DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything from the Naruto universe. This is my specific Mito, though, I suppose!

Thinking (+ flashbacks, Mito speaking to the Kyuubi, etc.)

Emphasis

Bijuu, etc. speaking

Bijuu, etc. thinking

Kakashi never wanted to come back here.

Minato-sensei had finally sent a team to investigate or excavate the body of Uchiha Obito, and here he was, back at that bridge: Kannabi, the one that had changed his life and took the person who had been his best friend… The person he'd treated so badly for years. Mito had to be wrong.

She was wrong!

Kakashi had no idea whether or not Mito's sensing abilities were as good as his sensei believed them to be, but she - like anyone - could make a mistake. And he was angry with both of them. Irrationally angry, and it couldn't be tolerated.

Shinobis must kill all emotions.
A shinobi must always put the mission first.

Obito - OBITO - was the one who taught him that those rules were sometimes wrong. He was the first one to say that his father's decision to save his teammates was honorable rather than traitorous, and now he was going back to being the "old Kakashi:" the brat who put the rules before everything. No… He covered his mouth, realizing that he was sweating, cold, and trembling, and tried not to puke.

He pushed his grief and disgust down, down, down where he wouldn't feel them anymore.

"Mito never forgets a chakra signature once she's exposed to it, Kashi-kun. She spent over a month with Obito-kun, so… I don't want to believe it, either, son. I don't want to… As your sensei, I was responsible for you three! I was the one who left him alive under all those rocks…"

"Stop it, sensei! And I was the team leader on that mission!"

Naruto's cries had stopped the conversation as they often did. The Elders and civilians hated that.

Clan matriarchs had chosen to act as nursemaids for the baby, something that was previously unheard of. Minato-sensei was currently angry with Mikoto-san, Kushina-nee's best friend because he caught her channeling chakra into the baby's stomach while she nursed him. She was trying to see if Naruto was the new jinchuuriki, sensei had said.

Now Kakashi was with her husband, who was in charge of this mission.

"You alright, Boss?"

"I'm fine, Pakkun. Have you or the boys caught his scent?"

"The area reeks of death," Pakkun said with a distasteful sneeze. He was glad he didn't have to do many of these missions: usually, they were reserved for the Inuzuka ninken, some of whom were here, too. He and his pack were here mainly to support Kakashi. He scooted up next to his summoner, nearly sitting on his foot. Kakashi relaxed a little, but to his keen senses, he stank of stress and sweat even in the cold.

The Earth users were using a variety of techniques to examine every bit of the landscape and kicking up all kinds of dirt and dust. For once, Kakashi wasn't using that borrowed eye of his to copy their techniques, the pug noticed. His boss was here to verify exactly where Obito had been left, and Kakashi's natural eye never left the zone where he'd almost been killed. So far the Inuzukas and Akimichis had the "best luck," if one could call it that, digging up ten bodies in the area so far: all of them from Iwa.

Obito seemed to be long gone, but Fugaku was determined to find his body or proof of the absence of it.

"That half-breed, no-talent boy could NOT have recovered if what Kakashi-kun said was true! There is no WAY he, of all people, could've summoned the fox!"

"Stand down, Kakashi!"

Although Kakashi was the one who approached the Uchiha clan head as if to attack him, it was Minato's order and Killing Intent that stopped Fugaku-sama from saying anything more about his summoner's supposedly deceased teammate. Now, though, Pakkun - and Kakashi, he was sure - wondered if, more than anything, Uchiha Fugaku did NOT want to find Obito's body here.

If Obito wasn't the one who released the fox and then put it under a genjutsu, then what Uchiha did declare war on the Leaf? Can a bijuu be put into a genjutsu? Pakkun wondered.

All other Uchihas were supposedly accounted for, dead and alive. If it wasn't Obito that attacked Kushina-sama and Konoha, who was it? Kakashi said that the Kyuubi's eyes took on a Sharingan form and that even he could see it from the barrier his summoner had been confined inside.

His comrades' barking got Pakkun's attention, chasing away his morbid conclusions. He hopped over the debris to see what the Inuzuka hound had found. Inhaling only once, he smelled something he knew by heart, although there were no longer any physical traces of it that could be seen to the eye. Blood. Specifically, Kakashi's blood: the blood he and the pack were bound to. "Boss!"

Kakashi slowly approached his ninken, trying to remain composed when he would finally see Obito's decayed body. The body that had been haunting him in his nightmares.

But it wasn't there.

"It's faint, but it's definitely your blood, Boss, and… his, I think."

Kakashi let out a whimper and fisted his hands, shaking all over. "Keep digging."

Time dragged on.

Mito had been in worse places, she reminded herself, but seldomly had she been in more boring places. Or more misogynistic places. For the most part, the monks at the Fire Temple regarded her as "the princess" and seemed to overwhelmingly feel that she was a burden to them and treated her like glass.

She was a burden to them.

It had been many years since Mito had to practice chakra control exercises, but now they seemed to take up her entire life outside of the physical training she'd sneak out to do. She was desperate to prove to Katsuya-sama that she could remain one of her summoners, although her chakra was now so powerful and destructive she understood why the slugs currently refused to partner with her. They were extremely sensitive and couldn't handle her chakra.

The issues she was having with Katsuya made communicating with her family difficult. The toads could find her, but so far her father had only sent two messages in the months she'd been here. She understood why, but she longed to hear from him. She reread those two letters every day, longing to be in Konoha so that she could support him and Naruto-chan. She had delivered and been around babies before: they took up so much of their parents' time and energy, and her father was doing it all alone.

Oh, he claimed in his letters that he was getting support from his apprentice and his guards, plus his old friends, but his old friends all had babies, and his guards were all teenagers! Teens could certainly babysit: babysitting was supposedly a Genin mission tradition, but Naruto was so little and surely they couldn't do the job as well as she could. She was his sister!

They were blood: all that was left of her mother's blood. The last Uzumakis.

Don't think that way, Mito. Mom never gave up on finding Uzushio survivors, and I shouldn't, either.

Even if the monks refused her presence in anything other than working on barrier fuuinjutsu, she never stopped training or trying to do better. An emergency could arise at any time, and she was determined to remain a combat medic. So at night while the monks slept, Mito escaped to the forest to train. She couldn't even make leaves stick to her body: they just blasted off of her! The first time she stepped on a tree, it exploded, waking up the monks. And her chakra scalpel was so big and unruly, that it was more like an incredibly sharp club than a surgical instrument.

At least the water still obeyed her will. -At least she hadn't lost that.

Her secondary Wind and even a few fire jutsus came to her more easily, too. They were unruly as hell, though, and too dangerous to use in the field as they were right now.

Her pessimistic thoughts were interrupted by a small white snake that set her heart racing. "Hey! Oboro-sama, right?" The little white snake nodded, then poofed away, disappointing her. She'd hoped her favorite uncle would send a message, but it seemed he was just checking up on her.

"Oh, man," she whined. Then the floorboards cracked just before the ground moved. Mito jumped up and grabbed her hidden weapons, ready to take down the intruder - who was holding up his hands, looking bored and temperamental. "Orochimaru-oji!" She rushed the Sannin, wrapping her arms around him and receiving a gentle pat on the head.

"One moment, kit," he said, prying the silly girl off of him. He reached down into the broken flooring and pulled his apprentice up through the ground. "Problem, Anko-chan?"

"OOF!" Anko fell back with her "unconventional" friend and layers of dirt on top of her.

She'd missed her! She was also glad her friend wasn't making fun of her for getting stuck at the end of her jutsu. "Hey Mito: how's it hangin'?"

"Long and limp!" Mito greeted right back, fighting back tears as she got off the girl that was probably her best friend.

Orochimaru hummed and looked around the very bare room: it bothered him. "Happy birthday, kit. I bring this awful child's presence as a gift, along with this," Orochimaru said, pulling out a scroll.

"What? It's not... It's - it's my birthday?" Mito asked in a small voice.

"Yeah, dummy," Anko said, smiling brightly. "Aw, man! I shoulda gotten you a calendar." Mito, though, was silent before beginning to chuckle in a quiet way that gave Anko chills and made her want to run. Her master whacked her friend with the weird hair on the head.

"Oww," Mito exclaimed, pouting as she rubbed her head. "What the fuck, man." She got whacked again. "Oww!"

"Language, kit." Orochimaru put down a silencing seal as his apprentice stuck her fingers in her ears and began "la-la-ing:" something that was completely unnecessary. "And you were channeling the fox's chakra."

"Oh. I'm... I'm deeply sorry," Mito said, aghast that she'd done that so easily. "I - I'm sorry for that, and ano, I didn't realize that I'd been here... a year?" she asked brokenly as she sat down near her futon. "Has it really been a year?"

"Time flies when you're having fun?" Orochimaru asked dryly.

"Fuck, no, I haven't been having fun. Owwww! You're going to leave me with TBI!"

"I highly doubt that, although brain damage is said to be common in Uzumakis," Orochimaru snarked. The kit grumbled at him and he decided to lean on the wall.

"We're exiled," Anko yelled as if it were something good. Mito's jaw dropped as Orochimaru looked toward the ceiling for help that wasn't coming.

"I am on SABBATICAL," Orochimaru claimed hotly after deactivating the seal. "You were finally permitted to accompany me, were you not?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Anko said as if they'd been through what to call their "experience/journey/Orochimaru's punishment" a hundred times. "We got kicked out of Konoha," Anko explained.

To most, Mito suddenly looked blank, but Orochimaru had known the girl (and her father: that dreadful man) long enough to know that she was seething. Minato was the same: that deadly calm before the storm... "It's temporary," he said with a slight flick of his hand as if it didn't matter. "It benefits me, otherwise I wouldn't have put up with your father's nonsense."

"Be careful, Orochi-oji: my father's the Hokage," Mito reminded him unnecessarily as she eventually turned and sat down very close to Anko since the floor was totaled.

"You're hot," Anko said with a frown. She put her forehead against her friend's and Mito pushed her away, rolling her eyes.

"I run that way now," she said with a sigh before looking into her friend's eyes as much as she could. "So you know about... you know," she said, clutching her stomach.

Anko shrugged: she wasn't sure about the whole thing but could take a guess, plus there was a huge rumor going around that Mito had to know about. "Hey did you hear about your baby brother being the..."

"That's enough, Anko," Orochimaru interrupted in a scolding manner.

"People... Do people think that Naruto-chan's the jinchuuriki? Is that what you were going to say?!" Mito asked. Seeing the way the snake summoners looked at each other, she knew it was true. Getting up to pace what she could of the small room, she felt panic that she tried to push down. "That - that's dangerous! That's what I was trying to avoid! Wait- Dad never said! Is Naruto a jinchuuriki, too?"

"...I don't even fucking know," she continued before mumbling Kami knows what jibberish and threats to the world at large, Orochimaru thought, closing his eyes. He decided to let the language go for now, and had no definitive answer to her question regarding the toddler. And if Mito didn't truly know, who would, considering everything that had gone wrong with the fox's sealing?

Other than Minato.

"That man rarely lets the child out of his sight."

Mito turned to him, looking contemplative. "Have you... seen him?" she asked, gripping her hand and fiddling with her fingers.

"He has whiskers," Anko said simply, making the other occupants of the room snort, although Mito had a look of fondness and hope on her face. She was a pretty girl, Anko thought, even with the little white scar-like marks on the top of her cheeks. Anko knew they were smooth, almost as if they weren't there at all because the first day she'd met her, she pinched and rubbed Mito's cheeks to see what was up with them. She'd gotten bitten for doing it, which she thought (looking back on it) was hilarious!

Orochimaru rolled his eyes and sighed. "His, quote-unquote, 'whiskers' are a result of being in the previous jinchuuriki's womb, I'm sure... Something you'll be able to dread in your own kits."

There was a long pause before Mito spoke, and when she did, it was with utmost seriousness and loathing, surprising the Snake Sannin. "I'll never have children. The seal is weakened during childbirth, and he's already right there," she said with a huff, meaning the fox.

Orochimaru stepped toward the girl, looking at her with the curiosity he normally reserved for his experiments before he looked back at Anko and pressed his fingertip to her forehead, effectively sealing away what they'd just discussed and putting her into a light genjutsu. -It was a creation of his own. Mito complained about him doing so but eventually quieted. "What do you mean, the fox is 'right there?' I'm assuming that's what you're referring to?"

Mito rubbed her temples. "Right on the edge of my consciousness," she explained and activated a bigger silencing seal she should've enabled earlier. "He's stuck in the basement of my mind palace: he's - he's in really bad shape, last I visited," she said guiltily while rubbing her arms. Kinda like her, the fox was always exhausted and although he'd screamed at her for asking if he was sick, saying the question was "inane" and calling her horrible names, Mito felt that she had caused him great injury.

She was supposed to be a healer first and a fighter second.

- Didn't matter that he was a big mean fox.

"Let him be, kit," Orochimaru said seriously, knowing how the girl felt about animals; he was sure that stupidity would extend to a chakra entity in the form of a fox. How many of his experiments had she released until the girl found one that perished because it was unprepared for life in the wild? She'd only been 5 or 6 at the time but had learned a valuable lesson. Mito nodded at him eventually, but Orochimaru didn't believe her.

She was such a troublesome child.

"Can you tell me about him? I, ano, haven't heard anything about Naruto-chan in a while."

Orochimaru retracted his jutsu on Anko and repeated Mito's question. He had no desire to talk about the Hokage or his other brat and wanted to observe the girls.

"Okay," Anko said, not reading the room or realizing what had just happened. "He looks like the Hokage, but they say Hokage-sama thinks he looks like your mom." Mito nodded with a look on her face that made Anko figure she was trying to imagine her baby brother and not cry at the same time. She'd always wanted siblings - or family at all, although she had her master which she figured was something like having a family - so she could kinda guess that Mito was longing for the little brat. "He cries a lot and is REALLY loud, but Orochimaru-shishou says he's pretty smart."

Orochimaru scoffed, looking both embarrassed and disgusted. "Tch, his development is as expected for a human born of shinobi."

"That's... good," Mito said, then chewed at her lip. "Dad did say he looked like Mom," she mumbled to herself with a watery sniff.

"He's fat," Anko said, making Mito stop and bark out a laugh.

"Baka!" Mito yelled.

"Most will say he looks like Minato because of his coloring, but you resemble your father much more," Orochimaru said at the same time with a wave before shoving the scroll he brought to the girl with central heterochromia. As always, he brought what was necessary in order to test her immune system to ensure that her genetic mutation would not affect her continued development. Although the girl had the more common eye variant of heterochromia, she had the oddest hair patterns he'd ever seen but otherwise appeared normal, as did her previous tests. Now that she was the jinchuuriki, however, her health was even more important.

Her health and welfare mattered to him, no matter that the Hokage recently claimed otherwise.

Seeing that she was getting no new information, Mito sighed, then sat down with the scroll. Inside of it was a beautiful kimono along with a new kunoichi outfit that looked like it would actually fit her. She had grown a few inches over the last YEAR - I can't believe it's been a year: a long, miserable YEAR! - and needed the new clothing. "Thank you Oji," she said gratefully before approaching the man for another hug.

He didn't give the best hugs, but it was definitely better than nothing. And nothing was all that she had had for a really long time.

Orochimaru also brought her scrolls on various jutsus and theories. Anko's present was dangos, which was much better than a calendar - although Mito realized that she really needed to either get one or count the days since she'd lost track of So. Much. Time.
Many of the monks didn't really care about the passage of time in a normal way and she didn't want to be like them.

The trio shared the dangos while discussing Orochimaru's sabbatical in the Land of Grass and what he planned to do there for an hour or so.

/

Mito was left to repair her floor alone. She snuck into a warehouse to grab some lumber, knowing that some of the monks would break out into a fit of furious supposed serenity if they saw how Orochimaru-oji left her room. They'd blame her, instead, since she had to keep his visit a secret. As she began pulling up floorboards, her godmother and big sister figure appeared in a puff of smoke alongside a clone of Katsuya, who immediately dispelled. She almost cried, but took a deep breath instead, chanting a mantra that she'd often used when dealing with a few of the monks who definitely had something wrong with them. Those monks made her angry and afraid...

Shinobis must kill all emotions.
Shinobis must kill all emotions.
Shinobis must kill all emotions.

"Tsunade-sama, Shizune-nee-chan. I am grateful for your visit," Mito said without emotion before bowing.

"What the fuck, brat?! How long has it been, and this is the shitty greeting you give me? I should just leave!"

"Tsunade-hime," Shizune yelped, scolding her aunt as usual.

"Please don't," Mito said weakly before giving up the ruse and throwing her arms around both of them. Unintentionally smothered in Tsunade's enormous breasts as the woman nearly fractured her spine and ribs with a hug, the two women told her "Happy Birthday," unsealed a cake, plus more kunoichi clothing. They were good enough to help her with the floor as Tsunade cursed her teammate the entire time.

Her other teammate, Jiraiya, showed up just after the new lumber had been put down.

"Behold! It is I, the Great Sage of..."

"Shut up, Jiraiya," Tsunade shouted, forcing Mito to cower and cover her sensitive ears - stupid fox giving me weird powers, Mito thought. "And get rid of that damn toad!"

Thank the Sage it was one of his smaller ones.

"Aw, Hime! You're so mean!" He bounced over to his goddaughter and ruffled her long hair mercilessly until she pretended to try to punch him, then pulled her into a hug. "Shrimp! You've grown! New floors?"

"Ugh," Mito grumbled but was probably happier than she'd been in months, or at least she was for a while...

Jiraiya, at least, was a small fountain of information.

"The Elders are trying to knot a noose around your father's balls..."

…

"What?! Of course, he sent a note!"

- Mito suddenly caught a keen sense that seemed to lock into place, one which she didn't want to believe. Her godfather was lying: it was almost like a smell or mist that came from her godfather that let her know. She said nothing, however, as he searched his pockets for a message from her father that she knew wasn't there.

She was right.

She did get a picture of Naruto-chan, finally, and his chubby face and smile melted her heart. Look at all those baby teeth. He was standing up: no one said he was walking yet, but the evidence was in the picture. Shinobi children developed much faster than civilians, so Naruto-chan had probably been walking for weeks or even months.

She really needed to get her shit together.

…

"Rebuilding is finally finished, so that should free up some of his time, Mito-chan. Between the brat and the village, your father's exhausted; I swear to Kami I don't know why anyone would want the Hokage position."

…

"Asuma's a right pain in the ass. I swear, your whole generation sucks. Hehe... Excluding you, of course, hime-chan!"

- At least he didn't seem to be lying about that.

"...That boy's still chasing Yuhi-chan's skirt; spying on her like a creep."

"Like you're one to talk, Pervert!"

Tsunade and Jiraiya's banter made her smile - even though her big sister seemed more and more uncomfortable and afraid of her the longer they were there.

Clenching her hands into fists as she turned away from them, Mito felt acutely aware of how alone she normally was now.

Kami. She'd really been a spoiled little princess before this, hadn't she?

Hours later, she made her way back into the basement of her mind palace.

"You're looking better, Fox-sama."

"So my jailor has returned," he sneered, observing his new jinchuuriki who was... angry. The great fox hummed to himself. Anger's something I can work with.