man's arms, briefly paralyzing them.
He rushed in, low to the ground after avoiding a stab kick that would have cave in his chest. A sweep from a kunai hamstrung the offending leg. A stab to the groin ensured lethality. Slitting the man's carotid merely quickened his end and released a spray of blood into the air. Suddenly he stumbled.
There was a great whooping laugh like a monkey and a large hairy man with wild hair and a broad chest landed on the boy's back on all fours. The youth's hat flew off as he was crushed into the earth, wavy black hair splayed about in a mess. A stone club crashed down on his skull as again and again the man hammered the boy's head into the earth as if it were a nail. The hairy man grinned as the ruined head mixed with the soil, becoming a thick muddy red paste.
"Ha-ha! Take that!" He laughed.
Then he twisted to one side, leaping away, the hairy man left behind an arm and a leg lopped off by wind enhanced shuriken.
"H-how?" He gasped, balancing shakily on one leg. On the ground lay the dead body of his long armed comrade, his head was crushed.
Fukurou stood in the trees hatless, a thick sleeve served to filter out any stray poison from the mist below. "The conditions aren't right for a mist, it was too suspicious…" He told the man, "Also, I could feel your bloodlust."
"Guaaaaugh!" The man vomited a billowing cloud of poison before rushing off into the forest. He leaked a trail of blood as he hopped from tree to tree on one leg.
He made it as far as a small clearing before a trio of wind enhanced arrows took him in the throat. But as Fukurou made to check the body he was forced to dodge a couple of thrown weapons as seven masked Prajñā Group ninja attacked from all sides. He skillfully evaded more thrown weapons and sword thrusts. In the middle of the fight, the assassins started to pull back and he realized why when he was backlit by the orange glow of fire.
A torrent of burning napalm flowed over him, or rather it flowed over the arrow riddled body that he replaced himself with. A lightning enhanced arrow impaled and electrocuted the large bellied shinobi that had tried to immolate him. The man screamed in pain before exploding with a massive 'whump' and a shockwave that knocked everyone off of their feet.
The Prajñā were closer to the blast, one had run off, two were dead and four remained to fight. They were unsteady on their feet but met their end as proud ninja. Fukurou used shunshin to appear in their midst and hacked them apart with a wind enhanced ninjatō. He looked over their bodies, then out into the darkness of the deep forest. True ninja indeed, should that last man get away it would be the Prajñā Group's victory in the long term.
Part of Fukurou's new job as Commander of Root involved cleaning up Danzo's messes. The Land of Wood had been destroyed by war and subsumed by Fire Country sometime during the First Shinobi World War. The Prajñā Group was an organization of dedicated nationalists that had headed an underground movement to train an army with the singular goal of regaining their independence from Hi no Kuni. They had caused a crisis after crisis during the successive shinobi wars by providing Fire Country's enemies with scouts and guides that were as talented as the best Konoha ninja in forest warfare.
In the end the Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai was founded and under the dual leadership of Danzo and the Sandaime the major strongholds of the Prajñā Group were wiped out by AnBu. The Hokage was content to leave the matter there with the group in military defeat but Danzo had gone a step further. He had decided to secretly eliminate any pro-nationalist faction within the former Land of Wood that held ties to the Prajñā Group.
It was a massacre that was several times larger than the one Danzo had planned for the Uchiha. While he had succeeded in eliminating the last of the original members of the Prajñā Group, the ill will fostered by the killings led to the situation that Fukurou found himself in now. The purge it seemed hadn't been as effective as Danzo believed.
Danzo may have been thinking he was destroying a threat for good by taking a scorched earth policy but Fukurou could already guess what happened. Even those who were not sympathetic to the cause might give shelter to a fellow countryman. The Prajñā Group wasn't so much a clan as it was a movement. It was a system of beliefs and by its very nature could not be killed unless it is forgotten.
Lines of heredity were useful for breeding stronger, more able ninja but adoption could serve just as well if what you were passing on was a system of beliefs. A seed of hatred planted by Danzo long ago had blossomed into a modern threat. Intel indicated that Kumo was providing supplies and training to the group. Given the cold war between the two villages that waxed and waned, and the history of the Prajñā Group, it meant nothing good for Konoha.
As a result Fukurou was standing before a hut that was filled with orphaned children, some of them were children orphaned by the Prajñā Group itself. Lacking familial connection to anyone save themselves, these children served as the perfect pawns. This was where Danzo got his ideas for indoctrinating agents. The oldest of the children was a four year old whose arms were broken and braced in preparation for the lengthening process.
He had a choice to make, kill them and end the threat of the Prajñā Group to his home and family or somehow find a way to let them live while risking all that he loved. He stood there thinking as Tera and Dajimu returned with the body of the escapee. He had them throw the bodies into the hut, along with the bodies of all the other Prajñā agents his soldiers had killed in this systematic assault. The detection seals set throughout the forest ensured that no ninja got in or out without their knowledge.
With a heavy heart Fukurou went through the seals for a grand fireball technique…
Heading toward Kaminari, a squad of Kumo 'advisors' bounded through the trees shaken by what they had seen. The children's screams would stay with them forever. When they gave their report to the Raikage much of the debriefing would revolve around Konoha's Asura. There was no doubt that he was a true shinobi of darkness.
The mangekyō sharingan receded as he sent the captured Kumo shinobi on their way. A seal on his forehead, shaped like a third mangekyō, darkened and shrunk into a pinprick. Three nordic runes for enhancing strength, vitality and stamina diminished into tomoe surrounding the dot. The runes were Uruz, symbolizing physical strength, Nauthiz representing need and granting greater endurance; and Dagaz providing balance and clarity. Fukurou turned to the root agents guarding the caravans full of sleeping children, "Take them to the base in River country." He ordered Fū and Torune.
"Yes Sir."
Three Years Later, Konoha
Fukurou protected the clan from the darkness, while Mikoto did so in the light. That had been the way the chips fell. Though Old Harry had proven an apt leader both at war and in peace, neither he nor Fukurou were much enthused in the process of governing unless forced to it. As a result, most decisions were left in the hands of Mikoto and the new clan council which was mostly composed of men and women concerned about securing the future of the clan in ways that a sixteen year old wouldn't consider.
Day's off from work were rare for Fukurou. The things that Danzo had learned and done in the service of his village would have given lesser men nightmares. For Fukurou it was encouragement to train harder. He had done away with Danzo's old methods of emotional conditioning. Sharingan induced hypnosis and mental conditioning allowed for the same effect with less psychological trauma and fewer dead trainees.
Of course Danzo would never have let an Uchiha near the minds of his new recruits so he had to settle for older, cruder methods like variations of the infamous Mist Genin Test. Not all of the older training methods were gotten rid of. The old fart had copied many of Chun Chu's weapon's training routines, taken Akimichi secret recipes, stolen ninjutsu and genjutsu techniques and training maneuvers from across the Elemental Countries; and had even ripped off the taijutsu training methods of some jounin called Maito Gai.
It was the cream of the crop, and Fukurou subjected himself to the training as readily as he committed all the other trainees. If he was to survive the freakish enemies that Danzo's memories told him was out there he would need every weapon in his arsenal honed to perfection. That not only included the jutsu he used to kill Danzo but everything, mind and body. He would learn though that there was one aspect of his training that was sorely lacking…
Fukurou sat still on the couch sweating. Tsuruko smiled gently. "Ah…" He said before stopping to lick his dry lips, "What are you doing?"
Tsuruko's hand was stroking somewhere above his left knee and her well endowed chest was pressed against his side. God! This wasn't what he'd intended when he'd agreed to help comfort a grieving widow!
Tsuruko's hands drifted higher and her smile turned more inviting. Her marriage had been made by arrangement and while she paid respect to her dead husband she had been with him out of duty not love. Likewise her actions now were out of duty to her clan, to ensure that Fukurou was at least amenable to the idea of siring at least one child by the many widows reaching the end of their child bearing years.
As her right hand drifted across iron-hard abs before tweaking an equally firm behind her gaze turned more speculative. The three year difference in their ages was much smaller than the nine year that had separated her from Uchiha Inabi. Fukurou vanished from under her questing hands but not before Tsuruko was able to confirm that he was at least physically amenable to the idea and that yes, she would very much like to volunteer for the task of convincing him to agree to it.
AN: Updates are going to come a little slower over the next few weeks as I begin a busy period. On the other hand the chapter length is going to be a little longer. There's an image of Fukurou's Mangekyō on my profile page.