This chapter just spilled out of me. OF COURSE the feels would come easier to me than action. I actually wrote it all in one day but held off posting it immediately after chapter 48 because I was super shy about it. Now I'm ... getting it over with.

'Cause I'm dropping a real bombshell on you in this one.

The Uchiha compound is the biggest district in Konoha. Since the massacre it has been completely closed off, leaving almost a hundred family homes to slowly decay. That most of them are still in acceptable repair after so many years is a testament of the clan's wealth; this sort of craftsmanship must have cost a fortune.

Hisana feels like an intruder when she opens the wrought iron gate that the village had installed. It creaks so loudly that she almost fears someone might come to look what she's doing. But then she remembers that the entire district is a ghost town; no one cares what she is doing here. There's nothing left to steal, nobody to care if she vandalized anything.
Hisana is amazed that nobody else appears to have tried either. She figured some precocious Academy student or a bunch of bored genin may have come and defaced a few walls. Or that maybe someone would have looked around for interesting things to take home and brag about. But everything seems completely undisturbed and no dirty-sweaty-child scents linger in the air. Wandering the empty, silent streets Hisana wonders if maybe they felt the lingering tragedy of the place too and thought better of it.

Finding Sasuke's family home is the easiest task. It's located in the middle of the compound, bigger than the other houses and with the Uchiha fan displayed on the garden gate like a badge of honor.

The lock broke and hasn't been repaired yet; nevertheless there is a small silver key dangling on Hisana's keychain. She pushes carefully against the door, silently apologizing to her cousin. Stepping into the house where his family died without his knowledge feels like the most intense violation of privacy she's ever committed. It's for Sasuke, she reminds herself. And if not her, who else will do it? The house is dark except for what little light comes through the dirty windows. The electricity has been turned off, of course, and Hisana hasn't thought far enough ahead to bring candles in the middle of the day.

The kitchen and living room seem undisturbed. Whatever furniture might have been upturned during a fight has been righted by the clean-up crew. A thick layer of dust coats everything. Apart from that the entire downstairs area looks as if the occupants may come through the door at any minute. It's not as eerie as Hisana would have expected – maybe because she's seen too many real-life horrors to be scared of ghosts anymore – but rather infinitely sad. Right by the door there is a picture on the mantle, turned on its face. Next to it three pairs of slippers, one a faded pink, two in Uchiha-blue. Hisana knows Sasuke used to have a matching pair at home until he outgrew them.

Other than those sad little reminders of family there is nothing conspicuous downstairs. The only thing she takes with her, quietly and already thinking ten years ahead, is a small photo album tucked into her bag. She knows if Sasuke finds out about Itachi he will burn every picture of his brother he can get his hands on. And then he will come to regret it.

Throwing a few cautious but thorough looks around the dojo reveals it to be clean in the loosest sense of the word. Carefully walking around the darkened spots on the floor, scrubbed until the lacquer came off but never quite the same again, Hisana inspects the bare walls and searches for lose floor boards. When nothing turns up she hurriedly abandons the room. To be sure she bows on her way out, paying respects to whatever is left of her first cousin, once removed and her husband.

Going upstairs she gets a taste of what it would have been like for Sasuke to sneak out at night. It's so quiet there that she fights the impulse to hold her breath. The room at the end of the hall is Fugaku-sama and Mikoto-hime's bedroom. It's very neat in the way parents' bedrooms always seem to be, but apart from the photos of Sasuke and Itachi littering every corner it is also very empty. Hisana wonders if they loved each other, or if it was a marriage of politics and convenience. Both are equally likely and both could be equally true. Looking through Mikoto's belongings she finds a diary that she doesn't want to open but has to anyway.

There must be more of these, she realizes. The first pages don't date back very far; the first entry talks animatedly about Sasuke's sixth's birthday. The last used pages, about halfway into the simple ninja issue notebook, talk mostly about Itachi's increasingly stand-offish behavior. She worried about him in those last weeks. 'I'm afraid he may lose his way someday' it says somewhere. And 'We cannot let this distance from the clan grow.'

Did Sasuke's mother know about the planned coup and about how heavy it lies on Itachi's conscious? Hisana sincerely doubts she would have written it down in such a flimsily protected little book in any case. What to do with it will be Sasuke's to decide. The book gives nothing away but Itachi's restlessness. She has no doubt her cousin will rationalize it away.

Fugaku doesn't seem to hold with such silly things as personal journals. Hisana knows that as the head of his clan he will have kept some sort of record but she's unlikely to find it in his bedroom. The most personal item she finds is a drawing, sloppily titled 'From Sasuke, to Otou-chan' neatly folded and hidden in his sock drawer.

The second bedroom belongs to Sasuke. Hisana spares it a few sad moments, admiring the posters on the walls. One of them depicts the Hokage Mountain, another a heroic looking drawing of Sarutobi Sasuke. There's a toy kunai lying in the middle of the bed. Everything else seems to have been packed and taken to their apartment.

Itachi's bedroom looks very much like his parents': Very neat and empty of all personal belongings. Did he clean it out when he got the order to kill his clan? Did he pack a bag to take with him? – And what was in it? Or did he simply never have much? For the first time ever Hisana actively worries for her oldest cousin, not about him. What must it be like, living with criminals if all you want is peace? He has kindred spirits of sorts in Nagato and Konan, but she cannot imagine Itachi approving of their actions in any way, shape, or form.

The manga mostly described him as a gentle soul. A pacifist in a violent world.

She takes the most care looking through his room, patting down walls, sniffing for unusual scents. Finally, in a secret compartment on the underside of his bed Hisana finds a photograph of his family and a letter. It's faded and blotchy, as if someone had been crying on the paper, and starts with 'Itachi, I fear I may fail …' and ends with 'I'm so sorry'. At the very bottom, in neat, blocky characters, it is signed 'Shisui'.

A chill runs down Hisana's spine. This is definitely something she needs to destroy, but it may have been the last thing Shisui ever wrote apart from his suicide note. Something inside her hates the thought of losing it. So instead she folds it very small and stuffs it in her bra. The photo she puts back where it belongs, neatly sealing the compartment back up. Hisana purposely doesn't think about why he didn't take it with him.

The last room upstairs is Fugaku's office.
Hisana already dreads it. The clan head's office is sure to be full of 'important' documents; she has absolutely no desire to trudge through them all. But that's exactly what she does. Luckily her clan's lawyer appears to have taken everything concerning finances and political entitlements, so a lot of the shelves are empty. It's still mid-day when she can finally decide there's nothing worth worrying about here. Hisana did, however, find records of Sasuke's immediate family. It's not a family tree as much as it is a record of who inherits what if somebody dies, but it does list Mitoko's father, Sasuke and her common grandfather, as 'Uchiha Isamu'. All the really important documents must be hidden elsewhere, she thinks. The shrine would make sense as a hiding place. Its name escapes her at the moment, but there can't be too many shrines around.

However, in a few hours she is meeting Haru and Sora for training tonight, so that will have to wait for another day. Right now she needs to see where her own family lived.

It's the most vexing thing, but she has no idea where Hisana's house could possibly be. On a gamble she looks in close proximity first; Mitoko's close relatives may have settled somewhere near.

It still takes her almost an hour and a half until she spies a cracked vase through a dirty window. A genin team cleaned out the fridge, she knows, and someone … took care of whatever immediate family 'Hisana' had, but nothing else should have been touched. This must be her house. She presses her nose to the glass and indeed she can make out childish characters etched into the ugly vase. It reads 'Hisana'.

The scruffy key on her chain fits perfectly into the lock. Two pairs of abandoned slippers await her in the hall – two people who died here. They are both adult slippers, big enough for grown men; one of them has silly pictures of a tiger on them. Hisana strolls through the living room, smaller than Sasuke's but cozier, randomly touching things they could have touched. An old, faded runner on a chest of drawers speaks of a feminine touch long grown cold. Hisana's mother must have been long dead already.

But there have been efforts to spruce up the place. 'Artsy' pictures hang on the walls. It looks very much like something a man bought trying to think of something a woman would like. She snorts a little, caressing the gaudy picture frames and wondering at the painful throb of her heart. A little less conspicuous, almost like an afterthought, someone added a smaller frame the ensemble. It hangs a little lower than the others, but right next to a well-used armchair.

Hisana easily recognizes her own face in it, though younger, but the boy is unfamiliar to her. She takes the frame off the wall and carefully plucks the photo out of it.

He's older than her, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and very handsome. My brother, she thinks faintly. No, Hisana's brother. She trails a finger over his face, marveling at their similarities. Their eyes are exactly the same, and even the straight, aristocratic nose that she always associated with her former self looks perfectly natural on his face.

It's not a posed picture, but rather a candid shot. Her brother is clutching her by the waist while she holds on to his head, fingers gripping tightly enough in his hair to make him wince. But there is a huge smile on his face, pressed sideways against his sister's belly, even as she is obviously yelling at him. He loved her really a lot, she thinks sadly, rubbing at her chest right where it aches. An older brother. Irrational tears well up in her eyes; something inside her feels decidedly empty.

Unable to look at it any longer Hisana finally turns the photo around and finds a faded date at the back. It was taken in the summer, some six years prior; the script below reads 'Hisana and Shisui'.

For a few minutes Hisana stares at the words, only vaguely understanding what they're saying. Then she carefully checks herself for signs of shock. But her breathing is strong and steady, and while she feels a little light headed it's only to be expected. No, the anxiety attack she's been expecting the second her head could grasp just who this boy in the picture is, isn't coming. Because of course – of fucking course Hisana couldn't have been a normal girl. It was so obviously too much to ask.

And Shisui. Thank god he isn't here to see it, she thinks, heart breaking just a little. He would have known immediately. The way he looks at her in that picture – he would have realized that an imposter had taken over his sister. It would have killed him; she knows that with absolute, unshakable certainty. Turning the photo back around, her brother's face winking up at her, Hisana nearly gives up and leaves the house. She wants to be here even less now, but at the same time she also wants to know who her parents were.
Hisana gets her wish. Inside her father's bedroom she finds a photo taken during the war. On it a woman with Shisui's face, holding the young boy by the hand, and their father, strong and tall, proudly presenting his small toddler daughter to the world.

Hurriedly Hisana decides it's enough for today after all.

She ducks into the guest bathroom, free of all personal items, and wipes furiously at her face before she goes to meet her old team. Her eyes are a little red, but she resolves to blame it on allergies.

But Hisana shouldn't have worried. By the time she reaches the training grounds her face doesn't feel so hot anymore, and if the boys notice that anything is off they don't say anything. The photo of her and Shisui is still tucked safely into Sasuke's photo album, his letter to Itachi in a separated pocket of her training bra. It'll be fine there until she has a better idea; Hisana sincerely doubts Sasuke would feel the need to search there.

"Training always does you good," Haru remarks after almost two hours with a wry quirk of his lips. He sinks down next to her, throwing both his teammates bottled water before flopping down on his back. "No matter how angry or sad you are, if you can beat someone into a pulp you suddenly brighten up."

"Right?!" Sora squawks from next to her, as if happy to hear that he's not just imagining it. "I think she's a bit of a sadist!" Hisana shoves at him good-naturedly.

"I'm not a sadist," she insists. "It's just therapeutic. Have I told you what I do every Friday? There's this uptight little Hyuuga – …"

She's interrupted by a familiar chakra signature entering the grounds. Choumei, taller than when she's last seen him after team 6's promotion, drops from one of the trees with a surprisingly quiet thud.

"Hisana-san, I've been looking for you," he announces, as if proud of himself that he did finally discover her. Only now she realizes that he's wearing medic-nin scrubs.

"Chocho!" Sora crows from his spot on the ground. "What gives?"

"No," the other boy dismisses him, "Not you, idiot. Hisana-san, the head medic sent me. Your shishou has finally returned and he's making a racket. Would you please make him lie down and get treated?"

Are you surprised? I'm wondering if anyone is going to call bullshit on this.

But I remember one of you actually calling it at one point; my heart literally stopped when I read it – "Noooooo, that was supposed to be a surprise!"

Please remember, you can vote about what fic you'd like after BaH+sequel:)