"Unfaithful traitor.
Shut up, get out of my way.
My pain is greater,
But you can't keep me at bay.
Don't you remember?
We were the most glorious gang."
-CG5, Evil Team
He was born Ken Shimura.
His father was a Yamanaka, his mother the Shimura. Neither parent wanted him.
His first memory was of Root. A small room with a gray floor and gray walls. A hard bed and a scratchy pillow. Isolation. Loneliness. His great-uncle's soft, kind smile.
Later, in a small, rainy village wedged between the Land of Fire and the Land of Earth, they called him Shuji.
闇
Shuji eyed the empty space behind the counter. As soon as he sat down, the bartender excused himself to the back room. Orochimaru had chosen a table in a back corner of the bar, closer to the secret door than the entrance.
The Sanin followed his gaze, chin propped on his hand. "If you think he'll be a problem, I can take care of him for you, Kura."
When Shuji met Orochimaru for the first time he'd been wearing the mask of Kura, a boy orphaned in the war that made a nuisance of himself begging for scraps from shinobi, to the point that they soon stopped questioning his presence near clan compounds (except the Uchiha and Hyuuga), or shinobi-designated apartments.
His excuse to anyone who asked always was that shinobi had more to give than civilians. No one suspected the scrappy boy with gray eyes of listening in on private conversations and dissecting every word said, watching for any inkling of traitorous thoughts or open disapproval of the Hokage.
Orochimaru was the first to see through his act back then, and he found endless entertainment in the name since, though Shuji never understood why.
"Think of it as a favor between old friends," Orochimaru added.
"He won't be a problem," Shuji said, bland and monotone. It was the real him, once all the masks were stripped away. A tool. A blank slate.
It had been years since he let go of the mask of 'Shuji' long enough to be what others would consider 'himself'. He'd been so careful, only for all that to come undone when Orochimaru sent him a message asking that they meet, on behalf of Lord Danzo. It was a request he couldn't refuse.
Shuji didn't like that the bartender knew the truth about him, but the man was too useful to let die just yet. Shuji would never trust him, but he was confident in the man's cowardice, his stubborn refusal to involve himself in shinobi business anymore.
Orochimaru's eyes glinted with amusement. A clinical sort of amusement, like Shuji was an interesting experiment he was watching run around in a lab.
"You wanted to see me?" Shuji asked.
Orochimaru leaned back. "I don't have much time, I'm afraid. I'm only passing through on the way to my own assignment. So I'll make this quick," he said. "Danzo has given you a new assignment."
Shuji knew that Orochimaru only referred to Lord Danzo informally to try and get a reaction from him, but he remained passive.
Orochimaru smiled. "I'm sure Danzo expected underhanded tactics when he allied himself with Hanzo, but your message about the Salamander picking the Third as the better, stronger option seems to have hit a particular nerve. Danzo's lost all interest in working with him, but he's too much of a threat to be left unchecked. You know what that means, don't you, Kura?"
Shuji did. An assassination would be too obvious, especially with all the members of Root in the village. A lack of specific instructions meant that, since he knew the target best, it was up to him to decide how to take Hanzo off the board, or, at least, make it so he would never be a threat to Konoha.
"Understood," he said, and his mind whirled.
Hanzo desperately wanted peace. He didn't tolerate even small threats. He was merciless to his enemies. He cherished his friends.
"You have a week to do it."
Shuji's eyes flashed up to Orochimaru, surprised, and the sanin looked delighted.
"Or, at least, to show you've made progress," Orochimaru clarified, mock apologetic. "Danzo doesn't want Hanzo getting in the way anymore than he already has."
A week.
He had a week to execute his rough idea of a plan, to exploit the only known weakness he knew Hanzo the Salamander had. His inner circle.
Shuji had been slowly, methodically, poisoning Hanzo against his friends since the day they met. It was a weakness of his own making.
He needed scrolls, but ones that couldn't be tracked. They needed to be smuggled in from outside Ame, and it would have to be done discreetly, in between being 'Shuji' and shadow-commanding Root. He couldn't allow any of it to be traced back to him.
"Once you've taken care of Hanzo, there'll be no need to report on him anymore," Orochimaru said, suddenly serious. The sanin held his gaze.
"I understand," Shuji said. A faint feeling of something stirred in his chest, but it didn't make it past the wall of apathy.
"That's all the time I have," Orochimaru said, standing. His coy smile was back in place. "Until next time, Kura."
Shuji watched him go.
He'd start with Mamoru.
以前は
His first mask was given to him by Lord Danzo.
You will be Ken Yamanaka.
And so he was.
It had been the first test post-graduation, a measure of skill by throwing him into the deep end of a lake and telling him to swim. He was to seamlessly infiltrate the Yamanaka clan. He could pass as one of them if he dyed his hair.
He utterly failed.
His second mask was Kura and went remarkably better.
His third, Goro Wada of Kusa, who 'died' on the frontlines.
And finally, his favorite mask. Shuji of Ame. He slipped in among a pack of exhausted refugees in his mid-teens. They were from a small settlement in the Land of Earth that had turned into a battlefield and burned to the ground.
His mother and father, he'd say, died in the fires.
He wanted to be a shinobi to protect what was left of his people, he'd claim.
The refugees had long ago lost count on who was alive and who was dead, so what was one more orphan?
He first drew Hanzo's attention in the only place he could've. In battle, wearing the headband of Ame, Konoha shinobi dead at his feet.
Hanzo already had his friends at his side back then. Mamoru. Tadao. Osamu.
Shuji's place in Hanzo's inner circle was earned by how much blood he spilled, by how fast he was promoted, standing atop a hill of foreign corpses. It was Tadao who spoke to him first, assessing him without outright saying so, asking casual questions that were secretly probing.
But by then, his mask had been in place for so long that it was cemented to him. After that, he met the others, and he began his reports to Lord Danzo.
Shuji used his own past as a base as he prepared the scrolls. He changed details, embellished facts or lied outright, and made the whole thing look like a set of coded orders.
In another scroll, he wrote down as much detail as he could remember from one of the few 'reply' messages he received directly from Lord Danzo.
It took three days and a good chunk of his savings to have the scrolls smuggled in from an ally in the Land of Wind.
He only had time to work on them for a few hours before dawn each day.
It was an impossible task to accomplish in a week.
He did it anyway. It was sloppy and rushed, but it would do.
は
Shuji never wanted to take Lord Danzo's scroll back.
The Root fodder he sent down into the cellar to die were distractions, a way to keep Tadao busy while he put on a transformation and met with the non-fodder agents. Though the fodder did have their uses. He'd need to know how to disable those traps later and they brought him closer to figuring them out, death by death.
There were six 'squad leaders' of Root who took orders directly from him, passed the information down to the others, and were the likeliest to return alive if sent to the frontlines. Shuji met them one by one and ordered them to maintain their pretend to loyalty to Ame after he was gone. Unless they received orders from Lord Danzo himself, they were never to take off their masks.
In exchange, they told him that eight orphans had been captured and packaged off to Konoha for reconditioning. The agents that 'escorted' them would act as defectors, cowards running from the war. The rest of Root was ordered to treat them like traitors.
When Shuji went back to the tower, a blast had destroyed most of the bottom floor. He stepped around Osamu's unconscious body (face down in the rain), looking at all the red-tinted puddles on the floor. A tarp had been hastily thrown over the missing cellar door.
The building was only still standing because of four battle-worn support beams. A handful of able-bodied shinobi hovered around outside, clueless to what happened but still on alert.
Later, a squad leader, an Aburame, would inform him that Inu and Usagi failed their mission. She would also tell him that her bugs tasted traces of Mamoru's chakra around the area, and the chakra of four unknowns.
She couldn't tell him how the unknowns were connected to Mamoru, but only that they were involved.
A week later a 'defector' handed Danzo Shuji's newest report, alerting him of the potential new threats.
太陽
After Osamu left his apartment, Aki came to him.
She was small and young, but the most skilled in hiding her presence. Shuji found her in his living room, kneeling, water dripping from her black cloak, head bowed out of respect.
"Report."
"Hanzo left the tower," she said quietly. "He was heavily armored, despite there being no sighting of either Iwa or Konoha at the borders."
Shuji still tasted the bitter tea on his tongue. He listened to the soft pat-pat of the rain hitting the walls outside and pooling on the roof.
I think I'll even miss the rain.
There was something again. A faint flutter in his chest. The distant screams of Ken Shimura, locked in a cage called Root.
Aki waited, another tool, inanimate until given orders.
"Continue watching Hanzo," Shuji ordered. "Maintain your distance. Report any change in movement to the squad leaders."
"Understood," she said, and disappeared.
.
.
.
It was a short walk to the tower.
It was cold and empty when he entered (from the second floor, since the first was still unstable), and made his way down to the cellar. There wasn't another place in Ame that was waterproof, soundproof, and (used to be) impossible to enter that wasn't destroyed or caved in.
The only reason Hanzo still kept sensitive documents in there was because the only other option was to burn them all.
The door had been replaced, but whoever did it was no Tadao.
Shuji walked carefully down each step, avoiding the bodies of fodder tangled in leftover traps, kicking them to trigger others, and finally, made it down to the bottom.
An inch of water flooded the place. Cabinets were thrown down, mission reports floated in soggy clumps, and scrolls bobbed listlessly.
He stopped, taking in the devastation.
The last time he'd been in this room was right after Mamoru found Moyasu. Without taking a step further, Shuji knew he wouldn't find Lord Danzo's scroll here.
The message inside the scroll was entirely real, and completely damming. Any other shinobi would've used it for blackmail or become arrogant with having that kind of power over an advisor to the Hokage, and Shuji was sure that was what Lord Danzo planned for.
Shuji left the cellar. As he made his way up to Hanzo's office, he thought that Lord Danzo had only given away the scroll with the expectation that demands would be made of him that he already planned to meet, or Hanzo would be dead before he had to fulfill them.
He'd never given it much thought before.
"Lord Hanzo has requested that he not be disturbed," the shinobi stationed at the door told him sternly, holding a hand up to keep him back.
Shuji could've said he had urgent news from the frontlines, could've smiled and tried to convince him diplomatically (all the while knowing the office was empty). He could've, but he didn't need the mask of 'Shuji' anymore.
His eyes were blank. His hand moved, as quick as a snake.
Blood splattered the wall. Red coated the edge of Shuji's kunai.
The shinobi's eyes bulged, hands flying up to his neck, desperately trying to stem the blood that gushed out of him. He tried to shout for help, but it was a deep cut.
And the man that was neither Shuji nor Ken watched him for a moment before sliding the door open and stepping over his writhing body. He closed it behind him.
The only other place Hanzo would keep the scroll was on his person, but he was too paranoid to risk it being lost to the rain or destroyed by Osamu. Shuji strode to Hanzo's desk and pulled open each drawer until he found it—under a false bottom in the third drawer.
He inspected it, then once he confirmed it was the very same one, checked for copies, though he knew there wouldn't be any.
That had been Tadao's job.
Shuji opened the scroll, spread it out on the desk, and bit his thumb until he drew blood.
There'll be no need to report on him anymore.
His mission was complete. Hanzo was a threat to no one but his own people. Lord Danzo discarding the alliance meant that this scroll was of no use anymore. It had to be destroyed. Utterly and completely.
Shuji's thumb hovered over the scroll. Something made him hesitate.
It was a lot of fun.
His blood would trigger a seal etched into the paper, only able to be detected by someone as skilled in fuinjutsu as Kushina Uzumaki. She'd created it, after all.
It was triggered by the blood of the user and meant to be a quick way of getting rid of mission-sensitive scrolls if a shinobi was taken hostage by the enemy.
She showed it to the Yellow Flash, and then it fell into the hands of the Toad Sage, the Third Hokage and finally, Lord Danzo. It was heavily modified from the original, but the base matrix was still there.
Shuji stared down at the scroll and realized who he was. Or rather, who he wasn't.
For a brief, glorious moment of self-preservation, he'd unconsciously clung to his masks. All the faces he wore, all the emotions he felt, all, in some capacity, feared the unknown. Feared death. And maybe he did too, a little.
But he was and always had been an empty vessel, and he had orders.
He smeared his blood against the paper.
Black lines leapt to life, forming circles and arrows and symbols that covered the scroll and tumbled off it, leaking down onto the desk.
And then it burst, exploding with enough force that Shuji hardly felt it at all.
闇 - Darkness, 以前は - Before, は - The, 太陽 - Sun