Chapter 11: Aftermath
A/N: It sounds like there is interest in seeing how Kiyo's survival plays out, so I've put some thought into it, and I have a few ideas that I'd like to explore. I've also added the Alternate Ending sections into this chapter so that it flows a little better.
…
I woke in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room.
I blinked slowly, staring up at the white ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights.
Hospital. Yes, I was in a hospital. I turned my head, but Itachi was no longer sitting at my side. I opened my mouth to call out for him, but I only managed a faint rasp. My throat was so dry. Had I been dreaming? There were faint remnants of foreign chakra in my body. It was the sterile chakra of a medical ninjutsu.
I reached up expecting to see a wrinkled old hand. But it…wasn't. It was smooth and tiny. A child's hand. Whose hand was that?
I was an old lady, not a child.
I was…
I was…
Red eyes.
A pinwheel.
"Tsukuyomi."
I was supposed to be dead
Why wasn't I dead?
And then I recalled Itachi's words, the ones he'd whispered to me before I fell asleep.
"I will love you forever, in this life and the next, little sister. I do not know if two people as different as you and I could ever be destined for the same place. But if there is still mercy in this world for someone like me, I hope to find you there soon. However, if there is any part of you that still wishes to live, then please wake so that I can see you again someday."
The hand-my hand-fell back to the bed sheet.
I was so tired.
Across the room, a door opened. I half expected it to be my brother, but it was only a blonde medic with a bored expression and a clipboard. She didn't even seem to notice me at first as she jotted down a few notes and checked the time. Then her eyes flicked up to meet mine.
She did a double-take.
Then she was gone, her voice carrying from the hallway as she shouted for a senior medic.
I closed my eyes.
…
There was chakra in my veins and voices in my room.
Strangers.
Or not quite.
I knew that chakra. I'd felt it once before at the Academy entrance ceremony.
But what was the Hokage doing here?
I opened my eyes and blinked against the harsh light.
An ANBU stood over me. His hands were bright with chakra.
I made a faint sound of surprise and tried to shy away, but I could only twitch. The ANBU carefully withdrew his chakra and stood back.
"Thank you, Bear," said the Hokage. He was holding his pipe, still smoking despite it being against several hospital regulations. "Please wait outside."
The ANBU vanished. I didn't even hear the door open or close.
I shuddered.
"Kiyo-chan," said the Hokage, his expression both grandfatherly and serious. "Do you know where you are?"
I looked around. I'd been in the hospital plenty of times, but I'd never been in this particular room. The window vibrated with security seals, and we were above the tree line, so at least on the fourth floor. The secure wing. It was a restricted place for high-risk patients.
"H-hospital," I croaked.
The Hokage nodded.
"Do you know why you're here?" he asked.
I swallowed thickly, my mouth very dry.
"My family…everyone…everyone is…" I trailed off. "Why am I alive?"
Why hadn't Itachi killed me?
Why hadn't the Hokage?
The Hokage sat back and drew in a deep puff from his pipe before exhaling a long sigh of smoke.
"I was hoping you could tell me," he admitted. "You were placed under a powerful genjutsu and have been in a coma for the past several weeks. Did he tell you why he did what he did?"
Oh.
The Hokage was still looking at me like a sad old man.
Harmless.
My hands clenched, and I looked down, shaking my head.
The Hokage sighed again.
"You're safe here," he said, his voice gentle. "What happened…was a terrible tragedy. The one responsible is no longer in a position to hurt you."
Clever phrasing, as it could have referred to either Itachi or Danzo. But Danzo wasn't the only threat. He might have been the one to give the order, but the Hokage had done nothing to stop it. And if word ever got out that the Hokage was even tangentially involved in the massacre of a Konoha clan, it would mean civil war. The complete destruction of the entire hidden village and possibly even the Land of Fire.
Weighed against all of that, what was the life of one sickly child?
If I'd been in a coma for several weeks already, it would be easy to make me vanish, and no one would ever know.
"Please tell me," he continued.
What did he know?
What did he think I knew?
I shook my head, silent and terrified.
The Hokage was silent for a long minute.
He stood and turned to the window.
"I've already spoken with your brother, and he has told me everything," he said. I focused on keeping my breathing even.
Which brother? Underneath the underneath.
Plausible deniability.
A true ninja could skirt the edge of truth and lies, and the Hokage was nothing if not a true ninja.
"According to Sasuke, Itachi chose to murder the clan as a test of his abilities," he continued. "When you fell to his genjutsu, he deemed you unworthy of killing, though he was not sure if you would survive the attack. It seems that your Uzumaki heritage was enough to save you, granting you enough life energy to survive what would have killed most others. Sasuke, likewise, was spared."
He took another long draw from his pipe.
"Is there anything you would like to add?" he asked, and his meaning suddenly became clear. Itachi had gone to the Hokage to beg for Sasuke's life. And if he'd left me alive intentionally, that meant…
…that meant that he must have begged for my life as well.
But Itachi hadn't been sure if I would live. I'd been in a coma for weeks, and few people knew that I had woken. As long as Sasuke remained alive, the Hokage could kill me without retribution. He might not have wanted to, but he would.
Unless I wasn't a threat.
"No," I said, the word ash in my mouth. "There isn't anything."
…
The hospital door slammed open with such force that I dropped my plastic fork. A frantic Sasuke scanned the room until his gaze landed on me. He froze, his manic, too-wide eyes staring with haunted desperation.
"Nii-chan," I said, but then he was on top of me, having crossed the room with startling speed and knocking my tray of tasteless hospital food to the floor with an echoing clatter. He was shaking and gasping with ragged breaths when he caught me in a bone-crushing hug. I tried to embrace him, but I could barely move in his too-tight grip. I did my best anyway. "It's okay…It's okay."
But Sasuke only shook his head, his grip tightening further.
"No, it's not," he said, the words catching. "Everyone is…"
"I know," I said, leaning into his shoulder. I managed to get one arm free and stroked his hair. "I know."
We stayed like that for a very long time, neither moving nor letting go.
Eventually, Sasuke spoke.
"He said something to me…before he left," said Sasuke. He was still clinging to my hospital gown. "He said that one day I'd be worth killing, but not right now. He said that I should find him when I had the same eyes as him."
He paused, looking lost and afraid.
"What eyes?" I asked, but I already knew.
"He said that I have to kill my closest friend…like he did," said Sasuke. "That's why he left you…"
Sasuke blanched.
Ah, so that was the story. Itachi had spared Sasuke because he wasn't yet worth the effort of killing. And he had spared me so that Sasuke could use me to gain the Mangekyo Sharingan. It was a plausible story if you disregarded the fact that Sasuke would never hurt me. Itachi must have been counting on that as well.
He wanted Sasuke to be a hero.
"I won't do it," said Sasuke, his voice unnaturally fierce. "I'll protect you. No matter what. And I…" He paused, his grip tightening once more, his eyes once again unnaturally wide. "I will kill him."
Oh no.
No, this was the wrong path. This was Itachi's mistake. I ran my fingers through Sasuke's hair to soothe him, but he remained as taut as a bowstring.
"Tou-chan said that we should walk our own path," I said. "Not in his footsteps. Maybe…maybe this is what he meant."
No. Fugaku had meant that we should be loyal to the clan when Itachi was not. But Sasuke didn't need to know that. He needed to know that Itachi's path was not the only option. He didn't have to live a life of hatred and darkness. He could grow and heal and find happiness again one day.
Somehow.
"Yeah," said Sasuke. "I'll kill him to avenge our clan."
I winced, but there wasn't much else I could say to that. The Hokage's warning still hung in the air like a storm cloud. Right now, only I knew the truth. Only I was at risk. Telling Sasuke would do nothing but draw a target on his back. We were too young and too vulnerable.
If Sasuke tried to fight back, we would both be killed.
If we tried to escape from the village, we'd be branded as missing ninja and then killed.
Ignorance was the only shield I could give him.
For now.
"Kiyo-chan, there was something I wanted to ask you," Sasuke continued. He was frowning at the wall. "Nii…that man said something else. He said that there was a genin who hurt you, but that you were too pathe…I mean, you didn't want anyone to know."
I stared at him. Why would Itachi tell Sasuke about that? But, as I thought about it, I supposed that it made sense. He was warning Sasuke that I might not ask for help if I was in danger. And, well, it was also a warning that Itachi wasn't the only threat out there. Apparently he'd done it in a way to make me sound pathetic and not worth killing.
If I was too pathetic to protect myself against a genin, how could I stand against him?
I hung my head.
"The genin was arrested after Onii-chan—" I began.
"Don't call him that!" Sasuke shouted suddenly, his listless melancholy vanishing in a burst of raw fury. I flinched away from his sudden outburst, afraid for some reason I couldn't quite explain. Sasuke's face, twisted in anger, softened when he saw my fear. He looked away, ashamed as the tension drained from his shoulders. "Don't call him that. He's not…he's not…"
He's not our brother anymore.
"Sorry," I said.
We sat in awkward silence until Sasuke cleared his throat.
"If he—if anyone tries to hurt you again, tell me," he said. His eyes were narrowed. "I will protect you."
He said it as though he were swearing a sacred oath, as though he were willing to put his life on the line to make it true. Sasuke had always been driven, but this was different.
This was the Curse of Hatred.
And I didn't know how to stop it.
"I know you will," I said.
…
We spent the night together in my hospital room. Sasuke slept in my bed, still clinging to me even in sleep. When I was discharged early the next morning, Sasuke took my hand and led me down an unfamiliar street away from the Uchiha district. I was confused until we reached a small two-story building and Sasuke produced a key.
Oh, well, I supposed we couldn't exactly stay in the Uchiha district anymore. I shuddered at the thought, and Sasuke squeezed my hand. Inside was sparsely furnished, and there were stacks of boxes shoved against one wall. Sasuke gave me a quick tour. It was a three bedroom, two bath home with more than enough space for a pair of children.
"I bought it," said Sasuke with a shrug, as though purchasing a house wasn't a huge investment requiring months of research, paperwork, funding, and whatever bureaucracy existed in the ninja world.
"You…bought it?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, still nonchalant. "I think the paperwork is in a box somewhere."
The paperwork turned out to be spread across several boxes. Apparently the Hokage had provided the documents to facilitate the purchase using clan funds. I managed to locate the bank records. Someone had helpfully consolidated all the funds from our deceased clan into a single account. I could only stare at the excessive number of zeros. The Uchiha clan had been quite wealthy, but I hadn't realized that we were that wealthy. This amount was enough to keep us in good standing for the rest of our lives provided that we didn't go completely wild with repeated large purchases.
…Like buying property.
Why the Hokage had allowed this, I wasn't sure. Sasuke was seven.
"You're the clan head," I muttered, the fact suddenly clicking as I scanned an amended form on the purchase papers.
"Yeah, so?" Sasuke asked.
"The founding clans have certain rights," I explained. "Like owning clan grounds. As clan head, you have the right to purchase housing even though you're too young to sign a contract."
Personal property and village property got a little fuzzy in Konoha. It was a dictatorship, although a supposedly benevolent one. Buildings within Konoha belonged to people, but the land belonged to the village, and it was distributed however the Hokage saw fit. Powerful clans had enough political influence to secure the best land and resources, and founding clans like the Uchiha had always been given a generous land stipend. That was how we'd secured vast training fields, parks, and an entire lake for the Uchiha district while minor clans made due with small housing blocks. But the village could still reclaim land in times of need and redistribute it based on the common good. Now that the clan was gone…
From a legal perspective, this house was the new Uchiha district. Our home, the lake, all the houses, training fields, and shops that had belonged to our family. Everything we'd grown up with, everything was now reclaimed by the village and replaced with this one small house.
As if taking our family wasn't enough. He'd taken everything else too.
"Are you alright?" Sasuke asked, worried.
"Yes," I said, taking a steadying breath and giving him an admittedly weak smile. "Let me make some breakfast, and we can look through all this together, okay?"
Aside from the money, teasing out what we owned was a small headache. We had inherited the actual buildings in the old district because they'd been constructed with clan money and labor, but if we wanted to use them, we'd have to prove to the Hokage that we needed the land they were standing on, which I doubted we could do. The Hokage had also granted us one whole year to remove clan property from the lands before they were eligible for redistribution. That meant we had one year to sell off all the personal effects of everyone before he was legally allowed to raze the entire district. The paper crumpled in my hand before I consciously loosened my grip.
One year.
One year to sort out everything before it was dumped in a land fill. No time to grieve. Sorting out valuables from garbage would take months, and that was if it could be done at all. How were we supposed to know the difference between priceless family heirlooms and regular old junk? Without the memories those heirlooms carried, was there even a difference anymore?
All that knowledge, all our history, all of it was just gone, cut away in a single night with no way to bring it back. We'd just have to do our best with what we had. And what we had was a giant list of stuff. Aside from the general buildings, we (or rather Sasuke) owned three weapons shops, the senbei shop, Fumiko's clothing shop, and a few small side businesses that would have to be shut down now that the proprietors were…no longer here. Those had been privately owned, and the village had no claim over them.
That also meant that we were responsible for any pending transactions and debts they might have incurred. Over the next week, I reached out to all of the farms and businesses which were owned by the Uchiha and operated by third parties, transferring ownership to Sasuke and establishing lines of communication for business matters. I spent another week just sorting through the paperwork alone.
"How do you know how to do all this?" Sasuke asked one evening as I was balancing a transaction spreadsheet.
"Oh, I learned it when I…" I began, half-distracted.
But then I stopped. Because I'd learned it when Mikoto had begun to transition some of the clan Matriarch responsibilities to me. But that had only happened in Tsukuyomi. Actually, now that I thought about it, much of what I knew about the clan came from those years of memories. Little things like the cost of living and the inner workings of the clan vassals, not to mention the other basic adult-skills I'd been unconsciously using.
Was that intentional? Had he done it to make the illusion more real? Or was he teaching me how to live without the clan?
"Kiyo-chan?" Sasuke prompted when my silence stretched on.
Oh, right. He was still waiting for my response.
"…I…um…" I mumbled, unable to explain.
How could I tell him about Itachi's Tsukuyomi? How could I explain away Itachi's mercy? And if I tried, would Sasuke realize the truth? That I'd known about the massacre. That I'd done nothing. That I'd sat back and let everyone die.
He would hate me.
"Kiyo-chan!" Sasuke said, suddenly alarmed as I began hyperventilating. I gasped, trying to pull in enough air as my throat seemed to close.
Right. I still had asthma. I'd almost forgotten. I hadn't gotten sick even once during all of those years in Tsukuyomi. But this wasn't an illusion. Sasuke shouted and clutched at my shoulders as I cycled healing chakra to my throat, opening my airway and taking steadying breaths.
Only once I was done did I register what he was saying.
"You can't die!" he was screaming. "You can't! You can't!"
"Nii-chan, I'm okay!" I wheezed, still a little breathless. "It's just my asthma. I'm okay now."
But Sasuke just shook his head, wrapping me in a bear hug.
"You can't die," he said, his eyes wild once more. "You can't. Not ever. I won't let you. You can't die."
"I won't," I said, as if that was something I could promise.
Sasuke didn't seem to hear me at all. He didn't react when I stroked his hair either. He just kept muttering to himself. Eventually I managed to pull him up and bring him to bed. I slept beside him that night, and he woke three times screaming my name.
I held him each time until he fell asleep again.
I didn't know what else to do.
Some time later I woke when I heard a crash from the bathroom. I burst through the door in time to see Sasuke smashing his fists into the shattered mirror over and over again, a look of helpless rage etched onto his face. His knuckles were bloody, and broken glass littered the floor.
He threw a few more punches before stopping, breathing hard and fast.
"Nii-chan?" I whispered.
He looked at me.
And I stepped back.
His anger and pain and his hatehatehate vanished when he saw me. He looked down at the mess of broken glass, suddenly shamefaced.
"…sorry," he mumbled.
"Just stay there," I said. "I'll get a broom."
I healed his cuts, and we cleaned up the mess together, Sasuke muttering another apology.
"It's fine," I said. "Just be careful, okay?"
Sasuke nodded, but when he looked at the mirror again, I saw a brief flash of bitter hatred before it vanished under a mask of apathy.
And I wondered if things would be fine after all.
…
As it turned out, the Hokage had left us one building within the Uchiha district: the Uchiha Shrine.
"I asked for it," Sasuke muttered when I squinted at the paperwork. "…Because it was important to our family."
And the Hokage had granted the request because taking a family shrine from a pair of orphans would have looked bad. Also, shrines generally weren't destroyed to make room for new developments, so no one else would want it anyway. Now that I thought about it, even if the clan grounds were eligible for redistribution in a year, I doubted anyone would be willing to claim them. Not after what had happened here.
I was surprised that Sasuke had thought to request the shrine, though. It was the clan meeting place, but we were rarely invited there. Only Chunin and higher were invited to most meetings. It wouldn't have held any sentimental value to him. And the only other thing there was…
…was the stone tablet.
Yes, Itachi must have told him about it. Sasuke would have gone to see it for himself. It was an Uchiha secret, one even a child like Sasuke wouldn't want others finding out about.
"Thank you, Nii-chan," I said. "I think I know what to do with it…"
Sasuke and I went around to every house, avoiding the dried blood on the floors and walls. The bodies had been removed, but nothing else had been touched. We searched through every room collecting anything that looked like it might be valuable along with every single picture in the houses. Then we took everything back to the shrine.
Our search of the clan grounds hadn't turned up much in the way of truly valuable items, but there were a few things that we couldn't just leave lying around. I'd been hoping to find a jutsu library, but the Uchiha didn't really record our stolen jutsu like that. We shared jutsu via the Sharingan, so millennia of stolen techniques had been lost in the massacre. There were a few things that had been noted down, though.
One of my distant cousins had painstakingly drawn out a bunch of taijutsu from all over the elemental nations. Asumi-obaa-chan had a whole shelf on rare eye-based medical ninjutsu. Another cousin had a similar collection on genjutsu, and I found a half-filled notebook on his experiments with Sharingan-based genjutsu. An uncle had books on sealing techniques. There were even a few summoning scrolls, though Sasuke and I didn't have the chakra to use them yet. It wasn't much, but it wasn't nothing either.
"We'll need a place to keep these," I said. "Somewhere safe."
"I think I know a place," said Sasuke, and he showed me the room hidden beneath the shrine. I read Hagoromo's tablet and felt the heavy weight of inevitability, but there was nothing I could do about it right now.
Once everything was safely stored away, Sasuke and I gathered various mementos and made a memorial for our clan. Every single picture went up on the wall. Clan members. Ancestors. Team Pictures. Each family had their own little shrine within the shrine. And each shrine had items from their home. For Fumiko, it was her sewing machine, all of her many drawings, and her summer yukata. Teyaki and Uruchi had a recipe book and their wedding clothes. Children had toys. Ninja had their forehead protectors and their police uniforms.
I didn't know all clan members equally well. There were over three hundred of them. But I did try to find something to remember them by.
For our parents, I was at a bit of a loss. It was impossible to whittle down their lives into a few sentimental objects. I did my best, placing Fugaku's uniform, his Chief of Police name plate, and the shuriken he'd used to train Sasuke and me into his shrine.
Mikoto was even harder. She wore no forehead protector, no uniform, and no jewelry. She wasn't a part of any organizations and held no hobbies aside from running the clan with Fugaku. History would remember 'Wicked Eye' Fugaku for his accomplishments on the battlefield, for his place as clan head, and as the chief of police. But I doubted anyone would make note of the housewife who had toiled day in and day out, always looking after me, giving me medicine when I was sick and taking me to my endless hospital appointments, always offering comfort and reassurance.
I gave her the drawing I'd made of her when I was younger, the one she kept up on the fridge, but it wasn't enough.
How could that ever be enough?
"I'm sorry, Kaa-chan," I said, kneeling in front of her picture. It was displayed in pride of place beside Fugaku at the center of the shrine. She'd spent her whole life supporting the clan and raising us. She deserved more than a drawing in crayon. "I-I promise I'll look after our family, so don't worry about us, okay?"
I wasn't sure if she could hear me, but Rin had watched over Obito after her death. I hoped that maybe, somehow, Mikoto and Fugaku might be watching over me too.
"I see you two have been quite busy."
My head snapped up as if a bolt of electricity had passed straight through me. I whirled around to see the Hokage standing within the shrine and looking around at all the faces and personal things of my clan. He was holding his still-smoking pipe and giving us a sympathetic, grandfatherly smile.
I saw red.
"GET OUT!"
I didn't recognize the voice torn out of my throat. It wasn't a Kiyo voice. It was loud and rough, more like a vengeful demon than a little girl.
The Hokage's smile vanished, but he remained where he stood, the acrid smell of his pipe filling the room.
"I know you're—," he began.
"Get out!" I screamed, so loud my throat burned. "You're not allowed to be here!"
"Show some respect for the Hokage," said one of the masked ANBU guards. I hadn't even registered their presence.
"GET! OUT!" I shrieked, louder. My eyes stung, and my vision blurred. I swiped away the hot tears, but more replaced them as soon as I swept them away. "Get out and never come back!"
It was a stupid thing to say. He was the Hokage. He could go wherever he pleased whenever he pleased. He could burn down this shrine with us inside it, and there wasn't anything we could do to stop him. But I couldn't…
I couldn't…
"I see you need some time alone," he said, giving me a nod before turning and slowly walking out of the shrine.
The scent of his pipe lingered in the still air.
"What…?" Sasuke asked, looking at me with wide eyes.
He'd never seen me like that before.
I'd never seen me like that before.
"I don't want anyone else in here," I said, my voice soft and quiet. That was a Kiyo voice.
I turned away from Sasuke. I couldn't explain what the Hokage had done, what he'd failed to do.
"…Okay," said Sasuke, shifting uncomfortably. "No one else."
He didn't ask about it again.
…
A/N2: My updates won't be quite as quick or regular, but I intend to keep going for as long as readers are still interested.
