Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto/Naruto Shippuden. I own my original characters so no you can't have them:).
Chapter 4:
Secrets Revealed: The Past
Age 3
It wasn't often that he came out to this part of Konoha himself. This was one of the poorest areas in Konoha, and crime here was routine. The neighborhood was cut off from the rest of the village. This was probably in order to keep up appearances when other nations visit.
The last time he was here in person, was years ago. But this time, he wanted to come to ask a witness questions about a case himself. Being the leader of Konoha's Military Police Force, it wasn't common for him to do such a thing.
He had gotten what he needed, and so he was heading out of there. He had the gates in sight when he felt his body tingle all over. He went numb.
He had never felt this way before. It was chilling, and his finger tips felt hot. He began to sweat and his head was throbbing with every pulsing heartbeat.
He swept the knuckle of his thumb above his eyebrow. He did understand, but for some unknown reason, he felt vulnerable.
He suddenly became more aware of the blood in his body, heating his core and head with every beat of his heart, spreading from his chest throughout the rest of his body. He felt light headed and nauseous. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead.
He then noticed his body felt like it was pulling on him. His muscles kept him in place, but every part of him was being beckoned.
He slowly turned around. There, under a tree by the side of the dirt road, was a little girl. She wore worn sandals and was covered in dirt and bruises. Her purple waves of hair going all the way down her back.
She was sitting with a stick in her hand, drawing in the dirt. He didn't understand, was this girl responsible for the way he was feeling? She couldn't be, she looked like a toddler.
He walked over to her and squatted down in front of her. Whether she had noticed him or not, she wasn't acknowledging his presence.
"Hey, why are you here all by yourself? Don't you want to play with the other kids?" he ask her. He wasn't sure what to say to her or why he was talking to her in the first place, but there he was.
The little girl looked up at him. He noticed she had a black eye, and some other bruises on her chin.
She didn't say anything to him. "Wouldn't you rather play with the other kids? It can't be fun to be all alone."
"The other kids don't like me very much," she looked back down at the ground. "They don't want me to play with them."
"Well why not? That doesn't sound very nice," he decided to keep conversation.
"Well today was different. I asked to play this time, but one of the boys was calling me names. I don't know what lots of the words mean, but when he called me ugly, I... I-" her eyes jumped towards herself guiltily. "I kicked him in the face," her voice got quite towards the end of her sentence.
He still felt uncomfortable, but he laughed. The girl looked up at him in confusion. This had been the first time she had ever done anything so mean, and this man was just laughing at her for it.
"Well I hope you gave him a good black eye to match yours!" Was he... encouraging her?
"It's good to stand up for yourself sometimes. Don't let those bullies beat you up all the time," he said when he had calmed down.
"That was this one time, but they don't like me for the same reason you don't." This got his attention. She was suddenly more intriguing than he had thought her.
"I never said I didn't like you, what made you think that?"
"You're afraid of me, just like everybody else."
This statement did strike a tinge of fear in his heart. Maybe this girl is the source of the feelings I'm having. If she is, she holds great power. Power that could be useful one day. He thought to himself.
"What do you mean, power?" she asked aloud to him.
He looked at her again, stunned. But I didn't say anything.
"But I heard you say it," she continued.
As if it has just dawned on her, her eyes widened. She had just realized that his mouth had not moved.
She was confused, "I don't understand." She looked at the ground with eyes still wide and unfocussed. She looked terrified.
Realizing that he had to be cautious of what he thought, he only let his mind attend to everything moment by moment.
He steadied his breath, still feel light headed. "My name is Fugaku. Why don't you come with me, I'll clean you up. You look like you need someone to tend to all your injuries."
She looked back up at him slowly, unsure of herself. He reached out his hand to help her up. She stared at it for a while, but then took it.
To the little girl's surprise, he picked her up to carry her. She couldn't remember the last time she was carried, let alone touched without it hurting.
He carried her quite a distance, and she didn't know where they were. Everyone would stare at them as they walked by. Everyone could feel her presence.
They went through the Uchiha district gates, and when they got to his house, Mikoto, his wife, was standing in the doorway with a look of serious concern on her face. She was afraid of whatever that feeling was as well.
When her eyes settled on the little girl in her husband's arms, she knew immediately that the girl was the reason for what she was feeling.
"Fugaku?" she asked as he walked past her into the house. "And who do we have here?" she was trying her best to mask her fear.
"I found her on the side of the road on my way back. She needs to be looked at, will you do that for me?" he asked walking off into the next room after setting her down.
Mikoto looked at the little girl. She had a son about the girl's age, why was she so afraid?
"Did you get hurt sweetie?" she asked bending down to be closer to eye level with the girl.
The girl said nothing to her. She was unsure what that meant. She was concerned that maybe the girl didn't like her already.
"Here, why don't you sit down and I'll go get some bandages and something to clean you off with, okay?" Seeing as how the girl again said nothing, she walked off to get supplies from the bathroom.
When she returned she didn't say anything, but she picked the girl up and sat her on top of the table and tended to her. When she was all bandaged up, Fugaku had returned.
"All right, will you wait here for me for a bit?" Mikoto asked. She got no response, so she walked out of the room with Fugaku.
"Why did you bring that girl here?"
"You feel it too, don't you?" Fugaku ignored her question.
"Yes, what is it?" Mikoto was seriously concerned about all of this.
"I'm not sure, but she has power. I'm guessing your father might be able to shed some light onto this, if anyone might have an idea about what this power is, he would." Fugaku was thinking everything through in his mind. He had a plan already.
"Yes, that's true, but how do you know this girl really has any kind of power? And what do you think you could do to harness that power anyway?" Mikoto asked.
"The girl knew what I was thinking. At one point, she couldn't tell the difference between what I was actually saying out loud, and what I was thinking in my head."
Mikoto's eyes widened. She was more afraid of the girl now than she had been before.
"If we can keep her close to us, get her to trust us, then maybe she'll one day use that power for us."
"Do you really think that that would work? The closest people to a child are their family, and we can't be that for her," Mikoto didn't like the idea of being close to a being that knew what she was thinking.
"Maybe not, but I would like to try. She could be useful."
"I don't know what my father would say, but if you want to know about her power, take her to visit him. He'll have to feel what we feel in order to determine what she is. After that, then we can talk about keeping her close. If it's too risky, then I don't feel comfortable having her around," Mikoto didn't really want anything to do with the girl.
"Alright," Fugaku leaned in and kissed his wife on the forehead. "I'll take her to see your father before it gets dark. I know you're afraid, so I want you to know, that I'm afraid too."
She smiled sadly up at him. He turned and went to get the girl.
"Alright, I'm going to take you to meet someone new, are you okay with that?" Fugaku asked the little girl.
She didn't say anything to him, but she hopped off the table to stand at his side.
He picked her up again and this time, put her on his shoulders. He carried her to the library, where a certain retired shinobi, who studied ancient shinobi clans and their powers and abilities, now worked to pass the time.
Mikoto's father knew more about all the different clans' history than anyone else in the village.
When they got to the library, the secretary told Fugaku that his father-in-law was in his office. The young girl lead him to the room in the back with the door closed. The girl quickly scurried off, it was obvious she felt afraid.
Fugaku was about to knock on the door when it opened.
The old man looked up at the little girl who was on Fugaku's shoulders. "Who is this girl Fugaku? Why did you bring her here?" the man never took his eyes off the girl. She stared back at him.
Fugaku lifted the girl off his shoulders and set her down on the floor. "Couldn't you wait out here for a while? I promise I'll be back shortly, I just have to talk to this man."
She again didn't say anything to him, but she walked off to a book shelf, pulled a book that was down at her level, and sat down right there in the aisle.
He entered his father-in-law's office and closed the door behind him. "I want to know about the girl's power. Do you have any idea what it is? She knew what I was thinking earlier, and I'm sure you could feel her presence long before I got here."
"Fugaku, I understand your interest, but I also know that you aren't curious about the girl for just knowledge sake. You want to know if you can use her power, am I right?" the old man asked, testing his son-in-law.
"It's for the good of the clan. My only interest in her power is because it could be very useful."
"For the good of the clan is it? Alright then, bring her in here so that I may assess her," he motioned for him to get the door.
Fugaku walk back out the room and went to bring her to the old man. When he had come back with her in his arms, the old man had an old scroll unrolled on the floor. He preformed some hand seals and quickly placed his hand over the girls heart before Fugaku could do anything.
Symbols from the scroll crept from the parchment, up Fugaku and onto the girls body. The symbols began to glow pale green. They stopped moving and settled on her arms, legs, face, neck, torso, and an open circle right over her heart.
The symbols faded, and the girl passed out cold.
"What did you do to her?!" Fugaku was livid.
"I sealed her chakra away. Now you won't be able to use her as a weapon. You should not drag a child into our clan's affairs. Her chakra nature is lighting, and she has abnormally high chakra control. Using her chakra, she can sense all electric signals. This means that she can sense all the electric signals in your body. As your brain sends signals to your body, her brain interprets them. She knows everything your body is doing, and because your thought are also electric signals, she can "hear" your thoughts as well. Or at least, she could."
"You had no right to do that!"
"You're right. Just as how you had no right to treat this poor child like a tool. Listen, she doesn't know what it's like to not be able to sense everything that happens around her. In order to see things, she will actually have to look at them. In order to hear things, she will actually have to be close enough to hear them. In order to feel things, she will have to touch them. Using her chakra the way she had been was subconscious. It was her way of interpreting the world, she doesn't know that other people don't experience things the way she did. I took her way of interpreting the world away from her, so she'll need help. She'll need someone to be there for her. When she wakes up, I'm sure she'll be more frightened then she ever has been in her life. She'll need someone to guide her through this. So treat her like a child, she's vulnerable, and she needs someone to take care of her. Make sure she has someone like that."
Fugaku had lied the little girl down on the floor and he sat next to her and placed her head on his lap. He had to wait for her to wake up to ask her for directions on how to get her home.
His father-in-law sat down beside him with much trouble getting all the way down to the floor in his old age. "My guess is that she is a descendent of a clan of sensory ninja, although I've never heard of such a particular ability. She would have been great at intelligence gathering," the old man spoke.
Fugaku sighed. "I didn't know that someone could have such an ability. It's incredible."
"Yes, it really is. To hold such power as this, if she were to be led down the wrong path, there's no telling what destruction she'd bring."
"What do you mean?" Fugaku questioned.
"It is true that her ability is meant for sensory purposes, but that does not mean that it cannot be twisted and skewed into something else. There is a way that it could be used as a weapon, but I'm not sure if she is capable. It would be much more difficult to use as a weapon."
"How could she have used it in such a way?" Fugaku was once more intrigued.
"Now that, I will not tell you. But it doesn't matter anymore because she can't do anything with it now," the old man was glad that Fugaku had brought her to him. "This girl could have been dangerous if I hadn't sealed her chakra away. I was worried that maybe, if you had decided to turn her into a weapon, she would one day realize that you had only wanted her for her power. And then the first people she would came after, would be you and Mikoto. And I couldn't let that happen. The girl might have grown up to be a monster."
"Well now without her chakra, the girl doesn't have much of a chance to become a ninja. But maybe that's best anyway."
The old man looked over at Fugaku, "My son, I know that you want our clan to receive the respect it deserves, but even if you had used her to help in this, she is not an Uchiha. If you really are serious about the plans you have, you need to do it with your own power and the power of the clan. There are no shortcuts when it comes to matters such as these."
"So then, you aren't disagreeing with my plans?"
"Fugaku, you are the head of the clan. And as such, I follow you loyally. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with all of our decisions. And I will also do what I must sometimes to point you in the right direction."
"According to how you see things?" Fugaku didn't like all that he had said.
"Yes, I suppose you could say that."
After that was said, they both sat there in silence until the little girl started to stir.
As the girl awoke, she shifted herself in Fugaku's lap. She turned her body inward towards him. When she opened her eyes, all she did was stare.
"It seems you're awake," Fugaku commented.
The girl moved her hand in front of her face and stared at it. She clenched her hand into a tight fist and allowed her finger nails to dig into her skin. Her knuckles turned white and she released her hand and looked at the marks her nails had made.
She then traced over the marks with her finger tips. "What is she doing?" Fugaku directed his question at his father-in-law.
"I believe she is trying to figure out if any of this is real or not. She has never experienced things quite like this before. Everything is surreal to her, she must feel impaired."
She began to dig her nails further into her skin. Fugaku grabbed her hand and slid his fingers under hers, blocking her from doing any further damage to herself. "Stop that."
She tilted her head up and made eye-contact with him. Her eyes were terrified, and she truly was afraid.
"It's okay," the old man began. The girl sat up to look at the grey-haired Uchiha. "This is real, and you're real too."
Her look told the man that she was still unsure. He grabbed her free hand and held it against his throat. "You see, you can feel it can't you? Maybe you can't feel me speak in the same way as before, but you still can in a different way. So you'll be okay." His voice was low but gentle, and she seemed to be calmed.
Instead of the terrified look she had in her eyes, it was now replaced by a sleepy, warm look. The sun had already set behind the trees, and Fugaku knew that her parents would probably be worried about her.
"I need to get you home, can you guide me to your house?" Fugaku asked her.
She took her hand off of the old man's neck and placed it on Fugaku's instead. She still had Fugaku's fingers pinned to her palm. She didn't want to let go, she didn't know how to keep track of them without sensing them. She was afraid that if she let go, she would be alone and in the dark forever.
Fugaku was still. He didn't know what he should do. "Tell her again," Mikoto's father told him. "She wants to feel you tell her."
Fugaku understood, "Will you be my guide? I'll carry you the whole way there, okay?"
She could feel the vibrations of his vocal cords that allowed him to speak. She nodded to him, and he stood up with her, once again, in his arms.
He then helped his father-in-law up from the ground. "Well despite everything, I want to thank you for at least helping me with her. I still don't understand her, but you did help me get closer to that."
The old man looked on at the two of them. "Just make sure she's taken care of."
Fugaku nodded and left.
Once Fugaku had made it back to the spot he had met the girl earlier that day, he woke her up after having fallen asleep in his arms, and she pointed him toward her house without saying a word.
The house that she led him to was small and old looking. But it didn't look too bad in comparison with most of the area. It had one floor, and was square.
He knocked on the door. After hearing some murmuring followed by footsteps, a large man with blonde hair and blues eyes answered the door.
"Who are you?" the man looked Fugaku over. "Is that my daughter you're holding?"
"My name is Fugaku Uchiha, and I was just bringing your daughter home."
"Uchiha? You're with the police aren't you? Did she do something? We aren't gonna have to go to court, are we?" the girl's father pressed.
"No, nothing like that, she didn't do anything. I just wanted to take her home, it is after dark, so I wanted to make sure she got home safely." Fugaku defended.
"Honey, who are you talking to?" A woman appeared just behind the man, presumably the girl's mother.
She had long, dark purple hair and dark green eyes. Fugaku then noticed that the girl's eye were silver, and looked nothing like either of her parents'. She looked like a mixture of her parents in every single way, with the exception of her eyes.
He let the girl down from his arms, but to his surprise, she stayed but his side.
He watched as the woman's eyes settle on her daughter. Neither the woman, nor her husband had felt their daughter's presence, and they still couldn't feel it now. This scared them, perhaps more so than when they could feel her.
"What have you done with her?" the woman asked.
"She's fine, she isn't hurt or anything. I was just trying to do the right thing by bringing her back to her parents. Okay?"
The man stepped back inside and stepped to the side to let the girl in the house. She understood what he was getting at and went inside the house, disappearing from Fugaku's sight.
"Well thank you for bringing her home, have a nice night," the woman said as she closed the door.
Fugaku went home after that.
Once Fugaku was far enough away, the girl's father began to hit her. Blow after blow, the little girl gritted her teeth and winced at the pain.
She didn't cry though. She knew that the only reason her father did this to her was because he was truly afraid of her. This was her father's way of asserting dominance over her. She knew that this made him feel safer, and that he thought he was protecting himself and his wife.
She knew that especially tonight, he needed this to feel safe. He couldn't feel her, and that was scary.
Once he had finished beating her, he left her their and went to bed. The girl's mother walked by with a basket of laundry. "Mommy," the girl rarely spoke to her mother. "I think my arm is broken, it won't move when I tell it to."
Her mother stopped walking, but didn't look at her, "Clean up the mess you made." She then walked off.
The girl got up and wet a rag and cleaned the blood off the walls and floor. There wasn't very much blood, but cleaning it up hurt in more ways than one.
She supported her arm by carrying her limp limb by her other hand. She made her way out the door and started walking to that man's house.
She tried to remember the way their to the best of her ability. It was far for such a small child to walk, but she kept walking alone in the dark. She didn't know if she was going in the right direction, but she pressed forward anyway.
When she arrived at the gate with a fan on the front, she remembered this was the area. She decided to walk straight down the middle road, hoping she would find the house. Or at least the way to get there.
She did find the house after searching for quite awhile. She made it to the front steps before she collapsed from exhaustion.
She couldn't feel anything the same way, everything was blank to her. She didn't know what to do, she couldn't get up and she was so afraid.
Her instincts took over and she started to scream, "Help! Please, Fugaku, help me!" She was sobbing and making as much noise as she could to try and get his attention.
Both Fugaku and Mikoto rushed outside at the sound of all the screaming and pleading.
Fugaku took one look at the girl and knew this was all too serious. "Mikoto, stay here with Sasuke, I'm taking her to the hospital," he instructed as he picked her up and ran off in the direction of Konoha's hospital.